Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating facial displays of emotion for the android robot Geminoid F

With android robots becoming increasingly sophisticated in their technical as well as artistic design, their non-verbal expressiveness is getting closer to that of real humans. Accordingly, this paper presents results of two online surveys designed to evaluate a female android's facial display of five basic emotions. We prepared both surveys in English, German, and Japanese language allowing us to analyze for inter-cultural differences. Accordingly, we not only found that our design of the emotional expressions “fearful” and “surprised” were often confused, but also that many Japanese participants seemed to confuse “angry” with “sad” in contrast to the German and English participants. Although similar facial displays portrayed by the model person of Geminoid F achieved higher recognition rates overall, portraying fearful has been similarly difficult for the model person. We conclude that improving the android's expressiveness especially around the eyes would be a useful next step in android design. In general, these results could be complemented by an evaluation of dynamic facial expressions of Geminoid F in future research.
Effects of simultaneous nicotine and alcohol use in periodontitis progression in rats: A histomorphometric study

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of alcohol and nicotine, when used alone or simultaneously, on the alveolar bone loss area resulting from ligature-induced periodontitis in rats. Study design: Forty adult male rats received a cotton ligature in the first lower molar sulcular area, and the animals were randomly assigned to different treatments (n = 10, each group) including daily peritoneal injections of saline solution (group A), submitted to self-administration of alcohol 25% (group B), nicotine solution in concentration 0.19 μl/ml (group C), and nicotine solution in concentration 0.19 μl/ml plus self-administration of alcohol 25% (group D). Five weeks later, the animals were sacrificed, and the samples were routinely processed for semi-serial decalcified sections. Results: Ligated teeth showed more alveolar bone loss than unligated ones (p < 0.05). Unligated teeth showed no significant differences between each other (p > 0.05). Analyses between the ligated teeth showed that the group C (nicotine) or group B (alcohol 25%) each had increasing alveolar bone loss in the furcation area, and the simultaneous combination alcohol and nicotine (group D) intensified these effects (p < 0.05). Conclusion: The results suggest that the simultaneous combination of alcohol and nicotine have a synergistic effect in the progression of periodontitis, evidenced by increased furcation region bone destruction in periodontal disease in rats. Key words:Alveolar bone loss, periodontitis, nicotine, alcohol, rats.
Classifying Trust/Distrust Relationships in Online Social Networks

Online social networks are increasingly being used as places where communities gather to exchange information, form opinions, collaborate in response to events. An aspect of this information exchange is how to determine if a source of social information can be trusted or not. Data mining literature addresses this problem. However, if usually employs social balance theories, by looking at small structures in complex networks known as triangles. This has proven effective in some cases, but it under performs in the lack of context information about the relation and in more complex interactive structures. In this paper we address the problem of creating a framework for the trust inference, able to infer the trust/distrust relationships in those relational environments that cannot be described by using the classical social balance theory. We do so by decomposing a trust network in its ego network components and mining on this ego network set the trust relationships, extending a well known graph mining algorithm. We test our framework on three public datasets describing trust relationships in the real world (from the social media Epinions, Slash dot and Wikipedia) and confronting our results with the trust inference state of the art, showing better performances where the social balance theory fails.
Theoretical study on the adsorption behavior of CO and C 2 H 2 on graghene sheet : Active sites and basal surface

The adsorption of CO and C2H2 on perfect and defective graphene surfaces has been investigated by adopting cluster models in conjunction with semi-empirical molecular orbital calculations. The interaction potential energy curves for three different orientations of CO and C2H2 molecules with respect to the inert basal plane graphene have been calculated with approximate step size of 0.5 Angstrom. Moreover, the calculated adsorption energies of CO and C2H2 on the clean basal surface revealed their weak interaction nature and consequently their physisorped behavior on this surface model. Moreover, it was found that the defect edge sites of zigzag and armchair surface models exhibit the significant catalytic role toward the chemisorptions and activation of molecular CO and C2H2 while these molecules is not only able to strongly bind to these edge sites but also C-O and C-C bond strength is obviously weakened.
Questions used in the modified PBT to estimate pregnancy outcomes

Application of PBT in Ghana A pilot test of PBT to assess its feasibility in estimating stillbirths, miscarriages and induced abortions was conducted in Accra, Ghana (Oliveras et al. 2008). Data were collected during prenatal and maternity visits made from November 2003 through January 2004 at three public and two private clinics. As such, the sample reflects women with access to prenatal and maternity services available in Accra and is not representative of the general population. Staff nurses at the participating clinics collected the data as part of their routine care. Prenatal clients were interviewed at the time of check-in, and delivery clients were interviewed at a time that was convenient for them; all interviews were strictly confidential. All women older than 15 who came to the clinics for services were included. Since the pilot showed that the method worked better in terms of implementation and reporting with prenatal than with delivery clients (Oliveras et al. 2008), the text below describes its application in the recommended setting of prenatal care provision. To ensure that each prenatal client was interviewed just once, clients were only eligible (and interviewed) if they were making their first visit. Women’s background characteristics were collected from both health records and the study questions to allow researchers to assess any personal characteristics that could be associated with abortion. Nurses conducting routine intake interviews incorporated four additional questions that asked about the outcome of a woman’s preceding pregnancy (Table 1, see table at the end of the chapter). First, each woman was asked whether she had been pregnant before. Women who said they had were asked about the outcome of their last pregnancy. If that pregnancy did not end in a live birth, the woman was asked if she had had a stillbirth, a miscarriage or an induced abortion. Women who reported a The purpose of this chapter is to present examples of data collection techniques that minimize or eliminate the underreporting of induced abortion, which is particularly relevant in contexts where abortion is illegal or access is highly restricted. The methodological challenge of measuring induced abortion, which is deliberately practiced clandestinely, has led researchers to adapt estimation methods that can investigate stigmatized behaviors. The techniques described in this chapter are the Preceding Birth Technique (PBT) and the Randomized Response Technique (RRT). These methods, when combined with population and pregnancy data, can yield indicators such as abortion rates and ratios, and when applied to data for multiple years, can yield information about trends in induced abortion. However, they cannot obtain detailed information on the characteristics of women who have induced abortions. The results of RRT in particular are usually used to complement findings from other research techniques.
The Double-Edged Nature of Technostress on Work Performance: A Research Model and Research Agenda

This research agenda is the first step toward the adaptation of transactional theory of stress (TTS) into the technostress context, which aims to fill the research gaps in the technostress literature. A research model is developed based on TTS. In the model, we assume technostress to be neutral, and its effects on a person’s workplace outcomes depend on the appraisal on technostress. The positive appraisal on technostress, that is, technostress challenge appraisal will generally lead to positive outcomes, whereas the negative appraisal on technostress, that is, technostress threat appraisal will generally lead to negative outcomes. Although technostress is neutral in a holistic perspective, different types of technostress would be appraised differently. Therefore, the model also predicts how different types of technostress would be appraised. A three-phase agenda is proposed to validate the model. At the end, we highlight the theoretical and practical implications, as well as opportunities for future studies.
Extremely energetic Fermi Gamma-Ray Bursts obey spectral energy correlations

The extremely energetic Fermi GRBs 080916C, with its Eiso of ~ 10^{55} erg in 1 keV - 10 GeV and intense GeV emission, and 090323 give us a unique opportunity to test the reliability and extension of spectral energy correlations. Based on Konus/WIND and Fermi spectral measurements, we find that both events are fully consistent with the updated (95 events as of April 2009) Ep,i - Eiso correlation, thus further confirming and extending it and pointing against a possible flattening or increased dispersion at very high energies. This also suggests that the physics behind the emission of peculiarly bright and hard GRBs is the same as for softer and weaker ones. In addition, we find that the normalization of the correlation obtained by considering these two GRBs and the other long ones for which Ep,i was measured with high accuracy by the Fermi/GBM are fully consistent with those obtained by other instruments (e.g., BeppoSAX, Swift, Konus-WIND), thus indicating that the correlation is not affected significantly by detectors limited thresholds and energy bands. Prompted by the extension of the spectrum of GRB 080916C up to several GeVs without any excess or cut-off, we also investigated if the evaluation of Eiso in the commonly adopted 1 keV - 10 MeV energy band may bias the Ep,i - Eiso correlation contributing to its scatter. By computing Eiso from 1 keV to 10 GeV, the slope of the correlation becomes slightly flatter, while its dispersion does not change significantly. Finally, we find that GRB 080916C is also consistent with most of the other spectral energy correlations derived from it, with the possible exception of the Ep,i - Eiso - tb correlation.
A comparative study on river hydrokinetic turbines blade profiles

Diesel based electricity supply is the common practice in rural and isolated areas in the North of Brazil. The diesel fuel is usually transported from a nearby city as Manaus by river to these isolated communities. During wet seasons and inundations this means of transport is very risky and not usually safe. The hydrokinetic technology is among the promising technologies for most of the Amazon areas because of the large hydraulic capacity and low density population settlements. In this paper the authors propose a cheap hydrokinetic turbine system whose blades are easy to design, manufacture, replace when necessary and its operation is independent of flow direction. In this work CFD, RANS (Reynolds Average Navier Stokes) equations are used to characterize and develop a methodology of numerical simulation of a vertical axis hydrokinetic turbine. In the simulations, four blade profiles were investigated. The effects of the number of blades, blade profile and water flow velocity on the turbine torque and power coefficients were presented and discussed.
Criminality, narrative and the expert witness in American biohistory

Abstract This article considers forensic anthropologists’ roles in negotiating the concept of criminality in biohistorical cases, those investigations of the famous and infamous dead that are driven by public interest rather than traditional medicolegal relevance. We review three biohistorical cases from the United States: the purported skull of a martyred Catholic priest from sixteenth century Georgia, the Mountain Meadows Massacre that occurred in Utah in the mid-nineteenth century, and the search for Billy the Kid’s grave in New Mexico. We find that anthropologists have active and passive roles in the manufacture, assignment, and sometimes denial of criminality in these cases. Additionally we explore how the analysis and discussion of violence in these biohistorical cases reflects two concepts that are distinctive to United States’ history, notably manifest destiny and the idea of closure in historical narratives. The perception that the present order is a natural culmination of history, and that the past is truly past underestimates the relevance and impact of labelling past personages as criminals to contemporary culture. As a result, forensic anthropologists’ negotiation of criminality in U.S. biohistorical cases is fraught with nebulous ethical challenges and tangible consequences.
Design and implementation of a qualitative simulation model of λ phage infection

Motivation: Molecular biology databases hold a large number of empirical facts about many different aspects of biological entities. That data is static in the sense that one cannot ask a database ‘What effect has protein A on gene B? ’ or ‘Do gene A and gene B interact, and if so, how? ’. Those questions require an explicit model of the target organism. Traditionally, biochemical systems are modelled using kinetics and differential equations in a quantitative simulator. For many biological processes however, detailed quantitative information is not available, only qualitative or fuzzy statements about the nature of interactions. Results: We designed and implemented a qualitative simulation model of λ phage growth control in Escherichia coli based on the existing simulation environment QSim. Qualitative reasoning can serve as the basis for automatic transformation of contents of genomic databases into interactive modelling systems that can reason about the relations and interactions of biological entities. Availability: The general qualitative simulator QSim, written in Lisp, is for research purposes available at http://www.cs. utexas.edu/users/qr/QR-software.html. Our code for the simulation of λ phage growth can be obtained from http://cogito.rz-berlin.mpg. de/qr.html. Contact: steffen@chemie.fu-berlin.de or http://igd.rz-berlin.mpg. de/∼steffen.
The effects of food-related personality traits on tourist food consumption motivations

ABSTRACT This study explores the motivational dimensions underlying food consumption in tourism, and to examine the effects of two food-related personality traits, namely food neophobia and variety-seeking, on these motivational dimensions. A tourist food consumption motivational scale was developed and seven motivational dimensions were identified: novelty and variety, authentic experience and prestige, interpersonal and culture, price/value and assurance, health concern, familiarity and eating habit, and sensory and contextual pleasure. Both food neophobia and variety-seeking were found to have significant effects on various motivational dimensions. The implications of the findings for practice and future research are discussed.
Multilingual Distributional Semantic Models: Toward a Computational Model of the Bilingual Mental Lexicon

In this paper, we propose a novel framework of a multilingual distributional semantic model to provide a psychologically plausible computational model of the bilingual mental lexicon. In the proposed framework, a monolingual semantic space for each target language is first generated from the corresponding monolingual corpus. These monolingual semantic spaces are then converted into ones with common dimensions, which are in turn integrated into a single multilingual semantic space. The language of dimensions, which we refer to as a pivot language, determines the type of bilinguals simulated by the model. We also tested the psychological plausibility of the proposed multilingual distributional semantic model by comparing the cosine similarity computed by the model with the cross-language word similarity ratings of L1 Japanese/L2 English sequential bilinguals. The result was that the bilingual semantic space with Japanese as a pivot language, which is predicted to be a model for L1 Japanese/L2 English sequential bilinguals, achieved better performance in simulating the similarity rating data. This suggests the plausibility of the proposed multilingual model.
Early Prediction of Student Success: Mining Students Enrolment Data

This paper explores the socio-demographic variables (age, gender, ethnicity, education, work status, and disability) and study environment (course programme and course block), that may influence persistence or dropout of students at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. We examine to what extent these factors, i.e. enrolment data help us in pre-identifying successful and unsuccessful students. The data stored in the Open Polytechnic student management system from 2006 to 2009, covering over 450 students who enrolled to 71150 Information Systems course was used to perform a quantitative analysis of study outcome. Based on a data mining techniques (such as feature selection and classification trees), the most important factors for student success and a profile of the typical successful and unsuccessful students are identified. The empirical results show the following: (i) the most important factors separating successful from unsuccessful students are: ethnicity, course programme and course block; (ii) among classification tree growing methods Classification and Regression Tree (CART) was the most successful in growing the tree with an overall percentage of correct classification of 60.5%; and (iii) both the risk estimated by the cross-validation and the gain diagram suggests that all trees, based only on enrolment data are not quite good in separating successful from unsuccessful students. The implications of these results for academic and administrative staff are discussed.
Generation of retinal pigmented epithelium from iPSCs derived from the conjunctiva of donors with and without age related macular degeneration

Fidelity in pluripotent stem cell differentiation protocols is necessary for the therapeutic and commercial use of cells derived from embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells. Recent advances in stem cell technology, especially the widespread availability of a range of chemically defined media, substrates and differentiation components, now allow the design and implementation of fully defined derivation and differentiation protocols intended for replication across multiple research and manufacturing locations. In this report we present an application of these criteria to the generation of retinal pigmented epithelium from iPSCs derived from the conjunctiva of donors with and without age related macular degeneration. Primary conjunctival cells from human donors aged 70–85 years were reprogrammed to derive multiple iPSC lines that were differentiated into functional RPE using a rapid and defined differentiation protocol. The combination of defined iPSC derivation and culture with a defined RPE differentiation protocol, reproducibly generated functional RPE from each donor without requiring protocol adjustments for each individual. This successful validation of a standardized, iPSC derivation and RPE differentiation process demonstrates a practical approach for applications requiring the cost-effective generation of RPE from multiple individuals such as drug testing, population studies or for therapies requiring patient-specific RPE derivations. In addition, conjunctival cells are identified as a practical source of somatic cells for deriving iPSCs from elderly individuals.
A Nonphotic Stimulus Inverts the Diurnal–Nocturnal Phase Preference in Octodon degus

Mechanisms differentiating diurnal from nocturnal species are thought to be innate components of the circadian timekeeping system and may be located downstream from the circadian pacemaker within the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus. In the present study, we found that the dominant phase of behavioral activity and body temperature (Tb) is susceptible to modification by a specific modality of behavioral activity (wheel-running activity) in Octodon degus, a mammal that exhibits multiple chronotypes. SevenOctodon degus exhibited diurnal Tb and locomotor activity (LMA) circadian rhythms while entrained to a 24 h light/dark cycle (LD 12:12). When the diurnal animals were provided unrestricted access to a running wheel, the overt daily rhythms in these animals inverted to nocturnal. This nocturnal pattern was sustained in constant darkness and returned to diurnal after removal of the running wheel. Six additional animals exhibited nocturnal chronotypes in LD 12:12 regardless of access to running wheels. Wheel-running activity inverted the phase preference in the diurnal animals without changing the 24 hr mean LMA or Tb levels. Because wheel running did not increase the amplitude of the pre-existing diurnal pattern, simple masking effects on LMA and Tb cannot explain the rhythm inversion. The diurnal–nocturnal inversion occurred without reversing crepuscular-timed episodes of activity, suggesting that diurnal or nocturnal phase preference is controlled separately from the intrinsic timing mechanisms within the SCN and can be dependent on behavioral or environmental factors.
The quasar epoch and the stellar ages of early-type galaxies

We investigate the hypothesis that quasars formed together with the stellar populations of early-type galaxies. This hypothesis – in conjunction with the stellar ages of early-type galaxies from population synthesis models, the relation of black hole mass to bulge velocity dispersion, and the velocity dispersion distribution of spheroids from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – completely determines the cosmic accretion history of supermassive black holes and the redshift evolution of the characteristic luminosity. On the other hand, the precise shape of the luminosity function of quasars depends on the light curve of quasars and – in the optical, but not so much in X-rays – on the covering factor of the dust surrounding the active nucleus. We find a plausible set of assumptions for which the coeval formation of supermassive black holes and elliptical galaxies is in good agreement with the observed B-band and X-ray luminosity functions of quasars.