Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Education Still Needs Artificial Intelligence to Support Personalized Motor Skill Learning: Aikido as a Case Study

Motor skill learning is hardly considered in current AIED literature. However, there are many learning tasks that require consolidating motor tasks into memory through repetition towards accurate movements, such as learning to write, to draw, to play a musical instrument, to practice a sport technique, to dance, to use sign language or to train for surgery. The field of Artificial Intelli- gence (AI) needs new sap to cope with the challenges in the Educational (ED) domain aimed to support psychomotor learning. This new sap can be provided by novel interactive technologies around the Internet of the Things that deal with Quantified-self wearable devices, 3D modelling, Big Data processing, etc. The paper aims to identify opportunities and challenges for AI + ED that can be discussed during the workshop. Some of the issues raised are illustrated within a case study instantiated in the Aikido practice, a defensive martial art that in- volves learning skilled movements by training both the body and the mind, and which is not only part of extra-curricular activity in many schools, but has also been reported of value for teaching in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer- ing and Mathematics) education, in particular, some laws of mechanics.
Online Homework, Help or Hindrance? What Students Think and How They Perform.

To improve students’ retention rates in general chemistry, online homework was introduced into our curriculum. Replacing quizzes directly by online homework significantly improved (p < .0005) success rates in second-term general chemistry. Attitudinal Likert survey results indicate that the majority of students completed the online homework assignments (90%) and viewed the assignments as worth the effort (83.5%). Students were overwhelming (85.7%) in their recommendation that online homework use should continue. More consistent study habits were reported by 75.6% of students, and students reported using a suite of effective problem-solving approaches for questions marked as incorrect. Our instructors have willingly embraced the use of online homework and point to the incredible amount of time savings for the instructor as reason enough to use online homework.
Differential Spaces in Korean Places? Feminist Geography and Female Managers in South Korea

Is there evidence of new, differential space challenging entrenched, status quo abstract space at firms in South Korea? Based on quantitative analyses of responses from 360 survey participants, this study deploys a feminist geographical perspective to examine the careers of female managers in South Korea. Results include extensive descriptive statistics of waged and non-waged work environments, motivations for work and career breaks, income expenditures, and gender-based impacts on opportunities, networks and promotions in the workplace. An overall discriminatory atmosphere leads to decreased equality in opportunities to participate in training and business trips, which in turn leads to fewer promotions for female managers. Likewise, female managers in positions specifically designated for females receive fewer promotions. Korean firms have a stronger preference for sending men on business trips and more overall discriminatory atmospheres than foreign firms, while informal networks figure more predominantly into hiring and promotion at Korean firms. Finally, regression results indicate that both country of origin and organizational discriminatory atmosphere, despite concrete departmental and organizational policies geared toward the reduction of gender discrimination, negatively impact the percentage of female managers at firms in Korea.
A Theory of Emotion, and its Application to Understanding the Neural Basis of Emotion

Abstract It is shown that emotions can usefully be considered as states produced by reinforcing stimuli. The ways in which a wide variety of emotions can be produced, and the functions of emotion, are considered. There is evidence that the amygdala is involved in the formation of stimulus-reinforcement associations, and the orbitofrontal cortex with correcting behavioural responses when these are no longer appropriate because previous reinforcement contingencies change. This evidence comes from the effects of damage to these structures, and from recording the activity of single neurons in these structures in the monkey during the formation and disconnection of stimulus-reinforcement associations. In so far as emotions can be defined as states produced by reinforcing stimuli, then the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex are seen to be of great importance for emotions, in that they are involved respectively in the elicitation of learned emotional responses, and in the correction or adjustment of these emotion.
Diversity in Democracy: Minority Representation in the United States and Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics

Diversity in Democracy: Minority Representation in the United States. Edited by Gary M. Segura and Shaun Bowler. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. 316p. $45.00. Freedom Is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates, and American Presidential Politics. By Ronald W. Walters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 239p. $27.95. Diversity in Democracy is an ambitious book—even more ambitious than its subtitle suggests. Together with an impressive team of contributors, Gary Segura and Shaun Bowler set out to examine how minority Americans—blacks and Latinos, in particular—engage with the democratic political process, from how they align themselves within the existing party system to how they use the tools of democratic citizenship (namely, the vote) to advance their interests. In many ways Segura, Bowler, and their colleagues succeed and, in the process, reveal a number of important empirical phenomena and relationships, such as the value of descriptive representation in promoting both political trust and participation. Because of its contribution to basic knowledge about minority political behavior, this book would certainly be a valuable addition to any minority politics syllabus. However, its ambition is both a source of strength and a weakness.
Host specificity of filamentous, segmented microorganisms adherent to the small bowel epithelium in mice and rats

Germfree rats and mice were given by gavage samples of ileal homogenates prepared from conventional rats and mice. Filamentous, segmented procaryotes adhered to the small bowel epithelium in the ex-germfree mice only when the homogenate was made from mouse bowel and in the ex-germfree rats only when the inoculum came from rats. Thus, the filamentous microorganisms are host animal specific.
Lorcaserin Reduces the Discriminative Stimulus and Reinforcing Effects of Cocaine in Rhesus Monkeys

Cocaine abuse and obesity are serious public health problems, and studies suggest that both dopamine and serotonin systems are involved in regulating the consumption of drugs and food. Lorcaserin has serotonin (5-HT)2C receptor agonist actions, is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating obesity, and might be effective for treating cocaine abuse. These studies characterized the pharmacokinetic and behavioral profiles of lorcaserin (intragastric administration) and determined the effectiveness of lorcaserin to alter discriminative stimulus and reinforcing effects of cocaine (intravenous administration) in rhesus monkeys. Administered acutely, lorcaserin dose-dependently increased the occurrence of yawning while decreasing spontaneous activity and operant responding for food. These effects appeared within 30–60 minutes of administration and began to dissipate by 240 minutes, a time course closely matching plasma concentrations of lorcaserin. In monkeys discriminating cocaine from saline, lorcaserin alone did not occasion cocaine-appropriate responding but shifted the cocaine dose-response curve to the right and down in two of three monkeys. When administered acutely, lorcaserin dose-dependently decreased the rate at which monkeys responded for infusions of cocaine. When administered chronically, 3.2 mg/kg lorcaserin reduced the rate of cocaine-maintained responding by 50% for the duration of a 14-day treatment period. Together, these results show that lorcaserin attenuates the discriminative stimulus effects of cocaine after acute administration and the reinforcing effects of cocaine after acute and repeated administration, consistent with the view that it might have utility in treating cocaine abuse.
AMPK: A Target for Drugs and Natural Products With Effects on Both Diabetes and Cancer

The AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a highly conserved sensor of cellular energy that appears to have arisen at an early stage during eukaryotic evolution. In 2001 it was shown to be activated by metformin, currently the major drug for treatment for type 2 diabetes. Although the known metabolic effects of AMPK activation are consistent with the idea that it mediates some of the therapeutic benefits of metformin, as discussed below it now appears unlikely that AMPK is the sole target of the drug. AMPK is also activated by several natural plant products derived from traditional medicines, and the mechanisms by which they activate AMPK are discussed. One of these is salicylate, probably the oldest medicinal agent known to humankind. The salicylate prodrug salsalate has been shown to improve metabolic parameters in subjects with insulin resistance and prediabetes, and whether this might be mediated in part by AMPK is discussed. Interestingly, there is evidence that both metformin and aspirin provide some protection against development of cancer in humans, and whether AMPK might be involved in these effects is also discussed.
Personal Construct Psychology in Clinical Practice: Theory, Research and Applications

Part 1 Personal construing: its nature and assessment the theory techniques for the assessment of construing. Part 2 Construing in psychological disorder and its treatment: a review of the research disorders of the structure of the construct system the content of construing in disorder explorations of therapy and reconstruction. Part 3 Clinical applications of personal construct psychology the personal construct theory approach to diagnosis personal construct psychotherapy personal construct theory and alternative constructions of psychological disorder and therapy.
The functional role of neural oscillatory activity in perception and action

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THE FUNCTIONAL ROLE OF NEURAL OSCILLATORY ACTIVITY IN PERCEPTION AND ACTION By Yan Zhang August 2008 Chair: Mingzhou Ding Major: Biomedical Engineering Spontaneous ongoing neural oscillations are traditionally considered to reflect an ‘idling’ or deactivated brain state. In contrast, recent slice studies have demonstrated that the moderate amount of membrane potential oscillations can bring the local neuron populations closer to the firing threshold, making them more sensitive to a weak sensory stimulus. Other reports showed that very high levels of spontaneous oscillations inhibit sensory evoked responses. Hence, to distinguish these competing views, we investigated the relationship between ongoing neural oscillations preceding stimulus presentation and subsequent cognitive processing and behavior. First, we studied the relationship between reaction times and prestimulus neural oscillations in a broad frequency band over multiple cortical regions. Second, we explored the relationship between middle-latency somatosensory evoked potentials and prestimulus mu oscillations. Third, we investigated the large-scale synchronization and directionality of prestimulus neural activity in sensory perception and sensorimotor processing by applying adaptive multivariate autoregressive coherence and Granger causality analysis. In conclusion, our main findings suggest that cortical neural oscillations, especially spontaneous ongoing neural oscillations, are crucial in subsequent cognitive perception and behavioral performance. Also, the prestimulus neural synchronization over large-scale cortical
Fast and exact signed Euclidean distance transformation with linear complexity

We propose a new signed or unsigned Euclidean distance transformation algorithm, based on the local corrections of the well-known 4SED algorithm of Danielsson (1980). Those corrections are only applied to a small neighborhood of a small subset of pixels from the image, which keeps the cost of the operation low. In contrast with all fast algorithms previously published, our algorithm produces perfect Euclidean distance maps in a time linearly proportional to the number of pixels in the image. The computational cost is close to the cost of the 4SSED approximation.
Influence of Parental Education and Family Income on Children's Education in Rural Uganda.

This article investigates the effect of parentsΓCO literacy levels and family income in Uganda on the quality and nature of parentsΓCO involvement in their childrenΓCOs primary education. A mixed-methods study with an ethnographic element was employed to explore the views and opinions of 21 participants through a qualitative approach. Methods for data collection included observation of family routines and practices, semi-structured interviews with parents and children, and review of relevant documents. VygotskyΓCOs socio-cultural historical theory and the Feinsteinian concept of intergenerational transmission of educational success offer the basis for the investigation.Findings indicated a significant relationship between parentsΓCO income and literacy levels and the quality of support to their childrenΓCOs education. Household poverty emerged as a major obstacle to educational success for children across the three socio-economic categories of family studied. Compromised lack of time for parent-child interaction proved to be the main obstacle as parents spent significant hours in non-academic matters for the day-to-day survival of their families. Parental illiteracy showed negative associations with childrenΓCOs literacy competence and subsequent success in primary school.
Dermoscopy in General Dermatology

Dermoscopy improves the diagnostic accuracy in the clinical evaluation of pigmented skin lesions, but it is also useful for the assessment of vascular structures that are not visible to the naked eye. As a consequence, dermoscopy has been employed more and more for the differential diagnosis of nonpigmented skin disorders, including tumors but also inflammatory and infectious diseases. This article provides a review of the dermoscopic features seen in various nonpigmented tumoral and nontumoral skin lesions as well as the dermoscopic criteria used for monitoring skin reactions to various treatments.
A rat model of mild cognitive impairment associated with vascular factor

Vascular factors have been shown to be important in cognitive impairment and dementia in the elderly. Recent evidence suggests that treatment at the stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) can prevent progression to dementia. In this study we established a rat model that simulates the pathophysiological condition of vascular MCI, characterized by gait disturbance in the absence of motor deficits and mild working memory dysfunction and not being demented. Initiation of vascular MCI pathology was not associated with loss of neurons, but was correlated with microglial activation and white matter changes. This MCI rat model will be useful for analysis of effects of vascular factors on cognitive dysfunction and neurodegenerative processes and development of drugs for treatment of this disorder.
Hierarchical Attention Network for Action Recognition in Videos

Understanding human actions in wild videos is an important task with a broad range of applications. In this paper we propose a novel approach named Hierarchical Attention Network (HAN), which enables to incorporate static spatial information, short-term motion information and long-term video temporal structures for complex human action understanding. Compared to recent convolutional neural network based approaches, HAN has following advantages (1) HAN can efficiently capture video temporal structures in a longer range; (2) HAN is able to reveal temporal transitions between frame chunks with different time steps, i.e. it explicitly models the temporal transitions between frames as well as video segments and (3) with a multiple step spatial temporal attention mechanism, HAN automatically learns important regions in video frames and temporal segments in the video. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on the standard video action benchmarks, i.e., UCF-101 and HMDB-51, and it significantly outperforms the state-of-the arts
Nonverbal communication in human interaction

Preface. Part I: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION. 1. Nonverbal Communication: Basic Perspectives. 2. The Roots of Nonverbal Behavior. 3. The Ability to Receive and Send Nonverbal Signals. Part II: THE COMMUNICATION ENVIRONMENT. 4. The Effects of the Environment on Human Communication. 5. The Effects of Territory and Personal Space on Human Communication. Part III: THE COMMUNICATORS. 6. The Effects of Physical Characteristics on Human Communication. Part IV: The Communicators' Behavior. 7. The Effects of Gesture and Posture on Human Communication. 8. The Effects of Touch on Human Communication. 9. The Effects of the Face on Human Communication. 10. The Effects of Eye Behavior on Human Communication. 11. The Effects of Vocal Cues That Accompany Spoken Words. Part V: COMMUNICATING IMPORTANT MESSAGES. 12. Using Nonverbal Behavior in Daily Interaction. 13. Nonverbal Messages in Special Contexts.
An epigenetic aging clock for dogs and wolves

Several articles describe highly accurate age estimation methods based on human DNA-methylation data. It is not yet known whether similar epigenetic aging clocks can be developed based on blood methylation data from canids. Using Reduced Representation Bisulfite Sequencing, we assessed blood DNA-methylation data from 46 domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) and 62 wild gray wolves (C. lupus). By regressing chronological dog age on the resulting CpGs, we defined highly accurate multivariate age estimators for dogs (based on 41 CpGs), wolves (67 CpGs), and both combined (115 CpGs). Age related DNA methylation changes in canids implicate similar gene ontology categories as those observed in humans suggesting an evolutionarily conserved mechanism underlying age-related DNA methylation in mammals.
TWO-Dimensional Linear Discriminant Analysis of Principle Component Vectors for Face Recognition

In this paper, we proposed a new two-dimensional linear discriminant analysis (2DLDA) method. Based on two-dimensional principle component analysis (2DPCA), face image matrices do not need to be previously transformed into a vector. In this way, the spatial information can be preserved. Moreover, the 2DLDA also allows avoiding the small sample size (SSS) problem, thus overcoming the traditional LDA. We combine 2DPCA and our proposed 2DLDA on the two-dimensional linear discriminant analysis of principle component vectors framework. Our framework consists of two steps: first we project an input face image into the family of projected vectors via 2DPCA-based technique, second we project from these space into the classification space via 2DLDA-based technique. This does not only allows further reducing of the dimension of the feature matrix but also improving the classification accuracy. Experimental results on ORL and Yale face database showed an improvement of 2DPCA-based technique over the conventional PCA technique
Preprint Title: Light Rail Transit Impacts in Portland: the First Ten Years

This paper examines how the first decade of light rail transit (LRT) in the Portland region has affected auto ownership, mode share, density, and property values. The empirical analysis provides evidence that light rail has had some positive effect of rail on single-family property values, transit use, and slower growth of two-plus car households in the outer part of the LRT corridor as compared to an outer part of a parallel bus corridor. These effects may be the result of households self-selecting to make housing location decisions where LRT is located, rather than current households changing mode. This assessment of the evidence indicates the extent to which consumer preferences have responded to LRT investments. This kind of assessment is needed to provide the basis for estimating travel mode shares and market shares for dispersed and concentrated development forms. Examination of data suggests that it may be advisable for planners to entertain more modest expectations of LRT.
Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of intravenous bumetanide in mutant Nagase analbuminemic rats: importance of globulin binding for the pharmacodynamic effects.

The importance of plasma protein binding of intravenous furosemide in circulating blood for its urinary excretion and hence its diuretic effects in mutant Nagase analbuminemic rats was reported. Based on the furosemide report, the diuretic effects of another loop diuretic, bumetanide, could be expected in analbuminemic rats if plasma protein binding of bumetanide is considerable in the rats. This was proved by this study. After intravenous administration of bumetanide, 10 mg/kg, to analbuminemic rats, the plasma protein binding of bumetanide was 36.8% in the rats mainly due to considerable binding to alpha- and beta-globulins (this value, 36.8%, was considerably greater than only 12% for furosemide), and hence the percentages of intravenous dose of bumetanide excreted in 6 h urine as unchanged drug was 16.0% in the rat (this value was considerably greater than only 7% for furosemide). After intravenous administration of bumetanide to analbuminemic rats, the area under the plasma concentration-time curve from time zero to time infinity (1012 compared with 2472 microg min/mL) was significantly smaller [due to significantly faster both renal clearance (1.49 compared with 0.275 ml/min/kg) and nonrenal clearance (8.30 compared with 3.71 ml/min/kg)], terminal half-life (9.94 compared with 22.4 min) and mean residence time (4.25 compared with 5.90 min) were significantly shorter (due to faster total body clearance, 9.88 compared with 4.05 ml/min/kg), and amount of 6 h urinary excretion of unchanged bumetanide (559 compared with 261 microg, due to increase in intrinsic renal excretion) was significantly greater than that in control rats. The 6 h urine output and 6 h urinary excretions of sodium, chloride and potassium were comparable between two groups of rats although the 6 h urinary excretion of bumetanide was significantly greater in analbuminemic rats. This could be explained by the following. The amount of urinary excretion of bumetanide was significantly greater in analbuminemic rats than that in control rats only between 0 and 30 min urine collection. In both groups of rats, the urinary excretion rates of bumetanide during 0-30 min reached a upper plateau with respect to urine flow rate as well urinary excretion rates of sodium, potassium and chloride, therefore, the diuretic effects (6 h urine output and 6 h urinary excretions of sodium, potassium and chloride) were not significantly different between two groups of rats.
Cerebral hemodynamics in orthostatic intolerance with normal head‐up tilt test

Orthostatic hypotension (OH) and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) are well‐known causes of orthostatic intolerance (OI). In addition, there are OI patients who are characterized by the symptoms of OI and lack of abnormal findings in head‐up tilt (HUT) test. The aim of this study was to determine the cerebral hemodynamic changes in HUT test of OI patients with normal HUT (OINH).