Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Communicative satisfaction of male-to-female transsexuals

The aim of this qualitative study was to gain an understanding of the way male-to-female transsexuals perceived their communication and their satisfaction with it in different aspects of their lives. Three focus groups were conducted for the purposes of this study, each consisting of four participants. The transcribed dialogues of the groups were analysed using a grounded theory approach to find the common underlying themes. These then formed the basis of the five major categories that identified key themes relating to transsexuals’ communicative satisfaction: communicative situations, emotions, groups of people, other contributing factors, and features of communication. The results revealed that although participants commented on the situations and contexts in which they experienced decreased communicative satisfaction, it was not always important to them to maintain their female communicative patterns in situations in which they felt comfortable. These five categories guided the development of a two-part pilot Functional Communicative Satisfaction Questionnaire (FCSQ). The FCSQ explores a variety of situations that the participants identified as impacting on their communicative satisfaction. Further development of the FCSQ is likely to enable speech pathologists to have a more informed approach to the management of this population.
Directional Field Synthesis, Design, and Processing

Direction fields and vector fields play an increasingly important role in computer graphics and geometry processing. The synthesis of directional fields on surfaces, or other spatial domains, is a fundamental step in numerous applications, such as mesh generation, deformation, texture mapping, and many more. The wide range of applications resulted in definitions for many types of directional fields: from vector and tensor fields, over line and cross fields, to frame and vector‐set fields. Depending on the application at hand, researchers have used various notions of objectives and constraints to synthesize such fields. These notions are defined in terms of fairness, feature alignment, symmetry, or field topology, to mention just a few. To facilitate these objectives, various representations, discretizations, and optimization strategies have been developed. These choices come with varying strengths and weaknesses. This report provides a systematic overview of directional field synthesis for graphics applications, the challenges it poses, and the methods developed in recent years to address these challenges.
City Size and Political Contention

Abstract In this research we propose an ironic theory of urban concentration, city size, and democratic reform. Authoritarian regimes tend to concentrate their countries’ populations in primate cities early in development. While this allows autocratic regimes to easily monitor and suppress most of their countries’ would-be political entrepreneurs and incipient social movement organizations, over time such primate cities can grow very large, concentrating grievance (in the form of conspicuous inequalities and ascribed identities) in places that may also offer unique mobilization resources (e.g., international media). We propose that large primary cities can become democratic “pressure cookers” for authoritarian regimes, suggesting that a country's space-economy may be an integral part of the puzzle of democratic transition. Using information from over eighty developing countries, our fixed-effects pooled time-series analyses of city growth, antistate demonstrations, and democratization generally bear out our theory. We conclude that authoritarian rulers do enjoy political and economic advantages by encouraging or dictating urban concentration, but also that these advantages probably diminish and perhaps reverse over time. As primary cities swell in population, they form global “theaters” that amplify contention and encourage other social forces that hasten democratic reform, which can hoist authoritarianism “on its own petard. ” We offer this as a somewhat ironic addendum to current macrosocial theories of political contention and change.
Anxiety and the deployment of visual attention over time

Two studies investigated the effects of anxiety on the time course of attention to threatening material. A rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm required report of words belonging to a prespecified semantic category with a distractor placed at varying positions preceding the target. Where there was little resemblance in meaning between distractors and targets, threat distractors briefly captured the attention of high state anxious individuals but only after a delay. Where distractors resembled the meaning of the targets, attention was captured more immediately, but processing of threat-related material was concentrated at different points in time as a function of both the degree of semantic resemblance between distractors and target, and state anxiety. The extent to which distractors are salient to the experimental task influences attentional capture and the temporal course of processing. The methodological implications of these results are discussed together with a new hypothesis about the effects of state anxiety on attention.
Parental Language Learning Beliefs and Practices in Young Children's Second Language Acquisition and Bilingual Development: Case Studies of Mexican Heritage Families in California and Arizona

We know that young children acquire language through everyday interactions. But little is known empirically about the salience and influence of parents' beliefs and explicit strategies, relative to tacit language socialization, especially among parents who consider bilingual language development. This thesis digs deeply into three contrasting Mexican American households to observe the extent to which mothers articulate language goals and beliefs, and then act from them. Parents' beliefs about how languages are learned influence their young children's first and second language development by parents' management of family routines, daily activities, and language practices. Parents' language learning beliefs emerge from understandings they have of their past language experiences and their response to the current environment where their children are growing. Parents express their language learning beliefs in relationship to language practices that occur within the context of their family, community life, and their children's schools. The basic components of Language Policy Theory--beliefs, practices, and management--are useful when considering the importance of parents' influence over their children's first and second language learning, but language policy also must be theorized in the local contexts where children are growing and learning. Ecocultural Theory is useful in situating Language Policy Theory in the historical, cultural, and environmental context where bilingual parenting occurs in order to understand how parental language learning beliefs, coupled with family routines and daily activity choices, influence the language learning opportunities of young children. This thesis presents findings of case studies of three first-generation Mexican American mothers and their young children who participated in a twenty-four family ethnographic study of child-rearing practices in Mexican heritage families. From the twenty-four mothers in the initial study who were the primary care-givers for their pre-kindergarten age child, emic parental beliefs about language development, childhood bilingualism, and features of the local environment emerged. In response to the local context, the mothers consciously served as facilitators, teachers, or role models for their children's bilingual development through their explicit practices. In case studies, mothers expressed and exemplified variation in bilingual parenting intentions with one mother seeing herself as learning to be bilingual from her children, another mother learning to be bilingual with her children, and another mother explicitly teaching her children to be bilingual. Parental language learning beliefs, family language practices, and parents' management of children's daily activities have implications for children attaining the language learning goals which their parents have for them and also have implications for teachers of second language learners.
Homozygous 10q23/PTEN deletion and its impact on outcome in glioblastoma: A prospective translational study on a uniformly treated cohort of adult patients

Tumors from a prospective cohort of adult patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma (n = 73), treated uniformly with radiochemotherapy, were examined for 10q23/PTEN deletion by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). Statistical methods were employed to evaluate the degree of association between 10q23/PTEN deletion status and patient age. Survival analysis was performed using Kaplan‐Meier log‐rank test and multivariable Cox models to assess the prognostic value of 10q23/PTEN deletion. Interestingly, 10q23/PTEN homozygous deletion was frequent in patients >45 years of age (P = 0.034) and the median age of patients harboring PTEN homozygous deletions was significantly higher than those with the retained status (P = 0.019). 10q23/PTEN homozygous deletion was associated with shorter survival in the entire cohort as well in patients >45 years (P < 0.05), indicating that loss of 10q23/PTEN showed clinical importance in elderly patients. Our study highlights the independent prognostic/predictive value of 10q23/PTEN deletion status as identified by FISH, particularly in glioblastoma patients aged >45 years.
Design of High-Speed, Low-Inertia Induction Machines With Drag-Cup Rotor

The subject of this paper is high-speed induction motor (IM) with drag-cup rotor with low inertia, designed for use in high-speed automotive applications such as kinetic energy recovery system (KERS). The aim of this paper is to present the optimization procedure of the air-gap length and the rotor thickness of this kind of motor in order to achieve the highest efficiency in the speed and torque range of interest. Simple procedure for stator dimensioning was conducted in order to get main dimensions of the motor. Based upon reasonable approximations, analytical considerations are performed in order to envisage and demonstrate the effects of changes in the rotor thickness and the two air-gap lengths on the motor performance. Starting with these raw results, finite element method (FEM) tools are used to obtain more precise performance prediction, and to perform the optimization of the air-gap lengths and the rotor thickness. Finally, simulation results were consolidated, presented, and used to draw conclusions and propose design guidelines.
Is Reflective Practice Compatible with Malay-Islamic Values? Some Thoughts on Teacher Education in Brunei Darussalam

This paper critically examines the compatibility of Brunei culture values with the assumptions of reflective practice. Cultural, political and educational institutions in Brunei are thoroughly embedded within a fusion of Malay-Islamic values. In an attempt to examine the issue of teacher effectiveness, reflective practice and allied concepts, such as action research, have been introduced into the teacher education curriculum at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam. Based on a juxtaposition of Brunei values/culture with the assumptions underlying reflection, the paper discusses why the cultural distinctiveness of Brunei poses serious obstacles to the implementation of reflective strategies in teacher education. The paper also underlines the need for teacher educators in non-western cultures to take cognisance of contextual factors when importing educational ideas and concepts from the ‘west’.
VR‐VIBE: A Virtual Environment for Co‐operative Information Retrieval

We present a virtual reality application called VR‐VIBE which is intended to support the co‐operative browsing and filtering of large document stores. VR‐VIBE extends a visualisation approach proposed in a previous two dimensional system called VIBE into three dimensions, allowing more information to be visualised at one time and supporting more powerful styles of interaction, The essence of VR‐VIBE is that multiple users can explore the results of applying several simultaneous queries to a corpus of documents. By arranging the queries into a spatial framework, the system shows the relative attraction of each document to each query by its spatial position and also shows the absolute relevance of each document to all of the queries. Users may then navigate the space, select individual documents, control the display according to a dynamic relevance threshold and dynamically drag the queries to new positions to see the effect on the document space. Co‐operative browsing is supported by directly embodying users and providing them with the ability to interact over live audio connections and to attach brief textual annotations to individual documents. Finally, we conclude with some initial observations gleaned from our experience of constructing VR‐VIBE and using it in the laboratory setting.
The relationship of physical performance with HIV disease and mortality

Objective:To evaluate whether HIV infection was associated with reduced physical performance, and to examine if reduced physical performance predicted mortality in our aging cohort of HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected persons. Design:Prospective, observational cohort of current and former injection drug users in the AIDS Linked to the IntraVenous Experience study in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Methods:The Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB) was used as an objective measure of physical performance and measured semiannually along with behavioral and demographic data. Correlates of reduced physical performance (SPPB score ⩽10) were identified and the relationship between reduced physical performance, HIV infection and mortality was analyzed by Cox regression. Results:Among 12 270 person-visits contributed by 1627 participants, the median age was 51, 30.3% were HIV-infected and 32.6% had an SPPB score 10 or less. In multivariable models, HIV infection was independently associated with 30% increased odds of reduced physical performance [odds ratio 1.30; 95% confidence interval (CI):1.12–1.52]. Reduced physical performance predicted mortality in a dose-response manner and within all HIV disease strata. Whereas reduced physical performance alone (hazard ratio 2.52, 95% CI: 1.59–4.00) and HIV infection alone (hazard ratio 2.78, 95% CI: 1.70–4.54) increased mortality, HIV-infected participants with reduced physical performance had a six-fold increased mortality risk (hazard ratio 6.03, 95% CI: 3.80–10.0) compared with HIV-uninfected participants with higher physical performance. Conclusion:HIV infection was independently associated with reduced physical performance. HIV and reduced physical performance have independent and joint effects on mortality. Physical performance measurement may be an important research and clinical tool to predict adverse outcomes among aging HIV-infected persons.
Development of a Multiplex PCR Assay Targeting O-Antigen Modification Genes for Molecular Serotyping of Shigella flexneri

ABSTRACT Shigella flexneri is the major Shigella species that causes diarrheal disease in developing countries. It is further subdivided into 15 serotypes based on O-antigen structure. Serotyping of S. flexneri is important for epidemiological purposes. In this study, we developed a multiplex PCR assay targeting the O-antigen synthesis gene wzx and the O-antigen modification genes gtrI, gtrIC, gtrII, oac, gtrIV, gtrV, and gtrX for molecular serotyping of S. flexneri. The multiplex PCR assay contained eight sets of specific PCRs in a single tube and can identify 14 of the 15 serotypes (the exception being serotype Xv) of S. flexneri recognized thus far. A nearly perfect concordance (97.8%) between multiplex PCR assay and slide agglutination was observed when 358 S. flexneri strains of various serotypes were analyzed, except that 8 strains were carrying additional cryptic and/or defective serotype-specific genes. The multiplex PCR assay provides a rapid and specific method for the serotype identification of S. flexneri.
Effect of spin fluctuations in the thermodynamic and transport properties of itinerant ferromagnet CoS2

Through a detailed study of the specific heat, resistivity and susceptibility under pressure in polycrystalline and single-crystal CoS2, we demonstrate that the thermodynamic and transport properties of this system are governed by spin density fluctuations. We give the correct (P, T) coordinates of its tricritical point, and discuss the origin of the first-order magnetic phase transition in this system. Our results highlight the importance of having clean single crystals in order to extract definitive conclusions about the intrinsic properties of itinerant weak ferromagnets.
Optimizing the creation of base populations for aquaculture breeding programs using phenotypic and genomic data and its consequences on genetic progress

The success of an aquaculture breeding program critically depends on the way in which the base population of breeders is constructed since all the genetic variability for the traits included originally in the breeding goal as well as those to be included in the future is contained in the initial founders. Traditionally, base populations were created from a number of wild strains by sampling equal numbers from each strain. However, for some aquaculture species improved strains are already available and, therefore, mean phenotypic values for economically important traits can be used as a criterion to optimize the sampling when creating base populations. Also, the increasing availability of genome-wide genotype information in aquaculture species could help to refine the estimation of relationships within and between candidate strains and, thus, to optimize the percentage of individuals to be sampled from each strain. This study explores the advantages of using phenotypic and genome-wide information when constructing base populations for aquaculture breeding programs in terms of initial and subsequent trait performance and genetic diversity level. Results show that a compromise solution between diversity and performance can be found when creating base populations. Up to 6% higher levels of phenotypic performance can be achieved at the same level of global diversity in the base population by optimizing the selection of breeders instead of sampling equal numbers from each strain. The higher performance observed in the base population persisted during 10 generations of phenotypic selection applied in the subsequent breeding program.
Integrated Syntenic and Phylogenomic Analyses Reveal an Ancient Genome Duplication in Monocots[W]

Whole-genome duplication (WGD) is a primary source of genetic material for evolutionary variation. This work compares the genomes of four monocots and two eudicots using integrated phylogenomic and syntenic analyses, revealing an ancient WGD that shaped the genomes of all commelinid monocots, including grasses, bromeliads, bananas, gingers, palms, and other economically important plants. Unraveling widespread polyploidy events throughout plant evolution is a necessity for inferring the impacts of whole-genome duplication (WGD) on speciation, functional innovations, and to guide identification of true orthologs in divergent taxa. Here, we employed an integrated syntenic and phylogenomic analyses to reveal an ancient WGD that shaped the genomes of all commelinid monocots, including grasses, bromeliads, bananas (Musa acuminata), ginger, palms, and other plants of fundamental, agricultural, and/or horticultural interest. First, comprehensive phylogenomic analyses revealed 1421 putative gene families that retained ancient duplication shared by Musa (Zingiberales) and grass (Poales) genomes, indicating an ancient WGD in monocots. Intergenomic synteny blocks of Musa and Oryza were investigated, and 30 blocks were shown to be duplicated before Musa-Oryza divergence an estimated 120 to 150 million years ago. Synteny comparisons of four monocot (rice [Oryza sativa], sorghum [Sorghum bicolor], banana, and oil palm [Elaeis guineensis]) and two eudicot (grape [Vitis vinifera] and sacred lotus [Nelumbo nucifera]) genomes also support this additional WGD in monocots, herein called Tau (τ). Integrating synteny and phylogenomic comparisons achieves better resolution of ancient polyploidy events than either approach individually, a principle that is exemplified in the disambiguation of a WGD series of rho (ρ)-sigma (σ)-tau (τ) in the grass lineages that echoes the alpha (α)-beta (β)-gamma (γ) series previously revealed in the Arabidopsis thaliana lineage.
Real‐time two‐photon confocal microscopy using a femtosecond, amplified Ti:sapphire system

The bilateral imaging approach known from confocal applications operating in the line mode was used to realize real‐time two‐photon imaging. It is shown that the sectioning inherent to two‐photon imaging could be improved by the introduction of a confocal line aperture in the imaging path. Using a high‐power, low‐repetition‐rate amplified Ti:sapphire system, various biological objects were visualized including live boar sperm.
Forced symbiosis between Synechocystis spp. PCC 6803 and apo-symbiotic Paramecium bursaria as an experimental model for evolutionary emergence of primitive photosynthetic eukaryotes

Single-cell green paramecia (Paramecium bursaria) is a swimming vehicle that carries several hundred cells of endo-symbiotic green algae. Here, a novel model for endo-symbiosis, prepared by introducing and maintaining the cells of cyanobacterium (Synechocystis spp. PCC 6803) in the apo-symbiotic cells of P. bursaria is described.
Diversity of Transcripts of Nitrite Reductase Genes (nirK and nirS) in Rhizospheres of Grain Legumes

ABSTRACT Transcription of the nirK and nirS genes coding for dissimilatory bacterial nitrite reductases was analyzed by reverse transcription PCR (RT-PCR) of mRNA isolated from rhizosphere samples of three economically important grain legumes at maturity: Vicia faba, Lupinus albus, and Pisum sativum. The nirK gene and transcripts could be detected in all the rhizosphere samples. In contrast, nirS could not be detected. Sampling variations were analyzed by comparing denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis profiles derived from nirK RT-PCR products. High similarity was observed between the replicates, and so one representative product per legume was cloned. Clones with the correct insert size were screened by restriction fragment length polymorphism by using the restriction enzyme MspI. The clones could be distributed into 12 different patterns. Patterns 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 were common in clone libraries of the three rhizosphere types under study. Patterns 2, 9, 10, and 11 were absent from Pisum rhizospheres, while patterns 6, 8, and 12 were absent from the Vicia library. Pattern 1, which was the most dominant in the Vicia and Lupinus libraries, constituted about 25% of all clones. The Lupinus library had clones representing all 12 patterns, indicating it to be the most diverse among the three. Clones representative of each pattern were sequenced. All patterns grouped together forming a distinct cluster, which was divergent from previously described nirK sequences in the database. The study revealed a hitherto unknown diversity of denitrifiers in legume rhizospheres. A plant-dependent rhizosphere effect on the transcripts of a gene was evident.