Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-time deformation and fracture in a game environment

This paper describes a simulation system that has been developed to model the deformation and fracture of solid objects in a real-time gaming context. Based around a corotational tetrahedral finite element method, this system has been constructed from components published in the graphics and computational physics literatures. The goal of this paper is to describe how these components can be combined to produce an engine that is robust to unpredictable user interactions, fast enough to model reasonable scenarios at real-time speeds, suitable for use in the design of a game level, and with appropriate controls allowing content creators to match artistic direction. Details concerning parallel implementation, solver design, rendering method, and other aspects of the simulation are elucidated with the intent of providing a guide to others wishing to implement similar systems. Examples from in-game scenes captured on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC platforms are included.
A study of auditors' skeptical characteristics and their relationship to skeptical judgments and decisions

The purpose of this exploratory study is to examine the relationship between auditors’ skeptical characteristics and skeptical judgments and decisions. Despite the importance of auditor skepticism, as recognized by auditing standards, regulators, and practice, there is a lack of consensus and empirical data on the identification of auditor’s skeptical characteristics, how they are measured and the extent to which skeptical characteristics map with auditors’ skeptical judgments and decisions. Gaining insight on these issues has important implications for auditor recruitment and training, guidance to provide in audit tools, and future research. Three widely recognized skeptical characteristics from the psychology and auditing literatures are examined: (1) interpersonal trust; (2) suspension of judgment; and (3) locus of control. Furthermore, a comprehensive professional skepticism scale developed for the field of auditing is also considered. Finally, to examine the effect of client risks, the influence of control environment strength on the relationship between skeptical characteristics and auditors’ judgments and decisions is examined. An experimental study is conducted to address these issues involving a sample of 376 auditors from offices of the Big Four auditing firms in the Netherlands with experience ranging from staff to partner. The results show that the strength of the relationship between the alternative skeptical characteristics and skeptical judgments and decisions varies significantly. Overall, interpersonal trust displays the highest significance in predicting skeptical judgments and decisions. However, the relationship between auditors’ skeptical characteristics and skeptical judgments and decisions appears to be dependent on the strength of the control environment.
Caesarean Risk Factors in Northern Region of Bangladesh: A Statistical Analysis

Purpose: To explore the measurement of a scale of caesarean (C-section) risk factors and degree of risk contribution in different health facilities and to determine a suitable graphical representation (image) of caesarean cases. Methods: Based on seventeen indicators, a composite index was computed for each respondent and classified into three groups using Beta distribution of first kind. For the analysis of contribution of risk factors between private and public patients, principal component analysis (PCA) was also used. An attempt was made to visualise a suitable graphical representation of caesarean cases by independent component analysis (ICA). Results: The selected risk factors were more contributory to public hospital patients than to those in private hospitals on the basis of higher estimated value of range (R = 0.134) but a higher proportion of C-section occurred in private (93.4 %) than in public hospitals (30.3 %). On the other hand, PCA showed that the contribution of selected risk factors accounts for approximately 60.0 % and 68.5 % in private and public hospitals, respectively. Furthermore, from the various graphical representation, the numbers of private patients were more interlinked by ICA but not of the other graphical representations of PCA. Conclusion: We had expected the rate of C-section would be higher among public hospital patients than private hospital patients but the results obtained indicate the reverse. It seems that the combination of the propensity of private practice doctors to carry out C-section and the financial benefits on the part of private hospitals may be contributory factors to the caesarean section rates in private health facilities.
The role of alcohol in non‐smokers and tobacco in non‐drinkers in the aetiology of oral epithelial dysplasia

Oral epithelial dysplasia (OED) is an important risk factor in predicting subsequent development of invasive carcinoma. Despite the malignant potential of OED, the current state of knowledge regarding aetiological risk factors associated with OED is limited. The aim of our study was to evaluate the aetiological role of alcohol consumption in non‐tobacco smokers and smoking behaviour in non‐drinkers, in patients presenting with OED. Data from a hospital‐based case‐control study of OED were used to analyse the risk associated with alcohol in non‐smokers and with tobacco in non‐drinkers. A total of 140 cases and 236 controls were included. In the non‐drinkers, the risks of OED increased with tobacco smoking of more than 20 cigarettes per day, particularly non‐filter cigarettes. The risk of OED declined following smoking cessation, with ex‐smokers of 10 or more years demonstrating no excess risk relative to non‐smokers. In the non‐smokers, consumption of alcohol was not a significant predictor of OED. However, there was a synergistic effect of alcohol when combined with some aspects of tobacco smoking. Our results confirm that tobacco has an independent role in the aetiology of OED. The role of alcohol, however, is principally only important in conjunction with tobacco use. Int. J. Cancer77:333–336, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
[Neural correlates of "negative" formal thought disorder].

Formal thought disorder (FTD) is a core feature of schizophrenia, but its pathophysiology is poorly understood. It can be conceptualised as 'positive' (e.g. incoherence, neologisms) or 'negative' (e.g. poverty of thought) thought disorder. We investigated the neural correlates of negative FTD. Blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) contrast was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while six patients with schizophrenia and six healthy control subjects spoke about seven Rorschach inkblots for 3 min each. Varying degrees of thought-disordered speech were elicited during each run. In a within-subject design, the degree of negative thought disorder, conceptualised as 'poverty of speech' (Liddle et al. (2002) Thought and Language Index. Br J Psychiatry) was correlated with BOLD contrast in the two runs per patient showing the highest variance in this phenomenon. The degree of poverty of speech correlated positively mainly with activation in the right inferior parietal lobe (BA 40), middle frontal gyrus (BA 46), cuneus (BA 18), and the left posterior cingulate (BA 31). Negative correlations were evident in the left hippocampal/fusiform gyrus (BA 35/36/37). The severity of negative FTD correlates with activation in areas previously implicated in autobiographic episodic memory. During symptoms behaviourally characterised as negative, patients may experience rich memories and associations.
Time-travel debugging for JavaScript/Node.js

Time-traveling in the execution history of a program during debugging enables a developer to precisely track and understand the sequence of statements and program values leading to an error. To provide this functionality to real world developers, we embarked on a two year journey to create a production quality time-traveling debugger in Microsoft's open-source ChakraCore JavaScript engine and the popular Node.js application framework.
A Source-Channel Separation Theorem With Application to the Source Broadcast Problem

A converse method is developed for the source broadcast problem. Specifically, it is shown that the separation architecture is optimal for a variant of the source broadcast problem, and the associated source-channel separation theorem can be leveraged, via a reduction argument, to establish a necessary condition for the original problem, which unifies several existing results in the literature. Somewhat surprisingly, this method, albeit based on the source-channel separation theorem, can be used to prove the optimality of non-separation-based schemes and determine the performance limits in certain scenarios where the separation architecture is suboptimal.
READ–IT: Assessing Readability of Italian Texts with a View to Text Simplification

In this paper, we propose a new approach to readability assessment with a specific view to the task of text simplification: the intended audience includes people with low literacy skills and/or with mild cognitive impairment. READ-IT represents the first advanced readability assessment tool for what concerns Italian, which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic information. In READ-IT readability assessment is carried out with respect to both documents and sentences where the latter represents an important novelty of the proposed approach creating the prerequisites for aligning the readability assessment step with the text simplification process. READ-IT shows a high accuracy in the document classification task and promising results in the sentence classification scenario.
Regulation of Alternative Polyadenylation by U1 snRNPs and SRp20

ABSTRACT Although considerable information is currently available about the factors involved in constitutive vertebrate polyadenylation, the factors and mechanisms involved in facilitating communication between polyadenylation and splicing are largely unknown. Even less is known about the regulation of polyadenylation in genes in which 3′-terminal exons are alternatively recognized. Here we demonstrate that an SR protein, SRp20, affects recognition of an alternative 3′-terminal exon via an effect on the efficiency of binding of a polyadenylation factor to an alternative polyadenylation site. The gene under study codes for the peptides calcitonin and calcitonin gene-related peptide. Its pre-mRNA is alternatively processed by the tissue-specific inclusion or exclusion of an embedded 3′-terminal exon, exon 4, via factors binding to an intronic enhancer element that contains both 3′ and 5′ splice site consensus sequence elements. In cell types that preferentially exclude exon 4, addition of wild-type SRp20 enhances exon 4 inclusion via recognition of the intronic enhancer. In contrast, in cell types that preferentially include exon 4, addition of a mutant form of SRp20 containing the RNA-binding domain but missing the SR domain inhibits exon 4 inclusion. Inhibition is likely at the level of polyadenylation, because the mutant SRp20 inhibits binding of CstF to the exon 4 poly(A) site. This is the first demonstration that an SR protein can influence alternative polyadenylation and suggests that this family of proteins may play a role in recognition of 3′-terminal exons and perhaps in the communication between polyadenylation and splicing.
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

THE END OF FAITH: RELIGION, TERROR, AND THE FUTURE OF REASON. Sam Harris. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Pp. 348, $13-95. Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton (Evangel University/Springfield, MO). The 9/11 Islamic terrorists emblazoned the psychological truism of the path from belief to behavior on the minds of millions. The world saw the lethiferous power of religious belief. We witnessed the purpose driven death. Sam Harris pummels readers with invidious images of destruction associated with religious belief. We may well dispute many of his conclusions, but the ineluctable truth is that belief matters. At times acerbic, Harris has prepared a puissant polemic focused primarily upon the terror of Islam with ample scathing visited upon Christianity and Judaism. His thesis is that the beliefs of religious people have become unhinged from reason to the point that meaningful conversations cannot take place. He asserts that reason is in exile (chapter one) and that survival requires a return from unproven beliefs to evidence-based reason when making decisions that affect human life. In chapters two and three, Harris examines the notion of belief and the manner in which numerous contradictory beliefs are accumulated from early authority figures. He notes important findings that people are conservative - they do not easily give up beliefs. As beliefs develop into a worldview, a subset deals with matters of religious faith. By way of example, Harris shows the importance of re-examining beliefs that can have powerful consequences on health and wellbeing. Harris provides two historical examples of the inquisition and the holocaust to demonstrate the incredible power of malevolent belief systems to wreak havoc in the lives of hapless victims. Harris wages war on Islam in chapter four. His major point is that there is a reason we are facing Islamic terrorists rather than people of another faith - the principle of jihad. He acknowledges that apologists for Islam interpret the jihad as a personal struggle, but warns of those warriors who believe in a holy war against all non-Muslims, who are by definition infidels or apostate. To further his point, he quotes several hadithic lines that encourage war on earth and promise eternal rewards for martyrs. He follows this litany with a list of massacres and pogroms against Jews and quotations from Pew Research that support an alarmingly high percentage of people in various countries that affirm the justification of suicide bombing in the name of Islam (e.g., Lebanon 73%, Ivory Coast 56%). In West of Eden (chapter 5), the author challenges the extant American theocracy, which is primarily an attack on the two-term presidency of George W. Bush and the values of Christian fundamentalists that he believes were foisted on the general public. This analysis appears a bit dated given the 2008 presidential election. However, there are clearly laws and political positions related to such issues as abortion, stem cell research, certain substances (e. …
Prevalence of, and risk factors for, HIV, hepatitis B and C infections among men who inject image and performance enhancing drugs: a cross-sectional study

Objective To describe drug use, sexual risks and the prevalence of blood-borne viral infections among men who inject image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs). Design A voluntary unlinked-anonymous cross-sectional biobehavioural survey. Setting 19 needle and syringe programmes across England and Wales. Participants 395 men who had injected IPEDs. Results Of the participants (median age 28 years), 36% had used IPEDs for <5 years. Anabolic steroids (86%), growth hormone (32%) and human chorionic gonadotropin (16%) were most frequently injected, with 88% injecting intramuscularly and 39% subcutaneously. Two-thirds also used IPEDs orally. Recent psychoactive drug use was common (46% cocaine, 12% amphetamine), 5% had ever injected a psychoactive drug and 9% had shared injecting equipment. ‘Viagra/Cialis’ was used by 7%, with 89% reporting anal/vaginal sex in the preceding year (20% had 5+ female-partners, 3% male-partners) and 13% always using condoms. Overall, 1.5% had HIV, 9% had antibodies to the hepatitis B core antigen (anti-HBc) and 5% to hepatitis C (anti-HCV). In multivariate analysis, having HIV was associated with: seeking advice from a sexual health clinic; having had an injection site abscess/wound; and having male partners. After excluding those reporting male partners or injecting psychoactive drugs, 0.8% had HIV, 8% anti-HBc and 5% anti-HCV. Only 23% reported uptake of the hepatitis B vaccine, and diagnostic testing uptake was poor (31% for HIV, 22% for hepatitis C). Conclusions Previous prevalence studies had not found HIV among IPED injectors. HIV prevalence in this, the largest study of blood-borne viruses among IPED injectors, was similar to that among injectors of psychoactive drugs. Findings indicate a need for targeted interventions.
short stop Is Allelic to kakapo, and Encodes Rod-Like Cytoskeletal-Associated Proteins Required for Axon Extension

short stop (shot) is required for sensory and motor axons to reach their targets in the Drosophila embryo. Growth cones in shot mutants initiate at the normal times, and they appear normal with respect to overall morphology and their abilities to orient and fasciculate. However, sensory axons are unable to extend beyond a short distance from the cell body, and motor axons are unable to reach target muscles. The shot gene encodes novel actin binding proteins that are related to plakins and dystrophin and expressed in axons during development. The longer isoforms identified are predicted to contain an N-terminal actin binding domain, a long central triple helical coiled-coil domain, and a C-terminal domain that contains two EF-hand Ca2+ binding motifs and a short stretch of homology to the growth arrest-specific 2 protein. Other isoforms lack all or part of the actin binding domains or are truncated and contain a different C-terminal domain. Only the isoforms containing full-length actin binding domains are detectably expressed in the nervous system.shot is allelic to kakapo, a gene that may function in integrin-mediated adhesion in the wing and embryo. We propose that Shot's interactions with the actin cytoskeleton allow sensory and motor axons to extend.
New Insights on Plant Salt Tolerance Mechanisms and Their Potential Use for Breeding

Soil salinization is a major threat to agriculture in arid and semi-arid regions, where water scarcity and inadequate drainage of irrigated lands severely reduce crop yield. Salt accumulation inhibits plant growth and reduces the ability to uptake water and nutrients, leading to osmotic or water-deficit stress. Salt is also causing injury of the young photosynthetic leaves and acceleration of their senescence, as the Na+ cation is toxic when accumulating in cell cytosol resulting in ionic imbalance and toxicity of transpiring leaves. To cope with salt stress, plants have evolved mainly two types of tolerance mechanisms based on either limiting the entry of salt by the roots, or controlling its concentration and distribution. Understanding the overall control of Na+ accumulation and functional studies of genes involved in transport processes, will provide a new opportunity to improve the salinity tolerance of plants relevant to food security in arid regions. A better understanding of these tolerance mechanisms can be used to breed crops with improved yield performance under salinity stress. Moreover, associations of cultures with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi could serve as an alternative and sustainable strategy to increase crop yields in salt-affected fields.
The effect of high-fat meals and exercise on endothelial function and triacylglycerol concentrations in adolescent boys

The thesis investigated the effect of exercise on endothelial function (measured as flow-mediated dilation (FMD)) and triacylglycerol concentrations following the ingestion of a high-fat breakfast and lunch in adolescent boys. The validity of measuring lipid and lipoprotein concentrations from a capillary blood sample, and the reproducibility of the postprandial FMD and triacylglycerol concentration responses to the high-fat meals, was established. The effects of prior continuous moderate-intensity exercise (60 min walking at 60% V O2peak), repeated very short duration sprints (40 x 6 s maximal effort cycle sprints) and accumulated moderate-intensity exercise (6 x 10 min running at 70% V O2peak) on endothelial function and triacylglycerol concentrations in adolescent boys were then established across three studies, each consisting of two, 2-day main trials (control and exercise). On day 1, participants were either inactive or completed the prescribed exercise. On day 2, FMD and triacylglycerol concentrations were measured prior to, and following, ingestion of a high-fat breakfast and lunch. In each control trial FMD was reduced (signifying endothelial dysfunction), compared to fasting, by 20-32% and 24-33% following the high-fat breakfast and lunch. Following continuous moderate-intensity exercise, repeated very-short duration sprints and accumulated moderate-intensity exercise these reductions were only 8% and 10% (main effect trial, P = 0.002; main effect time, P = 0.023; interaction effect trial x time, P = 0.088), 2% and 5% (main effect trial, P = 0.012; main effect time, P = 0.004; interaction effect trial x time, P = 0.003) and 1% and 3% (main effect trial, P = 0.020; main effect time, P < 0.001; interaction effect trial x time, P = 0.014) respectively. The continuous moderate-intensity exercise and repeated very short duration sprints also significantly reduced the total area under the triacylglycerol concentration versus time curve by 22% (Control vs. Exercise; 12.68 (sem 1.37) vs. 9.84 (sem 0.75) mmol L-1 6.5h, P = 0.018) and 13% (Exercise vs. Control: 8.65 (sem 0.97) vs. 9.92 (sem 1.16) mmol L-1 6.5h, P = 0.023). The accumulated moderate-intensity exercise also reduced the total area under the triacylglycerol concentration versus time curve by 11%, but this reduction was not significant (Control vs. Exercise: 10.71 (sem 0.94) vs. 9.56 (sem 0.67) mmol L-1 6.5h, respectively, P = 0.183). The experimental evidence from these studies emphasise that exercise might offer an acceptable, non-pharmacological means of influencing CHD risk when individuals are young. The results of these studies can help shape future physical activity guidelines.
Neural Models for Key Phrase Detection and Question Generation

We propose a two-stage neural model to tackle question generation from documents. First, our model estimates the probability that word sequences in a document are ones that a human would pick when selecting candidate answers by training a neural key-phrase extractor on the answers in a question-answering corpus. Predicted key phrases then act as target answers and condition a sequence-to-sequence question-generation model with a copy mechanism. Empirically, our key-phrase extraction model significantly outperforms an entity-tagging baseline and existing rule-based approaches. We further demonstrate that our question generation system formulates fluent, answerable questions from key phrases. This two-stage system could be used to augment or generate reading comprehension datasets, which may be leveraged to improve machine reading systems or in educational settings.
Oxidative Decarboxylation of Levulinic Acid by Silver(I)/Persulfate

The oxidative decarboxylation of levulinic acid (LA) by silver(I)/persulfate [Ag(I)/S2O82−] has been investigated in this paper. The effects of buffer solution, initial pH value, time and temperature and dosages of Ag(I)/S2O82− on the decarboxylation of LA were examined in batch experiments and a reaction scheme was proposed on basis of the reaction process. The experimental results showed that a solution of NaOH-KH2PO4 was comparatively suitable for the LA decarboxylation reaction by silver(I)/persulfate. Under optimum conditions (temperature 160 °C, pH 5.0, and time 0.5 h), the rate of LA conversion in NaOH-KH2PO4 solutions with an initial concentration of 0.01 mol LA reached 70.2%, 2-butanone (methyl ethyl ketone) was the single product in the gas phase and the resulted molar yield reached 44.2%.