Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disaster-Related Public Speeches: The Role of Emotions

Disaster managers are dealing with serious situations and their speeches should be factual yet empathetic, they should be objective yet show restraint. Nowadays messages to the public for the preparedness or the recovery phase of a crisis from disaster managers are disseminated through formal and social media, where the authorities delivering them appear surrounded by specialists. The common perception is that words uttered by these managers are the key, no matter how the person is perceived. The focus of technology has been on textual analytics and the acoustic quality of the deliverer's voice. However human beings tend to fuse the verbal information with the nonverbal aspect of communication, like tone of voice and facial expressions. Facial expressions are used in human communication to express the affect and attitudes of the speaker. The human aggregation process fuses data from video stream and audio stream together with the emotion stream (anger, joy, fear). Our analysis deals with the obsevation of facial muscle movements-emotion proxies on face. This paper describes an important contribution to safety and security in disasters, specifically in disaster management and public communications. This initial study is based on four political authorities and their speeches.
Loss of Retinoschisin (RS1) Cell Surface Protein in Maturing Mouse Rod Photoreceptors Elevates the Luminance Threshold for Light-Driven Translocation of Transducin But Not Arrestin

Loss of retinoschisin (RS1) in Rs1 knock-out (Rs1–KO) retina produces a post-photoreceptor phenotype similar to X-linked retinoschisis in young males. However, Rs1 is expressed strongly in photoreceptors, and Rs1–KO mice have early reduction in the electroretinogram a-wave. We examined light-activated transducin and arrestin translocation in young Rs1–KO mice as a marker for functional abnormalities in maturing rod photoreceptors. We found a progressive reduction in luminance threshold for transducin translocation in wild-type (WT) retinas between postnatal days P18 and P60. At P21, the threshold in Rs1–KO retinas was 10-fold higher than WT, but it decreased to <2.5-fold higher by P60. Light-activated arrestin translocation and re-translocation of transducin in the dark were not affected. Rs1–KO rod outer segment (ROS) length was significantly shorter than WT at P21 but was comparable with WT at P60. These findings suggested a delay in the structural and functional maturation of Rs1–KO ROS. Consistent with this, transcription factors CRX and NRL, which are fundamental to maturation of rod protein expression, were reduced in ROS of Rs1–KO mice at P21 but not at P60. Expression of transducin was 15–30% lower in P21 Rs1–KO ROS and transducin GTPase hydrolysis was nearly twofold faster, reflecting a 1.7- to 2.5-fold increase in RGS9 (regulator of G-protein signaling) level. Transduction protein expression and activity levels were similar to WT at P60. Transducin translocation threshold elevation indicates photoreceptor functional abnormalities in young Rs1–KO mice. Rapid reduction in threshold coupled with age-related changes in transduction protein levels and transcription factor expression are consistent with delayed maturation of Rs1–KO photoreceptors.
Electrospun nanofiber meshes with tailored architectures and patterns as potential tissue-engineering scaffolds

Using a stainless steel mesh as a template collector, electrospun nanofiber meshes with well-tailored architectures and patterns were successfully prepared from biodegradable poly (ε-caprolactone) (PCL). It was found that the resulting PCL nanofiber (NF) meshes had similar topological structures to that of the template stainless steel mesh. Such PCL nanofiber meshes (NF meshes) had improved the tensile strength with Young's modulus of 62.7 ± 5.3 MPa, which is >40% higher than the modulus of 44 ± 5.7 MPa as measured with the corresponding randomly oriented PCL nanofiber mats (RNF mat). On the other hand, the ultimate strain (87.30%) of the PCL NF meshes was distinctly lower than that of the PCL RNF mats (146.46%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the mechanical properties of nanofiber meshes with tailored architectures and patterns were studied and reported. When cultured with a mouse osteoblastic cell line (MC3T3-E1), the electrospun PCL NF meshes gave a much higher proliferation rate as compared with the randomly oriented PCL RNF mats. More importantly, it was found that the cells grew and elongated along the fiber orientation directions, and the resulted cellular organization and distribution mimicked the topological structures of the PCL NF meshes. These results indicated that the electrospun nanofiber scaffolds with tailored architectures and patterns hold potential for engineering functional tissues or organs, where an ordered cellular organization is essential.
Hotelling's Location Model in Mixed Duopoly

We investigate a mixed duopoly market where a welfare-maximizing public firm competes against a profit-maximizing private firm, using a linear-city location-then-price model with linear transportation costs. We find that, compared with the results in the purely private duopoly case discussed by Hotelling (1929) and d' Aspremont, Gabszewicz, and Thisse (1979), the condition under which price equilibrium exists for every location of private firm and public firm is changed while the main result of no subgame perfect Nash equilibrium (SPNE) for the game still holds true.
Effects of metallicity, star-formation conditions, and evolution in B and Be stars I. Large Magellanic Cloud, ﬁeld of NGC 2004 (cid:1)

Aims. To statistically study the e ﬀ ects of the metallicity, star-formation conditions, and evolution on the behaviour of massive stars and, more particularly, of B and Be stars, we observed large samples of stars in the Magellanic Clouds for the ﬁrst time. In this article we present the ﬁrst part of this study. Methods. Spectroscopic observations of hot stars belonging to the young cluster LMC-NGC2004 and its surrounding region were carried out with the VLT-GIRAFFE facilities in MEDUSA mode. We determined the fundamental parameters ( T e ﬀ , log g , V sin i , and radial velocity) for all B and Be stars in the sample thanks to a code developed in our group. The e ﬀ ect of fast rotation (stellar ﬂattening and gravitational darkening) are taken into account in this study. We also determined the age of observed clusters. We then compared the mean V sin i obtained for ﬁeld and cluster B and Be stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) with the ones in the Milky Way (MW). Results. We ﬁnd, in particular, that Be stars rotate faster in the LMC than in the MW, in the ﬁeld as well as in clusters. We discuss the relations between V sin i , metallicity, star-formation conditions, and stellar evolution by comparing the LMC with the MW. We conclude that Be stars began their main sequence life with an initial rotational velocity higher than the one for B stars. It is probable that only part of the B stars, those with a su ﬃ cient initial rotational velocity, can become Be stars. This result may explain the di ﬀ erences in the proportion of Be stars in clusters with similar ages.
Running Head : IS EMPATHY NARCISSISM ? IS EMPATHY ULTIMATELY JUST NARCISSISM ?

Question: Is empathic concern merely narcissism? Do mirror neurons cause me to see you as my mirror image and thus cause me to be concerned about your welfare because I am concerned about my own and I see myself when I look at you? Or does mirror neuron theory elevate empathy by saying that I use my own embodied state to understand your state, through a process of resonance, but I do so because I want to know how you feel and that resonance is the best way to find out? Empathic concern can certainly be linked to concern for oneself. This is especially true of cognitive empathy. An example can be found with psychopaths. Psychopaths are incapable of feeling emotion and, thus, are incapable of emotionally empathizing with others. They do practice cognitive empathy, however. They use cognitive empathy as a tool to control and manipulate others to further their own ends and personal ambitions. For example, a psychopath might cognitively empathize by putting himself in the shoes of a 'friend' in order to figure out how he thinks or plans; in this way, the psychopath can use that knowledge to take advantage of his 'friend. ' Certainly, this is an example where cognitive empathy is completely self-serving. But what about emotional empathy — the type of empathy people probably think of first when the notion of empathy is brought to mind? The majority of people in the world are not psychopaths. They are capable of emotion and emotional empathy as a result. But is empathetically caring for someone else entirely altruistic? Or is there perhaps an underlying level of egoism involved when someone expresses empathic concern? I will argue in support of the existence of a non-altruistic, egoistic brand of empathic concern. First, it is more sensible to ask whether or not empathic concern is rooted in self-Empathy & Narcissism 3 interest, as opposed to the somewhat hyperbolic term narcissism. Second, while a number of studies have shown support for an empathy-altruism model over empathy-related reward and empathy-related punishment models (Batson et al., 1988), the findings have since been reexamined (Cialdini et al., 1997), demonstrating the notion of oneness as a factor accounting for prosocial behaviour. Finally, targets of helping belonging to an in-group, as opposed to an out-group, were rewarded with a greater empathic response, further illustrating the more impactful factor of oneness. When it comes to studies …
De Novo Transcriptome Sequencing of Desert Herbaceous Achnatherum splendens (Achnatherum) Seedlings and Identification of Salt Tolerance Genes

Achnatherum splendens is an important forage herb in Northwestern China. It has a high tolerance to salinity and is, thus, considered one of the most important constructive plants in saline and alkaline areas of land in Northwest China. However, the mechanisms of salt stress tolerance in A. splendens remain unknown. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies can be used for global gene expression profiling. In this study, we examined sequence and transcript abundance data for the root/leaf transcriptome of A. splendens obtained using an Illumina HiSeq 2500. Over 35 million clean reads were obtained from the leaf and root libraries. All of the RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) reads were assembled de novo into a total of 126,235 unigenes and 36,511 coding DNA sequences (CDS). We further identified 1663 differentially-expressed genes (DEGs) between the salt stress treatment and control. Functional annotation of the DEGs by gene ontology (GO), using Arabidopsis and rice as references, revealed enrichment of salt stress-related GO categories, including “oxidation reduction”, “transcription factor activity”, and “ion channel transporter”. Thus, this global transcriptome analysis of A. splendens has provided an important genetic resource for the study of salt tolerance in this halophyte. The identified sequences and their putative functional data will facilitate future investigations of the tolerance of Achnatherum species to various types of abiotic stress.
Aerobic fitness and neurocognitive function in healthy preadolescent children.

PURPOSE We investigated the relationship between age, aerobic fitness, and cognitive function by comparing high- and low-fit preadolescent children and adults. METHOD Twenty-four children (mean age = 9.6 yr) and 27 adults (mean age = 19.3 yr) were grouped according to their fitness (high, low) such that four approximately equal groups were compared. Fitness was assessed using the Fitnessgram test, and cognitive function was measured by neuroelectric and behavioral responses to a stimulus discrimination task. RESULTS Adults exhibited greater P3 amplitude at Cz and Pz sites, and decreased amplitude at the Oz site compared with children. High-fit children had greater P3 amplitude compared with low-fit children and high- and low-fit adults. Further, adults had faster P3 latency compared with children, and high-fit participants had faster P3 latency compared with low-fit participants at the Oz site. Adults exhibited faster reaction time than children; however, fitness interacted with age such that high-fit children had faster reaction time than low-fit children. CONCLUSION These findings suggest that fitness was positively associated with neuroelectric indices of attention and working memory, and response speed in children. Fitness was also associated with cognitive processing speed, but these findings were not age-specific. These data indicate that fitness may be related to better cognitive functioning in preadolescents and have implications for increasing cognitive health in children and adults.
Learning the human chromatin network from all ENCODE ChIP-seq data

Introduction: A cell’s epigenome arises from interactions among regulatory factors — transcription factors, histone modifications, and other DNA-associated proteins — co-localized at particular genomic regions. Identifying the network of interactions among regulatory factors, the chromatin network, is of paramount importance in understanding epigenome regulation. Methods: We developed a novel computational approach, ChromNet, to infer the chromatin network from a set of ChIP-seq datasets. ChromNet has four key features that enable its use on large collections of ChIP-seq data. First, rather than using pairwise co-localization of factors along the genome, ChromNet identifies conditional dependence relationships that better discriminate direct and indirect interactions. Second, our novel statistical technique, the group graphical model, improves inference of conditional dependence on highly correlated datasets. Such datasets are common because some transcription factors form a complex and the same transcription factor is often assayed in different laboratories or cell types. Third, ChromNet’s computationally efficient method and the group graphical model enable the learning of a joint network across all cell types, which greatly increases the scope of possible interactions. We have shown that this results in a significantly higher fold enrichment for validated protein interactions. Fourth, ChromNet provides an efficient way to identify the genomic context that drives a particular network edge, which provides a more comprehensive understanding of regulatory factor interactions. Results: We applied ChromNet to all available ChIP-seq data from the ENCODE Project, consisting of 1451 ChIP-seq datasets, which revealed previously known physical interactions better than alternative approaches. ChromNet also identified previously unreported regulatory factor interactions. We experimentally validated one of these interactions, between the MYC and HCFC1 transcription factors. Discussion: ChromNet provides a useful tool for understanding the interactions among regulatory factors and identifying novel interactions. We have provided an interactive web-based visualization of the full ENCODE chromatin network and the ability to incorporate custom datasets at http://chromnet.cs. washington.edu.
Implementation of Guidance and Counseling As a Positive Discipline Management Strategy in Bulawayo Metropolitan Province Secondary Schools

Abstract The paper examined how secondary schools implemented a guidance and counseling strategy to maintain positive discipline. It adopted a qualitative approach and employed a case study design. Purposive sampling was used to select four secondary schools and participants that comprised two education officers, four school heads, four school counselors, twenty members of the disciplinary committee, forty prefects and four School Development Committee chairpersons. Data was collected using semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, and analyzed thematically. The study established that guidance and counseling services were offered through lessons and counseling sessions, schools referred serious cases to experts for professional counseling, and secondary schools experienced challenges in implementing guidance and counseling. The paper concluded that pockets of good practices were evident in the implementation of the guidance and counseling. It recommends that the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education should create a substantive post of a non-teaching school counselor in every school.
T Helper 17-Associated Cytokines Are Produced during Antigen-Specific Inflammation in the Mammary Gland

Infectious mastitis cuts down milk production profitability and is a major animal welfare problem. Bacteria-induced inflammation in the mammary gland (MG) is driven by innate immunity, but adaptive immunity can modulate the innate response. Several studies have shown that it is possible to elicit inflammation in the MG by sensitization to an antigen subsequently infused into the lumen of the gland. The objective of our study was to characterize the inflammation triggered in the MG of cows sensitized to ovalbumin, by identifying the cytokines and chemokines likely to play a part in the reaction. Among immunized cows, responders mobilized locally high numbers of leukocytes. An overexpression of the genes encoding IL-17a, IL-17F, IL-21, IL-22 and INF-γ was found in milk cell RNA extracts in the early phase of the inflammatory response. At the protein level, IL-17A was detected in milk as soon as the first sampling time (8 h post-challenge), and both IL-17A and IFN-γ concentrations peaked at 12 to 24 h post-challenge. In mammary tissue from challenged quarters, overexpression of the genes encoding IL-17A, IL-17F, IL-21, IL-22, IL-26 and IFN-γ was observed. Neutrophil-attracting chemokines (CXCL3 and CXCL8) were found in milk, and overexpressed transcripts of chemokines attracting lymphocytes and other mononuclear leukocytes (CXCL10, CCL2, CCL5, CCL20) were detected in mammary tissue. Expression of IL-17A, as revealed by immunohistochemistry, was located in epithelial cells, in leukocytes in the connective tissue and in association with the epithelium, and in migrated alveolar leukocytes of challenged quarters. Altogether, these results show that antigen-specific inflammation in the MG was characterized by the production of IL-17 and IFN-γ. The orientation of the inflammatory response induced by the antigen-specific response has the potential to strongly impact the outcome of bacterial infections of the MG.
Web Page Recommender System based on Folksonomy Mining for ITNG &#146;06 Submissions

There have been many attempts to construct Web page recommender systems using collaborative filtering. But the domains these systems can cover are very restricted because it is very difficult to assemble user preference data to Web pages, and the number of Web pages on the Internet is too large. In this paper, we propose the way to construct a new type of Web page recommender system covering all over the Internet, by using folksonomy and social bookmark which are getting very popular in these days
Comments on “A Closed-Form Solution to Tensor Voting: Theory and Applications”

We comment on a paper that describes a closed-form formulation to Tensor Voting, a technique to perceptually group clouds of points, usually applied to infer features in images. The authors proved an analytic solution to the technique, a highly relevant contribution considering that the original formulation required numerical integration, a time-consuming task. Their work constitutes the first closed-form expression for the Tensor Voting framework. In this work we first observe that the proposed formulation leads to unexpected results which do not satisfy the constraints for a Tensor Voting output, hence they cannot be interpreted. Given that the closed-form expression is said to be an analytic equivalent solution, unexpected outputs should not be encountered unless there are flaws in the proof. We analyzed the underlying math to find which were the causes of these unexpected results. In this commentary we show that their proposal does not in fact provide a proper analytic solution to Tensor Voting and we indicate the flaws in the proof.
Subsistema coparental: Revisão sistemática de estudos empíricos

Estudos sobre coparentalidade sao recentes no Brasil, embora a literatura cientifica investigue o construto ha mais de quatro decadas e confirme sua relevância a pesquisa e a clinica psicologica. Objetivou-se analisar as caracteristicas metodologicas, os objetivos e os resultados de estudos empiricos sobre coparentalidade. Trata-se de uma revisao sistematica de artigos cientificos no periodo 2007-2016 no Portal BVS e nas bases PsycINFO e Web of Science por meio dos termos coparentalidade e alianca parental. Com base nos criterios de inclusao, 29 artigos foram selecionados para analise. Verifica-se que as pesquisas investigam a coparentalidade por meio de pesquisa quantitativa, longitudinal e explicativa. Apontam a multiplicidade de perspectivas de investigacao da coparentalidade que pode estar associada aos questionamentos que ainda buscam ser respondidos e refletir as diferentes formas de compreender os processos familiares e as repercussoes no individuo e no casal. Sao discutidos resultados relevantes aos profissionais da clinica e aos pesquisadores.
The ecological and evolutionary energetics of hunter‐gatherer residential mobility

Residential mobility is a key aspect of hunter‐gatherer foraging economies and therefore is an issue of central importance in hunter‐gatherer studies. Hunter‐gatherers vary widely in annual rates of residential mobility. Understanding the sources of this variation has long been of interest to anthropologists and archeologists. The vast majority of hunter‐gatherers who are dependent on terrestrial plants and animals move camp multiple times a year because local foraging patches become depleted and food, material, and social resources are heterogeneously distributed through time and space. In some environments, particularly along coasts, where resources are abundant and predictable, hunter‐gatherers often become effectively sedentary. But even in these special cases, a central question is how these societies have maintained viable foraging economies while reducing residential mobility to near zero.
Cell-Autonomous Sex Differences in Gene Expression in Chicken Bone Marrow–Derived Macrophages

We have identified differences in gene expression in macrophages grown from the bone marrow of male and female chickens in recombinant chicken M-CSF (CSF1). Cells were profiled with or without treatment with bacterial LPS for 24 h. Approximately 600 transcripts were induced by prolonged LPS stimulation to an equal extent in the male and female macrophages. Many transcripts encoded on the Z chromosome were expressed ∼1.6-fold higher in males, reflecting a lack of dosage compensation in the homogametic sex. A smaller set of W chromosome–specific genes was expressed only in females. LPS signaling in mammals is associated with induction of type 1 IFN–responsive genes. Unexpectedly, because IFNs are encoded on the Z chromosome of chickens, unstimulated macrophages from the female birds expressed a set of known IFN-inducible genes at much higher levels than male cells under the same conditions. To confirm that these differences were not the consequence of the actions of gonadal hormones, we induced gonadal sex reversal to alter the hormonal environment of the developing chick and analyzed macrophages cultured from male, female, and female sex-reversed embryos. Gonadal sex reversal did not alter the sexually dimorphic expression of either sex-linked or IFN-responsive genes. We suggest that female birds compensate for the reduced dose of inducible IFN with a higher basal set point of IFN-responsive genes.