Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characteristics of Social Anxiety From Virtual Interpersonal Interactions in Patients With Schizophrenia

Dysfunctional emotional processing affects social functioning in patients with schizophrenia. However, the relationship between emotional perception and response in social interaction has not been elucidated. Twenty-seven patients with schizophrenia and 27 normal controls performed a virtual reality social encounter task in which they introduced themselves to avatars expressing happy, neutral, or angry emotions while verbal response duration and onset time were measured and perception of emotional valence and arousal, and state anxiety were rated afterwards. Self-reported trait-affective scale scores and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) ratings were also obtained. Patient group significantly underestimated the valence and arousal of angry emotions expressed by an avatar. While valence and arousal ratings of happy avatars were comparable between groups, patient group reported significantly higher state anxiety in response to happy avatars. State anxiety ratings significantly decreased from encounters with neutral to happy avatars in normal controls while no significant decrease was observed in the patient group. The Social Anhedonia Scale and PANSS negative symptom subscale scores (blunted affect, emotional withdrawal, and passive/apathetic social withdrawal items) were significantly correlated with state anxiety ratings of the encounters with happy avatars. These results suggest that patients with schizophrenia have interference with the experience of pleasure in social interactions which may be associated with negative symptoms.
International Evidence on School Competition, Autonomy, and Accountability: A Review

This article reviews evidence from four international student achievement tests on the effects on student performance of competition from privately managed schools, schools' freedom to make autonomous decisions, and accountability introduced by external exit exams. The multivariate cross-country regressions are performed at the level of individual students and control for extensive family and school background information. The results reveal that students perform better in countries with more competition from privately managed schools, in countries where public funding ensures that all families can make choices, in schools that have freedom to make autonomous process and personnel decisions, where teachers have both freedom and incentives to select appropriate teaching methods, where parents take interest in teaching matters, and where school autonomy is combined with external exams that provide an information basis allowing for well-informed choices and holding schools accountable for their autonomous decisions.
A Critical Appraisal of the Role of Dietary Long-Chain Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids on Neural Indices of Term Infants: A Randomized, Controlled Trial

Objective. To determine whether dietary long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFA), such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid, affect visual evoked potential (VEP) acuity of formula-fed infants, relative to breastfed infants. A secondary objective was to assess the effect of LCPUFA on Bayley's mental developmental index (MDI) and psychomotor developmental index (PDI). Methods. Formula-fed infants were randomly allocated, in a double-blind manner, to either a placebo (no LCPUFA;n = 21), DHA supplemented (n = 23), or DHA+arachidonic acid supplemented formula (n = 24). Infants were fed their assigned formula from the first week of life until 1 year of age. A parallel reference group of breastfed infants was recruited and followed (n = 46). Infant VEP acuity was assessed at 16 and 34 weeks, and Bayley's MDI and PDI were assessed at 1 and 2 years of age. Results. There were no differences among the randomized formula groups for VEP acuity at either 16 or 34 weeks of age. Breastfed infants had better VEP acuity at 34 weeks of age, but not at 16 weeks, compared with all formula-fed infants. Bayley's MDI and PDI were similar in the 3 formula-fed groups at 1 and 2 years. Breastfed infants had higher MDI scores than formula-fed infants at 2 years of age even after adjusting for environmental variables. Conclusions. LCPUFA supplementation did not influence VEP acuity development in these well-nourished, formula-fed infants.
Design of a Test Processor for Asynchronous Chip Test

Due to asynchronous timing and arbitration asynchronous designs may behave no deterministically. For the test of such systems, this means that an exact timing, i.e. a tester cycle, of a test response cannot be guaranteed. This behavior makes functional tests of asynchronous designs relatively complex or even impossible. Therefore, this paper presents a concept for performing functional tests of asynchronous designs using a test processor infrastructure. To this end, we propose a low-cost 16-bit microprocessor solution with special support of asynchronous handshake signalling that can either be integrated into the device-under-test (DUT), mounted on the load board of the tester or a combination of both.
A Data Aggregation Transfer Protocol Based on Clustering and Data Prediction in Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy of wireless sensor networks is limited and the energy consumption of wireless communication takes most of the total energy consumption of sensor nodes. This paper proposes an energy-efficient data aggregation transfer protocol based on clustering and data prediction called DACP. In the initialization phase sensor network nodes send messages to sink node, then sink node divides entire networks into several clusters and elects cluster head nodes for each cluster. In the prediction phase sensor member nodes receive predicted data and compare it with sensed data to decide whether send it or not. In the data aggregation phase cluster head nodes aggregate sensed data received from cluster member nodes and decide to send it to sink node or not according to receiving predicted data. It is effective to reduce data transmission and improve the efficiency of data aggregation by data prediction. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can significantly provide longer lifetime and prolong the life of every node to survive.
Evaluation of Mechanical Properties of Reinforced Poplar Laminated Veneer Lumber

Three types of reinforcement materials, a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) sheet, a glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) mesh, and a composite of the CFRP sheet and GFRP mesh, were used to reinforce poplar laminated veneer lumber (LVL), and the multi-step hot-pressing method was also applied. The mechanical properties, i.e., modulus of rupture (MOR), modulus of elasticity (MOE), and horizontal shear strength (HSS), of the reinforced LVL were investigated, as well as the effects of lay-up location of the CFRP sheet/GFRP mesh composite. The results indicated that applying the multi-step hot-pressing method and incorporating the CFRP sheet, GFRP mesh, and the CFRP sheet/GFRP mesh composite noticeably improved the MOR and MOE under horizontal and vertical loadings. Only the multi-step hot-pressing method was able to greatly improve the HSS of reinforced LVL under both loading modes. The improved effect of the three kinds of reinforcing materials on the mechanical properties was ordered as follows: CFRP sheet/GFRP mesh composite > CFRP sheet > GFRP mesh. Locating the CFRP sheet/GFRP mesh composite closer to the surface veneer layer yielded the best mechanical properties for the reinforced poplar LVL.
Holographic representation of local bulk operators

The Lorentzian anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence implies a map between local operators in supergravity and nonlocal operators in the CFT. By explicit computation we construct CFT operators which are dual to local bulk fields in the semiclassical limit. The computation is done for general dimension in global, Poincare and Rindler coordinates. We find that the CFT operators can be taken to have compact support in a region of the complexified boundary whose size is set by the bulk radial position. We show that at finite N the number of independent commuting operators localized within a bulk volume saturates the holographic bound.
SemEval-2012 Task 6: A Pilot on Semantic Textual Similarity

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) measures the degree of semantic equivalence between two texts. This paper presents the results of the STS pilot task in Semeval. The training data contained 2000 sentence pairs from previously existing paraphrase datasets and machine translation evaluation resources. The test data also comprised 2000 sentences pairs for those datasets, plus two surprise datasets with 400 pairs from a different machine translation evaluation corpus and 750 pairs from a lexical resource mapping exercise. The similarity of pairs of sentences was rated on a 0-5 scale (low to high similarity) by human judges using Amazon Mechanical Turk, with high Pearson correlation scores, around 90%. 35 teams participated in the task, submitting 88 runs. The best results scored a Pearson correlation >80%, well above a simple lexical baseline that only scored a 31% correlation. This pilot task opens an exciting way ahead, although there are still open issues, specially the evaluation metric.
Multi-constrained Routing Algorithm: A Networking Evaluation

IP networks may face issues to support the offered workload due to the increasing number of Internet users, the steady influx of new Internet applications, which require stringent QoS, and applications needing big data transmission. QoS routing can be viewed as an attractive approach to tackle this issue. However, most of the QoS routing solutions are not evaluated in a realistic framework. In this paper we propose a networking evaluation of multi-constrained routing to assess the potential benefit of QoS routing protocol. To do this, we converted a multi-constrained routing algorithm into a protocol, and implemented it in the simulator NS2. Our results indicate that if the monitoring tool of a network can not sustain frequent link-state announcements, the benefits coming from implementing a QoS routing are quite low. On the other hand, if the network is equipped with an adequate measurement tool, then QoS routing can be worth implementing, and the routing based only the available bandwidth at each link arises as the best option (no need to consider the end-to-end delay constraint, nor the loss rate constraint).
Mobile Cloud-Computing-Based Healthcare Service by Noncontact ECG Monitoring

Noncontact electrocardiogram (ECG) measurement technique has gained popularity these days owing to its noninvasive features and convenience in daily life use. This paper presents mobile cloud computing for a healthcare system where a noncontact ECG measurement method is employed to capture biomedical signals from users. Healthcare service is provided to continuously collect biomedical signals from multiple locations. To observe and analyze the ECG signals in real time, a mobile device is used as a mobile monitoring terminal. In addition, a personalized healthcare assistant is installed on the mobile device; several healthcare features such as health status summaries, medication QR code scanning, and reminders are integrated into the mobile application. Health data are being synchronized into the healthcare cloud computing service (Web server system and Web server dataset) to ensure a seamless healthcare monitoring system and anytime and anywhere coverage of network connection is available. Together with a Web page application, medical data are easily accessed by medical professionals or family members. Web page performance evaluation was conducted to ensure minimal Web server latency. The system demonstrates better availability of off-site and up-to-the-minute patient data, which can help detect health problems early and keep elderly patients out of the emergency room, thus providing a better and more comprehensive healthcare cloud computing service.
Prevalence of metabolic syndrome and obesity in renal transplanted Mexican children

Abstract: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the prevalence of MS and obesity in Mexican children with more than one yr post‐renal transplantation. Thirty‐two children transplanted between January 2004 and February 2006 were included in the study. The weight and height at the time of renal transplant were obtained. A fasting blood sample was drawn for serum creatinine, adiponectin, and complete lipid profile, and a three‐h glucose tolerance test was also taken. A complete nutritional evaluation was performed including anthropometry. There was a statistically significant increase in BMI at one yr post‐transplant that was maintained at two yr post‐transplant. Three patients exhibited obesity and were overweight. Seventeen patients had hypertension, 14 patients had low HDL, 12 patients had hypertriglyceridemia, all had normal fasting glucose, six of them had glucose intolerance, and two had waist circumference higher than 90%. Eight patients (25%) had MS. Patients with MS had higher proportion of deceased donor grafts, acute rejection episodes, and received more methylprednisolone pulses; also they had a statistically significant higher pretransplant BMI than patients without MS. There was a significant relationship between BMI at one yr post‐renal transplant and creatinine clearance estimated by Schwartz formula.
Improved Multi-resolution Analysis of the Motion Patterns in Video for Human Action Classification

The automatic recognition of human actions in video is of great interest in many applications such as automated surveillance, content-based video summarization, video search, and indexing. The problem is challenging due to a wide range of variations among the motion pattern of a given action such as walking across different subjects and the low variations among similar motions such as running and jogging. This thesis has three contributions in a discriminative bottom-up framework to improve the multi-resolution analysis and classification of the motion patterns in video for better recognition of human actions. The first contribution is the introduction of a novel approach for a robust local motion feature detection in video. To this end, four different multi-resolution temporally causal and asymmetric filters of log Gaussian, scale-derivative Gaussian, Poisson, and asymmetric sinc are introduced. The performance of these filters is compared with the widely used multi-resolution Gabor filter in a common framework for detection of local salient motions. The features obtained from the asymmetric filtering are more precise and more robust under geometric deformations such as view change or affine transformations. Moreover, they provide higher classification accuracy when they are used with a standard bag-of-words representation of actions and a single discriminative classifier. The experimental results show that the asymmetric sinc performs the best. The Poisson and the scale-derivative Gaussian perform better than log Gaussian and that better than the symmetric temporal Gabor filter. The second contribution is the introduction of an efficient action representation. As the salient features at different spatial and temporal scales characterize different motion information, a multi-resolution action signature is developed for a more discriminative video representation. The third contribution is on the classification of different human actions. To this end, an ensemble of classifiers in a multiple classifier systems (MCS) framework with a parallel topology is utilized. This framework can fully benefit from the multi-resolution characteristics of the motion patterns in the human actions. The classification combination concept of the MCS has been then extended to address two problems in the configuration setting of a recognition framework, namely the choice of distance metric for comparing the action representations and the size of the codebook by which an action is represented. This implication of MCS at multiple stages of the recognition pipeline provides a multi-stage MCS framework which outperforms the existing methods which use a single classifier. Based on the experimental results of the local feature detection and the action classification, the multi-stage MCS framework, which uses the multi-scale features obtained from the temporal asymmetric sinc filtering, is recommended for the task of human action recognition in video.
Filling the Periorbital Hollows With Hyaluronic Acid Gel: Initial Experience With 244 Injections

Purpose: To review our initial experience using hyaluronic acid gel (Restylane) as a filler to treat the periorbital hollows. Methods: This is a retrospective, anecdotal case review of 244 cosmetic hyaluronic acid gel injections in 155 patients. An average volume of 0.9 ml per injection session was used in an individualized pattern that variably included the orbital rim hollow, zygomatic hollow, septal confluence hollow, and eyebrow and cheek fat pad. To achieve smooth contours, a layered, feathered threading technique was used, placing the filler deep to the orbicularis. Hyaluronidase injections were used in 11% of patients at follow-up visits to “dissolve” some of the filler to reduce contour irregularities. Results: One hundred eight of 121 (89%) patients with follow-up visits were satisfied with the cosmetic improvement after hyaluronic acid gel injections. For maintenance, the interval to second injection averaged 6.5 months. Side effects included lumps or contour irregularities (11%), bruising (10%), color change (7%), and fluid (15%). Twelve patients were unsatisfied and were not interested in additional injections: 5 with malar fluid, 3 with lumpy irregularity, and 3 with color change. Conclusions: Complex 3-dimensional contours and thin skin over bone render periorbital filling difficult. However, with individualized planning and with care taken to create smooth, feathered contours, it is possible to achieve acceptable improvement. We found that most patients considered themselves improved cosmetically, despite occasional side effects including contour irregularity or lumps, bruising, color change, and fluid accumulation. Patients with very thin skin, preexisting color problems, or preexisting eyelid fluid may not be good candidates for periorbital filling with hyaluronic acid gel. The effect of the filler is temporary, of course, and we counsel patients to anticipate maintenance injections at 6- to 12-month intervals.
A Study of the Performance of Dielectric Barrier Discharge under Different Conditions for Nitrobenzene Degradation

Water scarcity and water contamination due to the extensive use of organic compounds in industries trigger us to adopt modern techniques for wastewater treatment. In this research, we developed a new dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) system which was evaluated for the degradation of nitrobenzene in water under different experimental arrangements. DBD produces an enormous amount of active species like O3, •O, O2+ and O2− and •OH to degrade the pollutants. In this study, NB (Nitrobenzene) was treated from wastewater by changing the gas flow rate, adopting different carrier gas, by adding inhibitors and promoters and the effect of applied voltage on the production of active species to check the effectiveness of the DBD system. The DBD system was evaluated based on input power, degradation efficiency and energy yield compared with other advanced oxidation processes. The energy yield of the DBD system was 1.253 mg/kWh for the degradation of 20 mg/L of NB to 75% in 60 min with the discharge power of 0.538 W, which displays better results in comparison with the other AOPs regarding energy yield and the degradation efficiency of the pollutant. The results illustrate the significance of the system and further suggest its application to industrial-scale treatment.
Social Coping Among Academically Gifted Adolescents in a Residential Setting: A Longitudinal Study

Much of the research on the social coping of students with gifts and talents has relied on a single administration of an instrument while the participants were attending a summer program. This study attempts to understand how attendance at a residential high school (academy) may affect academically gifted students over time. Students in two graduating classes at the academy completed the Social Coping Questionnaire on two (class of 2006) or three (class of 2005) occasions during their 2 years at the academy. Significant differences across approximately the first year at the academy are found for the items denying giftedness (more common after a year at the academy), social interaction (less common after a year at the academy), and peer acceptance (higher after a year at the academy). Putting the Research to Use: Schools are inherently sccial enterprises. Research has demonstrated that students with gifts and talents often learn coping behaviors to navigate the social milieus of their schools. Because students have agency, they have the capability to modify their social coping strategies based on their perceptions and social goals. This paper sheds light on both the soical coping behaviors of 300 academically gifted students upon entering a residental school for gifted adolescents and how they adapted to the new community over a two-period. The results of this study allow the reader to understand the complexities of school environments as social contexts and how students with gifts and talents cope with them.
Predictive value of early HCV RNA quantitation for sustained response in nonresponders receiving daily interferon and ribavirin therapy

The prognostic value of early hepatitis C virus (HCV)‐RNA load was evaluated among nonresponder patients to previous interferon (IFN) therapy treated with daily IFN and ribavirin. One hundred‐six nonresponders (83 men), mean age 44.8 ± 11 years, were treated with IFN‐α2b 3 MU/day for 24 weeks, followed by 3 MU × 3/week for 24 weeks plus ribavirin 1–1.2 g/day for 48 weeks. HCV RNA was quantified by Versant HCV RNA 3.0 assay (Bayer). The predictive values of the baseline and the change in viral load at week 1, 4, and 12 for sustained virological responses were analyzed using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, as well as predictive values of >2 log10 drop from baseline by weeks 1, 4, and 12 in combination with undetectable HCV RNA for sustained virological response. Thirty‐two patients (30.2%) were sustained virological responders. The highest area under the curve was obtained at week 4. The unquantifiable HCV RNA level, in combination with at least a 2 log10 drop in viral load by week 4 and week 12, had a negative predictive value of 96% and 97%, respectively. Nonresponse can be predicted as early as week 4 or week 12 in nonresponders treated with daily IFN and ribavirin. J. Med. Virol. 72:46–51, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.