Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Saturation of the Magnetothermal Instability in Three Dimensions

In dilute astrophysical plasmas, thermal conduction is primarily along magnetic field lines, and therefore highly anisotropic. As a result, the usual convective stability criterion is modified from a condition on entropy to a condition on temperature. For small magnetic fields or small wavenumbers, instability occurs in any atmosphere where the temperature and pressure gradients point in the same direction. We refer to the resulting convective instability as the magnetothermal instability (MTI). We present fully three-dimensional simulations of the MTI and show that saturation results in an atmosphere with different vertical structure, dependent on the boundary conditions. When the temperature at the boundary of the unstable layer is allowed to vary, the temperature gradient relaxes until the unstable region is almost isothermal. When the temperature at the boundary of the unstable region is fixed, the magnetic field is reoriented to an almost vertical geometry as a result of buoyant motions. This case exhibits more vigorous turbulence. In both cases the resulting saturated heat flux is almost one-half of the value expected if the conduction were purely isotropic, Q̃ ~ χΔT/L, where χ is the thermal conductivity, ΔT is the fixed temperature drop across the simulation domain, and L is the temperature gradient scale length. The action of the MTI results in dynamical processes that lead to significant transport perpendicular to the initial direction of the magnetic field. The resulting magnetoconvection in both cases amplifies the magnetic field until it is almost in equipartition with sustained subsonic turbulence. These results are relevant to understanding measurements of the temperature profiles of the intracluster medium of clusters of galaxies as well as the structure of radiatively inefficient accretion flows.
A Comparative Analysis of Elementary Education Preservice and Novice Teachers' Perceptions of Preparedness and Teacher Efficacy

Approved: ______________________________ ______________________________ Deborah Byrnes, Ph.D. Gary Straquadine, Ph.D. Major Professor Committee Member ______________________________ ______________________________ Parker Fawson, Ed.D. Richard Sudweeks, Ph.D. Committee Member Committee Member ______________________________ ______________________________ Francine Johnson, Ph.D. Byron R. Burnham, Ed.D. Committee Member Dean of Graduate Studies
A Framework for Prediction of Response to HCV Therapy Using Different Data Mining Techniques

Hepatitis C which is a widely spread disease all over the world is a fatal liver disease caused by Hepatitis C Virus (HCV). The only approved therapy is interferon plus ribavirin. The number of responders to this treatment is low, while its cost is high and side effects are undesirable. Treatment response prediction will help in reducing the patients who suffer from the side effects and high costs without achieving recovery. The aim of this research is to develop a framework which can select the best model to predict HCV patients' response to the treatment of HCV from clinical information. The framework contains three phases which are preprocessing phase to prepare the data for applying Data Mining (DM) techniques, DM phase to apply different DM techniques, and evaluation phase to evaluate and compare the performance of the built models and select the best model as the recommended one. Different DM techniques had been applied which are associative classification, artificial neural network, and decision tree to evaluate the framework. The experimental results showed the effectiveness of the framework in selecting the best model which is the model built by associative classification using histology activity index, fibrosis stage, and alanine amino transferase.
The effect of online word-of-mouth in electronic markets: An investigation of the culture differences in the Chinese and U.S. contexts

Feedback profiles could affect both prices and the probability of sales. However, cultural mindset interprets the online feedback differently, which is likely to result in the variation of online trading behavior. The previous studies have been long downplayed in the online trading behavior. With the growing amount of Chinese E-Commerce, we ask whether the western e-commerce model works in the Chinese Context. This study attempts to explore and compare the effect of online word-of-mouth on trust building, and price premium in Chinese and U.S. Contexts. We propose that collectivism would increase the buyer's reliance on the feedback profile. Risk avoidance moderates the association between information of feedback profile and price premium. Structural equation model and regression techniques will be employed to analyze the data collected from online auctions and questionnaires. Future research opportunities are identified.
The phonetics of English and Dutch

This book provides a complete introductory course on the phonetics of English and Dutch based on an essentially practical approach to the subject. No previous knowledge of phonetics is assumed and all terms are explained in straightforward English as they are introduced. Theoretical and practical aspects of the subject are clarified for the student by means of numerous self-studies exercises in articulation and transcription. The book contains a detailed contrastive description of British RP English and of Dutch (in both the Netherlands and Belgian standard varieties). In addition to a full description of the individual vowels and consonants, full attention is paid to features of connected speech, e.g. intonation, assimilation and elision, stress and articulatory setting. There sections on sound-spelling relationships in English and an analysis of the commonest pronunciation errors in the English of Dutch-speakers. A guide to the technique of phonemic transcription is also provided, with numerous transcription passage for which correction keys are available. One chapter is devoted to differences between British and American pronunciation. Another section provides a survey of a range of British regional accents (e.g. Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Northern, London, Midlands and West Country).
Experimental Pain and Opioid Analgesia in Volunteers at High Risk for Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Background Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is characterized by recurrent nocturnal hypoxia and sleep disruption. Sleep fragmentation caused hyperalgesia in volunteers, while nocturnal hypoxemia enhanced morphine analgesic potency in children with OSA. This evidence directly relates to surgical OSA patients who are at risk for airway compromise due to postoperative use of opioids. Using accepted experimental pain models, we characterized pain processing and opioid analgesia in male volunteers recruited based on their risk for OSA. Methods After approval from the Intitutional Review Board and informed consent, we assessed heat and cold pain thresholds and tolerances in volunteers after overnight polysomnography (PSG). Three pro-inflammatory and 3 hypoxia markers were determined in the serum. Pain tests were performed at baseline, placebo, and two effect site concentrations of remifentanil (1 and 2 µg/ml), an μ-opioid agonist. Linear mixed effects regression models were employed to evaluate the association of 3 PSG descriptors [wake after sleep onset, number of sleep stage shifts, and lowest oxyhemoglobin saturation (SaO2) during sleep] and all serum markers with pain thresholds and tolerances at baseline, as well as their changes under remifentanil. Results Forty-three volunteers (12 normal and 31 with a PSG-based diagnosis of OSA) were included in the analysis. The lower nadir SaO2 and higher insulin growth factor binding protein-1 (IGFBP-1) were associated with higher analgesic sensitivity to remifentanil (SaO2, P = 0.0440; IGFBP-1, P = 0.0013). Other pro-inflammatory mediators like interleukin-1β and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) were associated with an enhanced sensitivity to the opioid analgesic effect (IL-1β, P = 0.0218; TNF-α, P = 0.0276). Conclusions Nocturnal hypoxemia in subjects at high risk for OSA was associated with an increased potency of opioid analgesia. A serum hypoxia marker (IGFBP-1) was associated with hypoalgesia and increased potency to opioid analgesia; other pro-inflammatory mediators also predicted an enhanced opioid potency. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00672737.
Automatic Test Generation for Coverage Analysis of ERTMS Software

ERTMS is the European Railway Traffic Management System. The CENELEC EN50128 guidelines for software development of safety critical system require that the software produced is verified by providing a set of tests covering the 100% of the code. This requirement, however, substantially increases the costs associated to the Testing phase, since it may involve the manual generation of tests. In this paper we present a methodology to automatic generate test achieving the desired code coverage. The automatization of the test generation phase, applied to some modules of the ERTMS developed by Ansaldo STS (an Italian leading company in the field), led to a dramatic increase in the productivity and to a reduction of the costs of the entire Software Development process.
Prevalence of episodic homelessness among adult childbearing women in Philadelphia, PA.

Pregnancy and the responsibilities of caring for children create additional barriers for low-income women and families seeking adequate and affordable housing, yet few studies have assessed the relative risk or prevalence of homelessness among pregnant or parenting women in the United States.1 The economic, social, and psychological dislocations associated with housing instability and homelessness may have particularly serious negative consequences for the health and well-being of pregnant and parenting women and their children,2–4 highlighting the need to document the number of women exposed to such conditions. Enumerating homeless populations is fraught with both difficulty and controversy5; however, effective public health planning and advocacy are problematic in the absence of a better understanding of the scope of the homelessness problem among pregnant and parenting women. In light of the need for relevant data, we sought to estimate the prevalence of homelessness among childbearing women living in a single, large urban area within the continental United States.
Patient Selection for Carotid Endarterectomy: How Far Is Risk Modeling Applicable to the Individual?

Background and Purpose— Risk-factor modeling has been proposed to identify patients with carotid stenosis who will most benefit from surgery. Validation by independent institutions performing carotid endarterectomy is necessary to determine the applicability of such models to the individual patient. Methods— A series of patients with a recently symptomatic high-grade carotid stenosis were selected for surgery according to current guidelines and were consecutively operated on in a single institution. In addition, a prognostic model was applied to the patients to analyze the concordance of both selection methods. Results— The study included 134 patients operated on between 1999 and 2001. The risk model predicted that 49% of the patients should have been excluded from surgery because the operation was found to be possibly harmful in 1 patient (1%) and not significantly beneficial in 65 patients (48%). This resulted from the predominant negative weight of the surgical risk factors in the model. However, this predominance was negated in our series by the fact that only 1 major complication (0.75%) occurred during follow-up. Conclusions— Exclusion of single patients on the basis of risk modeling may be problematic when the rate of perioperative complications is very low.
Factores atencionales en el coste por cambio de tarea

Cambiar de una tarea a otra produce habitualmente un coste en la ejecucion. Parte de este coste puede ser eliminado al proporcionar al participante conocimiento previo sobre el cambio de tarea y tiempo suficiente para anticiparlo. Sin embargo, otra parte del coste siempre permanece, es el coste residual. Estudiamos la naturaleza atencional del coste residual en funcion de la division de van der Heijden (1992) entre atencion espacial, expectativa e intencion. Nuestros resultados indican que el coste no interactua con los beneficios atencionales espaciales, ni con los beneficios por expectativa previa de tarea ni con el efecto Simon. Nuestra conclusion es que el coste residual es automatico
Informational Channels of Financial Contagion

Two main classes of channels are studied as informational sources of financial contagion. One is a fundamental channel that is based on real and financial links between economies, and the second is a social learning channel that arises when agents base their decisions on noisy observations about the actions of others in foreign markets. Using global games, I present a two‐country model of financial contagion in which both channels can operate and I test its predictions experimentally. The experimental results show that subjects do not extract information optimally, which leads to two systematic biases that affect these channels directly. Base‐rate neglect leads subjects to underweight their prior, and thus weakens the fundamental channel. An overreaction bias strengthens the social learning channel, since subjects rely on information about the behavior of others, even when this information is irrelevant. These results have significant welfare effects rooted in the specific way in which these biases alter behavior.
Vehicular opportunistic communication under the microscope

We consider the problem of providing vehicular Internet access using roadside 802.11 access points. We build on previous work in this area [18, 8, 5, 11] with an extensive experimental analysis of protocol operation at a level of detail not previously explored. We report on data gathered with four capture devices from nearly 50 experimental runs conducted with vehicles on a rural highway. Our three primary contributions are: (1) We experimentally demonstrate that, on average, current protocols only achieve 50% of the overall throughput possible in this scenario. In particular, even with a streamlined connection setup procedure that does not use DHCP, high losses early in a vehicular connection are responsible for the loss of nearly 25% of overall throughput, 15% of the time. (2) We quantify the effects of ten problems caused by the mechanics of existing protocols that are responsible for this throughput loss; and (3) We recommend best practices for using vehicular opportunistic connections. Moreover, we show that overall throughput could be significantly improved if environmental information was made available to the 802.11 MAC and to TCP. The central messagein this paper is that wireless conditions in the vicinity of a roadside access point are predictable, and by exploiting this information, vehicular opportunistic access can be greatly improved.
The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs

Entropy is a dimensionless quantity that is used for measuring uncertainty about the state of a system but it can also imply physical qualities, where high entropy is synonymous with high disorder. Entropy is applied here in the context of states of consciousness and their associated neurodynamics, with a particular focus on the psychedelic state. The psychedelic state is considered an exemplar of a primitive or primary state of consciousness that preceded the development of modern, adult, human, normal waking consciousness. Based on neuroimaging data with psilocybin, a classic psychedelic drug, it is argued that the defining feature of “primary states” is elevated entropy in certain aspects of brain function, such as the repertoire of functional connectivity motifs that form and fragment across time. Indeed, since there is a greater repertoire of connectivity motifs in the psychedelic state than in normal waking consciousness, this implies that primary states may exhibit “criticality,” i.e., the property of being poised at a “critical” point in a transition zone between order and disorder where certain phenomena such as power-law scaling appear. Moreover, if primary states are critical, then this suggests that entropy is suppressed in normal waking consciousness, meaning that the brain operates just below criticality. It is argued that this entropy suppression furnishes normal waking consciousness with a constrained quality and associated metacognitive functions, including reality-testing and self-awareness. It is also proposed that entry into primary states depends on a collapse of the normally highly organized activity within the default-mode network (DMN) and a decoupling between the DMN and the medial temporal lobes (which are normally significantly coupled). These hypotheses can be tested by examining brain activity and associated cognition in other candidate primary states such as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and early psychosis and comparing these with non-primary states such as normal waking consciousness and the anaesthetized state.
Near-Cathode Plasma Layer on CuCr Contacts of Vacuum Arcs

A model of near-cathode layers in vacuum arcs is developed. The model relies on a numerical solution of the problem of near-cathode space-charge sheath with ionization of atoms emitted by the cathode surface, and allows the self-consistent determination of all parameters of the near-cathode layer, including the ion backflow coefficient. The dependence of the density of energy flux from the plasma to the cathode surface on the local surface temperature is nonmonotonic with a maximum, a feature that plays an important role in the physics of plasma–cathode interaction. The developed model may be used for a variety of purposes, including as a module of complex nonstationary multidimensional numerical models of plasma–cathode interaction in vacuum arcs. As a simple example, an analytical evaluation of parameters of stationary spots on copper and chromium is given. In the case of composite CuCr contacts with large grains, spots with current of several tens of amperes burning on the copper matrix coexist with spots with currents of the order of 1 A burning on the chromium grains.
Optimal control of constrained piecewise affine systems with state- and input-dependent disturbances∗

Finite horizon optimal control of piecewise affine systems with a piecewise affine (1-norm or ∞-norm) stage cost and terminal cost is considered. Provided the respective constraint sets are given as the unions of polyhedra, it is shown that the partial value functions and partial optimal control laws are piecewise affine on a polyhedral cover of the set of states that can be steered, by an admissible control policy, to a terminal set of states in a finite number of steps. Existing results only consider the case of systems without disturbances, or systems with disturbances that are independent of the state and input. This paper extends these results to the case where the disturbance is dependent on the state and input.
VFDB 2012 update: toward the genetic diversity and molecular evolution of bacterial virulence factors

The virulence factor database (VFDB, http://www.mgc.ac.cn/VFs/) has served as a comprehensive repository of bacterial virulence factors (VFs) for >7 years. Bacterial virulence is an exciting and dynamic field, due to the availability of complete sequences of bacterial genomes and increasing sophisticated technologies for manipulating bacteria and bacterial genomes. The intricacy of virulence mechanisms offers a challenge, and there exists a clear need to decipher the ‘language’ used by VFs more effectively. In this article, we present the recent major updates of VFDB in an attempt to summarize some of the most important virulence mechanisms by comparing different compositions and organizations of VFs from various bacterial pathogens, identifying core components and phylogenetic clades and shedding new light on the forces that shape the evolutionary history of bacterial pathogenesis. In addition, the 2012 release of VFDB provides an improved user interface.
Multimedia object placement for hybrid transparent data replication

In this paper, we address present an optimal solution for the problem of multimedia object placement for hybrid transparent data replication. The performance objective is to minimize the total access cost by considering both transmission cost and transcoding cost. The performance of the proposed solution is evaluated with a set of carefully designed simulation experiments for various performance metrics over a wide range of system parameters. The simulation results show that our solution consistently and significantly outperforms comparison solutions in terms of all the performance metrics considered
Screening for disability in a community: the 'ten questions' screen for children, in Bondo, Kenya.

BACKGROUND Although the need for early identification and interventions of disabilities is evident, the current state of routine screening practice in Kenya needs intensive training of screeners before more rigorous techniques are introduced. OBJECTIVE To compare the precision and practical utility of the 'ten questions' and EARC screens among the 2- 9 year olds in a community setting. METHOD In this analytical comparative cross-sectional survey of two disabilities screening methods. multiphase sampling and multistage data collection procedures were employed. Quantitative research utilizing structured interview checklist was used for data collection. It described the prevalence rates of different types of disabilities using both methods. It analyzed the precision and practical utility of the two methods in a community setting. RESULTS 64 of the 399 children under study were disabled (50.5% male and 49.5% female). The 'ten questions' picks up only those problems that are of great concern to families. EARC services are a more definite case defining process of measuring the existence and degree of disability in children. It screens the children who are severely disabled leaving out the mildly disabled and medical conditions which, when left untreated, could lead to possible disablement. CONCLUSION Parents need to be sensitized about symptoms requiring the ten questions that can be used to screen out the potentially disabled children and the Education Assessment and Resource Centres (EARC) be used to diagnose the type and degree of the disability and refer the ill children for treatment. The basic needs of disabled children could be met in the community and do not require highly specialized personnel. They need to be localized and accessible.
Caller Experience: A method for evaluating dialog systems and its automatic prediction

In this paper we introduce a subjective metric for evaluating the performance of spoken dialog systems, caller experience (CE). CE is a useful metric for tracking the overall performance of a system in deployment, as well as for isolating individual problematic calls in which the system underperforms. The proposed CE metric differs from most performance evaluation metrics proposed in the past in that it is a) a subjective, qualitative rating of the call, and b) provided by expert, external listeners, not the callers themselves. The results of an experiment in which a set of human experts listened to the same calls three times are presented. The fact that these results show a high level of agreement among different listeners, despite the subjective nature of the task, demonstrates the validity of using CE as a standard metric. Finally, an automated rating system using objective measures is shown to perform at the same high level as the humans. This is an important advance, since it provides a way to reduce the human labor costs associated with producing a reliable CE.