Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning to Operate Complex Devices: Effects of Conceptual and Operational Similarity

In two experiments we investigated the effect of prior knowledge of a given device on learning to operate a similar device. Two kinds of similarity were investigated: conceptual similarity, in which the underlying concepts of how the devices worked were the same, and operational similarity, in which the organization and structure of the operating procedure were the same. Experiment 1 used devices that were always physically the same, regardless of how they were described and the procedure used to operate them. Experiment 2 used devices that were always physically different but required the same logical sequence of steps. In both experiments there were substantial effects of operational similarity but no reliable effect of conceptual similarity. It was concluded that prior experience with similar devices often helps because similar devices have similar operating procedures, not because similar devices work similarly.
Cellular senescence and its effector programs

Cellular senescence can be described as a state of stable cell cycle arrest in response to diverse stresses. Senescence is a collective phenotype of multiple effectors, and their intensity and combination can be different depending on triggers and cell types. In this review, Salama et al. summarize effector mechanisms and highlight some key components of the collective phenotype of senescence.
Human Visual Search Does Not Maximize the Post-Saccadic Probability of Identifying Targets

Researchers have conjectured that eye movements during visual search are selected to minimize the number of saccades. The optimal Bayesian eye movement strategy minimizing saccades does not simply direct the eye to whichever location is judged most likely to contain the target but makes use of the entire retina as an information gathering device during each fixation. Here we show that human observers do not minimize the expected number of saccades in planning saccades in a simple visual search task composed of three tokens. In this task, the optimal eye movement strategy varied, depending on the spacing between tokens (in the first experiment) or the size of tokens (in the second experiment), and changed abruptly once the separation or size surpassed a critical value. None of our observers changed strategy as a function of separation or size. Human performance fell far short of ideal, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Bombesin-Targeted PET of Prostate Cancer

Imaging plays an important role in prostate cancer (PC), including accurate evaluation of the extent of disease, assessment of sites of recurrent disease, and monitoring of response to treatment. Molecular imaging techniques are among the novel developments related to the imaging of PC, and various SPECT and PET radiopharmaceuticals are now available in clinical trials or commercially. Here we describe the preclinical and clinical use of gastrin-releasing peptide receptors as targets for the imaging of PC, with a focus on the development of PET tracers for the imaging of gastrin-releasing peptide receptor–positive tumors.
Letter: the definition of budesonide dependence in microscopic colitis—authors’ reply

SIRS, We appreciate the comments of Drs. Fernandez-Banares and Gisbert on our article. We agree that our definition of budesonide dependence was broad, namely recurrence of diarrhoea after budesonide discontinuation. We also agree with their clinically important recommendation that maintenance budesonide should be used at the lowest effective dose, to minimise the risk of steroid-related side effects and cost, as noted in reviews from the USA and Europe. An average dose of 4.5 mg/d was more effective than placebo in a randomised trial, and in clinical practice, doses as low as 3 mg/d or even 3 mg every other day may be effective for maintenance. The Spanish Microscopic Colitis Group demonstrated the effectiveness of this strategy in a group of patients with collagenous colitis, and also reported that a subset of patients requires higher doses. In this study, only NSAID use at diagnosis was predictive of the need for higher maintenance doses of budesonide. We aimed to study doseresponse in our cohort treated with maintenance budesonide, but in a substantial proportion of patients in this retrospective study, we only knew the starting dose of budesonide but not the lowest dose used to maintain remission. We share the concerns of Fernandez-Banares and Gisbert that higher doses of budesonide over the long term may be associated with higher risk of steroid-related side effects, but we are not aware of robust evidence that higher doses (ie 6 mg/d) are riskier than lowdose budesonide (ie 3 mg/d). In the absence of such data, we prefer a broader definition of budesonide dependence to include any patient requiring long-term treatment for symptom control. As recommended previously, patients on maintenance budesonide should be monitored for the adverse events, particularly those on higher doses. Furthermore, it is not clear that maintenance treatment with immunomodulators is safer than budesonide, even at a dose of 69 mg/d, and therefore we tend to restrict use of immunomodulators to patients who are actually experiencing a side effect on budesonide.
Intranasal midazolam vs rectal diazepam for the home treatment of acute seizures in pediatric patients with epilepsy.

OBJECTIVE To compare intranasal midazolam, using a Mucosal Atomization Device (IN-MMAD), with rectal diazepam (RD) for the home treatment of seizures in children with epilepsy. DESIGN Prospective randomized study. SETTING Patients' homes and a freestanding children's hospital that serves as a referral center for 5 states. PATIENTS A total of 358 pediatric patients who visited a pediatric neurology clinic from July 2006 through September 2008 and were prescribed a home rescue medication for their next seizure. INTERVENTION Caretakers were randomized to use either 0.2 mg/kg of IN-MMAD (maximum, 10 mg) or 0.3 to 0.5 mg/kg of RD (maximum, 20 mg) at home for their child's next seizure if it lasted more than 5 minutes. OUTCOME MEASURES The primary outcome measure was total seizure time after medication administration. Our secondary outcome measures were total seizure time, time to medication administration, respiratory complications, emergency medical service support, emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and caretakers' ease of administration and satisfaction with the medication. RESULTS A total of 92 caretakers gave the study medication during a child's seizure (50 IN-MMAD, 42 RD). The median time from medication administration to seizure cessation for IN-MMAD was 1.3 minutes less than for RD (95% confidence interval, 0.0-3.5 minutes; P=.09). The median time to medication administration was 5.0 minutes for each group. No differences in complications were found between treatment groups. Caretakers were more satisfied with IN-MMAD and report that it was easier to give than RD. CONCLUSIONS There was no detectable difference in efficacy between IN-MMAD and RD as a rescue medication for terminating seizures at home in pediatric patients with epilepsy. Ease of administration and overall satisfaction was higher with IN-MMAD compared with RD. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00326612.
Dialogue and the Construction of Knowledge in E-Learning: Exploring Students’ Perceptions of Their Learning While Using Blackboard’s Asynchronous Discussion Board

This research explores students' perceptions of their learning while using Blackboard's asynchronous discussion board. It aims to understand through in-depth qualitative analysis how students perceive their construction of knowledge while using dialogue in an e-learning context. While attempting to comprehend the links between how a student perceives the use of dialogue and what they actually do in the learning task, the study explores individual constructions of knowledge in this environment, while outlining commonalities between different learners. The research maintains that an understanding by the teacher of students' perceptions of their learning while using dialogue in an e-learning environment provides comprehension of the nexus between how students understand a phenomenon belonging to a learning task and what they actually do in undertaking that task. For the teacher, and underlying a heuristic teaching objective, an insight into these perceptions provides a means from which to develop the learning context into one that truly stimulates the individual and social construction of knowledge. The study illustrates that asynchronous dialogue within a web interface can provide an educational tool that is conducive to learning in that it helps students construct knowledge as a result of using and interacting within an online discussion board. The research shows that students use and construct knowledge within the context in different ways, but go about learning within a constructivist framework through which they gain knowledge and become better learners.
Inhibin B and anti-Mullerian hormone as markers of persistent spermatogenesis in men with non-obstructive azoospermia: a meta-analysis of diagnostic accuracy studies.

INTRODUCTION A non-invasive test, which could predict the presence of sperm during a testicular sperm extraction (TESE) procedure in men with non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA), would be of profound clinical importance. Inhibin B (Inh-B) and anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) have been proposed as direct markers of Sertoli cell function and indirect markers of spermatogenesis. METHODS A search was conducted in the electronic databases MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials from inception through June 2009. Thirty-six different studies reported data on the predictive value of one or more index markers (serum Inh-B: 32 studies, seminal Inh-B: 5 studies, serum AMH: 2 studies, seminal AMH: 4 studies) and were included in the systematic review. Nine studies, which had serum Inh-B as index marker, met the predefined criteria and were included in the meta-analysis. RESULTS Serum Inh-B demonstrated a sensitivity of 0.65 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.56-0.74) and a specificity of 0.83 (CI: 0.64-0.93) for the prediction of the presence of sperm in TESE. When the pre-test probability of 41% was incorporated in a Fagan's nomogram, resulted in a positive post-test probability of 73% and a negative post-test probability of 23% for the presence of sperm in TESE. CONCLUSIONS Serum Inh-B cannot serve as a stand-alone marker of persistent spermatogenesis in men with NOA. Although limited, evidence on serum AMH and serum/seminal AMH do not support their diagnostic value in men with NOA.
Chance-Constrained Consistency for Probabilistic Temporal Plan Networks

Unmanned deep-sea and planetary vehicles operate in highly uncertain environments. Autonomous agents often are not adopted in these domains due to the risk of mission failure, and loss of vehicles. Prior work on contingent plan execution addresses this issue by placing bounds on uncertain variables and by providing consistency guarantees for a `worst-case' analysis, which tends to be too conservative for real-world applications. In this work, we unify features from trajectory optimization through risk-sensitive execution methods and high-level, contingent plan execution in order to extend existing guarantees of consistency for conditional plans to a chance-constrained setting. The result is a set of efficient algorithms for computing plan execution policies with explicit bounds on the risk of failure. To accomplish this, we introduce Probabilistic Temporal Plan Network (pTPN), which improve previous formulations, by incorporating probabilistic uncertainty and chance-constraints into the plan representation. We then introduce a novel method to the chance-constrained strong consistency problem, by leveraging a conflict-directed approach that searches for an execution policy that maximizes reward while meeting the risk constraint. Experimental results indicate that our approach for computing strongly consistent policies has an average scalability gain of about one order of magnitude, when compared to current methods based on chronological search.
Understanding occupy in Australia

Occupy is a formative social movement that has gained considerable attention in Europe and North America. Beginning circa early May 2011 in Spain ('the Indignants' or '15-M' movement) and growing in response to the domestic effects of the economic crisis sweeping through parts of Europe (Der Spiegel International, 2011), the Movement's ideas and concerns were picked up in the United States, initially via the activist magazine Adbusters (Schwartz 2012) under the banner 'Occupy Wall Street' in mid-September. Under the construction of 'Occupy [location]', the social movement spread throughout North America and globally. The style of the Movement has tended to focus on the establishment, where possible, of permanent encampments to act as a base of operations, focus of solidarity and media (making and reporting). The emphasis on the occupation of public space has been attributed to inspiration from the 'Arab Spring' uprisings in the Middle-East (Hall, 2011), as well as reflecting concerns about civic participation and access to sites for democratic expression.
Identification of Macroeconomic Factors in Large Panels CRED WP 2010 / 10

This paper presents a dynamic factor model where the extracted factors and shocks are given a clear economic interpretation. The economic interpretation of the factors is obtained by means of a set of over-identifying loading restrictions, while the structural shocks are estimated following standard practices in the SVAR literature. Estimators based on the EM algorithm are developed. We apply this framework to a large panel of US monthly macroeconomic series. In particular, we identify ve macroeconomic factors and discuss the economic impact of monetary policy shocks. The results are theoretically more plausible than those implied by standard SVAR models and indicate a signi cant role for monetary policy shocks in macroeconomic dynamics. JEL classi cations: E3, E43, C51, E52, C33 Keywords: Monetary policy, Business Cycles, Factor Models, EM Algorithm. Please address any comments to romain.houssa@fundp.ac. be. We thank Paul Söderlind, Ken Nyholm, Tom Engsted, Priscilla To¤ano and participants at EEA 2010 for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Jean Boivin for kindly making the data set available on his website, HEC-Montréal. Hans Dewachter acknowledges nancial support from FWO grant N G.0626. 07. yFinance Research Group, Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus and CREATES at the University of Aarhus, a research center funded by Danish National Research Foundation. zCES, University of Leuven, RSM Rotterdam and CESIFO. xCRED and CEREFIM, University of Namur 1
Parent HPV Vaccine Perspectives and the Likelihood of HPV Vaccination of Adolescent Girls

The study is descriptive research aimed at identifying parents’ knowledge of HPV vaccination of their children, acceptance of the vaccination, and factors influencing the acceptance. In terms of results, in knowledge about cervical cancer and HPV vaccine, a significant difference was found between mothers and fathers with the former gaining the better score. Regarding hindrance to vaccination, mothers picked ‘worries over the effectiveness and side effects of the vaccine’ as the biggest barrier in this study and fathers ‘no knowledge’ about HPV vaccine. Fathers garnered significantly lower scores than mothers in ‘HPV vaccination rate,’ ‘HPV vaccinate rate of daughters,’ and ‘knowledge of cervical cancer and HPV vaccine’. All these results considered together suggest that education of not only mothers but also fathers is badly required to raise the HPV vaccination rate of middle and high school students who are at the best age to be vaccinated. Also in order to raise Korea’s HPV vaccination rate, which is much lower than those of advanced countries, vaccination subsidies and diverse government policy efforts, such as governmentled education and promotional programmes, are required.
PINOID Kinase Regulates Root Gravitropism through Modulation of PIN2-Dependent Basipetal Auxin Transport in Arabidopsis1[W][OA]

Reversible protein phosphorylation is a key regulatory mechanism governing polar auxin transport. We characterized the auxin transport and gravitropic phenotypes of the pinoid-9 (pid-9) mutant of Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) and tested the hypothesis that phosphorylation mediated by PID kinase and dephosphorylation regulated by the ROOTS CURL IN NAPHTHYLPHTHALAMIC ACID1 (RCN1) protein might antagonistically regulate root auxin transport and gravity response. Basipetal indole-3-acetic acid transport and gravitropism are reduced in pid-9 seedlings, while acropetal transport and lateral root development are unchanged. Treatment of wild-type seedlings with the protein kinase inhibitor staurosporine phenocopies the reduced auxin transport and gravity response of pid-9, while pid-9 is resistant to inhibition by staurosporine. Staurosporine and the phosphatase inhibitor, cantharidin, delay the asymmetric expression of DR5∷revGFP (green fluorescent protein) at the root tip after gravistimulation. Gravity response defects of rcn1 and pid-9 are partially rescued by treatment with staurosporine and cantharidin, respectively. The pid-9 rcn1 double mutant has a more rapid gravitropic response than rcn1. These data are consistent with a reciprocal regulation of gravitropism by RCN1 and PID. Furthermore, the effect of staurosporine is lost in pinformed2 (pin2). Our data suggest that reduced PID kinase function inhibits gravitropism and basipetal indole-3-acetic acid transport. However, in contrast to PID overexpression studies, we observed wild-type asymmetric membrane distribution of the PIN2 protein in both pid-9 and wild-type root tips, although PIN2 accumulates in endomembrane structures in pid-9 roots. Similarly, staurosporine-treated plants expressing a PIN2∷GFP fusion exhibit endomembrane accumulation of PIN2∷GFP, but no changes in membrane asymmetries were detected. Our data suggest that PID plays a limited role in root development; loss of PID activity alters auxin transport and gravitropism without causing an obvious change in cellular polarity.
Fibromyalgia syndrome: assessment of the severity of the condition 2 years after diagnosis.

OBJECTIVE To review the outcome of patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) diagnosed and treated with minimal intervention in community rheumatology practice. METHODS Forty-four ambulant patients with FMS, first seen in a 2-month period and treated with a simple management program, were identified and reviewed 2 years after diagnosis. A variety of clinical and psychological features were assessed using standard techniques. RESULTS Forty-seven percent no longer fulfilled Smythe or ACR criteria for FMS. Remission was objectively identified in 24.2% of assessed patients. Significant differences in objective clinical signs, in symptoms, and in self-described disability were found between patients with and without FMS. Regular physical exercise, rather than drug or specific physical therapies, correlated highly with low FMS activity scores. Analysis of mood and coping strategies at the 2-year review showed low correlations with current FMS activity. CONCLUSION Community FMS has a better prognosis than the literature suggests. Simple intervention may be associated with good outcome in a significant number of patients with FMS.
Narratives of educational transition and learner identity

This article examines how educational transitions in Hong Kong are concurrently classed processes and practices, and how learner identity is developed and negotiated in an education system that prizes English as capital. Through the lens of habitus, the connected but distinct autobiographical accounts suggest that the stronger the insulation between the home and the school, the keener an individual’s sensitivity may be towards class distinction in adapting to a new field. Learner identity associated with academic success is potentially negotiable and self-sustained through determination, self-regulation, and reflexive strategies, rendering the availability of resource support less important for working-class students’ identity development.
Improving the Scalability of Optimal Bayesian Network Learning with External-Memory Frontier Breadth-First Branch and Bound Search

Previous work has shown that the problem of learning the optimal structure of a Bayesian network can be formulated as a shortest path finding problem in a graph and solved using A* search. In this paper, we improve the scalability of this approach by developing a memory-efficient heuristic search algorithm for learning the structure of a Bayesian network. Instead of using A*, we propose a frontier breadth-first branch and bound search that leverages the layered structure of the search graph of this problem so that no more than two layers of the graph, plus solution reconstruction information, need to be stored in memory at a time. To further improve scalability, the algorithm stores most of the graph in external memory, such as hard disk, when it does not fit in RAM. Experimental results show that the resulting algorithm solves significantly larger problems than the current state of the art.
Relative Quantitation of Glycopeptides Based on Stable Isotope Labeling Using MALDI-TOF MS

We have developed an effective, sensitive method for quantitative glycopeptide profiling using stable isotope labeling and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry (MS). In this study, we synthesized benzoic acid-d0 N-succinimidyl ester (BzOSu) and benzoic acid-d5 N-succinimidyl ester (d-BzOSu) as light and heavy isotope reagents for stable isotope quantification for the comparative analysis of glycopeptides. Using this approach provided enhanced ionization efficiency in both positive and negative modes by MALDI-TOF MS. These reagents were quantitatively reacted with glycopeptides from human serum IgG (hIgG) at a wide range of concentrations; the labeling efficiency of the glycopeptides showed high reproducibility and a good calibration curve was obtained. To demonstrate the practical utility of this approach, we characterized the structures of glycopeptides from hIgG and from IgG1 produced by myeloma plasma. The glycopeptides were quantitatively analyzed by mixing Bz-labeled IgG1 glycopeptides with d-Bz-labeled hIgG glycopeptides. Glycan structural identification of the hIgG glycopeptides was demonstrated by combining the highly specific recognition of endo-β-N-acetyl glucosaminidases from Streptococcus pyogenes (endoS) or from Streptococcus pneumoniae (endo-D) with MALDI-TOF MS analysis. The obtained data revealed the glycan profile and the ratio of glycan structural isomers containing a galactosylated extension on IgG1, IgG2 and IgG3 glycopetides.
Reducing False Positives by Combining Abstract Interpretation and Bounded Model Checking

Fully automatic source code analysis tools based on abstract interpretation have become an integral part of the embedded software development process in many companies. And although these tools are of great help in identifying residual errors, they still possess a major drawback: analyzing industrial code comes at the cost of many spurious errors that must be investigated manually. The need for efficient development cycles prohibits extensive manual reviews, however. To overcome this problem, the combination of different software verification techniques has been suggested in the literature. Following this direction, we present a novel approach combining abstract interpretation and source code bounded model checking, where the model checker is used to reduce the number of false error reports. We apply our methodology to source code from the automotive industry written in C, and show that the number of spurious errors emitted by an abstract interpretation product can be reduced considerably.