Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Left–Right Orientation Matter in the Perceived Expressiveness of Pictures? A Study of Bewick's Animals (1753–1828)

Strong claims have been made about the importance of orientation in visual art. Although there have been a few studies whether left or right oriented pictures are more aesthetically pleasing, there have been no empirical studies whether the meaning and expressiveness of pictures depend on orientation. Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) made explicit decisions about whether the main protagonist in his pictures should face left or right and did so to express particular meaning. In three experiments we examined whether orientation changes the expressiveness of an image. In experiment 1 participants viewed eight of Bewick's animal wood engravings facing either in their original orientation or reversed, in a between-subjects design. They rated each print on ten characteristics, for example: docile–wild, clumsy–agile, and weak–strong. The original received more extreme ratings, across characteristics, than the reversal. Experiment 2 confirmed this result with participants from Italy. In experiment 3, using a within-subjects design, participants viewed ten wood engravings of dogs and rated them on characteristics specifically identified by Bewick. Again, the ratings of the original orientation were more extreme. Thus, in agreement with Bewick, we conclude that orientation affects expressiveness.
The Unending Deposit Insurance Mess

The thrift institution deposit insurance mess is rooted in defects in political and bureaucratic accountability. Under existing incentives, covering up evidence of poor regulatory performance and relaxing binding capital requirements are rational governmental responses to widespread industry insolvency. Similarly, aggressive industry risk taking is a rational response by thrift managers to regulatory forbearances. Far from acknowledging these incentive defects, the Bush plan for cleaning up the mess adopts theories that spotlight other causes: specifically, poor thrift management and the deregulation of thrift institution activities and of deposit interest rates. To end the mess, politicians and regulators must jettison these comfortable theories and surrender discretion that permits them to finesse the need to budget for governmental financial commitments.
Role of isostaticity and load-bearing microstructure in the elasticity of yielded colloidal gels

We report a simple correlation between microstructure and strain-dependent elasticity in colloidal gels by visualizing the evolution of cluster structure in high strain-rate flows. We control the initial gel microstructure by inducing different levels of isotropic depletion attraction between particles suspended in refractive index matched solvents. Contrary to previous ideas from mode coupling and micromechanical treatments, our studies show that bond breakage occurs mainly due to the erosion of rigid clusters that persist far beyond the yield strain. This rigidity contributes to gel elasticity even when the sample is fully fluidized; the origin of the elasticity is the slow Brownian relaxation of rigid, hydrodynamically interacting clusters. We find a power-law scaling of the elastic modulus with the stress-bearing volume fraction that is valid over a range of volume fractions and gelation conditions. These results provide a conceptual framework to quantitatively connect the flow-induced microstructure of soft materials to their nonlinear rheology.
FarmBeats: An IoT Platform for Data-Driven Agriculture

Data-driven techniques help boost agricultural productivity by increasing yields, reducing losses and cutting down input costs. However, these techniques have seen sparse adoption owing to high costs of manual data collection and limited connectivity solutions. In this paper, we present FarmBeats, an end-to-end IoT platform for agriculture that enables seamless data collection from various sensors, cameras and drones. FarmBeats's system design that explicitly accounts for weather-related power and Internet outages has enabled six month long deployments in two US farms.
EVOLUTION OF AVIAN COOPERATIVE BREEDING: COMPARATIVE TESTS OF THE NEST PREDATION HYPOTHESIS

Comparative analyses carried out on two different phylogenies of cooperatively and noncooperatively breeding Australian passerine birds (parvorder Corvida) were unable to detect a significant difference in nest predation rates after controlling for body mass and risk of predation due to location of the nest (nest safety). Nest predation rates, however, decrease as nest safety and body mass increase. We suggest that cooperative breeding does not bring about a current net change in rates of nest predation among Australian passerines. Species breeding cooperatively may have developed antipredator strategies that produce results similar to those adopted by noncooperatively breeding species. The function of cooperative breeding may lie outside of antipredator strategies.
An Empirical Study of the Use of Frankl-Weyuker Data Flow Testing Criteria to Test BPEL Web Services

Programs using service-oriented architecture (SOA) often feature ultra-late binding among components. These components have well-defined interfaces and are known as web services. Messages between every pair of web services dually conform to the output interface of a sender and the input interface of a receiver. Unit testing of web services should not only test the logic of web services, but also assure the correctness of the web services during input, manipulation, and output of messages. There is, however, little software testing research in this area. In this paper, we study the unit testing problem to assure components written in orchestration languages, WS-BPEL in particular. We report an empirical study of the effectiveness of the Frankl-Weyuker data flow testing criteria (particularly the all-uses criterion) on WS-BPEL subject programs. Our study shows that conventional data flow testing criteria can be much less effective in revealing faults in interface artifacts (WSDL documents) and message manipulations (XPath queries) than revealing faults in BPEL artifacts.
Use of Minimum Node Velocity Based Stable Connected Dominating Sets for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

We propose an algorithm to determine stable connected dominating sets (CDS), based on node velocities, for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The proposed minimum velocity-based CDS (MinV-CDS) algorithm prefers slow-moving nodes with lower velocity, rather than the usual approach of preferring nodes with a larger number of uncovered neighbors, i.e., larger density (referred to as MaxD-CDS). The construction of the MinV-CDS starts with the inclusion of the node having the lowest velocity, into the CDS. Once a node is added to the CDS, all its neighbors are said to be covered. The covered nodes are considered in the increasing order of their velocity, for inclusion in the CDS. If a node has lower velocity and is the next candidate node to be considered for inclusion in the CDS, it is added to the CDS if it has at least one neighbor that is yet to be covered. This procedure is repeated until all the nodes in the network are covered. Simulation results illustrate that the MinV-CDS has a significantly longer lifetime compared to MaxD-CDS. MinVCDS also has a larger number of nodes and edges compared to MaxD-CDS and this helps to reduce the hop count as well as the end-to-end delay and improves the fairness of node usage.
The Mirth of Nations

A social and historical study of jokes told in the main English-speaking countries, based on an extensive use of archives and other primary sources including old and rare joke books. It is a tightly-argued book and uses the comparative method to undermine existing theories of humour, rooted in notions of hostility conflict and superiority and derived ultimately from Hobbes and Freud. Comparisons between the humour of specific nations and ethnic and regional groups make understanding the humour of each nation or group easier. Thus, Jewish humour is linked to that of the Scots, and Jewish jokes about Jewish women contrasted with Australian jokes about Australian men.
Effects of Communication Competence and Social Network Centralities on Learner Performance

Collaborative learning has become a dominant learning apparatus for higher level learning objectives. Much of the psychological and social mechanisms operating under this complex group activity, however, is not yet well understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of college students' communication competence and degree centralities of their social networks on learning outcomes in a collaborative learning situation. The study participants were 63 students of educational technology at a women's university in Korea. Path analyses of the data using NetMiner 3.4 and AMOS 7.0 indicated that: 1) communication competence caused trust network degree centrality (β = .24, p = .13), 2) communication competence caused knowledge sharing network degree centrality (β = .46, p = .00), 3) trust network degree centrality enhanced knowledge sharing network degree centrality (β = .41, p = .00), and 4) knowledge sharing network degree centrality affected individual students' learning outcomes (β = .55, p = .00). The study results revealed the significant collective effects of network degree centrality measures and individual communication competence on learners' performance. Based on these results, implications for team organization strategy and future research directions are discussed.
Immunologic and Clinical Effects of Injecting Mature Peptide-Loaded Dendritic Cells by Intralymphatic and Intranodal Routes in Metastatic Melanoma Patients

Purpose: A phase I/II trial was conducted to evaluate clinical and immunologic responses after intralymphatic and intranodal injections of mature dendritic cells. Experimental Design: Fourteen patients with a metastatic melanoma received matured dendritic cells, loaded with Melan-A/MART-1 and/or NA17-A peptides and keyhole limpet hemocyanin. The cells were matured overnight with Ribomunyl, a toll-like receptor ligand, and IFN-γ, which ensured the production of high levels of interleukin-12p70. Dendritic cells were injected at monthly intervals, first into an afferent lymphatic and then twice intranodally. Immunologic responses were monitored by tetramer staining of circulating CD8+ lymphocytes and delayed-type hypersensitivity tests. Results: Dendritic cell vaccination induced delayed-type hypersensitivity reactivity toward NA17-A-pulsed, keyhole limpet hemocyanin–pulsed, and Melan-A-pulsed dendritic cells in 6 of 10, 4 of 11, and 3 of 9 patients, respectively. Four of the 12 patients analyzed by tetramer staining showed a significantly increased frequency of Melan-A-specific T cells, including one patient vaccinated only with NA17-A-pulsed dendritic cells. Furthermore, 2 of the 12 analyzed patients had a significant increase of NA17-A-specific T cells, including one immunized after an optional additional treatment course. No objective clinical response was observed. Two patients were stabilized at 4 and 10 months and three patients are still alive at 30, 39, and 48 months. Conclusions: Injections into the lymphatic system of mature peptide-loaded dendritic cells with potential TH1 polarization capacities did not result in marked clinical results, despite immunologic responses in some patients. This highlights the need to improve our understanding of dendritic cell physiology.
The motivation of English language teachers in Greek secondary schools

This thesis addresses a largely uncharted area within language motivation research, which is the motivation of teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL). A qualitative research approach was employed to identify and document different motivational influences affecting EFL teacher motivation. The method of analysis employed in our dataset, which consisted of a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with Greek state EFL and non-EFL teachers, followed the principles of grounded theory. Most of the findings coincided with insights from other teacher motivation studies; namely that the intrinsic aspect of teaching was the most satisfying, and thus the most motivating, of all motivational factors, while the extrinsic aspect both within and outside the school context was one of the main contributors to teacher demotivation. However, the findings have also highlighted an area that had not been paid much attention to in the literature, the temporal dimension of teacher motivation, which plays an important role in the development and motivation of the teacher due to the fact that teaching as a profession is a lifelong engagement. The study has offered several insights into EFL teacher motivation and the results are hoped to facilitate the alleviation of the problem of teacher demotivation and dissatisfaction. The thesis concludes with implications for future work in this novel area of research.
Complement activation and release of interleukin-6 and tumour necrosis factor-alpha in drained and systemic blood after major orthopaedic surgery.

OBJECTIVE To measure the concentration of complement activation products C3bc and terminal complement complex (TCC) and the cytokines interleukin 6 (IL-6) and tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) in systemic and drained wound blood for the first six hours after a major orthopaedic operation. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING University hospital, Norway. PATIENTS 8 patients operated on for thoracic scoliosis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Concentrations of complement activation products, IL-6 and TNF-alpha in arterial (systemic) and drained (local) blood were measured at wound closure and 1, 2, 4, and 6 hours postoperatively. RESULTS C3bc and TCC were 10 times higher, and IL-6 showed extreme values, in drained compared with arterial blood. The concentration of TNF-alpha did not increase significantly, either in drained or in arterial blood. The white cell count (WCC) increased threefold in both drained and arterial blood compared with arterial control values before operation. CONCLUSION Complement activation and IL-6 release after surgical trauma differ significantly in local and systemic blood samples. Conclusions based only on systemic findings may be limited.
Learning the PE Header, Malware Detection with Minimal Domain Knowledge

Many efforts have been made to use various forms of domain knowledge in malware detection. Currently there exist two common approaches to malware detection without domain knowledge, namely byte n-grams and strings. In this work we explore the feasibility of applying neural networks to malware detection and feature learning. We do this by restricting ourselves to a minimal amount of domain knowledge in order to extract a portion of the Portable Executable (PE) header. By doing this we show that neural networks can learn from raw bytes without explicit feature construction, and perform even better than a domain knowledge approach that parses the PE header into explicit features.
Evaluating the perception of semi-transparent structures in direct volume rendering techniques

Direct volume rendering (DVR) provides the possibility to visualize volumetric data sets as they occur in many scientific disciplines. A key benefit of DVR is that semi-transparency can be facilitated in order to convey the complexity of the visualized data. Unfortunately, semi-transparency introduces new challenges in spatial comprehension of the visualized data, as the ambiguities inherent to semi-transparent representations affect spatial comprehension. Accordingly, many visualization techniques have been introduced to enhance the spatial comprehension of DVR images. In this paper, we conduct a user evaluation in which we compare standard DVR with five visualization techniques which have been proposed to enhance the spatial comprehension of DVR images. In our study, we investigate the perceptual performance of these techniques and compare them against each other to find out which technique is most suitable for different types of data and purposes. In order to do this, a large-scale user study was conducted with 300 participants who completed a number of micro-tasks designed such that the aggregated feedback gives us insight on how well these techniques aid the end user to perceive depth and shape of objects. Within this paper we discuss the tested techniques, present the conducted study and analyze the retrieved results.
Addressing sex and gender in epidemic-prone infectious diseases

Acknowledgements WHO would like to thank Martha Anker for preparing this publication. Thanks are also due to Addressing sex and gender in epidemic-prone infectious diseases. " This publication has been a joint effort of the Departments of Gender, Women and Health, and Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response, WHO, Geneva " – Acknowledgements. The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the World Health Organization concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Dotted lines on maps represent approximate border lines for which there may not yet be full agreement. The mention of specifi c companies or of certain manufacturers' products does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by the World Health Organization in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned. Errors and omissions excepted, the names of proprietary products are distinguished by initial capital letters. All reasonable precautions have been taken by the World Health Organization to verify the information contained in this publication. However, the published material is being distributed without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. The responsibility for the interpretation and use of the material lies with the reader. In no event shall the World Health Organization be liable for damages arising from its use.
Imaging Implicit Morphological Processing: Evidence from Hebrew

Is morphology a discrete and independent element of lexical structure or does it simply reflect a fine-tuning of the system to the statistical correlation that exists among orthographic and semantic properties of words? Hebrew provides a unique opportunity to examine morphological processing in the brain because of its rich morphological system. In an fMRI masked priming experiment, we investigated the neural networks involved in implicit morphological processing in Hebrew. In the lMFG and lIFG, activation was found to be significantly reduced when the primes were morphologically related to the targets. This effect was not influenced by the semantic transparency of the morphological prime, and was not found in the semantic or orthographic condition. Additional morphologically related decrease in activation was found in the lIPL, where activation was significantly modulated by semantic transparency. Our findings regarding implicit morphological processing suggest that morphology is an automatic and distinct aspect of visually processing words. These results also coincide with the behavioral data previously obtained demonstrating the central role of morphological processing in reading Hebrew.
highlighted topics Signal Transduction in Smooth Muscle Invited Review: Arteriolar smooth muscle mechanotransduction: Ca 2 1 signaling pathways underlying myogenic reactivity

Invited Review: Arteriolar smooth muscle mechanotransduction: Ca 2 1 signaling pathways underlying myogenic reactivity. J Appl Physiol 91: 973–983, 2001. —The smooth muscle of arterioles responds to an increase in intraluminal pressure with vasoconstriction and with vasodilation when pressure is decreased. Such myogenic vasoconstriction provides a level of basal tone that enables arterioles to appropriately adjust diameter in response to neurohumoral stimuli. Key in this process of mechanotransduction is the role of changes in intracellular Ca 2 1 . However, it is becoming clear that considerable complexity exists in the spatiotemporal characteristics of the Ca 2 1 signal and that changes in intracellular Ca 2 1 may play roles other than direct effects on the contractile process via activation of myosin light-chain phosphorylation. The involvement of Ca 2 1 may extend to modulation of ion channels and release of Ca 2 1 from the sarcoplasmic reticulum, alterations in Ca 2 1 sensitivity, and coupling between cells within the vessel wall. The purpose of this brief review is to summarize the current literature relating to Ca 2 1 and the arteriolar myogenic response. Consideration is given to coupling of Ca 2 1 changes to the mechanical stimuli, sources of Ca 2 1 , involvement of ion channels, and spatiotemporal aspects of intracellular Ca 2 1 signaling.
Assessment of non-response bias in a probability household survey of male same-gender sexual behavior.

OBJECTIVE To assess non-participation bias in a survey of male sexual behavior. MATERIAL AND METHODS A household survey was carried out in 1992-1993 using a probability sampling frame in Mexico City. Demographic variables were available for all eligible men. The extent of non-participation bias was estimated using a version of the Heckman method, which utilizes two equations, one to predict participation and the other to predict reports of same-gender sexual behavior. RESULTS A total of 8,068 of the 13,713 eligible men completed a face-to-face questionnaire (response rate 59%); 173 men (2.1%) reported bisexual behavior in their lifetime, and 37 (0.4%) reported only male partners. Survey participation was predicted using demographic variables: 67% of the observations were correctly predicted by a probit regression model: 82% of participants and 53% of non-participants (pseudo-r2 = 0.13). Same-gender sexual behavior was predicted by variables indicating attachment to gay/bisexual social networks, history of sexually transmitted diseases, positive attitudes towards gay and bisexual males, and lack of support from male relatives. Ninety-seven per cent of the cases was correctly predicted by the probit model (pseudo-r2 = 0.14). The correlation between these two equations was not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that prevalence estimates of same-gender sexual behavior among Mexico City men were not biased by selective survey participation. Careful selection and training of household interviewers may have assisted in minimizing potential bias.
Validity and reliability of self-assessment of sexual maturity in elite adolescent athletes.

AIM The variability along the progression of different stages of maturation during puberty suggests that chronological age is not the best indicator in assessing biological status during adolescence. This is particularly relevant for adolescents involved in high level of sports competitions, which implies greater physiological and biomechanical demands to the body. Therefore, monitoring physical changes during this period may help the coaching and medical staff to construct and adapt on an individual basis, better training programs and, then, improve performance while preventing injuries. Thus, the aim of this study was to evaluate the validity and the reliability of self-assessment of sexual maturity among elite adolescent athletes. METHODS Using the Tanner sexual maturity method, 24 male and 23 female athletes aged 12 to 17 years, were assessed by a physician, and, then, self-assessed for sexual maturity. RESULTS Agreement with the physician ratings was high (k coefficients of 0.79 for pubic hair and 0.67 for genital development for boys and 0.75 and 0.85 for pubic hair and breast development for girls, respectively). Spearman correlations ranged from 0.86 to 0.97 (P= or <0.05). CONCLUSION The self-assessment is a valid and reliable method to assess sexual maturity in elite adolescent athletes.