Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning style preferences of preclinical medical students in a Malaysian university

Method: To explore the pattern of preferred learning styles of 82 students, we administered the VARK questionnaire to the participants. To assess self-esteem, Rosenberg self-esteem questionnaire was used and the academic performance was based on the overall results of the formative assessments. Results: Among the respondents, 84% preferred multimodal style of learning. Out of that, dual, trimodal and quadrimodal styles were preferred by 8.5%, 2.4% and 73.2% respectively. The remaining 16% of the students preferred single mode. Female students had more diverse learning style preferences with several VARK combinations. A large proportion of our students were in the average group in terms of self- confidence and academic performance. Conclusion: Most students in this study preferred multimodal inputs in their learning process. Our study did not reveal any major gender differences in preferred learning styles. The results of selfesteem, learning style preference and academic performance did not have any bearing on each other.
Measuring Association between Library Instruction and Graduation GPA

Academic libraries devote considerable human resources in delivering library instruction programs. This study attempts to determine if these instructional efforts have any measurable effect on student performance in terms of overall grades. Library workshop attendance and graduation GPA of over 8,000 students was analyzed at Hong Kong Baptist University. It was found that, if more than one or two library workshops were offered to students within the course of their program, there was a higher tendency of workshop attendance having a positive impact on final GPA. The results indicate that library instruction has a direct correlation with student performance, but only if a certain minimum amount of instruction is provided.
Effects of a Tumor Necrosis Factor-α Antagonist on Experimentally Induced Rhinosinusitis

This prospective, randomized, and controlled study examined the effects of tumor necrosis factor soluble receptor type I (sTNFRI, a TNF-α antagonist) on experimentally induced rhinosinusitis in rats. The experimental groups received an instillation of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) plus an intramuscular injection of amoxicillin/clavulanate (antibiotic group), an instillation of sTNFRI (sTNFRI group), an instillation of sTNFRI and an injection of amoxicillin/clavulanate (sTNFRI/antibiotic group), or no additional treatment (LPS group). Histopathological changes were determined using hematoxylin-eosin and periodic acid-Schiff (PAS) staining. Leakage of exudate was determined using fluorescence microscopy. Vascular permeability was measured using the Evans blue dye technique. Expression of MUC5AC was measured using reverse transcriptase PCR. The sTNFRI, antibiotic, and sTNFRI/antibiotic groups had significantly less capillary permeability, mucosal edema, PAS staining, and expression of MUC5AC than the LPS group. There were no differences in capillary permeability, mucosal edema, PAS staining, and MUC5AC expression between the sTNFRI and sTNFRI/antibiotic groups. The antibiotic group had PAS staining similar to that of the sTNFRI and sTNFRI/antibiotic groups but had a greater increase in capillary permeability, mucosal edema, and MUC5AC expression. This study shows that sTNFRI reduces inflammatory activity and mucus hypersecretion in LPS-induced rhinosinusitis in rats.
Dislocated trial femoral head during total hip arthroplasty: review of the literature and the new algorithm for treatment

Dislocation of the trial femoral head is a rare and unpleasant event that can compromise the success of the total hip arthroplasty. A 62-year-old Caucasian woman with osteoarthritis was admitted to our Department and underwent an elective total hip arthroplasty. While performing the dislocation manoeuver the trial femoral head dissociated from the taper in the superior and anterior direction in the soft tissue and could not be retrieved immediately. The operation was then executed and finished in an ordinary manner. Three months after discharge from our department patient presented with the pain in the hip and groin and periprosthetic joint infection was diagnosed. The successful second operation for the retrieval of the dislocated trial femoral head was conducted through ilioinguinal approach. In this paper we reviewed the published literature and developed the algorithm for the decision-making while dealing with the dislocated and lost trial femoral head.
Client cache management in a distributed object database

A distributed object database stores persistently at servers. Applications run on client machines, fetching objects into a client-side cache of objects. If fetching and cache management are done in terms of objects, rather than fixed-size units such as pages, three problems must be solved: 1. which objects to prefetch 2. how to translate, or swizzle, inter-object references when they are fetched from server to client, and, 3. which objects to displace from the cache. This thesis reports the results of experiments to test various solutions to the problems. The experiments use the runtime system of the Thor distributed object database and benchmarks adapted from the Wisconsin 007 benchmark suite. The thesis establishes the following points: 1. For plausible workloads involving some amount of object fetching, the prefetching policy is likely to have more impact on performance than swizzling policy of cache management policy. 2. A simple breadth-first prefetcher can have performance that is at worst roughly comparable to an approximation of a paged system, and is sometimes much better, completing some computations 10 times faster. 3. The client cache is managed by a combination of two simple schemes, one based on garbage collection and on based on shrinking some objects to surrogates, where a surrogate is a small data structure containing the objects name at the server. Garbage collection and shrinking have complimentary strengths. Experiments show that cache management using both techniques performs much better than cache management using only one technique. A system with both garbage collection and shrinking can complete a benchmark traversal using roughly an order of magnitude less cache storage than a system using only garbage collection. 4. For minimizing elapsed time on the benchmarks used, managing the client cache with a true LRU policy achieves close to the performance of an unattainably good minimal-fetching policy. The other policies tested all do worse than LRU, and there is little meaningful difference among them on the benchmarks used. 5. Swizzling at the granularity of individual references (so-called edge marking) has performance that is roughly comparable to the performance of swizzling at the granularity of objects (so-called node marking). Accordingly, a choice between these swizzling mechanisms should be made on the basis of factors other than performance, such as implementation complexity.
Effects of Infant and Maternal Demographic Characteristics, Maternal Knowledge of Infant Development, Maternal Self-Efficacy, and Maternal Parenting Stress on Infant Development

This study was conducted to determine which variables of interest could be used to predict the development of infants. The variables of interest in this study were demographic variables regarding to the infants and mothers, maternal knowledge of infant development, maternal self-efficacy, maternal parenting stress, and infant development. The participants consisted of 252 infant-mother pairs and all infants included in this study were 15 months to 36 months of age. The development of Infants was assessed by classroom teachers. Data regarding the mothers’' demographic information, maternal knowledge of infant development, maternal self-efficacy, and maternal stress were gathered by maternal self-reported questionnaires. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, t tests, and regression analyses. The primary results demonstrated that family income, maternal infant knowledge, and maternal parenting stress were predictive of the infant development. In addition, different patterns in the results of the stepwise multiple regression were observed among the infant’'s of different age. Implications for research and practice were discussed along with the results of study.
Green Leaf Volatiles: A Plant’s Multifunctional Weapon against Herbivores and Pathogens

Plants cannot avoid being attacked by an almost infinite number of microorganisms and insects. Consequently, they arm themselves with molecular weapons against their attackers. Plant defense responses are the result of a complex signaling network, in which the hormones jasmonic acid (JA), salicylic acid (SA) and ethylene (ET) are the usual suspects under the magnifying glass when researchers investigate host-pest interactions. However, Green Leaf Volatiles (GLVs), C6 molecules, which are very quickly produced and/or emitted upon herbivory or pathogen infection by almost every green plant, also play an important role in plant defenses. GLVs are semiochemicals used by insects to find their food or their conspecifics. They have also been reported to be fundamental in indirect defenses and to have a direct effect on pests, but these are not the only roles of GLVs. These volatiles, being probably one of the fastest weapons exploited, are also able to directly elicit or prime plant defense responses. Moreover, GLVs, via crosstalk with phytohormones, mostly JA, can influence the outcome of the plant’s defense response against pathogens. For all these reasons GLVs should be considered as co-protagonists in the play between plants and their attackers.
Agent Personality Traits in Virtual Environments Based on Appraisal Theory Predictions

The current work investigates issues of expressivity and personality traits for Embodied Conversational Agents in e nvironments that allow for dynamic interactions with human users. Such environments are defined and modelled with the use of state of the art game engine technology. We focus on generating simple EC A behaviours, comprised of facial expressions and gestures i n a well defined context of non-verbal interaction .
Principles of nucleation of H3K27 methylation during embryonic development

During embryonic development, maintenance of cell identity and lineage commitment requires the Polycomb-group PRC2 complex, which catalyzes histone H3 lysine 27 trimethylation (H3K27me3). However, the developmental origins of this regulation are unknown. Here we show that H3K27me3 enrichment increases from blastula stages onward in embryos of the Western clawed frog (Xenopus tropicalis) within constrained domains strictly defined by sequence. Strikingly, although PRC2 also binds widely to active enhancers, H3K27me3 is only deposited at a small subset of these sites. Using a Support Vector Machine algorithm, these sequences can be predicted accurately on the basis of DNA sequence alone, with a sequence signature conserved between humans, frogs, and fish. These regions correspond to the subset of blastula-stage DNA methylation-free domains that are depleted for activating promoter motifs, and enriched for motifs of developmental factors. These results imply a genetic-default model in which a preexisting absence of DNA methylation is the major determinant of H3K27 methylation when not opposed by transcriptional activation. The sequence and motif signatures reveal the hierarchical and genetically inheritable features of epigenetic cross-talk that impose constraints on Polycomb regulation and guide H3K27 methylation during the exit of pluripotency.
Analisando a mentira no discurso de um psicopata: uma abordagem quantitativa

Psychopathy involves a series of specifi c cognitive, social and emotionalfeatures which make the psychopath different from the general population;the two most signifi cant characteristics are extreme selfi shness anddeep emotional defi cit that is refl ected in apathy. Notably, psychopathsare skilled communicators who that use language to lie. As therehas been little examination of the speech associated specifi cally withpsychopaths, especially in the Spanish language, the present study aimsto contrast different veracious excerpts to others which are deceptive.The text analysis is framed within forensic computational linguistics, andcomplemented with some information related to the stylometric profi le ofthe text. The investigation shows how the parameter mainly affected bythe psychological condition of the psychopath subject is the distributionof grammatical persons; in addition, some further evidence includes thefrequency of certainty adverbs and verbs related to cognitive processes.
User assisted modeling of buildings from aerial images

An approach that allows a user to assist an automatic system in modeling buildings is described. The approach is designed to be efficient in user time and effort while preserving the quality of the models created. Currently our system is able to handle the rectangular buildings with flat roof or symmetric gabled roof. Models can be created by only one or two clicks in many cases. Efficient editing of automatically derived models is also possible.
Lymph Node Fibroblastic Reticular Cells Construct the Stromal Reticulum via Contact with Lymphocytes

The sophisticated microarchitecture of the lymph node, which is largely supported by a reticular network of fibroblastic reticular cells (FRCs) and extracellular matrix, is essential for immune function. How FRCs form the elaborate network and remodel it in response to lymphocyte activation is not understood. In this work, we established ERTR7+gp38+VCAM-1+ FRC lines and examined the production of the ER-TR7 antigen. Multiple chemokines produced by FRCs induced T cell and dendritic cell chemotaxis and adhesion to the FRC surface. FRCs can secrete the ER-TR7 antigen as an extracellular matrix component to make a reticular meshwork in response to contact with lymphocytes. The formation of the meshwork is induced by stimulation with tumor necrosis factor-α or lymphotoxin-α in combination with agonistic antibody to lymphotoxin-β receptor in a nuclear factor-κB (RelA)–dependent manner. These findings suggest that signals from lymphocytes induce FRCs to form the network that supports the movement and interactions of immune effectors within the lymph node.
Asparagine of z8 Insert Is Critical for the Affinity, Conformation, and Acetylcholine Receptor-clustering Activity of Neural Agrin*

Agrin isoforms with different bioactivities are synthesized by the nerve and the muscle. Neural agrin containing an 8-amino acid insert (z8) introduced by alternative splicing is the active form that induces synaptic differentiation at the neuromuscular junction. In addition to alternative splicing, extracellular calcium is also required for the activity of neural agrin. To understand better how the activity of agrin is regulated by alternative splicing, we have applied alanine substitution mutagenesis to the z8 insert and the calcium binding site in the minimally functional AgG3z8 fragment. Single alanine substitutions in the 4th through the 7th amino acid of the z8 splice insert significantly reduced the function of agrin, in terms of acetylcholine receptor clustering activity and the affinity for binding to the muscle surface. Mutation of the asparagine at the 4th position drastically reduces bioactivity such that it is equivalent to that of muscle form AgG3z0. These reduced activity mutants also show reduced magnitudes of the calcium-induced CD spectrum change from that observed in AgG3z8 fragments, indicating that cross-talk between calcium and the z8 insert is critical for the normal activity of agrin. However, removal of Ca2+ binding via mutation of both aspartic acids in the calcium binding site did not totally eliminate the activity of AgG3z8. These results suggest a model wherein the z8 insert is a Ca2+-responsive allosteric element that is essential in forming an active conformation in neuronal agrin.
Priority of repetitive adaptation to mismatch response following undiscriminable auditory stimulation: a magnetoencephalographic study

We analysed two different neural mechanisms related to the unconscious processing of auditory stimulation, neural adaptation and mismatch negativity (MMN), using magnetoencephalography in healthy non‐musicians. Four kinds of conditioning stimulus (CS): white noise, a 675‐Hz pure tone, and complex tones with six (CT6) and seven components (CT7), were used for analysing neural adaptation. The seven spectral components of CT7 were spaced by 1/7 octaves between 500 and 906 Hz on the logarithmic scale. The CT6 components contained the same spectral components as CT7, except for the center frequency, 675 kHz. Subjects could not distinguish CT6 from CT7 in a discrimination test. A test stimulus (TS), a 675‐Hz tone, was presented after CS, and the effects of the presence of the same 675‐Hz frequency in the CS on the magnetoencephalographic response elicited by TS was evaluated. The P2m component following CT7 was significantly smaller in current strength than that following CT6. The equivalent current dipole for P2m was located approximately 10 mm anterior to the preceding N1m. This result indicated that neural adaptation was taking place in the anterior part of the auditory cortex, even if the sound difference was subthreshold. By contrast, the magnetic counterpart of the MMN was not recorded when CT6 and CT7 were used as standard and deviant stimuli, respectively, being consistent with the discrimination test. In conclusion, neural adaptation is considered to be more sensitive than our consciousness or the MMN, or is caused by an independent mechanism.
The selective advantage of reaction norms for environmental tolerance

A tolerance curve defines the dependence of a genotype's fitness on the state of an environmental gradient. It can be characterized by a mode (the genotype's optimal environment) and a width (the breadth of adaptation). It seems possible that one or both of these characters can be modified in an adaptive manner, at least partially, during development. Thus, we extend the theory of environmental tolerance to include reaction norms for the mode and the width of the tolerance curve. We demonstrate that the selective value of such reaction norms increases with increasing spatial heterogeneity and between‐generation temporal variation in the environment and with decreasing within‐generation temporal variation. Assuming that the maintenance of a high breadth of adaptation is costly, reaction, norms are shown to induce correlated selection for a reduction in this character. Nevertheless, regardless of the magnitude of the reaction norm, there is a nearly one to one relationship between the optimal breadth of adaptation and the within‐generation temporal variation perceived by the organism. This suggests that empirical estimates of the breadth of adaptation may provide a useful index of this type of environmental variation from the organism's point of view.
Malaria Journal Severe Falciparum Malaria in Gabonese Children: Clinical and Laboratory Features

Background: Malaria continues to claim one to two million lives a year, mainly those of children in sub-Saharan Africa. Reduction in mortality depends, in part, on improving the quality of hospital care, the training of healthcare workers and improvements in public health. This study examined the prognostic indicators of severe falciparum malaria in Gabonese children.
Nonlinear error dynamics for cycled data assimilation methods

We investigate the error dynamics for cycled data assimilation systems, such that the inverse problem of state determination is solved at tk, k = 1, 2, 3, …, with a first guess given by the state propagated via a dynamical system model from time tk − 1 to time tk. In particular, for nonlinear dynamical systems that are Lipschitz continuous with respect to their initial states, we provide deterministic estimates for the development of the error ‖ek‖ ≔ ‖x(a)k − x(t)k‖ between the estimated state x(a) and the true state x(t) over time. Clearly, observation error of size δ > 0 leads to an estimation error in every assimilation step. These errors can accumulate, if they are not (a) controlled in the reconstruction and (b) damped by the dynamical system under consideration. A data assimilation method is called stable, if the error in the estimate is bounded in time by some constant C. The key task of this work is to provide estimates for the error ‖ek‖, depending on the size δ of the observation error, the reconstruction operator Rα, the observation operator H and the Lipschitz constants K(1) and K(2) on the lower and higher modes of controlling the damping behaviour of the dynamics. We show that systems can be stabilized by choosing α sufficiently small, but the bound C will then depend on the data error δ in the form c‖Rα‖δ with some constant c. Since ‖Rα‖ → ∞ for α → 0, the constant might be large. Numerical examples for this behaviour in the nonlinear case are provided using a (low-dimensional) Lorenz ‘63 system.
The Initial Phase of a Longleaf Pine‐Wiregrass Savanna Restoration: Species Establishment and Community Responses

The significant loss of the longleaf pine‐wiregrass ecosystem in the southeastern United States has serious implications for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. In response to this loss, we have initiated a long‐term and landscape‐scale restoration experiment at the 80,125 ha (310 mi2) Department of Energy Savannah River Site (SRS) located near Aiken, South Carolina. Aristida beyrichiana (wiregrass), an important and dominant grass (i.e., a “matrix” species) of the longleaf pine savanna understory, and 31 other herbaceous “non‐matrix” species were planted at six locations throughout SRS in 2002 and 2003. Of the 36,056 transplanted seedlings, 75% were still alive in June 2004, while mean 1–2 year survival across all planted species was 48%. Lespedeza hirta (hairy lespedeza) exhibited the greatest overall survival per 3 × 3 m cell at 95%, whereas Schizachyrium spp. (little bluestem) exhibited the greatest mean cover among individual species at 5.9%. Wiregrass survival and cover were significantly reduced when planted with non‐matrix species. Aggregate cover of all planted species in restored cells averaged 25.9% in 2006. High rates of survival and growth of the planted species resulted in greater species richness (SR), diversity, and vegetative cover in restored cells. Results suggest that the loss of the longleaf pine‐wiregrass ecosystem may be ameliorated through restoration efforts and illustrate the positive impact of restoration plantings on biodiversity and vegetative cover.