Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estimating relative error in nematode numbers from single soil samples composed of multiple cores.

Spatial distributions of several species of plant-parasitic nematodes were determined in each of three fallow vegetable fields and in smaller subunits of those fields. Goodness of fit to each of several theoretical distributions was tested hy means of a X(2) test. Distributions for most species showed good agreement with a negative binomial model. An exception occurred with Crictmemella sp. , which showed a better fit to the Neyman Type A distribution. For nematodes distributed according to the negative binomial model, the number of cores per composite sample needed to achieve specified relative errors was calculated. For a given nematode species, such as Quinisulcius actus (Allen) Siddiqi or Meloidogyne incognita (Kofoid &White) Chitwood, the k values for the negative binomial distribution increased as field size decreased, with the result that fewer cores were needed to achieve the same level of precision in a smaller field. Best results were achieved when the single sample was used to estimate populations in fields of 0.25-0.45 ha in size. When using only a single composite sample to estimate mixed populations of the nematodes studied here in a field of that size, approximately 22 cores per composite sample would be needed to estimate all population means within a standard error to mean ratio of 25%. Considerably, more cores were needed to maintain a given level of precision in fields of 1.0 ha or greater, and it may be necessary to subdivide larger unils (ca. 1.5 ha and up) for accurate sampling.
Exploring the Experiences of Vulnerable Families: A Critical Reflection on the Participatory Research Approach

This thesis documents research undertaken to understand the experience of families who have lived with domestic violence, substance misuse and subsequent child protection intervention. Initially a participatory methodology was adopted, which presented significant challenges. This thesis presents a critical reflection of using the participatory methodology with vulnerable and stigmatized families and the divergence that this research experienced from participatory ideals when operationalized in a real-world setting. A range of methods have been employed to capture these experiences through a series of ‘polyvocal’ stories that not only provide authentic research findings, but also gave participants the chance to speak collectively about issues that concern them. This is an opportunity rarely afforded to families involved in child protection. Specific issues raised include the difficulty of inhabiting dual status as victim or perpetrator of domestic violence and a parent, the complexity of assessing structural injustice as opposed to agency responsibility when researching traumatic events and how services responses of ‘kinship care’ arrangements have substantial flaws. The study also generated new insight into the experiences of men as fathers and how ‘risk’ is assumed to be cross-contextual. No easy solutions are proposed, but the participatory principles employed demonstrate the need to embrace a high level of reflexivity to address the challenges of power sharing with vulnerable people. The identity barriers to transformational relationships of families involved in child protection services also need to be reviewed. Only then will safe and ethical research and social work practice become possible.
Painful Stimuli Evoke Potentials Recorded over the Human Anterior Cingulate Gyrus Stimulation Mapping through Adjacent Grid Electrodes Was Per- Short-duration Cutaneous Stimulation with a Co 2 Laser

trode over the right occipital convexity. Because scalp electrodes Lesser. Painful stimuli evoke potentials recorded over the human could not be applied with the grid in place, scalp LEPs were re-anterior cingulate gyrus. corded during scalp monitoring of the other four patients. None of Clinical studies of cingulotomy patients and imaging studies pre-the five patients had abnormalities on the magnetic resonance im-dict that the human cingulate gyrus might display pain-related aging scan (MRI); all gave informed consent under a protocol activity. We now report potentials evoked by painful cutaneous approved by the Hopkins institutional review board. stimulation with a CO 2 laser (LEP) and recorded from subdural The patients were alert, wore protective lenses, and lay in a electrodes over the medial wall of the hemisphere. In response to reclining position. Cutaneous heat stimulation was delivered by a facial laser stimulation on both sides, a negative (latency 211–242 CO 2 laser (LX-201, Luxar corporation, Bothell, WA; pulse dura-ms) and then a positive wave (325–352 ms) were recorded from tion, 20 ms; wavelength, 10.6 mm; beam diameter, 6 mm). The the cortex of right medial wall and from the falcine dura overlying stimulus was delivered from a distance of 4 cm above the skin at the left medial wall. Medial wall LEPs were similar to scalp LEPs an intensity of 10–13 W/mm 2 , which evoked pain (3–4/10, visual and were largest over the anterior cingulate and superior frontal analog scale). At these parameters, a component of mechanical, gyri just anterior to motor cortex contralateral to the side of stimula-warm or heat sensation was never reported spontaneously or in tion. These results demonstrate that there is significant direct noci-response to direct questioning (see also Bromm and Treede 1984; ceptive input to the human anterior cingulate gyrus (Brodmann's Carmon et al. 1978). Successive stimuli were applied at slightly area 24). different locations, to avoid sensitization, and at pseudorandom intervals (5–7 s). During recordings white noise was continuously delivered to both ears (Click-tone module, Subdural LEPs were recorded from a cartesian grid of circular The role of anterior cingulate cortex in human pain per-platinum-iridium electrodes (2.3 mm diam) embedded at 1-cm ception is suggested by the relief of intractable pain can intervals in a clear silastic sheet with one electrode facing each result from lesions in this area (Folz and White 1962; Hurt surface of the sheet (Ad-Tech Corp, Racine, WI, USA). Electrode …
Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Neural Activation Patterns of Successful Episodic Encoding: Reorganization during Childhood, Maintenance in Old Age

The two-component framework of episodic memory (EM) development posits that the contributions of medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) to successful encoding differ across the lifespan. To test the framework's hypotheses, we compared subsequent memory effects (SME) of 10–12 year-old children, younger adults, and older adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Memory was probed by cued recall, and SME were defined as regional activation differences during encoding between subsequently correctly recalled versus omitted items. In MTL areas, children's SME did not differ in magnitude from those of younger and older adults. In contrast, children's SME in PFC were weaker than the corresponding SME in younger and older adults, in line with the hypothesis that PFC contributes less to successful encoding in childhood. Differences in SME between younger and older adults were negligible. The present results suggest that, among individuals with high memory functioning, the neural circuitry contributing to successful episodic encoding is reorganized from middle childhood to adulthood. Successful episodic encoding in later adulthood, however, is characterized by the ability to maintain the activation patterns that emerged in young adulthood.
Excessive internet use: fascination or compulsion?

Excessive internet use and its problematic outcomes is a growing focus of research, receiving attention from academics, journalists, health workers, policymakers and the public. However, surprisingly little has yet been accomplished in terms of understanding the causes and consequences of this phenomenon. I argue that this is due to the framing of excessive internet use as an addiction, which leads researchers to neglect people’s reasons and motivations for excessive internet use. The perspective taken in this thesis is that excessive internet use may help people to cope with difficult life situations. This explains why people keep using the internet excessively despite problematic outcomes: the overall experience is positive because worse problems are alleviated. Based on the relationship between a person’s well-being, which is the focal point of literature on excessive internet use, and the motivations for media use grounded in uses and gratifications research, this thesis proposes a combined framework to examine if excessive internet use may be explained as a coping strategy taken to excess. This question was asked in relation to three online activities: World of Warcraft; Facebook; and online poker. Each group was surveyed about their psychosocial well-being, motivations for internet use, and any problematic outcomes. Findings showed that interactions between motivations for use and psychosocial well-being were important explanatory factors for problematic outcomes. Respondents with low self-esteem or high stress experienced more problematic outcomes when gaming or gambling to escape negative feelings, while escapist use was less problematic for players with high self-esteem or low stress. This has implications for how society needs to respond to cases of excessive internet use, since such behaviour can be both helpful and harmful. Future studies may usefully move beyond theories of addiction and consider excessive internet use as a coping behaviour that has both positive and negative outcomes.
Camera identification with deep convolutional networks

The possibility of detecting which camera has been used to shoot a specific picture is of paramount importance for many forensics tasks. This is extremely useful for copyright infringement cases, ownership attribution, as well as for detecting the authors of distributed illicit material (e.g., pedo-pornographic shots). Due to its importance, the forensics community has developed a series of robust detectors that exploit characteristic traces left by each camera on the acquired images during the acquisition pipeline. These traces are reverse-engineered in order to attribute a picture to a camera. In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach to solve camera identification problem. Indeed, we propose a data-driven algorithm based on convolutional neural networks, which learns features characterizing each camera directly from the acquired pictures. The proposed approach is tested on both instance-attribution and model-attribution, providing an accuracy greater than 94% in discriminating 27 camera models.
THE EFFECT OF CORONARY OCCLUSION ON MYOCARDIAL CONTRACTION

Many students of the coronary circulation must have noted that the ventricular zone affected by ligating a large coronary branch not only appears cyanotic and dilated, but that it seems to alter in its mode of contraction. The detailed and sequential changes in contraction are not easily followed by the unaided eye and so far have not been recorded myographically. The reasons for this were the lack of an adequate and suitable myograph and a technic for the application of one to a limited ventricular surface so that records obtained represent, at least reasonably well, changes in muscle length and not predominantly artefacts due to position changes, thrusts and vibrations of the vigorously beating ventricle. This communication concerns itself with descriptions of a technique and of a type of optical myograph suitable for such studies and an analysis of the changes in optical myograms which follow clamping of a large coronary vessel. APPARATUS. After preliminary efforts to obtain satisfactory ventricular myograms with the segment myograph used by one of us (Wiggers, 1916) to study auricular contraction, it became obvious that in order to overcome the distortions produced by twists and thrusts of the beating ventricle an instrument was needed in which the movable lever arm operates in fixed bearings. A suitable myograph which retains the compactness, lightness and efficiency of the earlier form is illustrated in figure 1. The body of the instrument consists of a small receiving tambour, E, (2.5 cm. in diameter) from which a tube leads off at right angles for connection with an optical segment capsule. The lever arms which are of aluminum are spaced 1.5 cm. apart. The rigid arm, A, is attached solidly to the back of the tambour and the movable one, B, is pivoted in jewel bearings, C, as indicated in the insert sketch. The total weight of the myograph is only
CD4+CD25−Nrp1+ T Cells Synergize with Rapamycin to Prevent Murine Cardiac Allorejection in Immunocompetent Recipients

Besides CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ regulatory T cells (Tregs), other immunosuppressive T cells also participated in the regulation of immune tolerance. Reportedly, neuropilin-1 (Nrp1) might be one of the molecules by which regulatory cells exert their suppressive effects. Indeed, CD4+CD25−Nrp1+ T cells exhibit potent suppressive function in autoimmune inflammatory responses. Here we investigated the specific role of CD4+CD25−Nrp1+ T cells in the setting of the transplant immune response. Through MLR assays, we found that CD4+CD25−Nrp1+ T cells suppressed the proliferation of naive CD4+CD25− T cells activated by allogeneic antigen-stimulation. Adoptive transfer of CD4+CD25−Nrp1+ T cells synergized with rapamycin to induce long-term graft survival in fully MHC-mismatched murine heart transplantation, which was associated with decreased IFN-γ, IL-17 and increased IL-10, TGF-β, Foxp3 and Nrp1 expression in the grafts. Importantly, our data indicated that CD4+CD25−Nrp1+ T cell transfer augments the accumulation of Tregs in the recipient, and creates conditions that favored induction of hyporesponsiveness of the T effector cells. In conclusion, this translational study indicates the possible therapeutic potential of CD4+CD25−Nrp1+ T cells in preventing allorejection. CD4+Nrp1+ T cells might therefore be used in bulk as a population of immunosuppressive cells with more beneficial properties concerning ex vivo isolation as compared to Foxp3+ Tregs.
A community-academic partnership to explore informational needs of African American women as a primer for cancer clinical trial recruitment

ABSTRACT Background: African Americans (AAs) are less likely to participate in cancer clinical trials (CCTs) despite experiencing disproportionately higher rates of cancer mortality. As a way to address these ongoing disparities, this study sought to qualitatively explore informational needs regarding CCTs among AA women and identify message considerations for educational information targeting AA women and their community. Methods: Three focus groups were conducted in which AA women viewed a DVD created as a decisional tool for CCT participation and provided feedback regarding content. Results: Results indicated general fear regarding CCTs, which is partially attributable to the impact of historic research abuses, lack of information regarding CCTs, and lack of cultural relevance of the education and outreach materials for AA communities. Recruitment of AAs to CCTs may be enhanced by educational and outreach approaches that increase awareness of CCTs as well as involvement of the AA community in developing such interventions. Conclusion: Interventions should include the perspectives of AA women, as key stakeholders and decision-makers for their family and provide research information in a multimedia format that will facilitate family discussion and decision-making regarding CCTs.
Inclination measurement of human movement using a 3-D accelerometer with autocalibration

In the medical field, accelerometers are often used for measuring inclination of body segments and activity of daily living (ADL) because they are small and require little power. A drawback of using accelerometers is the poor quality of inclination estimate for movements with large accelerations. This paper describes the design and performance of a Kalman filter to estimate inclination from the signals of a triaxial accelerometer. This design is based on assumptions concerning the frequency content of the acceleration of the movement that is measured, the knowledge that the magnitude of the gravity is 1 g and taking into account a fluctuating sensor offset. It is shown that for measuring trunk and pelvis inclination during the functional three-dimensional activity of stacking crates, the inclination error that is made is approximately 2/spl deg/ root-mean square. This is nearly twice as accurate as compared to current methods based on low-pass filtering of accelerometer signals.
The SAGE Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies

Introduction: Situating Race and Ethnic Studies - Patricia Hill Collins & John Solomos PART ONE: LOCATING THE FIELD: THEORETICAL AND HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS Theorizing Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Paradigms and Perspectives - Caroline Knowles Studying 'Race' and Ethnicity: Dominant and Marginalised Discourses in the Critical North American Case - Joe R. Feagin & Eileen O'Brien Researching Race and Ethnicity: Methodological Issues - Nancy A. Denton & Glenn D. Deane The Spirit Lives On: Races and Disciplines - Chetan Bhatt PART TWO: RACE, ETHNICITY AND SOCIAL HIERARCHY Racism, Class and the Dialectics of Social Transformation - Satnam Virdee The Nexus of Race and Gender: Parallels, Linkages, and Divergences in Race and Gender Studies - Margaret L. Andersen Ethnicities and Sexualities - Joane Nagel Nation and Post-Nation: Nationalism, Transnationalism and Intersections of Belonging - Floya Anthias PART THREE: THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF RACE AND ETHNICITY Multiculturalism and Racial Democracy: State Policies and Social Practices - Peter Kivisto Law, Critical Race Theory, and Related Scholarship - Athena D. Mutua Ethnic Conflict - Ralph Premdas Globalization, Migration and Citizenship - Liza Schuster PART FOUR: DEBATES AND NEW INITIATIVES The Family as a Race Institution - Maxine Baca Zinn Race, Ethnicity and Education: The Search for Explanations - James A. Banks & Caryn Park Still the 'Most Segregated Hour': Religion, Race and the American Experience - Cheryl Townsend Gilkes Whiteness in the Dramaturgy of Racism - Les Back No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Political Mobilisation - Michael G. Hanchard & Mark Q. Sawyer Diaspora and Hybridity - Claire Alexander Issues for the 21st Century - Patricia Hill Collins & John Solomos
Plasma cytokine profiles related to smoking-sensitivity and phenotypes of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Abstract Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) develops only in smoking-sensitive smokers and manifests heterogeneous phenotypes, including emphysema and non-emphysema types. We aimed to identify biomarkers related to the smoking-sensitivity and phenotypes of COPD. Among 240 smokers suggestive of COPD, we studied on four groups defined by % forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) and computed tomography-based pulmonary emphysema. Plasma concentrations of 33 inflammatory markers were measured in four groups as well as Non-smokers using multiplex protein arrays. IL-5, IL-7 and IL-13 were identified to be associated with smoking sensitivity and IL-6 and IL-10 were candidate biomarkers for airway-lesion dominant COPD.
Management of corneal ectasia after LASIK with combined, same-day, topography-guided partial transepithelial PRK and collagen cross-linking: the athens protocol.

PURPOSE To evaluate a series of patients with corneal ectasia after LASIK that underwent the Athens Protocol: combined topography-guided photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) to reduce or eliminate induced myopia and astigmatism followed by sequential, same-day ultraviolet A (UVA) corneal collagen cross-linking (CXL). METHODS Thirty-two consecutive corneal ectasia cases underwent transepithelial PRK (WaveLight ALLEGRETTO) immediately followed by CXL (3 mW/cm(2)) for 30 minutes using 0.1% topical riboflavin sodium phosphate. Uncorrected distance visual acuity (UDVA), corrected distance visual acuity (CDVA), manifest refraction spherical equivalent, keratometry, central ultrasonic pachymetry, corneal tomography (Oculus Pentacam), and endothelial cell counts were analyzed. Mean follow-up was 27 months (range: 6 to 59 months). RESULTS Twenty-seven of 32 eyes had an improvement in UDVA and CDVA of 20/45 or better (2.25 logMAR) at last follow-up. Four eyes showed some topographic improvement but no improvement in CDVA. One of the treated eyes required a subsequent penetrating keratoplasty. Corneal haze grade 2 was present in 2 eyes. CONCLUSIONS Combined, same-day, topography-guided PRK and CXL appeared to offer tomographic stability, even after long-term follow-up. Only 2 of 32 eyes had corneal ectasia progression after the intervention. Seventeen of 32 eyes appeared to have improvement in UDVA and CDVA with follow-up >1.5 years. This technique may offer an alternative in the management of iatrogenic corneal ectasia.
A Consistent Regularization Approach for Structured Prediction

We propose and analyze a regularization approach for structured prediction problems. We characterize a large class of loss functions that allows to naturally embed structured outputs in a linear space. We exploit this fact to design learning algorithms using a surrogate loss approach and regularization techniques. We prove universal consistency and finite sample bounds characterizing the generalization properties of the proposed methods. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed approach.
Interpolation of stochastic grammar and word bigram models in natural language understanding

The paper shows the e(cid:11)ects of combining a stochastic grammar with a word bigram language model by log-linear interpolation. It is divided into three main parts: The (cid:12)rst part derives the stochastic grammar model and gives a sound theoretical motivation to incorporate word dependencies such as bigrams. The second part describes two dif-ferent algorithmic approaches to the combination of both models by log-linear interpolation. The third part reports attribute error rate (AER) results measured on the Philips corpus of train time table inquiries that show a reduction of up to 9% relative.