Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Development of Craft and Technology Education Curriculums and Students’ Attitudes towards Technology in Finland, Estonia and Iceland

Abstract The research is based on a comparative study of craft and technology education curriculums and students’ attitudes towards craft and technology in Finland, Estonia and Iceland. The study was undertaken by the Helsinki University, University of Tallinn and University of Iceland during years 2012-2013. A literature review was completed, in order to examine and compare the origins of craft education in Finland, Estonia and Iceland. In addition, a quantitative survey was subsequently distributed to 658 school students in Finland, Estonia and Iceland. It consisted of 14 questions, which aimed to ascertain students’ attitudes towards craft and technology. The survey showed substantial differences in students’ attitudes towards craft and technology education in the three countries: these differences may be explained by differences in the national curriculums, the different pedagogical traditions and cultural differences in the field of technology. However, for deeper understanding, the qualitative findings need to be examined further with different research methods.
Detection and visualization of differential splicing in RNA-Seq data with JunctionSeq

Although RNA-Seq data provide unprecedented isoform-level expression information, detection of alternative isoform regulation (AIR) remains difficult, particularly when working with an incomplete transcript annotation. We introduce JunctionSeq, a new method that builds on the statistical techniques used by the well-established DEXSeq package to detect differential usage of both exonic regions and splice junctions. In particular, JunctionSeq is capable of detecting differential usage of novel splice junctions without the need for an additional isoform assembly step, greatly improving performance when the available transcript annotation is flawed or incomplete. JunctionSeq also provides a powerful and streamlined visualization toolset that allows bioinformaticians to quickly and intuitively interpret their results. We tested our method on publicly available data from several experiments performed on the rat pineal gland and Toxoplasma gondii, successfully detecting known and previously validated AIR genes in 19 out of 19 gene-level hypothesis tests. Due to its ability to query novel splice sites, JunctionSeq is still able to detect these differences even when all alternative isoforms for these genes were not included in the transcript annotation. JunctionSeq thus provides a powerful method for detecting alternative isoform regulation even with low-quality annotations. An implementation of JunctionSeq is available as an R/Bioconductor package.
Inhibition and Redistribution of NHE3, the Apical Na+/H+ Exchanger, by Clostridium difficile Toxin B

NHE3, the apical isoform of the Na(+)/H(+) exchanger, is central to the absorption of salt and water across the intestinal epithelium. We report that treatment of epithelial cells with toxin B of Clostridium difficile, a diarrheal pathogen, causes a pronounced inhibition of NHE3 activity, with little effect on the basolateral NHE1 isoform. Depression of NHE3 activity is accompanied by the translocation of apical exchangers to a subapical endomembrane compartment. Treatment of cells with toxin B increased the fraction of exchangers that were solubilized by nonionic detergents and induced dephosphorylation and extensive redistribution of ezrin. The Rho-kinase inhibitor, Y-27632, also altered the distribution and activity of NHE3. We suggest that inactivation of Rho-family GTPases by clostridial toxin B alters the interaction between NHE3 and the microvillar cytoskeleton, possibly by impairing the ability of ezrin to bridge the exchangers to filamentous actin. Detachment of NHE3 from the actin skeleton would facilitate its internalization, resulting in net disappearance from the apical surface. The consequent inhibition of transport is likely to contribute to the diarrheal effects of C. difficile.
Population-based Study of the Geographic Variation in Colon Cancer Incidence in Alabama: Relationship to Socioeconomic Status Indicators and Physician Density

Objectives: The objective of this population-based study was to examine the relationship between race, socioeconomic characteristics (socioeconomic status, SES), physician density, and colon cancer incidence in Alabama. Methods: Data for 5,788 colon cancer cases from 1996 to 1999 provided by the Alabama Statewide Cancer Registry are linked to county-level measures of SES, including median household income, percentage of high school graduates, percentage of families below poverty level, and occupational and health care factors. Poisson regression is used to model the predictors adjusting for age, gender, and race. Results: Blacks had higher incidences of colon cancer compared with whites and presented with later stages (20.4% versus 14.8% for distant disease (P = 0.0089). After controlling for race, gender, and age at diagnosis, significant associations were detected between colon cancer incidence and higher education (RR = 1.10; 95% CI, 1.03–1.17), and increased number of physicians per 1,000 (RR = 1.14; 95% CI, 1.06–1.22). The county percentage of families below poverty is associated inversely with localized disease and positively with distant stage. Conclusions: Colon cancer incidence varies geographically across Alabama and is positively related to aggregate SES factors, including education and physician density. A higher incidence of distant disease is related to black race and increased poverty. Health disparities in colon cancer across Alabama warrant further investigation.
context2vec: Learning Generic Context Embedding with Bidirectional LSTM

Context representations are central to various NLP tasks, such as word sense disam-biguation, named entity recognition, co-reference resolution, and many more. In this work we present a neural model for efﬁciently learning a generic context embedding function from large corpora, us-ing bidirectional LSTM. With a very simple application of our context representations, we manage to surpass or nearly reach state-of-the-art results on sentence completion, lexical substitution and word sense disambiguation tasks, while substantially outperforming the popular context representation of averaged word embeddings. We release our code and pre-trained models, suggesting they could be useful in a wide variety of NLP tasks.
The hamster cheek pouch carcinogenesis model

The Syrian golden hamster cheek pouch carcinogenesis model is probably the best‐known animal system that closely compares to events involved in the development of premalignant and malignant human oral cancers. Furthermore, it is one of the most well‐characterized models for squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs). However, stages of carcinogenesis (initiation, promotion, and progression) have not been well‐defined in this system. Basic understanding of the mechanism(s) of carcinogenesis in this organ is instrumental for the development of new strategies for chemoprevention and early chemointervention. To understand the important early events that occur in the hamster cheek pouch carcinogenesis model, we compared it to the mouse skin model, where a number of critical events have been well characterized. We determined that approximately 60% of the hamster cheek pouch SCCs have a mutation in codon 61 of the Ha‐ras gene. We also established a two‐stage carcinogenesis protocol in this model using a single dose of dimethylbenz(a)anthracene (DMBA) and multiple doses of benzoyl peroxide for 45 weeks. Twenty‐five percent of tumors developed with this protocol had the same mutation in codon 61 of the Ha‐ras gene, confirming that this mutation, as in the mouse skin model, is initiation‐related. We examined the sequential expression of hyperplasia, micronucleated cells, ornithine decarboxylase (ODC) activity, polyamine levels, transglutaminase I activity, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGF‐R) levels, keratins, γ‐glutamyltranspeptidase (GGT), transforming growth factor ‐β1 (TGF‐β1), leukoplakia, and carcinomas induced during carcinogenesis. A number of these important biological molecular and genetic markers could be excellent intermediate endpoints in assessing the effects of various chemopreventive agents to be tested in the hamster cheek pouch model and in human clinical trials.
Exemplar-Based Sparse Representations for Noise Robust Automatic Speech Recognition

This paper proposes to use exemplar-based sparse representations for noise robust automatic speech recognition. First, we describe how speech can be modeled as a linear combination of a small number of exemplars from a large speech exemplar dictionary. The exemplars are time-frequency patches of real speech, each spanning multiple time frames. We then propose to model speech corrupted by additive noise as a linear combination of noise and speech exemplars, and we derive an algorithm for recovering this sparse linear combination of exemplars from the observed noisy speech. We describe how the framework can be used for doing hybrid exemplar-based/HMM recognition by using the exemplar-activations together with the phonetic information associated with the exemplars. As an alternative to hybrid recognition, the framework also allows us to take a source separation approach which enables exemplar-based feature enhancement as well as missing data mask estimation. We evaluate the performance of these exemplar-based methods in connected digit recognition on the AURORA-2 database. Our results show that the hybrid system performed substantially better than source separation or missing data mask estimation at lower signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), achieving up to 57.1% accuracy at SNR = -5 dB. Although not as effective as two baseline recognizers at higher SNRs, the novel approach offers a promising direction of future research on exemplar-based ASR.
Factors Affecting Depression During Pregnancy and the Correlation Between Social Support and Pregnancy Depression

Background: Women are seriously subjected to psychiatric diseases during pregnancy and depression is the most prevailing one among these diseases. There is a relation between the social support and depression in pregnancy whose predisposing factors are genetic, psychological, biological, environmental, and hormonal. Objectives: This study aimed to determine the frequency of depression symptoms, and its risk factors. Also it studied the correlation between social support and pregnancy depression. Patients and Methods: This research is a descriptive cross-sectional study. It was conducted on 266 pregnant women selected by simple random method from all pregnant women admitted at the Maternity Hospital of Trabzon, Turkey from May 21 to June 13, 2008. The data were collected with a questionnaire form, the Beck depression inventory (BDI), and the multidimensional scale of perceived social support (MSPSS). Results: The mean BDI score of the pregnant women was 11.12 ± 6.65. According to the BDI, 46.2% of the pregnant women had no depression symptoms, 34.59% of them had mild, 13.91% had moderate, and 4.89% had severe level of depression symptoms. It was found that such factors as the educational level of the pregnant women and their husbands, having an undesired pregnancy, suffering from a chronic disease before pregnancy, presence of pregnancy-related problems, having a child with disability or having relatives whose children had disability, and smoking during pregnancy were the risk factors affecting the severity of the depression symptoms and these results were statistically significant (P < 0.05). On the other hand, the mean MSPSS score was 67.89 ± 14.26 and it was found that the pregnant women got the highest social support from their husbands. It was found that there was a significant correlation between BDI and MSPSS total score and its subscale scores (P < 0.05). Conclusions: According to this study, one-fifth of pregnant women were found to experience depressive symptoms, which require treatment during pregnancy, and the factors such as having no support from relatives was found to be associated with the severity of depressive symptoms during pregnancy.
The Relative Suitability of Sheep and Cattle as Hosts for the Liver Fluke, Fasciola hepatica L.

The suitability of sheep and cattle as hosts for Fasciola hepatica was compared after infection with metacercariae of ovine or bovine origin. It was found that, irrespective of the host of origin, the prepatent periods and the infectivity in both hosts were similar. The flukes in the sheep grew faster, more uniformly and to a greater size, but the individual parasites in the cattle produced approximately twice as many eggs per day as those in the sheep.
Word Embeddings via Tensor Factorization

Most popular word embedding techniques involve implicit or explicit factorization of a word co-occurrence based matrix into low rank factors. In this paper, we aim to generalize this trend by using numerical methods to factor higher-order word co-occurrence based arrays, or \textit{tensors}. We present four word embeddings using tensor factorization and analyze their advantages and disadvantages. One of our main contributions is a novel joint symmetric tensor factorization technique related to the idea of coupled tensor factorization. We show that embeddings based on tensor factorization can be used to discern the various meanings of polysemous words without being explicitly trained to do so, and motivate the intuition behind why this works in a way that doesn't with existing methods. We also modify an existing word embedding evaluation metric known as Outlier Detection [Camacho-Collados and Navigli, 2016] to evaluate the quality of the order-$N$ relations that a word embedding captures, and show that tensor-based methods outperform existing matrix-based methods at this task. Experimentally, we show that all of our word embeddings either outperform or are competitive with state-of-the-art baselines commonly used today on a variety of recent datasets. Suggested applications of tensor factorization-based word embeddings are given, and all source code and pre-trained vectors are publicly available online.
Children's Voices: Talk, Knowledge and Identity

Kenya, and he speaks Gujarati with his mother and English with his peers. One of the major points that emerges from this chapter is that there is no single way of ‘doing being’ British Asian. In a final chapter aptly named Taking Stock: Where to London? the author revisits the themes from the first part of the book in the light of the four London stories, asking what the stories tell us about migration as a global phenomenon, multiculturalism and multilingualism, migrant identities in the early 21st century, and finally, about London as a global city. The stories do actually reveal much about what it means to live in London and, as noted previously, the strength of this book is both the theoretical input and the vivid and telling accounts of a variety of under-researched London communities, or more correctly, individuals from these communities. The stories of these real individuals make this a very readable book and, at the very least, demonstrate the remarkable ethnolinguistic complexity of London. In attempting to make sense of the very different stories in the book and in line with the initial aim of the book, the author has drawn on several conceptual frameworks. Although a quick glance at the book might suggest it to be an odd assortment of stories foregrounded by a discussion of globalisation, migration, multiculturalism and identity, it does, in fact, provide a coherent whole and one which raises as many questions as it answers. One of the main issues which the reader grapples with is, on the one hand, the very vivid stories told in the four cases and, on the other, the attempts to pigeonhole these individuals into migrant categories. Given the fluid and flexible ways in which they live their lives, the attempts to fit them into particular migrant categories is not always convincing.
Early Screening of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Recommendations for Practice and Research

This article reviews current evidence for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) screening based on peer-reviewed articles published to December 2013. Screening provides a standardized process to ensure that children are systematically monitored for early signs of ASD to promote earlier diagnosis. The current review indicates that screening in children aged 18 to 24 months can assist in early detection, consistent with current American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations. We identify ASD-specific and broadband screening tools that have been ev-aluated in large community samples which show particular promise in terms of accurate classification and clinical utility. We also suggest strategies to help overcome challenges to implementing ASD screening in community practice, as well as priorities for future research.
Arabidopsis DDB1-CUL4 ASSOCIATED FACTOR1 Forms a Nuclear E3 Ubiquitin Ligase with DDB1 and CUL4 That Is Involved in Multiple Plant Developmental Processes[W]

The human DDB1-CUL4 ASSOCIATED FACTOR (DCAF) proteins have been reported to interact directly with UV-DAMAGED DNA BINDING PROTEIN1 (DDB1) through the WDxR motif in their WD40 domain and function as substrate-recognition receptors for CULLIN4-based E3 ubiquitin ligases. Here, we identified and characterized a homolog of human DCAF1/VprBP in Arabidopsis thaliana. Yeast two-hybrid analysis demonstrated the physical interaction between DCAF1 and DDB1 from Arabidopsis, which is likely mediated via the WD40 domain of DCAF1 that contains two WDxR motifs. Moreover, coimmunoprecipitation assays showed that DCAF1 associates with DDB1, RELATED TO UBIQUITIN–modified CUL4, and the COP9 signalosome in vivo but not with CULLIN-ASSOCIATED and NEDDYLATION-DISSOCIATED1, CONSTITUTIVE PHOTOMORPHOGENIC1 (COP1), or the COP10-DET1-DDB1 complex, supporting the existence of a distinct Arabidopsis CUL4 E3 ubiquitin ligase, the CUL4-DDB1-DCAF1 complex. Transient expression of fluorescently tagged DCAF1, DDB1, and CUL4 in onion epidermal cells showed their colocalization in the nucleus, consistent with the notion that the CUL4-DDB1-DCAF1 complex functions as a nuclear E3 ubiquitin ligase. Genetic and phenotypic analysis of two T-DNA insertion mutants of DCAF1 showed that embryonic development of the dcaf1 homozygote is arrested at the globular stage, indicating that DCAF1 is essential for plant embryogenesis. Reducing the levels of DCAF1 leads to diverse developmental defects, implying that DCAF1 might be involved in multiple developmental pathways.
MicroRNA: a new and promising potential biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis of ovarian cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the leading cause of death among all gynecological malignancies. Despite the technological and medical advances over the past four decades, such as the development of several biological markers (mRNA and proteins biomarkers), the mortality rate of ovarian cancer remains a challenge because of its late diagnosis, which is specifically attributed to low specificities and sensitivities. Under this compulsive scenario, recent advances in expression biology have shifted in identifying and developing specific and sensitive biomarkers, such as microRNAs (miRNAs) for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. MiRNAs are a novel class of small non-coding RNAs that deregulate gene expression at the posttranscriptional level, either by translational repression or by mRNA degradation. These mechanisms may be involved in a complex cascade of cellular events associated with the pathophysiology of many types of cancer. MiRNAs are easily detectable in tissue and blood samples of cancer patients. Therefore, miRNAs hold good promise as potential biomarkers in ovarian cancer. In this review, we attempted to provide a comprehensive profile of key miRNAs involved in ovarian carcinoma to establish miRNAs as more reliable non-invasive clinical biomarkers for early detection of ovarian cancer compared with protein and DNA biomarkers.
Modeling Sluggishness in Binaural Unmasking of Speech for Maskers With Time-Varying Interaural Phase Differences

In studies investigating binaural processing in human listeners, relatively long and task-dependent time constants of a binaural window ranging from 10 ms to 250 ms have been observed. Such time constants are often thought to reflect “binaural sluggishness. ” In this study, the effect of binaural sluggishness on binaural unmasking of speech in stationary speech-shaped noise is investigated in 10 listeners with normal hearing. In order to design a masking signal with temporally varying binaural cues, the interaural phase difference of the noise was modulated sinusoidally with frequencies ranging from 0.25 Hz to 64 Hz. The lowest, that is the best, speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were observed for the lowest modulation frequency. SRTs increased with increasing modulation frequency up to 4 Hz. For higher modulation frequencies, SRTs remained constant in the range of 1 dB to 1.5 dB below the SRT determined in the diotic situation. The outcome of the experiment was simulated using a short-term binaural speech intelligibility model, which combines an equalization–cancellation (EC) model with the speech intelligibility index. This model segments the incoming signal into 23.2-ms time frames in order to predict release from masking in modulated noises. In order to predict the results from this study, the model required a further time constant applied to the EC mechanism representing binaural sluggishness. The best agreement with perceptual data was achieved using a temporal window of 200 ms in the EC mechanism.
Silver nanoparticles synthesis mediated by new isolates of Bacillus spp., nanoparticle characterization and their activity against Bean Yellow Mosaic Virus and human pathogens

Extracellular agents produced by newly isolated bacterial strains were able to catalyze the synthesis of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs). The most effective isolates were identified as Bacillus pumilus, B. persicus, and Bacillus licheniformis using molecular identification. DLS analysis revealed that the AgNPs synthesized by the above strains were in the size range of 77–92 nm. TEM observations showed that the nanoparticles were coated with a capping agent, which was probably involved in nanoparticle stabilization allowing their perfect dispersion in aqueous solutions. FTIR analyses indicated the presence of proteins in the capping agent of the nanoparticles and suggested that the oxidation of hydroxyl groups of peptide hydrolysates (originated from the growth medium) is coupled to the reduction of silver ions. Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy confirmed the above results. The nanoparticles, especially those synthesized by B. licheniformis, were stable (zeta potential ranged from −16.6 to −21.3 mV) and showed an excellent in vitro antimicrobial activity against important human pathogens and a considerable antiviral activity against the Bean Yellow Mosaic Virus. The significance of the particular antiviral activity is highlighted, given the significant yield reduction in fava bean crops resulting from Bean Yellow Mosaic Virus infections, in many African countries.