Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Investigatin of the Extent to Which Two African American Children With Autism Have Developed Social Language Variation

The aim of the current research design is to start to develop an understanding of how autism spectrum disorder affects the ability to acquire social language variation. To narrow the scope, the population selected for this design is African American children with autism, allowing me to focus on a specific variety of English (African American English). In the research design, I consider four factors that could influence how each individual child on the autism spectrum acquires social language variation: 1) level of social interaction, 2) production of autistic speech, 3) ability to joint attend, and 4) ability to attend to speech sounds. The design includes collection of speech samples of an African American triad (mother, child with autism, and sibling) and an African American dyad (mother and child with autism). Matched guise testing targeted special education teachers, student teachers, and experts. The matched guise survey included samples of speech from the members of the triad and dyad and it simply asked the listeners to identify the racial or ethnic background of the speaker. From the phonological analysis for both cases, there was interspeaker variation between the mother, child with autism, and the sibling of the triad case and between the mother and child of the dyad case. This research design provides a framework for future design with the same aim. When speech pathologists understand social language variation acquisition for typically developing individuals and individuals with autism and other developmental disorders, they will be able to provide more comprehensive intervention that will have sociolinguistic and psychological implications.
Concurrent Substance Use Disorders and Mental Illness: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Treatment

People with concurrent disorders (CDs; i.e., mental illness and substance use disorders) are at high risk for a number of adverse outcomes if they do not receive appropriate treatment. Yet despite wide availability of evidence-based guidelines and easy-to-access clinical resources for this population, implementation has lagged. Integrated treatment involves targeting both the substance use and the mental illness at the same time in a systematic way and is a recommended practice for CDs. However, very little true integration of addiction and mental health services has occurred in Canada. This review outlines the main best-practice guidelines for working with people with CDs and describes some of the barriers and facilitators to integration. An example of successful integrated treatment is presented, with suggestions for how psychologists can play a key role in this important work. Les personnes atteintes de troubles concomitants (par ex., la maladie mentale et les troubles de consommation de substances) courent un risque élevé de subir des conséquences défavorables si elles ne reçoivent pas un traitement adéquat. Or, malgré la présence de nombreuses directives basées sur des preuves et la facilité d’accès aux ressources cliniques pour cette population, la mise en œuvre accuse un retard. Le traitement intégré implique le ciblage de la consommation de substances et de la maladie mentale en même temps, de manière systématique en plus d’être une pratique recommandée chez les personnes atteintes de troubles concomitants. Or, très peu efforts en termes d’intégration véritable de la dépendance et des services de santé mentale ont été entrepris au Canada. Le présent examen souligne les principales directives concernant les meilleures pratiques de travail avec les personnes atteintes de troubles concomitants et décrit quelques barrières et facilitateurs à l’intégration. Nous y présentons un exemple de traitement intégré réussi ainsi que des suggestions pour les psychologues quant au rôle clé que ces derniers ont à jouer dans cet important travail.
CHANDRA/HETGS OBSERVATIONS OF THE BRIGHTEST FLARE SEEN FROM Sgr A*

Starting in 2012, we began an unprecedented observational program focused on the supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy, Sgr A*, utilizing the High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer (HETGS) instrument on the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. These observations will allow us to measure the quiescent X-ray spectra of Sgr A* for the first time at both high spatial and spectral resolution. The X-ray emission of Sgr A*, however, is known to flare roughly daily by factors of a few to ten times over quiescent emission levels, with rarer flares extending to factors of greater than 100 times quiescence. Here we report an observation performed on 2012 February 9 wherein we detected what are the highest peak flux and fluence flare ever observed from Sgr A*. The flare, which lasted for 5.6 ks and had a decidedly asymmetric profile with a faster decline than rise, achieved a mean absorbed 2–8 keV flux of (8.5 ± 0.9) × 10−12 erg cm−2 s−1. The peak flux was 2.5 times higher, and the total 2–10 keV emission of the event was approximately 1039 erg. Only one other flare of comparable magnitude, but shorter duration, has been observed in Sgr A* by XMM-Newton in 2002 October. We perform spectral fits of this Chandra-observed flare and compare our results to the two brightest flares ever observed with XMM-Newton. We find good agreement among the fitted spectral slopes (Γ ∼ 2) and X-ray absorbing columns (NH ∼ 15 × 1022 cm−2) for all three of these events, resolving prior differences (which are most likely due to the combined effects of pileup and spectral modeling) among Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of Sgr A* flares. We also discuss fits to the quiescent spectra of Sgr A*.
A Tool for Getting Cultural Differences in HCI

The "Intercultural Interaction Analysis" tool (IIA tool) was developed to obtain data regarding cultural differences in HCI. The main objective of the IIA tool is to observe and analyze the interaction behavior of users from different cultures with a computer system to determine different interaction patterns according to their cultural background. Culture influences the interaction of the user with the computer because of the movement of the user in a cultural surrounding (Rose, 2002). To locate and find out the kind of different interaction behavior of the users from different cultural groups (at national level (country) between Chinese and German user first because of the high cultural distance) the interaction behavior of the users with the computer will be observed and detected. The objective is to be able to draw inferences regarding differences of the cultural imprint of users by analyzing the interaction behavior of those users with a computer system to get knowledge that is relevant for intercultural user interface design and a necessary precondition for cultural adaptive systems (Heimgartner, 2006). E.g. the right number and arrangement of information units is very important for an application whose display is very small and at the same time the mental workload of the user has to be as low as possible (e.g. driver navigation systems).
Hyperbaric Hyperoxia Accelerates Fracture Healing in Mice

Increased oxygen tension influences bone metabolism. This study comprised two main experiments: one aimed to determine the bone mineral apposition and bone formation rates in vivo under hyperbaric hyperoxia (HBO), and the other aimed to evaluate the effects of exposure to HBO on fracture healing. In experiment 1, male mice were exposed to HBO [90 min/day at 90% O2 at 2 atmospheres absolute (ATA) for 5 days]. In experiment 2, an open femur fracture model was created in mice, followed by exposure to HBO 5 times/week (90 min/day at 90% O2 at 2 ATA) for 6 weeks after surgery. In experiment 1, HBO treatment significantly increased the mineral apposition and bone formation rates in the lumbar vertebra and femur and type 1 collagen alpha 1 and alkaline phosphatase mRNA expression in the lumbar vertebra. In experiment 2, at 2 weeks after fracture, the fracture callus was significantly larger in the HBO group than in the non-HBO group. Furthermore, at 4 and 6 weeks after fracture, radiographic findings showed accelerated fracture healing in the HBO group. At 6 weeks after fracture, femur stiffness and maximum load were significantly higher in the HBO group than in the non-HBO group. Urinary 8-hydroxy-2′-deoxyguanosine and plasma calcium concentrations were not significantly different between groups. These results suggest that exposure to HBO enhances bone anabolism and accelerates fracture healing without causing oxidative DNA damage or disruption of plasma calcium homeostasis.
A weighted topical document embedding based clustering method for news text

As an unsupervised machine learning method, clustering can preliminarily group text without artificial labeling, which effectively accelerates the organization, abstraction and navigation on large news set. The length of news is long, and the text contains many homonymy and polysemy, that is one of the reason that traditional text clustering methods perform weaker on grouping news text. This paper presents a novel text representation method based on topical document embedding (TDE) to capture the semantic features of different topics. In TDE representation, document embedding of news texts is obtained by adding up word vector from Skip-Gram model weighted by TF-IDF score of all the key words in the text. While the topical document embedding is learned by joining the topic vectors obtained from LDA model and the document vectors in document embedding. By using topical document embedding to perform clustering, we implement a novel text clustering method (TDE-TC). The experimental results show that the effect of news clustering based on TDE representation is better than that of bag of words model and LDA model.
Individual and environmental factors associated with the seroprevalence of Borrelia burgdorferi in Belgian farmers and veterinarians

Background Lyme disease (LD) is a common tick-borne disease in Europe. Diverse factors at various scales determine the spatial distribution of Borrelia burgdorferi infection risk and a better understanding of those factors in a spatially explicit framework is needed for disease management and prevention. While the ecology of ticks and the landscape favoring their abundance have been extensively studied, the environmental conditions favoring an intense contact with susceptible humans, including groups at risk, are sparse. The aim of this study is to assess which individual and environmental factors can favor B. burgdorferi infection in a Belgian group professionally at risk. Methods Serological results of 127 veterinarians and farmers enrolled in this study were analyzed, taking into account their municipality of residence. Using binary logistic regression and considering interaction terms, the joint effects of landscape composition and configuration, and forest and wildlife management were examined. Results Seven of the 127 workers were seropositive for LD, leading to a seroprevalence of 5.51%. Seropositivity was higher in older persons. The proportion of forest and semi-natural habitats and wetland had a positive impact on LD seroprevalence while arable land–grassland ecotones had a negative one. Our results confirmed the need to consider complex interactions between landscape variables in order to model risk. Conclusions Our data show that LD has to be considered as a risk for farmers and veterinarians. Rather than focusing either on ecological aspects of tick and pathogen distribution or on purely epidemiological aspects such as individual risk factors, our model highlights the role of human–environment interactions in LD risk assessment.
The Early Warning Signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder among Saudi Children = الظواهر للإنذار المبكر باحتمالية الإصابة باضطراب طيف التوحد لدى الأطفال السعوديين

ackground: Identifying Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as early as possible is the most important step to be achieved due to the fact that early intervention can result in significant improvement of ASD symptoms. It is proved that the impairments identified in children with ASD are in skills that normally develop between the first 12 to18 months of life. Aim: To determine the early warning signs for participants with ASD in the north of Riyadh. Method: A retrospective case control study, 57 subjects with ASD typical symptoms were selected by a convenience sampling method at King Khalid University Hospital and compared with a randomly selected, community based control group (N=84) matched for age and gender. Written informed consent was obtained from all parents/caregivers who completed questionnaires and were also interviewed. Results: Our findings suggest that loss of shared enjoyment with family members, absence of early speech symbols, e.g. stringing sounds together, loss of eye to eye contact between the child and others and lack of imaginative play are early warning signs of ASD by the age 12 to 18 months in Saudi subjects with ASD.
Identifying Protein Phosphorylation Sites with Kinase Substrate Specificity on Human Viruses

Viruses infect humans and progress inside the body leading to various diseases and complications. The phosphorylation of viral proteins catalyzed by host kinases plays crucial regulatory roles in enhancing replication and inhibition of normal host-cell functions. Due to its biological importance, there is a desire to identify the protein phosphorylation sites on human viruses. However, the use of mass spectrometry-based experiments is proven to be expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, previous studies which have identified phosphorylation sites in human viruses do not include the investigation of the responsible kinases. Thus, we are motivated to propose a new method to identify protein phosphorylation sites with its kinase substrate specificity on human viruses. The experimentally verified phosphorylation data were extracted from virPTM – a database containing 301 experimentally verified phosphorylation data on 104 human kinase-phosphorylated virus proteins. In an attempt to investigate kinase substrate specificities in viral protein phosphorylation sites, maximal dependence decomposition (MDD) is employed to cluster a large set of phosphorylation data into subgroups containing significantly conserved motifs. The experimental human phosphorylation sites are collected from Phospho.ELM, grouped according to its kinase annotation, and compared with the virus MDD clusters. This investigation identifies human kinases such as CK2, PKB, CDK, and MAPK as potential kinases for catalyzing virus protein substrates as confirmed by published literature. Profile hidden Markov model is then applied to learn a predictive model for each subgroup. A five-fold cross validation evaluation on the MDD-clustered HMMs yields an average accuracy of 84.93% for Serine, and 78.05% for Threonine. Furthermore, an independent testing data collected from UniProtKB and Phospho.ELM is used to make a comparison of predictive performance on three popular kinase-specific phosphorylation site prediction tools. In the independent testing, the high sensitivity and specificity of the proposed method demonstrate the predictive effectiveness of the identified substrate motifs and the importance of investigating potential kinases for viral protein phosphorylation sites.
Biological Robustness: Paradigms, Mechanisms, and Systems Principles

Robustness has been studied through the analysis of data sets, simulations, and a variety of experimental techniques that each have their own limitations but together confirm the ubiquity of biological robustness. Recent trends suggest that different types of perturbation (e.g., mutational, environmental) are commonly stabilized by similar mechanisms, and system sensitivities often display a long-tailed distribution with relatively few perturbations representing the majority of sensitivities. Conceptual paradigms from network theory, control theory, complexity science, and natural selection have been used to understand robustness, however each paradigm has a limited scope of applicability and there has been little discussion of the conditions that determine this scope or the relationships between paradigms. Systems properties such as modularity, bow-tie architectures, degeneracy, and other topological features are often positively associated with robust traits, however common underlying mechanisms are rarely mentioned. For instance, many system properties support robustness through functional redundancy or through response diversity with responses regulated by competitive exclusion and cooperative facilitation. Moreover, few studies compare and contrast alternative strategies for achieving robustness such as homeostasis, adaptive plasticity, environment shaping, and environment tracking. These strategies share similarities in their utilization of adaptive and self-organization processes that are not well appreciated yet might be suggestive of reusable building blocks for generating robust behavior.
Impact of Lifestyle-Related Factors on All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE To examine whether combined lifestyle behaviors have an impact on all-cause and cause-specific mortality in patients aged 30–94 years with type 2 diabetes (T2DM). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Participants included 5,686 patients >30 years old with T2DM who were enrolled in a Diabetes Care Management Program at a medical center in central Taiwan before 2007. Lifestyle behaviors consisted of smoking, alcohol drinking, physical inactivity, and carbohydrate intake. The main outcomes were all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Cox proportional hazards models were used to examine the association between combined lifestyle behaviors and mortality. RESULTS The mortality rate among men was 24.10 per 1,000 person-years, and that among women was 17.25 per 1,000 person-years. After adjusting for the traditional risk factors, we found that combined lifestyle behavior was independently associated with all-cause mortality and mortality due to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Patients with three or more points were at a 3.50-fold greater risk of all-cause mortality (95% CI 2.06–5.96) and a 4.94-fold (1.62–15.06), 4.24-fold (1.20–14.95), and 1.31-fold (0.39–4.41) greater risk of diabetes-specific, CVD-specific, and cancer-specific mortality, respectively, compared with patients with zero points. Among these associations, the combined lifestyle behavior was not significantly associated with cancer mortality. CONCLUSIONS Combined lifestyle behavior is a strong predictor of all-cause and cause-specific mortality in patients with T2DM.
The Effects of Inquiry Based Practices on Students Problem Solving Competence

This action research project looked at the impacts that family dynamics and family resources have on student achievement and self-advocacy. It then went a step further by showing how inquiry-based strategies can give students with little family resources the tools to self-advocate and become academically successful. A specific six-step inquiry process was taught and implemented amongst 28 rural fifth grade students. The researcher utilized observations, assessments, and compared completed student work to Minnesota Academic Standards throughout the project period. After the students learned and implemented inquiry practices, their self-advocacy and academic achievement increased showing that these practices can affect students in a positive manner. Inquiry based learning may allow students to build intrinsic value and help support core curriculum. Through the knowledge of how family dynamics affect students and the impact of inquiry strategies on student achievement, educators can successfully support a diverse set of learners.
Targeting the Immunogenetic Diseases with the Appropriate HLA Molecular Typing: Critical Appraisal on 2666 Patients Typed in One Single Centre

We compared the immunogenetic data from 2666 patients affected by HLA-related autoimmune diseases with those from 4389 ethnically matched controls (3157 cord blood donors CBD, 1232 adult bone marrow donors BMD), to verify the appropriateness of HLA typing requests received in the past decade. The frequency of HLA-B∗27 phenotype was 10.50% in 724 ankylosing spondylitis, 16.80% in 125 uveitis (3.41% BMD, 4.24% CBD, P < 0.0001); HLA-B∗51 allele was 15.57% in 212 Behçet's disease (12.91% BMD, 9.88% CBD, P < 0.0001); the HLA-DRB1-rheumatoid arthritis (RA) shared epitope was 13.72% in 554 RA (10.85% BMD, 13.48% CBD, P = 0.016); the carriers of almost one of HLA-DQB1 susceptibility alleles were 84.91% in 795 celiac disease (CD) and 59.37% in 256 insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) (46.06% in 875 CBD, 42.75% in 662 BMD P < 0.0001). Overall, our results show that the HLA marker frequencies were higher in patients than controls, but lower than expected from the literature data (excluding CD and IDDM) and demonstrate that, in complex immunogenetic conditions, a substantial number of genetic analyses are redundant and inappropriate, burdening to the public health costs. For this reason, we suggest the Italian Scientific Society of Immunogenetics to establish guidelines to improve the appropriateness of typing requests.
Scaling Up Three-Dimensional Science Learning Through Teacher-Led Study Groups Across a State

The vision for science teaching in the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards requires a radical departure from traditional science teaching. Science literacy is defined as three-dimensional (3D), in which students engage in science and engineering practices to develop and apply science disciplinary ideas and crosscutting concepts. This knowledge building presents many challenges for teachers. We describe a two-pronged program for scaling 3D science professional development (PD) across a state: (a) 24 teachers developed expertise in 3D learning and facilitating teacher study groups; (b) these peer facilitators led 22 study groups of teachers in 3D science activities, analyzing student learning, and investigating classroom interactions. We describe design approaches for supporting teacher and facilitator learning. We present analyses of teacher learning, including shifts in 3D science, beliefs, and pedagogical content knowledge that supports 3D science teaching, and consider implications for scalable design approaches for supporting science teacher learning.
A Polarization Model for Describing Group Preferences

This article develops a model for describing the preferences of a group of its individual members. The model incorporates the empirically observed group-polarization phenomenon. It Is interesting that the resulting group preference evaluation is essentially a weighted linear model of individual preferences with the addition of an intercept term. The polarization model is empirically tested in two experimental contexts, faculty-candidate and restaurant selection. For both experimental situations, the polarization model performed better for the majority of groups tested in predicting a holdout sample than did either the more common weighted linear model without an intercept (with weights summing to one) or the multilinear model. Copyright 1991 by the University of Chicago.
When Do Vendors Benefit from Relational Governance? Contracts, Relational Governance and Vendor Profitability in Software Development Outsourcing

We examine the interacting effect of formal contracts and relational governance on vendor profitability in the software outsourcing industry. We argue that the presence of relational governance is driven by perceptions of exchange hazards. In a departure from extant literature, we propose that its benefits depend on the manner in which exchange risks are shared. Specifically, we hypothesize that relational governance provides benefits to an exchange partner only in those contracts in which they are exposed to greater risk. We test these arguments by examining 105 software projects completed by a software vendor. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings.