Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Development of Social Cognition in Filipino Deaf and Hearing Individuals

The overall purpose of this thesis was to examine the nature and pattern of development of social cognition in deaf and hearing individuals from the Philippines. Additionally, predictive factors and social consequences of social cognitive understanding were examined. Previous research has established that deaf children experience significant delays in social cognition compared to typically developing hearing children (e.g., Dyck, Farrugia, Shochet, & Holmes-Brown, 2004; Ketelaar, Rieffe, Wiefferink, & Frijns, 2012; Peterson & Siegal, 1995, 1999). However, prior studies are restricted due to the focus on specific skills, the poverty on work in deaf samples from non-Western cultures, and the limited understanding of the relationship between conceptual knowledge of social cognition and real world social functioning. The present thesis contributes to the current understanding of social cognition by (a) systematically and comprehensively examining the performance of Filipino deaf and hearing individuals, in Theory of Mind (ToM), emotion understanding, and affective recognition and labelling; (b) examining the sequence of acquisition across a range of social-cognitive tasks to establish if the nature of development is the same for Filipino hearing and deaf individuals, irrespective of any delays; (c) investigating the influence of language and the communicative environment on the development of social cognitive understanding; and, lastly, (d) exploring the associations between the concurrent influence of these three key areas of social cognition and their consequences to classroom behaviour. To establish parity with extant literature, the five studies reported in this thesis examined the abilities of deaf individuals aged 8 to 22 years and typically developing children aged 3 to 14 years from the Philippines on well-established measures of theory of mind and emotion knowledge. Specifically, in study 1, group differences in the rate and order of acquisition of ToM understanding of n = 250 deaf and hearing participants were examined using the ToM scale by Wellman and Liu (2004). In study 3, group differences in emotion
Effects of propofol and desflurane anaesthesia on the alveolar inflammatory response to one-lung ventilation.

BACKGROUND One-lung ventilation (OLV) induces a pro-inflammatory response including cytokine release and leucocyte recruitment in the ventilated lung. Whether volatile or i.v. anaesthetics differentially modulate the alveolar inflammatory response to OLV is unclear. METHODS Thirty patients, ASA II or III, undergoing open thoracic surgery were randomized to receive either propofol 4 mg kg(-1) h(-1) (n = 15) or 1 MAC desflurane in air (n = 15) during thoracic surgery. Analgesia was provided by i.v. infusion of remifentanil (0.25 microg kg(-1) min(-1)) in both groups. The patients were mechanically ventilated according to a standard protocol during two-lung ventilation and OLV. Fibre optic bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) of the ventilated lung was performed before and after OLV and 2 h postoperatively. Alveolar cells, protein, tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFalpha), interleukin (IL)-8, soluble intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (sICAM), IL10, and polymorphonuclear (PMN) elastase were determined in the BAL fluid. Data were analysed by parametric or non-parametric tests, as indicated. RESULTS In both groups, an increase in pro-inflammatory markers was found after OLV and 2 h postoperatively; however, the fraction of alveolar granulocytes (median 63.7 vs 31.1%, P < 0.05) was significantly higher in the propofol group compared with the desflurane group. The time courses of alveolar elastase, IL-8, and IL-10 differed between groups, and alveolar TNFalpha (7.4 vs 3.1 pg ml(-1), P < 0.05) and sICAM-1 (52.3 vs 26.3 ng ml(-1), P < 0.05) were significantly higher in the propofol group. CONCLUSIONS These data indicate that pro-inflammatory reactions during OLV were influenced by the type of general anaesthesia. Different patterns of alveolar cytokines may be a result of increased granulocyte recruitment during propofol anaesthesia.
Morphology vs. Syntax in Adjective Class Acquisition

This paper discusses the role of morphological and syntactic information in the automatic acquisition of semantic classes for Catalan adjectives, using decision trees as a tool for exploratory data analysis. We show that a simple mapping from the derivational type to the semantic class achieves 70.1% accuracy; syntactic function reaches a slightly higher accuracy of 73.5%. Although the accuracy scores are quite similar with the two resulting classifications, the kinds of mistakes are qualitatively very different. Morphology can be used as a baseline classification, and syntax can be used as a clue when there are mismatches between morphology and semantics.
Preparing BSW Students for Practicum: Reducing Anxiety through Bridge to Practicum Course

A challenge for BSW programs is designing curriculum that both addresses students’ anxiety prior to their field placements and prepares students to enter the field with the necessary values, skills, and knowledge. While the literature is rich in discussions of anxiety among graduate students, there is limited research on BSW students. Hence, this study examined the effectiveness of utilizing a Bridge to Practicum course in reducing anxiety of students entering the practicum. The study further identifies topic areas that help increase preparedness for practicum. Results indicated that core social work courses had prepared students to handle the rigor of the field placement. Although students may begin with preconceived notions (about the practicum site, their field instructor, and the work they are expected to perform), a major issue with anxiety was the fear of the unknown.
Focus–Specific Clinical Profiles in Human African Trypanosomiasis Caused by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense

Background Diverse clinical features have been reported in human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) foci caused by Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense (T.b.rhodesiense) giving rise to the hypothesis that HAT manifests as a chronic disease in South-East African countries and increased in virulence towards the North. Such variation in disease severity suggests there are differences in host susceptibility to trypanosome infection and/or genetic variation in trypanosome virulence. Our molecular tools allow us to study the role of host and parasite genotypes, but obtaining matched extensive clinical data from a large cohort of HAT patients has previously proved problematic. Methods/Principal Findings We present a retrospective cohort study providing detailed clinical profiles of 275 HAT patients recruited in two northern foci (Uganda) and one southern focus (Malawi) in East Africa. Characteristic clinical signs and symptoms of T.b. rhodesiense infection were recorded and the degree of neurological dysfunction determined on admission. Clinical observations were mapped by patient estimated post-infection time. We have identified common presenting symptoms in T.b. rhodesiense infection; however, marked differences in disease progression and severity were identified between foci. HAT was characterised as a chronic haemo-lymphatic stage infection in Malawi, and as an acute disease with marked neurological impairment in Uganda. Within Uganda, a more rapid progression to meningo-encephaltic stage of infection was observed in one focus (Soroti) where HAT was characterised by early onset neurodysfunction; however, severe neuropathology was more frequently observed in patients in a second focus (Tororo). Conclusions/Significance We have established focus-specific HAT clinical phenotypes showing dramatic variations in disease severity and rate of stage progression both between northern and southern East African foci and between Ugandan foci. Understanding the contribution of host and parasite factors in causing such clinical diversity in T.b. rhodesiense HAT has much relevance for both improvement of disease management and the identification of new drug therapy.
SimNets: A Generalization of Convolutional Networks

We present a deep layered architecture that generalizes classical convolutional neural networks (ConvNets). The architecture, called SimNets, is driven by two operators, one being a similarity function whose family contains the convolution operator used in ConvNets, and the other is a new ”soft max-min-mean” operator called MMECS that realizes classical operators like ReLU and max-pooling, but has additional capabilities that make SimNets a powerful generalization of ConvNets. Two interesting properties that emerge from the architecture are: (i) the basic input to hidden-units to output-nodes machinery contains as special case a kernel machine, and (ii) initializing networks using unsupervised learning is natural. Experiments demonstrate the capability of achieving state of the art accuracy with networks that are 1/8 the size of comparable ConvNets.
Peak power demand analysis and reduction by using battery buffers for monotonic controllers

Demand of electricity varies on hourly basis whereas the production is quite inelastic. This results in fluctuating prices. Data centers and industrial consumers of electricity are penalized for the peak power demand of their loads. To shave the peak power demand, a battery buffer can be adopted. The battery is charged during low load and is discharged during peaks. One essential question is to analyze the reduction of the peak power demand by adopting battery buffers. The power loads are modeled in this paper by adopting the concept of arrival curves in Network Calculus. We analyze monotonic controllers, which have these two properties: (1) comparing one given trace of power loads and two initial battery statuses, if we start from higher battery status, the resulting battery status in the future will not become lower; (2) to increase the power demand at time slot t, the power loads released before t should be as close as possible to t. We present a simple and effective monotonic controller and also provide analyses for the peak power demand to the power grid. Our analysis mechanism can help determine the appropriate battery size for a given load arrival curve to reduce the peak.
A memory mapping approach for parallel interleaver design with multiples read and write accesses

For high throughput applications, turbo-like iterative decoders are implemented with parallel architectures. However, to be efficient parallel architectures require to avoid collision accesses i.e. concurrent read/write accesses should not target the same memory block. This consideration applies to the two main classes of turbo-like codes which are Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) and Turbo-Codes. In this paper we propose a methodology which always finds a collision-free mapping of the variables in the memory banks and which optimizes the resulting interleaving architecture. Finally, we show through a pedagogical example the interest our approach. This research was supported by the European project DAVINCI.
Maszyny liczace an inteligencja t Universal Turing Machine

The synthesis of Boolean logic is a technical challenge. Given the current status of interactive symmetries, physicists shockingly desire the understanding of IPv7. We verify not only that write-back caches and RAID can collaborate to fulﬁll this intent, but that the same is true for journaling ﬁle systems.
A reversal of age-dependent proliferative capacity of endothelial progenitor cells from different species origin in in vitro condition

Introduction: A large number of cardiovascular disorders and abnormalities, notably accelerated vascular deficiencies could be related to aging changes and increased length of life. During the past decades, the discovery of different stem cells facilitates ongoing attempts for attenuating many disorders, especially in vascular beds. Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are a subtype of stem cells that have potent capacity to differentiate into mature endothelial cells (ECs). However, some documented studies reported an age-related decline in proliferation and function of many stem cells. There is no data on aging effect upon proliferation and morphological feature of EPCs. Methods: To show aging effect on EPCs proliferation and multipotentiality, bone marrow samples were provided from old and young cases in three different species; human, mouse and dog. After 7 days of culture, the cell morphology and clonogenic capacity were evaluated. We also calculated the mean number of colonies both in bone marrow samples from old and young subjects. To confirm the cell phenotype, isolated cells were immune-phenotyped by a panel of antibodies against Tie-2, CD133 and CD309 markers. Results: Our results showed that EPCs exhibited prominent spindle form in all bone marrow samples from young cases while the cell shape became more round by aging. Notably, the number of colonies was reduced in aged samples as compared to parallel young subject samples (P < 0.05). We also detected that the expression of endothelial related markers diminished by aging. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest that the age-related vascular abnormalities could be presumably related to the decline in stemness capacity of EPCs.
Karl Schwarzschild Lecture: Dissecting Galaxies with Quantitative Spectroscopy of the Brightest Stars in the Universe

Measuring distances to galaxies, determining their chemical composition, investigating the nature of their stellar populations and the absorbing properties of their interstellar medium are fundamental activities in modern extragalactic astronomy helping to understand the evolution of galaxies and the expanding universe. The optically brightest stars in the universe, blue supergiants of spectral A and B, are unique tools for these purposes. With absolute visual magnitudes up to MV ∼= −9.5 they are the ideal to obtain accurate quantitative information about galaxies through the powerful modern methods of quantitative stellar spectroscopy. The spectral analyis of individual blue supergiant targets provides invaluable information about chemical abundances and abundance gradients, which is more comprehensive than the one obtained from HII regions, as it includes additional atomic species, and which is also more accurate, since it avoids the systematic uncertainties inherent in the strong line studies usually applied to the H II r gions of spiral galaxies beyond the Local Group. Simultaneously, the spectral analysis yields stellar parameters and interstellar extinction for each individual supergiant target, which provides an alternative very accurate way to determine extragalactic distances through a newly developed method, called the Flux-weighted Gravity Luminosity Relationship (FGLR). With the present generation of 10m-class telescopes these spectroscopic studies can reach out to distances of 10 Mpc. The new generation of 30m-class will allow to extend this work out to 30 Mpc, a substantial volume of the local universe.
Sensitivity computation of the ℓ1 minimization problem and its application to dictionary design of ill-posed problems

The ℓ1 minimization problem has been studied extensively in the past few years. Recently, there has been a growing interest in its application for inverse problems. Most studies have concentrated in devising ways for sparse representation of a solution using a given prototype dictionary. Very few studies have addressed the more challenging problem of optimal dictionary construction, and even these were primarily devoted to the simplistic sparse coding application. In this paper, sensitivity analysis of the inverse solution with respect to the dictionary is presented. This analysis reveals some of the salient features and intrinsic difficulties which are associated with the dictionary design problem. Equipped with these insights, we propose an optimization strategy that alleviates these hurdles while utilizing the derived sensitivity relations for the design of a locally optimal dictionary. Our optimality criterion is based on local minimization of the Bayesian risk, given a set of training models. We present a mathematical formulation and an algorithmic framework to achieve this goal. The proposed framework offers the design of dictionaries for inverse problems that incorporate non-trivial, non-injective observation operators, where the data and the recovered parameters may reside in different spaces. We test our algorithm and show that it yields improved dictionaries for a diverse set of inverse problems in geophysics and medical imaging.
Divalent ion trapping inside potassium channels of human T lymphocytes

Using the patch-clamp whole-cell recording technique, we investigated the influence of external Ca2+, Ba2+, K+, Rb+, and internal Ca2+ on the rate of K+ channel inactivation in the human T lymphocyte-derived cell line, Jurkat E6-1. Raising external Ca2+ or Ba2+, or reducing external K+, accelerated the rate of the K+ current decay during a depolarizing voltage pulse. External Ba2+ also produced a use-dependent block of the K+ channels by entering the open channel and becoming trapped inside. Raising internal Ca2+ accelerated inactivation at lower concentrations than external Ca2+, but increasing the Ca2+ buffering with BAPTA did not affect inactivation. Raising [K+]o or adding Rb+ slowed inactivation by competing with divalent ions. External Rb+ also produced a use-dependent removal of block of K+ channels loaded with Ba2+ or Ca2+. From the removal of this block we found that under normal conditions approximately 25% of the channels were loaded with Ca2+, whereas under conditions with 10 microM internal Ca2+ the proportion of channels loaded with Ca2+ increased to approximately 50%. Removing all the divalent cations from the external and internal solution resulted in the induction of a non-selective, voltage-independent conductance. We conclude that Ca2+ ions from the outside or the inside can bind to a site at the K+ channel and thereby block the channel or accelerate inactivation.
ComTest: a tool to impart TDD and unit testing to introductory level programming

Research has noticed that imparting TDD-like testing to an early computing curriculum is challenging because it increases technical and cognitive load for the students. This paper addresses the challenge with a software-based solution constructed to facilitate the process of writing tests. The solution allows using a compact while efficient syntax for formulating tests, writing tests into JavaDoc comments, thus close to the source code that implements intended functionalities, and automates the generation of actual test code. The constructed solution -- the ComTest tool -- has now been used in four introductory level programming course offerings. The paper presents the tool and concludes with initial lessons learned.
A comparative study of different machine learning methods for electricity prices forecasting of an electricity market

Generally, it is difficult to accurately forecast electricity prices because they are unpredictable. Yet, accurate price forecasting is expected to provide crucial information, needed by power producers and consumers to bid strategically, thereby decreasing their risks and increasing their profits in the electricity market. In this paper, two models using artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machines (SVM) were developed for electricity price forecasting. In addition, ant colony optimization (ACO) was used to reduce the feature space and give the best attribute subset for ANN model. Using ACO for feature selection significantly reduced the training time for ANN-based electricity price forecasting model while the results were almost as accurate as those from ANN model.
Making Rewards Work: Refinin g the Overjustific ation Hypothesis

This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact ecommons@luc.edu. for the invaluable aid and suggestions throughout the preparation of this thesis. I should like to also thank the staff at the Niles Township Nursery School for their graciousness and helpfulness in helping me carry out this experiment. of Illinois, where she was a mernber of Alpha Lambda Delta honorary society. In 1958, she transferred to
A Reliable People Counting System via Multiple Cameras

Reliable and real-time people counting is crucial in many applications. Most previous works can only count moving people from a single camera, which cannot count still people or can fail badly when there is a crowd (i.e., heavy occlusion occurs). In this article, we build a system for robust and fast people counting under occlusion through multiple cameras. To improve the reliability of human detection from a single camera, we use a dimensionality reduction method on the multilevel edge and texture features to handle the large variations in human appearance and poses. To accelerate the detection speed, we propose a novel two-stage cascade-of-rejectors method. To handle the heavy occlusion in crowded scenes, we present a fusion method with error tolerance to combine human detection from multiple cameras. To improve the speed and accuracy of moving people counting, we combine our multiview fusion detection method with particle tracking to count the number of people moving in/out the camera view (“border control”). Extensive experiments and analyses show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in single- and multicamera datasets for both speed and reliability. We also design a deployed system for fast and reliable people (still or moving) counting by using multiple cameras.