Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reflections on a process model for international research collaboration in social work

This article seeks to reflect on knowledge and experiences gained from an International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES). Challenges and opportunities inherent in the development and management of a large-scale international research project in social work are explored. Through a synthesis of conceptual frameworks a process model for international research collaboration is constructed based chiefly on the stages of group development, a conceptual framework for cross-national research, an interdisciplinary teamwork process and collaborative knowledge building. The five stages of the process model, namely forming, norming, storming, performing and adjourning and associated steps are connected by a practice of reflexivity.
Before e-Governance and e-Government, Back to Basics! The Case of the Caribbean

This conceptual article discusses the opportunities and challenges presented by e-government and e-governance in the Caribbean. An understanding of the issues inherent in these phenomena is crucially important, particularly for the governance systems of small island developing states in the Caribbean. In practice, however, they are rarely discussed,—not least because their complexity is often misunderstood or inappropriately unacknowledged as new directions by political scientists and policy planners. Moreover, the foundational debate on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on governance and the wider implications for development remain muted owing to the theatrical commotion in other “pressing” aspects of Caribbean political life. As a consequence, this article contextualizes the debate by bringing to the fore a discussion on the importance of understanding the broader political, social, and economic issues and the implications of the use of ICTs and development. In the analysis, a balance is struck to avoid the often disproportionate technocratic parables of a future technological cornucopia being peddled by some international development agencies and officials in the region. Such a macro discussion is necessary if as development advocates and citizens, we are to realize any gains while acknowledging the limitations an enabling e-government and e-governance environment could portend.
Decompressive Surgery in Patients with Poor-grade Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage: Clipping with Simultaneous Decompression Versus Coil Embolization Followed by Decompression

Objective In addition to obliterating the aneurysm using clipping or coiling, decompressive surgery for control of rising intracranial pressure (ICP) is thought to be crucial to prevention of adverse outcomes in patients with poor grade aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH). We evaluated the clinical characteristics of patients with poor-grade aSAH, and compared outcomes of aneurysmal clipping with simultaneous decompressive surgery to those of coil embolization followed by decompression. Materials and Methods In 591 patients with aSAH, 70 patients with H-H grade IV and V underwent decompressive surgery including craniectomy, lobectomy, and hematoma removal. We divided the patients into two groups according to clipping vs. coil embolization (clip group vs. coil group), and analyzed outcomes and mortality. Results Aneurysmal clipping was performed in 40 patients and coil embolization was performed in 30 patients. No significant differences in demographics were observed between the two groups. Middle cerebral artery and posterior circulation aneurysms were more frequent in the clip group. Among 70 patients, mortality occurred in 29 patients (41.4%) and 61 patients (87.1%) had a poor score on the Glasgow outcome scale (scores I-III). No significant difference in mortality was observed between the two groups, but a favorable outcome was more frequent in the coil group (p < 0.05). Conclusion In this study, despite aggressive surgical and endovascular management for elevated ICP, there were high rates of adverse outcomes and mortality in poor-grade aSAH. Despite poor outcomes overall, early coil embolization followed by decompression surgery could lead to more favorable outcomes in patients with poor-grade aSAH.
Schedule processes, not VCPUs

Multiprocessor virtual machines expose underlying abundant computing resources to applications. This, however, also worsens the double scheduling problem where the hypervisor and a guest operating system will both do the CPU scheduling. Prior approaches try to mitigate the semantic gap between the two levels of schedulers by leveraging hints and heuristics, but only work in a few specific cases. This paper argues that instead of scheduling virtual CPUs (vCPUs) in the hypervisor layer, it is more beneficial to dynamically increase and decrease the vCPUs according to available CPU resources when running parallel workloads, while letting the guest operating system to schedule vCPUs to processes. Such a mechanism, which we call vCPU ballooning (VCPU-Bal for short), may avoid many problems inherent in double scheduling. To demonstrate the potential benefit of VCPU-Bal, we simulate the mechanism in both Xen and KVM by assigning an optimal amount of vCPUs for guest VMs. Our evaluation results on a 12-core Intel machine show that VCPU-Bal can achieve a performance speedup from 1.5% to 57.9% on Xen and 8.2% to 63.8% on KVM.
Labor Market Integration of People with Disabilities: Results from the Swiss Spinal Cord Injury Cohort Study

Objectives We aimed to describe labor market participation (LMP) of persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) in Switzerland, to examine potential determinants of LMP, and to compare LMP between SCI and the general population. Methods We analyzed data from 1458 participants of employable age from the cross-sectional community survey of the Swiss Spinal Cord Injury Cohort Study. Data on LMP of the Swiss general population were obtained from the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. Factors associated with employment status as well as the amount of work performed in terms of full-time equivalent (FTE) were examined with regression techniques. Results 53.4% of the participants were employed at the time of the study. Adjusted odds of being employed were increased for males (OR = 1.73, 95% CI 1.33–2.25) and participants with paraplegia (OR = 1.78, 95% CI 1.40–2.27). The likelihood of being employed showed a significant concave relationship with age, peaking at age 40. The relation of LMP with education was s-shaped, while LMP was linearly related to time since injury. On average, employment rates were 30% lower than in the general population. Males with tetraplegia aged between 40 and 54 showed the greatest difference. From the 771 employed persons, the majority (81.7%) worked part-time with a median of 50% FTE (IRQ: 40%-80%). Men, those with younger age, higher education, incomplete lesions, and non-traumatic etiology showed significantly increased odds of working more hours per week. Significantly more people worked part-time than in the general population with the greatest difference found for males with tetraplegia aged between 40 and 54. Conclusions LMP of persons with SCI is comparatively high in Switzerland. LMP after SCI is, however, considerably lower than in the general population. Future research needs to show whether the reduced LMP in SCI reflects individual capacity adjustment, contextual constraints on higher LMP or both.
A Co-Culture Model of Fibroblasts and Adipose Tissue-Derived Stem Cells Reveals New Insights into Impaired Wound Healing After Radiotherapy

External radiation seems to be associated with increased amounts of cytokines and other cellular modulators. Impaired microcirculation and fibrosis are examples of typical long term damage caused by radiotherapy. Adipose tissue-derived stem cells (ASC) are discussed to enhance wound healing, but their role in wounds due to radiotherapy is poorly understood. Normal human fibroblasts (NHF) and ASCs were co-cultured and external radiation with doses from 2–12 Gray (Gy) was delivered. Cell proliferation and mRNA levels of matrix metalloproteinases (MMP1, MMP2 and MMP13) were determined 48 h after irradiation of the co-cultures by qPCR. Additionally, tissue inhibitors of matrix metalloproteinases (TIMP1, TIMP2) were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). There was a reduction of cell proliferation after external radiation in mono-cultures of NHFs and ASCs compared to controls without irradiation. The co-culture of ASCs and NHFs showed reduced impairment of cell proliferation after external radiation. Gene expression of MMP1 and MMP13 was reduced after external irradiation in NHF. MMP2 expression of irradiated NHFs was increased. In the co-culture setting, MMP1 and MMP2 gene expression levels were upregulated. TIMP1 and TIMP2 protein expression was increased after irradiation in NHFs and their co-cultures with ASCs. ASCs seem to stimulate cell proliferation of NHFs and modulate relevant soluble mediators as well as proteinases after external radiation.
All-optical packet-switched interconnection network based on modular photonic digital processing

Future interconnection networks will be required to achieve ultra-high bandwidth and low latency communications to cope with the increasing performance requirements of backbone routers, large data storage systems and supercomputing systems. Aiming at achieving ultra-high bandwidth communications and approaching optical time-of-flight processing latency while being robust to cascade impairments, the authors propose an all-optical packet-switched interconnection network, where not only the actual packet switching but also the packet processing is performed in the photonic domain. The authors present two modular architectures, based on the crossbar and the Batcher-Banyan topologies, capable of forwarding fixed-length packets with two classes of service. Both use photonic digital-processing subsystems built by combining a single integrable module which exploits cross gain modulation in a semiconductor optical amplifier. System level simulations on the crossbar switch controller guarantee that the control signals maintain an acceptable quality during the processing. Moreover, the Batcher-Banyan configuration is more cost-effective than the crossbar for increasing port count, while effective network performance in terms of packet loss rate can be obtained by adding just few recirculating delay lines.
Analysis of Rat Vestibular Hair Cell Development and Regeneration Using Calretinin as an Early Marker

Despite increased interest in inner ear hair cell regeneration, it is still unclear what exact mechanisms underlie hair cell regeneration in mammals because of our limited understanding of hair cell development and the lack of specific hair cell markers. In this report, we studied hair cell development using immunohistochemistry on sections prepared from embryonic day (E) 13 to postnatal day 7 rat inner ear tissues. Of many epithelial, neuronal, and glial markers, we found that calcium-binding protein antibodies recognizing calretinin, calmodulin, or parvalbumin labeled immature hair cells in rat vestibular end organs. In particular, calretinin antiserum labeled the initial differentiating hair cells at E15, a stage immediately after the terminal mitosis of hair cell progenitors. The selective immunoreactivity of postmitotic presumptive hair cells, but not supporting cells or peripheral epithelial cells, was confirmed in utricular epithelial sheet cultures. Double labeling with calretinin and bromodeoxyuridine antibodies in long-term cultures showed that only a few mitotic utricular supporting cells became calretinin positive. Thus, although proliferation-mediated regeneration of new hair cells might directly contribute to hair cell regeneration in rat utricles after injury, it is very limited. In addition, double labeling with calretinin and terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) revealed that differentiated hair cells underwent apoptosis during normal development at late embryonic and early postnatal stages in vivo and in vitro. Therefore, these experiments lay the groundwork for the time course of differentiation, regeneration, and apoptosis of mammalian vestibular hair cells. This work also suggests that calcium-binding proteins are useful markers for studies on inner ear hair cell differentiation and regeneration.
Nonasymptotic and Second-Order Achievability Bounds for Coding With Side-Information

We present a novel nonasymptotic or finite blocklength achievability bounds for three side-information problems in network information theory. These include: 1) the Wyner-Ahlswede-Körner (WAK) problem of almost-lossless source coding with rate-limited side-information; 2) the Wyner-Ziv (WZ) problem of lossy source coding with side-information at the decoder; and 3) the Gel'fand-Pinsker (GP) problem of channel coding with noncausal state information available at the encoder. The bounds are proved using ideas from channel simulation and channel resolvability. Our bounds for all three problems improve on all previous nonasymptotic bounds on the error probability of the WAK, WZ, and GP problems-in particular those derived by Verdú. Using our novel nonasymptotic bounds, we recover the general formulas for the optimal rates of these side-information problems. Finally, we also present achievable second-order coding rates by applying the multidimensional Berry-Esséen theorem to our new nonasymptotic bounds. Numerical results show that the second-order coding rates obtained using our nonasymptotic achievability bounds are superior to those obtained using existing finite blocklength bounds.
Zinc chlorins for artificial light-harvesting self-assemble into antiparallel stacks forming a microcrystalline solid-state material

We introduce a concept to solve the structure of a microcrystalline material in the solid-state at natural abundance without access to distance constraints, using magic angle spinning (MAS) NMR spectroscopy in conjunction with X-ray powder diffraction and DFT calculations. The method is applied to a novel class of materials that form (semi)conductive 1D wires for supramolecular electronics and artificial light-harvesting. The zinc chlorins 3-devinyl-31-hydroxymethyl-132-demethoxycarbonylpheophorbide a (3′,5′-bis-dodecyloxy)benzyl ester zinc complex 1 and 3-devinyl-31-methoxymethyl-132-demethoxycarbonylpheophorbide a (3′,5′-bis-dodecyloxy)benzyl ester zinc complex 2, self-assemble into extended excitonically coupled chromophore stacks. 1H-13C heteronuclear dipolar correlation MAS NMR experiments provided the 1H resonance assignment of the chlorin rings that allowed accurate probing of ring currents related to the stacking of macrocycles. DFT ring-current shift calculations revealed that both chlorins self-assemble in antiparallel π-stacks in planar layers in the solid-state. Concomitantly, X-ray powder diffraction measurements for chlorin 2 at 80 °C revealed a 3D lattice for the mesoscale packing that matches molecular mechanics optimized aggregate models. For chlorin 2 the stacks alternate with a periodicity of 0.68 nm and a 3D unit cell with an approximate volume of 6.28 nm3 containing 4 molecules, which is consistent with space group P21221.
Curriculum Development for Enhancing the Art Aesthetic in Art Learning Substance for Grade 7 Students: Pilot Study.

The objective of this research and development was to develop a curriculum for enhancing grade 7 students’ aesthetic sense and substantial art learning. There were 2 phases of the study consisting of: (i) the study of basic information about art aesthetics, including the attributes, approaches, theories, problems, and needs, (ii) the development of a tentative curriculum including 1) Rationale, 2) Objective, 3) Content, 4) Instructional activity (using PRemAA Process), and 5) Measurement and evaluation as well as a pilot study in order to study the feasibility of the resulting curriculum. The research findings found that the students’ post-test art aesthetic attribute was higher than the pre-test. In addition, the curriculum consisted of feasibility in both theory and practice. Key words: Curriculum development, instructional design, aesthetic education, art appreciation, aesthetic values.
Phylogeography, intraspecific structure and sex‐biased dispersal of Dall’s porpoise, Phocoenoides dalli, revealed by mitochondrial and microsatellite DNA analyses

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) control‐region sequences and microsatellite loci length polymorphisms were used to estimate phylogeographical patterns (historical patterns underlying contemporary distribution), intraspecific population structure and gender‐biased dispersal of Phocoenoides dalli dalli across its entire range. One‐hundred and thirteen animals from several geographical strata were sequenced over 379 bp of mtDNA, resulting in 58 mtDNA haplotypes. Analysis using FST values (based on haplotype frequencies) and ΦST values (based on frequencies and genetic distances between haplotypes) yielded statistically significant separation (bootstrap values P < 0.05) among most of the stocks currently used for management purposes. A minimum spanning network of haplotypes showed two very distinctive clusters, differentially occupied by western and eastern populations, with some common widespread haplotypes. This suggests some degree of phyletic radiation from west to east, superimposed on gene flow. Highly male‐biased migration was detected for several population comparisons. Nuclear microsatellite DNA markers (119 individuals and six loci) provided additional support for population subdivision and gender‐biased dispersal detected in the mtDNA sequences. Analysis using FST values (based on allelic frequencies) yielded statistically significant separation between some, but not all, populations distinguished by mtDNA analysis. RST values (based on frequencies of and genetic distance between alleles) showed no statistically significant subdivision. Again, highly male‐biased dispersal was detected for all population comparisons, suggesting, together with morphological and reproductive data, the existence of sexual selection. Our molecular results argue for nine distinct dalli‐type populations that should be treated as separate units for management purposes.
Towards networked sliding mode control

In this paper, a sliding mode based control concept for networked feedback loops with variable transmission delays is presented. The proposed algorithm consists of a buffering mechanism and a robust discrete-time control law capable of rejecting bounded matched perturbations. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by means of a numerical example and a real-world experiment.
Diagnosis of dementia--automatic quantification of brain structures.

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study was to examine the usefulness of a fully automatic quantification of brain structures by means of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for diagnosing dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). MATERIAL AND METHOD MRI scans of the brains of 122 patients, referred to a memory clinic, were analysed using Neuroquant® software, which quantifies the volume of various brain structures. Clinical diagnoses were made by two doctors without knowledge of the MRI results. We performed Receiver Operating Characteristic analyses and calculated the area under the curve (AUC). A value of 1 means that all ill patients have been diagnosed as diseased and no patient has been falsely diagnosed as diseased. RESULTS The mean age of the patients was 67.2 years (SD 10.5 years), 60 % were men, 63 had DAT, 24 had another type of dementia, 25 had mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and ten had subjective cognitive impairment (SCI). In the comparison between DAT patients and patients with SCI or MCI, seven of eleven volumes were significantly larger than AUC 0.5. Positive and negative likelihood ratios were less than 5 and more than 0.2, respectively, for the best limit values of the volumes. Apart from the cerebellum (AUC 0.67), none of the brain structures was significantly different from AUC 0.5 in patients with dementia conditions other than dementia Alzheimer's type. INTERPRETATION MRI scans with Neuroquant analyses cannot be used alone to distinguish between persons with dementia of Alzheimer's type and persons without dementia.
Corticomuscular coherence during bilateral isometric arm voluntary activity in healthy humans

Bilateral voluntary contractions involve functional changes in both primary motor cortices. We investigated whether a voluntary contraction controlled by one hemisphere can influence oscillatory processes contralaterally. Corticomuscular coherence was calculated between EEG recorded over the motor cortex hand representation and electromyogram from the first dorsal interosseous muscle when the nondominant hand performed a precision grip task. The dominant arm remained at rest or performed a finger abduction or an elbow flexion task at 10, 40, and 70% of maximal isometric voluntary contraction (MVC). Mean coherence in the 15- to 30-Hz range in the hand performing a precision grip increased during 40% (by 72%) and 70% (by 73%) but not during 10% of MVC in the finger abduction task. Similarly, in the elbow flexion task, mean coherence increased during 40% (by 40%) and 70% (by 48%) but not during 10% of MVC. No differences were observed between the increments in coherence between the finger abduction and elbow flexion tasks at a given force level. We speculate that these results reflect the increased complexity of controlling a fine motor task with one hand while performing a strong contraction with the contralateral hand and suggest that increased oscillatory corticomuscular coupling may contribute to successful task performance.
From Good Communists to Even Better Capitalists? Entrepreneurial Pathways in Post-Socialist Romania

This article tests four theses regarding the origins of Romanian post-socialist entrepreneurs: (1) “political capitalism,” (2) “post-socialist managerialism,” (3) “capitalism from below,” and (4) “refuge from poverty. ” The results of the analyses show that the former cadres are at an advantage in being employers due to their organizational experience and network resources. Nevertheless, in line with arguments advanced by the second thesis mentioned above, education, as the most basic form of human capital, plays an important role in this story of entrepreneurship. Consistent with the predictions of the third thesis, the experience in the second economy under state socialism, as a form of cultural capital, represents an asset for being an employer and a small business operator in 2000. Private farming is an avenue taken by former socialist farmers and by some of those who have lost their jobs after 1990, especially the former peasant-workers of state socialism.