Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
VGF Peptide Profiles in Type 2 Diabetic Patients’ Plasma and in Obese Mice

To address the possible involvement of VGF peptides in obesity and diabetes, we studied type 2 diabetes (T2D) and obese patients, and high-fat diet induced obese mice. Two VGF peptides (NAPP-19 and QQET-30) were identified in human plasma by HPLC-ESI-MS. The VGF C-terminus, the above two cleaved peptides, and the TLQP-21 related peptide/s were studied using ELISA and immunohistochemistry. In euglycemic patients, plasma NAPPE and TLQP like peptides were significantly reduced with obesity (74±10 vs. 167±28, and 92±10 vs. 191±19 pmol/ml, mean+SEM, n = 10 and 6, obese vs. normal BMI, respectively, p<0.03). Upon a standard glucose load, a distinct response was shown for VGF C-terminus, TLQP and QQET-like (ERVW immunoreactive) peptides in euglycemic normal BMI patients, but was virtually abolished in euglycemic obese, and in T2D patients independently of BMI. High-fat diet induced obese mice showed reduced plasma VGF C-terminus, NAPPE and QQET-like (ERVW) peptide/s (3±0.2 vs. 4.6±0.3, 22±3.5 vs. 34±1.3, and 48±7 vs. 100±7 pmol/ml, mean+SEM, n = 8/group, obese vs. slim, respectively, p<0.03), with a loss of the response to glucose for all VGF peptides studied. In immunohistochemistry, TLQP and/or VGF C-terminus antibodies labelled VGF containing perikarya in mouse celiac ganglia, pancreatic islet cells and thin beaded nerve fibres in brown adipose tissues, with fewer in white adipose tissue. Upon the glucose load, tyrosine hydroxylase and VGF C-terminus immunoreactive axons became apparent in pancreatic islets of slim animals, but not in obese animals. Alltogether, a significant loss of VGF peptide immunoreactivity and/or their response to glucose was demonstrated in obese patients, with or without T2D, in parallel with a similar loss in high-fat diet induced obese mice. An involvement of VGF in metabolic regulations, including those of brown and/or white adipose tissues is underlined, and may point out specific VGF peptides as potential targets for diagnosis and/or treatment.
Bio-inspired therapeutic pet robots: Review and future direction

This paper presents an extensive review of "bio-inspired therapeutic pet robots", an emerging class of social robots deployed for therapeutic scenarios with a wide range of human stakeholders from elderly to autistic children. We begin by covering prominent literature that studies the roles and benefits of biological pets in therapeutic situations. We then present an overview on biologically inspired therapeutic pet robots. Finally, we discuss the needs and future potential for a parrot inspired robot and related research challenges.
The Health Effect of the Syrian Conflict on IDPs and Refugees

Syrian conflict and oppression caused extreme suffering for Syrians. They threatened the existence of Syrian identity and Syria’s territorial integrity. They caused more than half of Syria’s population to be internally displaced or become refugees. The goal of the current study was to assess the physical and mental health toll of Syrian experience, an intergroup trauma, on Syrians as individuals. A sample of 195 internally displaced and 111 Syrian refugees in the Nederland was administered measures of oppressive Syrian experience (SOE), cumulative stress and trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), postcumulative stress and trauma disorders (complex PTSD), and existential annihilation anxiety (EAA). Descriptive statistics showed high rates of PTSD, comorbidities, and suicidality. Internally displaced had significantly higher morbidity rates than refugees. Using path analysis, we tested a model where SOE, mediated by other interpersonal traumas, triggered EAA and affected severely their mental and physical health. The model fitted well. We tested the model’s structural invariance across genders and the 2 groups. While the model was configurally and metrically (conceptually) invariant across groups, it was not strongly or strictly invariant. We examined the dynamics behind their similarities and differences. We discussed the need to resolve the conflict and develop evidence-based interventions to help relieve their suffering.
A Best-First Search Algorithm for Generating Referring Expressions

Existing algorithms for generating referential descriptions to sets of objects have serious deficits: while incremental approaches may produce ambiguous and redundant expressions, exhaustive searches are computationally expensive. Mediating between these extreme control regimes, we propose a best-first searching algorithm for uniquely identifying sets of objects. We incorporate linguistically motivated preferences and several techniques to cut down the search space. Preliminary results show the effectiveness of the new algorithm.
A Conceptual Framework for the Electronic Performance Support Systems within IBM Lotus Notes 6 ( LN 6 ) Example

The concept of Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) is containing multimedia or computer based instruction components that improves human performance by providing process simplification, performance information and decision support system. EPSS has become a hot topic for organizational development, human resources, performance technology, training, and educational development professionals. A conceptual framework of EPSS is constructed under five interrelated and interdependent domains for educational implications. The domains of the framework are online collaboration, cost-effectiveness, motivation, service management, and performance empowering. IBM Lotus Notes 6 (LN6) is used as an example application tool to illustrate the power of this framework. The framework describes a set of relevant events based upon deductive analyses for improving our understanding of the EPSS and its implications on education and training. The article is also pointed out that there are some similarities between the EPSS’ and the LN6’s specific features within this conceptual framework. It can provide some guidelines and benefits to researchers, educators, and designers as well.
Meditation for Law Students: Mindfulness Practice as Experiential Learning

In today’s competitive law school environment, research indicates that many students arrive in law school with anxiety or emotional difficulties or develop them due to stress inherent in law school studies. In fact, law school more than other course of graduate study creates stress-induced difficulties in students, and these difficulties often persist in the practice of law. When law schools teach mindfulness, they recognize that law students suffer from stress and its harms, and that mindfulness education may help to bring balance to the lives of law students. Mindfulness or meditation training provides one way for students to become present and accepting of their experiences and may help to alleviate stress-related problems. Students learn to be able to maintain focus and calm, even when their minds are busy, and gain a useful tool that they can use when addressing their school or professional work. Mindfulness practice combined with simulations involving the interpersonal skills of deep listening, counseling, interviewing, and negotiating satisfies the ABA requirement of experiential learning and offers students a new way to approach lawyering skills. Students learn to reflect, rather than react, while appreciating the intrinsic value of everyone involved in the interaction. Mindfulness training as experiential learning helps students to be ready to approach their professional experiences with focus, presence, acceptance, and compassion. By offering an experiential learning curricula that includes mindfulness education, law schools will further demonstrate that they care about the well-being of their students and are taking steps to help them to develop balance in their personal and professional endeavors.
Rediscovering Design Education as a Social Constructivist Foundation for Innovative Design Thinking

Design has been described by Bruno Latour as the missing masses, and tellingly as “nowhere to be said and everywhere to be felt” (2005: 73). Traditionally, not only objects, but design‟s presence in general has gone largely unnoticed by the public, but that is changing, due, in considerable part, to the ubiquitous presence of computing technology. Design, as representative of unnoticed and neutral objects, is no longer feasible, but design, as a participative presence in the lives of its users, is fast gaining ground in our complex society. Designers are no longer fully in control of the design process, meaning design practice, and as a result design education must change to adapt to the increasing pace at which different social groups are evolving new ways of communicating and living.
Women behaving badly: negative posts on Facebook memorial pages

ABSTRACT This study explores negative posts in Facebook pages dedicated to dead subjects. As with places for mourning in offline environments, memorial pages in Facebook appear to exude a sacred character as objects to both celebrate the life of the deceased and grieve their departure with others. Through a two-step content analysis of an initial sample of 600 pages containing the ‘R.I. P.’ acronym in their title, we found, however, a number of posts violating conventional expectations of respect for these mourning spaces. Negative posts in memorial pages take the form of flames (i.e., insults directed at the subject of the page, its administrator, or other visitors), venting (e.g., violent language against the victimizers of the subject of a memorial page), or ‘spam’ (i.e., advertisement and content not related to the subject and purpose of the page). Moreover, while results show that most memorial pages in Facebook are created and maintained by women (even thought the subject in the majority of those pages are young males who died an untimely death), they also reveal that women post the majority of negative posts in those pages as well. In other words, whereas women seem to perpetuate traditional offline roles in connection to mourning and grieving rituals, in the online world, they are also the first ones challenging the socially sanctioned sacral attributes of those practices in social networking sites.
VarDroid: Online variability emulation in Android/Linux platforms

Variability is the real big challenge for integrated circuits. Today, simulators help to estimate the effect of variability, but fail to capture real workload dynamics and user interactions, which are fundamental to mobile devices. This paper presents VarDroid, a low-overhead tool to emulate power and performance variability on real platforms, running on top of the Android operating system. VarDroid enables analyzing the effect of variability in power and performance while capturing the complex interactions characteristic of mobile workloads, thus relating to user's quality of experience. The paper presents use cases to show the utility of VarDroid to test applications, device and OS robustness under the effects of variability. Our results show that a variability-agnostic OS can incur in a performance penalty of up to 60% and a power penalty of up to 20%.
Process diversity in software development

First of all, what is a process? Asking this might seem trivial, but by reading the many excellent submissions for this issue, we realized this question has a far from trivial answer. According to the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, you can define a process as " a series of actions or operations conducing to an end. " This definition seems to fit peoples' general ideas about process, but clearly, numerous differing definitions of process exist. Is process the way a company operates—from marketing to human resources, to actual development—or the way a developer produces design or code, or tests the software? Does the process refer to management, engineering, or both? Does process imply a lot of formalism and expanding effort for writing and reading documents , instead of product development? Some people would answer yes to these questions, others no. Maybe the correct an-A " one size fits all " approach doesn't work in software development. Processes work or are appropriate only under certain conditions. Does NASA follow the same software development process as a startup e-commerce company? The answer is obvious. Processes differ greatly throughout the industry, and this special issue looks at some aspects of this diversity.
Expression of the Genetic Suppressor Element 24.2 (GSE24.2) Decreases DNA Damage and Oxidative Stress in X-Linked Dyskeratosis Congenita Cells

The predominant X-linked form of Dyskeratosis congenita results from mutations in DKC1, which encodes dyskerin, a protein required for ribosomal RNA modification that is also a component of the telomerase complex. We have previously found that expression of an internal fragment of dyskerin (GSE24.2) rescues telomerase activity in X-linked dyskeratosis congenita (X-DC) patient cells. Here we have found that an increased basal and induced DNA damage response occurred in X-DC cells in comparison with normal cells. DNA damage that is also localized in telomeres results in increased heterochromatin formation and senescence. Expression of a cDNA coding for GSE24.2 rescues both global and telomeric DNA damage. Furthermore, transfection of bacterial purified or a chemically synthesized GSE24.2 peptide is able to rescue basal DNA damage in X-DC cells. We have also observed an increase in oxidative stress in X-DC cells and expression of GSE24.2 was able to diminish it. Altogether our data indicated that supplying GSE24.2, either from a cDNA vector or as a peptide reduces the pathogenic effects of Dkc1 mutations and suggests a novel therapeutic approach.
Efficient network codes for cyclic networks

In this work we address the problem of network codes for cyclic networks. We show that network codes can be constructed for cyclic networks as long as at least one edge in each cycle has a delay, but it is not required that every edge would have a delay. We then present the algorithm for constructing an optimal multicast network code, developed in our previous work, and analyze its computational complexity, showing that it is polynomial in the graph size. We discuss the properties of the resulting codes, and show the ability to modify the code in a localized manner when sinks are added or removed. This property is also applicable to acyclic networks. Finally, we propose the sequential decoding algorithm we developed in an earlier work for decoding the resulting codes. For this we analyze its decoding delay, for both acyclic and cyclic networks
The Market for OTC Credit Derivatives∗

The over-the-counter (OTC) market for credit derivatives is very large relative to banks’ trading assets, and gross notionals are highly concentrated on the balance sheets of just a few large dealer banks. Moreover, the large volume of varied bilateral trades create an intricate system of liability linkages between participating banks. These stylized observations have drawn the attention of policy makers and the public alike. In this paper, we develop a model of equilibrium entry, trade, and prices, in order to formally analyze positive and normative issues surrounding OTC credit derivatives. In our model, banks’ bilateral exposures arise endogenously given their characteristics and their initial exposure to an aggregate default risk factor. We show that the large volume of bilateral trades, the high concentration of gross notionals, and the complex liability structure linking all banks, are explained by a combination of economies of scale, hedging needs, and incentives to provide intermediation services in the OTC market. From a social welfare perspective, we show that the liability structure is indeed too concentrated, but in our model market size in and of itself does not impact welfare. We also show that unless trading frictions are negligible, both total gross notional outstanding, and the concentration of gross notional in large dealer banks, increase as trading frictions decline and risk sharing improves. ∗We’d like to thank Ben Lester, Tyler Muir, Ionid Rosu, Daniel Sanches, and seminar participants at UC Davis, UT Austin, OSU, Kellogg, UCLA, LSE, and LBS, for fruitful discussions and suggestions. Patrick Kiefer and Omair Syed provided expert research assistance. We thank the Bank of France for financial support. All errors are ours. †Department of Economics, University of California Los Angeles, e-mail: andy@atkeson.net ‡Finance Area, Anderson School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, e-mail: andrea.eisfeldt@anderson.ucla. edu §Department of Economics, University of California Los Angeles, e-mail: poweill@econ.ucla. edu
Socioeconomic Status, Race, and Diurnal Cortisol Decline in the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) Study

Objectives: The objectives of this study were to assess whether socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with dysregulation of the cortisol diurnal rhythm and whether this association is independent of race and occurs equally in whites and blacks; and to determine if an association between SES and cortisol can be explained (is mediated) by behavioral, social, and emotional differences across the SES gradient. Methods: Seven hundred eighty-one subjects from a multisite sample representing both whites and blacks provided six saliva cortisol samples over the course of the day: at awakening, 45 minutes, 2.5 hours, 8 hours, and 12 hours after awakening, and at bedtime. Results: Both lower SES (education and income) and being black were associated with higher evening levels of cortisol. These relationships were independent of one another and SES associations with cortisol were similar across racial categories. The evidence was consistent with poorer health practices (primarily smoking), higher levels of depressive symptoms, poorer social networks and supports, and feelings of helplessness (low mastery) mediating the link between SES and cortisol. However, we found no evidence for psychosocial or behavioral mediation of the association between race and cortisol response. Conclusions: Lower SES was associated in a graded fashion with flatter diurnal rhythms as a result of less of a decline during the evening. This association occurred independent of race and the data were consistent with mediation by health practices, emotional and social factors. Blacks also showed a flatter rhythm at the end of the day. This association was independent of SES and could not be explained by behavioral, social, or emotional mediators. CARDIA = Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study; SES = socioeconomic status; HPA = hypothalamic–pituitary adrenocortical; BMI = body mass index; AUC = area under the curve; CES-D = Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale; MIDUS = Midlife in the U.S. Survey; PAH = Physical Activities History questionnaire.
Multi-Site Validation of the SWAT Model on the Bani Catchment: Model Performance and Predictive Uncertainty

The objective of this study was to assess the performance and predictive uncertainty of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model on the Bani River Basin, at catchment and subcatchment levels. The SWAT model was calibrated using the Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation (GLUE) approach. Potential Evapotranspiration (PET) and biomass were considered in the verification of model outputs accuracy. Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) was used for identifying important model parameters. Results indicated a good performance of the global model at daily as well as monthly time steps with adequate predictive uncertainty. PET was found to be overestimated but biomass was better predicted in agricultural land and forest. Surface runoff represents the dominant process on streamflow generation in that region. Individual calibration at subcatchment scale yielded better performance than when the global parameter sets were applied. These results are very useful and provide a support to further studies on regionalization to make prediction in ungauged basins.
Face recognition by subspace analysis of 2D Log-Gabor wavelets features

In this paper, we discuss a face recognition scheme by subspace analysis of 2D log-Gabor wavelets features. In which, an input face image is firstly decomposed with a set of two dimensional log-Gabor wavelets (2D-LGWs) localized with respect to spatial location, orientation and frequency. Based on complex responses of filters, local energy model (LEM) is used to represent log-Gabor features (LGFs) which are substantially effective for the task of recognition. Then, subspace modeling is performed to transform the high dimensional LGFs into more compact one to simplify the task of classification. Common nearest-neighbor (NN) based matching algorithm is adopted to classify a probe to one of classes. The superiority of the proposed scheme for face recognition is comparatively demonstrated with the traditional appearance-based methods. Moreover, performances of several leading subspace techniques, PCA, ICA and LDA, are comparatively evaluated based on LGFs representation.
Genotyping single-nucleotide polymorphisms by the invader assay with dual-color fluorescence polarization detection.

BACKGROUND The PCR-Invader assay is a robust, homogeneous assay that has been shown to be highly sensitive and specific in genotyping single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers. In this study, we introduce two changes to improve the assay: (a) we streamline the PCR-Invader method by assaying both alleles for each SNP in one reaction; and (b) we reduce the cost of the method by adopting fluorescence polarization (FP) as the detection method. METHODS PCR product was incubated with Invader oligonucleotide and two primary probes at 93 degrees C for 5 min. Signal probes corresponding to the cleaved flaps of the primary probes [labeled with fluorescein and 6-carboxytetramethylrhodamine (TAMRA) dye] and Cleavase VIII enzyme (a flap endonuclease) were then added to the mixture. This reaction mixture was incubated at 63 degrees C for 5 min. FP measurements were made with a fluorescence plate reader. RESULTS Eighty-eight individuals were genotyped across a panel of 10 SNPs, using PCR product as template, for a total of 880 genotypes. An average "no call" rate of 3.2% was observed after first round of experiments. PCR products were remade in those samples that failed to produce any genotype in the first round, and all gave clear-cut genotypes. When the genotypes determined by the PCR-Invader assay and template-directed dye-terminator incorporation assay with FP were compared, they were in 100% concordance for all SNP markers and experiments. CONCLUSIONS The improvements introduced in this study make PCR-Invader assay simpler and more cost-effective, and therefore more suitable for high-throughput genotyping.
Investigating novice English language teachers' competency : A case study / Nursyuhada Zakaria

This study aimed to investigate novice English language teachers’ competency to teach in schools. There were three research objectives examined, which were to: i) identify novice teachers’ level of teaching knowledge; ii) assess their competency in classroom teaching; and iii) assess their competency in relation to the teaching knowledge and classroom teaching. This research employed a descriptive research design, with a total of forty-one novice English language teachers in secondary schools were selected as the sample for the study. The instruments used were the Teaching Knowledge Test (TKT), teaching observation form, and semi-structured interviews. All forty-one respondents were required to complete the TKT, while only nine respondents were selected for the observations and interviews based on their scores in the TKT. The findings revealed that the novice teachers have adequate teaching knowledge, as reflected in their scores in TKT. However, the knowledge was not completely applied in their teaching as observed by the researcher, which also indicated that they were incompetent in some aspects of teaching, such as choosing appropriate teaching methods and time management. The findings hoped to provide input to the teacher training programmes offered in Malaysia.