Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lives in foster care: the educational and social support experiences of young people aged 13 to 14 years in long term foster care

This study aimed to tackle three main research questions: " What are the day to day experiences of education and schooling for young people aged 13 to 14 years in long term foster care? " What kind of social supports do these young people have available to them beyond the foster family in which they are placed? (Social supports are measured here in terms of contact with birth family, friendship networks and participation in hobbies/leisure activities). " What relationship, if any, do placement conditions have with young people’s education and schooling, as well as their social supports?
An Analysis of the Relationship between a Write Access Reduction Method for NVM/DRAM Hybrid Memory with Programming Language Runtime Support and Execution Policies of Garbage Collection

There are several research projects about new generation non-volatile memory (NVM), such as STT-MRAM, PCM and ReRAM. Non-volatile main memory makes it possible to integrate secondary storages in main memory. The integration enables to reduce I/O to slow block devices. It is, however, impossible to construct large capacity main memory with a single NVM in this point. It is required to combine DRAM and NVM or combine NVM and another NVM to construct unified non-volatile main memory. The previous researches discussed NVM/DRAM hybrid main memory architecture, which combine PCM and DRAM. In our previous work, we proposed a method to manage NVM/DRAM hybrid main memory with programming language runtimes supports. Language runtimes, such as Java runtimes, have more detailed informaion about write acceess to data than operating system has. The language runtime supports are useful to manage NVM/DRAM hybrid memory therefore. In the proposed method, the runtime migrates objects between NVM and DRAM based on the characteristics of write access. The language runtime executes the migration processes during garbage collection processes. The performance of the proposed method rely on the frequency of garbage collection. In this paper, we will discuss and do an experiment about how the frequency of garbage collection effects the performance of the proposed method. The results of the experiment shows that the improved method cut 91 percent of write access. The results also show that the improved method cut 50 percent of the usage of DRAM.
Diet and bone mineral density study in postmenopausal women from the TwinsUK registry shows a negative association with a traditional English dietary pattern and a positive association with wine.

BACKGROUND The effect of diet on bone mineral density (BMD) remains controversial, mainly because of difficulties in isolating dietary factors from the confounding influences of age, lifestyle, and genetic factors. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to use a novel method to examine the relation between BMD and diet. DESIGN A co-twin control study design with linear regression modeling was used to test for associations between BMD and habitual intakes of calcium, vitamin D, protein, and alcohol plus 5 previously identified dietary patterns in postmenopausal women from the TwinsUK registry. This approach exploited the unique matching of twins to provide an estimate of an association that was not confounded by age, genetic background, or shared lifestyle. RESULTS In >2000 postmenopausal women (BMD data on 1019, 1218, and 1232 twin pairs at the hip neck, hip, and spine, respectively), we observed a positive association between alcohol intake (from wine but not from beer or spirits) and spine BMD (P = 0.01) and a negative association with a traditional 20th-century English diet at the hip neck (P = 0.01). Both associations remained borderline significant after adjustment for mean twin-pair intakes (P = 0.04 and P = 0.055, respectively). Other dietary patterns and intakes of calcium, vitamin D, and protein were unrelated to BMD. CONCLUSION Our results showed that diet has an independent but subtle effect on BMD; wine intake was positively associated with spine BMD, whereas a traditional (20th-century) English diet had a negative association with hip BMD.
Different Foreign Genes Incidentally Integrated into the Same Locus of the Streptococcus suis Genome

ABSTRACT Some strains of Streptococcus suis possess a type II restriction-modification (RM) system, whose genes are thought to be inserted into the genome between purH and purD from a foreign source by illegitimate recombination. In this study, we characterized the purHD locus of the S. suis genomes of 28 serotype reference strains by DNA sequencing. Four strains contained the RM genes in the locus, as described before, whereas 11 strains possessed other genetic regions of seven classes. The genetic regions contained a single gene or multiple genes that were either unknown or similar to hypothetical genes of other bacteria. The mutually exclusive localization of the genetic regions with the atypical G+C contents indicated that these regions were also acquired from foreign sources. No transposable element or long-repeat sequence was found in the neighboring regions. An alignment of the nucleotide sequences, including the RM gene regions, suggested that the foreign regions were integrated by illegitimate recombination via short stretches of nucleotide identity. By using a thermosensitive suicide plasmid, the RM genes were experimentally introduced into an S. suis strain that did not contain any foreign genes in that locus. Integration of the plasmid into the S. suis genome did not occur in the purHD locus but occurred at various chromosomal loci, where there were 2 to 10 bp of nucleotide identity between the chromosome and the plasmid. These results suggest that various foreign genes described here were incidentally integrated into the same locus of the S. suis genome.
Visual odometry in the wolf spider Lycosa tarantula (Araneae: Lycosidae)

The wolf spider Lycosa tarantula homes using path integration. The angular component of the displacement is measured using a polarized-light compass associated with the functioning of the anterior median eyes. However, how L. tarantula estimates the linear component of the displacement was not known prior to this investigation. The ability of L. tarantula to gauge the distance walked after being displaced from its burrow was investigated using experimental channels placed in an indoor setup. Firstly, we manipulated the perception of visual stimuli by covering all the spider's eyes. Secondly, we changed the optic flow supplied by a black-and-white grating (λ=2 cm) perceived either in the lateral or in the ventral field of view. Finally, the period of the lateral or ventral grating was changed from λ=2 cm to λ=1 cm. Our results indicate that visual information contributes to distance estimation because when the spider's eyes were covered, the spiders tended to search for the burrow at very variable distances. This visual information is created by the motion of the image as the spider walks, the motion in the lateral field of view being the most important. The preference of a lateral optic flow over the ventral flow can be explained by the difference in the resolution capacity of the posterior lateral eyes and the anterior lateral eyes.
Three-dimensional analysis of the distal movement of maxillary 1st molars in patients fitted with mini-implant-aided trans-palatal arches

Objective The aim of this study was to investigate three-dimensional molar displacement after distalization via miniscrews and a horizontal modification of the trans-palatal-arch (TPA). Methods The subjects in this clinical trial were 26 Class II patients. After the preparation of a complete set of diagnostic records, miniscrews were inserted between the maxillary 2nd premolar and 1st molar on the palatal side. Elastic modules connected to the TPA exerting an average force of 150-200 g/side parallel to the occlusal plane were applied. Cone-beam computed tomography was utilized to evaluate the position of the miniscrews relative to the adjacent teeth and maxillary sinus, and the direction of force relative to molar furcation. The distances from the central point of the incisive papilla to the mesiopalatal cusps of the 1st maxillary molars and the distances between the mesiopalatal cusps of the left and right molars were measured to evaluate displacement of the maxillary molars on the horizontal plane. Interocclusal space was used to evaluate vertical changes. Results Mean maxillary 1st molar distalization was 2.3 ± 1.1 mm, at a rate of 0.4 ± 0.2 mm/month, and rotation was not significant. Intermolar width increased by 2.9 ± 1.8 mm. Molars were intruded relative to the neighboring teeth, from 0.1 to 0.8 mm. Conclusions Distalization of molars was possible without extrusion, using the appliance investigated. The intrusive component of force reduced the rate of distal movement.
A Pilot Study of Diversity in High Impact Bugs

Since increasing complexity and scale of modern software products imposes tight scheduling and resource allocations on software development projects, a project manager must carefully triage bugs to determine which bug should be necessarily fixed before shipping. Although in the field of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) there are many promising approaches to predicting, localizing, and triaging bugs, most of them do not consider impacts of each bug on users and developers but rather treat all bugs with equal weighting, excepting a few studies on high impact bugs including security, performance, blocking, and so forth. To make MSR techniques more actionable and effective in practice, we need deeper understandings of high impact bugs. In this paper we report our pilot study on high impact bugs, which classifies bugs reported to four open source projects into six types of high impact bugs.
Fat Intake and CNS Functioning: Ageing and Disease

In 1972, Crawford and Sinclair published evidence that AA and DHA were independent determinants of brain growth and evolution [Crawford and Sinclair 1972; Broadhurst et al., 2002; Enard et al., 2002; Pennisi 2002]. Deficiency studies in rodents [Sinclair and Crawford 1972; Benolken et al., 1973; Galli and Socini, 1983; Weisinger et al., 1999; Catalan et al., 2002], chickens [Budowski et al., 1987], primates [Fiennes et al., 1973; Neuringer et al., 1986], and visual and cognitive trials in human infants [Carlson and Werkman, 1996; Martinez and Vazquez, 1998; Birch et al., 2000] have indicated that both AA and DHA are essential for brain development and function. Moreover, the competition that exists between n–6/n–3 fatty acids applies to their balance being critical for brain development and structural integrity [Budowski and Crawford, 1985]. DHA is essential in vision, brain neurones and cell signalling.
A Spectral Analysis of Function Composition and its Implications for Sampling in Direct Volume Visualization

In this paper we investigate the effects of function composition in the form g(f(x)) = h(x) by means of a spectral analysis of h. We decompose the spectral description of h(x) into a scalar product of the spectral description of g(x) and a term that solely depends on f(x) and that is independent of g(x). We then use the method of stationary phase to derive the essential maximum frequency of g(f(x)) bounding the main portion of the energy of its spectrum. This limit is the product of the maximum frequency of g(x) and the maximum derivative of f(x). This leads to a proper sampling of the composition h of the two functions g and f. We apply our theoretical results to a fundamental open problem in volume rendering - the proper sampling of the rendering integral after the application of a transfer function. In particular, we demonstrate how the sampling criterion can be incorporated in adaptive ray integration, visualization with multi-dimensional transfer functions, and pre-integrated volume rendering
Data assimilation: Mathematical and statistical perspectives

The bulk of this paper contains a concise mathematical overview of the subject of data assimilation, highlighting three primary ideas: (i) the standard optimization approaches of 3DVAR, 4DVAR and weak constraint 4DVAR are described and their interrelations explained; (ii) statistical analogues of these approaches are then introduced, leading to filtering (generalizing 3DVAR) and a form of smoothing (generalizing 4DVAR and weak constraint 4DVAR) and the optimization methods are shown to be maximum a posteriori estimators for the probability distributions implied by these statistical approaches; and (iii) by taking a general dynamical systems perspective on the subject it is shown that the incorporation of Lagrangian data can be handled by a straightforward extension of the preceding concepts.
A Wound Field Switched Flux Machine With Field and Armature Windings Separately Wound in Double Stators

In this paper, a double stator (DS) wound field (WF) switched flux (SF) (DS-WFSF) machine is proposed. In the DS-WFSF machine, field and armature windings are separately placed in two different stators. Compared with the conventional WFSF machine with single stator, in which both field and armature windings are located, nonoverlapping concentrated windings and large slot areas can be obtained in the DS-WFSF machine. The proposed DS-WFSF machine exhibits >19% higher torque than the conventional WFSF machine, with both machines having the same space envelope and being globally optimized. The influence of leading design parameters, such as copper loss ratio between the field and armature windings, air-gap diameter, and rotor iron piece thickness and widths, on the average output torque is investigated for the DS-WFSF machines having 12/10, 12/11, 12/13, and 12/14 stator slots/rotor iron pieces. All the analyses are confirmed by both finite element and experimental results.
Regulation of photoreceptor gene transcription via a highly conserved transcriptional regulatory element by vsx gene products

Purpose The photoreceptor conserved element-1 (PCE-1) sequence is found in the transcriptional regulatory regions of many genes expressed in photoreceptors. The retinal homeobox (Rx or Rax) gene product functions by binding to PCE-1 sites. However, other transcriptional regulators have also been reported to bind to PCE-1. One of these, vsx2, is expressed in retinal progenitor and bipolar cells. The purpose of this study is to identify Xenopus laevis vsx gene products and characterize vsx gene product expression and function with respect to the PCE-1 site. Methods X. laevis vsx gene products were amplified with PCR. Expression patterns were determined with in situ hybridization using whole or sectioned X. laevis embryos and digoxigenin- or fluorescein-labeled antisense riboprobes. DNA binding characteristics of the vsx gene products were analyzed with electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSAs) using in vitro translated proteins and radiolabeled oligonucleotide probes. Gene transactivation assays were performed using luciferase-based reporters and in vitro transcribed effector gene products, injected into X. laevis embryos. Results We identified one vsx1 and two vsx2 gene products. The two vsx2 gene products are generated by alternate mRNA splicing. We verified that these gene products are expressed in the developing retina and that expression resolves into distinct cell types in the mature retina. Finally, we found that vsx gene products can bind the PCE-1 site in vitro and that the two vsx2 isoforms have different gene transactivation activities. Conclusions vsx gene products are expressed in the developing and mature neural retina. vsx gene products can bind the PCE-1 site in vitro and influence the expression of a rhodopsin promoter-luciferase reporter gene. The two isoforms of vsx have different gene transactivation activities in this reporter gene system.
X-ray QSO evolution from a very deep ROSAT survey

Some 32 quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) were identified to a flux limit of 2 x 10(exp -15) erg/sq cm in the deepest optically identified X-ray survey performed to date. This Rosat position sensitive proportional counter survey (PSPC) is spectroscopically 86 percent complete. The surface density of quasars at this flux limit is 210 +/- 37 per sq deg. The QSO X-ray luminosity function was measured at low luminosities and high redshifts, the highest of which was 3.4.
Robot watchfulness hinders learning performance

Educational technological applications, such as computerized learning environments and robot tutors, are often programmed to provide social cues for the purposes of facilitating natural interaction and enhancing productive outcomes. However, there can be potential costs to social interactions that could run counter to such goals. Here, we present an experiment testing the impact of a watchful versus non-watchful robot tutor on children's language-learning effort and performance. Across two interaction sessions, children learned French and Latin rules from a robot tutor and filled in worksheets applying the rules to translate phrases. Results indicate better performance on the worksheets in the session in which the robot looked away from, as compared to the session it looked toward the child, as the child was filling in the worksheets. This was the case in particular for the more difficult worksheet items. These findings highlight the need for careful implementation of social robot behaviors to avoid counterproductive effects.
TASK Channels on Basal Forebrain Cholinergic Neurons Modulate Electrocortical Signatures of Arousal by Histamine

Basal forebrain cholinergic neurons are the main source of cortical acetylcholine, and their activation by histamine elicits cortical arousal. TWIK-like acid-sensitive K+ (TASK) channels modulate neuronal excitability and are expressed on basal forebrain cholinergic neurons, but the role of TASK channels in the histamine-basal forebrain cholinergic arousal circuit is unknown. We first expressed TASK channel subunits and histamine Type 1 receptors in HEK cells. Application of histamine in vitro inhibited the acid-sensitive K+ current, indicating a functionally coupled signaling mechanism. We then studied the role of TASK channels in modulating electrocortical activity in vivo using freely behaving wild-type (n = 12) and ChAT-Cre:TASKf/f mice (n = 12), the latter lacking TASK-1/3 channels on cholinergic neurons. TASK channel deletion on cholinergic neurons significantly altered endogenous electroencephalogram oscillations in multiple frequency bands. We then identified the effect of TASK channel deletion during microperfusion of histamine into the basal forebrain. In non-rapid eye movement sleep, TASK channel deletion on cholinergic neurons significantly attenuated the histamine-induced increase in 30–50 Hz activity, consistent with TASK channels contributing to histamine action on basal forebrain cholinergic neurons. In contrast, during active wakefulness, histamine significantly increased 30–50 Hz activity in ChAT-Cre:TASKf/f mice but not wild-type mice, showing that the histamine response depended upon the prevailing cortical arousal state. In summary, we identify TASK channel modulation in response to histamine receptor activation in vitro, as well as a role of TASK channels on cholinergic neurons in modulating endogenous oscillations in the electroencephalogram and the electrocortical response to histamine at the basal forebrain in vivo. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Attentive states and cognitive function are associated with the generation of γ EEG activity. Basal forebrain cholinergic neurons are important modulators of cortical arousal and γ activity, and in this study we investigated the mechanism by which these neurons are activated by the wake-active neurotransmitter histamine. We found that histamine inhibited a class of K+ leak channels called TASK channels and that deletion of TASK channels selectively on cholinergic neurons modulated baseline EEG activity as well as histamine-induced changes in γ activity. By identifying a discrete brain circuit where TASK channels can influence γ activity, these results represent new knowledge that enhances our understanding of how subcortical arousal systems may contribute to the generation of attentive states.
Parent-Child relations in cross-cultural perspective

This chapter aims to contribute to the discussion about the quality of parent-child relations from a cross-cultural perspective. Kuczynski and the other authors in this volume are critical of the traditional and widely accepted assumption that parent-child relations are characterized by a static, asymmetric power structure and unidirectional causality-that is, that parents influence their children's development, but not vice versa. In contrast, the concept of a bidirectional parentchild relation recognizes the influence, agency, and power of the child. In line with Kuczynski, the present chapter starts with the assumption that parent-child relations are bidirectional in many aspects. In addition, however, it points out that parent-child interactions are embedded in a broader sociocultural context and that they therefore differ in quality, function, and meaning in different cultures. Furthermore, the relation of unidirectionality and bidirectionality may also differ. The present chapter attempts to contribute to an understanding of parent-child relations from a culturally informed perspective in order to avoid ethnocentric theorizing. Parent-child relations have been studied mostly in Western cultures and by researchers who were socialized in the West and who therefore tend to interpret their data from a Western perspective. Furthermore, researchers previously studying parent-child relations have tried to do so in accordance with the experimental paradigm of natural sciences, using the concept of "independent" variables influencing "dependent" variables. These studies have regarded the cultural context as irrelevant or as a source of error variance; the cultural context was even ignored in order to exclude confounding factors . Therefore, one must ask whether the concept of bidirectionality (Kuczynski & Lollis, in press; Kuczynski, Marshall, & Schell, 1997) is universally valid or instead applies only to the contemporary Western world. This question can be answered only by means of cross-cultural studies.
The Blame Game

This paper draws on a qualitative action research investigation of the treatment of Māori with ischaemic heart disease, in the course of which interview data were gathered from individual patients and health care providers. Thematic analysis is used to describe clinicians’ discourses around uptake of medical advice by Māori patients. We contrast these views with the experiences of Māori users of health care to highlight differences in the ways the two groups approach the issues. Clinicians widely described Māori patients as non-compliant in relation to their health. Explanations of non-compliance were diverse, ranging from Māori ignorance and poverty to attributions of wilfulness and self-destructive-ness. The experiences of Māori patients suggest engaged, proactive and mindful health-seeking—at odds with the predominant clinician discourses. The findings are discussed as a factor in the cultural competence of clinicians to work successfully with Māori, with implications for improved practice and better outcomes for Māori.