Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Energy Preserved Sampling for Compressed Sensing MRI

The sampling patterns, cost functions, and reconstruction algorithms play important roles in optimizing compressed sensing magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI). Simple random sampling patterns did not take into account the energy distribution in k-space and resulted in suboptimal reconstruction of MR images. Therefore, a variety of variable density (VD) based samplings patterns had been developed. To further improve it, we propose a novel energy preserving sampling (ePRESS) method. Besides, we improve the cost function by introducing phase correction and region of support matrix, and we propose iterative thresholding algorithm (ITA) to solve the improved cost function. We evaluate the proposed ePRESS sampling method, improved cost function, and ITA reconstruction algorithm by 2D digital phantom and 2D in vivo MR brains of healthy volunteers. These assessments demonstrate that the proposed ePRESS method performs better than VD, POWER, and BKO; the improved cost function can achieve better reconstruction quality than conventional cost function; and the ITA is faster than SISTA and is competitive with FISTA in terms of computation time.
The Use of Metaphors in the Processes of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Due to growing concern about the quality of learning, higher education institutions are looking at their academic achievements and developing initiatives related to research into their teaching activities. The main aim of this article is to contribute to broader knowledge about pedagogical issues in higher education regarding reasoning structure used in the classroom. On a more objective level, the article focuses on the importance of analogical reasoning and the specific use of metaphors as vehicles for learning. It is a case study focused on the use of metaphors in a particular course, which seeks to research the mode and effectiveness of using metaphors as interpretive and explanatory models of scientific phenomena in the processes of teaching and learning. Research shows that the two main uses of metaphors served educational purposes and produced foundational knowledge. Additionally, the use of metaphors was an opportunity to promote teacher awareness of his/her own teaching.
Vagal Nerve Stimulation Therapy: What Is Being Stimulated?

Vagal nerve stimulation in cardiac therapy involves delivering electrical current to the vagal sympathetic complex in patients experiencing heart failure. The therapy has shown promise but the mechanisms by which any benefit accrues is not understood. In this paper we model the response to increased levels of stimulation of individual components of the vagal sympathetic complex as a differential activation of each component in the control of heart rate. The model provides insight beyond what is available in the animal experiment in as much as allowing the simultaneous assessment of neuronal activity throughout the cardiac neural axis. The results indicate that there is sensitivity of the neural network to low level subthreshold stimulation. This leads us to propose that the chronic effects of vagal nerve stimulation therapy lie within the indirect pathways that target intrinsic cardiac local circuit neurons because they have the capacity for plasticity.
VPPIPP and IPPVPP: Two Hexapeptides Innovated to Exert Antihypertensive Activity

In this study, two hexapeptides of IPPVPP and VPPIPP were innovated by using two commercial antihypertensive peptides IPP and VPP as two domains cis-linked and trans-linked, respectively. The IPPVPP and VPPIPP were chemically synthesized and evaluated for the antihypertensive activity in vitro/vivo. The in vitro ACE-inhibitory study showed that VPPIPP (34.71±4.38%) has a significantly stronger activity than that of IPPVPP (13.17±0.25%) at a treatment concentration of 10 µmol/L, but it was weaker than the commercial IPP (56.97±2.40%) (P<0.05). However, VPPIPP, IPPVPP, and IPP lowered the systolic blood pressure by 21±0.9%, 17.4±1.3% and 17.5±0.9%, respectively, in rats at 1.5 mg/kg body weight dosage. The result was consistent with the mRNA level of sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+, Mg2+ -ATPase Gene (SERCA 2a) in rat hearts. Additionally, VPPIPP and IPPVPP showed no negative impact on blood glycometabolism. The results suggested that the two hexapeptides could be potent bioactive peptides in functional foods for people with high blood pressure.
Forensic DNA phenotyping in Europe: views “on the ground” from those who have a professional stake in the technology

Forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP) is an emerging technology that seeks to make probabilistic inferences regarding a person’s observable characteristics (“phenotype”) from DNA. The aim is to aid criminal investigations by helping to identify unknown suspected perpetrators, or to help with non-criminal missing persons cases. Here we provide results from the analysis of 36 interviews with those who have a professional stake in FDP, including forensic scientists, police officers, lawyers, government agencies and social scientists. Located in eight EU countries, these individuals were asked for their views on the benefits and problems associated with the prospective use of FDP. While all interviewees distinguished between those phenotypic tests perceived to either raise ethical, social or political concerns from those tests viewed as less ethically and socially problematic, there was wide variation regarding the criteria they used to make this distinction. We discuss the implications of this in terms of responsible technology development.
Mathematical Classroom Discussion as an Equitable Practice: Effects on Elementary English Learners’ Performance

ABSTRACT This mixed-method study examines the relationship between classroom discussion and student performance in twenty 3rd and 4th grade classrooms in northern California with 50% English language learners (ELLs). Discussions were scored on features including use of multiple approaches for solving problems, students’ opportunities to speak, equitable participation, explanations, and connections between ideas. A linguistically-modified math assessment measured student performance. Quantitative analysis using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) showed that the discussion features variety of approaches and equitable participation significantly contributed to the explanation of between-class variation in assessment scores, above and beyond that explained by prior mathematics performance and English proficiency. Importantly, mathematical discussion was equally beneficial for students classified as ELLs and those not classified as ELLs. Two classroom vignettes illustrate the different features of discussion and offer insight into ways ELLs contributed to the discussion in different contexts.
GABAergic interneurons targeting dendrites of pyramidal cells in the CA1 area of the hippocampus

The dendrites of pyramidal cells are active compartments capable of independent computations, input/output transformation and synaptic plasticity. Pyramidal cells in the CA1 area of the hippocampus receive 92% of their GABAergic input onto dendrites. How does this GABAergic input participate in dendritic computations of pyramidal cells? One key to understanding their contribution to dendritic computation lies in the timing of GABAergic input in relation to excitatory transmission, back‐propagating action potentials, Ca2+ spikes and subthreshold membrane dynamics. The issue is further complicated by the fact that dendritic GABAergic inputs originate from numerous distinct sources operating with different molecular machineries and innervating different subcellular domains of pyramidal cell dendrites. The GABAergic input from distinct sources is likely to contribute differentially to dendritic computations. In this review, I describe four groups of GABAergic interneuron according to their expression of parvalbumin, cholecystokinin, axonal arborization density and long‐range projections. These four interneuron groups contain at least 12 distinct cell types, which innervate mainly or exclusively the dendrites of CA1 pyramidal cells. Furthermore, I summarize the different spike timing of distinct interneuron types during gamma, theta and ripple oscillations in vivo, and I discuss some of the open questions on how GABAergic input modulates dendritic operations in CA1 pyramidal cells.
Effects of Reforestation of a Degraded Imperata Grassland on Dominant Flow Pathways and Streamflow Responses in Leyte, the Philippines

Reforestation of degraded grasslands can increase the soil hydraulic conductivity and number of preferential flow pathways. However, it is not clear to what extent these changes affect streamflow responses and whether this depends on the event size. We, therefore, studied the hydrological response of two small catchments near Tacloban, Leyte (the Philippines): a degraded Imperata grassland catchment and a catchment that was reforested 23 years prior to our study. Precipitation, stream stage, and electrical conductivity were measured continuously from June to November 2013. Samples were taken from streamflow, precipitation, groundwater, and soil water for geochemical and stable isotope analyses. Streamflow and electrical conductivity changed rapidly during almost every event in the grassland catchment, but in the reforested catchment, these responses were much smaller and only occurred during large events. Streamflow was a mixture of groundwater and precipitation for both catchments, but the maximum event water contributions to streamflow were much larger for the degraded grassland than for the reforested catchment. The differences in the event water contributions and timing of the streamflow responses were observed across all event sizes, including a large tropical storm. Together with the low saturated hydraulic conductivity in the degraded catchment, these results suggest that overland flow occurred more frequently and was much more widespread in the degraded grassland than in the reforested catchment. We, therefore, conclude that reforestation of a degraded grassland can change the dominant flow pathways and restore the hydrological functioning if the forest soil is allowed to develop over a sufficiently long period.
Mechanical conversion of low-affinity Integration Host Factor binding sites into high-affinity sites

Although DNA is often bent in vivo, it is unclear how DNA-bending forces modulate DNA-protein binding affinity. Here, we report how a range of DNA-bending forces modulates the binding of the Integration Host Factor (IHF) protein to various DNAs. Using solution fluorimetry and electrophoretic mobility shift assays, we measured the affinity of IHF for DNAs with different bending forces and sequence mutations. Bending force was adjusted by varying the fraction of double-stranded DNA in a circular substrate, or by changing the overall size of the circle (1). DNA constructs contained a pair of Forster Resonance Energy Transfer dyes that served as probes for affinity assays, and read out bending forces measured by optical force sensors (2). Small bending forces significantly increased binding affinity; this effect saturated beyond ~3 pN. Surprisingly, when DNA sequences that bound IHF only weakly were mechanically bent by circularization, they bound IHF more tightly than the linear "high-affinity" binding sequence. These findings demonstrate that small bending forces can greatly augment binding at sites that deviate from a protein's consensus binding sequence. Since cellular DNA is subject to mechanical deformation and condensation, affinities of architectural proteins determined in vitro using short linear DNAs may not reflect in vivo affinities.
Average level crossing rates and average fade durations for maximal-ratio combining in correlated Nakagami channels

For uncorrelated Nakagami channels in wireless systems, the level crossing rates (LCKs) and average fade durations (AFDs) of maximum ratio combining have been derived. However, this assumption is usually violated in the real world. In this paper, we derive the LCRs and AFDs for correlated Nakagami channels, which have not been addressed in the literature. Simulation results demonstrate that the LCRs and AFDs of the correlation signals are larger than those of the uncorrelated signals at lower levels. Furthermore, the effects of fading severity of the channel and the number of diversity branches on the LCRs and AFDs are also studied.
Transforming E-Business Practices and Applications Emerging Technologies and Concepts

This study examines the driving forces of customer loyally in the broadband market in Hong Kong. The authors developed and empirically tested a model to examine the antecedents of customer loyalty towards Internet service providers (ISPs) in Hong Kong. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to evaluate the proposed model. A total of 737 valid returns were obtained through a questionnaire survey. The results show that customer satisfaction, switching cost, and price perception are antecedents that lead directly to customer loyalty, with customer satisfaction exerting the greatest influence. Although research found that service quality significantly influences customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to customer loyalty, a direct relationship between service quality and customer loyalty was not found. Results also reveal that corporate image is not related to customer loyalty. This empirical investigation suggests that investing huge resources in building corporate image can indeed be a risky strategy for ISPs.
Long-Range Temporal Correlations and Scaling Behavior in Human Brain Oscillations

The human brain spontaneously generates neural oscillations with a large variability in frequency, amplitude, duration, and recurrence. Little, however, is known about the long-term spatiotemporal structure of the complex patterns of ongoing activity. A central unresolved issue is whether fluctuations in oscillatory activity reflect a memory of the dynamics of the system for more than a few seconds. We investigated the temporal correlations of network oscillations in the normal human brain at time scales ranging from a few seconds to several minutes. Ongoing activity during eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions was recorded with simultaneous magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography. Here we show that amplitude fluctuations of 10 and 20 Hz oscillations are correlated over thousands of oscillation cycles. Our analyses also indicated that these amplitude fluctuations obey power-law scaling behavior. The scaling exponents were highly invariant across subjects. We propose that the large variability, the long-range correlations, and the power-law scaling behavior of spontaneous oscillations find a unifying explanation within the theory of self-organized criticality, which offers a general mechanism for the emergence of correlations and complex dynamics in stochastic multiunit systems. The demonstrated scaling laws pose novel quantitative constraints on computational models of network oscillations. We argue that critical-state dynamics of spontaneous oscillations may lend neural networks capable of quick reorganization during processing demands.
New perspectives on spoken language understanding: Does machine need to fully understand speech?

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) has been traditionally formulated to extract meanings or concepts of user utterances in the context of human-machine dialogue. With the broadened coverage of spoken language processing, the tasks and methodologies of SLU have been changed accordingly. The back-end of spoken dialogue systems now consist of not only relational databases (RDB) but also general documents, incorporating information retrieval (IR) and question-answering (QA) techniques. This paradigm shift and the author's approaches are reviewed. SLU is also being designed to cover human-human dialogues and multi-party conversations. Major approaches to “understand” human-human speech communication and a new approach based on the lister's reactions are reviewed. As a whole, these trends are apparently not oriented for full understanding of spoken language, but for robust extraction of clue information.
RETAIN early career teacher retention programme: evaluating the role of research informed continuing professional development for a high quality, sustainable 21st century teaching profession

ABSTRACT Teacher recruitment and retention is an international challenge. In England the government have reported that more teachers leave before retirement age than five years ago, 30% within five years and schools are finding it difficult to fill posts with quality teachers . This paper evaluates the contribution of the research-informed RETAIN Early Career Teacher (ECT) Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Programme for developing and retaining quality teachers. RETAIN was a yearlong CPD pilot for Early Career Teachers (ECTs) in primary schools in Cornwall, UK (a region with high levels of socio-economic disadvantage). The programme design was informed by research and based on factors shown to support the retention of ECTs. It was contextualised using the precept that teachers should be active researchers, influencing curriculum development as ‘reflective practitioners’, focussed with a Professional Learning Community lens and theorised within a social constructivist frame. In addition, RETAIN utilised robust evidence-informed practice approaches to support teacher development in schools with persistently disadvantaged pupils. The programme was independently evaluated using multiple-methods over the course of the programme to generate data. The theory-based evaluation suggests that the contribution of this intervention to the field is the specific combination of development; taught workshops, coaching and collaborative professional learning, which improved the self-efficacy, confidence and quality of teaching of ECTs in differing but complementary ways. All ECTs who completed the programme have been retained in teaching and all have achieved a leadership role in their school. We argue that these outcomes are of international significance and the promise of the programme can be utilised for developing and retaining high quality teachers in other countries.
SPOC: A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Opportunistic Computing Framework for Mobile-Healthcare Emergency

With the pervasiveness of smart phones and the advance of wireless body sensor networks (BSNs), mobile Healthcare (m-Healthcare), which extends the operation of Healthcare provider into a pervasive environment for better health monitoring, has attracted considerable interest recently. However, the flourish of m-Healthcare still faces many challenges including information security and privacy preservation. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving opportunistic computing framework, called SPOC, for m-Healthcare emergency. With SPOC, smart phone resources including computing power and energy can be opportunistically gathered to process the computing-intensive personal health information (PHI) during m-Healthcare emergency with minimal privacy disclosure. In specific, to leverage the PHI privacy disclosure and the high reliability of PHI process and transmission in m-Healthcare emergency, we introduce an efficient user-centric privacy access control in SPOC framework, which is based on an attribute-based access control and a new privacy-preserving scalar product computation (PPSPC) technique, and allows a medical user to decide who can participate in the opportunistic computing to assist in processing his overwhelming PHI data. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed SPOC framework can efficiently achieve user-centric privacy access control in m-Healthcare emergency. In addition, performance evaluations via extensive simulations demonstrate the SPOC's effectiveness in term of providing high-reliable-PHI process and transmission while minimizing the privacy disclosure during m-Healthcare emergency.
Health and demographic characteristics of respondents in an Australian national sexuality survey: comparison with population norms

Study objective: To assess the representativeness of survey participants by systematically comparing volunteers in a national health and sexuality survey with the Australian population in terms of self reported health status (including the SF-36) and a wide range of demographic characteristics. Design: A cross sectional sample of Australian residents were compared with demographic data from the 1996 Australian census and health data from the 1995 National Health Survey. Setting: The Australian population. Participants: A stratified random sample of adults aged 18–59 years drawn from the Australian electoral roll, a compulsory register of voters. Interviews were completed with 1784 people, representing 40% of those initially selected (58% of those for whom a valid telephone number could be located). Main results: Participants were of similar age and sex to the national population. Consistent with prior research, respondents had higher socioeconomic status, more education, were more likely to be employed, and less likely to be immigrants. The prevalence estimates, means, and variances of self reported mental and physical health measures (for example, SF-36 subscales, women’s health indicators, current smoking status) were similar to population norms. Conclusions: These findings considerably strengthen inferences about the representativeness of data on health status from volunteer samples used in health and sexuality surveys.
Rethinking edge effects: the unaccounted role of geometric constraints

Edge effects strongly affect the abundance and distribution of organisms across landscapes, with wide-ranging implications in ecology and conservation biology. The extensive literature on the subject has traditionally considered that edge effects result from the active avoidance or preference of organisms for certain portions of the habitat patch, assuming that abundance is uniform across a patch when environmental conditions are uniform. We demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect due to the so-far ignored ‘geometric edge effect’ (GEE). In the absence of environmental gradients, abundance of any organism living in a bounded habitat patch will tend to be lower in areas located near the edges compared to areas in the centre of the patch, simply because the areas in the centre receive individuals from all directions, whereas areas near the edge do not receive individuals from outside the patch. This geometric effect was already known for species richness at large geographic scales, the mid-domain effect, but its importance in the literature of edge effects remained neglected so far. Using simulations, we show that the GEE tends to reduce population abundance and community richness near the edges of bounded habitat patches, and that apparently neutral or negative responses to the edge may occur even when habitat quality is higher near the edges. A published study that detected significant edge effects is reanalyzed, demonstrating that interpreting observed abundance patterns without taking the GEE into account – as traditionally done in the vast literature on edge effects – could provide misleading conclusions. The incorporation of the GEE into sampling and analytical protocols of future studies could advance substantially our ability to understand and predict edge effects in heterogeneous landscapes.