Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Role of 'Price Value' for Understanding Consumer Adoption of Technology: A Review and Meta-analysis of UTAUT2 based Empirical Studies

Price value is important theoretical addition to the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) as individuals bear monetary cost in using technology in consumer setting. A preliminary review of 650 UTAUT2 citations revealed majority of the studies utilized UTAUT2 in combination with external theories omitting some of original UTAUT2 constructs and rarely included moderators. Only 147 studies utilized at least one UTAUT2 construct in their research model. Thus, the aim of this study is to identify usage of price value construct in UTAUT2 based studies and their reason for inclusion or omission. The findings from 79 UTAUT2 empirical studies revealed only 32 studies (41%) utilized price value while the remaining 47 studies (59%) excluded the construct from their research model. The major reason for exclusion was studies examined technologies such as mobile applications and social networking sites that are available to individuals at free of cost
Cancellous bone and theropod dinosaur locomotion. Part III—Inferring posture and locomotor biomechanics in extinct theropods, and its evolution on the line to birds

This paper is the last of a three-part series that investigates the architecture of cancellous bone in the main hindlimb bones of theropod dinosaurs, and uses cancellous bone architectural patterns to infer locomotor biomechanics in extinct non-avian species. Cancellous bone is highly sensitive to its prevailing mechanical environment, and may therefore help further understanding of locomotor biomechanics in extinct tetrapod vertebrates such as dinosaurs. Here in Part III, the biomechanical modelling approach derived previously was applied to two species of extinct, non-avian theropods, Daspletosaurus torosus and Troodon formosus. Observed cancellous bone architectural patterns were linked with quasi-static, three-dimensional musculoskeletal and finite element models of the hindlimb of both species, and used to derive characteristic postures that best aligned continuum-level principal stresses with cancellous bone fabric. The posture identified for Daspletosaurus was largely upright, with a subvertical femoral orientation, whilst that identified for Troodon was more crouched, but not to the degree observed in extant birds. In addition to providing new insight on posture and limb articulation, this study also tested previous hypotheses of limb bone loading mechanics and muscular control strategies in non-avian theropods, and how these aspects evolved on the line to birds. The results support the hypothesis that an upright femoral posture is correlated with bending-dominant bone loading and abduction-based muscular support of the hip, whereas a crouched femoral posture is correlated with torsion-dominant bone loading and long-axis rotation-based muscular support. Moreover, the results of this study also support the inference that hindlimb posture, bone loading mechanics and muscular support strategies evolved in a gradual fashion along the line to extant birds.
The Roles of Autophagy in Cancer

Autophagy is an intracellular degradative process that occurs under several stressful conditions, including organelle damage, the presence of abnormal proteins, and nutrient deprivation. The mechanism of autophagy initiates the formation of autophagosomes that capture degraded components and then fuse with lysosomes to recycle these components. The modulation of autophagy plays dual roles in tumor suppression and promotion in many cancers. In addition, autophagy regulates the properties of cancer stem-cells by contributing to the maintenance of stemness, the induction of recurrence, and the development of resistance to anticancer reagents. Although some autophagy modulators, such as rapamycin and chloroquine, are used to regulate autophagy in anticancer therapy, since this process also plays roles in both tumor suppression and promotion, the precise mechanism of autophagy in cancer requires further study. In this review, we will summarize the mechanism of autophagy under stressful conditions and its roles in tumor suppression and promotion in cancer and in cancer stem-cells. Furthermore, we discuss how autophagy is a promising potential therapeutic target in cancer treatment.
The Effects of VIIRS Spectral Response Differences between Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 for the Thermal Emissive Bands

The NOAA-20 satellite was successfully launched on November 18,2017 into an afternoon orbit with local equator crossing time ~1: 30pm, in the same orbital plane as that of the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) but with a time separation of half an orbit or ~50 minutes. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard NOAA-20 will become the primary operational imager succeeding the VIIRS onboard Suomi NPP which has been in-orbit for more than six years. Although the VIIRS onboard Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 have identical design, there are small differences in the relative spectral response (RSR) in most bands. Previous studies have shown that minor differences in RSR can lead to a number of effects at detector level, such as striping. This study investigates the VIIRS RSR differences between Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 for the Thermal Emissive Bands (TEB) including M12-M16. The Line-By-Line radiative transfer model (LBLRTM) is used at very high spectral resolution for convolving with the RSR of VIIRS on both satellites. The impact of RSR difference between Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 are evaluated for radiometric biases and potential striping in TEB. This study will contribute to the measurement consistency for the long term observations in the thermal infrared bands, and ensure the quality of the data produced by VIIRS, such as sea surface temperature (SST), fire and other retrievals.
Forging new worlds: high-resolution synthetic galaxies with chained generative adversarial networks

Astronomy of the 21st century increasingly finds itself with extreme quantities of data. This growth in data is ripe for modern technologies such as deep image processing, which has the potential to allow astronomers to automatically identify, classify, segment and deblend various astronomical objects. In this paper, we explore the use of chained generative adversarial networks (GANs), a class of generative models that learn mappings from latent spaces to data distributions by modelling the joint distribution of the data, to produce physically realistic galaxy images as one use case of such models. In cosmology, such datasets can aid in the calibration of shape measurements for weak lensing by augmenting data with synthetic images. By measuring the distributions of multiple physical properties, we show that images generated with our approach closely follow the distributions of real galaxies, further establishing state-of-the-art GAN architectures as a valuable tool for modern-day astronomy.
Towards a Near Universal Time Series Data Mining Tool: Introducing the Matrix Profile

Author(s): Yeh, Michael Chin-Chia | Advisor(s): Keogh, Eamonn | Abstract: The last decade has seen a flurry of research on all-pairs-similarity-search (or, self-join) for text, DNA, and a handful of other datatypes, and these systems have been applied to many diverse data mining problems. Surprisingly, however, little progress has been made on addressing this problem for time series subsequences. In this thesis, we have introduced a near universal time series data mining tool called matrix profile which solves the all-pairs-similarity-search problem and caches the output in an easy-to-access fashion. The proposed algorithm is not only parameter-free, exact and scalable, but also applicable for both single and multidimensional time series. By building time series data mining methods on top of matrix profile, many time series data mining tasks (e.g., motif discovery, discord discovery, shapelet discovery, semantic segmentation, and clustering) can be efficiently solved. Because the same matrix profile can be shared by a diverse set of time series data mining methods, matrix profile is versatile and computed-once-use-many-times data structure. We demonstrate the utility of matrix profile for many time series data mining problems, including motif discovery, discord discovery, weakly labeled time series classification, and representation learning on domains as diverse as seismology, entomology, music processing, bioinformatics, human activity monitoring, electrical power-demand monitoring, and medicine. We hope the matrix profile is not the end but the beginning of many more time series data mining projects.
Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens: Making psychological science more representative of the human population

Two primary goals of psychological science should be to understand what aspects of human psychology are universal and the way that context and culture produce variability. This requires that we take into account the importance of culture and context in the way that we write our papers and in the types of populations that we sample. However, most research published in our leading journals has relied on sampling WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. One might expect that our scholarly work and editorial choices would by now reflect the knowledge that Western populations may not be representative of humans generally with respect to any given psychological phenomenon. However, as we show here, almost all research published by one of our leading journals, Psychological Science, relies on Western samples and uses these data in an unreflective way to make inferences about humans in general. To take us forward, we offer a set of concrete proposals for authors, journal editors, and reviewers that may lead to a psychological science that is more representative of the human condition.
Neural Rendering Model: Joint Generation and Prediction for Semi-Supervised Learning

Unsupervised and semi-supervised learning are important problems that are especially challenging with complex data like natural images. Progress on these problems would accelerate if we had access to appropriate generative models under which to pose the associated inference tasks. Inspired by the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for supervised prediction in images, we design the Neural Rendering Model (NRM), a new probabilistic generative model whose inference calculations correspond to those in a given CNN architecture. The NRM uses the given CNN to design the prior distribution in the probabilistic model. Furthermore, the NRM generates images from coarse to finer scales. It introduces a small set of latent variables at each level, and enforces dependencies among all the latent variables via a conjugate prior distribution. This conjugate prior yields a new regularizer based on paths rendered in the generative model for training CNNs-the Rendering Path Normalization (RPN). We demonstrate that this regularizer improves generalization, both in theory and in practice. In addition, likelihood estimation in the NRM yields training losses for CNNs, and inspired by this, we design a new loss termed as the Max-Min cross entropy which outperforms the traditional cross-entropy loss for object classification. The Max-Min cross entropy suggests a new deep network architecture, namely the Max-Min network, which can learn from less labeled data while maintaining good prediction performance. Our experiments demonstrate that the NRM with the RPN and the Max-Min architecture exceeds or matches the-state-of-art on benchmarks including SVHN, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100 for semi-supervised and supervised learning tasks.
How Fast are Fast Scatterers Associated with Breaking Wind Waves?

Ka-band Radar Doppler velocity is compared to the optical velocity of deep water breaking wind waves observed in field conditions from a stationary oceanographic platform. One typical record is analyzed: wind speed is 11 m/s, dominant wave frequency is 0.24 Hz, radar incidence angle is 53°, and radar-to-wind azimuth is upwind. This 30 minute record includes 42 breaking wave events. The Doppler velocity is estimated as the first moment of instantaneous Doppler spectrum. The optical velocity of breakers is measured using spatially collocated and temporally synchronized video records of the radar footprint. As found the Doppler velocity of breakers is remarkably slower (by a factor of 4) than the “optical” velocity of whitecaps. This suggests that whitecaps (translated with phase velocities of breaking waves) represent a moving source of the enhanced surface roughness providing radar returns. Since this roughness is “embedded” into the water, its Doppler velocity is much smaller than the phase velocity.
Warm Season Snow/Ice Probability Maps from MODIS and VIIRS Sensors over Canada

The development of snow and ice probability maps at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) from the MODIS and VIIRS sensors is described. Time series are generated for each warm season (April-September) since 2000 at 250m spatial resolution over the Northern latitudes that cover Canada and neighboring regions. These data are valuable for characterization of fresh water resources, such as snow and land ice, which are very sensitive to climate variations. Comparison of CCRS data against several land cover schemes revealed large discrepancies in the permanent snow/ice extent that can reach nearly 200% over the Canadian Arctic region. CCRS results are very consistent with the Randolph Glacier Inventory (RGI) and can be used for the RGI validation and updates. Data are publicly available from the Canadian Federal Geospatial Platform (FGP) data archive.
Fatty Acid Composition in Various Types of Cardiac Adipose Tissues and Its Relation to the Fatty Acid Content of Atrial Tissue

Diet, with its content of various types of fatty acids (FAs), is of great importance for cellular function. Adipose tissue (AT) serves as a storage for dietary FAs, but after appropriate activation it may also offer important biological properties, e.g., by releasing adipokines and cytokines to the surrounding milieu. Such effects may depend on the diet and type of FA involved. Similarly, the composition of FAs in the heart is also likely to be important for cardiac function. We investigated samples of epicardial adipose tissue (EAT), pericardial adipose tissue (PAT), subcutaneous adipose tissue (SCAT), and tissue from the right atrial appendage to compare the FA compositions in patients undergoing elective cardiac surgery. Minor differences among AT compartments were found, while the comparison of atrial tissue and EAT showed major differences in saturated fatty acids (SFAs), monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs), and n-3 and n-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). These findings may be of importance for understanding biological availability, dietary effects, and the effects of FAs on the heart.
InterPro in 2019: improving coverage, classification and access to protein sequence annotations

Abstract The InterPro database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/) classifies protein sequences into families and predicts the presence of functionally important domains and sites. Here, we report recent developments with InterPro (version 70.0) and its associated software, including an 18% growth in the size of the database in terms on new InterPro entries, updates to content, the inclusion of an additional entry type, refined modelling of discontinuous domains, and the development of a new programmatic interface and website. These developments extend and enrich the information provided by InterPro, and provide greater flexibility in terms of data access. We also show that InterPro's sequence coverage has kept pace with the growth of UniProtKB, and discuss how our evaluation of residue coverage may help guide future curation activities.
Simultaneous estimation of rewards and dynamics from noisy expert demonstrations

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from demonstrations of an expert. Current approaches typically require the system dynamics to be known or additional demonstrations of state transitions to be available to solve the inverse problem accurately. If these assumptions are not satisﬁed, heuristics can be used to compensate the lack of a model of the system dynamics. However, heuristics can add bias to the solution. To overcome this, we present a gradient-based approach, which simultaneously estimates rewards, dynamics, and the pa-rameterizable stochastic policy of an expert from demonstrations, while the stochastic policy is a function of optimal Q-values.
Macrophages enhance Vegfa-driven angiogenesis in an embryonic zebrafish tumour xenograft model

ABSTRACT Tumour angiogenesis has long been a focus of anti-cancer therapy; however, anti-angiogenic cancer treatment strategies have had limited clinical success. Tumour-associated myeloid cells are believed to play a role in the resistance of cancer towards anti-angiogenesis therapy, but the mechanisms by which they do this are unclear. An embryonic zebrafish xenograft model has been developed to investigate the mechanisms of tumour angiogenesis and as an assay to screen anti-angiogenic compounds. In this study, we used cell ablation techniques to remove either macrophages or neutrophils and assessed their contribution towards zebrafish xenograft angiogenesis by quantitating levels of graft vascularisation. The ablation of macrophages, but not neutrophils, caused a strong reduction in tumour xenograft vascularisation and time-lapse imaging demonstrated that tumour xenograft macrophages directly associated with the migrating tip of developing tumour blood vessels. Finally, we found that, although macrophages are required for vascularisation in xenografts that either secrete VEGFA or overexpress zebrafish vegfaa, they are not required for the vascularisation of grafts with low levels of VEGFA, suggesting that zebrafish macrophages can enhance Vegfa-driven tumour angiogenesis. The importance of macrophages to this angiogenic response suggests that this model could be used to further investigate the interplay between myeloid cells and tumour vascularisation. Summary: Zebrafish embryonic macrophages associate with the distal tips of tumour xenograft blood vessels and are required for Vegfa-driven angiogenesis.
Roles of metacognition and achievement goals in mathematical modeling competency: A structural equation modeling analysis

This study investigates the relationship between metacognition and achievement goals which may influence mathematical modeling competency in students of mathematics education programs. The current study employs 538 students of mathematics education program; 483 (89.8%) of whom are male and 55 (10.2%) are aged from 18 years old to 22 years old. The study follows a correlational research design to investigate and measure the degree of relationship amongst mathematical modeling competencies, achievement goals and metacognition. Results indicate that achievement goals and metacognition positively influence mathematical modeling competency. Moreover, four metacognition dimensions including awareness, planning, cognitive strategy and self-checking are positive partial mediators because they increase the association between achievement goals and mathematical modeling competency. In conclusion, metacognition and achievement goals positively affect students’ mathematical modeling competency.
The Initiation of Rehabilitation Therapies and Observed Outcomes in Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury

Purpose Pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) is associated with immense physical, emotional, social, and economic burden. This study examined timing and frequency of rehabilitation services provided by the inpatient interdisciplinary team in children admitted for a TBI. Understanding the timing and frequency of rehabilitation services could guide TBI recovery. Design and Methods This is a 3-year prospective observational study of previously healthy children (n = 35) admitted for a TBI to an urban Level 1 trauma hospital. Children with mild, moderate, and severe TBI were included. Initiation and frequency of the interdisciplinary rehabilitation team’s care and neurocognitive-functional outcomes were analyzed. Outcome measures included the Glasgow Outcome Scale-Extended Pediatrics and the Speech Pathology Neurocognitive-Functional Evaluation at hospital discharge and first follow-up visit. Results The initiation and the frequency of rehabilitation services were found in all severities of TBI. Timing and frequency of services also aligned with varied severities. Children with moderate TBI showed the most improvement in Glasgow Outcome Scale-Extended Pediatrics and the Speech Pathology Neurocognitive-Functional Evaluation on their first follow-up visit, whereas children with mild and severe TBI demonstrated little change in outcome at their first follow-up visit and had varied services based on their hospital course. Conclusion Services by interdisciplinary rehabilitation teams were provided across all brain injury severity groups, despite the lack of comprehensive rehabilitation guidelines. Varied neurocognitive and functional outcome changes measured found children with moderate TBI had the greatest change in outcomes. Further research is warranted to assess the timing and frequency of services and their relationship to neurocognitive-functional outcomes.
Influência da temperatura de secagem sobre as propriedades físicas dos grãos de soja.

Objetivou-se com o presente trabalho avaliar o efeito da temperatura de secagem sobre algumas propriedades fisicas de graos de soja. Para avaliar o efeito da temperatura, amostras de graos de soja com teor inicial de agua de 0,244 (b.s.) foram secadas numa estufa com circulacao forcada de ar nas temperaturas de 40, 50, 60, 70 e 80 °C ate o teor final de agua de 0,136 (b.s.), sendo entao determinadas as propriedades fisicas: ângulo de repouso, massa especifica aparente, massa especifica unitaria, massa de mil graos, cor e condutividade eletrica da solucao dos exsudatos dos graos. Notouse que, a excecao da porosidade, a temperatura do ar de secagem influenciou significativamente as propriedades fisicas de graos de soja, proporcionando aumento do ângulo de repouso e da condutividade eletrica da solucao dos exsudatos. As massas especificas aparente e unitaria, massa de mil graos e a cor caracteristica dos graos de soja diminuiram com o aumento da temperatura do ar empregado na secagem. Concluiu-se que o aumento da temperatura do ar de secagem diminuiu a qualidade dos graos de soja analisados.
Determination of Metals Content in Wine Samples by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry

Knowledge about the metal content of wine is very important, for many reasons. Depending on the element, its quantity varies in wine from ng/L to mg/L. Despite the fact that metals are not directly connected to the taste and aroma of the wine, their content should be determined and controlled, because excess is undesirable, and in some cases prohibited, due to potential toxicity. Several analytical procedures for metal determination are applied. However, due to sensitivity, low limit of detection and speed of analysis, inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) is one of the most frequently used techniques. The aim of this study was to reveal specific relationships between the wine samples or between the chemical variables in order to classify the wines according to their metal content by application of chemometric analysis. For metals content determination, two techniques, ICP-MS and inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), were applied. Data obtained showed that none of the wine samples surpassed the toxic levels reported for metals in the literature, thus, these wines appeared to be safe as regards the risk associated with the potentially toxic metals intake. However, specific correlations between metals and specific aspects of the wines themselves have been found.