Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of telephone versus face-to-face interview modes on reports of alcohol consumption.

AIMS AND DESIGN In order to assess the effects of survey modality on alcohol consumption estimates, data from two surveys using different interview modes (face-to-face and telephone) were compared on several alcohol measures. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Face-to-face survey data were drawn from the 1990 National Alcohol Survey, while the telephone data came from the 1990 Warning Labels Survey. Both surveys used a probability sampling of the US adult general population in the 48 contiguous states. MEASUREMENTS Measures of alcohol use derived from an identical "graduated frequencies" series included estimates of any drinking in the past 12 months, overall volume, and heavy (5+) drinking days. FINDINGS Abstention rates did not differ by survey mode, nor did distributions of alcohol consumption by volume and reported frequency of drinking five or more drinks in a day. Multiple regression models including demographic-mode interaction terms were used to examine how mode effects might differ across demographic subgroups. Lower income respondents were under-represented in the telephone sample, and were associated with lower reports of volume and 5+ days, compared to respondents in the face-to-face mode. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that although there are few differences in alcohol consumption estimates by interview mode, telephone samples may need to be supplemented or estimates adjusted by income level in order to attain equivalent results.
Implementing Tutoring Feedback into a Clinical Reasoning Learning Simulator

TeachMed is a patient simulator for clinical reasoning learning (CRL). It allows students to evaluate a simulated patient, in a one-on-one problem-based learning mode, by iteratively collecting evidences and formulating hypotheses until converging to one or two final hypotheses, that is, the most probable diagnosis. Evidences are collected by asking questions to the patient, performing a physical exam and ordering labs. In this paper we discuss our ongoing work for modeling tutoring feedback into TeachMed by using Bayesian networks. The student’s actions (e.g., evidence collections and hypothesis formulations) are monitored to provide tutoring feedback based on the quality of these actions with respect to a Bayesian network modeling expert clinical knowledge for the patient case.
Performance evaluation of intel's quad core processors for embedded applications

Recently, multiprocessing is implemented using either chip multiprocessing (CMP) or Simultaneous multithreading (SMT). Multi-core processors, represent CMP processors, are widely used in desktop and server applications and are now appearing in real-time embedded applications. We are investigating optimal configurations of some of the available multi-core processors suitable for developing real-time software for a multithreaded application used for pavement performance measurements. For the application discussed in this paper we are considering the use of either the Intel core 2 quad or the core i7 (a quad core processor with hyper threading (HT) technology. ) Processor performance is a major requirement in this set of real-time, computational intensive embedded applications. The performance of both processors is measured and evaluated using single and multithreaded workloads supplied by different benchmark suites. As for the core i7 processor we also provide an evaluation for the HT technology implemented in each core of this processor.
Heart Rhythm Coherence - An Emerging Area of Biofeedback

The analysis of heart rate vari- ability (HRV), or heart rhythms, provides a reliable measure of autonomic nervous system dynamics that is particularly sensitive to changes in psychophysiological state. Whereas common methods of HRV analysis typically quantify the amount of variability in a given recording, additional information can be gained by heart rhythm pattern analysis. Research has shown that sustained positive emotions lead to a highly efficient and regen- erative functional mode associated with increased coherence in heart rhythm patterns and greater synchronization and harmony among physiological systems. A new develop- ment in biofeedback technology is the recent introduction of heart rhythm feedback train- ers, which monitor heart rhythm patterns and help people develop skills to maintain states of increased physiological coherence. The use of pulse wave sensors makes this technology extremely versatile, time-efficient, and easy to use in a wide variety of settings. Heart rhythm feedback trainers are currently utilized in medical, mental health, corporate, and aca- demic settings to improve clinical, psychologi- cal, and performance outcomes. This technology holds promise as a powerful and practical tool for the enhancement of health and human potential.
A panorama-based method of personal positioning and orientation and its real-time applications for wearable computers

In this paper, we describe an improved method of personal positioning and orientation using image registration between input video frames and panoramic images captured beforehand. In our previous work, we proposed the method of image registration with an affine transform. However, the affine transform is generally not capable of image registration between a frame and a panorama. We improved the previous method so that it can estimate projective transform parameters without severely increasing computational cost. We also improved the method to be robust with respect to lighting changes by using the weighted sum of absolute difference of both brightness and its gradient between images. We confirmed that this improved method could estimate image registration parameters under conditions that hindered the previous method. Its computational cost increased by only 10-20% and its software implementation was capable of real-time processing.
“A Foundation for Something Bigger”

This longitudinal, qualitative study explores developmental English students’ experience of remediation in the context of a first-semester learning community (LC). Conducted at an urban community college in the Northeast, data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted over a 3-year period with a cohort of 15 students who were placed into a first-semester LC that linked the lowest level of developmental English with Introduction to Psychology and a student development course. Findings shed light on students’ changing perceptions of their placement in remedial English, their insights into LC participation, and reveal implications for community college research and practice. Developmental students’ experiences, voices, and perspectives are the focus of this study and are analyzed in the context of the highly contentious debate over college remediation.
SSSim: a Simple and Scalable Simulator for P2P Streaming Systems

This paper describes SSSim, the Simple and Scalable Simulator for P2P streaming systems. SSSim is designed for performance and scalability, and allows the simulation of the diffusion of a very large number of chunks over large number of peers in reasonable times. This result has been obtained by optimising the simulator for recurrent workloads and minimizing the memory footprint. After describing the simulator's structure and the most important design decisions, the paper presents some experimental results comparing the simulation times of SSSim and a traditional simulator.
Complete Genome Sequence of Spiroplasma citri Strain R8-A2T, Causal Agent of Stubborn Disease in Citrus Species

ABSTRACT Spiroplasma citri causes stubborn disease in Citrus spp. and diseases in other plants. Here, we report the nucleotide sequence of the 1,599,709-bp circular chromosome and two plasmids of S. citri strain R8-A2T. This information will facilitate analyses to understand spiroplasmal pathogenicity and evolutionary adaptations to lifestyles in plants and arthropod hosts.
Analysis of the stability of adiabatic reversible logic using the theory of normal modes in coupled oscillators

The stability of adiabatic stepwise charging reversible logic is discussed from the viewpoint of coupled oscillators. For adiabatic logic with asymmetric tank capacitors, we derive a matrix that connects the initial voltage with the voltage change after the charge-recycle process. This matrix is the same as the mechanical oscillator matrix of a string with equally spaced beads having different mass. From the theory of normal modes in coupled oscillators, it is proved that the eigenvalue of the matrix connecting the initial voltage with the final one is less than 1, which shows that a step waveform is spontaneously generated after many charge-recycle processes.
DETECTION MECHANISM FOR DISTRIBUTED DENIAL OF SERVICE (DDOS) ATTACKS FOR ANOMALY DETECTION

DDoS means Distributed Denial of Service. DDoS is the attack to pollute the network. The attacker crea tes a large amount of packet to the particular system. DoS attacks synchronized by a group of attackers wi ll lead to Distributed DoS. The packets are sending by using the compromised computers. Which are targeted systems does not response to all the packets becaus e of the DDOS attacks. In this paper, it is proposed a novel statically method for DDoS attacks that is based on anomaly detection. Statistical techniques are used to classify packets followed by rule set m odel which helps in improving proposed system performance.
Indexing and compressing full-text databases for CD-ROM

CD-ROM is an attractive delivery velucle for full-text databases. Because of large storage capacity and low access speed, carefully designed indexing structures—including a con cordance—are necessary to enable the text to be retneved efficiently. However, the indexes are sufficiently large that they tax the ability of main store to hold them when processing quenes. The use of compression techniques can substantially mcrease the volume of text that a disk can accommodate, and substantially decrease the amount of pnmary storage needed to hold the indexes. This paper describes a suitable indexing mechanism, and its compression potential using modem compression methods. It is possible to double the amount of text that can be stored on a CD-ROM disk and include a full concordance and indexes as well. A single disk can accommodate around 180 million words of text—equivalent to a library of 1000-1500 books—and provide rapid response to a vanety of quenes involving multi ple search terms and word fragments.
Altered interoceptive awareness in anorexia nervosa: Effects of meal anticipation, consumption and bodily arousal.

OBJECTIVE Impaired interoceptive awareness (IA), the subjective perception of internal body sensations, has been proposed as a vulnerability or maintaining factor in anorexia nervosa (AN). We examined whether IA of heartbeat and breathing sensations was impaired in AN across a range of arousal levels, and whether it was influenced by meal anticipation and consumption. METHOD IA was assessed using randomized, double-blinded, bolus intravenous infusions of isoproterenol, a peripheral beta-adrenergic sympathetic agonist, and saline. Fifteen women with AN and 15 age-, and sex- matched healthy comparisons (HC) were evaluated before and after consumption of a 1,000 Calorie meal. During each infusion participants rated their moment-to-moment intensity of heartbeat and breathing sensations with a dial. To measure IA we evaluated interoceptive detection thresholds, retrospective ratings of palpitation and dyspnea intensity, and interoceptive accuracy via correlations between subjective dial ratings and observed heart rate responses. RESULTS Contrary to prediction the AN group was more likely to report detection of interoceptive sensations across all conditions, an effect driven by false discriminations at low arousal levels. Concordant with prediction, meal anticipation was associated with intensified interoceptive sensations, particularly dyspnea. There were no differences in interoceptive accuracy. DISCUSSION This represents the first demonstration of interoceptive prediction errors in AN. Although IA is unimpaired at high arousal levels in AN, prediction signals are abnormal at low arousal levels, especially during meal anticipation. Altered interoceptive prediction signaling during meal anticipation could contribute to phenotypes of high anxiety in AN or alternatively, might be explained by enhanced meal associated anxiety.
A Review of the Navigation HCI Research During the 2000's

Two of the common problems associated with navigation research in the field of human computer interaction (HCI) systems, are the relatively narrow view that the display is able to provide for a large information space, and the impact that a diversity of contexts has on the usersâ? divided attention. In recent years, much research has been focused on the development of navigation presentation techniques to address the first problem, and the development of capturing the context with multimodal interaction in order to address the second challenge. However, the growing number of new terminologies and techniques that has been developed has caused considerable confusion for HCI researchers, consequently making the comparison of these techniques and the generalization of empirical results of experiments very difficult, if not impossible. This article provides a taxonomy of current navigation research, which describes clearly the navigation research on desktop and non-desktop environments; it also helps to identify research domains that afford and promote the direction of navigation research. This review reveals gaps where navigation research has identified challenges but has not yet explored them.
Phosphorus Chemistry and Bacterial Community Composition Interact in Brackish Sediments Receiving Agricultural Discharges

Background External nutrient discharges have caused eutrophication in many estuaries and coastal seas such as the Baltic Sea. The sedimented nutrients can affect bacterial communities which, in turn, are widely believed to contribute to release of nutrients such as phosphorus from the sediment. Methods We investigated relationships between bacterial communities and chemical forms of phosphorus as well as elements involved in its cycling in brackish sediments using up-to-date multivariate statistical methods. Bacterial community composition was determined by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism and cloning of the 16S rRNA gene. Results and Conclusions The bacterial community composition differed along gradients of nutrients, especially of different phosphorus forms, from the estuary receiving agricultural phosphorus loading to the open sea. This suggests that the chemical composition of sediment phosphorus, which has been affected by riverine phosphorus loading, influenced on bacterial communities. Chemical and spatial parameters explained 25% and 11% of the variation in bacterial communities. Deltaproteobacteria, presumptively sulphate and sulphur/iron reducing, were strongly associated to chemical parameters, also when spatial autocorrelation was taken into account. Sulphate reducers correlated positively with labile organic phosphorus and total nitrogen in the open sea sediments. Sulphur/iron reducers and sulphate reducers linked to iron reduction correlated positively with aluminium- and iron-bound phosphorus, and total iron in the estuary. The sulphate and sulphur/iron reducing bacteria can thus have an important role both in the mineralization and mobilization of nutrients from sediment. Significance Novelty in our study is that relationships between bacterial community composition and different phosphorus forms, instead of total phosphorus, were investigated. Total phosphorus does not necessarily bring out interactions between bacteria and phosphorus chemistry since proportions of easily usable mobile (reactive) phosphorus and immobile phosphorus forms in different sediments can vary. Our study suggested possible feedbacks between different forms of phosphorus and bacterial community composition.
The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China

In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were. Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions. Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries.
Data-Distribution-Aware Fuzzy Rough Set Model and its Application to Robust Classification

Fuzzy rough sets (FRSs) are considered to be a powerful model for analyzing uncertainty in data. This model encapsulates two types of uncertainty: 1) fuzziness coming from the vagueness in human concept formation and 2) roughness rooted in the granulation coming with human cognition. The rough set theory has been widely applied to feature selection, attribute reduction, and classification. However, it is reported that the classical FRS model is sensitive to noisy information. To address this problem, several robust models have been developed in recent years. Nevertheless, these models do not consider a statistical distribution of data, which is an important type of uncertainty. Data distribution serves as crucial information for designing an optimal classification or regression model. Thus, we propose a data-distribution-aware FRS model that considers distribution information and incorporates it in computing lower and upper fuzzy approximations. The proposed model considers not only the similarity between samples, but also the probability density of classes. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we design a new sample evaluation index for prototype-based classification based on the model, and a prototype selection algorithm is developed using this index. Furthermore, a robust classification algorithm is constructed with prototype covering and nearest neighbor classification. Experimental results confirm the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed model.
Giving instructions in virtual environments by corpus based selection

Instruction giving can be used in several applications, ranging from trainers in simulated worlds to non player characters for virtual games. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for rapidly prototyping virtual instruction-giving agents from human-human corpora without manual annotation. Automatically prototyping full-fledged dialogue systems from corpora is far from being a reality nowadays. Our approach is restricted in that only the virtual instructor can perform speech acts while the user responses are limited to physical actions in the virtual worlds. We have defined an algorithm that, given a task-based corpus situated in a virtual world, which contains human instructor's speech acts and the user's responses as physical actions, generates a virtual instructor that robustly helps a user achieve a given task in the virtual world. We explain how this algorithm can be used for generating a virtual instructor for a game-like, task-oriented virtual world. We evaluate the virtual instructor with human users using task-oriented as well as user satisfaction metrics. We compare our results with both human and rule-based virtual instructors hand-coded for the same task.
Urokinase‐plasminogen activator, a marker for aggressive breast carcinomas. Preliminary report

Plasminogen activator is a serine protease which exists in two forms, known as tissue‐type plasminogen activator and urokinase‐type plasminogen activator. Here, we show that urokinase‐type plasminogen activator activity in primary breast carcinomas correlates with both size of tumor and number of axillary nodes with metastases. Patients with primary carcinomas containing high levels of urokinase‐type plasminogen activator activity had a significantly shorter disease‐free interval than patients with low levels of activity. It is concluded that urokinase‐plasminogen activator may be a new prognostic marker in breast cancer.
A hidden Markov model based framework for recognition of humans from gait sequences

In this paper we propose a generic framework based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) for recognition of individuals from their gait. The HMM framework is suitable, because the gait of an individual can be visualized as his adopting postures from a set, in a sequence which has an underlying structured probabilistic nature. The postures that the individual adopts can be regarded as the states of the HMM and are typical to that individual and provide a means of discrimination. The framework assumes that, during gait, the individual transitions between N discrete postures or states but it is not dependent on the particular feature vector used to represent the gait information contained in the postures. The framework, thus, provides flexibility in the selection of the feature vector. The statistical nature of the HMM lends robustness to the model. In this paper we use the binarized background-subtracted image as the feature vector and use different distance metrics, such as those based on the L/sub 1/ and L/sub 2/ norms of the vector difference, and the normalized inner product of the vectors, to measure the similarity between feature vectors. The results we obtain are better than the baseline recognition rates reported before.
The Anabaena sp. Strain PCC 7120 Gene all2874 Encodes a Diguanylate Cyclase and Is Required for Normal Heterocyst Development under High-Light Growth Conditions

ABSTRACT The genome of the heterocyst-forming cyanobacterium Anabaena sp. strain PCC 7120 harbors 14 genes containing a GGDEF diguanylate cyclase domain. We found that inactivation of one of these genes, all2874, caused abnormal heterocyst development. The all2874 mutant showed a pronounced reduction in heterocyst frequency during diazotrophic growth and reduced vegetative cell size compared to the wild type. The severity of the mutant phenotype varied with light intensity; at high light intensity, the mutant phenotype was accentuated, whereas at low light intensity the phenotype was similar to wild type. Under high-light growth conditions, the initial heterocyst frequency and pattern for the all2874 mutant were normal, but within 4 days following nitrogen step-down, many intervals between heterocysts increased to as many as 200 vegetative cells, whereas in the wild type the intervals were less than 25 vegetative cells. Filaments containing these unusually long vegetative cell intervals between heterocysts also contained intervals of normal length. An all2874 mutant strain carrying a P patS -gfp transcriptional reporter fusion failed to show normal upregulation of the reporter, which indicates that the decrease in heterocyst frequency is due to an early block in differentiation before induction of the patS gene, which in the wild type takes place 8 h after nitrogen step-down. Genetic epistasis experiments suggest that All2874 acts upstream of the master regulator HetR in differentiating cells. We also showed that purified All2874 functions as a diguanylate cyclase in vitro. We hypothesize that All2874 is required for the normal regulation of heterocyst frequency under high-light growth conditions.