Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The speech act of advice in educational contexts in Tshivenda

This study examines data from advice-giving in Tshivenda relating to pragmatic theorist's argument that every human interaction, to a large extent carries with it an element of threatening to one or both participant's face. The speech act of politeness has been identified as one of the most effective speech acts to be employed in giving as well as soliciting advice. Every speech acts is influenced by contextual, cultural and many other background factors associated to age, gender and rank which contribute towards how a speech is composed. The issues relating to the theory of politeness prompted this study on the extent to which politeness plays a role in giving advice in an educational context of Tshivenda speaking learners. The study has employed Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness as a universal phenomenon against the findings of my data, in that universality of these theorists does not quite fit with this study. In this study, politeness in Tshivenda school context has demonstrated that it has been employed as a strategy for encoding distance between speaker and the solicitor. The purpose of advising teachers and students through politeness behavior is to mitigate face and to create a favourable context anticipated by the solicitor. Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za
DUX4 recruits p300/CBP through its C-terminus and induces global H3K27 acetylation changes

Abstract Ectopic expression of the double homeodomain transcription factor DUX4 causes facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD). Mechanisms of action of DUX4 are currently unknown. Using immortalized human myoblasts with a titratable DUX4 transgene, we identify by mass spectrometry an interaction between the DUX4 C-terminus and the histone acetyltransferases p300/CBP. Chromatin immunoprecipitation shows that DUX4 recruits p300 to its target gene, ZSCAN4, displaces histone H3 from the center of its binding site, and induces H3K27Ac in its vicinity, but C-terminal deleted DUX4 does not. We show that a DUX4 minigene, bearing only the homeodomains and C-terminus, is transcriptionally functional and cytotoxic, and that overexpression of a nuclear targeted C-terminus impairs the ability of WT DUX4 to interact with p300 and to regulate target genes. Genomic profiling of DUX4, histone H3, and H3 modifications reveals that DUX4 binds two classes of loci: DNase accessible H3K27Ac-rich chromatin and inaccessible H3K27Ac-depleted MaLR-enriched chromatin. At this latter class, it acts as a pioneer factor, recruiting H3K27 acetyltransferase activity and opening the locus for transcription. In concert with local increased H3K27Ac, the strong H3K27Ac peaks at distant sites are significantly depleted of H3K27Ac, thus DUX4 uses its C-terminus to induce a global reorganization of H3K27 acetylation.
Embedded systems' virtualization: The next challenge?

Traditionally, virtualization has been adopted by enterprise industry aiming to make better use of general purpose multi-core processors and its use in embedded systems (ES) seemed to be both a distant and unnecessary reality. However, with the rise of each more powerful multiprocessed ESs, virtualization brings an opportunity to use simultaneously several operating systems (OS) besides offering more secure systems and even an easier way to reuse legacy software. Although ESs have increasingly bigger computational power, they are still far more restricted than general purpose computers, especially in terms of area, memory and power consumption. Therefore, is it possible to use virtualization — a technique that typically demands robust systems — in powerful yet restricted current embedded systems? In this paper we show why the answer should be yes.
At-Satellite Reflectance: A First Order Normalization Of Landsat 7 ETM+ Images

Regional Landsat applications often rely on clear and near cloud-free images. With the spectral value being represented by digital number (DN), however, such images contain substantial noises. A significant proportion of such noises can be normalized by converting the DN to at-satellite reflectance value. Being physically based and ready to automate, the conversion method can serve as a first order normalization of Landsat 7 images, making it possible to derive land surface information from such images more consistently. Key word: Landsat 7, ETM+, image normalization, digital number, at-satellite reflectance.
Tee: Traffic-based energy estimators for duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy is classically considered as a critical resource in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). These networks are composed of tiny devices that auto-organize around one or few gateways, which may have various roles from simple reference or traffic sinks to full network orchestrator. Such a gateway could influence the network behavior, for instance by decreasing activity when energy becomes scarce. It however needs to be able to estimate the nodes remaining energy. Indeed, this gateway is on the path of all traffic going in or out the WSN. This traffic sample could be used to acquire a coarse estimate of individual nodes energy consumption. The accuracy of this estimation can then be improved by explicit signaling if needed. This paper presents Tee, a set of such Traffic-based energy estimators that operates at the WSN gateway. We evaluate, by simulation, the accuracy of two such estimators in IEEE 802.15. 4 networks running RPL and ContikiMAC, a duty cycled MAC layer. Results show that such silent estimators benefit from information already available at the gateway, such as the routing topology. However, they still underestimate the consumption due to the routing control messages, to the packets strobing, or to contention and collisions and can easily be complemented by lightweight explicit calibrations.
Wallerian degeneration of zebrafish trigeminal axons in the skin is required for regeneration and developmental pruning

Fragments of injured axons that detach from their cell body break down by the molecularly regulated process of Wallerian degeneration (WD). Although WD resembles local axon degeneration, a common mechanism for refining neuronal structure, several previously examined instances of developmental pruning were unaffected by WD pathways. We used laser axotomy and time-lapse confocal imaging to characterize and compare peripheral sensory axon WD and developmental pruning in live zebrafish larvae. Detached fragments of single injured axon arbors underwent three stereotyped phases of WD: a lag phase, a fragmentation phase and clearance. The lag phase was developmentally regulated, becoming shorter as embryos aged, while the length of the clearance phase increased with the amount of axon debris. Both cell-specific inhibition of ubiquitylation and overexpression of the Wallerian degeneration slow protein (WldS) lengthened the lag phase dramatically, but neither affected fragmentation. Persistent WldS-expressing axon fragments directly repelled regenerating axon branches of their parent arbor, similar to self-repulsion among sister branches of intact arbors. Expression of WldS also disrupted naturally occurring local axon pruning and axon degeneration in spontaneously dying trigeminal neurons: although pieces of WldS-expressing axons were pruned, and some WldS-expressing cells still died during development, in both cases detached axon fragments failed to degenerate. We propose that spontaneously pruned fragments of peripheral sensory axons must be removed by a WD-like mechanism to permit efficient innervation of the epidermis.
Good and not-so-good ideas in research. A tutorial in idea assessment and generation

This starting point of this paper is the difficulty for many graduate students to ever finish a Ph. D. and the graduate student’s need for good research ideas. According to Swedish data, only 20 percent of those who start as graduate students in the social sciences ever finish. One crucial problem is probably the lack of ideas and awareness of how to foster creativity. What are good ideas? Ideas are assessed all the time, by journal editors and referees, by research councils and thesis supervisors. Yet, there is little reflection on the question of what constitutes good ideas, and bad. Philosophy of science is briefly discussed in the paper, with examples from behaviorism and social constructivism, and it is argued that it provides no good basis for generating and assessing good ideas. The paper then proceeds by discussing examples of good, and not-so-good ideas. The notion of good bad ideas is introduced and an example is given. The paper then discusses several questions. Which characteristics of research ideas make them good, and which make them less good? How does one go about creating good ideas? What sort of research environment is most likely to stimulate the growth of good ideas? What are the processes which kill creativity in research? Creativity requires an open mind and strong interest. It takes time, sometimes much time, before good ideas arrive. Yet, success in a research career requires publications, and a brief section discusses how to plan one’s publications and have them accepted by journal editors. Finally, Swedish experience with an attempt to reform graduate education is discussed. It is pointed out that administrators’ inclinations to favor concrete policy measures such as financing do not necessarily lead to the desired consequences of increasing completion rate and decreasing study time. Another approach must be applied: the fostering of creativity.
Learning & Knowledge Production in North Carolina Sea Turtle Conservation Communities of Practice.

Kathleen Carol Martin: Learning & Knowledge Production in North Carolina Sea Turtle Conservation Communities of Practice (Under the direction of Dorothy C. Holland, Ph.D.) This dissertation focused upon non-formal and informal learning practices and knowledge production amongst [adult] participants involved in local sea turtle conservation practices along the US Atlantic coast. In the United States, adult learning and adult education has historically occurred within non-formal settings (e.g., through community-based organizations) and/or as informal education (e.g., self-directed). In recent years, research focused upon non-formal and informal sites of learning and knowledge production has increased and includes learning experiences specific for different age groups. These increases in research on informal and non-formal learning practices and knowledge production have occurred within the field of education (proper) and within non-education fields and disciplines of study as well. This dissertation project was an ethnographic study of three North Carolina communities of practice (scientists, state park employees and citizen volunteers) that emerged concomitant with their respective concerns about sea turtle conservation along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast. The community of practice concept belongs to an intellectual tradition of social learning theories that regards the following elements as potential features affecting learning: identity formation, practice, social structure, and situated experience.
Amyloid cannot resist identification

The capacity to polymerize into amyloid fibrils is common to many proteins. While some proteins naturally form these fibrils to serve functional roles, amyloid is usually associated with pathogenic processes in which specific proteins aberrantly aggregate within cells or tissues. Though the contribution of amyloid fibrils to actual disease pathogenesis is not always clear, one possibility is that the titration of essential proteins from solution into aggregates contributes to the cellular degeneration common to many amyloid diseases. Using mammalian and yeast model systems, we recently showed that the common biophysical properties of amyloid aggregates—including strong resistance to dissolution—enable stringent purification and identification of both amyloid-forming and amyloid-associated proteins directly from cells. Strikingly, many proteins that were previously implicated in formation or clearance of intracellular aggregates, including several stress granule components, were found to co-aggregate with amyloid formed by a polyglutamine-expanded huntingtin fragment. This direct evaluation of proteins within aggregates can help identify new amyloid-forming proteins, as well as proteins that can indirectly contribute to disease mechanisms.
Regime Shifts and Bond Returns

This paper investigates the implications of a 2-regime model of the business cycle for term premiums and volatilities in the bond market. The model, which is estimated via maximum likelihood using GDP, consumption and production data, has two key features -- mean growth rates that vary across regimes and time-varying transition probabilities between regimes. The implied dynamics of term premiums and volatilities are complex and interesting. Business cycle turning points are characterized by high volatility and strongly time-varying term premiums. These implications are then investigated using data on bond returns. Nonparametric estimation results are broadly consistent with the model. Using the slope of the term structure as a conditioning variable, we can identify periods with negative term premiums and volatile returns.
Experimental Assessment of ‘subgrid’ scale Probability Density Function Models for Large Eddy Simulation

Filtered density functions (FDFs) of mixture fraction are quantified by analyzing experimental data obtained from two-dimensional planar laser-induced fluorescence scalar measurements in the isothermal swirling flow of a combustor operating at a Reynolds number of 28,662 for three different swirl numbers (0.3, 0.58 and 1.07). Two-dimensional filtering using a box filter was performed on the measured scalar to obtain the filtered variables used for presumed beta-FDF and top-hat FDF for Large Eddy Simulations (LES). A dependant variable from the measured scalar, which was a pre-computed temperature, was integrated over the experimentally obtained FDF as well as over the presumed beta or top-hat FDFs and a relative error in temperature prediction was calculated. The experimentally measured FDFs depended on swirl numbers and axial and radial positions in the flow. The FDFs were unimodal in the regions of low variance and bimodal in the regions of high variance. The influence of the filter spatial dimension on the measured FDF was evaluated and consequences for Subgrid modeling for LES discussed.
Mobile Device and Intelligent Display Interaction via Scale-invariant Image Feature Matching

We present further developments of our system that allows direction interaction between a camera-equipped hand-held device and a remote display. The essence of this system is the ability to estimate a planar projectivity between the remote display and the displayed image of that display on the handheld device. We describe how to achieve this by matching scale invariant SURF features across the two displays (remote and hand-held). We implement a prototype system and a drawing application and conduct both performance and usability evaluations. The feedback given indicates that our system is responsive, accurate and easy to use.
Quantifying Global Tolerance of Biochemical Systems: Design Implications for Moiety-Transfer Cycles

Robustness of organisms is widely observed although difficult to precisely characterize. Performance can remain nearly constant within some neighborhood of the normal operating regime, leading to homeostasis, but then abruptly break down with pathological consequences beyond this neighborhood. Currently, there is no generic approach to identifying boundaries where local performance deteriorates abruptly, and this has hampered understanding of the molecular basis of biological robustness. Here we introduce a generic approach for characterizing boundaries between operational regimes based on the piecewise power-law representation of the system's components. This conceptual framework allows us to define “global tolerance” as the ratio between the normal value of a parameter and the value at such a boundary. We illustrate the utility of this concept for a class of moiety-transfer cycles, which is a widespread module in biology. Our results show a region of “best” local performance surrounded by “poor” regions; also, selection for improved local performance often pushes the operating values away from regime boundaries, thus increasing global tolerance. These predictions agree with experimental data from the reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) redox cycle of human erythrocytes.
Finite Gain L p Stability for Hybrid Dynamical Systems ⋆

We characterize finite gain Lp stability properties for hybrid dynamical systems. By defining a suitable concept of hybrid Lp norm, we introduce hybrid storage functions and provide sufficient Lyapunov conditions for Lp stability of hybrid systems, which cover the well-known continuous-time and discrete-time Lp stability notions as special cases. We then focus on homogeneous hybrid systems and prove a result stating the equivalence among local asymptotic stability of the origin, global exponential stability, existence of a homogeneous Lyapunov function with suitable properties for the hybrid system with no inputs, and input-to-state stability, and we show how these properties all imply Lp stability. Finally we characterize systems with direct and reverse average dwell time properties and establish parallel results for this class of systems. We also make several connections to the existing results on dissipativity properties of hybrid dynamical systems.
First-principles studies of carrier injection in polyethylene (PE) and ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer (EVA) oligomers

First principles calculations are utilized in order to gain a better understanding of charge injection from metals to insulators. As a starting point, a comparative study of hole injection into polyethylene (PE) oligomer and ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) oligomer is conducted. We evaluate the hole injection barriers at metal/PE oligomer and metal/EVA oligomer interfaces in two ways: (1) from band-plus-lineup based approach and (2) from density of states based analysis. In line with experimental findings that hole injection into EVA is much easier than that into PE, both methods indicated that hole injection barrier of EVA oligomer is smaller than that of PE oligomer. The results showed that vacuum level shift induced by the adsorption of EVA oligomer on metal surface is strongly affected by the molecular dipole and varies over a wide range (around 1 eV) depending on the orientation of the dipole. When the molecular dipole points in the direction of the metal surface, the ionization level was shifted towards the Fermi level, resulting in the decrease in the hole injection barrier. In addition, it was indicated that ionization level of EVA (mainly an anti-bonding combination of C=O), which resides above the ionization level of PE, may well serve as localized states where holes can be injected.
[Preparation of multivariant-phospholipid complex of Ginkgo biloba extract].

OBJECTIVE To prepare Ginkgo biloba extract multivariant-phospholipid complex(MGBP) and improve the vitro dissolution of ginkgo total flavonoids by adding another water-soluble carrier in phospholipid complex. METHOD MGBP was prepared using solvent evaporation method with Poloxamer-188 as the carrier and the multivariant complex was analyzed by DSC and X-diffraction technique. The physicochemical properties of the MGBP we also studied, including apparent oil-water distribution coefficients in different pH aqueous solution and its release in vitro. RESULT The in vitro dissolution of ginkgo total flavonoids was significantly increased while the apparent oil-water distribution coefficient was improved after been made into multivariant-phospholipid complex. CONCLUSION The preparation technology of MGBP is simple and economic. MGBP can significantly increase the vitro dissolution of ginkgo total flavonoids and improve oil-water distribution coefficients, which can be the reference for the bioavailability in vivo in the further researches.
Refined Error Bounds for Several Learning Algorithms

This article studies the achievable guarantees on the error rates of certain learning algorithms, with particular focus on refining logarithmic factors. Many of the results are based on a general technique for obtaining bounds on the error rates of sample-consistent classifiers with monotonic error regions, in the realizable case. We prove bounds of this type expressed in terms of either the VC dimension or the sample compression size. This general technique also enables us to derive several new bounds on the error rates of general sample-consistent learning algorithms, as well as refined bounds on the label complexity of the CAL active learning algorithm. Additionally, we establish a simple necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a distribution-free bound on the error rates of all sample-consistent learning rules, converging at a rate inversely proportional to the sample size. We also study learning in the presence of classification noise, deriving a new excess error rate guarantee for general VC classes under Tsybakov's noise condition, and establishing a simple and general necessary and sufficient condition for the minimax excess risk under bounded noise to converge at a rate inversely proportional to the sample size.
Stochastic delay guarantees and statistical call admission control for IEEE 802.11 single-hop ad hoc networks

This paper presents a new approach to provide stochastic delay guarantees via fully distributed model-based call admission control for IEEE 802.11 single-hop ad hoc networks. We propose a novel stochastic link-layer channel model to characterize the variations of the channel service process in a non-saturated case using a Markov-modulated Poisson process (MMPP) model. We use the model to calculate the effective capacity of the IEEE 802.11 channel. The channel effective capacity concept is the dual of the effective bandwidth theory. Our approach offers a tool for distributed statistical resource allocation in ad hoc networks, which combines both efficient resource utilization and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning to a certain probabilistic limit. Simulation results demonstrate that the MMPP link-layer model and the calculated effective capacity can be used effectively in allocating resources with stochastic delay guarantees.
Complexity Metrics for business Process Models

Business process models, often modelled using graphical languages like UML, serve as a base for communication between the stakeholders in the software development process. To fulfill this purpose, they should be easy to understand and easy to maintain. For this reason, it is useful to have measures that can give us some information about understandability and maintainability of a business process model. Such measures should tell us whether the model has an appropriate size, is clearly structured, easy to comprehend and partitioned into modules in a sensible way. This paper discusses how existing research results on the complexity of software can be extended in order to analyze the complexity of business process models.