Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The power of precision air strikes and social media feeds in the 2012 Israel–Hamas conflict: ‘targeting transparency’

This article analyses the evolving uses of social media during wartime through the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson Facebook and Twitter accounts. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-affiliated groups in November 2012 has generated interesting data about social media use by a sovereign power in wartime and the resultant networked discourse. Facebook data is examined for effective patterns of dissemination through both content analysis and discourse analysis. Twitter data is explored through connected concept analysis to map the construction of meaning in social media texts shared by the IDF. The systematic examination of this social media data allows the authors’ analysis to comment on the evolving modes, methods and expectations for state public diplomacy, propaganda and transparency during wartime.
Characterization of inner membrane protein YciB in Escherichia coli: YciB interacts with cell elongation and division proteins

The function of inner membrane protein YciB in Escherichia coli has not been identified. In this study, the membrane topology of the protein that contains five transmembrane domains was clarified. YciB was found to interact with various proteins involved in cell elongation and cell division using a bacterial two‐hybrid system. It was also found that the deletion mutant of yciB is susceptible to the low osmolarity. These observations together with previous reports indicate that YciB is involved in synthesis of the cell envelope by interacting with cell elongation and cell division complexes.
A group-selected and gain controllable CMOS active mixer for UWB applications

This paper presents a group-selected (GS) and gain controllable (GC) active mixer designed for ultra-wide-band (UWB) receiver. The double-balanced Gilbert-type configuration, current bleeding technique and resonating technique for tail capacitance are incorporated in the proposed mixer. A switched capacitance network (SCN) is used to control the resonant frequency of the tail capacitance for the group selection. Digitally controlled tail current source and bleeding current source are used to justify and compensate the loss of conversion gain due to the switched capacitance network while working at low frequency groups. These two techniques greatly enhance the conversion gain and noise performance in each group. Designed in a standard 0.18-µm CMOS technology, the mixer achieves a conversion gain of 17dB, a minimum noise figure of 7.31dB and an input IP3 of −6dBm over the 3.432GHz∼7.656GHz frequency range for UWB groups #1∼#3. It consumes a minimum 9mW from a 1.8V supply.
Misidentification of maternal heart rate as fetal on cardiotocography during the second stage of labor: the role of the fetal electrocardiograph

Objective: To identify the incidence of fetal heart rate (FHR) accelerations in the second stage of labor and the role of fetal electrocardiograph (ECG) in avoiding misidentification of maternal heart rate (MHR) as FHR. Design: Retrospective observational study. Setting: University hospital labor ward, London, UK. Sample: Cardiotocograph (CTG) tracings of 100 fetuses monitored using external transducers and internal scalp electrodes. Methods: CTG traces that fulfilled inclusion criteria were selected from an electronic FHR monitoring database. Main outcome measures: Rate of accelerations during external and internal monitoring as well as decelerations for a period of 60 minutes prior to delivery were determined. The role of fetal ECG in differentiating between MHR and FHR trace was explored. Results: Decelerations occurred in 89% of CTG traces during the second stage of labor. Accelerations indicating possible recording of FHR or MHR were found in 28.1 and 10.9% of cases recorded by an external ultrasound transducer as well as internal scalp electrode, respectively. Accelerations coinciding with uterine contractions occurred only in 11.7 and 4% of external and internal recording of FHR, respectively. Absence of ‘p‐wave’ of the ECG waveform was associated with MHR trace. Conclusion: Decelerations were the commonest CTG feature during the second stage of labor. The incidence of accelerations coinciding with uterine contractions was less than half in fetuses monitored using a fetal scalp electrode. Analysing the ECG waveform for the absence of ‘p‐wave’ helps in differentiating MHR from FHR.
Experimental and FEM verification of cogging forces of a permanent magnet linear motor with a discontinuous magnet track

Permanent magnet track linear motor drives offer a cost-effective motion control solution in numerous industrial manufacturing processes, covering a wide range of material handling and conveyor applications. To further reduce the initial costs of a permanent magnet track linear motor drive system, discontinuous magnet tracks can be considered. However, in a discontinuous magnet track, the armature has to face regions with and without permanent magnets, thereby resulting in edge crossings, where the armature is only partly overlapping with the permanent magnets. As a result, both the cogging force and electromechanical forces cause high disturbances at the edge crossings, having a major impact on the performance of the motion controllers. In this paper, disturbances of a nonsalient permanent magnet linear motor with a discontinuous magnet track are studied. An experimental test setup for the estimation of disturbance forces at the edge is presented. The behavior of the estimated disturbance forces at the edge crossings is also evaluated by a FEM model and compared with the experimental results.
Multi-scale FCN with Cascaded Instance Aware Segmentation for Arbitrary Oriented Word Spotting in the Wild

Scene text detection has attracted great attention these years. Text potentially exist in a wide variety of images or videos and play an important role in understanding the scene. In this paper, we present a novel text detection algorithm which is composed of two cascaded steps: (1) a multi-scale fully convolutional neural network (FCN) is proposed to extract text block regions, (2) a novel instance (word or line) aware segmentation is designed to further remove false positives and obtain word instances. The proposed algorithm can accurately localize word or text line in arbitrary orientations, including curved text lines which cannot be handled in a lot of other frameworks. Our algorithm achieved state-of-the-art performance in ICDAR 2013 (IC13), ICDAR 2015 (IC15) and CUTE80 and Street View Text (SVT) benchmark datasets.
Ultra-low power FIR filter using STSC-CVL logic

The paper shows the implementation of digital FIR filter using ultra-low power logic components. Source coupled logic is used and operated at sub-threshold region to achieve low power consumption while keeping a satisfactory output swing. The STSCL (sub-threshold source coupled logic) circuit is added with controllable voltage-level feature to minimize overall leakage current flow, including both gate leakage and sub-threshold. Seven-stage ring oscillators are implemented in CMOS, STSCL and our proposed logic at similar supply voltage to observe the differences with power consumption for the proposed technique came at nW range. Later on the FIR was design in both CMOS and proposed with measurement results shown in the paper. All measurements for are shown using 65 nm process technology, at a supply voltage of 0.5 V.
CD200R1 and CD200 expression are regulated by PPAR‐γ in activated glial cells

The mechanisms that control microglial activation are of interest, since neuroinflammation, which involves reactive microglia, may be an additional target in the search for therapeutic strategies to treat neurodegenerative diseases. Neuron‐microglia interaction through contact‐dependent or independent mechanisms is involved in the regulation of the microglial phenotype in both physiological and pathological conditions. The interaction between CD200, which is mainly present in neurons but also in astrocytes, and CD200R1, which is mainly present in microglia, is one of the mechanisms involved in keeping the microglial proinflammatory phenotype under control in physiological conditions. Alterations in the expression of CD200 and CD200R1 have been described in neurodegenerative diseases, but little is known about the mechanism of regulation of these proteins under physiological or pathological conditions. The aim of this work was to study the modulation of CD200 and CD200R1 expression by peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor gamma (PPAR‐γ), a transcription factor involved in the control of the inflammatory response. Mouse primary neuronal and glial cultures and neuron‐microglia cocultures were treated with the PPAR‐γ endogenous ligand 15‐deoxy‐Δ12, 14‐prostaglandin J2 (15d‐PGJ2) in the presence and absence of lipopolysaccharide plus interferon‐γ (LPS/IFN‐γ)‐induced glial activation. We show that 15d‐PGJ2 inhibits the pro‐inflammatory response and prevents both CD200R1 downregulation and CD200 upregulation in reactive glial cells. In addition, 15d‐PGJ2 abrogates reactive‐microglia induced neurotoxicity in neuron‐microglia cultures through a CD200‐CD200R1 dependent mechanism. These results suggest that PPAR‐γ modulates CD200 and CD200R1 gene expression and that CD200‐CD200R1 interaction is involved in the anti‐inflammatory and neuroprotective action of PPAR‐γ agonists. GLIA 2014;62:982–998
Career capital during international work experiences: contrasting self-initiated expatriate experiences and assigned expatriation

This article explores the career capital of expatriates, differentiating between self-initiated expatriates (SEs) and company assigned expatriates (AEs). Previous research has considered issues such as individual background variables, employer and task variables, motives, compensation, and repatriation. The present study adds new perspectives related to the development of career capital. The article uses a survey of more than 200 Finnish expatriates to explore these concepts in relation to international work experiences; finding considerable similarities and some differences in the development of career capital of those sent on an expatriate assignment by an organization, and those having a self-initiated expatriate experience.
Intergenerational Advice and Matching: An Experimental Study

This paper is motivated by the idea that economic mechanisms should be tested in the environments in which they are used in the real world. For example, in school matching parents whose children are currently in the match receive advice from their predecessors. We investigate the impact of this intergenerational advice and demonstrate that it is dramatic. We nd that while subjects who repeatedly play the Gale-Shapley mechanism for 20 rounds wind up reporting truthfully 77% of the time, those who play the game once and get advice from their predecessors, wind up reporting truthfully only 44% of the time. We oer an explanation for this result that contrasts the experiential learning that takes place in our repeated treatments with the social learning that takes place in our intergenerational treatments.
Justice in the workplace: the centrality of social versus judgmental predictors of performance varies by gender

Men and women are said to perceive justice differently, with women proposed to be more concerned with relational issues and men focused more on material issues. In this study, the potential for differential effects of justice on performance by gender was analyzed across the four contemporary types of justice. Respondents were 265 male and 113 female occupationally diverse employees in a single organization. The results show significant differences in how men and women respond to the four justice types with only one – informational justice – acting similarly by gender. The differential relationships between each of the justice types and the outcomes by gender highlight the utility of the four factor approach to measuring organizational justice. Women were more interested in maintaining social harmony than men. The results appear to strongly support the use of the justice judgment model over the group-value model as a means of explaining the gender differences. Implications for management include the importance of informational justice both generally and within the performance appraisal process.
Are all crowds equally wise? A comparison of political election forecasts by experts and the public

Four groups made forecasts of the outcome of the Swedish Parliamentary election in the fall of 2006. They consisted of members of the public, political scientists, journalists writing about domestic politics in Swedish daily newspapers, and journalists who were editing sections of readers' letters in daily newspapers. They estimated, using a 12-step category scale, which percentage of the votes that they believed seven parties would get in the election. Data were then obtained on the outcome of the election, and on the two opinions polls closest in time to it. When median forecasts were compared across groups, it was found that the group from the public was most successful in forecasting the outcome of the election. This was in spite of the fact that the median error made by individual members of that group was about 50% larger than the median error made by members of other groups. The two polls were less efficient than the group from the public and overestimated the span between the incumbent government and the opposition by a factor of 2. The members of the public and journalists showed some wishful thinking in their forecasts. There were large and consistent individual differences in forecasting ability. Men performed better than women, as did those who expressed more interest and knowledge in politics. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Characterization of the complete mitochondrial genome sequence of Homatula potanini (Cypriniformes, Nemacheilidae, Nemachilinae)

Abstract Homatula potanini is an endemic and one of ornamental fishes in the upper stream of the Yangtze River and its tributaries. However, wild populations of H. potanini declined sharply due to anthropological activity in the Jinsha River during the past decades. In present study, the complete mitochondrial DNA genome sequence of H. potanini was first determined by DNA sequencing based on the PCR fragments. The complete mitochondrial genome sequence is a circular molecule of 16,569 bp in size. It consists of 13 protein-coding genes, 22 tRNA genes, 2 rRNA genes, and a control region (D-loop). The gene nucleotide composition of H. potanini is 30.1% A, 26.9% C, 16.7% G, and 26.3% T, with a relatively high A + T content (56.4%). The results could provide useful data for studies on genetic structure and rational resource conservation in H. potanini.
Latent mixed Markov modelling of smoking transitions using Monte Carlo bootstrapping

It has been established that measures and reports of smoking behaviours are subject to substantial measurement errors. Thus, the manifest Markov model which does not consider measurement error in observed responses may not be adequate to mathematically model changes in adolescent smoking behaviour over time. For this purpose we fit several Mixed Markov Latent Class (MMLC) models using data sets from two longitudinal panel studies—the third Waterloo Smoking Prevention study and the UWO smoking study, which have varying numbers of measurements on adolescent smoking behaviour. However, the conventional statistics used for testing goodness of fit of these models do not follow the theoretical chi-square distribution when there is data sparsity. The two data sets analysed had varying degrees of sparsity. This problem can be solved by estimating the proper distribution of fit measures using Monte Carlo bootstrap simulation. In this study, we showed that incorporating response uncertainty in smoking behaviour significantly improved the fit of a single Markov chain model. However, the single chain latent Markov model did not adequately fit the two data sets indicating that the smoking process was heterogeneous with regard to latent Markov chains. It was found that a higher percentage of students (except for never smokers) changed their smoking behaviours over time at the manifest level compared to the latent or true level. The smoking process generally accelerated with time. The students had a tendency to underreport their smoking behaviours while response uncertainty was estimated to be considerably less for the Waterloo smoking study which adopted the ‘bogus pipeline’ method for reducing measurement error while the UWO study did not. For the two-chain latent mixed Markov models, incorporating a ‘stayer’ chain to an unrestricted Markov chain led to a significant improvement in model fit for the UWO study only. For both data sets, the assumption for the existence of an independence chain did not lead to significant improvement in model fit. The unrestricted two-chain latent mixed Markov model led to a significant improvement of model fit compared to a simple latent Markov model, but this model was overparameterized when the latent transition probabilities and=or response probabilities were assumed nonstationary. For the other models, the manifest=latent transition probabilities and response probabilities (for the four-wave Waterloo study only) were tested to be nonstationary for both data sets.
The Effect of Teaching Concept Mapping in Reading on EFL Learners' Self-Regulation

The present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of teaching concept mapping as a learning strategy in reading on Iranian EFL learners' self-regulation. To fulfill the purpose of this study, a group of 90 female learners attending Intermediate courses of Zarrin Language School took a sample PET as a proficiency test, 60 of them were selected as homogenous learners and were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Then, all of the students in two groups completed the "Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire" (MSLQ) as a pretest. The teacher taught the same content based on "American Head Way 4" throughout a 16-session to two groups. The only difference was that the experimental group received concept mapping strategy training. At the end of the training, all the students in two groups again completed the selfregulation questionnaire (MSLQ) as post-test in order to assess the learners' self-regulation. The results of the independent t-test indicate that there is a significant difference between experimental and control groups' mean scores on the post-test of self-regulation which means that the experimental group outperformed the control group on the post-test of self-regulation after receiving concept mapping strategy.
The Ten Commandments for Ranking University Quality

In the rapidly changing world of higher education, where increasing emphasis is being placed on the assessment of research and teaching quality as indicators of University Quality, the key issues that need to be considered have been debated widely in both the private and public sectors. The UK and New Zealand have undertaken rigorous research performance exercises over an extended period, while Australia is presently entering a similar phase of assessing research quality. However, ranking University Quality is more general than assessing and ranking research quality alone. To date, the various stakeholders do not seem to have reached agreement on the most important indicators that need to be addressed in assessing and ranking University Quality. The Ten Commandments for ranking University Quality address some of the key issues in the ongoing discussions. Starting with the original set of Ten Commandments, most commandments seem to have been routinely ignored, at least in part, by all but the most conscientious and religious individuals. For this reason, the current set should perhaps be seen as guidelines rather than regulations.
Temperature and Cardiovascular Deaths in the US Elderly: Changes Over Time

Background: Short-term changes in temperature have been associated with cardiovascular deaths. This study examines changes in this association over time among the US elderly. Methods: Daily cardiovascular mortality counts from 107 cities in the US National Morbidity and Mortality Air Pollution Study were regressed against daily temperature using the case-crossover method. Estimates were averaged by time and season using a meta-analysis. Results: In summer 1987 the average increase in cardiovascular deaths due to a 10°F increase in temperature was 4.7%. By summer 2000, the risk with higher temperature had disappeared (−0.4%). In contrast, an increase in temperature in fall, winter and spring was associated with a decrease in deaths, and this decrease remained constant over time. Conclusions: Heat-related cardiovascular deaths in the elderly have declined over time, probably due to increased use of air conditioning, while increased risks with cold-related temperature persist.
Online Recognition of Navigation Goals Through Goal Mirroring

Goal recognition is the problem of inferring the (unobserved) goal of an agent, based on a sequence of its observed actions [4, 2, 1, 5]. It is a fundamental research problem in artifificial intelligence, closely related to plan, activity, and intent recognition [10]. In offline recognition the entire sequence of observations is provided to the agent ahead of time. In contrast, in online recognition the sequence of observations is revealed incrementally instead of being known in advance, thus exacerbating an already hard problem.
Technological sources and regional productivity growth in China

This paper looks into whether China's continuously high economic growth is mainly contributed by productivity growth after the mid-1990s when it has devoted more efforts to innovative activity. More importantly, I also systematically investigate how and to what extent various technological sources contribute to productivity growth in China. Identifying the internal and external technological sources, this paper adopts a newly developed technique of the stochastic metafrontier function to evaluate regional productivity growth in China and then analyzes the impacts of technological sources on moving up the technology ladder in China. The first-step estimation shows that the average productivity growth is 2.821% during 1996–2004, which is similar to that before 1995. However, the coastal and non-coastal regions witnessed an apparent difference in total factor productivity (TFP) growth, 4.567% vs. 1.718%. Concerning the effects of technological sources, in-house research and development (R&D), foreign direct investment (FDI) and technology import are all positive on significantly promoting productivity. Relative to R&D and FDI, the contribution through importing technologies seems to be larger, implying that China's technological progress relies heavily on more advanced foreign knowledge. However, neither technological source is found to have a larger influence on productivity growth among non-coastal regions.