Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of an Embodied Conversational Agent on Student Affective Dynamics while Using an Intelligent Tutoring System

We determine the effects of an embodied conversational agent, Scooter the Tutor, on student affect as students use an intelligent tutoring system for Scatterplots. We found that affective states and transitions between affective states were very similar among students in both conditions. With the exception of neutrality, no affective state occurred significantly more in one condition over the other. Boredom, confusion, and engaged concentration persisted in both conditions. Students in both conditions demonstrated similar symmetries among affective transitions was also observed, i.e., boredom was unlikely to transition into confusion and vice versa; confusion was unlikely to transition into engaged concentration and vice-versa. These findings imply that Scooter does not have a large effect on students’ affective states or their dynamics. Keywords-affect, embodied conversational agents, Scatterplot tutor
Moving Towards Goal-Based Safety Management Dr

In virtually all safety-critical industries the operators of systems have to demonstrate a systematic and thorough consideration of safety. This is generally done through the application of safety standards as part of the development of safety critical systems. Many safety assurance standards (like EN50126 (1999), IEC 61508 (1995), DEF (Aust) 5679) (1998) are very prescriptive. They require specific techniques, approaches or measures to be applied to achieve the safety objective without allowing the users to select a suite of techniques and measures best suited for their application and development environment. The application of prescriptive techniques can work well for some systems but can be a hindrance for emerging technologies. There has therefore been an increasing trend in many industries to demonstrate safety by assuring certain goals have been achieved, rather than simply following prescriptive standards. Goal-based safety standards are now a reality and applied in the medical industry and defence. This paper will describe the pros and cons of prescriptive and goal-based standards, and make recommendations for the evolution of future safety standards.
The International Journal of Biostatistics Interval Estimation of Some Epidemiological Measures of Association Tasneem Zaihra , University of New Brunswick

In epidemiological cohort studies, the probability of developing a disease for individuals in a treatment/intervention group is compared with that of a control group. The groups involve varying cluster sizes, and the binary responses within each cluster cannot be assumed independently. Three major measures of association used to report the efficacy of treatments or effectiveness of public health intervention programs in case of prospective studies are Risk Difference (RD), Risk Ratio (RR) and Relative Risk Difference (RED). The preference of one measure of association over the other in drawing statistical inference depends on design of study. Lui (2004) discusses a number of methods of constructing confidence intervals for each of these measures. Specifically, Lui (2004) discusses four methods for RD, four methods for RR and three methods for RED. For the construction of confidence intervals for RD, Paul and Zaihra (2008) compare the four methods discussed by Lui (2004), using extensive simulations with a method based on an estimator of the variance of a ratio estimator by Cochran (1977) and a method based on a sandwich estimator of the variance of the regression estimator using the generalized estimating equations approach of Zeger and Liang (1986). Paul and Zaihra (2008) conclude that the method based on an estimate of the variance of a ratio estimator performs best overall. In this paper, we extend the two new methodologies introduced in Paul and Zaihra (2008) to confidence interval construction of the risk measures RR and RED. Extensive simulations show that the method based on an estimate of the variance of a ratio estimator performs best overall for constructing confidence interval for the other two risk measures RR and RED as well. This method involves a very simple variance expression which can be implemented with a very few computer codes. Therefore, it can be considered as an easily implementable alternative for all the three measures of association.
Optimal position control of synchronous reluctance motor via totally invariant variable structure control

A iicwly dcsigncd optiinal control mctliod is prcswitcd. The proposcd controller is dcsigncd via combining classical sink Eecdback conlrol and variable slructure control (VSC). This new method fully matches the merits of the easy design of the linear quadratic (LQ) method and the strong robustiicss of thc VSC. Thc prescntcd optimal control mcthod is dcnlonstrated on il synchronous reluctance inotor (SytiRM). Tt is proved that the syiichronous reluctance motor can be used in position control by thc proposcd method, and the dcsigncd pcrfnroiancc can be easily obtained regardless of the disturbaiice and uncertainty. A prototype PC-based SyiiRM control system is built to verify the validity of the proposed scheme.
Spliceosomal protein eftud2 mutation leads to p53-dependent apoptosis in zebrafish neural progenitors

Abstract Haploinsufficiency of EFTUD2 (Elongation Factor Tu GTP Binding Domain Containing 2) is linked to human mandibulofacial dysostosis, Guion-Almeida type (MFDGA), but the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms remain to be addressed. We report here the isolation, cloning and functional analysis of the mutated eftud2 (snu114) in a novel neuronal mutant fn10a in zebrafish. This mutant displayed abnormal brain development with evident neuronal apoptosis while the development of other organs appeared less affected. Positional cloning revealed a nonsense mutation such that the mutant eftud2 mRNA encoded a truncated Eftud2 protein and was subjected to nonsense-mediated decay. Disruption of eftud2 led to increased apoptosis and mitosis of neural progenitors while it had little effect on differentiated neurons. Further RNA-seq and functional analyses revealed a transcriptome-wide RNA splicing deficiency and a large amount of intron-retaining and exon-skipping transcripts, which resulted in inadequate nonsense-mediated RNA decay and activation of the p53 pathway in fn10a mutants. Therefore, our study has established that eftud2 functions in RNA splicing during neural development and provides a suitable zebrafish model for studying the molecular pathology of the neurological disease MFDGA.
Asylum in Ireland - a public health perspective

Apart from intermittent groups of program refugees, officially invited as part of a government response to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) requests, Ireland was not, until 1994, a chosen country of destination for asylum-seekers. Throughout the 1980's and up to the early part of the 1990's, this country, in contrast to its EU counterparts, received less than 100 applications annually for political asylum. Consequently, asylum issues were seldom the subject of public debate and did not arouse any great deal of socio-political concern. Service delivery was limited to addressing the relatively more manageable needs of culturally homogeneous communities of Bosnian and Vietnamese program refugees. In 1994, a significant change was signalled. The majority of new applicants came on an individual basis from a larger variety of refugee producing countries. For instance, during 1998, most (72%) came from the continent of Africa and from Eastern Europe.
Characteristic contours of syllabic-level units in laughter

Trying to automatically detect laughter and other nonlinguistic events in speech raises a fundamental question: Is it appropriate to simply adopt acoustic features that have traditionally been used for analyzing linguistic events? Thus we take a step back and propose syllabic-level features that may show a contrast between laughter and speech in their intensity-, pitch-, and timbral-contours and rhythmic patterns. We motivate and define our features and evaluate their effectiveness in correctly classifying laughter from speech. Inclusion of our features in the baseline feature set for the Social Signals Sub-Challenge of the Computational Paralinguistics Challenge yielded an improvement of 2.4% in Unweighted Average Area Under the Curve (UAAUC). But beyond objective metrics, analyzing laughter at a phonetically meaningful level has allowed us to examine the characteristic contours of laughter and to recognize the importance of the shape of its intensity envelope.
A Normalized Local Binary Fitting Model for Image Segmentation

A normalized local binary fitting (NLBF) model is proposed for image segmentation in this paper. The proposed model can effectively and efficiently segment images with intensity in homogeneity because the image local characteristics are considered. At the same time, we use a Gaussian filtering process instead of the regularization to keep the level set function smooth in the evolution process. The strategy can reduce computational cost. Comparative experimental results on synthetic and real images demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the well-known local binary fitting (LBF) model in computational efficiency and robustness to the initial contour.
The improved On-Line Analysis Mining for multi-dimension data based on association rules

In the paper, we discussed the characteristics of data mining on association rules for multi-dimension data. Then through the multi-dimension data attributes analysis and OLAP operations, we integrate the OLAP and data mining based on their advantages to one method which is called On-Line Analysis Mining (OLAM) [1]. Based on OLAM, an algorithm for multi-dimension data on association rules has been reformed. It can improve the efficiency and flexible of rules searching. Finally, our performance has proved the algorithm.
The Impact of a Surgical Protocol for Enhanced Recovery on Living Donor Right Hepatectomy

AbstractThe concept of surgery for enhanced recovery (SFER) program has never been an issue in the context of living donor right hepatectomy (LDRH), much less its effects. The purpose of this study was to evaluate outcomes after the establishment of an SFER protocol for LDRH in a single center.A single-center cohort study was performed in 500 consecutive living donors who underwent right hepatectomy from January 2005 to June 2014 by analyzing the outcomes before and after an established SFER protocol that evolved with continuous refinements in surgical technique and management over 300 LDRHs, being in place on September 2011. Donor characteristics, operative outcomes, and postoperative complications divided into 2 groups (group 1, stepwise adjustment; group 2, complete adherence to the protocol) were compared.Donor characteristics were comparable in the 2 groups. Overall complication rate was 10.0% with no mortality. In group 2, operative time, hospital stay, and overall complication rate decreased significantly, and the morbidity was 1% and confined in grade I complication without reoperation, perioperative blood transfusion, or readmission. All donors in this series recovered fully and returned to the previous functional lifestyle.An SFER protocol on LDRH can be established by the gradual implementation of various refinements of surgical technique, and the recent outcomes achieved after the establishment of an SFER protocol could provide a current guidance on LDRH toward the ultimate goal of zero morbidity.
Distribution of minichromosomes in individual Escherichia coli cells: implications for replication control

A novel method was devised to measure the number of plasmids in individual Escherichia coli cells. With this method, involving measurement of plasmid‐driven expression of the green fluorescent protein gene by flow cytometry, the copy number distribution of a number of different plasmids was measured. Whereas natural plasmids had fairly narrow distributions, minichromosomes, which are plasmids replicating only from a cloned oriC copy, have a wide distribution, suggesting that there is no copy number control for minichromosomes. When the selection pressure (kanamycin concentration) for minichromosomes was increased, the copy number of minichromosomes was also increased. At up to 30 minichromosomes per host chromosome, replication and growth of the host cell was unaffected. This is evidence that there is no negative element for initiation control in oriC and that there is no incompatibility between oriC located on the chromosome and minichromosome. However, higher copy numbers led to integration of the minichromosomes at the chromosomal oriC and to initiation asynchrony of the host chromosome. At a minichromosome copy number of ∼30, the cell's capacity for synchronous initiation is exceeded and free minichromosomes will compete out the chromosome to yield inviable cells, unless the minichromosomes are incorporated into the chromosome.
Identifying Similar Web Pages using Scoring Methods for Web Community Mining

A World Wide Web (WWW) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via internet. The knowledge in web page is increasing every minute and web user uses the web page to acquire knowledge. Because of the voluminous size of the web, the process of web information retrieval, web content filtering, web usage mining and web structure mining is more complex and difficult. Identifying the web community is one of the goal in web structure mining. The web structure mining is based on the graph structure of hyperlinks and it extracts the useful information from structure of web data. Web structure mining aims to generate structural summary about web sites and web pages. This paper presents an alternate web community identification approach to detect the similar web pages in web community. The web community identification model is generated by extracting the attributes from the HTML source of input URL. The candidates are identified from the input page. Candidates are scored by three scoring methods and compared with preference value to find the similar pages in web community. The candidate pages with scores equal to preference value of the input pages are recognized as similar pages and hence it is found that the method that produces scores that are equal to preference value is enhanced approach for identifying the similar pages.
Version history based source code plagiarism detection in proprietary systems

While the advent of open source code search tools have made the source code of thousands of open source software (OSS) readily accessible, thereby increasing legitimate reuse, it has also opened up the possibility of unconscientious employees plagiarizing code from OSS repositories. Plagiarism in proprietary software would not only lead to costly lawsuits, but also undermine the credibility of the organization. Hence detecting plagiarism in proprietary software is an urgent need. Though there exist a number of techniques for detecting plagiarism in student project assignments, they do not scale well in the case of large proprietary software. Especially when code snippets are plagiarized from the large number of available open source software. In this paper we propose a novel approach that applies Mining Software Repositories (MSR) based techniques to the problem of plagiarism detection. We create a programming style profile for each maintenance engineer by mining the version history and use that to detect source code commits that are likely to be plagiarized. Such suspected code fragments can be analyzed using any of the existing plagiarism detection techniques to confirm the plagiarism and ascertain the original code.
What Weight Should be Given to Asset Prices in the Measurementof Inflation

Besides the theoretical (Alchian/Klein, 1973) case for including asset prices in measures of inflation, there is also a practical case, that some asset prices, notably housing, are closely associated with the main trends in inflation, and via 'bubbles and busts' with output disturbances. Attempts to use the pure Alchian/Klein methodology in practice give excessive weight to unstable asset prices, but there are more appropriate weighting schemes, derived either from econometrically measured relationships or from final expenditures. Either way, the statistical treatment of housing is crucial, and is being discussed in Eurostat.
An information sharing and analysis method for detection of abnormal behavior in computational grids

Computational grids, which make large-scale simulation possible, are valuable infrastructure for users such as research scientists, and many users benefit from the computational capabilities of high-performance resources. However, concerns exist about improper use by malicious users because of the processing ability of computational grids. Currently, both normal users and administrators demand safety and reliability for large distributed computing. This paper proposes an approach based on the concept of ISAC for administrators to support incident response and forensic analysis, using gathered resource information and user activities in a computational grid environment
Prenatal Bisphenol A Exposure and Early Childhood Behavior

Background Prenatal exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) increases offspring aggression and diminishes differences in sexually dimorphic behaviors in rodents. Objective We examined the association between prenatal BPA exposure and behavior in 2-year-old children. Methods We used data from 249 mothers and their children in Cincinnati, Ohio (USA). Maternal urine was collected around 16 and 26 weeks of gestation and at birth. BPA concentrations were quantified using high-performance liquid chromatography–isotope-dilution tandem mass spectrometry. Child behavior was assessed at 2 years of age using the second edition of the Behavioral Assessment System for Children (BASC-2). The association between prenatal BPA concentrations and BASC-2 scores was analyzed using linear regression. Results Median BPA concentrations were 1.8 (16 weeks), 1.7 (26 weeks), and 1.3 (birth) ng/mL. Mean (± SD) BASC-2 externalizing and internalizing scores were 47.6 ± 7.8 and 44.8 ± 7.0, respectively. After adjustment for confounders, log10-transformed mean prenatal BPA concentrations were associated with externalizing scores, but only among females [β = 6.0; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.1–12.0]. Compared with 26-week and birth concentrations, BPA concentrations collected around 16 weeks were more strongly associated with externalizing scores among all children (β = 2.9; 95% CI, 0.2–5.7), and this association was stronger in females than in males. Among all children, measurements collected at ≤ 16 weeks showed a stronger association (β = 5.1; 95% CI, 1.5–8.6) with externalizing scores than did measurements taken at 17–21 weeks (β = 0.6; 95% CI, −2.9 to 4.1). Conclusions These results suggest that prenatal BPA exposure may be associated with externalizing behaviors in 2-year-old children, especially among female children.
Activity-Dependent Local Translation of Matrix Metalloproteinase-9

Local, synaptic synthesis of new proteins in response to neuronal stimulation plays a key role in the regulation of synaptic morphogenesis. Recent studies indicate that matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9), an endopeptidase that regulates the pericellular environment through cleavage of its protein components, plays a critical role in regulation of spine morphology and synaptic plasticity. Here, we sought to determine whether MMP-9 mRNA is transported to dendrites for local translation and protein release. First, dendritic transport of MMP-9 mRNA was seen in primary hippocampal neuronal cultures treated with glutamate and in dentate gyrus granule cells in adult anesthetized rats after induction of long-term potentiation. Second, rapid, activity-dependent polyadenylation of MMP-9 mRNA; association of the mRNA with actively translating polysomes; and de novo MMP-9 protein synthesis were obtained in synaptoneurosomes isolated from rat hippocampus. Third, glutamate stimulation of cultured hippocampal neurons evoked a rapid (in minutes) increase in MMP-9 activity, as measured by cleavage of its native substrate, β-dystroglycan. This activity was reduced by the polyadenylation inhibitor, thus linking MMP-9 translation with protein function. In aggregate, our findings show that MMP-9 mRNA is transported to dendrites and locally translated and that the protein is released in an activity-dependent manner. Acting in concert with other dendritically synthesized proteins, locally secreted MMP-9 may contribute to the structural and functional plasticity of the activated synapses.
Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems ( PACIS ) 7-3-2008 Building Cooperation in VoIP Network through a Reward Mechanism

In this paper, for solving the moral hazard problem of super nodes in VOIP network and achieving better communication quality, we establish a reward mechanism based on classical efficiency-wage models. In the reward mechanism, the function of reward is to encourage super nodes to contribute their bandwidth and cover their effort costs, whereas the function of fine is to prevent opportunistic super nodes from shirking. We consider that network quality and idle bandwidth are the essential criterions for selecting qualified super nodes. Once all super nodes can satisfy specific conditions, the required reward can be derived so as to improve the VoIP platform’s revenue. Moreover, we also suggest several targets both in technical and economic view that the platform provider can strive in order to boost his/her market share. In addition, the case of Skype is discussed in this study and we also examine its current pricing strategy.
Electromagnetic induction imaging of concealed metallic objects by means of resonating circuits

An electromagnetic induction system, suitable for 2D imaging of metallic samples of different electrical conductivities, has been developed. The system is based on a parallel LCR circuit comprising a ferrite-cored coil (7.8 mm x 9.5 mm, L=680 μH at 1 KHz), a variable resistor and capacitor. The working principle of the system is based on eddy current induction inside a metallic sample when this is introduced into the AC magnetic field created by the coil. The inductance of the LCR circuit is modified due to the presence of the sample, to an extent that depends on its conductivity. Such modification is known to increase when the system is operated at its resonant frequency. Characterizing different metals based on their values of conductivity is therefore possible by utilizing a suitable system operated at resonance. Both imaging and material characterization were demonstrated by means of the proposed electromagnetic induction technique. Furthermore, the choice of using a system with an adjustable resonant frequency made it possible to select resonances that allow magnetic-field penetration through conductive screens. Investigations on the possibility of imaging concealed metals by penetrating such shields have been carried out. A penetration depth of δ~3 mm through aluminium (Al) was achieved. This allowed concealed metallic samples- having conductivities ranging from 0.54 to 59.77 MSm-1 and hidden behind 1.5-mm-thick Al shields- to be imaged. Our results demonstrate that the presence of the concealed metallic objects can be revealed. The technique was thus shown to be a promising detection tool for security applications.