Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Quasi-Static Modelling of Needle Deflection During Steering in Soft Tissue

In this letter, we present a model for needle deflection estimation in soft tissue. The needle is modelled as a vibrating compliant cantilever beam that experiences forces applied by the tissue as it is inserted. Each of the assumed vibration modes are associated with a weighting coefficient whose magnitude is calculated using the minimum potential energy method. The model only requires as input the tissue stiffness and needle-tissue cutting force. Contributions of this letter include the estimation of needle-tissue contact forces as a function of the tissue displacement along the needle shaft, while allowing for multiple bends of the needle. The model is combined with partial ultrasound image feedback in order to adaptively calculate the needle-tissue cutting force as the needle is inserted. The image feedback is obtained by an ultrasound probe that follows the needle tip and stops at an appropriate position to avoid further tissue displacement. Images obtained during early stages of the insertion are used to predict the deflection of the needle further along the insertion process. Experimental results in biological and phantom tissue show an average error in predicting needle deflection of 0.36 mm.
Stresses and Satisfactions of Family Caregivers to Older Stroke Patients

This research investigated the daily stresses (hassles) and satisfactions (uplifts) reported by 78 family members caring for a relative who had recently experienced a stroke. Four domains of hassles and uplifts were examined for their direct effects on three indices of caregiver well-being (caregivers' social activities, social relationships, depression), as well as for the protective effects of uplifts on well-being. Caregivers reported more uplifts than hassles, and care-recipient characteristics were stronger predictors of both hassles and uplifts than were caregiver characteristics. Hassles demonstrated the strongest associations with well-being, with caregivers who reported more hassles also reporting lower levels of well-being. Although uplifts failed to demonstrate consistent direct assoctations with well-being, when the net effects of appraisals were positive (that is, when caregiving uplifts outweighed caregiving hassles), caregivers reported lower levels of distress. Results concerning the protective effects of uplifts are consistent with transactional models of stress.
TNF-α Mediated Increase of HIF-1α Inhibits VASP Expression, Which Reduces Alveolar-Capillary Barrier Function during Acute Lung Injury (ALI)

Acute lung injury (ALI) is an inflammatory disorder associated with reduced alveolar-capillary barrier function and increased pulmonary vascular permeability. Vasodilator-stimulated phosphoprotein (VASP) is widely associated with all types of modulations of cytoskeleton rearrangement-dependent cellular morphology and function, such as adhesion, shrinkage, and permeability. The present studies were conducted to investigate the effects and mechanisms by which tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) increases the tight junction permeability in lung tissue associated with acute lung inflammation. After incubating A549 cells for 24 hours with different concentrations (0–100 ng/mL) of TNF-α, 0.1 to 8 ng/mL TNF-α exhibited no significant effect on cell viability compared with the 0 ng/mL TNF-α group (control group). However, 10 ng/mL and 100 ng/mL TNF-α dramatically inhibited the viability of A549 cells compared with the control group (*p<0.05). Monolayer cell permeability assay results indicated that A549 cells incubated with 10 ng/mL TNF-α for 24 hours displayed significantly increased cell permeability (*p<0.05). Moreover, the inhibition of VASP expression increased the cell permeability (*p<0.05). Pretreating A549 cells with cobalt chloride (to mimic a hypoxia environment) increased protein expression level of hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) (*p<0.05), whereas protein expression level of VASP decreased significantly (*p<0.05). In LPS-induced ALI mice, the concentrations of TNF-α in lung tissues and serum significantly increased at one hour, and the value reached a peak at four hours. Moreover, the Evans Blue absorption value of the mouse lung tissues reached a peak at four hours. The HIF-1α protein expression level in mouse lung tissues increased significantly at four hours and eight hours (**p<0.001), whereas the VASP protein expression level decreased significantly (**p<0.01). Taken together, our data demonstrate that HIF-1α acts downstream of TNF-α to inhibit VASP expression and to modulate the acute pulmonary inflammation process, and these molecules play an important role in the impairment of the alveolar-capillary barrier.
Time Pressure Management as a Compensatory Strategy Training after Closed Head Injury

Following severe closed head injury, deficits in speed of information processing are common. As a result, many head-injured patients experience a feeling of “information overload” in daily tasks that once were relatively easy. Many remedial programmes have been designed that treat different aspects of attention (often including mental speed requirements) by repetitive exercises. In the present study, a different approach to slow information processing has been taken, namely Time Pressure Management (TPM). TPM consists of a set of alternative cognitive strategies that allow head-injured patients in real-life tasks to compensate for their mental slowness. In a randomised pre-training vs. post-training vs. follow-up group study, the effectiveness of TPM training was compared with concentration training in which verbal instruction was the key element. The results indicate that specific TPM strategies are learned by the experimental subjects but that both treatments improve task performance significantly for an information intake task. TPM, however, produces greater gains than concentration training and also appears to generalise to other measures of speed and memory function.
The Organization of Lexicons: a Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Monosyllabic Words

Lexicons utilize a fraction of licit structures. Different theories predict either that lexicons prioritize contrastiveness or structural economy. Study 1 finds that the monosyllabic lexicon of Mandarin is no more distinctive than a randomly sampled baseline using the phonological inventory. Study 2 finds that the lexicons of Mandarin and American English have fewer phonotactically complex words than the random baseline: Words tend not to have multiple low-probability components. This suggests that phonological constraints can have superadditive penalties for combined violations, consistent with e.g. Albright (ms.).
Simvastatin Impairs Growth Hormone-Activated Signal Transducer and Activator of Transcription (STAT) Signaling Pathway in UMR-106 Osteosarcoma Cells

Recent studies have demonstrated that statins reduce cell viability and induce apoptosis in various types of cancer cells. The molecular mechanisms underlying these effects are poorly understood. The JAK/STAT pathway plays an important role in the regulation of proliferation and apoptosis in many tissues, and its deregulation is believed to be involved in tumorigenesis and cancer. The physiological activation of STAT proteins by GH is rapid but transient in nature and its inactivation is regulated mainly by the expression of SOCS proteins. UMR-106 osteosarcoma cells express a GH-responsive JAK2/STAT5 signaling pathway, providing an experimental model to study the influence of statins on this system. In this study we investigated the actions of simvastatin on cell proliferation, migration, and invasion on UMR-106 cells and examined whether alterations in GH-stimulated JAK/STAT/SOCS signaling may be observed. Results showed that treatment of osteosarcoma cells with simvastatin at 3 to 10 µM doses decreases cell proliferation, migration, and invasion in a time- and dose-dependent manner. At the molecular level, although the mechanisms used by simvastatin are not entirely clear, the effect of the statin on the reduction of JAK2 and STAT5 phosphorylation levels may partially explain the decrease in the GH-stimulated STAT5 transcriptional activity. This effect correlated with a time- and dose-dependent increase of SOCS-3 expression levels in cells treated with simvastatin, a regulatory role that has not been previously described. Furthermore, the finding that simvastatin is capable of inducing SOCS-3 and CIS genes expression shows the potential of the JAK/STAT pathway as a therapeutic target, reinforcing the efficacy of simvastatin as chemotherapeutic drug for the treatment of osteosarcoma.
Narrative, Identity, and the News Media in the 2009-2010 Health Care Reform Controversy

NARRATIVE, IDENTITY, AND THE NEWS MEDIA IN THE 2009-2010 HEALTH CARE REFORM CONTROVERSY Theresa M. Logan, M.S. George Mason University, 2012 Thesis Director: Dr. Sandra Cheldelin This study engaged in a narrative analysis of the 2009-2010 U.S. health care reform controversy from a conflict analysis and resolution perspective grounded in social identity theory. Four sets of artifacts produced during the controversy were analyzed using a narrative framework, including online content from both pro-reform and anti-reform interest groups, news coverage from newspaper, radio and cable television media outlets, and letters to newspaper editors written by members of the public. Analysis of the interest groups’ documents revealed two distinct narratives framed by 1) different estimations of the nation’s health care problems and 2) competing beliefs about the appropriate roles for the federal government and the free market in addressing those problems. Pro-reform groups defined the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a pragmatic response to both fiscal and moral imperatives to repair the broken and unsustainable health care system which they believe violates many Americans’ basic human right to access quality, affordable health care. Anti-reform groups defined the controversy as another battle in the ongoing war to protect individual liberty from government expansion and inappropriate interventions in private markets. The narrative structure of the letters to the editor suggested that morality and values are likely more important than calculations of rational self-interest in the public’s formation of opinions on health care reform. The news media’s coverage was dominated by a ‘sportscaster’ frame, which frequently used sports analogies to describe the political process and focused narrowly on the strategies and maneuvers of political players, thereby marginalizing other stakeholders and failing to identify the central importance of values in the controversy. While no consistent patterns of bias were identified in coverage from the more ‘liberal’ news outlets, some evidence of bias in favor of the anti-reform narrative was found among the ‘conservative’ news sources owned by Rupert Murdoch. Finally, it was observed that melodrama—the framing of conflict as a battle between righteous heroes and evil villains to save or harm innocent victims— appears to be the dominant conflict frame across the political spectrum. However, those promoting the liberal pro-reform narrative exhibited a slightly better understanding of the complex structural and psychological sources, processes and dynamics of intergroup conflict than those promoting the conservative anti-reform narrative.
Loneliness, Gender, and Parasocial Interaction: A Uses and Gratifications Approach

This study investigates how unfulfilled interpersonal needs due to loneliness are met by mediated communication, specifically through parasocial interaction. Emotional (family and romantic), social, chronic, situational, and transient loneliness are differentiated. Different types of loneliness are expected to predict different uses of parasocial interaction, with gender serving as a moderator of these effects. Based on a college-student sample (N = 154), social loneliness was negatively related to the use of parasocial interaction. Gender interacted with family, romantic, and chronic loneliness in predicting parasocial interaction. For women, greater family loneliness predicted greater parasocial interaction, whereas for men the effect was negative. For men, greater chronic loneliness led to more parasocial interaction, whereas for women this effect was negative. Finally, for men, greater romantic loneliness was associated with less parasocial interaction, whereas for women this relationship was slightly positive. The findings were interpreted in terms of the uses and gratifications perspective, which relates interpersonal and mass communication.
Implementing Proactive Means-End Reasoning

This work focuses on self-adaptation as a prominent property for developing complex distributed software systems. Taking in account that notable approaches as the runtime goal model artifacts, this paper investigates how it is possible to provide goal models at run-time that do not contain tasks, i.e. the description of how to address goals, thus breaking the design-time tie up between Tasks and Goals, generally outcome of a means-end analysis. In this vision the system is up to decide how to combine its available Capabilities: the Proactive Means-End Analysis. The envisioned impact is to implement a goal-oriented form of self-adaptation where goal models can be injected at runtime. The paper also introduces MUSA, a Middleware for User-driven Service self-Adaptation.
Extending the Technology Acceptance Model for Mobile Government Systems

Mobile government systems allow users, ranging from individuals to businesses and government institutions, to have convenient access to information and government services. However, being able to assess users' acceptance to mobile government systems is one of the challenges that faces the adoption of these systems. Systems providers need to know in advance that systems would be accepted by the intended users; otherwise all the development effort would be wasted. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) has been widely used to assess the acceptance of new technologies. However, this model needs to be extended in order to accommodate the special nature of the mobile government systems. This paper proposes an extension to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) for mobile government systems based upon additional factors such as perceived ease of adoption, trust, and taking the system into use. The extended model also incorporates age, gender, education, mobile usage duration and profile as external variables in predicting system usage and acceptance. The paper also validates the model empirically based on a questionnaire that measures the constructs of the model and using a high fidelity prototype designed for Mobile-based Civil Registry System. The results showed strong positive correlations among all the studied constructs and therefore that all the constructs of the proposed Extended TAM (ETAM) are significantly positively related to predict users' acceptance of the mobile system. The results show furthermore that the most influential aspect on the future intention to use is the perceived value of the mobile system, and that the external variables of age and experience with the mobile system were proved not to be strong indicators of system use.
An intrinsic coordinate system for 3D face registration

We present a method to estimate, based on the horizontal symmetry, an intrinsic coordinate system of faces scanned in 3D. We show that this coordinate system provides an excellent basis for subsequent landmark positioning and model-based refinement such as Active Shape Models, outperforming other -explicit- landmark localisation methods including the commonly-used ICP+ASM approach.
Bone age assessment: a large scale comparison of the Greulich and Pyle, and Tanner and Whitehouse (TW2) methods

PURPOSE Comparison of bone age assessed using either the “atlas matching” method of Greulich and Pyle or the “point scoring system” of Tanner and Whitehouse (TW2). MATERIALS AND METHODS 362 consecutive “bone age” radiographs of the left hand and distal radius performed in a large provincial teaching hospital. Data were analysed using the “method comparison” statistical technique. Ten per cent of the radiographs were re-analysed to assess intra-observer variation. RESULTS The 95% confidence interval for the difference between the two methods was 2.28 to −1.52 years. Intra-observer variation was greater for the Greulich and Pyle method than for the TW2 method (95% confidence limit, −2.46 to 2.18 v −1.41 to 1.43). CONCLUSION The two methods of bone age assessment as used in clinical practice do not give equivalent estimates of bone age and we suggest that one method only (preferably the TW2) should be used when performing serial measurements on an individual patient.
The personalization of politics: Lessons from the Italian case

We examine how the traits and values of both candidates and voters contribute to political choice, using the five-factor model of traits and the Schwartz (1992) theory of basic personal values. 1,164 subjects reported their voting intention, their own traits and values, and those they perceived in the leader of one Italian political coalition (center-right or center-left). As hypothesized, voters simplified their personality judgments of politicians. Instead of the 5 trait factors and 10 basic values they employed in self-descriptions, they described the politicians using 2 trait factors (integrity and leadership) and 2 value dimensions (concern for others vs. self and excitement vs. caution). Logistic regressions revealed that voters own values predicted voting intention as hypothesized based on the policies advocated by the coalitions. Values trumped both own traits and demographic characteristics. The perceived traits and values of candidates accounted for additional variance in voting intention. The .
A segmentation-based lossless image coding method for high-resolution medical image compression

Lossless compression techniques are essential in archival and communication of medical images. Here, a new segmentation-based lossless image coding (SLIC) method is proposed, which is based on a simple but efficient region growing procedure. The embedded region growing procedure produces an adaptive scanning pattern for the image with the help of a very-few-bits-needed discontinuity index map. Along with this scanning pattern, an error image data part with a very small dynamic range is generated. Both the error image data and the discontinuity index map data parts are then encoded by the Joint Bi-level Image Experts Group (JBIG) method. The SLIC method resulted in, on the average, lossless compression to about 1.6 b/pixel from 8 b, and to about 2.9 b/pixel from 10 b with a database of ten high-resolution digitized chest and breast images. In comparison with direct coding by JBIG, Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), hierarchical interpolation (HINT), and two-dimensional Burg prediction plus Huffman error coding methods, the SLIC method performed better by 4% to 28% on the database used.
Factor Structure of Opportunity to Learn for Students with and without Disabilities

Opportunity to Learn (OTL) stems from the basic premise that there is an important relationship between the quality and intensity of classroom instruction and students' levels of academic success. For many students with disabilities, an emphasis on OTL has become national priority, yet measuring its impact is a complex challenge. The first purpose of this study was to explore the factorial validity of OTL using indicators found in the 2005 4 th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The study entailed confirmatory factor analyses for potential OTL factors including teacher preparation, professional development, classroom activities, and access to technology. Separate factor analyses were conducted using the reading and mathematics datasets. The authors then looked at the degree to which OTL factors influenced NAEP estimates of ability for both students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers. The following three OTL factors differentially predicted student scores: classroom activities (reading), student constructed projects (reading), and using calculators for instruction (mathematics). For the remaining three reading factors and seven mathematics factors, there were no differences in the relationship between the factors and scores for students with and without disabilities.
Subtle and blatant prejudice in Western Europe

This paper develops, measures, and tests two types of intergroup prejudice—blatant and subtle. Blatant prejudice is the traditional, often studied form; it is hot, close and direct. Subtle prejudice is the modern form; it is cool, distant and indirect. Using data from seven independent national samples from western Europe, we constructed 10-item scales in four languages to measure each of these varieties of prejudice. We report the properties, structure and correlates of both scales across the seven samples, and make initial checks on their validity. The cross-nationally consistent results support the value of the blatant-subtle distinction as two varieties of prejudice. While they share many correlates, their distinctive differences suggest better specification of these correlates of prejudice. And the blatant-subtle distinction also aids in more precise specification of the effects of prejudice on attitudes toward immigrants. The paper closes with a normative interpretation of Subtle Prejudice.
A comparative study: function approximation with LWPR and XCSF

Function approximation is an important tool that is frequently used in numerical mathematics and engineering. The most challenging approximation problems arise, when even the function class is unknown and the surface has to be approximated online from incoming samples. One way to achieve good approximations of complex non-linear functions is to cluster the input space into small patches, apply linear models in each niche, and recombine these models via a weighted sum. While it is rather simple to optimally fit a linear model to given data, it is fairly complex to find a reasonable structuring of the input space in order to exploit linearities in the underlying function. We compare two algorithms that are able to approximate multi-dimensional, non-linear functions online. The XCSF Learning Classifier System is a modified version of XCS, which is a genetics-based machine learning algorithm. Locally Weighted Projection Regression (LWPR) is a statistics-based machine learning technique that is widely used for function approximation, particularly in robotics. The two algorithms are compared on three benchmark functions by monitoring several performance related measures over the learning trials. Moreover, an illustration of the final input space structuring sheds light on the clustering capabilities.