Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling Player Experience for Content Creation

In this paper, we use computational intelligence techniques to built quantitative models of player experience for a platform game. The models accurately predict certain key affective states of the player based on both gameplay metrics that relate to the actions performed by the player in the game, and on parameters of the level that was played. For the experiments presented here, a version of the classic Super Mario Bros game is enhanced with parameterizable level generation and gameplay metrics collection. Player pairwise preference data is collected using forced choice questionnaires, and the models are trained using this data and neuroevolutionary preference learning of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). The derived models will be used to optimize design parameters for particular types of player experience, allowing the designer to automatically generate unique levels that induce the desired experience for the player.
Bias in attending to emotional facial expressions: Anxiety and visual search efficiency

There has been much controversy around the relationship between anxiety and attentional processing of threat-related information. The purpose of this study was to examine how threatening facial expressions affect attentional processing, according to the level of trait anxiety. Through visual search tasks, two different components of attentional bias to threat were investigated: engagement and disengagement of attention from an angry face. Two main results were found. First, reaction times (RTs) were slower in detecting the absence of a discrepant face in the all angry-display conditions rather than other expression conditions; however, there was no difference between anxiety groups. Second, the difference in search efficiency for the angry versus happy target was significant within the high-anxiety group but not within the low-anxiety group. The results suggest that the detection process for angry faces is more efficient for highly anxious people. On the other hand, the time to disengage attention from angry faces was not associated with anxiety level. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Deglacial whole‐ocean δ13C change estimated from 480 benthic foraminiferal records

Terrestrial carbon storage is dramatically decreased during glacial periods due to cold temperatures, increased aridity, and the presence of large ice sheets on land. Most of the carbon released by the terrestrial biosphere is stored in the ocean, where the light isotopic signature of terrestrial carbon is observed as a 0.32–0.7‰ depletion in benthic foraminiferal δ13C. The wide range in estimated δ13C change results from the use of different subsets of benthic δ13C data and different methods of weighting the mean δ13C by volume. We present a more precise estimate of glacial-interglacial δ13C change of marine dissolved inorganic carbon using benthic Cibicidoides spp. δ13C records from 480 core sites (more than 3 times as many sites as previous studies). We divide the ocean into eight regions to generate linear regressions of regional δ13C versus depth for the Late Holocene (0–6 ka) and Last Glacial Maximum (19–23 ka) and estimate a mean δ13C decrease of 0.38 ± 0.08‰ (2σ) for 0.5–5 km. Estimating large uncertainty ranges for δ13C change in the top 0.5 km, below 5 km, and in the Southern Ocean, we calculate a whole-ocean change of 0.34 ± 0.19‰. This implies a terrestrial carbon change that is consistent with recent vegetation model estimates of 330–694 Gt C. Additionally, we find that a well-constrained surface ocean δ13C change is essential for narrowing the uncertainty range of estimated whole-ocean δ13C change.
Vascular Dysfunction as Target Organ Damage in Animal Models of Hypertension

Endothelial dysfunction is one of the main characteristics of chronic hypertension and it is characterized by impaired nitric oxide (NO) bioactivity determined by increased levels of reactive oxygen species. Endothelial function is usually evaluated by measuring the vasodilation induced by the local NO production stimulated by external mechanical or pharmacological agent. These vascular reactivity tests may be carried out in different models of experimental hypertension such as NO-deficient rats, spontaneously hypertensive rats, salt-sensitive rats, and many others. Wire myograph and pressurized myograph are the principal methods used for vascular studies. Usually, increasing concentrations of the vasodilator acetylcholine are added in cumulative manner to perform endothelium-dependent concentration-response curves. Analysis of vascular mechanics is relevant to identify arterial stiffness. Both endothelial dysfunction and vascular stiffness have been shown to be associated with increased cardiovascular risk.
Knowledge Combination in Graphical Multiagent Model

A graphical multiagent model (GMM) represents a joint distribution over the behavior of a set of agents. One source of knowledge about agents' behavior may come from gametheoretic analysis, as captured by several graphical game representations developed in recent years. GMMs generalize this approach to express arbitrary distributions, based on game descriptions or other sources of knowledge bearing on beliefs about agent behavior. To illustrate the flexibility of GMMs, we exhibit game-derived models that allow probabilistic deviation from equilibrium, as well as models based on heuristic action choice. We investigate three different methods of integrating these models into a single model representing the combined knowledge sources. To evaluate the predictive performance of the combined model, we treat as actual outcome the behavior produced by a reinforcement learning process. We find that combining the two knowledge sources, using any of the methods, provides better predictions than either source alone. Among the combination methods, mixing data outperforms the opinion pool and direct update methods investigated in this empirical trial.
Activation of Cutaneous Protein Kinase Cα Induces Keratinocyte Apoptosis and Intraepidermal Inflammation by Independent Signaling Pathways

Skin keratinocytes are major mediators of host immune responses. The skin is also a target for immunologically based inflammation in many pathological states. Activation of protein kinase C (PKC) can induce cutaneous inflammation, but the precise role of each of six cutaneous PKC isoforms (α, δ, ε, η, ζ, μ) that regulate normal skin homeostasis or contribute to skin pathology has not been clarified. We generated transgenic mice that overexpress PKCα in the basal layer of the epidermis and the outer root sheath of hair follicles under the regulation of the bovine keratin 5 promoter. K5-PKCα transgenic mice exhibit severe intraepidermal neutrophilic inflammation and disruption of the epidermis and upper hair follicles when treated topically with 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA). Both TPA and UVB cause apoptosis in transgenic skin, but only TPA evokes intraepidermal inflammation. TPA also induces apoptosis in cultured transgenic keratinocytes, and this is prevented by an AP-1 dominant-negative construct. However, inhibiting AP-1 in vivo does not abrogate intraepidermal inflammation. Transcripts for specific cytokines and chemokines are elevated in TPA-treated cultured transgenic keratinocytes, and conditioned culture medium from these cells promotes neutrophil migration in vitro. Chemokine expression and neutrophil migration are not diminished by inhibiting AP-1. Thus, PKCα activation induces keratinocyte apoptosis via an AP-1-dependent pathway and mediates chemokine induction and intraepidermal inflammation independently. This model system will be useful to define specific chemokines regulated by PKCα that promote intraepidermal neutrophilic inflammation, a condition that characterizes several human cutaneous diseases such as pustular psoriasis and acute generalized exanthematous pustulosis.
Stories as indicators of practical knowledge: Analysing project workers' talk from a study of participation in a youth inclusion programme

The paper deals with the issue of practical knowledge for enabling participation. Participation as a strategy for change is widespread in community, health and human service contexts. Research to date has focused on the mechanisms of beneficiaries' participation (e.g. identity, empowerment, activity, gender, space). However, participation as an engagement strategy is action oriented and requires high levels of interaction between those creating the conditions for participation and those participating. These conditions need to be continuously adjusted and outcomes are often unpredictable. This process of ‘working with’ is often dealt with as a technical issue and captured in metaphorical language. Less emphasis has been given to the type of knowledge modalities that might be necessary in order to enable participation. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of participation in a youth inclusion programme the paper explores the role of stories as potential indicators of practical knowledge. The paper argues that enabling young people's participation requires intuition and imagination, patience and perseverance, and judgement for acting under uncertainty. It concludes that stories only partially fulfil their potential as indicators of such knowledge modalities.
Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems ( PACIS ) 2010 Emotional Trust and Cognitive Distrust : From A Cognitive-Affective Personality System Theory Perspective

The objective of this research is to identify the role of trust and distrust in online shopping mall business. To differentiate the status of distrust from low trust, cognitive-affective personality system theory was applied, through which five types of psychological units were proposed. The research model proposed seven hypotheses showing the processes through which the features of an online shopping mall – truthfulness and effectiveness of the website affect trust, distrust levels, and behavior of individual customers. Assuming that trust and distrust are in psychologically different stages, the study further proposed that distrust, which emerges and diminishes rather cognitively, is the antecedent of trust. Then trust, which emerges and diminishes as an emotion-based variable, is posited as the antecedent of customer loyalty. To validate, a survey was conducted with 310 Korean online shopping mall users. Results show that six out of seven hypotheses are supported. From the result, we draw following discussions. First, trust and distrust are different in terms of their psychological status, and trust seems to be the more critical factor in the online business context. Second, both effectiveness and truthfulness are found to be important sources of customer loyalty. However, unlike our expectation, only effectiveness showed a direct association with customer loyalty while truthfulness had an indirect impact through trust.
On the Performance of the Energy-Efficient Split FIFO-Buffer Architecture for the Medium Access Controller of IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Rapid growth of high rate data transmissions in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) stimulates the ratification of IEEE 802.11 standard and its successors. Energy Conservation (EC) is an important issue in the design of mobile devices that are characterized by limited battery energy. We ever proposed a Split FIFO-Buffer Architecture (SFBA) for the Medium Access Controller (MAC) of the 802.11 WLAN to achieve EC. In this paper, necessary interface functions for the SFBA are defined and circuits are designed using the VHDL codes. An Altera software is employed to justify the functionality and evaluate the performance. To further exploit the advantages resulting from splitting, we also present an MAC with Extended SFBA (ESFBA), in which both the FIFO and the Buffer in the SFBA are extensively divided into two parts with equal capacity. Simulation results show that by using the SFBA and ESFBA, significant power consumption of the FIFO in a conventional architecture can be saved. It is found that EC capability of the SFBA and ESFBA depends on the traffic characteristics.
Optimal Contraction Theorem for Exploration–Exploitation Tradeoff in Search and Optimization

Global optimization process can often be divided into two subprocesses: exploration and exploitation. The tradeoff between exploration and exploitation (T:Er&Ei) is crucial in search and optimization, having a great effect on global optimization performance, e.g., accuracy and convergence speed of optimization algorithms. In this paper, definitions of exploration and exploitation are first given based on information correlation among samplings. Then, some general indicators of optimization hardness are presented to characterize problem difficulties. By analyzing a typical contraction-based three-stage optimization process, optimal contraction theorem is presented to show that T:Er&Ei depends on the optimization hardness of problems to be optimized. T:Er&Ei will gradually lean toward exploration as optimization hardness increases. In the case of great optimization hardness, exploration-dominated optimizers outperform exploitation-dominated optimizers. In particular, random sampling will become an outstanding optimizer when optimization hardness reaches a certain degree. Besides, the optimal number of contraction stages increases with optimization hardness. In an optimal contraction way, the whole sampling cost is evenly distributed in all contraction stages, and each contraction takes the same contracting ratio. Furthermore, the characterization of optimization hardness is discussed in detail. The experiments with several typical global optimization algorithms used to optimize three groups of test problems validate the correctness of the conclusions made by T:Er&Ei analysis.
Extracting bilingual collocations from non-aligned parallel corpora

This paper proposes a new method to find correspondences of uninterrupted collocations from Japanese-English bilingual corpora without sentence-to-sentence alignment. Uninterrupted collocations in English such as “once again”, “give up”, or “gross national product” handled as a single word or a compound word in Japanese, can be automatically extracted with corresponding Japanese words using word co-occurrence frequencies in both corpora. The method consists of two stages. First, English and Japanese collocations are extracted separately from given corpora. After successive word units, which become collocation candidates, are collected by using n -gram statistics of each word, two kinds of entropy values, after-unit and before-unit are calculated for each unit to select word units surpassing thresholds as uninterrupted collocations. Second, a correspondent translation of each uninterrupted English collocation is extracted from the Japanese corpus by calculating correlation values between the target collocation and Japanese words or collocations which co-occur in the given corpora and using a basic English to Japanese word unit dictionary. Experiments are executed on economic articles of Asahi Newspaper as corpora. A Japanese word unit for each extracted English collocation is automatically obtained with more than 70 % precision rate, whereas the rate was about 40 % if only word-to-word correspondence is used.
Comparison of the Indirect and "Implemented" Direct Complement-Fixation Test in the Diagnosis of Turkey Ornithosis.

The increased number of reports on the public health importance of turkey ornithosis has stimulated investigations of serological methods for the diagnosis of this infection. In 1947, Rice (1) showed that heat inactivated turkey anti-pullorum sera failed to fix guinea-pig complement with S. pullorum antigen. The testing of non inactivated sera being unsatisfactory because of their anticomplementary and non-specific properties, Rice developed an indirect complement-fixation method for the demonstration of avian serum anti- bodies (2). Similar types of tests were adapted to the detection of ornithosis avian antibodies by Karrer, Meyer and Eddie (3) and also by Hilleman, Haig and Hel-mold (4).
The Prevalence of Patellofemoral Joint Disorders with Surgical Endpoint

The frequency of exercise-related injuries for physical activities and sports that have specifically lead to surgical intervention are rarely reported, especially regarding the patellofemoral articulation. Medical records from 1992 to 2005 of a multisite, urban-based hospital serving both large urban and rural populations were analyzed retrospectively. Injury data were presented by age, gender, and sport of choice. Significant (χ2 = (6,519) = 31.097, p < . 001) differences were found between age categories (adolescent, teenage, and adult) for the injuries leading to surgery. Significant gender (χ2 (3,519) = 18.064, p < . 001) differences were also found. This study presented a 13-year retrospective analysis of injuries to the patellofemoral joint leading to surgical endpoint, and found age and gender to significantly influence the frequency of injuries. Studies suggest that gender differences have not declined in response to the increasing number and experience of female athletes.
Pilot-based channel estimation for FBMC/OQAM systems under strong frequency selectivity

Scattered pilot-aided channel estimation in offset QAM-based filter bank multicarrier (FBMC/OQAM) systems has so far been only considered for channels of mild frequency selectivity. In more demanding scenarios, the classical auxiliary pilot (AP) idea has been shown to result in severe error floors. In this paper, a novel pilot-aided channel estimation method is developed which for the first time extends the applicability of the AP idea to highly frequency selective channels. The development relies on a Taylor series approximation of the signal model, which is able to accurately and concisely describe such scenarios. The obtained channel estimate can be viewed as a linear combination of the outputs of multiple parallel analysis filter banks each employing a derivative of the original prototype filter. The reported simulation results corroborate the analysis, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method in estimating channels of strong frequency selectivity.
Angiopoietin-2 Serum Levels Improve Noninvasive Fibrosis Staging in Chronic Hepatitis C: A Fibrogenic-Angiogenic Link

Aims Accurate liver fibrosis staging is crucial for the management of chronic hepatitis C (CHC). The invasiveness and cost burden of liver biopsy have driven the search for new noninvasive biomarkers of fibrosis. Based on the link between serum angiopoietin-1 and 2 levels and CHC progression, we aimed to determine the value of these angiogenic factors as noninvasive biomarkers of liver fibrosis. Methods Serum levels of angiopoietin-1 and -2 were measured by ELISA in 108 CHC patients who underwent pretreatment liver biopsy. The correlation between angiopoietins and clinical and demographic variables with liver fibrosis was analyzed by univariate regression. Significant factors were then subjected to multivariate analysis, from which we constructed a novel noninvasive liver fibrosis index (AngioScore), whose performance was validated in an independent series of 71 CHC patients. The accuracy of this model was compared with other documented fibrosis algorithms by De Long test. Results Angiopoietins correlated significantly with hepatic fibrosis; however, only angiopoietin-2 was retained in the final model, which also included age, platelets, AST, INR, and GGT. The model was validated and behaved considerably better than other fibrosis indices in discriminating all, significant, moderate and severe liver fibrosis (0.886, 0.920, 0.923). Using clinically relevant cutoffs, we classified CHC patients by discarding significant fibrosis and diagnosing moderate and severe fibrosis with greater accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Conclusions Our novel noninvasive liver fibrosis model, based on serum angiopoietin-2 levels, outperforms other indices and should help substantially in managing CHC and monitoring long-term follow-up prognosis.
How to Extract Knowledge from Professional E-Mails

Computer mediated communication is ubiquitous in Software design projects. Email is used for project coordination, but also for design, implementation and test. Especially with currents agile development methods, it is very common to interact through computer meditated communication like email, instant messaging and other collaborative tools in order to express functional needs, notify of issues and take appropriate decisions. In this paper we propose a Knowledge Trace Retrieval (KTR) system. It addresses the problem of retrieving elements of problem solving and design rationale inside business emails from a project. Even if knowledge management tools and practices are well spread in industry, they are rarely used for small projects. Our system aims at helping user retrieve traces of problem solving knowledge in large corpus of email from a past project. The framework and methodology is based on enhanced context (project data, user competencies and profiles), and use machine learning technics and ranking algorithm. Keywords-Knowledge Management; Traceability; Problem Solving; e-mails; project memory
Effects of upward and downward social comparison on mood states.

The impact of upward and downward social comparison on the mood states of high and low self-esteem persons was examined in a simulated support group setting. Subjects received bogus information indicating that a “group member” was either (a) facing minor problems adjusting to college and having difficulty coping with them (downward comparison condition), (b) facing minor problems and adjusting well (upward comparison), or (c) facing serious problems and coping relatively well with them. Results indicated that the downward comparison information improved the mood states of the low self-esteem subjects, but had little effect on the high self-esteem group. The opposite pattern of results was obtained in the upward comparison condition. In addition, both high and low self-esteem persons were encouraged by the information indicating that another person was coping successfully with rather severe problems. Results are discussed in terms of implications for social comparison theory and support groups.
Availability of iron from iron‐storage proteins to marine phytoplankton

We examined the bioavailability of iron‐storage proteins—including representatives of maxi‐ and miniferritins— to various species of marine phytoplankton. Both eukaryotic and prokaryotic species were able to grow rapidly with horse spleen ferritin (HoSF) or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)‐binding proteins from starved cells (Dps) from Trichodesmium erythraeum as the sole Fe source in the medium. In the presence of ethylenediaminetetra‐acetic acid (EDTA), cells grown with HoSF or Dps maintained exponential growth rates similar to those obtained at the same concentration of FeEDTA. Growth was also observed in the absence of EDTA, showing that a complexing agent is not necessary for Fe availability. The bioavailability of Fe in these storage proteins apparently results from a spontaneous release of Fe(III) to solution with an effective first‐order rate constant ~0.15 d−1. Genes coding for iron‐storage proteins are common in DNA samples from seawater. In iron‐deprived marine ecosystems, iron‐storage proteins may be important constituents of the recycled iron pool and modulate its availability to phytoplankton.