Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Novel Biodegradable Polyester Poly(Propylene Succinate): Synthesis and Application in the Preparation of Solid Dispersions and Nanoparticles of a Water-Soluble Drug

Poly(propylene succinate) (PPSu) polymers of average molecular weights from 2,800 to 13,100 g/mol were synthesized and characterized with regard to crystallinity, thermal properties, and cytocompatibility. Higher molecular weight samples exhibited lower degree of crystallinity and melted at lower temperatures. Melting of the polymer appeared to begin at 38°C. PPSu cytocompatibility was investigated based on human umbilical vein endothelial cells viability in the presence of increasing concentrations of polymer, and it was found that PPSu exhibited comparable cytocompatibility with poly(dl-lactide). The feasibility of applying PPSu as a drug carrier was shown for the first time, as solid dispersions and nanoparticles of sodium fluvastatin based in PPSu were prepared. Drug release rates decreased with increasing the molecular weight of PPSu in both solid dispersions and nanoparticles. For dispersions prepared from PPSu of the same molecular weight, drug release rates increased with drug loading. It appears that PPSu applicability as a drug carrier warrants further consideration.
A novel model for home energy management system based on Internet of Things

Under the environment of smart grid, residential users play an extremely key to improve the efficiency of the power grid. It is necessary to motivate residential users to participate in managing their household appliances. However, it is a considerable challenge for residential users to find an optimal scheduling scheme of household appliances by themselves. In this paper, a novel model for home energy management system (HEMS) based on Internet of things (IoT) is proposed to solve this challenge. The model not only utilizes radio frequency technology (RFID) to achieve full automatic control of household appliances, but also employs renewable energy, storage battery and plug-in electric vehicles (PEV). Considering various users' demands, the model can set four kinds of demands for household appliances via terminal appliances. To provide a higher users' satisfaction, two types of satisfactory functions are presented. The model adopts the time interval optimization strategy to find an optimal scheme, and the objective function minimizes the users' electricity costs as well as maximizes the users' satisfaction. Meanwhile the discrete multi-objective bacterial colony chemotaxis algorithm (DMOBCC) is adopted to solve this problem. Case studies are implemented to demonstrate the time interval optimization strategy and simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Did I Forget to Lock the Door? The Link between Prospective Memory Failures and Doubt in the Compulsion to Check

Previous research has demonstrated links between prospective memory failures and checking compulsions. The findings suggest that experiences with prospective memory failures may contribute to the intrusive doubts that tasks were not completed that instigate checking compulsions. However, the link between prospective memory and intrusive doubts has yet to be empirically investigated. Accordingly, the present study focused on examining whether prospective memory failures are related to doubting, as well as whether doubting mediates the relationship between prospective memory and checking compulsions. Undergraduate students completed self-report measures of checking compulsions, doubting, prospective memory and retrospective memory. Participants also completed objective tests of prospective memory and retrospective memory. Prospective memory failures and excessive doubting showed consistent correlations. Two of three objective tests of prospective memory and one of two measures of confidence in performance on prospective memory tests showed significant correlations with checking. Tests of mediation showed that the links between checking compulsions, objective prospective memory test failures and confidence in prospective memory performance were mediated by doubting. The results thereby supported the hypothesis that experiences with prospective memory failures contribute to the intrusive doubts that instigate checking.
Assessing Belief in Lunar Effects: Known-Groups Validation

It was hypothesized that police officers and psychiatric professionals would endorse more items indicative of belief in lunar effects than members of the general public. This hypothesis was tested by having 36 psychiatric personnel, 33 police officers, and 60 pedestrians indicate agreement with each of the 9 items on the Belief in Lunar Effects (BILE) scale. Results provided partial confirmation of this hypothesis. Police officers evidenced more belief in lunar effects than either psychiatric personnel or pedestrians, whose degree of belief did not differ.
“As You're Writing, You Have these Epiphanies”

This study draws on the perceptions and experiences of upper-division students enrolled in writing-intensive (WI) classes in their majors at a large state university. During extended interviews, students reported confidence in dealing with the writing requirements of their majors and predicted success in future job-related writing situations. The primary bases for this confidence are their experiences with a significant number of WI assignments and their ability to engage a variety of resources and use the knowledge thereby obtained. Students particularly valued research-related writing assignments in the major as opportunities for professional skills development and identity building. The authors discuss findings as they relate to the ideologies of writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines. The authors argue for greater attention to students' readiness to make connections across assignments, courses, and disciplines; they also suggest greater attention to a field's inquiry methods and strategies for solving problems.
Expectation Maximization for Sum-Product Networks as Exponential Family Mixture Models

Sum-Product Networks (SPNs) are a recent class of probabilistic models which encode very large mixtures compactly by exploiting efficient reuse of computation in inference. Crucially, in SPNs the cost of inference scales linearly with the number of edges $E$ but the encoded mixture size $C$ can be exponentially larger than $E$. In this paper we obtain an efficient ($O(E)$) implementation of Expectation Maximization (EM) for SPNs which is the first to include EM updates both on mixture coefficients (corresponding to SPN weights) and mixture components (corresponding to SPN leaves). In particular, the update on mixture components translates to a weighted maximum likelihood problem on leaf distributions, and can be solved exactly when leaves are in the exponential family. This opens new application areas for SPNs, such as learning large mixtures of tree graphical models. We validate the algorithm on a synthetic but non trivial "soft-parity" distribution with $2^{n}$ modes encoded by a SPN with only $O(n)$ edges.
The Long Arm of Warm Parenting

Does adulthood physical health continue to reflect parental support and warmth received during childhood? Although previous research supports this continuity, I examine this question according to a sex-matching perspective. Drawing on representative cross-sectional data featuring detailed measures of maternal and paternal warmth (1995 National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States), I focus on adults who came of age in traditional two-parent households containing a biological mother and father. Across three physical health outcomes, I find strong support for sex-matching, in that paternal warmth during childhood is usually more important to male adulthood health whereas maternal warmth tends to be more important to female adulthood health. Sex-matching effects are especially evident for physical health difficulties (number of chronic health conditions and functional limitations). These findings provide a new lens through which to view physical health disparities among today’s middle- to late-aged adults who came of age in traditional households.
Inspection Times and the Selection Task: Are They Relevant?

Five experiments are reported based upon Evans'(1996) inspection time paradigm in which subjects are required to solve computer-presented Wason Selection Task problems while simultaneously using a mouse to indicate which card is currently under consideration. It had previously been found that selected cards were inspected for considerably longer than were non-selected cards, and this was taken as support for the existence of pre-conscious heuristics that direct attention towards relevant aspects of a problem. The first experiment reported here fully replicated this effect. However, by systematically varying the task format in subsequent experiments, the effect was found to diminish, disappear, or even reverse. The change in effect size and direction was not accompanied by any systematic variations in the subjects’ card choices, indicating that the changes in taskformat had not altered the operation of the relevance-determining heuristics. On balance, it is suggested that the inspection time effect appears to be artefactual, and the inspection time paradigm therefore does not constitute satisfactory evidence for the existence of pre-conscious heuristics.
Score-informed transcription for automatic piano tutoring

In this paper, a score-informed transcription method for automatic piano tutoring is proposed. The method takes as input a recording made by a student which may contain mistakes, along with a reference score. The recording and the aligned synthesized score are automatically transcribed using the non-negative matrix factorization algorithm for multi-pitch estimation and hidden Markov models for note tracking. By comparing the two transcribed recordings, common errors occurring in transcription algorithms such as extra octave notes can be suppressed. The result is a piano-roll description which shows the mistakes made by the student along with the correctly played notes. Evaluation was performed on six pieces recorded using a Disklavier piano, using both manually-aligned and automatically-aligned scores as an input. Results comparing the system output with ground-truth annotation of the original recording reach a weighted F-measure of 93%, indicating that the proposed method can successfully analyze the student's performance.
A thiol-reactive 18F-labeling agent, N-[2-(4-18F-fluorobenzamido)ethyl]maleimide, and synthesis of RGD peptide-based tracer for PET imaging of alpha v beta 3 integrin expression.

UNLABELLED The cell adhesion molecule integrin alpha v beta 3 plays a key role in tumor angiogenesis and metastasis. A series of 18F-labeled RGD peptides have been developed for PET of integrin expression based on primary amine-reactive prosthetic groups. In this study we introduced a new method of labeling RGD peptides through a thiol-reactive synthon, N-[2-(4-18F-fluorobenzamido)ethyl]maleimide (18F-FBEM). METHODS 18F-FBEM was synthesized by coupling N-succinimidyl 4-18F-fluorobenzoate (18F-SFB) with N-(2-aminoethyl)maleimide. After high-pressure liquid chromatography purification, it was allowed to react with thiolated RGD peptides, and the resulting tracers were subjected to receptor-binding assay, in vivo metabolic stability assessment, biodistribution, and microPET studies in murine xenograft models. RESULTS Conjugation of monomeric and dimeric sulfhydryl-RGD peptides with 18F-FBEM was achieved in high yields (85% +/- 5% nondecay-corrected on the basis of 18F-FBEM). The radiochemical purity of the 18F-labeled peptides was >98% and the specific activity was 100 approximately 150 TBq/mmol. Noninvasive microPET and direct tissue sampling experiments demonstrated that both 18F-FBEM-SRGD (RGD monomer) and 18F-FBEM-SRGD2 (RGD dimer) had integrin-specific tumor uptake in subcutaneous U87MG glioma and orthotopic MDA-MB-435 breast cancer xenografts. CONCLUSION The new tracer 18F-FBEM-SRGD2 was synthesized with high specific activity via 18F-FBEM and the tracer exhibited high receptor-binding affinity, tumor-targeting efficacy, metabolic stability, as well as favorable in vivo pharmacokinetics. The new synthon 18F-FBEM developed in this study will also be useful for radiolabeling of other thiolated biomolecules.
Chitinases Are Essential for Sexual Development but Not Vegetative Growth in Cryptococcus neoformans

ABSTRACT Cryptococcus neoformans is an opportunistic pathogen that mainly infects immunocompromised individuals. The fungal cell wall of C. neoformans is an excellent target for antifungal therapies since it is an essential organelle that provides cell structure and integrity. Importantly, it is needed for localization or attachment of known virulence factors, including melanin, phospholipase, and the polysaccharide capsule. The polysaccharide fraction of the cryptococcal cell wall is a complex structure composed of chitin, chitosan, and glucans. Chitin is an indispensable component of many fungal cell walls that contributes significantly to cell wall strength and integrity. Fungal cell walls are very dynamic, constantly changing during cell division and morphogenesis. Hydrolytic enzymes, such as chitinases, have been implicated in the maintenance of cell wall plasticity and separation of the mother and daughter cells at the bud neck during vegetative growth in yeast. In C. neoformans we identified four predicted endochitinases, CHI2, CHI21, CHI22, and CHI4, and a predicted exochitinase, hexosaminidase, HEX1. Enzymatic analysis indicated that Chi2, Chi22, and Hex1 actively degraded chitinoligomeric substrates. Chi2 and Hex1 activity was associated mostly with the cellular fraction, and Chi22 activity was more prominent in the supernatant. The enzymatic activity of Hex1 increased when grown in media containing only N-acetylglucosamine as a carbon source, suggesting that its activity may be inducible by chitin degradation products. Using a quadruple endochitinase deletion strain, we determined that the endochitinases do not affect the growth or morphology of C. neoformans during asexual reproduction. However, mating assays indicated that Chi2, Chi21, and Chi4 are each involved in sexual reproduction. In summary, the endochitinases were found to be dispensable for routine vegetative growth but not sexual reproduction.
EVALUATION OF NEW PACKAGING FORMATS FOR DRY-CURED MEAT PRODUCTS USING CONJOINT ANALYSIS: AN APPLICATION TO DRY-CURED IBERIAN HAM

Dry-cured Iberian pork products have long been a traditional and highly appreciated delicacy in Spain, and because of their excellent sensorial and nutritional qualities, their market is now growing rapidly worldwide. They are usually marketed in a whole-piece format or sliced in vacuum-packed trays, but both of these formats present problems for the consumer (difficulty of slicing the whole piece, loss of sensory properties once the vacuum-packed tray is opened …). This paper uses conjoint analysis to examine a new packaging format (called “slice slab”) for dry-cured meat products that aims to overcome these problems. The product selected for analysis was Iberian dry-cured ham, as it is the most frequently consumed Iberian pork product. Data were collected by means of a survey conducted with 320 Spanish consumers from January to May 2010. Overall, the consumers preferred Iberian mast-fed ham, conventionally sliced and at the lowest price (5 €/100 g). Three well-defined preference-based clusters were identified: traditional consumers (n = 114), price-insensitive consumers (n = 113) and innovative consumers (n = 93). Analysis of the clusters indicated that sliced slab ham may be an interesting alternative for the most innovative consumers, who are willing to pay a premium for this packaging format. Practical Applications This study has presented a methodological guideline to analyze the importance of packaging in shaping consumers' preferences. In this context, the use of conjoint analysis may have a great potential for testing and evaluating both the acceptance and the economic feasibility of new packaging formats in the food market. Its results can also be used for a preference-based segmentation, which would allow target markets to be identified in which consumers' willingness-to-pay can be evaluated beforehand. The present work may therefore constitute a starting point in the search for new forms of presentation for both cured meat products and other foodstuffs that will be well accepted by the consumer. In particular, it opens the way for further research into sensory analysis in the context of testing and improving in the presentation of new foodstuff formats.
Constructing Holland’s Hexagon in South Africa

The purpose of this study was to document the development of the South African Career Interest Inventory and to examine the structural validity of Holland’s circular/hexagonal model in the South African context. The validity of Holland’s model was investigated in a sample of 985 university students in Study 1 and 175 university students and adults in Study 2. The randomization test of hypothesized order relations and covariance structure modeling were used to investigate the fit of a tight circular ordering and four circumplex models. The randomization test found good fit for the tight circular ordering in both the studies. Covariance structure modeling demonstrated unsatisfactory fit across the four circumplex models in Study 1 but satisfactory fit in Study 2. The results suggest that the structural validity of Holland’s circular ordering model in South Africa is tenable. Recommendations for research and practice are presented.
Social status versus coping as motivation for alcohol use

The goal of this study was to examine whether there are two distinct groups of adolescent alcohol users: (1) low-level adolescent alcohol users who may be motivated by social status and (2) high-level users who are expected to be more concerned with coping. Social status is measured by the sociometric variables popularity and centrality. Variables that indicate a need to cope are depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem. Using waves I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), support for these different etiological processes are found across high and lower level alcohol users. Among more normative (low level) alcohol users, social status plays a stronger role in predicting alcohol use than for more problematic (high level) alcohol users. For the high-level group, alcohol use appears to be a way to cope with depression. However, lower levels of self-esteem are only related to increased alcohol use among adolescents in the low-level group.
The Coliseum Immersive Teleconferencing System

We describe Coliseum, a desktop system for immersive teleconferencing. Five cameras attached to a desktop LCD monitor are directed at a participant. View synthesis methods produce arbitrary-perspective renderings of the participant from these video streams, and transmit them to other participants. Combining these renderings in a shared synthetic environment gives the illusion of having remote participants interacting in a common space.
Comparative Analysis of Neural Network Training Methods in Real-time Radiotherapy

Background: The motions of body and tumor in some regions such as chest during radiotherapy treatments are one of the major concerns protecting normal tissues against high doses. By using real-time radiotherapy technique, it is possible to increase the accuracy of delivered dose to the tumor region by means of tracing markers on the body of patients. Objective: This study evaluates the accuracy of some artificial intelligence methods including neural network and those of combination with genetic algorithm as well as particle swarm optimization (PSO) estimating tumor positions in real-time radiotherapy. Method: One hundred recorded signals of three external markers were used as input data. The signals from 3 markers thorough 10 breathing cycles of a patient treated via a cyber-knife for a lung tumor were used as data input. Then, neural network method and its combination with genetic or PSO algorithms were applied determining the tumor locations using MATLAB© software program. Results: The accuracies were obtained 0.8%, 12% and 14% in neural network, genetic and particle swarm optimization algorithms, respectively. Conclusion: The internal target volume (ITV) should be determined based on the applied neural network algorithm on training steps.
Evaluating a Behaviourally Based Parent Training Group: Outcomes for Parents, Children and Health Visitors

Seven mothers, identified by their health visitor as having conduct disordered pre-school children, participated in a behaviourally based parent training group. Two health visitors and a child care social worker also attended the group. The group members were taught skills in behaviour observation, reinforcement and goal setting. The results showed that the health visitors were able to identify children with conduct disorders and that the mothers of most of the children were themselves experiencing mental health difficulties. Participation in the group led to improvements for both the children and their mothers. The mothers found the group a satisfactory treatment method and the health visitors and social worker developed skills in the behavioural management of conduct disorders. The findings are considered in relation to the three components of the Welsh Strategic Intent and Direction for the NHS (health gain, people centred and resource effective).
Computational and Performance Aspects of PCA-Based Face-Recognition Algorithms

Algorithms based on principal component analysis (PCA) form the basis of numerous studies in the psychological and algorithmic face-recognition literature. PCA is a statistical technique and its incorporation into a face-recognition algorithm requires numerous design decisions. We explicitly state the design decisions by introducing a generic modular PCA-algorithm. This allows us to investigate these decisions, including those not documented in the literature. We experimented with different implementations of each module, and evaluated the different implementations using the September 1996 FERET evaluation protocol (the de facto standard for evaluating face-recognition algorithms). We experimented with (i) changing the illumination normalization procedure; (ii) studying effects on algorithm performance of compressing images with JPEG and wavelet compression algorithms; (iii) varying the number of eigenvectors in the representation; and (iv) changing the similarity measure in the classification process. We performed two experiments. In the first experiment, we obtained performance results on the standard September 1996 FERET large-gallery image sets. In the second experiment, we examined the variability in algorithm performance on different sets of facial images. The study was performed on 100 randomly generated image sets (galleries) of the same size. Our two most significant results are (i) changing the similarity measure produced the greatest change in performance, and (ii) that difference in performance of ±10% is needed to distinguish between algorithms.