Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implication of normal liver enzymes in liver disease

Summary. Chronic liver disease is usually asymptomatic until its late stages and also significant hepatic necroinflammation and fibrosis may be present in persistently normal ALT levels HBV, HCV carriers or similarly, in patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Given the large number of persons in the general population which may harbor a clinically significant liver disease behind the screen of normal alanine aminotransferase, more attention should be devoted to future research for alternative noninvasive markers of liver damage.
Dimensions of Financial Competence

Whether or not someone has the ability to look after his or her own financial affairs is one of the most common problems brought before courts and tribunals in Australia. At present, there is no agreed-upon objective standard for assessing financial competency. The aims of this study were twofold: (1) to clarify which financial skills and tasks are considered important to adults in the Australian community when assessing financial competence; and (2) to evaluate a model of financial competence proposed by Webber, Reeve, Kershaw and Charlton. Professional service providers and students judged the importance of 61 skills, tasks and characteristics related to financial competence. The results supported a 6-factor model of financial competence. The findings suggest that it is possible to identify agreed-upon criteria for financial competency and provide a first step towards the development of a valid scale of financial competency.
GATE: a simulation toolkit for PET and SPECT

Monte Carlo simulation is an essential tool in emission tomography that can assist in the design of new medical imaging devices, the optimization of acquisition protocols and the development or assessment of image reconstruction algorithms and correction techniques. GATE, the Geant4 Application for Tomographic Emission, encapsulates the Geant4 libraries to achieve a modular, versatile, scripted simulation toolkit adapted to the field of nuclear medicine. In particular, GATE allows the description of time-dependent phenomena such as source or detector movement, and source decay kinetics. This feature makes it possible to simulate time curves under realistic acquisition conditions and to test dynamic reconstruction algorithms. This paper gives a detailed description of the design and development of GATE by the OpenGATE collaboration, whose continuing objective is to improve, document and validate GATE by simulating commercially available imaging systems for PET and SPECT. Large effort is also invested in the ability and the flexibility to model novel detection systems or systems still under design. A public release of GATE licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License can be downloaded at http://www-lphe.epfl. ch/GATE/. Two benchmarks developed for PET and SPECT to test the installation of GATE and to serve as a tutorial for the users are presented. Extensive validation of the GATE simulation platform has been started, comparing simulations and measurements on commercially available acquisition systems. References to those results are listed. The future prospects towards the gridification of GATE and its extension to other domains such as dosimetry are also discussed.
The Limits of Theory in Art Education

The last forty years have seen substantial and dramatic changes in the thinking about education in art. Changes have taken place in art itself and there have been incredible social, political and economic upheavals. All this has led to an enlarged view of art education. It has given rise to the need for greater dialogue and debate. In more recent years, there have been more concentrated and focussed efforts to establish art curricula and standards of accomplishment for art education. In England, there has been the introduction of the National Curriculum and in the USA there has been the development of the National Standards for Arts Education. In both countries there have been numerous efforts at national or state, local and school levels aimed at assessing what students’ `know and are able to do’ in the arts. The role of theory in art education is of some importance. It is through theory that a systematic accounting can be constructed that explains and makes consistent the individual critiques of what is going on in classrooms, schools, committees and the nation-at-large. The paper discusses developments in England and the United States with regard to the theoretical development of curricula and the means for evaluation in art education. It also outlines and discusses the `limits of theory in art education’. It is not opposed to theory; rather it is posited that preoccupations with theory should not over-ride the importance of maintaining a multiplicity of competing (or emerging) meanings. It is argued that theories should inform and illuminate actions rather than place arbitrary limits upon them.
Brain, Mind and Dementia: With Particular Reference to Alzheimer's Disease

ABSTRACT A new theoretical framework for understanding and working with the dementing illnesses of old age is presented, and explicated with particular reference to senile dementia of the Alzheimer type. For several reasons the commonly accepted model, which assumes a simple linear causal relationship between neuropathology and dementia, is inadequate. A more comprehensive model, grounded in a monistic view of the mind-brain relationship, must take into account not only the psychological states that correspond to particular brain states, but also both developmental and pathological aspects of brain structure. Using this we can describe the dementing process, ‘normal’ psychological functioning in old age, pseudodementia and ‘benign senescent forgetfulness’. Further, the scope for some degree of ‘rementia’ is explored.
Prototype setting for elastic matching-based image pattern recognition

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of the consistency between the distance measures on prototype setting and discrimination in elastic matching (EM)-based recognition. Specifically, this paper focuses on the following points: (i) confirmation of performance degradation when Euclidean distance is used on prototype setting whereas EM-distance is used on discrimination, and (ii) proposal of new prototype setting algorithm where this inconsistency is avoided. Through an experiment of handwritten character recognition, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was quantified.
Conducting Research with Meta-Analysis: A New Direction for Gifted Education

Developing and validating new theories in gifted education is often limited by two factors: imprecise measurement and small numbers of subjects. The author asserts that the meta-analysis procedure offers gifted educators and researchers an opportunity to overcome these obstacles. He reviews the technique, responds to critiques of meta-analysis, and presents current research employing this procedure.
Bmp6 Expression Can Be Regulated Independently of Liver Iron in Mice

The liver is the primary organ for storing iron and plays a central role in the regulation of body iron levels by secretion of the hormone Hamp1. Although many factors modulate Hamp1 expression, their regulatory mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, we used conditional knockout mice for the iron exporter ferroportin1 (Fpn1) to modulate tissue iron in specific tissues in combination with iron-deficient or iron-rich diets and transferrin (Tf) supplementation to investigate the mechanisms underlying Hamp1 expression. Despite liver iron overload, expression of bone morphogenetic protein 6 (Bmp6), a potent-stimulator of Hamp1 expression that is expressed under iron-loaded conditions, was decreased. We hypothesized that factors other than liver iron must play a role in controlling Bmp6 expression. Our results show that erythropoietin and Tf-bound iron do not underlie the down-regulation of Bmp6 in our mice models. Moreover, Bmp6 was down-regulated under conditions of high iron demand, irrespective of the presence of anemia. We therefore inferred that the signals were driven by high iron demand. Furthermore, we also confirmed previous suggestions that Tf-bound iron regulates Hamp1 expression via Smad1/5/8 phosphorylation without affecting Bmp6 expression, and the effect of Tf-bound iron on Hamp1 regulation appeared before a significant change in Bmp6 expression. Together, these results are consistent with novel mechanisms for regulating Bmp6 and Hamp1 expression.
The Effect of Retail Distribution on Sales of Alcoholic Beverages

We use monthly sales of all wines, beer, and spirits sold between 2006 and 2011 by Sweden’s retail monopoly on alcohol to estimate the causal effect of retail distribution on market share by volume at the product level. Products are defined at the level of the stock-keeping unit. Two institutional features are key to identifying the causal effect: First, the monopolist uses four levels of retail distribution; a change in retail distribution is therefore associated with a discrete shift in the number of stores that carry a product in a given month. Second, the retailer is legally bound and monitored by the European Union to ensure that it acts in a non-discriminatory manner with all its suppliers. These features allow us to rule out many possible confounding factors in estimating the effect of distribution on sales volume. We find large and statistically significant effects from changes in retail distribution on market share by volume across all levels of retail distribution. The associated volume elastici.
COMPARISON OF TWO TREATMENTS FOR CHILDREN WITH SEVERELY DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOURS: A FOUR-YEAR FOLLOW-UP

A 4-year follow-up compared the long-term effects of two treatments for severely conduct disorder children referred to a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). Forty-two families received either the standard CAMHS treatment or a more intensive intervention. The intensive treatment involved a unit-based component for parents to practise new child management strategies. At the 6-month follow-up the intensive treatment group showed significant improvements on all measures of child behaviour and maternal mental health and improvements remained significant at the 4-year follow-up. By contrast, initial improvements for the standard treatment group, which were significant on only two measures, were not significant at the 4-year follow-up. The results suggest that the intensive treatment was advantageous in bringing about long-term improvements for these families. They also add to the growing evidence that interventions involving the rehearsal of child management strategies have better outcomes than those using more didactic methods of parent training.
Performance Analysis of Resource-Aware Task Scheduling Methods in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an attractive platform for monitoring and measuring physical phenomena. WSNs typically consist of hundreds or thousands of battery-operated tiny sensor nodes which are connected via a low data rate wireless network. A WSN application, such as object tracking or environmental monitoring, is composed of individual tasks which must be scheduled on each node. Naturally the order of task execution influences the performance of the WSN application. Scheduling the tasks such that the performance is increased while the energy consumption remains low is a key challenge. In this paper we apply online learning to task scheduling in order to explore the tradeoff between performance and energy consumption. This helps to dynamically identify effective scheduling policies for the sensor nodes. The energy consumption for computation and communication is represented by a parameter for each application task. We compare resource-aware task scheduling based on three online learning methods: independent reinforcement learning (RL), cooperative reinforcement learning (CRL), and exponential weight for exploration and exploitation (Exp3). Our evaluation is based on the performance and energy consumption of a prototypical target tracking application. We further determine the communication overhead and computational effort of these methods.
Automatic Text Removal and Replacement in Scanned Meteorological Thematic Maps

Geo-referenced data is required in many Geographic Information System (GIS) applications and one source of such data being maps. Meteorological maps are color-coded with different regions corresponding to different values of a parameter, parsing the image to convert into data is not very difficult. However, text and different planimetric elements overlaid on the regions in the map makes accurate image to data conversion a challenging problem, because it is almost impossible to exactly replace what was underneath the text or icons i.e., the need for inpainting. In this study, we propose a probabilistic technique that uses the probability of occurrence of colors present in the map along with the occurrence of those colors in the spatial neighborhood of the pixel (corresponding to text) whose color is required to be replaced. We test the limits of our proposed technique using simulated data and compare results with a popular image editing tool using public domain data with promising results.
The Limited Liability Effect in Experimental Duopoly Markets

Brander and Lewis argue in a seminal paper (AER, 1986) that a firm's debt-equity ratio should have important strategic effects on product market competition. We test their model in a duopoly experiment under both, Bertrand and Cournot competition. We find that leverage has strategic effects, but those effects are much weaker than predicted by theory. Specifically, we find for price competition a general tendency towards collusion, which has the same overall consequences - but deviates from - the subgame perfect equilibrium prediction. With quantity competition subjects choose much less debt than predicted by theory. It appears that subjects recognize the strategic effects of their own debt. However, they do not (want to) acknowledge possible strategic advantages of opponents' debt.
Distributed Localization Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks: From Design Methodology to Experimental Validation

Recent advances in the technology of wireless electronic devices have made possible to build ad–hoc Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) using inexpensive nodes, consisting of low–power processors, a modest amount ofmemory, and simplewireless transceivers. Over the last years, many novel applications have been envisaged for distributed WSNs in the area of monitoring, communication, and control. Sensing and controlling the environment by using many embedded devices forming a WSN often require the measured physical parameters to be associated with the position of the sensing device. As a consequence, one of the key enabling and indispensable services in WSNs is localization (i.e., positioning). Moreover, the design of various components of the protocol stack (e.g., routing and Medium Access Control, MAC, algorithms) might take advantage of nodes’ location, thus resulting in WSNs with improved performance. However, typical protocol design methodologies have shown significant limitations when applied to the field of embedded systems, like WSNs. As a matter of fact, the layered nature of typical design approaches limits their practical usefulness for the design of WSNs, where any vertical information (like, e.g., the actual node’s position) should be efficiently shared in such resource constrained devices. Among the proposed solutions to address this problem, we believe that the Platform–Based Design (PBD) approach Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (2002), which is a relatively new methodology for the design of embedded systems, is a very promising paradigm for the efficient design of WSNs. 1
The Lady'S Not for Turning: Rotation of the Thatcher Illusion

Inversion is especially detrimental to the processing of faces. This is clearly demonstrated by the Thatcher illusion. It has been suggested that this detriment is due to a loss of holistic or configural processing for inverted faces (Bartlett and Searcy, 1993 Cognitive Psychology 25 281–316). Stürzel and Spillmann (2000 Perception 29 937–942) suggest that this loss of configural processing occurs suddenly as a face is rotated slowly from upright to inverted. This hypothesis is tested in a study of the reaction times taken to indicate that a face has been Thatcherised at various angles of orientation. The results suggest that there is a gradual loss of configural information rather than a rapid switch from one type of processing to another.
Random ensemble metrics for object recognition

This paper presents a novel and generic approach for metric learning, random ensemble metrics (REMetric). To improve generalization performance, we introduce the concept of ensemble learning to the metric learning scheme. Unlike previous methods, our method does not optimize the global objective function for the whole training data. It learns multiple discriminative projection vectors obtained from linear support vector machines (SVM) using randomly subsampled training data. The final metric matrix is then obtained by integrating these vectors. As a result of using SVM, the learned metric has an excellent scalability for the dimensionality of features. Therefore, it does not require any prior dimensionality reduction techniques such as PCA. Moreover, our method allows us to unify dimensionality reduction and metric learning by controlling the number of the projection vectors. We demonstrate through experiments, that our method can avoid overfitting even though a relatively small number of training data is provided. The experiments are performed with three different datasets; the Viewpoint Invariant Pedestrian Recognition (VIPeR) dataset, the Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) dataset and the Oxford 102 category flower dataset. The results show that our method achieves equivalent or superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art metric learning methods.
Formyltetrahydrofolate Synthetase Sequences from Salt Marsh Plant Roots Reveal a Diversity of Acetogenic Bacteria and Other Bacterial Functional Groups

ABSTRACT Sixty-two partial formyltetrahydrofolate synthetase (FTHFS) structural gene sequences were recovered from roots of salt marsh plants, including Spartina alterniflora, Salicornia virginica, and Juncus roemerianus. Only S. alterniflora roots yielded sequences grouping with FTHFS sequences from known acetogens. Most other FTHFS or FTHFS-like sequences grouped with those from sulfate-reducing bacteria. Several sequences that grouped with Sphingomonas paucimobilis ligH were also recovered.
The measurement of the circulating red cell volume by means of two radioactive isotopes of iron.

Measurement of blood volume, both of its plasma and red cell portion, is a useful tool in clinical and experimental investigation. It provides basic data for the assay of the total quantity of individual blood components, as well as for the evaluation of observed hemodynamic changes in acute or chronic disturbances of the circulation. Blood volume determinations have proved of value in the study of congestive heart failure, the anemias, thyroid disorders, renal disease, and pregnancy; and they have been particularly useful-during the recent war years in the study of hemorrhage, burns and shock, and in the development of blood substitutes and blood cell preservatives. It seems reasonable to state that the dye method (1, 2) measures the circulating plasma volume with a high degree of accuracy both in normal and pathologic states, and in many clinical and experimentally induced abnormal circulatory conditions. This view appears to be shared by investigators who have had firsthand experience with the technique (3, 4). Perhaps the best experimental evidence that the method accurately measures changes in plasma volume was obtained in a series of experiments in which the increase in plasma volume following the intravenous injection of concentrated (25 per cent) human serum albumin was measured (5). The osmotic equivalent of 1 gram of this protein was found by Scatchard et al (6) to be 18 ml. of H20; the average increase in plasma volume in 11 male human subjects was 17.4 ml. of H20 (5) per gram of albumin.
Determinanten der beruflichen Weiterbildung Erwerbstätiger. Empirische Analysen auf der Basis des Mikrozensus 2003

Durch den bestandigen Wandel der Arbeitswelt und die zunehmende Alterung der Bevolkerung hat die berufliche Weiterbildung erheblich an Bedeutung gewonnen. In diesem Aufsatz wird mit Daten des Mikrozensus 2003 ein breites Spektrum an Einflussgrosen auf die Beteiligung an beruflicher Weiterbildung untersucht. Zunachst wird gefragt, in welchen Bildungsfeldern die Weiterbildung stattfindet. Sodann wird mittels Tabellenanalysen und einem logistischen Regressionsmodell der Einfluss individueller, betrieblicher und struktureller Faktoren auf die Beteiligung an Weiterbildung und die in Weiterbildung verbrachte Zeit untersucht. Den theoretischen Rahmen fur die Analysen bildet die Humankapitaltheorie. Die aus ihr abgeleiteten Hypothesen finden sich grostenteils in den empirischen Ergebnissen bestatigt. Insbesondere Bildung und das berufliche Umfeld haben einen starken Einfluss auf die Beteiligung an beruflicher Weiterbildung. Sozial benachteiligte Gruppen wie Geringqualifizierte oder Auslander beteiligen sich weniger stark als Hochqualifizierte oder Deutsche. Die Analysen zur Weiterbildungsintensitat zeigen nur wenige signifikante Zusammenhange, liefern aber einige interessante Hinweise fur die weitere Forschung. In der Summe zeigt sich, dass berufliche Weiterbildung die soziale Ungleichheit eher verstarkt als reduziert.
Programmable Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity Learning Circuits in Neuromorphic VLSI Architectures

Hardware implementations of spiking neural networks offer promising solutions for computational tasks that require compact and low-power computing technologies. As these solutions depend on both the specific network architecture and the type of learning algorithm used, it is important to develop spiking neural network devices that offer the possibility to reconfigure their network topology and to implement different types of learning mechanisms. Here we present a neuromorphic multi-neuron VLSI device with on-chip programmable event-based hybrid analog/digital circuits; the event-based nature of the input/output signals allows the use of address-event representation infrastructures for configuring arbitrary network architectures, while the programmable synaptic efficacy circuits allow the implementation of different types of spike-based learning mechanisms. The main contributions of this article are to demonstrate how the programmable neuromorphic system proposed can be configured to implement specific spike-based synaptic plasticity rules and to depict how it can be utilised in a cognitive task. Specifically, we explore the implementation of different spike-timing plasticity learning rules online in a hybrid system comprising a workstation and when the neuromorphic VLSI device is interfaced to it, and we demonstrate how, after training, the VLSI device can perform as a standalone component (i.e., without requiring a computer), binary classification of correlated patterns.
Promoting Single‐Parent Family Children’s Attitudes toward Science and Science Performance through Extracurricular Science Intervention in Taiwan

This study investigated the efficacy of extracurricular science intervention in promoting students’ science learning performance and attitudes toward science. The Junior High School Student Questionnaire (JSSQ) was used to measure attitudes toward science, sexist attitudes and perceptions of the classroom learning environment. Twenty‐eight eighth graders from single parent families were participants in the one group pre‐test post‐test study. It was found that they made significant progress on most of the measurements. Additional qualitative results of interview and observation were used for triangulation and consideration of findings. The initial findings from the approach of multi‐methods reveal a positive impact on the students’ learning of science.