Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Immunobiology of IL-37: mechanism of action and clinical perspectives

This article provides an overview of the biological function of a recently discovered cytokine, IL-37, formerly referred to as IL-1F7, and its role in chronic inflammation and autoimmune disease. Much has been discovered about IL-37 in the past decade, including its ability to down-regulate systemic and local inflammation by lowering levels of pro-inflammatory molecules. Here, we critically review the published reports. Future research is necessary to understand the receptor-dependent effects of IL-37, its intracellular and extracellular functions in both normal and diseased states and its potential role as a biomarker and pharmacological target in human disease.
Performance Improvement using Dynamic Contention Window Adjustment for Initial Ranging in IEEE 802.16 P2MP Networks

In IEEE 802.16 networks, initial ranging is a primary and important procedure of connection setup between subscriber stations and base station. The mandatory method defined in the standard of contention resolution is based on a truncated binary exponential backoff, with a fixed initial contention window size. However, the original algorithm neglects the possibility that the number of actively contending stations may change dynamically over time, leading to dynamically changing contention intensity. The major contribution of this paper is twofold: 1) we propose an accurate analytical model to analyze the performance of initial ranging requests in IEEE 802.16 networks. Two metrics, connection probability and average connection delay, are investigated to evaluate the network performance; 2) based on the above analysis, we propose an efficient performance improvement method by using dynamic window adjustment for initial ranging. Unlike the standard algorithm, this algorithm automatically adjusts the initial contention window to an optimal trade-off point between connection probability and connection delay. The performance revels that improving the service capacity and buffer size of base station can optimize the connection probability and the average connection delay. The numerical results also show that the optimal contention window adjustment outperforms the algorithm in the standard.
Two‐dimensional semi‐LASER correlation spectroscopy with well‐maintained cross peaks

To demonstrate that the limited bandwidth of the second 90° radiofrequency (RF) pulse in two‐dimensional (2D) localized correlation spectroscopy (L‐COSY) induces spatially dependent magnetization transfer that results in attenuated cross‐peaks, and to propose a new 2D semi‐adiabatically localized COSY sequence to solve this problem.
An Efficient Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Interface Circuit Using a Bias-Flip Rectifier and Shared Inductor

Harvesting ambient vibration energy through piezoelectric means is a popular energy harvesting technique which can potentially supply 10-100's of ¿W of available power. One of the main limitations of existing piezoelectric harvesters is in their interface circuitry. In this paper, a bias-flip rectifier circuit that can improve the power extraction capability from piezoelectric harvesters over conventional full-bridge rectifiers and voltage doublers by greater than 4X is implemented in a 0.35 ¿m CMOS process. An efficient control circuit to regulate the output voltage of the rectifier and recharge a storage capacitor is presented. The inductor used within the bias-flip rectifier is shared efficiently with a multitude of switching DC-DC converters within the system reducing the overall component count.
On WLS-Chebyshev FIR Digital Filters

A new numerical approach for designing FIR digital filters is proposed. The method is able to compromise maximum stopband attenuation and minimum stopband energy requirements. The approach is based on the weighted-least-squares (WLS) method using, at each iteration, a different weight function, which is made constant within a given frequency interval. In that manner, digital filters with partially equiripple and partially WLS-like stopbands are efficiently obtained. Generality of the method makes it suitable for the design of linear- and arbitrary-phase FIR filters.
The Intergenerational Field Needs More Ethnographic Research

Abstract Dominant approaches to intergenerational research may be inadequate to meet new challenges to the intergenerational field, such as increasing complexity of program settings, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a mandate to address social problems. An ethnographic approach to intergenerational work may be an effective strategy for meeting these challenges. An ethnographic approach involves a holistic perspective using field-based methods of data collection and a cross-cultural research base. As ethnographic methods have been used successfully in related areas such as education, gerontology, and child development, researchers are encouraged to integrate this perspective into studies of intergenerational programming. Various resource materials are described for practitioners and researchers interested in learning more about the ethnographic approach.
‘Someone Needs to Carry on the Legacy of My Family’: Childbearing Perceptions Among Adolescents and Young Adults with Perinatally Acquired Hiv

ABSTRACT Objectives: This qualitative project explored perceptions of adolescents and young adults (AYA) with perinatally acquired HIV (PHIV) regarding childbearing motivations and parenting. Methods: In-depth interviews were conducted with 35 AYA with PHIV (Mage = 20.5 years). Results: Primary childbearing motivations included the desire to experience parenthood, a wish to leave a legacy, and the chance to offer/receive unconditional love. Anticipated challenges included normative concerns (e.g., cost of parenting) and such HIV-specific concerns as parental disclosure/risk for transmission. Conclusions: Information is needed to tailor developmentally and culturally sensitive interventions to promote healthy development across the life span among the 3rd generation of HIV-affected families.
Complex Systems, Trade‐Offs, and Theoretical Population Biology: Richard Levin's “Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology” Revisited

Ecologist Richard Levins argues population biologists must trade‐off the generality, realism, and precision of their models since biological systems are complex and our limitations are severe. Steven Orzack and Elliott Sober argue that there are cases where these model properties cannot be varied independently of one another. If this is correct, then Levins's thesis that there is a necessary trade‐off between generality, precision, and realism in mathematical models in biology is false. I argue that Orzack and Sober's arguments fail since Levins's thesis concerns the pragmatic features of model building not just the formal properties of models.
Temporal control and training selection for HMM-based system

Most speaker-independent acoustic-phonetic decoding systems are based on hidden Markov models. Such systems lack a real temporal control for the phonetic models. Furthermore, inter-speaker variability makes speaker adaptation necessary. In order to solve these problems, we introduce two original approaches. On the one hand, discontinuities detected with the ForwardBackward Divergence method are used to constrain phonetic transitions and to perform a more accurate temporal control. On the other hand, an efficient interspeaker measure, based on AR-vector models, allows the selection of a speaker neighbourhood and the adaptation of the phonetic models. The contribution of these two methods is estimated on the TIMIT database.
Changes in Self-Efficacy and Health Behavior in Response to a Minimal Contact Community Health Campaign

This study suggests that both baseline levels and changes in perceived self-efficacy mediate the adoption of health behaviors in the context of a year-long community health campaign. With a pre- to postevaluation design, using path models to establish the relationships among perceived self-efficacy, campaign exposure, and four separate health behaviors, we establish that (a) exposure to a health campaign increases perceived self-efficacy, (b) baseline and changes in perceived self-efficacy each contribute to the adoption of health behaviors, and (c) baseline and changes in health behavior contribute to the development of perceived self-efficacy. There is a strong negative correlation between baseline self-efficacy and changes in self-efficacy, which may explain previous research in which baseline self-efficacy alone did not predict subsequent behavioral enactments.
Building Global Health Research Competencies at the Undergraduate Level

Faculty from the University of Calgary’s bachelor of health sciences (BHSc) Global Health Program argue for the development of global health research competencies to prepare students for international placements in low- and middle-income countries. These competencies include the ability to define and describe (a) how to use the concept of health research systems to investigate and describe health research activities in a given country, (b) the concept of health research capacity building, (c) the importance of building equitable and sustainable research partnerships, and (d) the role of knowledge mobilization and translation in health research. This article begins by outlining a rationale for preparing students for global health research activities and the BHSc Global Health Research Program. It then outlines these competencies and provides practical guidance to assist faculty and mentors preparing students for international placements. Finally, a case study of a student-led investigation of the health research system in Ethiopia is presented.
ATLAS: A Traffic Load Aware Sensor MAC Design for Collaborative Body Area Sensor Networks

In collaborative body sensor networks, namely wireless body area networks (WBANs), each of the physical sensor applications is used to collaboratively monitor the health status of the human body. The applications of WBANs comprise diverse and dynamic traffic loads such as very low-rate periodic monitoring (i.e., observation) data and high-rate traffic including event-triggered bursts. Therefore, in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol for WBANs, energy conservation should be the primary concern during low-traffic periods, whereas a balance between satisfying high-throughput demand and efficient energy usage is necessary during high-traffic times. In this paper, we design a traffic load-aware innovative MAC solution for WBANs, called ATLAS. The design exploits the superframe structure of the IEEE 802.15. 4 standard, and it adaptively uses the contention access period (CAP), contention free period (CFP) and inactive period (IP) of the superframe based on estimated traffic load, by applying a dynamic “wh” (whenever which is required) approach. Unlike earlier work, the proposed MAC design includes load estimation for network load-status awareness and a multi-hop communication pattern in order to prevent energy loss associated with long range transmission. Finally, ATLAS is evaluated through extensive simulations in ns-2 and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol.
Review: there is marked socioeconomic inequality in persistent depression

Study selection Population-based studies of the prevalence, incidence, and persistence of major depression in adults were eligible if they: (1) provided data related to income, education, occupation, social class, or wealth; (2) were published after 1979; (3) were published in English, French, German, or Spanish; and (4) focused on people aged over 16 years. Studies including a mix of depression and anxiety were included. Studies focused on substance abuse, schizophrenia, anxiety, or personality disorders were excluded, as were those devoted mainly to neighbourhood or regional levels of deprivation. Studies focused on primary care, hospitalised patients or groups at high risk were also excluded.
ShutterRoller: Preserving Social Network Privacy towards High-Speed Domain Gateway

Online Social Network (OSN) has become an important platform where people share their life and opinions nowadays, which is followed by security problems especially privacy leakage. Contents generated by OSN users can be browsed and shared by friends or even strangers, which may contain their privacy information and leads to a high risk of privacy leakage. However, traditional DPI mechanism, such as NIDS and NIPS, can hardly adapt to privacy detection and preservation in OSN because of their granularity limitation or poor performance. Privacy settings of OSN sites are seldom changed by users. In this paper, we proposed a social network privacy preserving system, ShutterRoller, based on domain gateway. By detecting the OSN traffic through gateway, ShutterRoller examines the existing of social features that may lead to privacy leakage, such as user behaviors and user generated contents. The work of ShutterRoller is accomplished with the following contributions: (1) a general network underlying framework for application layer data restoration with high throughput and low latency towards the high-speed network environment of gateway. (2) a customized OSN application layer inspection scheme to achieve fine-grained privacy leakage detection with a high accuracy. Experiments have been done by real network traffic, and indicate the high accuracy in fine-grained privacy leakage detection and high throughput as well as low latency in high-speed network.
Visual Representations as Effective Instructional Media in Foreign Language Teaching

Visual Representations as Effective Instructional Media in Foreign Language Teaching Although research on the effective use of visual representations in instruction has concentrated predominantly on the teaching of scientific and technical subjects, the principle that visual elements can only be used effectively if they are perceived as important instructional resources that require attentive processing is equally valid in foreign language learning. A study of language learners performing an authentic classroom task in which they were asked to use visual information as a basis for free language production suggested that pictures in this instructional context were processed efficiently but superficially, and were frequently not regarded as significant sources of information. The study also suggested that divergent picture interpretations are not unusual and could lead to communication problems mistakenly attributed to language deficits. A pragmatic way to achieve effective processing of the visual elements in language teaching materials, I propose, is to design materials which include explicit, specific guidance on how the pictures they contain are intended to support language learning activities, together, where needed, with processing instructions.
Parental Substance Abuse and Child Well-Being

Parental substance abuse is associated with adverse health and developmental outcomes for children. Existing research, however, has not fully explored the relative magnitude of the associations between maternal, paternal, and both parents' substance abuse and child outcomes, nor has it examined these associations in regard to substance abuse among nonresident fathers. We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,027) to explore these issues among a cohort of 3-year-old children. We find that children living with a substance-abusing parent are at considerable risk for poor health and behavior outcomes, that such risk is not moderated by parent gender, and that it is substantially larger when both parents have substance abuse problems. Moreover, children with substance-abusing fathers are at a potentially higher risk of health and behavior problems when their fathers live with them, although this risk is still substantial when they do not.
Trainee Primary Teachers' Ideas about the Ozone Layer.

Summary The ideas of trainee primary teachers about the ozone layer have been examined. Students were well informed about the nature and location of the ozone layer and appreciated that it screens the Earth from ultraviolet (UV) rays, although some thought that it protects the Earth from acid rain. Most identified real causes of ozone layer depletion, but many thought that radioactivity and factory and vehicle emissions cause ozone layer degradation. Almost all realised that ozone depletion might cause more skin cancers; fewer recognised other potential biological problems. Many confused ozone layer depletion with global warming. The proportions holding these ideas were similar to those of older secondary school children, suggesting that misconceptions persist to the adult population. Since these ideas were found in final year trainee teachers, there is a danger that erroneous ideas or the attitudes based on them might be perpetuated in a formal learning context.
Comparison of methods for smile deceit detection by training AU6 and AU12 simultaneously

Smiles play an important role in face to face interaction which is a human-specific direct and naturally preeminent way of communication. People smile out of various reasons. Some smiles are spontaneous while some others are just posed. It is hard for human to catch such subtle differences between the two different smiles. In this paper, different algorithm combinations are tried to realize the deceit detection of smiles by computer, that is to say, to recognize true (spontaneous) and fake (posed) smiles. The detection is based on AUs (facial action units). Moreover, AU6 and AU12 are dealt with together in each example, which is different from AU recognition. Images in our database are all frontal facial images with smiles of different types and levels, which are from subjects of different countries and ages with different colors. Experiments are implemented to find out which algorithm combination is the best one. Results show that the best accuracy of the tried combinations in detecting true and fake smiles is close to 86%, while human true-fake-smile recognition ability is much lower. Our work could be used as a tool for the analysis of smiles in psychological area and other regions.
Behavioral intervention for infants with Down syndrome improved spoken imitation and requesting skills, but improvements in speech intelligibility, problem solving, and nonverbal communication should be considered with caution

This review provides a summary and appraisal commentary on the treatment review by Bauer, S. M. , & Jones, E. A. (2014). Requesting and verbal imitation intervention for infants with Down syndrome: Generalization, intelligibility, and problem solving. Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities, 27, 37–66. doi:10.1007/s10882-014-9400-6 Source of funding and disclosure of interest: The original authors of this research did not report any source of funding nor any conflicts of interest.
A Randomized, Wait-List Controlled Effectiveness Trial Assessing School-Wide Positive Behavior Support in Elementary Schools

We report a randomized, wait-list controlled trial assessing the effects of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS). An effectiveness analysis was conducted with elementary schools in Hawaii and Illinois where training and technical assistance in SWPBS was provided by regular state personnel over a 3-year period. Results document that the training and technical assistance were functionally related to improved implementation of universal-level SWPBS practices. Improved use of SWPBS was functionally related to improvements in the perceived safety of the school setting and the proportion of third graders meeting or exceeding state reading assessment standards. Results also document that levels of office discipline referrals were comparatively low, but the absence of experimental control for this variable precludes inference about the impact of SWPBS. Implications for future research directions are offered.
Legal and Ethical Issues in Evaluating Abortion Services

When evaluation studies are conducted in a sensitive area, ethical and legal implications are bound to challenge evaluators. All too often, evaluators must deal with competing responsibilities in evaluating these programs or services. This article focuses on several ethical and legal issues that arose during an evaluation of abortion services. We discuss how we developed decision rules and considered trade-offs in dealing with these ethical and legal issues so that rational and objective decisions could be reached. We place this discussion within the context of balancing the utility and propriety evaluation standards with respect to obtaining true informed consent and protecting the privacy and confidentiality of data when evaluating abortion services. The article concludes with recommendations concerning the evaluation of abortion services.
Introducing Usability Concerns Early in the DSL Development Cycle: FlowSL Experience Report

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) developers aim to narrow the gap between the level of abstraction used by domain users and the one provided by the DSL, in order to help taming the increased complexity of computer systems and real-world problems. The quality in use of a DSL is essential for its successful adoption. We illustrate how a usability evaluation process can be weaved into the development process of a concrete DSL FlowSL used for specifying humanitarian campaign processes lead by an international Non-Governmental Organization. FlowSL is being developed following an agile process using Model-Driven Development (MDD) tools, to cope with vague and poorly understood requirements in the beginning of the development process.
Motivation of engineering students in higher education

Abstract This paper examines motivational factors affecting higher education (HE) students in the Faculty of Technology at the University of Portsmouth. A reliable identification of motivational factors would usefully inform pedagogical interventions. Students who are more intrinsically motivated may benefit from less prescriptive assignments which offer more freedom to choose from “formative” assessment topics in which they have a greater personal interest. Those who are more extrinsically motivated, where the final “summative” grade is thought of as the most important, may be less influenced by pedagogical styles. The investigatory approaches employed in this study to assess motivation discover different results. While questionnaire responses indicate that students operate both intrinsically and extrinsically, semi-structured interviews found little evidence of the former, with most students indicating that they operate extrinsically.
The Possibility of the Testimony: A Case for Case Study Research

This Connexions essay aims to reflect on the nature, rationale, and implications for research and researchers of conducting case studies. It draws on the works of Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben on the meaning of the testimony and the paradox of Auschwitz: only those who died could fully testify the atrocities of the camp, but they tragically passed away. Thus each testimony presents a lacuna, and one needs to listen to the voices coming from this empty space to comprehend what happened. For organizational scholars, this paradox metaphorically implies that listening to managers and interviewees has nothing to do with telling what could be seen (a fact) and rather relates to what is missing (a lacuna) and thus the issue is one of investigating this absence (this space left empty by whichever testimony). This opens some ethical questions: What is the role of researchers in this investigation? Where does their ‘authority’ to narrate come from? What are they ‘authorized’ to recount? And with what consequences? Are researchers ineluctably perpetrators of a domination in the absence (and in the name) of the Other or is there an escape from this?