Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In and Out of the Field

In this article I describe and discuss my attempt to design an entire course around a shared class project of conducting applied local environmental history research leading to an online book. Although I am an environmental historian, this course draws heavily on urban history as well. I start with the concrete details of my current course design, followed by some reflections on my previous attempts at teaching this course. Ultimately, I believe that both urban and environmental history courses would benefit from attempting to get our students into the field and conducting local research that links physical places to written documents and narratives. This provides the students the opportunity to connect history with physical places that they can visit and experience. We would be remiss if we did not use this inherent advantage that we have as urban and/or environmental historians. Through this “field history,” we can reach students and teach them how to truly engage in the practice and art of history.
Training Challenges to Face the New Social Configuration

Changes in society and education place new demands on the teaching profession. Due to the increasing cultural diversity in the classrooms, teacher education should provide teachers with knowledge about intercultural issues, both in the initial and the permanent training. With this in mind, this paper seeks to determine if teachers have the professional knowledge (skills, teaching strategies.) required to adequately address the student diversity in the classrooms and the value they give to the initial/permanent training received to face successfully their professional practice in an intercultural context. For this purpose, a quantitative research methodology has been used. The questionnaire, constructed ad hoc to collect data, has been applied to a representative sample of pre-primary and primary teachers; the obtained data have been subjected to various statistical treatments. The results reveal that an important problem in the commitment to interculturalism is the insufficient teacher education, especially the pre-service training. Also, significant relationships between the identification variables and the responses of the teachers have been found. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014. v5n27p1784
Mining Customer Knowledge for a Recommendation System in Convenience Stores

Taiwan's rapid economic growth with increasing personal income leads increasing numbers of young unmarried people to eat out, and shopping at convenience stores for food is indispensable to the lives of these people. Thus, it is an essential issue for convenience store owners to know how to accurately market appropriate products and to choose effective endorsers for brands or products in order to attract target consumers. Data mining is a business intelligence analysis approach with great potential to help businesses focus on the most important business information contained in a database. Therefore, this study uses the Apriori algorithm as an association rules approach, and clustering analysis for data mining. The authors divide consumers into three groups by their consumer profiles and then find each group's product preference mixes, product endorsers, and product/brand line extensions for new product development. These are developed as a recommendation system for 7-11 convenience stores in Taiwan.
Automatic identification of head movements in video-recorded conversations: can words help?

We present an approach where an SVM classifier learns to classify head movements based on measurements of velocity, acceleration, and the third derivative of position with respect to time, jerk. Consequently, annotations of head movements are added to new video data. The results of the automatic annotation are evaluated against manual annotations in the same data and show an accuracy of 68% with respect to these. The results also show that using jerk improves accuracy. We then conduct an investigation of the overlap between temporal sequences classified as either movement or non-movement and the speech stream of the person performing the gesture. The statistics derived from this analysis show that using word features may help increase the accuracy of the model.
Negative interpersonal interactions in student training settings

Studies demonstrate that negative interpersonal interaction(s) (NII) such as bullying are frequent and harmful to individuals in workplace and higher education student settings. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether the degree of perceived severity of NII varies by the status of the actor. The present study explored the moderating effect of actor status (supervisor or peer) on perceived severity (labeled ‘bother’) of experienced and witnessed NII, in workplace training settings, in a sample of students from professional Faculties including Education, Medicine, Nursing, and Social Work (N=68). The researchers hypothesised that NII experienced and witnessed from a supervisor toward a student would be associated with a greater degree of bother than NII experienced or witnessed from a peer toward a peer. Results showed that actor status played a significant role in predicting bother even after the effects of experienced and witnessed NII were taken into account. In following up on this finding, it was revealed that both peer and supervisor status predicted bother for those who had experienced NII whereas only peer status predicted bother for those who had witnessed NII. Finally, opposite to expectation, peer status demonstrated a stronger relationship to experienced NII than did supervisor status. Educators should be mindful of both peer and supervisor behaviours.
Surgical and Behavioral Treatments for Vestibulodynia: Two-and-One-Half–Year Follow-up and Predictors of Outcome

OBJECTIVE: To estimate whether treatment gains for provoked vestibulodynia participants randomly assigned to vestibulectomy, biofeedback, and cognitive–behavioral therapy in a previous study would be maintained from the last assessment—a 6-month follow-up—to the present 2.5-year follow-up. Although all three treatments yielded significant improvements at 6-month follow-up, vestibulectomy resulted in approximately twice the pain reduction as compared with the two other treatments. A second goal of the present study was to identify predictors of outcome. METHODS: In a university hospital, 51 of the 78 women from the original study were reassessed 2.5 years after the end of their treatment. They completed 1) a gynecologic examination involving the cotton-swab test, 2) a structured interview, and 3) validated pain and sexual functioning measures. RESULTS: Results from the multivariate analysis of variance conducted on the pain measures showed a significant time main effect (P<.05) and a significant treatment main effect (P<.01), indicating that participants had less pain at the 2.5-year follow-up than at the previous 6-month follow-up. Results from the multivariate analysis of variance conducted on sexual functioning measures showed that participants remained unchanged between the 6-month and 2.5-year follow-up and that there were no group differences. Higher pretreatment pain intensity predicted poorer outcomes at the 2.5-year follow-up for vestibulectomy (P<.01), biofeedback (P<.05), and cognitive–behavioral therapy (P<.01). Erotophobia also predicted a poorer outcome for vestibulectomy (P<.001). CONCLUSION: Treatment gains were maintained at the 2.5-year follow-up. Outcome was predicted by pretreatment pain and psychosexual factors. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: II
Self-Administered Semiquantitative Food Frequency Questionnaires: Patterns, Predictors, and Interpretation of Omitted Items

Background: Food items on a self-administered food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) may be left blank because the food was not consumed, because of difficulties remembering the frequency or amount of intake, or due to an oversight. Methods: We explored the predictors and frequency of consumption of omitted food items on an FFQ used in the Nurses’ Health Study II. Of 87,676 women who returned a mailed 147-item FFQ in 1999, 34% completed the entire questionnaire, whereas 66% left at least 1 food item blank. Ten or more food items were omitted by 5% of participants. Foods were more likely omitted by women who were older or more physically active. We resurveyed 2876 participants who had left between 1 and 70 food items blank and asked them to fill in the blanks. Overall, 2485 participants provided complete responses. Results: In the resurvey, 64% of the formerly omitted foods were marked as consumed never or less than once per month, 20% as 1 to 3 times per month, 8% as once per week, and 9% as more than once per week. Commonly consumed foods and beverages were less likely omitted because they were not consumed than rarely consumed foods. The best estimate for the true intake value of an omitted food was 0.82 times the average population intake. Conclusions: While calculating nutrient intake, the assumption that items missing represent zero intake is reasonable. However, food items consumed more often in the population at large are less likely than rarely consumed food items to be left blank because they were not consumed.
WBSG at TAC-KBP 2011

This paper reports the participation of team WBSG in the English entity-linking task at TAC KBP 2011. As first-timers in TAC, we used the opportunity to test the entity linking accuracy of our general-purpose entity and concept annotation system. Our system, DBpedia Spotlight, does not specialize on named entities of certain types. Its aim is to annotate any of the ≈3.5M entities and other concepts in DBpedia, a knowledge base extracted from Wikipedia. We applied the disambiguation step of our algorithm as is, without benefiting from the a priori knowledge of target entity types, and without applying specialized NIL detection or clustering approaches. We simply mapped our KB to that of TAC KBP’s, and labelled as NIL the entities from the former that were absent from the latter. Our simple approach worked surprisingly well, achieving 0.703 B F1. In future work we plan to specialize our algorithm to the entity types in TAC KBP, and investigate in which cases a larger KB provided us an advantage or disadvantage in the context of this evaluation.
Interventions with women offenders: a systematic review and meta-analysis of mental health gain

Currently, a conjunction of policy, legislative change in health and social care and the criminal justice system, combined with funding for innovative services make it opportune to assess the evidence base for interventions with women offenders. Women offenders have a distinctive criminological, health and social profile and a gender specific approach to their difficulties is advocated. This systematic review and meta-analysis focus on mental health gain in adult women offenders in forensic health settings, criminal justice institutions and in the community, following therapeutic interventions. Interventions were assessed in terms of specific outcome measures of depression, trauma symptomatology and global mental health status. Comprehensive search strategies yielded 3018 articles, from which we obtained 199 full text articles. Seventeen articles were included in the final review, of which six were excluded from the meta-analysis as there was no comparator group. There is a modest, but increasing, body of evidence for the utility of some interventions, notably those addressing the consequences of earlier trauma, including interventions which also address comorbid substance misuse. This does not amount, to date, to a robust evidence base. Limitations of these studies are discussed and include small sample sizes, their restriction mainly to prison populations and that they were substantially undertaken in the US. Variations in outcome measures follow-up and the difficulties inherent in measuring change in this complex population are also detailed. However, the review delineates definite avenues for further work. To achieve this, those responsible for policy, practice and purchase of services should both be mindful of existing evidence and promote additional, high quality research into interventions which are designed around a coherent, theoretical approach.
Review Article: Reasons for Underrating the Potential of Human Epidermal Growth Factor in Medical Applications

Human epidermal growth factor (EGF) was first found to be present in a pregnant woman’s urine sample in the mid-1970s [1]. Prior to this discovery, mouse EGF was first isolated and shown to promote incisor eruption and eyelid opening in murine neonates in 1962 [2]. Since then EGF was shown to exhibit a variety of physiological functions in animals such as healing of epidermal wounds [3], corneal injuries [4] and burns [5]. Recently, with human subjects, EGF has been shown to be effective in promoting treatments of both acute and chronic wounds, including scalds, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, diabetic foot ulcers and bedsores [6]. Moreover, EGF has also been exploited for enhancing skin tone and texture in cosmetic industry in the last two decades [7].
Fast Distributed k-Center Clustering with Outliers on Massive Data

Clustering large data is a fundamental problem with a vast number of applications. Due to the increasing size of data, practitioners interested in clustering have turned to distributed computation methods. In this work, we consider the widely used k-center clustering problem and its variant used to handle noisy data, k-center with outliers. In the noise-free setting we demonstrate how a previously-proposed distributed method is actually an O(1)-approximation algorithm, which accurately explains its strong empirical performance. Additionally, in the noisy setting, we develop a novel distributed algorithm that is also an O(1)-approximation. These algorithms are highly parallel and lend themselves to virtually any distributed computing framework. We compare each empirically against the best known sequential clustering methods and show that both distributed algorithms are consistently close to their sequential versions. The algorithms are all one can hope for in distributed settings: they are fast, memory efficient and they match their sequential counterparts.
Audiovisual laughter detection based on temporal features

Previous research on automatic laughter detection has mainly been focused on audio-based detection. In this study we present an audio-visual approach to distinguishing laughter from speech based on temporal features and we show that integrating the information from audio and video channels leads to improved performance over single-modal approaches. Static features are extracted on an audio/video frame basis and then combined with temporal features extracted over a temporal window, describing the evolution of static features over time. The use of several different temporal features has been investigated and it has been shown that the addition of temporal information results in an improved performance over utilizing static information only. It is common to use a fixed set of temporal features which implies that all static features will exhibit the same behaviour over a temporal window. However, this does not always hold and we show that when AdaBoost is used as a feature selector, different temporal features for each static feature are selected, i.e., the temporal evolution of each static feature is described by different statistical measures. When tested on 96 audiovisual sequences, depicting spontaneously displayed (as opposed to posed) laughter and speech episodes, in a person independent way the proposed audiovisual approach achieves an F1 rate of over 89%.
Protein data bank

Research Collaborators for structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank (RCBS PDB) began in 1970’s by group of the young crystallographers, including Edgar Meyer, Gerson Coheon and Helen M Berman. [1] The project was initiated in 1971 to list the structures of all the amino acids using neutron diffraction and has grown as a major international resource for structural biology containing more than 80,000 entries including proteins: 77,529; nucleic acids: 2420; proteins/ DNA complexes: 3795 and other: 24 (totally 83,768 entries) as of Tuesday Aug 14, 2012 at 5 PM DST. The website also proclaims that there have been 62987 structure hits and 11915 ligand hits on this date and that the PDB has 24583 citations.
Identification of Genes Encoding Conjugated Bile Salt Hydrolase and Transport in Lactobacillus johnsonii100-100

ABSTRACT Cytosolic extracts of Lactobacillus johnsonii 100-100 (previously reported as Lactobacillus sp. strain 100-100) contain four heterotrimeric isozymes composed of two peptides, α and β, with conjugated bile salt hydrolase (BSH) activity. We now report cloning, from the genome of strain 100-100, a 2,977-bp DNA segment that expresses BSH activity in Escherichia coli. The sequencing of this segment showed that it contained one complete and two partial open reading frames (ORFs). The 3′ partial ORF (927 nucleotides) was predicted by BLAST and confirmed with 5′ and 3′ deletions to be a BSH gene. Thermal asymmetric interlaced PCR was used to extend and complete the 948-nucleotide sequence of the BSH gene 3′ of the cloned segment. The predicted amino acid sequence of the 5′ partial ORF (651 nucleotides) was about 80% similar to the C-terminal half of the largest, complete ORF (1,353 nucleotides), and these two putative proteins were similar to several amine, multidrug resistance, and sugar transport proteins of the major facilitator superfamily. E. coli DH5α cells transformed with a construct containing these ORFs, in concert with an extracellular factor produced by strain 100-100, demonstrated levels of uptake of [14C]taurocholic acid that were increased as much as threefold over control levels. [14C]Cholic acid was taken up in similar amounts by strain DH5α pSportI (control) and DH5α p2000 (transport clones). These findings support a hypothesis that the ORFs are conjugated bile salt transport genes which may be arranged in an operon with BSH genes.
Dynamic Control and Resource Allocation in Wireless-Infrastructured Distributed Cellular Networks with OFDMA

In this paper, we consider joint optimization of end-to-end data transmission and resource allocation for Wireless-Infrastructured Distributed Cellular Networks (WIDCNs), where each base station (BS) in a cell is connected with its neighboring BSs via wireless links, and a mobile station (MS) can access one or multiple adjacent BSs simultaneously through time-varying OFDMA channels. The communications between a source MS and a destination MS are carried out with the help of BSs in the multi-hop, distributed manner. To achieve the joint optimization for such WIDCNs, a Stochastic Network Utility Maximization (SNUM) problem is formulated under the constraints of OFDMA sub-channel allocation on time-varying access links (both uplink and downlink), as well as routing and scheduling on forwarding links among BSs. By decomposing the corresponding dual problem, transforming it into a stochastic convex optimization problem and solving it by quasi-gradient method, we obtain distributed dynamic control algorithms for end-to-end data transmission. The algorithm can adapt to the OFMDA channel variation and converges asymptotically to the optimal solution. We also develop a distributed algorithm for OFDMA sub-channel allocation and link coordination between BSs. The simulation results show that the data rates of the flows can converge to optimal solution approximately, queues of the network is stable under the proposed distributed dynamic algorithm, and the multi-receiver scheme outperforms the single-receiver scheme due to diversity.
New Directions In Professional Development

There is increasing recognition that school reform and staff development are integrally related. Yet, despite a rich literature on adult learning and human development which supports teachers' need for a wide array of opportunities to construct their own understandings and theories in a collaborative setting, top down mandates have frequently left teachers out of the reform process. It is argued here that effective staff development should be tied directly to the daily life of classroom and grounded in the questions and concerns of teachers. Both a theory of pedagogy that advocates teaching for understanding and learning as understanding and a model of staff development based on practical knowledge enriched by critical reflection are discussed.
Primary biases in twin studies; a review of prenatal and natal difference-producing factors in monozygotic pairs.

IN all probability the net effect of most twin studies has been underestimation of the significance of heredity in the medical and behavior sciences. This happens because twins are relied upon for crucial evidence regarding individuals who are not twins, and that reliance is unsound. The crux of the twin method of studying heredity-environment problems is, in principle, sound enough. It is the assumption that monozygotic twins are "experiments" which nature has conducted for us, starting in each case with identical sets of genes and varying environmental factors. However, we are after-the-fact observers of the results, and are left to guess what environmental factors nature put into the experiments. Where we judge those factors wrongly, we are likely to interpret the results wrongly so far as individuals who are not twins are concerned. And nature is, so to speak, all too "designing" in her experiments with twins. Indeed, she sometimes conducts them with real mischief so far as the twins are concerned-and almost as though to mislead us into minimizing her powers among nontwins. There is, for example, at least one kind of environmental influence that is not only peculiar to the majority of monozygotic pairs but acts before they are born. Over 98% of humans have never been exposed to this condition at all. Yet its prenatal effects on the twins subjected to it are sometimes very severe, and the after-effects may cause most of the larger differences observed in monozygotic pairs postnatally. When this condition and certain other factors more or less unique to twins are overlooked in studying them, the intrapair differences are sometimes attributed to environmental influences that probably had little, if any, part in producing the differences. As a result, twin studies are often interpreted as proving that heredity is not a factor of much significance, and as proving the special importance of a wide variety of environmental factors. These range from dietary supplements proposed for expectant mothers in the hope of preventing congenital defects in infants, to psychiatric treatments for repressed "hostility" as a supposed
Concor AM Therapy in Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Concomitant Arterial Hypertension

Context: To date, there are very few studies regarding the eruption status of third molars in South Indian population. This study aims to analyse the eruption status of third molars and also the reasons behind their impactions. Aim: To study the prevalence of eruption status of third molars in South Indian population. Materials and Methods: Status of third molars was evaluated radio graphically for 150 subjects (75 males and 75 females) and the impaction status, eruption status and congenital absence of third molars were recorded. Statistical Analysis Used: The results were analysed using chi-square test. Results: Out of the expected number of molars in 150 patients i.e. 600, only 317 molars (52.8%) were completely erupted and 250(41.6%) failed to erupt completely and were impacted and 33(5.5%) molars were congenitally absent. Conclusion: Third molar impactions have a mandibular predisposition. Third molar impaction showed a predilection towards females than males.Agenesis of third molars was more common in females than in males and was more common on the right side. The most common pattern of impaction was Mesioangular followed by vertical which is more common on the left side, horizontal which is common on the right side. The most commonly impacted teeth were 18 and 48.