Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of trust in distributed design

Automated support of design teams, consisting of both human and automated systems, requires an understanding of the role of trust in distributed design processes. By explicating trust, an individual designer's decisions become better understood and may be better supported. Each individual designer has his or her private goals in a cooperative design setting, in which requirement conflicts and resource competitions abound. However, there are group goals that also need to be reached. This paper presents an overview of research related to trust in the context of agents and design, a computational knowledge-level model of trust based on the seven beliefs distinguished by Castelfranchi and Falcone, and an example of the use of the trust model in a specific design process, namely, Website design from the perspective of a single designer. The results are discussed in the context of distributed design in open systems.
Selamectin Is the Avermectin with the Best Potential for Buruli Ulcer Treatment

A comprehensive analysis was done to evaluate the potential use of anti-parasitic macrocyclic lactones (including avermectins and milbemycins) for Buruli ulcer (BU) therapy. A panel containing nearly all macrocyclic lactones used in human or in veterinary medicine was analyzed for activity in vitro against clinical isolates of Mycobacterium ulcerans. Milbemycin oxime and selamectin were the most active drugs against M. ulcerans with MIC values from 2 to 8 μg/mL and 2 to 4 μg/mL, respectively. In contrast, ivermectin and moxidectin, which are both in clinical use, showed no significant activity (MIC> 32 μg/mL). Time-kill kinetic assays showed bactericidal activity of selamectin and in vitro pharmacodynamic studies demonstrated exposure-dependent activity. These data together with analyses of published pharmacokinetic information strongly suggest that selamectin is the most promising macrocyclic lactone for BU treatment.
Extracting static and dynamic model elements from textual specifications in humanities

Information systems are composed of different dimensions of information: methodological, structural, architectural, etc. These dimensions appear connected in textual specifications created at early stages of information systems conception. These multidimensional textual specifications are particularly relevant in cases of information systems conceived to support processes in narrative-based domains, such as humanities or social sciences. Working on these domains, a hard effort of dimension decoupling and a fully understanding of the domain is required. Thus, software analysts put a considerable effort in the identification of the most relevant concepts of the domain---to create the static structure of the system---and, in a separate manner, in the identification of the activities---to understand how this information is produced and managed by users in real practice---. This paper presents how existing studies aim to bridge this modelling gap between static and dynamic aspects in information systems from a comprehensive perspective. It also proposes a pipeline method to deal with this gap, using a semi-automatic analysis of textual sources. The pipeline focused on the identification of activities and static concepts, producing concept maps as static models and activity logs as dynamic models. The final goal of the proposed pipeline is reducing the domain understanding complexity required to software analysts in humanities information system conception and improving the quality of the models in both static and dynamic dimensions.
CD36 Inhibitors Reduce Postprandial Hypertriglyceridemia and Protect against Diabetic Dyslipidemia and Atherosclerosis

CD36 is recognized as a lipid and fatty acid receptor and plays an important role in the metabolic syndrome and associated cardiac events. The pleiotropic activity and the multiple molecular associations of this scavenger receptor with membrane associated molecules in different cells and tissues have however questioned its potential as a therapeutic target. The present study shows that it is possible to identify low molecular weight chemicals that can block the CD36 binding and uptake functions. These inhibitors were able to reduce arterial lipid deposition, fatty acid intestinal transit, plasma concentration of triglycerides and glucose, to improve insulin sensitivity, glucose tolerance and to reduce the plasma concentration of HbAc1 in different and independent rodent models. Correlation between the anti-CD36 activity of these inhibitors and the known pathophysiological activity of this scavenger receptor in the development of atherosclerosis and diabetes were observed at pharmacological doses. Thus, CD36 might represent an attractive therapeutic target.
The Relative Importance of the Domains of Work Functioning: Evaluations of Health-Impaired Employees, Healthy Employees, and Employers

Objective: To determine the relative importance of central work functioning domains and propose a method for composite weighted measurement of the concept “work functioning. ” Methods: Health-impaired workers, healthy workers, and employers (n = 277) weighed work functioning domains by participating in a discrete choice experiment. A logistic regression model was tested to reveal the relative importance of the domains. Results: The central domains are significant indicators of the work functioning of health-impaired workers. The domain with the highest relative importance is quality of work performance, followed by, respectively, recovery, quantity of work, and capacity to work. This pattern of results was observed in all subgroups. Conclusions: The central domains are relevant indicators of the work functioning of health-impaired workers. Researchers should consider the relative importance of the domains and use the proposed weighting procedure, when measuring work functioning.
A Neural Filter for Electrolocation in Weakly Electric Fish

The weakly electric fish have the electric organ to generate the electric field and electrosensory mechanism to read the change of electric field with their electroreceptors. The electric organ produce a waveform of electric field as their electric organ discharge (EOD). Their active electrolocation system can detect the distortion of the self-generated electric field, which is caused by a target object, and estimate the position of a target object. In this paper, we suggest a hypothesis that the periodic EOD signals are involved to extract localization features from noisy electrosensory signals and then provide a possible neural network to process the noise-filtering to obtain the accurate information of a target position. The neural network has sinusoidal weights to process a time series of sensor readings for each electroreceptor.
Quality of life in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: the predictive validity of the BODE index

Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is currently the fourth cause of mortality and morbility in the developed world. Patients with COPD experience a progressive deterioration of health-related quality of life (HRQOL). A new model of severity classification, the body mass index, bronchial obstruction, dyspnoea, exercise (BODE) index, has recently been proposed. Objective: To evaluate the relationship between HRQOL and the BODE index, and the predictive ability of BODE on HRQOL measurements. Methods: Two HRQOL questionnaires were administered, namely the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP) and St George's Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ), in a sample of 67 patients with severe COPD. Results: Pearsonś correlation coefficient analysis shows a positive correlation between the BODE index and the total scores of the specific (P < 0.001), and general HRQOL (P < 0.001); the analysis shows a significant correlation between the BODE index and the subscales of symptoms, activity and impact of SGRQ (P < 0.001) and the subscales energy and physical mobility of the NHP (P < 0.001). The regression analysis shows that the BODE index is a significant predictor of HRQOL, explaining 46,1% of the total score of the SGRQ (P < 0.001) and 14.8% of the total score of the NHP (P < 0.001). Conclusions: The BODE index is good at predicting the worsening of HRQOL in patients with severe COPD. Chronic Respiratory Disease 2008; 5: 7—11
The Anti‐Democrat Diploma: How High School Education Decreases Support for the Democratic Party

Attending high school can alter students’ life trajectories by affecting labor market prospects and through exposure to ideas and networks. However, schooling’s influence competes with early socialization forces, and may be confounded by selection biases. Consequently, little is known about whether or how high school education shapes downstream political preferences and voting behavior. Using a generalized difference-in-differences design leveraging variation in U.S. state dropout laws across cohorts, I find that raising the school dropout age decreases Democratic partisan identification and voting later in life. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that an additional completed grade of high school decreases Democrat support by around fifteen percentage points among students induced to remain in school by higher dropout ages. High school’s effects principally operate by increasing income and support for conservative economic policies, especially at an individual’s mid-life earnings peak. In contrast, schooling does not affect conservative attitudes on non-economic issues or political engagement.
Driving Situations Understanding through Content Rhythm Analysis

The motivation of this paper is to propose a simple and reliable method to identify on-road vehicle events, particularly in the driving situations. A content rhythm is extracted by applying a virtual line lies on the same position of each frame. Thereupon a simplified representation of a continuous video is to record the temporal information of vehicle status. Thus, vehicle situations such as lane changing, vehicle passing, safe distance and zigzag driving can be detected instantly by analyzing the statistical characteristics of content rhythm. The proposed method can not only prevent accidents but also improve the traffic safety by monitoring the on-road vehicle status. Experimental results show the proposed method is reliable for vehicle event detection.
SHARPE at the age of twenty two

This paper discusses the modeling tool called SHARPE (Symbolic Hierarchical Automated Reliability and Performance Evaluator), a general hierarchical modeling tool that analyzes stochastic models of reliability, availability, performance, and performability. It allows the user to choose the number of levels of models, the type of model at each level, and which results from each model level are to act as which parameters in which higher-level models. SHARPE includes algorithms for analysis of fault trees, reliability block diagrams, acyclic series-parallel graphs, acyclic and cyclic Markov and semi-Markov models, generalized stochastic Petri nets, and closed single- and multi-chain product-form queueing networks. For many of these, the user can choose among alternative algorithms, and can decide whether to get a result in the form of a distribution function (symbolic in the time variable) or as a mean or probability. SHARPE has been useful to students, practicing engineers, and researchers. In this paper we discuss the history of SHARPE, give some examples of its use, and talk about some lessons learned.
Adult’s Participation in Work-related Training: The Balance between Improving Job and a Desire for Learning

The study draws on findings from a survey of adults in non-formal continuing education under the professional training for employment framework in Spain. Quantitative analysis was carried out to a sample of 425 respondents from three different educational providers. Firstly, a factor analysis was conducted to fourteen motives for participation items. A two-dimension model of motivation to participate was identified: one dimension oriented towards job-improvement and the other dimension oriented towards learning. Secondly, a variance analysis was conducted according to demographics variables. Results showed significant statistical differences in the first dimension according to demographic variables. This might indicates an instrumental motivation in participation in work-related training among different groups who try to cope with different types of drawbacks.
Dimensions of Alienation Among Manual and Non-Manual Workers

The pervasive use of the alienation framework in interpretative sociological works has generated a need for empirical studies of alienation itself. Empirical measures of powerlessness and normlessness are developed for political and economic areas, following the leads provided by Seeman's conceptual analysis. The alienation scales developed in the present study are combined with Srole's anomie scale and Seeman's status-orientation scale for factor analyses. The findings provide empirical support for Seeman's argument for the conceptual independence of alternative meanings of alienation, but do not support the sociological works hypothesizing significant relationships between mobility commitments and alienation. A high degree of similarity is found in the dimensional structure of alienation for samples of manual and non-manual workers.
A scalable location tracking and message delivery scheme for mobile agents

We present a novel scheme to implement reliable message delivery, agent migration, and agent location tracking for mobile agent based systems. This scheme requires that the agents and messages are transmitted through an imposed logical tree-shaped hierarchy of runtime servers. We present the procedures for building and maintaining the domain gateway hierarchy. Using this scheme, the cost of locating an agent is asymptotically bound by O(lg n) on the number of hops, while the agent registration is achieved at no additional cost.
Kernels on Linguistic Structures for Answer Extraction

Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Information Retrieval has always been an interesting and challenging research area. Despite the high expectations, most of the results indicate that successfully using NLP is very complex. In this paper, we show how Support Vector Machines along with kernel functions can effectively represent syntax and semantics. Our experiments on question/answer classification show that the above models highly improve on bag-of-words on a TREC dataset.
An effective BIST scheme for ring-address type FIFOs

FIFO memories impose special test problems because of their built-in addressing restrictions and access limitations. With the increasing usage of FIFOs today, generic algorithms are needed to test stand-alone FIFO chips and embedded FIFO macros. This paper addresses the problem of testing a very popular type of FIFO, namely the ring-address FIFO. It introduces two novel algorithms to test this type of FIFO. Both algorithms provide full fault coverage for a comprehensive fault model. The first algorithm uses a generic test approach in the sense that it does not require any change to the FIFO hardware. Whereas, the second algorithm is DFT-based. It assumes access to a FIFO design and suggests minor DFT modifications, in order to reduce the test complexity from O(n/sup 2/) to O(n). The BIST architecture of the DFT-based algorithm, which has recently been utilized in different products, is also described.
Answers without questions: The emergence of fragments in child language1

Non-sentential utterances (NSUs), utterances that lack an overt verbal (more generally predicative) constituent, are common in adult speech. This paper presents the results of a corpus study of the emergence of certain classes of NSUs in child language, based primarily on data from the Manchester Corpus from CHILDES. Our principal finding is the late short query effect: the main classes of non-sentential queries (NSQs) are acquired much later than non-sentential answers (NSAs). At a stage when the child has productive use of sentential queries, and has mastered elliptical declaratives and the polar lexemes ‘yes’ and ‘no’, non-sentential questions are virtually absent. This happens despite the fact that such questions are common in the speech of the child's caregivers and that the contexts are ones which should facilitate the production of such NSUs. We argue that these results are intrinsically problematic for analyses of NSUs in terms of a single, generalized mechanism of phonological reduction, as standard in generative grammar. We show how to model this effect within an approach of dialogue-oriented constructionism, wherein NSUs are grammatical words or constructions whose main predicate is a contextual parameter resolved in a manner akin to indexical terms, the relevant aspect of context being the discourse topic. We sketch an explanation for the order of acquisition of NSUs, based on a notion which combines accessibility of contextual parameters and complexity of content construction.
Psychometric Properties of a Digital Citizenship Questionnaire

The purpose of this study was twofold, i.e. to examine the extent to which students’ self-reported use of digital technology constituted meaningful and interpretable dimensions of the digital citizenship construct, and to test the adequacy of the construct in terms of its reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and measurement equivalence for male and female students. The sample consisted of 391 undergraduates from 15 institutions of higher education in Malaysia. The data were collected using a self-reported 17-item questionnaire measuring university students’ digital citizenship behaviours. The results of the study supported and extended the results of previous work on students’ behaviors when using digital technology. The study found evidence that students’ digital citizenship is a valid and reliable multidimensional construct, and the measurement is gender-invariant. The findings are useful in making evidence-informed decisions in choosing and developing instructional interventions to produce ethical and responsible technology users, and in informing future research in the area.
The use of code reading in teaching programming

Programming is an intertwined process of reading and writing. So far, computing education research has often focused on the writing part. This paper takes a further look into the role of reading source code in learning to program. In order to complement the findings from literature, we conducted interviews with programming instructors using the miracle question, on the role of code reading and comprehension. The analysis of these interviews describes this role in terms of the five categories conceptualization, occurrences, and effects of successful code reading, challenges for learners, as well as approaches to facilitate code reading. As a result, we suggest to take a further look into the different reading processes involved in programming, in order to add to the knowledge about programming instruction.
Validity Threats in Empirical Software Engineering Research - An Initial Survey

In judging the quality of a research study it is very important to consider threats to the validity of the study and the results. This is particularly important for empirical research where there is often a multitude of possible threats. With a growing focus on empirical research methods in software engineering it is important that there is a consensus in the community on this importance, that validity analysis is done by every researcher and that there is common terminology and support on how to do and report it. Even though there are previous relevant results they have primarily focused on quantitative research methods and in particular experiments. Here we look at the existing advice and guidelines and then perform a review of 43 papers published in the ESEM conference in 2009 and analyse the validity analysis they include and which threats and strategies for overcoming them that were given by the authors. Based on this analysis we then discuss what is working well and less well in validity analysis of empirical software engineering research and present recommendations on how to better support validity analysis in the future.
A spatial information measure method for hyperspectral image visualization

This paper presents a new band selection method for the visualization of hyperspectral images. The method selects three relevant spectral bands to build the red-green-blue composite. The proposed method uses not only mutual information, but also spatial information to select the bands. Results from the proposed method are presented and compared to other state-of-the-art methods in terms of informative content, gradient magnitude and variance. The results show that the proposed method compares favourably with alternative approaches.
Simultaneous Bilateral Breast Carcinomas: A Category with Frequent Coexpression of HER-2 and ER-α, High Ki-67 and bcl-2, and Low p53

The aim of this study was to evaluate clinicopathological characteristics and immunophenotypes of simultaneous bilateral adenocarcinomas of the breast and their axillary metastases. Immunohistochemical analysis and in situ hybridization were performed using formalin-fixed/paraffin-embedded tissues. In total, 15 primary and 9 metastatic tumors from 8 patients were evaluated. The expression of estrogen receptor-alpha (ER-α), progesterone receptor (PR), Ki 67, p53, bcl-2, and bax were evaluated by immunohistochemistry. Her2 gene amplification was evaluated by chromogenic in situ hybridization (CISH). Four patients were younger that 40 years of age (mean 47 years). Six patients had pleomorphic lobular carcinoma in 1 breast. Four of these had invasive ductal carcinoma in the contralateral breast. One patient had atypical medullary carcinoma in both breasts and 1 patient had atypical medullary carcinoma in 1 breast and pleomorphic lobular carcinoma in the other. The phenotype of the primary tumors and corresponding metastatic tumors was similar for the expression of ER-α (p=0.001), PR (p=0.03), and HER-2 (p=0.018). While strong coexpression of HER-2 and ER-α is exceptional in hereditary breast carcinoma and sporadic breast carcinoma, 6/8 (75%) patients in this study had tumors with strong coexpression of HER-2 and ER-α. P53 protein expression was found in only 2/15 (13%) primary tumors, which is in contrast to BRCA1-related hereditary bilateral breast carcinomas, which often express p53 protein. Most of the patients presented with axillary metastases and had very aggressive course. Characteristically, the tumors showed high levels of expression of ER-α and Her2 amplification, were bcl-2 positive, and had high Ki-67 fraction. However, in patients with atypical medullary carcinoma there was no expression of ER-α or amplification of Her-2.
Compressed Suffix Arrays to Self-Indexes Based on Partitioned Elias-Fano

 Abstract — A practical and simple self-indexing data structure, Partitioned Elias-Fano (PEF) - Compressed Suffix Arrays ( CSA), is built in linear time for the CSA based on PEF indexes. Moreover, the PEF-CSA is compared with two classical compressed indexing methods, Ferragina and Manzini implementation (FMI) and Sad-CSA on different type and size files in Pizza & Chili. The PEF-CSA performs better on the existing data in terms of the compression ratio, count, and locates time except for the evenly distributed data such as proteins data. The observations of the experiments are that the distribution of the φ is more important than the alphabet size on the compression ratio. Unevenly distributed data φ makes better compression effect, and the larger the size of the hit counts, the longer the count and locate time.