Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
We’re Graduating, What’s Next? Relational Contribution to the Educational Attainment of Black Bermudian Adolescent Boys

Guided by ecological and integrative theories of child development, this article examined the associations between multiple systems of influence (school and family) and the educational aspirations of Black Bermudian adolescent boys. This study used qualitative data gleaned from semistructured interviews with students in their senior year at a Bermudian public high school (N = 18, Mage = 18). Findings revealed that family members and teachers encouraged boys to stay committed to school, thereby supporting high school graduation, academic confidence, and educational aspirations for higher education. However, boys had not learned enough about the complicated process of college and fellowship applications to execute their educational goals, leaving them to wonder “what’s next? ” This study contributes to our cross-cultural and nuanced understanding of the important role that families and teachers play in the educational lives of Black male adolescents and suggests that interventions targeting families and teachers might promote the educational attainment, and consequent earnings, of Black male students.
Histopathological Determinants of Tumor Resistance: A Special Look to the Immunohistochemical Expression of Carbonic Anhydrase IX in Human Cancers

Intrinsic and acquired drug resistance of tumor cells still causes the failure of treatment regimens in advanced human cancers. It may be driven by intrinsic tumor cells features, or may also arise from micro environmental influences. Hypoxia is a microenvironment feature associated with the aggressiveness and metastasizing ability of human solid cancers. Hypoxic cancer cells overexpress Carbonic Anhydrase IX (CA IX). CA IX ensures a favorable tumor intracellular pH, while contributing to stromal acidosis, which facilitates tumor invasion and metastasis. The overexpression of CA IX is considered an epiphenomenon of the presence of hypoxic, aggressive tumor cells. Recently, a relationship between CA IX overexpression and the cancer stem cells (CSCs) population has been hypothesized. CSCs are strictly regulated by tumor hypoxia and drive a major non-mutational mechanism of cancer drug-resistance. We reviewed the current data concerning the role of CA IX overexpression in human malignancies, extending such information to the expression of the stem cells markers CD44 and nestin in solid cancers, to explore their relationship with the biological behavior of tumors. CA IX is heavily expressed in advanced tumors. A positive trend of correlation between CA IX overexpression, tumor stage/grade and poor outcome emerged. Moreover, stromal CA IX expression was associated with adverse events occurrence, maybe signaling the direct action of CA IX in directing the mesenchymal changes that favor tumor invasion; in addition, membranous/cytoplasmic co-overexpression of CA IX and stem cells markers were found in several aggressive tumors. This suggests that CA IX targeting could indirectly deplete CSCs and counteract resistance of solid cancers in the clinical setting.
Procedures in complex systems: the airline cockpit

In complex human-machine systems, successful operations depend on an elaborate set of procedures which are specified by the operational management of the organization. These procedures indicate to the human operator (in this case the pilot) the manner in which operational management intends to have various tasks done. The intent is to provide guidance to the pilots and to ensure a safe, logical, efficient, and predictable (standardized) means of carrying out the objectives of the job. However, procedures can become a hodge-podge. Inconsistent or illogical procedures may lead to noncompliance by operators. Based on a field study with three major airlines, the authors propose a model for procedure development called the "Four P's": philosophy, policies, procedures, and practices. Using this model as a framework, the authors discuss the intricate issue of designing flight-deck procedures, and propose a conceptual approach for designing any set of procedures. The various factors, both external and internal to the cockpit, that must be considered for procedure design are presented. In particular, the paper addresses the development of procedures for automated cockpits--a decade-long, and highly controversial issue in commercial aviation. Although this paper is based on airline operations, we assume that the principles discussed here are also applicable to other high-risk supervisory control systems, such as space flight, manufacturing process control, nuclear power production, and military operations.
Sensory Substitution is Substitution

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) make use of one substituting modality (e.g. touch) to get access to environmental information normally accessed through another modality (e.g. vision). Based on behavioural and neuroimaging data, some authors have claimed that using a vision-substituting device results in visual perception. Reviewing these data, we contend that this claim is untenable. We argue (i) that the kind of information processed by a SSD is metamodal, so that it can be accessed through any sensory modality and (ii) that the phenomenology associated with the use of a SSD is best described in terms of spatial phenomenology, only.
An effective TLBO-based memetic algorithm for hypersonic reentry trajectory optimization

In this paper, an effective Teaching-Learning Based Optimization (TLBO)-based memetic algorithm (TLBO-MA) is proposed to enhance the searching quality and efficiency of conventional TLBO, as its global fast coarse search capability and risks of getting prematurely stuck in local optima for the numerical optimization problems. In the proposed TLBO-MA, both TLBO-based operator and some special local searching operators are designed to balance the global exploration and local exploitation abilities. Some recent studies on the choice of local search method employed have shown that this choice significantly affects the efficiency of the memetic algorithm. To decide, at runtime, which local method is chosen, we adopt adaptive Meta-Lamarckian learning strategy. Finally, experimental studies with adaptive Meta-Lamarckian learning strategy on continuous benchmark problems and hypersonic trajectory optimization problem are presented. Simulation results on six benchmark problems and comparisons with Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and conventional TLBO indicate that the proposed TLBO-MA can not only effectively enhance the searching efficiency, but also greatly improve the searching quality. Simulation results on trajectory optimization demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed TLBO-MA to actual engineering problem.
A comparison of three weighted human gene functional association networks

Gene-gene association or protein-protein interaction databases have been important resource for the study of cellular functions and human diseases. A number of gene association databases have been available in the public domain. Each of these databases has its own unique virtues, but no single database could provide enough confidence and coverage. These years some meta-databases have been built by integrating various resources of gene functional associations and weighing the evidence of each association by some score systems. In this work, we compared three weighted genome-scale human gene association networks constructed from three such meta-databases, STRING, FunCoup and FLN, respectively. We found that the three networks share a large fraction of common genes but only quite limited overlapped interactions. However, most genes involved in important cellular processes and human diseases, as well as their pairwise interactions, is included in all of the three networks. This explains why all the three networks have been successfully applied in the study of cellular functions and diseases mechanisms. We believe that further integration of these meta-databases would provide higher confidence and coverage of gene associations in human proteome and facilitate the study of human gene association networks.
Self-Prediction of Performance Metrics for the Database Management System Workload

Workload in Database Management System (DBMS) consists of huge amount of data and number of concurrent users who are executing different requests that require some resources. To manage these types of activities, organizations hire different database experts. There is versatility in workload due to the huge data size and different types of requests (workload). These factors contribute to some new challenges in the workload management. These challenges are identification of the workload and decision about the problem queries, identification of resource oriented and contention queries, accurate workload classification, optimal plan selection, prediction and adoption. In DBMS, where workload management and tuning is performed through if-then approach, unforeseen behavior of the workload cannot be handled and sometime leads to unpredictable state. In this research a prediction framework has been proposed called as workload queries performance Predictor. The predictor will predict the performance metrics (workload size, elapsed time, record accessed, record used, disk I/Os, memory required, message count and bytes) for queries in a given workload. We are improving efficiency and reducing search time when projection of query feature vector is performed over performance feature vector. The predictor will take help from the optimizer and store the information in database which saves the information as history for the future.
The e↵ect of priming pictures and videos on a question-answer dialog scenario in a virtual environment (Preliminary Version) ⇤

Having a free speech conversation with avatars in a virtual environment can be desirable in virtual reality applications such as virtual therapy and serious games. However, recognizing and processing free speech seems too ambitious to realize with the current technology. As an alternative, pre-scripted conversations with keyword detection can handle a number of goal-oriented situations as well as some scenarios in which the conversation content is of secondary importance. This is, for example, the case in virtual exposure therapy for the treatment of people with social phobia, where conversation is for exposure and anxiety arousal only. A drawback of pre-scripted dialog is the limited scope of user’s answers. The system cannot handle a user’s response, which does not match the pre-defined content, other than by providing a default reply. A new method which uses priming material to restrict the possibility of the user’s response is proposed in this paper to solve this problem. Two studies were conducted to investigate whether people can be guided to mention specific keywords with video and/or picture primings. Study 1 was a two by two experiment in which participants (n = 20) were asked to answer a number of open questions. Prior to the session, participants watched priming videos or unrelated videos. During the session, they could see priming pictures or unrelated pictures on a whiteboard behind the person who asked the questions. Results showed that participants tended to mention more keywords both with priming videos and pictures. Study 2 shared the same experimental setting but was carried out in virtual reality instead of in the real world. Participants (n = 20) were asked to answer questions of an avatar when they were exposed to priming material before and/or during the conversation session. The same results were found: the surrounding media content had a guidance e↵ect. Furthermore, when priming pictures appeared in the environment, people sometimes forgot to mention the content they typically would mention.
Effective Color Ink Diffusion Synthesis

Our previous work proposed a non-stroke, image-based rendering algorithm for automatically synthesizing a reference image with color ink diffusion style. However, our previous work also showed drawbacks of "color shifting" and "detail missing. " In this paper, we present a new and effective color ink diffusion synthesis (ECIDS) algorithm. In particular, we propose a new Kubelka-Munk equation (SK-M) to properly mix pigment color. This new equation produces a resultant image that has a tone visually similar to the reference image. In addition, we present a new overlapping equation (NOL) to properly overlap deposit layer with diffusion layer. Thus, the resultant image can show more ink diffusion details than our previous work. Experimental results demonstrate that this new algorithm can effectively produce visually pleasing results better than our previous work.
Biology of personality dimensions

Rapid progress is being made in understanding the neurobiology of human personality. This has been facilitated by using self-report questionnaires that assess multiple dimensions of personality quantitatively and reliably. Hypothesis-driven research has mapped models with five to seven dimensions of personality to results from brain imaging, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, and molecular genetics. At each level of organization there are non-linear interactions among multiple variables. Even at the molecular genetic level, each personality dimension is influenced by epistatic interactions among a family of genes, and the sets influencing each trait are partially specific and partially overlapping. What emerges is a picture of self-organizing complexity appropriate for psychobiological systems that involve adaptation to an ever-changing environment.
Towards Democratic Models of Science: Exploring the Case of Scientific Pluralism

Scientific pluralism, a normative endorsement of the plurality or multiplicity of research approaches in science, has recently been advocated by several philosophers (e.g., Stephen Kellert, Helen Longino, and C. Kenneth Waters 2006, Philip Kitcher 2001, Helen Longino 2013, Sandra Mitchell 2009, and Hasok Chang 2010). Comparing these accounts of scientific pluralism, one will encounter quite some variation. We want to clarify the different interpretations of scientific pluralism by showing how they incarnate different models of democracy, stipulating the desired interaction among the plurality of research approaches in different ways.Furthermore, the example of scientific pluralism is used to advocate the application of democratic theory to philosophy of science problems in general. Drawing on the parallels between models of science and models of democracy, we can articulate how the plurality of research approaches in science should interact within a democratic framework as well as how to cultivate multiple research approaches in the epistemically most productive way possible. This will not only improve our understanding of scientific plurality, but it can also help us stipulating how different research approaches should interact to constitute the most objective account possible or how the ideal of scientific consensus has to be understood. Ultimately, developing democratic models of science bears on the question of how deeply science and democracy are entwined.
Women and ICT: exploring obstacles and enablers of a possible career

The ICT industry is a key contributor to the EU’s economy. Unfortunately, women’s presence is low overall and it decreases as they climb the corporate ladder. Underrepresentation of women in ICT is a research area that has received attention mostly in U.S.A. , UK and some European countries. This phenomenon, termed “IT gender gap”, has not received much attention in Italy, yet. Therefore, the purpose of this study is doing an “initial” research and understanding the characteristics of the IT workplace culture in Italy. Based on the international research, a framework and a questionnaire have been developed. To test the questionnaire, a first research sample (without any statistical relevance compared to the Italian context) has been created and the potential respondents were contacted via email. Data analysis discusses the workplace environmental factors that hinder and support the career development of women in ICT in this country. Understanding the limitations of this research project has given rise to some open points that deserve being analysed and further explored.
How to Collect Haptic Expressions of Spontaneous Emotions? Methodological Considerations

Eliciting emotions to collect affective expressions is frequently used in studies about facial, spoken or bodily expressions of emotions. However, recent works in affective hap tics focus mostly on expressions of acted emotions. The expression of spontaneous emotions using the haptic modality remains unexplored. This paper discusses methodological considerations for designing experimental protocols to collect haptic expressions of spontaneous emotions. We highlight the main difficulties to solve, provide illustrative examples from several experiments that we conducted, and describe methodological considerations for eliciting emotions and collecting corresponding haptic expressions.
Simulation of Built-in PHP Features for Precise Static Code Analysis

The World Wide Web grew rapidly during the last decades and is used by millions of people every day for online shopping, banking, networking, and other activities. Many of these websites are developed with PHP, the most popular scripting language on the Web. However, PHP code is prone to different types of critical security vulnerabilities that can lead to data leakage, server compromise, or attacks against an application's users. This problem can be addressed by analyzing the source code of the application for security vulnerabilities before the application is deployed on a web server. In this paper, we present a novel approach for the precise static analysis of PHP code to detect security vulnerabilities in web applications. As dismissed by previous work in this area, a comprehensive configuration and simulation of over 900 PHP built-in features allows us to precisely model the highly dynamic PHP language. By performing an intra- and inter-procedural data flow analysis and by creating block and function summaries, we are able to efficiently perform a backward-directed taint analysis for 20 different types of vulnerabilities. Furthermore, string analysis enables us to validate sanitization in a context-sensitive manner. Our method is the first to perform fine-grained analysis of the interaction between different types of sanitization, encoding, sources, sinks, markup contexts, and PHP settings. We implemented a prototype of our approach in a tool called RIPS. Our evaluation shows that RIPS is capable of finding severe vulnerabilities in popular real-world applications: we reported 73 previously unknown vulnerabilities in five well-known PHP applications such as phpBB, osCommerce, and the conference management software HotCRP.
A Language Stimulation Analysis of Cantonese-English Bilingual Infants in Hong Kong

This study measured naturalistic language stimulation in Hong Kong among eight bilingual (Cantonese, English) infants. Two findings were that (a) infants received more indirect (adult-to-adult) than direct (adult-to-infant) language stimulation and (b) infants received 6.8 hr of language stimulation per day with more fillers, vocatives, and baby talk than declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives.
The price of incivility.

We've all heard of (or experienced) the "boss from hell. " But that's just one form that incivility in the workplace can take. Rudeness on the job is surprisingly common, and it's on the rise. Whether it involves overt bullying or subtle acts of thoughtlessness, incivility takes a toll. It erodes productivity, chips away at morale, leads employees to quit, and damages customer relationships. Dealing with its aftermath can soak up weeks of managerial attention and time. Over the past 14 years the authors have conducted interviews with and collected data from more than 14,000 people throughout the United States and Canada in order to track the prevalence, types, causes, costs, and cures of incivility at work. They suggest several steps leaders can take to counter rudeness. Managers should start with themselves-monitoring their own behavior, asking for feedback on it, and making sure that their actions are a model for others. When it comes to managing the organization, leaders should hire with civility in mind, teach it on the job, create group norms, reward good behavior, and penalize bad behavior. Lest consistent civility seem an extravagance, the authors caution that just one habitually offensive employee critically positioned in an organization can cost millions in Lost employees, lost customers, and lost productivity.
Returning refugees: Psychosocial problems and mediators of mental health among Malawian returnees

The psychosocial problems and mediators of mental health were investigated in an adult sample of 74 Malawian returnees. A semi-structured interview indicated a number of specific problems facing the returnees, including reclaiming land, discrimination and disappointed expectations. A demographic questionnaire, the Coping Strategy Indicator, the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, and the Generalised Self-Efficacy Scale were used to identify potential mediating factors on mental health as measured by the Self Reporting Questionnaire and number of visits to a doctor/healer in the last year. Stepwise Regression analysis revealed that number of trauma events experienced, generalised self-efficacy and gender were significant predictors of mental health. However, there was no significant relationship between the measures of coping strategies and mental health. These results are discussed in relation to theories of stress, learned helplessness, and the possibility of facilitating returnee reintegration. The importance of contextualising the aims and instruments of research is emphasised.
A voice for the past: making 'public' slavery heritage in Rio de Janeiro.

This article discusses the first steps of slavery heritage making in the port region of Rio de Janeiro, after the prolonged institutional forgetting of the city’s slave past. The material presented shows that this slavery memorialisation interweaves with the contemporary flourishing of affirmative action in favour of Afro-descendants in Brazil, which aims to redress historically-rooted social inequalities and to include ‘minorities’ in the nation. In spite of its inclusive aims, however, the making of slavery heritage in Rio also exposes old and new social imbalances. Some imbalances are revealed, for example, by the different times that certain social actors (i.e., black social movements) have joined the process of public memorialisation in relation to others (i.e., archaeologists and the city council). Other imbalances are revealed through the political meanings that black activists now attach to slavery heritage in support of their struggle.