Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Elaboration Likelihood Model and Proxemic Violations as Peripheral Cues to Information Processing.

This paper provides a literature review of the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) as applied in persuasion. Specifically, the paper addresses distraction with regard to effects on persuasion. In addition, the application of proxemic violations as peripheral cues in message processing is discussed. Finally, the paper proposes to shed new light on the subject and inspire future efforts in distraction, elaboration likelihood, and nonverbal research on the basis that the ELM promises to be a newer and crisper explanation of several aspects of distraction and persuasion. Fifty-nine references are attached. (Author/SG) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the oric,inal document. *********************************************************************** Elaboration Likelihood The Elaboration Likelihood Model and Proxemic ViBlations as Peripheral Cues to Information Processing Michael Eaves Department of Communication Florida State University
Design and development of an AAC app based on a speech-to-symbol technology

The purpose of this paper is to present the design and the development of an Augmentative and Alternative Communication app that uses a speech to symbol technology to model language, i.e. to recognize the speech and display the text or the graphic content related to it. Our app is intended to be adopted by communication partners who want to engage in interventions focused on improving communication skills. Our app has the goal of translating simple speech sentences in a set of symbols that are understandable by children with complex communication needs. We moderated a focus group among six AAC communication partners. Then, we developed a prototype. We are currently starting testing our app in an AAC Centre in Milan, Italy.
Computing Ext for graph algebras

For a row-nite graph G with no sinks and in which every loop has an exit, we construct an isomorphism between Ext(C (G)) and coker(A I), where A is the vertex matrix of G. If c is the class in Ext(C (G)) associated to a graph obtained by attaching a sink to G, then this isomor- phism maps c to the class of a vector that describes how the sink was added. We conclude with an application in which we use this isomorphism to produce an example of a row-nite transitive graph with no sinks whose associated C -algebra is not semiprojective.
Approaching the Model-Driven Generation of Feedback to Remove Software Performance Flaws

The problem of interpreting results of performance analysis and providing feedback on software models to overcome performance flaws is probably the most critical open issue in the field of software performance engineering. Automation in this step would help to introduce performance validation as an integrated activity in the software lifecycle, without dramatically affecting the daily practices of software developers. In this paper we approach the problem with model-driven techniques, on which we build a general solution. Basing on the concept of performance antipatterns, that are bad practices in software modeling leading to performance flaws, we introduce metamodels and transformations that can support the whole process of flaw detection and solution. The approach that we propose is notation-independent and can be embedded in any (existing or future) concrete modeling notation by using weaving models and automatically generated model transformations. Finally, we discuss the issues opened from this work and the future achievements that are at the hand in this domain thanks to model-driven techniques.
Computer Mediated Communication among Virtual Teams : What are “ Teams ” and how are they “ Virtual ” ?

Introduction This chapter is concerned with computer-mediated communication among virtual teams. A focus on social factors in small group interaction is required to adequately answer the question: what is a “virtual team” and how can it be said to be “virtual? ” Understanding the role of social factors in small group interaction is important since governments and corporations around the world are increasing their reliance on information technology as a surrogate for face-to-face interaction among distributed teams. Work in this area is particularly timely since, as ‘virtual teaming’ has been on the rise, research in small groups has declined (Ilgen, 1999); (Gladstein, 1984). A survey of social science research on small groups will conceivably help software designers design ‘group friendly’ electronic environments for virtual teams. It is the first step towards knowing, for example, when a 3-D rendered virtual collaboration environment would better support collaboration than e-mail, a conference call or a face-to-face meeting. It is anticipated that work in this area will also inform management on the social-psychological impacts of distance on small group collaboration.
Gene therapy and peripheral nerve repair: a perspective

Clinical phase I/II studies have demonstrated the safety of gene therapy for a variety of central nervous system disorders, including Canavan’s, Parkinson’s (PD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD), retinal diseases and pain. The majority of gene therapy studies in the CNS have used adeno-associated viral vectors (AAV) and the first AAV-based therapeutic, a vector encoding lipoprotein lipase, is now marketed in Europe under the name Glybera. These remarkable advances may become relevant to translational research on gene therapy to promote peripheral nervous system (PNS) repair. This short review first summarizes the results of gene therapy in animal models for peripheral nerve repair. Secondly, we identify key areas of future research in the domain of PNS-gene therapy. Finally, a perspective is provided on the path to clinical translation of PNS-gene therapy for traumatic nerve injuries. In the latter section we discuss the route and mode of delivery of the vector to human patients, the efficacy and safety of the vector, and the choice of the patient population for a first possible proof-of-concept clinical study.
Keberkesanan animasi grafik dalam kalangan pelajar berbeza gaya icognitif dan kebolehan visualisasi spatial di politeknik

Kajian ini dijalankan untuk melihat keberkesanan penggunaan koswer animasi grafik dalam prestasi pencapaian ujian pra dan ujian pasca mata pelajaran Sistem Elektronik 1 dalam kalangan pelajar yang mengambil kursus Sijil Kejuruteraan Elektrik dan Elektronik, Politeknik Kementerian Pengajian Tinggi Malaysia (KPTM) yang mempunyai gaya kognitif (Field Independent & Field Dependent) dan kebolehan visualisasi spatial (Visual Tinggi & Visual Rendah) yang berbeza. Prestasi pencapaian ujian pra dan ujian pasca juga melibatkan kumpulan pelajar yang pembelajarannya menggunakan koswer animasi grafik (kumpulan rawatan) dan pembelajaran secara konvensional (kumpulan kawalan). Sampel kajian terdiri dari 138 orang pelajar semester 1 yang sedang mengikuti kursus Sijil Kejuruteraan Elektrik dan Elektronik di Jabatan Kejuruteraan Elektrik, politeknik KPTM. Kajian ini hanya meliputi dua buah politeknik KPTM di mana penyelidik telah membahagikan kawasan kajian kepada dua zon utama iaitu Zon Tengah dan Zon Selatan. Kajian ini ~enetapkanku mpulan rawatan adalah pelajar dari Zon Selatan manakala kumpulan kawalan pula merujuk kepada pelajar dari Zon Tengah. Reka bentuk kajian ini adalah kuasi-eksperimen dengan faktorial 2 x 2 (Gaya kognitif x Kebolehan visual spatial pelajar) yang menggunakan data-data kuantitatif. Data-data yang diperolehi telah dianalisis menggunakan statistik deskriptif dan inferensi seperti min, sisihan piawai dan ujian -T untuk sampel-sampel bebas. Tahap keertian 0.05 ditetapkan untuk melapor data. Secara keseluruhan dapatan kajian menunjukkan (a) terdapat perbezaan yang signifikan dalam pencapaian pelajar berciri gaya kognitif FI, FD, VT dan VR dimana kumpulan rawatan adalah lebih baik berbanding dengan kumpulan kawalan, (b) terdapat perbezaan yang signifikan dalam pencapaian gabungan pelajar berciri FIVT, FIVR, FDVT dan FDVR bagi kumpulan rawatan adalah lebih baik berbanding kumpulan kawalan dan (c) elemen-elemen (rekabentuk antaramuka, rekabentuk interaksi, motivasi dan mesra pengguna) yang terdapat pada koswer animasi grafik Sistem Elektronik 1 adalah membantu pencapaian pembelajaran pelajar. Kesiinpulannya, koswer animasi grafik berpotensi dalam meningkatkan pencapaian pelajar dimana pelajar berciri FIVT, FI dan VT lebih mendapat manfaat daripada pembelajaran berasaskan koswer animasi grafik tersebut.
The Consideration of Recency and Compactness in Sequential Pattern Mining

Sequential pattern mining is an important data-mining method for determining time-related behavior in sequence databases. The information obtained from sequential pattern mining can be used in marketing, biosequence analysis, medical records, sales analysis, etc. Existing methods only focus on the concept of frequency because of the assumption that sequences’ behaviors do not change over time. The environment from which the data is generated is often dynamic, however, so that the sequences’ behaviors may change over time. To adapt the discovered patterns to these changes, two new concepts, recency and compactness, are incorporated into traditional sequential pattern mining. The concept of recency causes patterns to quickly adapt to the latest behaviors in sequence databases, while the concept of compactness ensures reasonable time spans for the discovered patterns. We named the new patterns CFR-patterns because three concepts (compactness, frequency, and recency), are simultaneously considered. In this paper, a method is presented to find CFR-patterns. Empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method is computationally efficient and that it is more advantageous than the traditional method when sequences’ behaviors change over time.
Comparison of structures for joint equalization and decoding

We compare two structures for combined equalization/detection of linear codes over frequency selective channels. The structures come from different families of codes: convolutional codes on one hand and parity check block codes on the other hand. First, we show that the joint receiver process corresponds to an iterative belief propagation schedule on graphical representations. Then, we draw and comment upon the simulation results for various codes and channel choices.
Downregulation of tyrosine threonine kinase inhibits tumor growth via G2/M arrest in human endometrioid endometrial adenocarcinoma

Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic malignancy, about 80% of which is endometrial endometrioid carcinoma. Dysregulation of spindle assembly checkpoint plays a vital role in endometrial endometrioid carcinoma tumorigenesis and progression. The purpose of this study was to explore how tyrosine threonine kinase, a spindle assembly checkpoint–related protein, promotes the endometrial endometrioid carcinoma progression. We found that both messenger RNA and protein levels of tyrosine threonine kinase in endometrial endometrioid carcinoma tissues are higher than those in normal endometrial tissues, and its expression is associated with tumor stages. Genetic depletion of tyrosine threonine kinase by RNA interference in two endometrial endometrioid carcinoma cell lines significantly inhibits cell proliferation and induces apoptosis. Mechanistically, depletion of tyrosine threonine kinase induces G2/M cell cycle arrest and triggers caspase-dependent cell apoptosis. Collectively, tyrosine threonine kinase is significantly upregulated in endometrial endometrioid carcinoma, and downregulation of tyrosine threonine kinase can suppress endometrial endometrioid carcinoma cell proliferation and promote apoptosis via G2/M cell cycle arrest. Our study demonstrates that tyrosine threonine kinase can be a potential therapeutic target for endometrial endometrioid carcinoma treatment.
Unravelling the Complexity of Inherited Retinal Dystrophies Molecular Testing: Added Value of Targeted Next-Generation Sequencing

To assess the clinical utility of targeted Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) for the diagnosis of Inherited Retinal Dystrophies (IRDs), a total of 109 subjects were enrolled in the study, including 88 IRD affected probands and 21 healthy relatives. Clinical diagnoses included Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), Leber Congenital Amaurosis (LCA), Stargardt Disease (STGD), Best Macular Dystrophy (BMD), Usher Syndrome (USH), and other IRDs with undefined clinical diagnosis. Participants underwent a complete ophthalmologic examination followed by genetic counseling. A custom AmpliSeq™ panel of 72 IRD-related genes was designed for the analysis and tested using Ion semiconductor Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). Potential disease-causing mutations were identified in 59.1% of probands, comprising mutations in 16 genes. The highest diagnostic yields were achieved for BMD, LCA, USH, and STGD patients, whereas RP confirmed its high genetic heterogeneity. Causative mutations were identified in 17.6% of probands with undefined diagnosis. Revision of the initial diagnosis was performed for 9.6% of genetically diagnosed patients. This study demonstrates that NGS represents a comprehensive cost-effective approach for IRDs molecular diagnosis. The identification of the genetic alterations underlying the phenotype enabled the clinicians to achieve a more accurate diagnosis. The results emphasize the importance of molecular diagnosis coupled with clinic information to unravel the extensive phenotypic heterogeneity of these diseases.
Ninja code village for scratch: Function samples/function analyser and automatic assessment of computational thinking concepts

Ninja Code Village is a comprehensive learning-support environment for the Scratch, visual programming language. It provides more than 60 sample functions that are commonly used in Scratch projects, and analyses automatically which functions are used in a project in order to foster students' competencies in abstraction, modelling, and decomposition. It also provides automatic assessment of computational thinking concepts such as conditional statements, loops, data, and parallelism in order to develop students' programming skills.
Performance Analysis of Movement-Based Group Location Management for Mobile Stations Riding on Transportation Systems in Cellular Systems

Group location management was proposed to reduce significant simultaneous location registration signaling loads of mobile stations (MSs) riding on a transportation system (TS) when a TS with riding MSs moves between location areas (LAs), by only registering the location information of a TS and removing location registrations of all MSs riding on a TS in cellular systems. In this paper, the performance of movement-based group location management is analyzed, from the aspect of total signaling cost, which is the sum of registration signaling cost and paging signaling cost. Then, the performance of movement-based group location management is compared with that of movement-based individual location management for varying various parameters. The results show that the movement-based group location management scheme performs much better than the movement-based individual location management scheme, and there exists an optimal movement threshold for movement-based group location management.
Work-related determinants of return to work of employees on long-term sickness absence

Purpose. The aim of the study is to identify work-related determinants of return to work (RTW) of employees who are on long-term sickness absence. Method. The study was based on a sample of 926 employees on sickness absence (maximum duration of 12 weeks). The employees filled out a baseline questionnaire and were subsequently followed until the 10th month after listing sick. Cox proportional hazards regression analyses were used to identify determinants of RTW. Results. Working in one of the vocational sectors public administration, construction, financial and commercial services, transport, or education (P = 0.00) and having low co-worker support (P = 0.01) were related to longer duration to RTW in the mulitvariate model. Having low supervisor support (P = 0.01) was associated with a higher RTW rate. Conclusions. Vocational sector is a strong predictor of RTW. Especially employees from the sector education are slow as to RTW. The observed association between low supervisor support and RTW was unexpected. However, the study confirms earlier research on the association between low co-worker support and RTW.
Uremic Retention Solute Indoxyl Sulfate Level Is Associated with Prolonged QTc Interval in Early CKD Patients

Total mortality and sudden cardiac death is highly prevalent in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). In CKD patients, the protein-bound uremic retention solute indoxyl sulfate (IS) is independently associated with cardiovascular disease. However, the underlying mechanisms of this association have yet to be elucidated. The relationship between IS and cardiac electrocardiographic parameters was investigated in a prospective observational study among early CKD patients. IS arrhythmogenic effect was evaluated by in vitro cardiomyocyte electrophysiological study and mathematical computer simulation. In a cohort of 100 early CKD patients, patients with corrected QT (QTc) prolongation had higher IS levels. Furthermore, serum IS level was independently associated with prolonged QTc interval. In vitro, the delay rectifier potassium current (IK) was found to be significantly decreased after the treatment of IS in a dose-dependent manner. The modulation of IS to the IK was through the regulation of the major potassium ion channel protein Kv 2.1 phosphorylation. In a computer simulation, the decrease of IK by IS could prolong the action potential duration (APD) and induce early afterdepolarization, which is known to be a trigger mechanism of lethal ventricular arrhythmias. In conclusion, serum IS level is independently associated with the prolonged QTc interval in early CKD patients. IS down-regulated IK channel protein phosphorylation and the IK current activity that in turn increased the cardiomyocyte APD and QTc interval in vitro and in the computer ORd model. These findings suggest that IS may play a role in the development of arrhythmogenesis in CKD patients.
Unsupervised brain computer interface based on inter-subject information

This paper presents an unsupervised subject modeling technique and its application to a P300-based word speller. Due to EEG variations across subjects, a special training procedure is required to learn a subject-specific classification model (SSCM). To deal with the inter-subject variation, we first study a subject independent classification model (SICM) that is learned from EEG of a pool of subjects. Next we further adapt the SICM by learning from a subset of the pooled EEG that is automatically selected based on its similarity to the EEG of a new subject. Experiments over ten healthy subjects show that the SICM learned from all pooled EEG outperforms the cross-subject models greatly. More importantly, the adapted SICM achieves virtually the same performance as the SSCM, hence removing the complicated and tedious training procedure.
Internet traffic engineering without full mesh overlaying

The overlay approach has been widely used by many service providers for traffic engineering in large Internet backbones. In the overlay approach, logical connections are set up between edge nodes to form a full mesh virtual network on top of the physical topology. IP routing is then run over the virtual network. Traffic engineering objectives are achieved through carefully routing logical connections over the physical links. Although the overlay approach has been implemented in many operational networks, it has a number of well-known scaling issues. This paper proposes a new approach, which we call the integrated approach, to achieve traffic engineering without full-mesh overlaying. In the integrated approach, IP routing runs natively over the physical topology rather than over the virtual network. Traffic engineering objectives are realized by setting appropriate link metrics in IP routing protocols. We first illustrate our approach with a simple network, then present a formal analysis of the integrated approach and a method for deriving the appropriate link weights. Our analysis shows that for any given set of optimal routes of the overlay approach with respect to a set of traffic demands, the integrated approach can achieve exactly the same result by reproducing them as shortest paths. We further extend the result to a more generic one: for any arbitrary set of routes, as long as they are not loopy, they can be converted to shortest-paths with respect to some set of positive link weights. A theoretical insight of our result is that the optimal routing (with respect to any objective function) is always shortest path routing with respect to some appropriate positive link weights.
Entropy as a Measure of Average Loss of Privacy

Privacy means that not everything about a person is known, that we need to ask additional questions to get the full information about the person. It therefore seems to reasonable to gauge the degree of privacy in each situation by the average number of binary (``yes''-``no'') questions that we need to ask to determine the full information -- which is exactly Shannon's entropy. The problem with this idea is that it is possible, by asking two binary questions -- and thus, strictly speaking, getting only two bits of information -- to sometimes learn a large amount of information. In this paper, we show that while entropy is not always an adequate measure of the {\em absolute} loss of privacy, it is a good idea for gauging the {\em average} loss of privacy. To properly evaluate different privacy-preserving schemes, so also propose to supplement the average privacy loss with the standard deviation of privacy loss -- to see how much the actual privacy loss cab deviate from its average value.
Dynamic Rematerialization: Processing Distributed Queries Using Redundant Data

In this paper an approach to processing distributed queries that makes explicit use of redundant data is proposed. The basic idea is to focus on the dynamics of materialization, defined as the collection of data and partial results available for processing at any given time, as query processing proceeds. In this framework the role of data redudancy in maximizing parallelism and minimizing data movement is clarified. What results is not only the discovery of new algorithms but an improved framework for their evaluation.