Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Selfies On Social Media: The Role Of Appearance Contingent Self-Worth And Impact On Self-Esteem

In this dissertation, women’s motivation to post selfies, defined as self-taken photographs of only themselves, and the impact of feedback received on these images on self-esteem was investigated. It was hypothesized that women higher in appearance contingent self-worth would have a stronger desire for positive appearance feedback, and that this would result in more frequent selfie posting, as this could be a means of soliciting positive feedback. In addition, it was hypothesized that women higher in appearance contingent self-worth would be more strongly impacted by feedback received on selfies than would women lower in appearance contingent self-worth given that this feedback could be perceived as being appearance-based. Three studies were conducted online, all with female undergraduate students. In Study I (N = 297), survey-based data were collected, and the results indicated that although the correlation between appearance-contingent self-worth and frequency of selfie posting was not significant, there was a significant indirect relationship through the desire to obtain positive appearance feedback. Further, exploratory analyses revealed that appearance contingent self-worth was both directly and indirectly related to the extent to which women edit their photos. In Study II (N = 48), women’s Instagram accounts were accessed to obtain information about the average proportion of their followers who liked their selfies and provided positive appearance-based comments over two months. This information was used in conjunction with self-report measures to determine whether the amount of feedback received was associated with women’s trait self-esteem and appearance satisfaction over that time period. However, due to difficulties with recruitment, all
Efficient nonparametric confidence bands for receiver operating-characteristic curves

Receiver operating-characteristic curve is a popular graphical method frequently used in order to study the diagnostic capacity of continuous (bio)markers. In spite of the existence of a huge number of papers devoted to both theoretical and practical aspects of this topic, the construction of confidence bands has had little impact in the specialized literature. As far as the authors know, in the CRAN there are only three R packages providing receiver operating-characteristic curve confidence regions: plotROC, pROC and fbroc. This work tries to fill this gap studying and proposing a new nonparametric method to build confidence bands for both the standard receiver operating-characteristic curve and its generalization for nonmonotone relationships. The behavior of the proposed procedure is studied via Monte Carlo simulations and the methodology is applied on two real-world biomedical problems. In addition, an R function to compute the proposed and some of the previously existing methodologies is provided as online supplementary material.
R-plasmid curing of Listeria species from foods of animal origin.

Of the nine isolates of Listeria species tested for plasmid isolation and their characterization, eight harbored one to three plasmid fragments of varying molecular size between 16148.78 bp to 698.00 bp. All plasmid bearing Listeria isolates resistant to azithromycine were subjected to the presence of plasmid mediated drug resistance using glycine as a chemical agent. The curing experiment revealed elimination of plasmid of molecular size 9117.78 bp from only one isolate of Listeria murrayi. The frequency of curing was found to be 100 per cent. The remaining isolates of Listeria spp. failed to grow after addition of glycine in the BHI broth.
Working Paper No 2009 / 31 MAY 2009 Are Free Trade Agreements Contagious ?

This paper presents empirical evidence on the extent to which FTAs are “contagious”, using empirical techniques inspired by the study of contagion in exchange rate crises. Using different econometric techniques, it tests the null hypothesis that the signing of an FTA between one nation’s trade partners has no affect on the probability of the nation signing a new FTA. The hypothesis is tested against other political, economical and geographical determinants of the FTA formation previously stated in the literature, finding evidence that the contagion phenomenon is present in different specifications and samples.
Introducing NIEUW: Novel Incentives and Workflows for Eliciting Linguistic Data

This paper introduces the NIEUW (Novel Incentives and Workflows) project funded by the United States National Science Foundation and part of the Linguistic Data Consortium’s strategy to provide order of magnitude improvement in the scale, cost, variety, linguistic diversity and quality of Language Resources available for education, research and technology development. Notwithstanding decades of effort and progress in collecting and distributing Language Resources, it remains the case that demand still far exceeds supply for all of the approximately 7000 languages in the world, even the most well documented languages with global economic and political influence. The absence of Language Resources, regardless of the language, stifles teaching and technology building, inhibiting the creation of language enabled applications and, as a result, commerce and communication. Project oriented approaches which focus intensive funding and effort on problems of limited scope over short durations can only address part of the problem. The HLT community instead requires approaches that do not rely upon highly constrained resources such as project funding and can be sustained across many languages and many years. In this paper, we describe a new initiative to harness the power of alternative incentives to elicit linguistic data and annotation. We also describe changes to the workflows necessary to collect data from workforces attracted by these incentives.
A Weighted Minimum Distance Decoding for Uplink Multiuser MIMO Systems With Low-Resolution ADCs

This paper considers an uplink multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), in which <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> users equipped with a single-antenna communicate with one base station (BS) with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N_{\mathrm{ r}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> antennas. In this system, we present a novel multiuser MIMO detection framework inspired by coding theory. The key idea of the proposed framework is to create a code <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of length <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2N_{\mathrm{ r}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> over a spatial domain. This code is constructed by an <italic>auto-encoding</italic> function that is completely described by a channel transformation followed by a quantization function of the ADCs for a fixed input constellation set. Using the proposed framework, we present a novel <italic>weighted</italic> minimum distance decoding (wMDD) that achieves the optimal detection performance by appropriately exploiting unequal channel reliabilities. In addition, we show that bit error rate exponentially decreases with the minimum distance of the code <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, which plays a similar role with a condition number in conventional MIMO systems. Furthermore, we develop the communication method that uses the wMDD when the explicit channel state information is not available at the BS. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the superiority of the proposed method.
Differential Regulation of Proliferation and Differentiation in Neural Precursor Cells by the Jak Pathway

Neuronal precursor cells (NPCs) are temporally regulated and have the ability to proliferate and differentiate into mature neurons, oligodendrocytes, and astrocytes in the presence of growth factors (GFs). In the present study, the role of the Jak pathway in brain development was investigated in NPCs derived from neurosphere cultures using Jak2 and Jak3 small interfering RNAs and specific inhibitors. Jak2 inhibition profoundly decreased NPC proliferation, preventing further differentiation into neurons and glial cells. However, Jak3 inhibition induced neuronal differentiation accompanied by neurite growth. This phenomenon was due to the Jak3 inhibition‐mediated induction of neurogenin (Ngn)2 and NeuroD in NPCs. Jak3 inhibition induced NPCs to differentiate into scattered neurons and increased the expression of Tuj1, microtubule associated protein 2 (MAP2), Olig2, and neuroglial protein (NG)2, but decreased glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) expression, with predominant neurogenesis/polydendrogenesis compared with astrogliogenesis. Therefore, Jak2 may be important for NPC proliferation and maintenance, whereas knocking‐down of Jak3 signaling is essential for NPC differentiation into neurons and oligodendrocytes but does not lead to astrocyte differentiation. These results suggest that NPC proliferation and differentiation are differentially regulated by the Jak pathway. STEM CELLS 2010;28:1816–1828
Multiple Lenses: Rural Landscape through the Eyes of Nurse Preceptors and Students

In a recent photovoice study, fourth year nursing students and their rural nurse preceptors provided us with photographs and commentary documenting their everyday, lived realities, from which we constructed a narrative of preceptorship in the rural nursing context. We found that rural nursing integrates professional and community values, and that landscape mediates this integration in four ways: travel, occupationalism, historicity, and symbolic projection. Rural preceptorships introduce nursing students to dichotomous perceptions of landscape, derived from rural nurses' multiple roles and the competing scripts of official policy versus community bonds. Disseminated in media-rich formats such as exhibitions, photo-essays and online resources, these findings amount to a compelling message to prospective rural nurses, educators, and policymakers: rural nursing is a specialty, too long marginalized, with its own unique challenges and rewards. Keywords: landscape, rural, nursing, preceptorship, Gemeinschaft, photovoice
An efficiency approach for RBAC reconfiguration with minimal roles and perturbation

Role‐based access control (RBAC) has been widely used based on its good applicability and high flexibility in recent years. However, the RBAC system needs to be updated to meet the changes in access control policies during its run time. As the complexity of modifying role‐permission assignments, new roles are continuously added to the system without considering the business processes and the user demands. Therefore, the RBAC system needs to be reconfigured over time to optimize the RBAC configuration and keep as close as possible to the original at the same time. Although there have several RBAC reconfiguration schemes by generating roles that are similar to the deployed ones, most of them neglect the difference between roles (meaningful or meaningless, frequently used, or infrequently used, etc) and generate more roles than needed, which in turn increases the system management burden. In this paper, we first propose a method to evaluate the quality of roles based on two indicators and formally define the problem of RBAC reconfiguration with minimal roles and perturbation. Then, we present a log‐based RBAC reconfiguration approach that handles the motivation problem and its detail algorithm process. The effectiveness and stability of our approach is demonstrated by experiments at last.
NUMA-Aware Thread Scheduling for Big Data Transfers over Terabits Network Infrastructure

The evergrowing trend of big data has led scientists to share and transfer the simulation and analytical data across the geodistributed research and computing facilities. However, the existing data transfer frameworks used for data sharing lack the capability to adopt the attributes of the underlying parallel file systems (PFS). LADS (Layout-Aware Data Scheduling) is an end-to-end data transfer tool optimized for terabit network using a layout-aware data scheduling via PFS. However, it does not consider the NUMA (Nonuniform Memory Access) architecture. In this paper, we propose a NUMA-aware thread and resource scheduling for optimized data transfer in terabit network. First, we propose distributed RMA buffers to reduce memory controller contention in CPU sockets and then schedule the threads based on CPU socket and NUMA nodes inside CPU socket to reduce memory access latency. We design and implement the proposed resource and thread scheduling in the existing LADS framework. Experimental results showed from 21.7% to 44% improvement with memory-level optimizations in the LADS framework as compared to the baseline without any optimization.
The effect of technology supported teaching on students' academic achievement: a combined meta-analytic and thematic study

This research aimed to enlighten the ambiguous relationship between technology supported teaching (TST) and students' achievement. A meta-analysis was conducted incorporating the quantitative findings of 11 scientific studies derived from 245 theses and 386 articles. These addressed the effect of technology on students' academic achievement nationally and internationally between 2005 and 2016. The results indicate that TST has a positive effect on students' academic achievement. Furthermore, participants' perceptions of this issue were thematically derived from 12 academic studies and these corroborated the quantitative findings. Learners should therefore be exposed to innovative technologies such as Web 2.0 and augmented reality technologies to effectively and adequately benefit from them as learning strategies. The results of both studies are discussed in detail and suggestions made for future research.
Genetic and Histological Diversity between the Coastal and Desert Chamaeleo chamaeleon Subspecies in Egypt

The biodiversity between the two Chamaeleo chamaeleon (C.c.) subspecies (chamaeleon and musae) inhibiting the coastal and desert habitats of Egypt, respectively, was estimated using random amplification of genomic DNA (PCR-RAPD), histological and histochemical examinations. PCR-RAPD analysis using six arbitrary primers evidenced the genetic diversity. The observed slight histological variations including lightly stained neural nuclei and higher renal glomerulae and blood sinusoids in addition to higher pigment cells in C.c. chamaeleon than that observed in C.c. musae showed that C. c. chamaeleon subspecies is more active and adaptable to its coastal habitat. This was further evidenced by the observed higher histochemical localization of either lipid in C. c. chamaeleon or glycogen in C. c. musae.
Coprocessed excipients for solid dosage forms

Tablet manufacturing has been changed by the introduction of the direct-compression process and high-speed machines.These to developments have increased the demands on the functionality of excipients in terms of flow and compression properties. Particle engineering of individual excipients and excipient combinations using coprocessing, by virtue of subparticle modifications, has provided an attractive tool for developing high-functionality excipients that are suited to modern tablet manufacturing processes.
Comparing Pretrained Multilingual Word Embeddings on an Ontology Alignment Task

Word embeddings capture a string’s semantics and go beyond its surface form. In a multilingual environment, those embeddings need to be trained for each language, either separately or as a joint model. The more languages needed, the more computationally cost-and time-intensive the task of training. As an alternative, pretrained word embeddings can be utilized to compute semantic similarities of strings in different languages. This paper provides a comparison of three different multilingual pretrained word embedding repositories with a string-matching baseline and uses the task of ontology alignment as example scenario. A vast majority of ontology alignment methods rely on string similarity metrics, however, they frequently use string matching techniques that purely rely on syntactic aspects. Semantically oriented word embeddings have much to offer to ontology alignment algorithms, such as the simple Munkres algorithm utilized in this paper. The proposed approach produces a number of correct alignments on a non-standard data set based on embeddings from the three repositories, where FastText embeddings performed best on all four languages and clearly outperformed the string-matching baseline.
Mining association rules for admission control and service differentiation in e‐commerce applications

Workload demands in e‐commerce applications are very dynamic in nature, therefore it is essential for internet service providers to manage server resources effectively to maximize total revenue in server overloading situations. In this paper, a data mining technique is applied to a typical e‐commerce application model for identification of composite association rules that capture user navigation patterns. Two algorithms are then developed based on the derived rules for admission control, service differentiation, and priority scheduling. Our approach takes the following aspects into consideration: (a) only final purchase requests result in company revenue; (b) any other request can potentially lead to final purchase, depending upon the likelihood of the navigation sequence that starts from current request and leads to final purchase; (c) service differentiation and priority assignment are based on aggregated confidence and average support of the composite association rules. As identification of composite association rules and computation of confidence and support of the rules can be pre‐computed offline, the proposed approach incurs minimum performance overheads. The evaluation results suggest that the proposed approach is effective in terms of request management for revenue maximization.
Study on all-optical cross-band frequency conversion for communication satellite

A novel all-optical cross-band frequency conversion method for communication satellite is proposed and studied in this paper. An optical frequency comb (OFC) based on a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and a DFB laser is used as optical carrier and multi-wavelength local oscillators. The frequency conversion among C-band, Ku-band, K-band and Ka-band by feeding input signals of different frequency to the proposed scheme is demonstrated in the simulation. The proposed solution makes the cross-band frequency conversion possible and flexible, showing good application potential in the communication satellite systems of future.
MGAD: Multilingual Generation of Analogy Datasets

We present a novel, minimally supervised method of generating word embedding evaluation datasets for a large number of languages. Our approach utilizes existing dependency treebanks and parsers in order to create language-specific syntactic analogy datasets that do not rely on translation or human annotation. As part of our work, we offer syntactic analogy datasets for three previously unexplored languages: Arabic, Hindi, and Russian. We further present an evaluation of three popular word embedding algorithms (Word2Vec, GloVe, LexVec) against these datasets and explore how the performance of each word embedding algorithm varies between several syntactic categories.
A wireless biosignal measurement system using a SoC FPGA and Bluetooth Low Energy

This paper presents the development of a prototype for a wireless biosignal measurement system, which makes use of a System-on-Chip FPGA, with an embedded ARM processor, and the Bluetooth Low Energy standard for wireless data transmission to a smartphone. The body temperature and heart rate are monitored using a steel-head thermistor and an ECG acquisition module, respectively. The ARM processor runs a Real-Time Operating System. A part of the algorithm that extracts the heart rate runs on custom hardware implemented in the FPGA fabric. The prototype successfully extracts the vital signs and sends updated values to a smartphone every second.
Curative Ex Vivo Hepatocyte-Directed Gene Editing in a Mouse Model of Hereditary Tyrosinemia Type 1.

Hereditary tyrosinemia type 1 (HT1) is an autosomal recessive disorder caused by deficiency of fumarylacetoacetate hydrolase (FAH). It has been previously shown that ex vivo hepatocyte-directed gene therapy using an integrating lentiviral vector to replace the defective Fah gene can cure liver disease in small- and large-animal models of HT1. This study hypothesized that ex vivo hepatocyte-directed gene editing using CRISPR/Cas9 could be used to correct a mouse model of HT1, in which a single point mutation results in loss of FAH function. To achieve high transduction efficiencies of primary hepatocytes, this study utilized a lentiviral vector (LV) to deliver both the Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 nuclease and target guide RNA (LV-Cas9) and an adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector to deliver a 1.2 kb homology template (AAV-HT). Cells were isolated from Fah-/- mice and cultured in the presence of LV and AAV vectors. Transduction of cells with LV-Cas9 induced significant indels at the target locus, and correction of the point mutation in Fah-/- cells ex vivo using AAV-HT was completely dependent on LV-Cas9. Next, hepatocytes transduced ex vivo by LV-Cas9 and AAV-HT were transplanted into syngeneic Fah-/- mice that had undergone a two-thirds partial hepatectomy or sham hepatectomy. Mice were cycled on/off the protective drug 2-(2-nitro-4-trifluoromethylbenzoyl)-1,3-cyclohexanedione (NTBC) to stimulate expansion of corrected cells. All transplanted mice became weight stable off NTBC. However, a significant improvement was observed in weight stability off NTBC in animals that received partial hepatectomy. After 6 months, mice were euthanized, and thorough biochemical and histological examinations were performed. Biochemical markers of liver injury were significantly improved over non-transplanted controls. Histological examination of mice revealed normal tissue architecture, while immunohistochemistry showed robust repopulation of recipient animals with FAH+ cells. In summary, this is the first report of ex vivo hepatocyte-directed gene repair using CRISPR/Cas9 to demonstrate curative therapy in an animal model of liver disease.