Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teacher Beliefs as Predictors of Adolescents’ Cognitive Engagement and Achievement in Mathematics

ABSTRACT The authors explored the moderating effect of teachers’ expectancies and general sense of efficacy on the relationship between students’ achievement and their cognitive engagement and achievement 1 year later. They used hierarchical linear modeling with a longitudinal sample of 79 mathematics teachers and their 1,364 secondary school students coming from 33 schools serving disadvantaged communities in Québec (Canada). Results indicate that teachers’ self-reported beliefs directly influenced student academic experience. However, they did not influence more importantly low-achieving than high-achieving students. Such findings suggest that in schools serving low socioeconomic status students, teachers should be made aware of the role their attitudes can play on students’ cognitive engagement and achievement. Special efforts should also be made to help them develop positive attitudes toward all students.
The pursuit of authenticity in preserving digital art

This paper presents a real-life case-based investigation of current digital and media art conservation practices in public collections. Theoretical, methodological and practical issues associated with documentation, access, function, context and meaning of digital art are discussed, and reflections on authenticity and longevity for digital art are proposed towards a new interdisciplinary theoretical framework.
Protein–protein interaction and quaternary structure

Abstract Protein–protein recognition plays an essential role in structure and function. Specific non-covalent interactions stabilize the structure of macromolecular assemblies, exemplified in this review by oligomeric proteins and the capsids of icosahedral viruses. They also allow proteins to form complexes that have a very wide range of stability and lifetimes and are involved in all cellular processes. We present some of the structure-based computational methods that have been developed to characterize the quaternary structure of oligomeric proteins and other molecular assemblies and analyze the properties of the interfaces between the subunits. We compare the size, the chemical and amino acid compositions and the atomic packing of the subunit interfaces of protein–protein complexes, oligomeric proteins, viral capsids and protein–nucleic acid complexes. These biologically significant interfaces are generally close-packed, whereas the non-specific interfaces between molecules in protein crystals are loosely packed, an observation that gives a structural basis to specific recognition. A distinction is made within each interface between a core that contains buried atoms and a solvent accessible rim. The core and the rim differ in their amino acid composition and their conservation in evolution, and the distinction helps correlating the structural data with the results of site-directed mutagenesis and in vitro studies of self-assembly.
Finding Hubs and Authorities using Information Scent to Improve the Information Retrieval precision

Improvement in the effectiveness of Information Retrieval on the Web in one such research area in which efforts are going on to improve the precision by satisfying the user need effectively and efficiently. To improve the precision of Information Retrieval on the Web there is a need to understand the information need of the query issued by user and retrieve the good authorities and hub web pages for a particular information need implied by the query. Good authorities are those pages which are rich source of information for a specific information need. Good Hub pages are those pages which contain link to good authorities for a given information need. This paper identifies the good authorities and hub pages for a particular information need using Information Scent in HITS with query sessions mining. Information scent is used to identify the relevance of the clicked URLs in the query sessions of the user with respect to the information need of the query sessions. The approach proposed in this paper uses information need of query sessions modeled using information scent and content vector of clicked URLs in the sessions to cluster query sessions with similar information need . Each derived cluster is used in HITS algorithm to generate good hubs and authorities pages for each information need represented by cluster using information scent. The input query is then used to select the cluster that contains the high scent authorities and hub page for the information need associated with the input query. Performance of the proposed approach is evaluated with an experimental study of query sessions mining of the "Google" Search engine web history and the experimental results shows the improvement of the Information Retrieval precision.
A Longitudinal Study of Self-Awareness: Functional Deficits Underestimated by Persons with Brain Injury

A longitudinal study of 55 adults with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) investigated the areas of function for which they lacked self-awareness of their level of competency. Data were collected at 3 and 12 months post-injury using the Patient Competency Rating Scale. Self-awareness was measured by comparing patient self-ratings with the ratings of an informant. The results were consistent with previous studies, indicating that self-awareness was most impaired for activities with a large cognitive and socioemotional component, and least impaired for basic activities of daily living, memory activities, and overt emotional responses. For most areas of function that were overestimated at 3 months post-injury, self-awareness subsequently improved during the first year after injury.
Optimal Scheduling and Power Allocation in Cooperate-to-Join Cognitive Radio Networks

In this paper, optimal resource allocation policies are characterized for wireless cognitive networks under the spectrum leasing model. We propose cooperative schemes in which secondary users share the time-slot with primary users in return for cooperation. Cooperation is feasible only if the primary system's performance is improved over the non-cooperative case. First, we investigate a scheduling problem where secondary users are interested in immediate rewards. Here, we consider both infinite and finite backlog cases. Then, we formulate another problem where the secondary users are guaranteed a portion of the primary utility, on a long-term basis, in return for cooperation. Finally, we present a power allocation problem where the goal is to maximize the expected net benefit defined as utility minus cost of energy. Our proposed scheduling policies are shown to outperform non-cooperative scheduling policies, in terms of expected utility and net benefit, for a given set of feasible constraints. Based on Lyapunov optimization techniques, we show that our schemes are arbitrarily close to the optimal performance at the price of reduced convergence rate.
Presence experience in mobile gaming

As a growing number of people play computer games with small-screen mobile devices such as handheld computers, mobile phones and handheld game consoles, it is important to know whether the gaming experience is comparable to that for playing with a PC on a large screen. One important aspect of gaming experience is whether people feel themselves engaged in the game activity and whether they feel present in the game world. In the present study participants played a rally game either with a PC or with a PDA, and presence was measured by the MECSPQ presence questionnaire. The results showed that, even though there was no difference in attentional engagement between conditions, participants experienced significantly higher levels of presence in the PC condition. Some user characteristics, measured by the Witmer and Singer’s ITQ questionnaire, played a mediating role between device type and different aspects of presence.
Defining the role of palliative radiotherapy in bone metastasis from primary liver cancer: an analysis of survival and treatment efficacy.

AIMS AND BACKGROUND Primary liver cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide and is still associated with a poor prognosis. Hepatocellular carcinoma and cholangiocarcinoma are known to cause bone metastasis resulting in pain, neurologic impairment and risk of fracture. Palliative radiotherapy is the treatment of choice in symptomatic bone lesions and is usually performed as percutaneous fractionated radiotherapy. METHODS AND STUDY DESIGN From June 1987 to December 2009, 41 patients (median age, 64 years) with bone metastasis received radiotherapy in our department. The analyzed patients were treated for 67 sites of bone lesions. We analyzed the applied fractionation schedules and the preferred sites of metastasis and symptoms, evaluated the therapeutic outcome in terms of symptomatic improvement, and described the prognosis of these patients. RESULTS Main indication for palliative radiotherapy was pain in 94% of all cases. Most frequent radiation protocols were 10 x 3 Gy (20 patients) and 20 x 2 Gy (19 patients). Median applied overall dose was 39 Gy (range, 4-48 Gy) and median single dose was 2.5 Gy (range, 1.8-4 Gy). The median duration of the radiotherapeutic treatment was 15 days (range, 2-24 days) and in 12 cases treatment was discontinuated. The overall response rate to palliative radiotherapy in bone metastasis was 77%. Median overall survival in both cholangiocarcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma patients was 4.2 months after initiation of radiotherapy (range, 0.2-38.9). CONCLUSIONS Considering the poor prognosis of patients with bone metastasis in hepatocellular carcinoma and cholangiocarcinoma, with a poor median survival of 3.7-5.0 months according to our study and existing literature, shorter radiotherapy schedules or even single-fraction irradiation can be considered.
Weakly Supervised Object Class Learning Via Discriminative Subspace Models

In this paper, we address the problem of learning object class models from weakly labeled training images, where labels of object classes are only provided at image level. Such weakly supervised object learning can be considered as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem. We observed that object instances of a common category are visually similar and when characterized as high-dimensional feature representations, they approximately lie in a low-dimensional subspace. Therefore, we propose to learn a subspace based generative model for solving the weakly supervised object class learning task. The promising empirical studies on real data sets demonstrate that our proposed method is reasonable.
Vibrotactile Feedback in Digital Musical Instruments

This paper discusses vibrotactile feedback in digital musical instruments. It compares the availability of intrinsic vibrotactile feedback in traditional acoustic musical instruments with the lack of vibrotactile feedback in most digital musical instruments. A short description of human sensory ability with regard to this form of feedback is given and the usefullness of vibrotactile feedback to musical performers is also briefly discussed. A number of devices are examined which can be used to provide vibrotactile feedback in a digital musical instruments and some experiments to evaluate these devices are also described. Finally, examples are given of a number of instruments which make use of some of these devices to provide vibrotactile feedback to the performer.
ASSESSING THE EFFECTS OF DRIVING INATTENTION ON RELATIVE CRASH RISK

While driver distraction has been extensively studied in laboratory and empirical field studies, the prevalence of driver distraction on our nation’s highways and the relative crash risk is unknown. It has recently become technologically feasible to conduct unobtrusive large-scale naturalistic driving studies as the costs and size of computer equipment and sensor technology have both dramatically decreased. A large-scale naturalistic driving study was conducted using 100 instrumented vehicles (80 privately-owned and 20 leased vehicles). This data collection effort was conducted in the Washington DC metropolitan area on a variety of urban, suburban, and rural roadways over a span of 12-13 months. Five channels of video and kinematic data were collected on 69 crashes and 761 near-crashes during the course of this data collection effort. The analyses conducted here are the first to establish direct relationships between driving inattention and crash and near-crash involvement. Relative crash risk was calculated using both crash and near-crash data as well as normal, baseline driving data, for various sources of inattention. Additional analyses investigated the environmental conditions drivers choose to engage in secondary tasks or drive fatigued, assessed whether questionnaire data were indicative of an individual’s propensity to engage in inattentive driving, and examined the impact of driver’s eyes off the forward roadway. The results indicated that driving inattention was a contributing factor in 78% of all crashes and 65% of all near-crashes. Odds ratio calculations indicated that fatigued drivers have a 4 times higher crash risk than alert drivers. Drivers engaging in visually and/or manually complex tasks are at 7 times higher crash risk than alert drivers. There are specific environmental conditions in which engaging in secondary tasks or driving fatigued is deemed to be more dangerous, including intersections, wet roadways, undivided highways, curved roadways, and driving at dusk. Short, brief glances away from the forward roadway for the purpose of scanning the roadway environment (e.g., mirrors and blind spots) are safe and decrease crash risk, whereas such glances that total more than 2 seconds away from the forward roadway are dangerous and increase crash risk by 2 times over that of more typical driving.
Security design for three-party encrypted key exchange protocol using smart cards

Three-Party encrypted key exchange (3PEKE) protocol is an important cryptographic mechanism, enabling two clients to communicate with each other through a trusted server. Specifically, it is often applied to provide confidential communications between two participants over an insecure network. In 2007, Lu and Cao proposed a simple and efficient version. Unfortunately, we find that there exists a design weakness in their mechanism. We therefore design a novel mechanism using smart cards. The smart-card based scheme (SC-3PEKE) not only confirms the security essentials of general 3PEKE methods, but also outperforms related works in terms of authentication overheads with the adoption of smart cards.
Culture Phenotypes of Genomically and Geographically Diverse Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis Isolates from Different Hosts

ABSTRACT Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis causes paratuberculosis (Johne's disease) in ruminants in most countries. Historical data suggest substantial differences in culturability of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis isolates from small ruminants and cattle; however, a systematic comparison of culture media and isolates from different countries and hosts has not been undertaken. Here, 35 field isolates from the United States, Spain, Northern Ireland, and Australia were propagated in Bactec 12B medium and Middlebrook 7H10 agar, genomically characterized, and subcultured to Lowenstein-Jensen (LJ), Herrold's egg yolk (HEY), modified Middlebrook 7H10, Middlebrook 7H11, and Watson-Reid (WR) agars, all with and without mycobactin J and some with sodium pyruvate. Fourteen genotypes of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis were represented as determined by BstEII IS900 and IS1311 restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. There was no correlation between genotype and overall culturability, although most S strains tended to grow poorly on HEY agar. Pyruvate was inhibitory to some isolates. All strains grew on modified Middlebrook 7H10 agar but more slowly and less prolifically on LJ agar. Mycobactin J was required for growth on all media except 7H11 agar, but growth was improved by the addition of mycobactin J to 7H11 agar. WR agar supported the growth of few isolates. The differences in growth of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis that have historically been reported in diverse settings have been strongly influenced by the type of culture medium used. When an optimal culture medium, such as modified Middlebrook 7H10 agar, is used, very little difference between the growth phenotypes of diverse strains of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis was observed. This optimal medium is recommended to remove bias in the isolation and cultivation of M. avium subsp. paratuberculosis.
Modeling and Control of Switching Max-Plus-Linear Systems: Rescheduling of railway traffic and changing gaits in legged locomotion

The operation of many systems can be described by the timing of events. When the system behavior can be described by equations that are "linear'' in the max-plus algebra, which has maximization and addition as its basic operations, the system is called a max-plus-linear system. In many of these systems the order of the events may need to be changed due to changes in the conditions, or the requirements. Such systems that can change the order of events are called switching max-plus-linear (SMPL) systems. In this thesis we consider two application of SMPL systems. The first application of SMPL systems models the railway traffic networks and is used for on-line rescheduling of railway traffic in the case of delays. In this thesis a macroscopic model for the railway traffic network is presented that can model the effects on the railway traffic of several control actions. For every set of control actions the new event order and times are determined. In order to solve the on-line rescheduling problem for a railway traffic network a global model predictive control (MPC) approach and four distributed model predictive control (DMPC) approaches are proposed. The second type of SMPL system models legged locomotion for different gaits. In this thesis the steady state cyclic behavior of the max-plus-linear systems describing the gaits, and the transition to the steady state cyclic behavior, are analyzed. It is shown that the steady state behavior can be uniquely defined for all gaits. With the steady state behavior uniquely defined for all gaits we were able to determine optimal gait switches.
Toward Time-Evolving Feature Selection on Dynamic Networks

Recent years have witnessed the prevalence of networked data in various domains. Among them, a large number of networks are not only topologically structured but also have a rich set of features on nodes. These node features are usually of high dimensionality with noisy, irrelevant and redundant information, which may impede the performance of other learning tasks. Feature selection is useful to alleviate these critical issues. Nonetheless, a vast majority of existing feature selection algorithms are predominantly designed in a static setting. In reality, real-world networks are naturally dynamic, characterized by both topology and content changes. It is desirable to capture these changes to find relevant features tightly hinged with network structure continuously, which is of fundamental importance for many applications such as disaster relief and viral marketing. In this paper, we study a novel problem of time-evolving feature selection for dynamic networks in an unsupervised scenario. Specifically, we propose a TeFS framework by leveraging the temporal evolution property of dynamic networks to update the feature selection results incrementally. Experimental results show the superiority of TeFS over the state-of-the-art batch-mode unsupervised feature selection algorithms.
A Critical Role of Natural Immunoglobulin M in Immediate Defense Against Systemic Bacterial Infection

To evaluate the role of natural immunoglobulin (Ig)M in the immediate response against microbial infection, we tested mutant mice that are deficient in secreted (s)IgM in an acute peritonitis model induced by cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). 20% of wild-type mice died within 32 h of CLP, whereas 70% of sIgM-deficient mice died within the same time period. The increased susceptibility was associated with a reduced level of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, a decreased neutrophil recruitment and an increased bacterial load in the peritoneum, and elevated levels of endotoxin and proinflammatory cytokines in the circulation. Resistance to CLP by sIgM-deficient mice was restored by reconstitution with polyclonal IgM from normal mouse serum. Reconstitution with a monoclonal IgM specific to phosphatidylcholine, a conserved cell membrane component, has a modest effect but a monoclonal IgM specific to phosphocholine is not protective. These findings demonstrate a critical role of natural IgM in the immediate defense against severe bacterial infection.
Comparison of clinical behavior of melanoma of the hands and feet. A study of 283 patients

EGIONAL EVALUATION OF MALIGNANT TUR mors has clinical advantages in the recognition of their biological behavior. This is especially true if one compares the behavior of the tumor in two anatomically similar but functionally different organs, such as the hands and feet. This is the reason for choosing the subject for study. Hands mean from the wrist toward the fingers and foot means from the ankle toward the toes. In literature, “Melanoma” is always used with the adjective “Malignant”; however, in this paper I am using the word “Melanoma” or “Malignant melanoma” with equal meaning. There is only one exception in this definition and that is “Juvenile melanoma. ” This latter tumor is benign but has some histologic similarity to malignant melanoma. Tumors of the hands and feet, especially malignant tumors, are very rare and their incidence, compared to those of other regions of the body is considerably lower. In 11,212 patients admitted to Rosewell Park Hospital’a for malignant tumors all over the body, 1 . 1 % of those tumors were in the hands and 0.33% in the feet. This is interesting since the skin surface of these two organs is 10% of the body surface. There are contrasting reports in
Experiences with the Hector Multiprocessor Experiences with the Hector Multiprocessor

Hector is a shared-memory multiprocessor based on a hierarchy of unidirectional slotted rings. The architecture was designed to be both size scalable and generation scalable, yet remain simple. The Hector system demonstrates that a scal-able shared-memory multiprocessor need not be more complex than a distributed-memory multicomputer, yet it can provide for lower latency communication. This paper describes our experiences with the Hector project. It examines critically both the Hector architecture and the decisions made while building a prototype machine. The key implementation choices are presented and scrutinized with respect to the main objectives of simplicity and scala-bility. Software implications, based on the development of an operating system and application code, are discussed and evaluated. Performance results obtained in experiments run on the prototype are given.
On the change of support problem for spatio-temporal data.

In practice, spatial data are sometimes collected at points (i.e. point-referenced data) and at other times are associated with areal units (i.e. block data). The change of support problem is concerned with inference about the values of a variable at points or blocks different from those at which it has been observed. In the context of block data which can be sensibly viewed as averaging over point data, we propose a unifying approach for prediction from points to points, points to blocks, blocks to points, and blocks to blocks. The approach includes fully Bayesian kriging. We also extend our approach to the the case of spatio-temporal data, wherein a judicious specification of spatio-temporal association enables manageable computation. Exemplification of the static spatial case is provided using a dataset of point-level ozone measurements in the Atlanta, Georgia metropolitan area. The dynamic spatial case is illustrated using a temporally extended version of this dataset, enabling comparison at the common time point. *To whom correspondence should be addressed.