Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From competence to capability: a study of nurse practitioners in clinical practice.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES This research aimed to understand the level and scope of practice of the nurse practitioner in Australia and New Zealand further using a capability framework. BACKGROUND The original study, from which the present paper was developed, sought to identify competency standards for the extended role of the nurse practitioner in Australia and New Zealand. In doing so the researchers became aware that while competencies described many of the characteristics of the nurse practitioner they did not manage to tell the whole story. In a search of the literature, the concept of capability appeared to provide a potentially useful construct to describe the attributes of the nurse practitioner that went beyond competence. DESIGN A secondary analysis of data obtained from interviews with nurse practitioners working in Australia and New Zealand was undertaken. These data had previously been obtained in a study to identify nurse practitioner competencies. The analysis described in this paper investigated whether or not the components of capability would adequately explain the characteristics of the nurse practitioner. METHODS Fifteen nurse practitioners were interviewed from Australia and New Zealand. A secondary (deductive) analysis of interview data using capability as a theoretical framework was conducted. RESULTS The analysis showed that capability and its dimensions is a useful model for describing the advanced level attributes of nurse practitioners. Thus, nurse practitioners described elements of their practice that involved: using their competences in novel and complex situations as well as the familiar; being creative and innovative; knowing how to learn; having a high level of self-efficacy; and working well in teams. CONCLUSIONS This study suggests that both competence and capability need to be considered in understanding the complex role of the nurse practitioner. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE The dimensions of capability need to be considered in the education and evaluation of nurse practitioners.
Hand-held Force Display with Spring-Cam Mechanism for Generating Asymmetric Acceleration

This paper describes the development of a mechanism for a hand-held haptic display based on the force perception method, which exploits the perception of the difference between rapid and slow acceleration. Our prior force display was designed to generate asymmetric acceleration using a crank-slider mechanism with a rotational actuator. Here, to generate asymmetric acceleration, we propose a new mechanism that adopts a spring and cam with a linear actuator. The spring-cam mechanism can generate acceleration profiles of any shape and is suitable for miniaturization. We discuss the characteristics of a prototype of the spring-cam mechanism
Ligand Recognition of the Major Birch Pollen Allergen Bet v 1 is Isoform Dependent

Each spring millions of patients suffer from allergies when birch pollen is released into the air. In most cases, the major pollen allergen Bet v 1 is the elicitor of the allergy symptoms. Bet v 1 comes in a variety of isoforms that share virtually identical conformations, but their relative concentrations are plant-specific. Glycosylated flavonoids, such as quercetin-3-O-sophoroside, are the physiological ligands of Bet v 1, and here we found that three isoforms differing in their allergenic potential also show an individual, highly specific binding behaviour for the different ligands. This specificity is driven by the sugar moieties of the ligands rather than the flavonols. While the influence of the ligands on the allergenicity of the Bet v 1 isoforms may be limited, the isoform and ligand mixtures add up to a complex and thus individual fingerprint of the pollen. We suggest that this mixture is not only acting as an effective chemical sunscreen for pollen DNA, but may also play an important role in recognition processes during pollination.
Enhancing Secondary Special Education Teachers' Knowledge and Competencies in Working With Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Families Through Online Training

Although numerous studies have identified the importance of family involvement during transition planning, they have also identified significant barriers to such involvement among culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families. The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of online training on secondary special education teachers' knowledge of, attitudes toward, and competencies in working with CLD families during transition planning. Results indicated significant knowledge gain for teachers who participated in online training compared to the control group members, who did not receive the training. However, teacher attitudes and perceived levels of competence related to involving CLD families did not show significant changes. The authors discuss the implications for future research and training to improve transition practices specific to CLD families.
Rapid and reversible astrocytic reaction to afferent activity blockade in chick cochlear nucleus

We describe here rapid proliferation of astrocytic processes immunoreactive for glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) in the chick cochlear nucleus following blockade of action potentials in the afferent nerve. Unilateral eighth nerve activity blockade was achieved through intralabyrinthine injection of TTX. Within 1 hr of activity blockade, a 56% increase in area density of GFAP-immunoreactive processes was found in the ipsilateral cochlear nucleus as compared to the contralateral side of the brain. This increase reached 152% by 3 hr. When eighth nerve activity was allowed to recover and animals were studied 1 week after TTX injection, no difference was found in GFAP immunoreactivity between the ipsilateral and contralateral cochlear nuclei. This is the first report of a glial reaction to documented neuronal inactivity in the absence of neuropathology. These results indicate that neuronal activity may regulate the structure of astrocytic processes.
First experimental tests with a CdTe photon counting pixel detector hybridized with a Medipix2 readout chip

We present preliminary tests of hybrid pixel detectors consisting of the Medipix2 readout chip bump-bonded to a 1-mm thick CdTe pixel detector. This room temperature imaging system for single photon counting has been developed within the Medipix2 European Collaboration for various imaging applications with X-rays and gamma rays, including dental radiography, mammography, synchrotron radiation, nuclear medicine, radiation monitoring in nuclear facilities. The Medipix2+CdTe hybrid detector features 256x256 square pixels, a pitch of 55 /spl mu/m, a sensitive area of 14x14 mm/sup 2/. Here we analyzed the quality of the detector and bump-bonding and the response to nuclear radiation of the first CdTe hybrids. The CdTe pixel detectors, with Pt contacts, showed an ohmic response when negatively biased to less than 100 V (electrons collection mode). Tests were also performed in holes collection mode, where a non-resistive behaviour was observed above +15 V. We performed a series of imaging tests with gamma radioactive sources and with an X-ray tube. In flood illumination, we observed for all detectors the presence of numerous, stable small-scale structures in the form of small circles, with the central pixels showing a reduced counting efficiency with respect to the periphery (in electrons counting regime).
A subjective study of visibility thresholds for wavelet domain watermarking

Ensuring watermark invisibility in digital images is a challenging task. Most watermarking techniques empirically adjust a strength parameter in order to reach the best trade-off between invisibility and robustness. A target PSNR value is typically set in order to reach a defined quality level. Some watermarking techniques exploit local activity to increase the watermark strength in some specific images areas (edges, textures). In this work we study the visibility thresholds for wavelet domain multiplicative embedding using a watermarking oriented subjective experiment protocol. Thirty four observers were enrolled for a subjective experiment, and had to adjust the watermark strength in order to best define the visibility threshold for watermarking distortions. Three watermark embedding equations were tested in various wavelet sub-bands, and the optimal equation maximizing robustness was derived for every sub-band.
The effects of different nickel-titanium instruments on dentinal microcrack formations during root canal preparation

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate the incidence of dentinal microcracks caused by different preparation techniques. Materials and Methods: 120 extracted human mandibular incisor teeth were divided into five experimental groups and one control group (n = 20): Group 1: Hand preparation with balanced force technique up to #25 K-file. Group 2: Preparation with only ProTaper F2 instrument in a reciprocating movement. Group 3: Preparation with Reciproc R25 instrument in a reciprocating movement. Group 4: Preparation with ProTaper instruments up to F2 instrument. Group 5: Preparation with ProTaper Next instruments up to X2 instrument. No procedure was applied to control group. The roots were sectioned horizontally at 3, 6 and 9 mm from the apex and examined. Absence or presence of dentinal microcracks was noted. Results: The Chi-square test was performed to compare the appearance of cracked roots between all groups. There were no significant differences among the groups (P > 0.05). Conclusions: In conclusion, except the hand file and control group, all experimental groups showed microcrack formations.
Harvesting Consumer Opinion and Wine Knowledge Off the Social Media Grape Vine Utilizing Artificial Neural Networks

In this paper we mine over 80 million twitter microblogs in order to explore whether data from the social media initiative known as Twitter can be used to identify sentiment about red wines. We test to see whether models derived from Twitter data can corroborate industry sales figures and we employ text analysis software developed to assess emotional, cognitive, and structural components of text to analyze the twitter dataset to harvest knowledge about consumer sentiment on different wine varietals. A multi-knowledge based approach is proposed using, Self-Organizing Maps and domain expertise in order to establish view the social network conversation. We show that it is possible to both confirm previously known knowledge and find novel information through the proposed methodology.
Naming Our Reality: Negotiating and Creating Meaning in the Margin

This paper explores the ways in which music educators have allowed others outside of music education to name who and how they are in the world. Often comfortable with voicing advocacy and purpose from the status of second class citizen, music educators are complicit in the very processes of reproduction they wish to challenge. Seeking to address what could be a privileged positioning of marginalized status, this paper also speaks to the spaces that are created that could afford possibilities of transformation. Thus, rather than to allow the perceived netherworld of marginalized status to name who we are and can be, we can name our own reality as we challenge the ways in which our own thoughts, beliefs, and actions are acquired and reproduced.
24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics Proceedings of the Workshop on Reordering for Statistical Machine Translation Silver Sponsors Proceedings of the Workshop on Reordering for Statistical Machine Translation Workshop Chairs Organizers: Program Committee: Table of Contents Whit

Preface Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) is currently a very active area of research. Top NLP conferences typically include many papers on SMT, and the past decade has also seen many workshops on this topic (e.g., WMT, SSST). Results reported in papers on SMT include the influence of various components and processes, one of the most important of these being reordering (except for structurally similar language pairs like English-French). Traditional phrase-based SMT systems, which have been the state-of-the-art in the previous decade, do not handle reordering in a satisfactory manner, and various new and more sophisticated methods for reordering have been introduced in the past couple of years. However, unlike most other potential components of MT systems, such as transliteration, WSD, and anaphora resolution, reordering has not had a dedicated forum for its evaluation. The proposed workshop will be a platform to bring together different MT systems and compare how they tackle this crucial subtask. A shared task on "learning reordering from word-alignments" will be at the heart of this workshop. Parser-based reordering has been a popular method, but many languages do not have parsers (e.g., no Indian language has a publicly available parser), and using alignments to learn parsers (and thereafter reordering) or to learn reordering models directly is an important new idea in MT. The task is to develop a system for reordering a source sentence to best match the order of the corresponding target sentence. For example, the English (SVO language) sentence "Ram drinks water" is translated into Hindi (SOV language) as "Ram paanii piitaa hai (Ram water drinks)". Thus, the correct reordering of this English sentence which matches the target (Hindi) order is "Ram water drinks". We released high-quality word-alignments (annotated by hand) between English and 3 languages (Farsi, Italian and Urdu), and described one or two baseline techniques for reordering based on publicly available tools (such as GIZA++, Moses). We also made available part-of-speech tags for this data to enable participants to experiment with these additional features easily. The participants have to reorder the English sentences to match the order of the target language. Participants can choose either to come up with their own reordering models or tweak the baseline system to improve performance. Abstract Several studies have shown that the task of reordering source sentences to match the target order is crucial to improve the performance of Statistical Machine Translation, especially when the source and …
Chlorovirus ATCV-1 is part of the human oropharyngeal virome and is associated with changes in cognitive functions in humans and mice

Significance Human mucosal surfaces contain a wide range of microorganisms. The biological effects of these organisms are largely unknown. Large-scale metagenomic sequencing is emerging as a method to identify novel microbes. Unexpectedly, we identified DNA sequences homologous to virus ATCV-1, an algal virus not previously known to infect humans, in oropharyngeal samples obtained from healthy adults. The presence of ATCV-1 was associated with a modest but measurable decrease in cognitive functioning. A relationship between ATCV-1 and cognitive functioning was confirmed in a mouse model, which also indicated that exposure to ATCV-1 resulted in changes in gene expression within the brain. Our study indicates that viruses in the environment not thought to infect humans can have biological effects. Chloroviruses (family Phycodnaviridae) are large DNA viruses known to infect certain eukaryotic green algae and have not been previously shown to infect humans or to be part of the human virome. We unexpectedly found sequences homologous to the chlorovirus Acanthocystis turfacea chlorella virus 1 (ATCV-1) in a metagenomic analysis of DNA extracted from human oropharyngeal samples. These samples were obtained by throat swabs of adults without a psychiatric disorder or serious physical illness who were participating in a study that included measures of cognitive functioning. The presence of ATCV-1 DNA was confirmed by quantitative PCR with ATCV-1 DNA being documented in oropharyngeal samples obtained from 40 (43.5%) of 92 individuals. The presence of ATCV-1 DNA was not associated with demographic variables but was associated with a modest but statistically significant decrease in the performance on cognitive assessments of visual processing and visual motor speed. We further explored the effects of ATCV-1 in a mouse model. The inoculation of ATCV-1 into the intestinal tract of 9–11-wk-old mice resulted in a subsequent decrease in performance in several cognitive domains, including ones involving recognition memory and sensory-motor gating. ATCV-1 exposure in mice also resulted in the altered expression of genes within the hippocampus. These genes comprised pathways related to synaptic plasticity, learning, memory formation, and the immune response to viral exposure.
‘Authentic’ Music and its Effect on the Attitudes and Musical Development of Secondary School Students

Abstract The study is an evaluation of a series of five linked projects commissioned and run by the South Bank Centre in London in collaboration with six secondary schools. Students worked with a range of professional musicians over three years, commencing at age 11, Year 7. The methodology included interviews with the participants, observation at the Centre and in schools and an attitude inventory, for participating students and ‘control classes’, which were administered following each project. There were significantly different attitude scores to music in school between project and control groups. The project classes also maintained significantly less variance as the projects took place. There was a strong individual school effect. Interview and observational data support the interpretation that the attitudes of students towards music in school and the musical confidence of teachers were enhanced.
Exploring population geometry and multi-agent systems: a new approach to developing evolutionary techniques

Evolutionary algorithms require efficient recombination and selection mechanisms in order to produce high-quality solutions. In order to guide recombination a geometrical structure of the population is introduced. The aim of this paper is to explore connections between population geometry and individual interactions inducing autonomy, communication and reactivity. Each individual in the population acts as an autonomous agent with the goal of optimizing its fitness. In this process, each individual is able to communicate and select a mate for recombination. The introduced paradigm is illustrated by an evolutionary technique relying on a new population model and agent-based selection for recombination strategy. Search operators are asynchronously applied making the proposed approach more realistic. Numerical experiments indicate the potential of the proposed evolutionary agent-driven technique.
Learning to Generate Posters of Scientific Papers

Researchers often summarize their work in the form of posters. Posters provide a coherent and efficient way to convey core ideas from scientific papers. Generating a good scientific poster, however, is a complex and time consuming cognitive task, since such posters need to be readable, informative, and visually aesthetic. In this paper, for the first time, we study the challenging problem of learning to generate posters from scientific papers. To this end, a data-driven framework, that utilizes graphical models, is proposed. Specifically, given content to display, the key elements of a good poster, including panel layout and attributes of each panel, are learned and inferred from data. Then, given inferred layout and attributes, composition of graphical elements within each panel is synthesized. To learn and validate our model, we collect and make public a Poster-Paper dataset, which consists of scientific papers and corresponding posters with exhaustively labelled panels and attributes. Qualitative and quantitative results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.
An Enhanced Evolutionary Algorithm with a Surrogate Model

In this paper we present an enhanced evolutionary algorithm (EA) to solve computationally expensive design optimization problems. In this algorithm we integrate a genetic algorithm (GA) with a local search method to expedite convergence of the GA. We first use a GA to generate a population of data by evaluating real functions, then we construct computationally cheap surrogate models based on the available data. Thereafter, we perform gradient-based local searches on the surrogate models in lieu of the real functions. We apply the GA and gradientbased method alternatively until an optimum is reached. To guarantee convergence to the original problem, we use a trust region management to handle surrogate models. We investigate the effects of number of points used to construct the surrogate model, number of surrogate model constructed, and number of local search performed. Our numerical results, based on two single-objective problems and one multi-objective optimization problem, demonstrate the advantages of the hybrid GA over pure GAs.
Point-based stream surfaces and path surfaces

We introduce a point-based algorithm for computing and rendering stream surfaces and path surfaces of a 3D flow. The points are generated by particle tracing, and an even distribution of those particles on the surfaces is achieved by selective particle removal and creation. Texture-based surface flow visualization is added to show inner flow structure on those surfaces. We demonstrate that our visualization method is designed for steady and unsteady flow alike: both the path surface component and the texture-based flow representation are capable of processing time-dependent data. Finally, we show that our algorithms lend themselves to an efficient GPU implementation that allows the user to interactively visualize and explore stream surfaces and path surfaces, even when seed curves are modified and even for time-dependent vector fields.
Evolution of reproductive effort in viscous populations: the importance of population dynamics

I present two ecological models for the evolution of reproductive effort in viscous populations with empty sites. In contrast with previous studies, I show that limited dispersal needs not have a positive effect on the evolutionarily stable allocation of resources to fecundity versus survival. Rather, depending on the feedback between the trait and the population dynamics, population viscosity may have no effect or even lead to a decrease in the evolutionarily stable reproductive effort when individuals can degrade their environment during their lifetime. I show that the different evolutionary outcomes can be explained by the asymmetry in the level of kin competition resulting from investing into juveniles or into adults.