Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pre-Pregnancy Body Mass Index Is Associated with Dietary Inflammatory Index and C-Reactive Protein Concentrations during Pregnancy

There have been a limited number of studies examining the association between pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and dietary inflammation during pregnancy. Our aim is to examine the association between pre-pregnancy BMI and the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII)™ and C-reactive protein (CRP) concentrations during pregnancy. The study included 631 pregnant American women from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) cross-sectional examinations from 2003 to 2012. Pre-pregnancy BMI was calculated based on self-reported pre-pregnancy weight and measured height. The cut-offs of <18.5 (underweight), 18.5–24.9 (normal), 25.0–29.9 (overweight), and ≥30 kg/m2 (obese) were used to categorize the weight status of pregnant women prior to pregnancy. The DII, a literature-based dietary index to assess the inflammatory properties of diet, was estimated based on a one-day 24-h recall. Multivariable linear and logistic regressions were performed to estimate beta coefficients and the adjusted odds ratios (AORs) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) on the association of pre-pregnancy BMI categories with the DII and CRP concentrations during pregnancy. After controlling for variables including: race/ethnicity, family poverty income ratio, education, marital status, month in pregnancy, and smoking status during pregnancy; women who were obese before pregnancy (n = 136) had increased odds for being in the highest tertile of the DII and CRP concentrations compared to women with normal weight (AORs 2.40, 95% CIs 1.01–5.71; AORs 24.84, 95% CIs 6.19–99.67, respectively). These findings suggest that women with pre-pregnancy obesity had greater odds of reporting higher DII and having elevated CRP. In conclusion, high pre-pregnancy BMI was associated with increased odds of pro-inflammatory diet and elevated CRP levels during pregnancy in the USA.
Autonomous Exploitation of System Binaries using Symbolic Analysis

At the moment many software systems have bugs, and developers can be overwhelmed with bug reports describing crashes or unexpected behavior. Finding the critical bugs to focus on can be time consuming, and might lead to security critical bugs remaining unresolved for an extended period, which in turn can lead to data leaks or improper functioning of important systems. Current state of the art autonomous methods are still unable to find all bugs, and are often unable to determine if they are security critical. Therefore it is important that methods are developed and improvements are made with automatically finding and validating security vulnerabilities. In this paper, the application of concolic analysis and constraint solving are applied to this problem. Three algorithms, used to determine exploitable constraints, will be proposed and evaluated. Furthermore, these algorithms will be compared to the current state of the art, providing an overview of the field.
Segmentation of depth image using graph cut

A large number of tasks in computer vision involve finding a target from a background image. It is also known as the foreground/background discrimination problem. Various methods have been developed to solve this problem. [1, 2, 10, 11, 12] Newly developed techniques for general purpose of object abstraction use both color and edge information for segmentation purpose. In this paper, we use graph cut methods on images with depth information from A Kinect camera. Also, we apply the approach with pyramid representation. This greatly reduces the time used with the iterative graph cut methods. We estimate the statistic model on the bottom of the pyramid, while use graph cut on the top of the pyramid. This speeds up the whole segmentation process while keeps a good segmentation quality at the same time. When come across the situation like the object's color resembles that of the background but with different depth, our method can still achieve a good result.
Topic Modeling on Health Journals with Regularized Variational Inference

Topic modeling enables exploration and compact representation of a corpus. The CaringBridge (CB) dataset is a massive collection of journals written by patients and caregivers during a health crisis. Topic modeling on the CB dataset, however, is challenging due to the asynchronous nature of multiple authors writing about their health journeys. To overcome this challenge we introduce the Dynamic Author-Persona topic model (DAP), a probabilistic graphical model designed for temporal corpora with multiple authors. The novelty of the DAP model lies in its representation of authors by a persona---where personas capture the propensity to write about certain topics over time. Further, we present a regularized variational inference (RVI) algorithm, which we use to encourage the DAP model's personas to be distinct. Our results show significant improvements over competing topic models---particularly after regularization, and highlight the DAP model's unique ability to capture common journeys shared by different authors.
ECNU at SemEval-2017 Task 3: Using Traditional and Deep Learning Methods to Address Community Question Answering Task

This paper describes the systems we submitted to the task 3 (Community Question Answering) in SemEval 2017 which contains three subtasks on English corpora, i.e., subtask A: Question-Comment Similarity, subtask B: Question-Question Similarity, and subtask C: Question-External Comment Similarity. For subtask A, we combined two different methods to represent question-comment pair, i.e., supervised model using traditional features and Convolutional Neural Network. For subtask B, we utilized the information of snippets returned from Search Engine with question subject as query. For subtask C, we ranked the comments by multiplying the probability of the pair related question comment being Good by the reciprocal rank of the related question.
Systematic Comparison between the Asynchronous and the Multi-Synchronous Implementations of a Network on Chip Architecture

This paper presents a systematic comparison between two different implementations of a distributed network on chip: fully asynchronous and multi-synchronous. The NoC architecture has been designed to be used in a globally asynchronous locally synchronous clusterized multi processors system on chip. The 5 relevant parameters are silicon area, network saturation threshold, communication throughput, packet latency and power consumption. Both architectures have been physically implemented and simulated by SystemC/VHDL co-simulation. The electrical parameters have also been evaluated by post layout SPICE simulation for a 90nm CMOS fabrication process, taking into account the long wire effects
Building social and emotional efficacy to (re)engage young adolescents: capitalising on the ‘window of opportunity’

ABSTRACT Research confirms that when students disengage from learning, there is a greatly increased risk of them dropping out of school and not completing secondary education (Year 12). In an Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) report on Equity in Education [OECD. 2012. “Investing in Equity in Education Pays off”, in Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools. Paris, France: OECD. doi:10.1787/9789264130852-3-en], school dropout rates in developed countries averaged 20% and, in some countries, was as high as 25%. Lyche [2010. Taking on the Completion Challenge. A Literature Review on Policies to Prevent Dropout and Early School Leaving. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 53. OECD. doi:10.1787/5km4m2t59cmr-en] noted that school dropout does not ‘just happen’ but rather is a long process of disengagement from school. Students entering early adolescence are experiencing rapid and complex changes to their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development that can positively or negatively affect their experience in education environments. During this time, there is also an increased expectation, both at school and at home, that young adolescents should accept greater responsibility for themselves and their learning. However, when individual students fail to regulate their behaviour or manage the increasing difficulty of the academic work, they can begin to disengage from learning and become entrenched in a downward cycle of poor academic achievement and poor social competence. With an increasing trend in young adolescents to disengage from learning, identifying how to reengage students is critical to their social and academic success. This study reports on the key features of an early intervention programme that targets young adolescent students who are already showing early signs of disengaging from school. Data show that the programme aligns with evidence-based practice and has had a positive effect in promoting and building students’ social and emotional efficacy and re-engaging them in learning.
Emotional Control in Patients With Opioid Dependence Syndrome and Reported History of Negative Life Events

AimThe aim of this study was to evaluate the extent to which individuals who suffer from opioid dependency report controlling emotions of anger, anxiety, and depressed mood. MethodRecruitment was achieved through an outpatient drug treatment clinic in Birmingham, UK, and data were collected through a semistructured interview. One hundred and twenty participants with opioid-dependence syndrome were interviewed and 100 controls of nondrug-using family members and friends were included in the study. ResultThe mean age of the opioid group was 33.3 years, SD=8.8. The majority of the participants were white British (80.8%), unemployed (69.2%), and male (75%). There is a significant difference between the 2 groups in total control of emotional expression scores and all the 3 subscales. The control group had high ability in controlling their emotion and the patient group had very low ability in controlling their emotion (expression of affect) (P=0.000). Suppression of anger mean was clearly very low in the opioid-dependent group indicating a high level of expression of hostility. ConclusionsThe data presented indicate that a significant group of opioid-dependent patients experience and express their emotions in general, and hostile feelings in particular, owing to difficulties in controlling these emotions. Possibly, they tend to use drugs as a self-medication to help themselves in controlling their emotions. By attending to and addressing these issues, health-care workers can alleviate ongoing distress and promote confidence.
The Relation of Reading Comprehension and Retention to Hearing Comprehension and Retention

This investigation was undertaken to pro vide data pertinent to the answering of the following major issue: What is the relation of comprehension and retention in reading to comprehension and retention in hearing? It was thought that data pertinent to this question would also prove helpful in answer ing a second: To what extent is reading abil ity a result of good language comprehension? The problem of this study is of fundamen tal importance, for its solution should imply the correct reading procedures both for first teaching and remedial work; for example: Should the pupil who is deficient in silent reading ability be given thought-getting train ing and language exercises or should he be given drills to facilitate the various phases of eye movements? Are the mechanical factors of the reading activity such as the duration of eye fixation pauses, the number of eye fix ation pauses a line, the return sweep of the eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and the like, to be attacked or taught directly, or are they in the large to be acquired as a result of language and reading growth? As can be seen from a review of studies in this field (particularly Yoakam's study),2 it is known that children get very little from a single silent reading. The small returns from a silent reading may be due primarily to low language comprehension on the part of the pupils or primarily to their lack of such proficiencies as are peculiar to the act of read ing the printed page. Some of these pro ficiencies may be connected with the mechan ical or motor skills. No one yet has given a clear picture of the abilities needed in reading over and above those comprehended in lan guage efficiency. How much do pupils who get very little from an unassisted silent reading obtain from an oral teacher presentation? This question the experimenter determined to answer. Even though the returns from a teacher oral presentation might prove to be small, quite as small as those found in other studies for the silent reading, definite conclusions would be dependent upon the scores being comparable. Hence, it was decided to con duct again the experiment of finding the effect of a silent reading and to conduct this experi ment with the same cases and the same read ing materials at approximately the same time to ascertain the comparative effects of differ ent modes of presenting various types of content.
Empirical study on the effectiveness of the TPSR model in a junior high school class

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of Hellison's TPSR model, which was developed in the USA. The validity of the TPSR model was examined in a physical education class for 3rd year male students at a public junior high school. To confirm the effect of the TPSR model, a single case experimental design was used, switching between baseline classes where the model was not implemented and test classes in which the model was implemented. Multiple types of qualitative and quantitative data were collected for the assignment. Specifically, the data comprised measurements of social skills, personal assessment based on Hellison's table of levels, observation of sample students' behavior, observational assessment of the class as a whole, class observation records written by both observers and teachers, and free-format comments made by the students. The results were as follows: 1) The TPSR model tended to improve the students' social skills, increasing their self-awareness of responsible behavior and encouraging them to act responsibly. 2) The TPSR model tended to decrease inappropriate behavior (off-task behavior and destructive behavior) and increased appropriate behavior (positive social behavior and on-task behavior) by the sample students during class. 3) Because the influence of the learning task and the movement characteristic were larger than the model, the effect of the TPSR model could not be clearly confirmed as a key factor that stimulated students' learning activities.However, when the TPSR model was well utilized according to the learning task or the movement characteristic, it was suggested that its education value was considerable.
Real-Time PCR Method for Detection of Pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica in Food

ABSTRACT The current methods for the detection of pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica bacteria in food are time consuming and inefficient. Therefore, we have developed and evaluated in-house a TaqMan probe-based real-time PCR method for the detection of this pathogen. The complete method comprises overnight enrichment, DNA extraction, and real-time PCR amplification. Also included in the method is an internal amplification control. The selected primer-probe set was designed to use a 163-bp amplicon from the chromosomally located gene ail (attachment and invasion locus). The selectivity of the PCR method was tested with a diverse range (n = 152) of related and unrelated strains, and no false-negative or false-positive PCR results were obtained. The sensitivity of the PCR amplification was 85 fg purified genomic DNA, equivalent to 10 cells per PCR tube. Following the enrichment of 10 g of various food samples (milk, minced beef, cold-smoked sausage, fish, and carrots), the sensitivity ranged from 0.5 to 55 CFU Y. enterocolitica. Good precision, robustness, and efficiency of the PCR amplification were also established. In addition, the method was tested on naturally contaminated food; in all, 18 out of 125 samples were positive for the ail gene. Since no conventional culture method could be used as a reference method, the PCR products amplified from these samples were positively verified by using conventional PCR and sequencing of the amplicons. A rapid and specific real-time PCR method for the detection of pathogenic Y. enterocolitica bacteria in food, as presented here, provides a superior alternative to the currently available detection methods and makes it possible to identify the foods at risk for Y. enterocolitica contamination.
Managing Information about a Romantic Partner’s Relationship History: An Application of the Theory of Motivated Information Management

ABSTRACT Using the theory of motivated information management (TMIM), this study explored how individuals manage information about romantic partners’ past relationships, a typically taboo topic (Baxter & Wilmot, 1985). A sample (N = 146) of undergraduate students currently involved in romantic relationships was used to test TMIM’s predictions regarding cognitive, emotional, and communicative processes involved in information-management decisions regarding a partner’s previous relationships. The hypothesized models were supported for negative emotions (i.e., anger and fear) but not for happiness as a representative positive emotion. Further, efficacy emerged as a significant mediator of the relationships between the negative emotions and information-management strategies and of the associations between outcome assessments and information-management strategies. Implications and future research directions are discussed.
Efficient semantic-based content search in P2P network

Most existing peer-to-peer (P2P) systems support only title-based searches and are limited in functionality when compared to today's search engines. We present the design of a distributed P2P information sharing system that supports semantic-based content searches of relevant documents. First, we propose a general and extensible framework for searching similar documents in P2P network. The framework is based on the novel concept of hierarchical summary structure. Second, based on the framework, we develop our efficient document searching system by effectively summarizing and maintaining all documents within the network with different granularity. Finally, an experimental study is conducted on a real P2P prototype, and a large-scale network is further simulated. The results show the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of the proposed system.
Representations of Actions as an Interlingua

The output of the planner for the input instruction is a complete description of the actions involved, including participants, preparatory specifications, termination conditions, manner, duration, etc. Participants bring with them a list of inherent properties of the agent (e.g. agent capabilities) or physical objects (e.g., object configurations) and other characteristics, such as 'how to open' for an object such as a door. This complete description refers to a set of animation PARS which can be immediately animated. In this way, a P A R schema for the action enter may actually translate into an animation PAR for walking into a certain area. One way to differentiate between action PAR schemas and instantiated animation PARs is to consider what it is possible to motion capture 4 (by attaching sensors to a moving human figure). For example, the enter action and the put action are quite general and underspecified and could not be motion captured. However, characteristic activities such as walking and swimming could be. For further details about the animation PARs and the animation system see (Badler et al., 1999) and (Bindiganavaie et al., 2000).
Voice Disorder Classification Based on Multitaper Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients Features

The Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are widely used in order to extract essential information from a voice signal and became a popular feature extractor used in audio processing. However, MFCC features are usually calculated from a single window (taper) characterized by large variance. This study shows investigations on reducing variance for the classification of two different voice qualities (normal voice and disordered voice) using multitaper MFCC features. We also compare their performance by newly proposed windowing techniques and conventional single-taper technique. The results demonstrate that adapted weighted Thomson multitaper method could distinguish between normal voice and disordered voice better than the results done by the conventional single-taper (Hamming window) technique and two newly proposed windowing methods. The multitaper MFCC features may be helpful in identifying voices at risk for a real pathology that has to be proven later.
Mood-congruent bias and attention shifts in the different episodes of bipolar disorder

An “affective” go/no-go task was used in the different episodes of bipolar patients (euthymic, depressed, and manic) to examine (1) the presence of a mood-congruent attentional bias; and (2) the patients' ability to inhibit and invert associations between stimuli and responses through blocks. A group of healthy individuals served as controls. Results revealed a mood-congruent attentional bias: patients in the manic episode processed positive information faster, whereas those in the depressive episode processed negative information faster. In contrast, neither euthymic patients nor healthy individuals showed any mood-congruent biases. Furthermore, there was a shift cost across blocks for healthy individuals, but not for the patients. This may reflect a general impairment at selecting relevant information (e.g., in terms of disability to inhibit and invert associations between stimuli and responses) in bipolar participants, regardless of their episode. This state/trait dissociation in an episodic and chronic disorder such as bipolar disorder is important for its appropriate characterisation.
Mapping of the Rsd Contact Site on the Sigma 70 Subunit of Escherichia coli RNA Polymerase

ABSTRACT Rsd (regulator of sigma D) is an anti-sigma factor for theEscherichia coli RNA polymerase ς70 subunit. The contact site of Rsd on ς70 was analyzed after mapping of the contact-dependent cleavage sites by Rsd-tethered iron-p-bromoacetamidobenzyl EDTA and by analysis of the complex formation between Ala-substituted ς70 and Rsd. Results indicate that the Rsd contact site is located downstream of the promoter −35 recognition helix-turn-helix motif within region 4, overlapping with the regions involved in interaction with both core enzyme and ς70 contact transcription factors.
The polls--trends: immigrants and immigration.

This report summarizes attitudes and opinions in the United States concerning aspects of immigration based on searches of survey archives and both published and unpublished sources. It includes information on attitudes toward legal and illegal immigrants and toward immigrants from different countries evaluation of immigrant characteristics why Americans are reluctant to admit more immigrants the perceived impact of immigrants on U.S. culture and language and evaluation of immigration policies. Particular attention is given to attitudes and opinions on immigration in California.