Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Emerging Forms of Stratification in Higher Education: Comparing Canada and the United States

This study combines longitudinal and cohort analyses to provide an extensive examination of the nature ofpostsecondary stratification among Canadian and American universities and students in this era of unprecedented postsecondary expansion, institutional diversification, and rising competition for external research funding. Multiple statistical methods and a range of data sources are employed to analyse new and increasingly important forms of stratification at two levels of analysis: the structural (i.e., universities) and the individual (i.e., students). At the structural level, the results demonstrate that both nations have become more stratified over time. The extent of institutional stratification and rate of growth, however, is much higher in the U.S. At the top end of the U.S. hierarchy, a few '"elite" and larger institutions appear to be winning the majority of contests for economic resources and other independent sources of revenue. In Canada, universities changed only slightly over the span of thirty years, though there is some evidence of mild convergence across nations, particularly in areas where government regulation has become more variable (e.g., endowments, tuitions). At the individual level, even though a wider variety of students from varied social backgrounds are entering into higher education, the analyses reveal a significant degree of inequality in both Canada and the United States. Consistent with existing research, gender remains an important and consistent predictor of school and field of study choices. These educational decisions were also influenced by family background effects, as both parental education and SES exhibited positive and strong influences on institutional selectivity decisions across two U.S. cohorts. For field of study choices, moderate family background effects, strong and consistent academic ability effects and growing academic aspiration effects were found across most analyses, lending support to theories that predict family background has direct and indirect effects on higher education choices.
Future Changes in Northern Hemisphere Snowfall

Using simulations performed with 18 coupled atmosphere‐ocean global climatemodels from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), projections of the Northern Hemisphere snowfall under the representative concentration pathway (RCP4.5) scenario are analyzed for the period 2006‐2100. These models perform well in simulating twentieth-century snowfall, although there is a positive bias in many regions. Annual snowfall is projected to decrease across much of the Northern Hemisphere during the twentyfirst century, with increases projected at higher latitudes. On a seasonal basis, the transition zone between negative and positive snowfall trends corresponds approximately to the 2108C isotherm of the late twentiethcentury mean surface air temperature, such that positive trends prevail in winter over large regions of Eurasia and North America. Redistributions of snowfall throughout the entire snow season are projected to occur— eveninlocationswherethereislittlechangeinannualsnowfall.Changesinthefractionofprecipitationfalling as snow contribute to decreases in snowfall across most Northern Hemisphere regions, while changes in total precipitation typicallycontribute to increases in snowfall.A signal-to-noise analysis reveals that the projected changesinsnowfall,basedontheRCP4.5scenario,arelikelytobecomeapparentduringthetwenty-firstcentury for most locations in the Northern Hemisphere. The snowfall signal emerges more slowly than the temperature signal, suggesting that changes in snowfall are not likely to be early indicators of regional climate change.
A Novel Intrusion Detection Mechanism for SCADA systems which Automatically Adapts to Network Topology Changes

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are getting more vulnerable as they become increasingly interconnected with other systems. Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT) will bring new opportunities to business and society, along with new threats and security risks. One major change that ICS will face will be that of the dynamic network topology. Changes in the network architecture will aﬀect the performance of the ICS along with the eﬃciency of the security mechanisms that are deployed. The current article investigates how changes in the network architecture of a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system aﬀect the performance of an Intrusion Detection System IDS that is based on the One class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM). Also the article proposes an adaptive mechanism that can cope with such changes and can work in real time situations. The performance of the proposed adaptive IDS is tested using traces from a Hybrid ICS testbed with a dynamic topology.
Visual-Based Smoke Detection Using Support Vector Machine

Smoke detection becomes more and more appealing because of its important application in fire protection. In this paper, we suggest some more universal features, such as the changing unevenness of density distribution and the changing irregularities of the contour of smoke. In order to integrate these features reasonably and gain a low generalization error rate, we propose a support vector machine based smoke detector. The feature set and the classifier can be used in various smoke cases contrary to the limited applications of other methods. Experimental results on different styles of smoke in different scenes show that the algorithm is reliable and effective.
Effect of linguistic masker on the intelligibility of Mandarin sentences

The linguistic content of the masker is important for the benefit of masking release in understanding noise-corrupted speech. The present work investigated how Mandarin sentence recognition is influenced by background noise with different linguistic content via two studies, i.e., speech perception and intelligibility prediction. Mandarin sentences were corrupted by Mandarin-, Cantonese-, and English-speaking multi-talker (i.e., 2-talker and 6-talker) babbles at –5, –7.5 and –10 dB signal-to-noise ratios, and listening experiments were conducted to collect the intelligibility data of Mandarin sentence perception. Results showed that 1) the recognition of noise-corrupted Mandarin sentences was notably influenced by the linguistic content of background noise, with an increased influence from English, Cantonese to Mandarin; and 2) present intelligibility indices accounted modestly well for the variance of Mandarin sentence recognition when background noise contained different linguistic content.
Incidence of Hip Dysplasia Associated With Bladder Exstrophy

Background: Exstrophy of the bladder is a rare congenital defect seen in 2.15 children out of every 100,000 live births, with the most severe variant, cloacal exstrophy (CE), only occurring in 1 in 200,000. Developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) describes a spectrum of disease ranging from mild hip instability to frank dislocation. Underlying malformations, such as myelomeningocele and arthrogryposis, are often associated with the most severe variant of hip dysplasia, teratologic hip dislocation. The varying degrees of severity in DDH have been encountered in classic bladder exstrophy (CBE) patients, but the exact incidence is unknown. We sought to determine the incidence of DDH in CBE and CE patients. Methods: We performed a retrospective review of all children with CBE or CE presenting to a single pediatric center between 1994 and 2014. Each chart was reviewed for correct diagnosis of CBE or CE, patient age and demographics, associated medical conditions, pertinent surgeries performed, and the age at operation. Patient imaging was reviewed to determine whether bilateral hip imaging was available. Results: In a 20-year retrospective review, we identified 66 patients who were diagnosed with either CBE or CE and had available hip imaging (38 males and 28 females). Of these, 11 patients were found to have radiographic evidence of DDH, for an incidence of 16.7% (11/66). Five of these patients had CE, whereas 6 presented with CBE. The first radiographic evidence of DDH was noted at a mean age of 5.75 years (range, birth to 22 y). Conclusions: We advocate the use of routine hip screening ultrasound in all infants born with either CBE or CE. Early identification of DDH in these patients may allow additional treatment options to coincide with frequently used osteotomy and orthopaedic interventions. Level of Evidence: Level III—retrospective study.
Failing Boys? Issues in Gender and Achievement

Part 1 Boys' underachievement in context: schoolboy frictions - feminism and failing boys "a habit of healthy idleness" - boys' underachievement in historical perspective. Part 2 Different constructions of the debate and its under-currents: girls will be girls and boys will be first "zero tolerance", gender performance and school failure breaking out of the binary trap - boys' underachievement, schooling and gender relations real boys don't work - masculinities, "underachievements" and the harassment of sissies. Part 3 Boys, which boys? : loose canons - exploding the myth of the "black macho" lad boys' underachievement, special needs practices and equity. Part 4 Curriculum, assessment and the debate: language and gender - who, if anyone, is disadvantaged by what? gendered learning outside and inside the school -influences on achievement.
Comprehensive analysis of mRNA-lncRNA co-expression profile revealing crucial role of imprinted gene cluster DLK1-MEG3 in chordoma

Chordoma is a rare bone tumor with high recurrence rate, but the mechanism of its development is unclear. Long non-coding RNAs(lncRNAs) are recently revealed to be regulators in a variety of biological processed by targeting on mRNA transcription. Their expression profile and function in chordoma have not been investigated yet. In this study, we firstly performed the comprehensive analysis of the lncRNA and coding genes expression analysis with three chordoma samples and three fetal nucleus pulposus tissues. lncRNA and gene microarrays were used to determine the differentially expressed lncRNAs and protein coding genes. 2786 lncRNAs and 3286 coding genes were significantly up-regulated in chordoma, while 2042 lncRNAs and 1006 coding genes were down-regulated. Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to correlate differentially expressed lncRNAs with protein coding genes, indicating a comprehensive lncRNA-coding gene co-expression network in chordoma. Cis-correlation analysis showed that various transcripts of MEG3 and MEG8 were paired with the most differentially expressed gene DLK1. As located in the same locus, we further analyzed the miRNA clusters in this region, and identified that 61.22% of these miRNAs were significantly down-regulated, implying the silence of the imprinted gene cluster DLK1-MEG3. Overexpression of MEG3 suppressed the proliferation of chordoma cells. Our study pointed out the potential role of lncRNAs in chordoma, presented the lncRNA-coding genes co-expression profile, and revealed that imprinted gene cluster DLK1-MEG3 contributes to the pathogenesis of chordoma development.
Multiple renal cancer susceptibility polymorphisms modulate the HIF pathway

Un-physiological activation of hypoxia inducible factor (HIF) is an early event in most renal cell cancers (RCC) following inactivation of the von Hippel-Lindau tumor suppressor. Despite intense study, how this impinges on cancer development is incompletely understood. To test for the impact of genetic signals on this pathway, we aligned human RCC-susceptibility polymorphisms with genome-wide assays of HIF-binding and observed highly significant overlap. Allele-specific assays of HIF binding, chromatin conformation and gene expression together with eQTL analyses in human tumors were applied to mechanistic analysis of one such overlapping site at chromosome 12p12.1. This defined a novel stage-specific mechanism in which the risk polymorphism, rs12814794, directly creates a new HIF-binding site that mediates HIF-1α isoform specific upregulation of its target BHLHE41. The alignment of multiple sites in the HIF cis-acting apparatus with RCC-susceptibility polymorphisms strongly supports a causal model in which minor variation in this pathway exerts significant effects on RCC development.
Self-Adaptive Static Analysis

Static code analysis is a powerful approach to detect quality deficiencies such as performance bottlenecks, safety violations or security vulnerabilities already during a software system's implementation. Yet, as current software systems continue to grow, current static-analysis systems more frequently face the problem of insufficient scalability. We argue that this is mainly due to the fact that current static analyses are implemented fully manually, often in general-purpose programming languages such as Java or C, or in declarative languages such as Datalog. This design choice predefines the way in which the static analysis evaluates, and limits the optimizations and extensions static-analysis designers can apply. To boost scalability to a new level, we propose to fuse static-analysis with just-in-time-optimization technology, introducing for the first time static analyses that are managed and inherently self-adaptive. Those analyses automatically adapt themselves to yield a performance/precision tradeoff that is optimal with respect to the analyzed software system and to the analysis itself. Self-adaptivity is enabled by the novel idea of designing a dedicated intermediate representation, not for the analyzed program but for the analysis itself. This representation allows for an automatic optimization and adaptation of the analysis code, both ahead-of-time (through static analysis of the static analysis) as well as just-in-time during the analysis' execution, similar to just-in-time compilers.
Research on the roles of genes coding ATP‐binding cassette transporters in Porphyromonas gingivalis pathogenicity

Porphyromonas gingivalis, as a major pathogen of periodontitis, could rapidly adhere to and invade host gingival epithelial cells (GECs) for the induction of infection. One ATP‐binding cassette (ABC) transporter gene was found to be upregulated during this infection process, however, the molecular mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we systemically investigated the messenger RNA level changes of all ABC transporter family genes in P. gingivalis while being internalized within GECs by real‐time polymerase chain reaction. We identified that two ABC transporter genes, PG_RS04465 (PG1010) and PG_RS07320 (PG1665), were significantly increased in P. gingivalis after coculturing with GECs. Mutant strains with knockout (KO) of these two genes were generated by homogenous recombination. PG_RS04465 and PG_RS07320 KO mutants showed no change in the growth of bacteria per se. Knockdown of PG_RS07320, but not PG_RS04465, caused decreased endotoxin level in the bacteria. In contrast, both mutant strains showed decreased Arg‐ and Lys‐gingipains activities, with significantly reduced adhesion and invasion capabilities. Secreted interleukin‐1β (IL‐1β) and IL‐6 levels in GECs cocultured with PG_RS04465 or PG_RS07320 KO mutants were also decreased, whereas, only the cells cocultured with PG_RS07320 KO mutants showed significant decrease. In addition, virulence study using mouse revealed that both KO mutant strains infection caused less mouse death than wild‐type strains, showing reduced virulence of two KO strains. These results indicated that ABC transporter genes PG_RS04465 and PG_RS07320 are positive regulators of the virulence of P. gingivalis.
A Cross Gender and Cross Lingual Study on Acoustic Features for Stress Recognition in Speech

We present a systematic study of the acoustic features for emotional stress in university students across gender and language groups. We design a common questionnaire of stress-inducing and non-stress-inducing questions in Chinese and English, and interviewed 25 native speakers of Mandarin and 31 native speakers of English, of both gender. We extract 560 acoustic features including as low-level descriptors and Teager energy operator (TEO). Our acoustic feature-based classifier recognizes stress in the subjects’ speech with 81.28% accuracy on average within the same gender and language group, largely outperforming human perception tests which showed only 39.27%. Moreover, we show for the first time that whereas the emotion detection accuracy decreases by 28.18% across gender, our system maintains the same performance across Mandarin and English. Feature ranking experiments show that the most important stress features are TEO and MFCCs, rather than pitch. This explains the relative language-independence of our model, even though Mandarin is a tonal language. TEO features are also founded to be insensitive to gender difference.
Influence of blood pressure reduction on composite cardiovascular endpoints in clinical trials

Background The use of a composite cardiovascular endpoint (CCEP) is frequent in clinical trials. However, the relation between the reduction in blood pressure (BP) and the risk of CCEP is poorly known. Methods We conducted a meta-analysis of trials, which compared different BP-lowering agents with placebo or active treatments in patients with hypertension or composite features of high cardiovascular risk. The outcome measure was a triple (myocardial infarction, stroke and cardiovascular death) or quadruple (those mentioned above and congestive heart failure) CCEP. Results Thirty trials fulfilled the inclusion criteria, for a total of 221 024 patients. Experimental treatments reduced the risk of CCEP by 9% (P < 0.0001). In a multivariable meta-regression analysis, for each 5-mmHg reduction in SBP, there was a 13% less risk of CCEP (95% confidence interval 8–19, P = 0.001) and, for each 2-mmHg reduction in DBP, there was a 12% less risk of CCEP (95% confidence interval 7–16, P = 0.001). Use of triple or quadruple CCEP (P = 0.150), its definition as primary or nonprimary endpoint (P = 0.305) and use of placebo or active control as comparators (P = 0.552) did not influence the estimates. A different BP reduction of at least 4.6 mmHg in SBP or at least 2.2 mmHg in DBP was required to achieve a 95% prediction interval entirely lying below the unity. Conclusion BP reduction is important to reduce the risk of CCEP in clinical trials. A significant difference between two treatment groups in the risk of CCEP may be anticipated for a SBP/DBP reduction differing by 4.6/2.2 mmHg or more.
Magnetic field and tissue dependencies of human brain longitudinal 1H2O relaxation in vivo

Brain water proton (1H2O) longitudinal relaxation time constants (T1) were obtained from three healthy individuals at magnetic field strengths (B0) of 0.2 Tesla (T), 1.0T, 1.5T, 4.0T, and 7.0T. A 5‐mm midventricular axial slice was sampled using a modified Look‐Locker technique with 1.5 mm in‐plane resolution, and 32 time points post‐adiabatic inversion. The results confirmed that for most brain tissues, T1 values increased by more than a factor of 3 between 0.2T and 7T, and over this range were well fitted by T1 (s) = 0.583(B0)0.382, T1(s) = 0.857(B0)0.376, and T1(s) = 1.35(B0)0.340 for white matter (WM), internal GM, and blood 1H2O, respectively. The ventricular cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) 1H2O T1 value did not change with B0, and its average value (standard deviation (SD)) across subjects and magnetic fields was 4.3 (±0.2) s. The tissue 1/T1 values at each field were well correlated with the macromolecular mass fraction, and to a lesser extent tissue iron content. The field‐dependent increases in 1H2O T1 values more than offset the well‐known decrease in typical MRI contrast reagent (CR) relaxivity, and simulations predict that this leads to lower CR concentration detection thresholds with increased magnetic field. Magn Reson Med 57:308–318, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Automating Grab-Cut Selection for Single-Object Foreground Images

This paper investigates a technique to apply the GrabCut algorithm to single-subject images without requiring human delineation of a bounding box to separate foreground from background pixels. The proposed technique uses a weighted combination of several known methods of distinguishing pixels in regions of an image. Implemented are means of hue and intensity, Canny line density and So-
AS Science for Public Understanding

Education policy encourages students to study a broad range of AS levels in their first post-16 year. The AS Science for Public Understanding course offers science for non-science specialists. This work aims to offer an understanding of science for those studying mainly arts A Levels. This AS Level course from AQA has been developed in collaboration with the Nuffield Curriculum Projects Centre and the Science Education Group at the University of York. Science for public understanding aims to broaden the curriculum post-16, for arts students who want to demonstrate the breadth of their abilities and for science students who want to place their studies into real-life contexts. The text covers topics such as AIDS, and genetically modified food, and demonstrates the importance of science for understanding current issues. It should help students use science to make sense of their lives and the world around them.