Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Abundance of Interstellar Boron

We use new Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and archival Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) observations to study interstellar B II λ1362 and O I λ1355 absorption along seven sight lines. Our new column density measurements, combined with measurements of four sight lines from the literature, allow us to study the relative B/O abundances over a wide range of interstellar environments. We measure sight-line-integrated relative gas-phase abundances in the range [B/O] = -1.00 to -0.17, and our data show that the B/O abundances are anticorrelated with average sight line densities over the range log⟨nH⟩ ≈ -1.3 to +0.7. Detailed comparisons of the B II and O I line shapes show that the B/O ratio is significantly higher in warm interstellar clouds than in cool clouds. These results are consistent with the incorporation of boron into dust grains in the diffuse ISM. Since boron is likely incorporated into grains, we derive a lower limit to the present-day total (gas + dust) interstellar boron abundance of B/H ≳ (2.5 ± 0.9) × 10-10. The effects of dust depletion and ionization differences from element to element will make it very difficult to reliably determine 11B/10B along most interstellar sight lines.
Increasing Air Traffic: What is the Problem?

Nowadays, huge efforts are made to modernize the air traffic management systems to cope with uncertainty, complexity and sub-optimality. An answer is to enhance the information sharing between the stakeholders. This paper introduces a framework that bridges the gap between air traffic management and air traffic control on the one hand, and bridges the gap between the ground, the approach and the en-route centers on the other hand. An original system is presented, that has three essential components: the trajectory models, the optimization process, and the monitoring process. The uncertainty of the trajectory is modeled with a Bayesian Network, where the nodes are associated to two types of random variables: the time of overflight on metering points of the airspace, and the traveling time of the routes linking these points. The resulting Bayesian Network covers the complete airspace, and Monte- Carlo simulations are done to estimate the probabilities of sector congestion and delays. On top of this trajectory model, an optimization process minimizes these probabilities by tuning the parameters of the Bayesian trajectory model related to overflight times on metering points. The last component is the monitoring process, that continuously updates the situation of the airspace, modifying the trajectories uncertainties according to actual positions of aircraft. After each update, a new optimal set of overflight times is computed, and can be communicated to the controllers as clearances for the aircraft pilots. The paper presents a formal specification of this global optimization problem, whose underlying rationale was derived with the help of air traffic controllers at Thales Air Systems.
Homesickness in College Students: The Moderating Effect of Religiousness on the Relationship between Homesickness and Maladjustment

This study examined the moderating role of religiousness in relationship between homesickness and depression, alcohol use, and risky sexual behaviors in freshmen college students. Data were collected on 312 freshman (195 female, 117 male, mean age = 18 years). Religiousness was found to moderate the relationships between homesickness and depression and alcohol use; however, the moderation was dependent on the domain of religiousness measured. For the relationship between homesickness and depression, positive religious coping served as a protective factor, while organizational religiousness, private practices, and global religiousness functioned as risk factors. For the relationship between homesickness and alcohol use, private practices served as a protective factor, while personal religiousness was a risk factor. Religiousness had no impact on the relationship between homesickness and sexual behaviors. Results highlight the need for domain-specific religiousness measures, and for an increase in awareness of the role religiousness can play in an individual’s adjustment to college.
Be it ever so humble: Proposing a dual-dimension account and measurement of humility

Abstract What does it mean to be humble? We argue that humility is an epistemically and ethically aligned state of awareness – the experience of ourselves as a small part of a larger universe and as one among a host of other morally relevant beings. So conceived, humility can be operationalized and measured along the dual dimensions of low self-focus and high other-focus and is distinct from other related constructs (e.g., modesty and open-mindedness). We discuss our newly developed scale (Study 1 and 2), and provide preliminary validation using self-report (Study 3) and behavioral measures (Study 4), showing that humility is related to people’s general ethical orientation (e.g., empathy, universalism/benevolence, and civic responsibility), their well-being (e.g., sense of autonomy, life-purpose, and secure attachment), mature religious beliefs/practices, and reactions to disagreement – specifically, people high in humility sat closer and less angled away from their conversation partner with whom they disagreed. Together, this provides support for our new Dual-Dimension Humility Scale.
Engineered zinc finger nuclease-mediated homologous recombination of the human rhodopsin gene.

PURPOSE Novel zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) were designed to target the human rhodopsin gene and induce homologous recombination of a donor DNA fragment. METHODS Three-finger zinc finger nucleases were designed based on previously published guidelines. To assay for ZFN specificity, the authors generated human embryonic retinoblast cell lines stably expressing a Pro23His rhodopsin, the most common mutation associated with autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa in North America. They report quantification of these rhodopsin-specific ZFNs to induce a targeted double-strand break in the human genome, demonstrate their ability to induce homologous recombination of a donor DNA fragment, and report the quantification of the frequency of ZFN-mediated homologous recombination. RESULTS Compared with endogenous homologous recombination, the authors observed a 12-fold increase in homologous recombination and an absolute frequency of ZFN-directed homologous recombination as high as 17% in the human rhodopsin gene. CONCLUSIONS ZFNs are chimeric proteins with significant potential for the treatment of inherited diseases. In this study, the authors report the design of novel ZFNs targeting the human rhodopsin gene. These ZFNs may be useful for the treatment of retinal diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, one of the most common causes of inherited blindness in the developed world. Herein, they also report on several aspects of donor fragment design and in vitro conditions that facilitate ZFN-mediated homologous recombination.
Economics of Software Reuse Revisited

software reuse, costbenefit analysis, decision support The field of software reuse is attracting increasing attention from academics and practitioners who recognize the economies to be gained from reducing duplication of software development effort. However, development for reuse requires additional costs that are difficult to justify under a single-project management view. Since reuse benefits accrue over time and across a number of projects, project management decision making must shift to a multi-project, long-term view and this changes management information requirements. In particular, given scarce resources management needs to be able to assess whether software reuse will have the kind of return that warrants the up-front investment in reusability. This paper evaluates and extends the pioneering contributions of other authors in the area of cost-benefit analysis for software reuse. In addition to incorporating timing and risk inherent in future reuse opportunities, the analysis includes reuse costs and benefits that were not accounted for in previous models.
ExLRU: A unified write buffer cache management for flash memory

NAND flash memory has been widely adopted in embedded systems as secondary storage. Yet the further development of flash memory strongly hinges on the tackling of its inherent implausible characteristics, including read and write speed asymmetry, inability of in-place update, and performance harmful erase operations. While Write Buffer Cache (WBC) has been proposed to enhance the performance of write operations, the development of a unified WBC management scheme that is effective for diverse types of access patterns is still a challenging task. In this paper, a novel WBC management scheme named Expectation-based LRU (ExLRU) is proposed to improve the performance of write operations while at the same time reducing the number of erase operations on flash memory. ExLRU accurately maintains access history information in WBC, based on which a new cost model is constructed to select the data with minimum write cost to be written to flash memory. An efficient ExLRU implementation with negligible hardware overhead is further developed. Simulation results show that ExLRU outperforms state-of-art WBC management schemes under various workloads.
Exploring profiles of ideal high school mathematical teaching behaviours: perceptions of in-service and pre-service teachers in Taiwan

Abstract This study explored and compared the perspectives of Taiwanese in-service and pre-service high school mathematics teachers regarding ideal teaching behaviours; the perspectives of a nationwide sample of students were taken as the baseline. Fourteen factors contributing to ideal teaching behaviours were identified through exploratory factor analyses. Nine factors, including idea explanation and speedy lecture, were rooted in traditional Chinese culture; five factors, including concrete representation and student activities, were influenced by Western cultures. Three teacher profiles were identified through k-means clustering analysis. The perspectives of in-service teachers were dominated by a painless meaning-emphasised profile; these teachers emphasised meaningful learning for students and avoided the fast pace and demanding requirements that can cause distress in students, whereas pre-service teachers were dominated by an all-round profile, revealing their openness to all factors. Compared with pre-service teachers, in-service teachers’ perspectives were more similar to those of students.
Peepdeck: a dashboard for the distributed design studio

Designers adopt a large amount of general-purpose tools for supporting their remote collaborative tasks. Each tool provides very diverse functionalities: from file sharing to instant communication and video collaboration. The designer struggles when filtering and combining the right information spread across the multitude of tools. This research extends McGrath's framework of task circumflex to map the collaborative demands of the design practitioner and proposes Peepdeck, a design exploration to support them. Peepdeck is a dashboard that assembles information scattered across multiple tools in a personalized and organized way. Through two design iterations followed by evaluations of the user interface, several requirements were identified for supporting collaboration awareness in design teams. Insights confirmed the relevance of combining information from different but already familiar tools, rather than attempting to replace them. It was identified the importance of optimizing for visual scanning, supporting search of content and allowing users to customize the tool.
Alternative Monetary Policies in a Turnpike Economy: Vintage Article*

This paper modifies a Townsend turnpike model by letting agents stay at a location long enough to trade some consumption loans, but not long enough to support a Pareto optimal allocation. Monetary equilibria exist that are non-optimal in the absence of a scheme to pay interest on currency at a particular rate. Paying interest on currency at the optimal rate delivers a Pareto optimal allocation, but a different one than the allocation for an associated nonmonetary centralized economy. The price level remains determinate under an optimal policy. We study the response of the model to “helicopter drops” of currency, steady increases in the money supply, and restrictions on private intermediation.
Altering resistive force perception by modulating velocity of dot pattern projected onto hand

In this paper, we explore the possibility of altering user's resistive force perception by using pseudo-haptics in spatial augmented reality. Through a psychophysical experiment, we investigated the effect of changing the velocity of a dot pattern projected onto a participant's hand during the resistive force perception. A statistical analysis of the result reveals that the speed of the dot pattern movement affects the perceived force such that a faster movement makes participants feel a smaller force, and the direction of the movement has no effect.
The Braincase of the Basal Sauropod Dinosaur Spinophorosaurus and 3D Reconstructions of the Cranial Endocast and Inner Ear

Background Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest animals ever to walk on land, and, as a result, the evolution of their remarkable adaptations has been of great interest. The braincase is of particular interest because it houses the brain and inner ear. However, only a few studies of these structures in sauropods are available to date. Because of the phylogenetic position of Spinophorosaurus nigerensis as a basal eusauropod, the braincase has the potential to provide key evidence on the evolutionary transition relative to other dinosaurs. Methodology/Principal Findings The only known braincase of Spinophorosaurus (‘Argiles de l'Irhazer’, Irhazer Group; Agadez region, Niger) differs significantly from those of the Jurassic sauropods examined, except potentially for Atlasaurus imelakei (Tilougguit Formation, Morocco). The basisphenoids of Spinophorosaurus and Atlasaurus bear basipterygoid processes that are comparable in being directed strongly caudally. The Spinophorosaurus specimen was CT scanned, and 3D renderings of the cranial endocast and inner-ear system were generated. The endocast resembles that of most other sauropods in having well-marked pontine and cerebral flexures, a large and oblong pituitary fossa, and in having the brain structure obscured by the former existence of relatively thick meninges and dural venous sinuses. The labyrinth is characterized by long and proportionally slender semicircular canals. This condition recalls, in particular, that of the basal non-sauropod sauropodomorph Massospondylus and the basal titanosauriform Giraffatitan. Conclusions/Significance Spinophorosaurus has a moderately derived paleoneuroanatomical pattern. In contrast to what might be expected early within a lineage leading to plant-eating graviportal quadrupeds, Spinophorosaurus and other (but not all) sauropodomorphs show no reduction of the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear. This character-state is possibly a primitive retention in Spinophorosaurus, but due the scarcity of data it remains unclear whether it is also the case in the various later sauropods in which it is present or whether it has developed homoplastically in these taxa. Any interpretations remain tentative pending the more comprehensive quantitative analysis underway, but the size and morphology of the labyrinth of sauropodomorphs may be related to neck length and mobility, among other factors.
Brain perfusion SPECT analysis: New insights in mild cognitive impairment and neuromyelitis optica

Het doel van dit proefschrift was om aan te tonen dat hersenperfusie SPECT kan helpen bij het verhelderen van belangrijke vragen met betrekking tot het prodromale “Mild Cognitive Impairment” (MCI) stadium van de ziekte van Alzheimer (AD) en recidiverende Neuromyelitis Optica (NMO). Dit is niet alleen relevant gezien ons beperkte begrip van deze neurologische aandoeningen, maar ook omdat hersenperfusie SPECT een goedkope en wereldwijd toegankelijke technologie is. Een algemene introductie van deze neuroimaging-technologie wordt geboden, inclusief een nieuwe beeldanalysebenadering, gebaseerd op de “graph theory”, om de connectiviteit van de hersenen te bestuderen. MCI en recidiverende NMO worden ook kort beschreven, evenals relevante vragen met betrekking tot hersenperfusie bij deze ziekten. Onze bevindingen duiden erop dat de studie van hersenconnectiviteit, gebaseerd op perfusie SPECT gecombineerd met “graph theory” analyse, haalbaar en nuttig is voor zowel het onderzoeken van complexe problemen zoals cerebrovasculaire reactiviteitsveranderingen in MCI, als voor klinisch gebruik. Aan de andere kant leverde hersenperfusie SPECT gecombineerd met voxel-gebaseerde analyse bewijs dat hersen-microvasculatuur een vroeg ziektedoelwit is bij recidiverende NMO, wat suggereert dat perfusieveranderingen belangrijk zouden kunnen zijn bij de ontwikkeling van hersenstructuurafwijkingen bij deze ziekte. Bovendien geven onze bevindingen aan dat het aantal aanvallen van optische neuritis per patient een potentiele confounder is bij het vergelijken van recidiverende NMO patienten met controles, voor zowel weefselvolumes als perfusie, en vraagt aandacht voor toekomstige studies. De bevindingen die in dit proefschrift worden gepresenteerd, kunnen dus belangrijke klinische implicaties hebben en daarom het potentieel voor praktische toepasbaarheid.
Simultaneous Eye Tracking and Blink Detection with Interactive Particle Filters

We present a system that simultaneously tracks eyes and detects eye blinks. Two interactive particle filters are used for this purpose, one for the closed eyes and the other one for the open eyes. Each particle filter is used to track the eye locations as well as the scales of the eye subjects. The set of particles that gives higher confidence is defined as the primary set and the other one is defined as the secondary set. The eye location is estimated by the primary particle filter, and whether the eye status is open or closed is also decided by the label of the primary particle filter. When a new frame comes, the secondary particle filter is reinitialized according to the estimates from the primary particle filter. We use autoregression models for describing the state transition and a classification-based model for measuring the observation. Tensor subspace analysis is used for feature extraction which is followed by a logistic regression model to give the posterior estimation. The performance is carefully evaluated from two aspects: the blink detection rate and the tracking accuracy. The blink detection rate is evaluated using videos from varying scenarios, and the tracking accuracy is given by comparing with the benchmark data obtained using the Vicon motion capturing system. The setup for obtaining benchmark data for tracking accuracy evaluation is presented and experimental results are shown. Extensive experimental evaluations validate the capability of the algorithm.
Sphincter-sparing surgery after preoperative radiotherapy for low rectal cancers: feasibility, oncologic results and quality of life outcomes

The present study assesses the choice of surgical procedure, oncologic results and quality of life (QOL) outcomes in a retrospective cohort of 53 patients with low-lying rectal cancers (within 6 cm of the anal verge) treated surgically following preoperative radiotherapy (RT, median dose 45 Gy) with or without concomitant 5-fluorouracil. QOL was assessed in 23 patients by using two questionnaires developed by the QOL Study Group of the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer: EORTC QLQ-C30 and EORTC QLQ-CR38. After a median interval of 29 days from completion of RT, abdominoperineal resection (APR) was performed in 29 patients (55%), low anterior resection in 23 patients (20 with coloanal anastomosis) and transrectal excision in one patient. The 3-year actuarial overall survival and locoregional control rates were 71.4% and 77.5% respectively, with no differences observed between patients operated by APR or restorative procedures. For all scales of EORTC QLQ-C30 and EORTC QLQ-CR38, no significant differences in median scores were observed between the two surgical groups. Although patients having had APR tended to report a lower body image score (P = 0.12) and more sexual dysfunction in male patients, all APR patients tended to report better physical function, future perspective and global QOL. In conclusion, sphincter-sparing surgery after preoperative RT seems to be feasible, in routine practice, in a significant proportion of low rectal cancers without compromising the oncologic results. However, prospective studies are mandatory to confirm this finding and to clarify the putative QOL advantages of sphincter-conserving approaches. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaign
Translation, cross-cultural adaptation and applicability of the Brazilian version of the Frontotemporal Dementia Rating Scale (FTD-FRS)

BACKGROUND Staging scales for dementia have been devised for grading Alzheimer's disease (AD) but do not include the specific symptoms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). OBJECTIVE To translate and adapt the Frontotemporal Dementia Rating Scale (FTD-FRS) to Brazilian Portuguese. METHODS The cross-cultural adaptation process consisted of the following steps: translation, back-translation (prepared by independent translators), discussion with specialists, and development of a final version after minor adjustments. A pilot application was carried out with 12 patients diagnosed with bvFTD and 11 with AD, matched for disease severity (CDR=1.0). The evaluation protocol included: Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination-Revised (ACE-R), Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), Executive Interview (EXIT-25), Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI), Frontotemporal Dementia Rating Scale (FTD-FRS) and Clinical Dementia Rating scale (CDR). RESULTS The Brazilian version of the FTD-FRS seemed appropriate for use in this country. Preliminary results revealed greater levels of disability in bvFTD than in AD patients (bvFTD: 25% mild, 50% moderate and 25% severe; AD: 36.36% mild, 63.64% moderate). It appears that the CDR underrates disease severity in bvFTD since a relevant proportion of patients rated as having mild dementia (CDR=1.0) in fact had moderate or severe levels of disability according to the FTD-FRS. CONCLUSION The Brazilian version of the FTD-FRS seems suitable to aid staging and determining disease progression.
High-Throughput Sequencing and Copy Number Variation Detection Using Formalin Fixed Embedded Tissue in Metastatic Gastric Cancer

In the era of targeted therapy, mutation profiling of cancer is a crucial aspect of making therapeutic decisions. To characterize cancer at a molecular level, the use of formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue is important. We tested the Ion AmpliSeq Cancer Hotspot Panel v2 and nCounter Copy Number Variation Assay in 89 formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded gastric cancer samples to determine whether they are applicable in archival clinical samples for personalized targeted therapies. We validated the results with Sanger sequencing, real-time quantitative PCR, fluorescence in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry. Frequently detected somatic mutations included TP53 (28.17%), APC (10.1%), PIK3CA (5.6%), KRAS (4.5%), SMO (3.4%), STK11 (3.4%), CDKN2A (3.4%) and SMAD4 (3.4%). Amplifications of HER2, CCNE1, MYC, KRAS and EGFR genes were observed in 8 (8.9%), 4 (4.5%), 2 (2.2%), 1 (1.1%) and 1 (1.1%) cases, respectively. In the cases with amplification, fluorescence in situ hybridization for HER2 verified gene amplification and immunohistochemistry for HER2, EGFR and CCNE1 verified the overexpression of proteins in tumor cells. In conclusion, we successfully performed semiconductor-based sequencing and nCounter copy number variation analyses in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded gastric cancer samples. High-throughput screening in archival clinical samples enables faster, more accurate and cost-effective detection of hotspot mutations or amplification in genes.