Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of an intercultural communication workshop on participants’ intercultural communication competence: An exploratory study

It was the purpose of the present study to measure the effects of an intercultural communication workshop (ICW) on American participants’ intercultural communication competence. This study utilized the behavior observation methodology developed by Ruben (1976) with the contrast‐American simulation technique developed by Stewart (1966) to investigate intercultural communication competence development. Using a nonequivalent control group design, a structured communication event employing the contrast‐American technique was developed in which each subject discussed the topic of leadership communication with a contrast‐American at two intervals (pretest and posttest) and these interactions were videotaped. Two judges then viewed the videotaped interactions and rated the subjects’ intercultural communication competence using behavioral observation measures. The results suggest that (I) behavioral observation methodology can be reliably employed to assess intercultural communication competence and (2) the ICW d.
Object localization using stereo vision

Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see. The theoretical explanation about the optics of the eye and the information about the existence of images formed at the rear of the eye ball are provided by Kepler and Scheiner respectively in the 16th century (Lin, 2002). The field of computer vision is started emerging in the second half of 19th century, since then researchers have been trying to develop the methods and systems aiming at imitating the biological vision process and therefore increasing the machine intelligence for many possible applications in the real world. The theoretical knowledge behind the perception of 3D real world using multiple vision systems has been published in various literature, and (Hartley & Zisserman 2000) (Klette at al., 1998) (Sterger , 2007) are few well known from them. As there are numerous applications of computer vision in service, industrial, surveillance, and surgical etc automation sectors, researchers have been publishing numerous methods and systems that address their specific goals. It is intended with most of these researchers that their developed methods and systems are enough general with respect to the aspects such as functional, robust, time effective and safety issues. Though practical limitations hinder the researchers and developers in achieving these goals, many are getting ahead providing the solutions to the known and predicted problems. The field of computer vision is supporting the field of robotics with many vision based applications. In service robotics action interpretation and object manipulation are few examples with which the computer vision supports the humans. According to (Taylor & Kleeman, 2006), three things are almost certain about universal service robots of the future: many will have manipulators (and probably legs! ), most will have cameras, and almost all will be called upon to grasp, lift, carry, stack or otherwise manipulate objects in our environment. Visual perception and coordination in support of robotic grasping is thus a vital area of research for the progress of universal service robots. Service robotic tasks are usually specified at a supervisory level with reference to general actions and classes of objects. An example of such a task would be: Please get ‘the bottle’ from ‘the fridge’. Here, getting the bottle is the intended action, ‘bottle’ belongs to the class of objects that are manipulated, and ‘fridge’ belongs to the class of objects in/on which the objects to be manipulated lie. The content of the manuscript addresses the object manipulation tasks using stereo vision for applications of service robotics. Motivation of the content of the manuscript stems from the needs of service robotic systems FRIEND II and FRIEND III 15
Conditions Required for a Hybrid Artificial Liver Support System using a PUF/Hepatocyte-Spheroid Packed-Bed Module and it's use in Dogs with Liver Failure

We studied the effects of a hybrid artificial liver support system we developed on dogs with hepatic failure. The system consisted of a multi-channel polyurethane foam packed-bed culture module, including primary dog hepatocyte spheroids. Blood ammonia was well metabolized by 20 g hepatocytes, but the other functions such as glucose concentration, total bile acid concentration, and survival time required 30 g hepatocytes to improve conditions. We found that we should use a culture substratum that easily forms spheroids, and that an artificial liver module should be used as soon as possible after spheroid formation by hepatocytes in the module.
Disruptive coloration elicited on controlled natural substrates in cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis

SUMMARY Cephalopods are known for their ability to change camouflage body patterns in response to changes in the visual background. Recent research has used artificial substrates such as checkerboards to investigate some specific visual cues that elicit the various camouflaged patterns in cuttlefish. In this study, we took information from experiments on artificial substrates and assembled a natural rock substrate (fixed with glue) with those features that are thought to elicit disruptive coloration in cuttlefish. The central hypothesis is that light rocks of appropriate size, substrate contrast and edge characteristics will elicit disruptive camouflage patterns in cuttlefish. By adding graded light sand in successively greater quantities to this glued rock substrate, we predicted that disruptive camouflage patterns would be replaced by progressively more uniform patterns as the visual features of rock size, contrast and edges were altered by the addition of sand. By grading the degree of disruptiveness in the animals' body patterns, we found that the results support this prediction, and that there is a strong correlation between fine details of the visual background properties and the resultant body pattern shown by the cuttlefish. Specifically, disruptive coloration was elicited (1) when one or a few light rocks of approximately the size of the animal's White square skin component were in the surrounding substrate (dark rocks alone did not elicit disruptive coloration), (2) there was moderate-to-high contrast between the light rocks and their immediate surrounds, and (3) the rock edges were well defined. Taken together, the present study provides direct evidence of several key visual features that evoke disruptive skin coloration on natural backgrounds.
The Impact of Technological and Organizational Changes on Labor Flows - Evidence on French Establishments

This paper investigates the effect of organizational and technological changes on job stability of different occupations in France. We first develop a basic matching model with endogenous job destruction. It provides a structure to the empirical analysis, where we extensively exploit a unique data set on a representative sample of French establishments. The adoption of information technologies is positively correlated to labor flows of blue collar workers while most of the new workplace organizational practices positively influence the managers' turnover.
Early Intervention or Early Incarceration? Using a Screening Test for Intellectual Disability in the Criminal Justice System

Summary Background People with an intellectual disability are significantly over-represented in the criminal justice system in many Western jurisdictions; early identification in the system is important if they are to receive appropriate services, protection, diversion and rehabilitation. Methods The Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (KBIT) and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS) were compared with the Hayes Ability Screening Index (HASI), developed from a battery of items. In total, 567 adult and juvenile offenders, in custodial and community settings, were tested. Results Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses showed that the final version of the HASI was as effective as the KBIT or the VABS in predicting results on the other test. Correlation coefficients between the HASI, the KBIT and VABS were significant. Conclusions The HASI is an effective screening instrument for determining offenders who may have an intellectual disability and need to be referred for full-scale diagnostic assessment.
Challenges For Spoken Dialogue Systems

The past de ade has seen the development of a large number of spoken dialogue systems around the world, both as resear h prototypes and ommer ial appli a-tions. These systems allow users to intera t with a ma hine to retrieve information, ondu t transa tions, or perform other problem-solving tasks. In this paper we dis uss some of the design issues whi h onfront developers of spoken dialogue systems, provide some examples of resear h being undertaken in this area, and des ribe some of the ongoing hallenges fa ing urrent spoken language te hnology
Probabilistic collision estimation system for autonomous vehicles

Nearly 1.3 million people die each year in traffic-related accidents, whereas an additional 20-50 million people are injured. Introducing autonomous vehicles would aim to reduce these numbers by removing the driver from the loop entirely and thus removing the human error. Intersections are considered a complex traffic situation for autonomous vehicles. Functions which could accurately foresee future events in those situations, mimicking the situation awareness of humans, would improve autonomous systems and increase traffic safety.
Executing MPI programs on virtual machines in an Internet sharing system

Internet sharing systems aim at federating and utilizing distributed computing resources across the Internet. This paper presents a user-level virtual machine (VM) approach to MPI program execution in an Internet sharing framework. In this approach, the resource consumer has its own operating system running on top of and isolated from, the operating system of the resource provider. We propose an efficient socket virtualization technique to optimize VM network performance. Socket virtualization achieves the same network bandwidth as the physical network. In our LAN environment, it reduces the latency overhead from 112% (using existing TUN/TAP technique) to 35.6%. Performance results on MPI benchmarks show that our virtualization technique incurs small overhead compared with the physical host platform, while gaining in return a higher degree of guest isolation and customization. We also describe the key mechanisms that allow the employment of VMs in an existing Internet sharing system
Affective Computing for HCI

Not all computers need to pay attention to emotions, or to have emotional abilities. Some machines are useful as rigid tools, and it is fine to keep them that way. However, there are situations where the human-machine interaction could be improved by having machines naturally adapt to their users, and where communication about when, where, how, and how important it is to adapt involves emotional information, possibly including expressions of frustration, confusion, disliking, interest, and more. Affective computing expands humancomputer interaction by including emotional communication together with appropriate means of handling affective information.
Innovation in Higher Education Systems in the Post-Socialist Countries in Central and Eastern Europe, 1999–2005: Possibilities for Exploration through a Complexity Theory Framework

This article discusses the possibilities for applying a collection of theories, known as complexity theory, for the study of institutional innovation in higher education in the post-socialist countries in Eastern and Central Europe for the period 1999–2005. It presents an outline of the theory and suggests for discussion links between the framework of complexity theory and a research project under development, trying to map higher education change.
Resource Discovery Using Mobile Agents

Discovery of the multimedia resources on network is the focus of the many researches in post semantic web. The task of resources discovery can be automated by using agent. This chapter reviews the current most used technologies that facilitate the resource discovery process. The chapter also the presents the case study to present a fully functioning resource discovery system using mobile agents.
Antenatal Screening and Risk Factors for Intrauterine Growth Retardation

Abstract Antenatal risk factors in combination with symphysis-fundus distance can identify pregnancies with small infants, who can be divided in genetically small, malformed, and malnourished infants. Only the last category benefit from fetal surveillance. Maternal diseases, pregnancy complications (hypertension), and environmental factors (smoking) are connected to malnourished small infants.
Haplotypes and haplotype‐tagging single‐nucleotide polymorphism: Presentation Group 8 of Genetic Analysis Workshop 14

Moderately dense maps of single‐nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers across the human genome for both the simulated data set and data from the Collaborative Study of the Genetics of Alcoholism were available at Genetic Analysis Workshop 14 for the first time. This allowed examination of various novel and existing methods for haplotype analyses. Three contributors applied Mantel statistics in different ways for both linkage and association analysis by using the shared length between two haplotypes at a marker locus as a measure of genetic similarity. The results indicate that haplotype‐sharing based on Mantel statistics can be a powerful approach and needs further methodological evaluation. Four contributors investigated haplotype‐tagging SNP (htSNP) selection procedures, two contributors examined the use of multilocus haplotypes compared to single loci in association tests, and two contributors compared the accuracy of various methods for reconstructing haplotypes and estimating haplotype frequencies for both pedigree data and data from unrelated individuals. For all three different tasks, software packages and procedures gave similar results in regions of high linkage disequilibrium (LD). However, they were not as consistent in regions of moderate to low LD. One coalescence‐based approach for estimating haplotype frequencies, coupled with a Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, outperformed the other haplotype frequency estimation methods in regions of low LD. In conclusion, regardless of the task, results were similar in chromosomal regions of high LD. However, based on the differing results observed here, methodological improvements are required for chromosomal regions of low to moderate LD. Genet. Epidemiol. 29(Suppl. 1):S71–S59, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Construct Validity of the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC) Self-Report of Personality

The authors investigate the construct validity of the Behavior Assessment System for Children Self-Report of Personality (BASC-SRP; Reynolds & Kamphaus, 1998). A sample of 970 adolescents (16-18 years) with histories of disruptive behavior problems and truancy complete the SRP; a subsample of 290 adolescents also completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—Adolescent (Butcher et al., 1992). Confirmatory factor analysis support a three-factor structure for the SRP. The Clinical Maladjustment and Personal Adjustment composites show adequate convergent, discriminant, and discriminative validity. Less evidence for the validity of the School Maladjustment composite is found. Results support the overall construct validity of the SRP with adolescents referred for behavior problems but suggest that the SRP composites and scales measure a wider range of psychopathology than their labels imply.
Towards a cost-effective homecare for a public health management system in Brazil

During the last decade, several ICT systems have been proposed to fulfill the needs of managing individuals' physical activities at home. Unfortunately, most of the developed products have been so far expensive and could not be afforded by the large majority of the population, especially in underdeveloped countries. Therefore, developing a low-cost system accessible to large portion of population in these countries or even in developed ones (Classes D and E) is still necessary. This paper presents a prototype called Diga-Saúde which proposes to develop a low-cost system using mobile phones and the Brazilian set-top box (stb) receptor for digital TV to provide home care services. Diga-Saúde is part of a larger project called LARIISA, a governance supporting framework for public health systems centered on the family.
Impact of Directionality on Interference Mitigation in Full-Duplex Cellular Networks

In this paper, we consider two fundamental full-duplex (FD) architectures, two-node and three-node, in the context of cellular networks where the terminals employ directional antennas. The simultaneous transmission and reception of data in non-orthogonal channels makes FD radio a potential solution for the currently limited spectrum. However, its implementation generates high levels of interference either in the form of loopback interference (LI) from the output to the input antenna of a transceiver or in the form of co-channel interference in large-scale multicell networks due to the large number of active links. Using a stochastic geometry model, we investigate how directional antennas can control and mitigate the co-channel interference. Furthermore, we provide a model which characterizes the way directional antennas manage the LI in order to passively suppress it. Our results show that both architectures can benefit significantly by the employment of directional antennas. Finally, we consider the case where both architectures are employed in the network and derive the optimal values for the density fraction of each architecture, which maximize the success probability and the network throughput.
New compact six-band internal antenna

A novel compact six-band internal handset antenna for covering the GSM (890-960 MHz), GPS (1575 MHz), DCS (1710-1880 MHz), PCS (1880-1990 MHz), UMTS (1900-2200 MHz), and ISM (2400-2480 MHz) bands is presented. The proposed antenna consists of two layer patches and a folded stub and occupies a total volume of 36/spl times/17/spl times/8 mm/sup 3/. Details of the antenna as well as the measured results are presented.
A Personalised Ranking Framework with Multiple Sampling Criteria for Venue Recommendation

Recommending a ranked list of interesting venues to users based on their preferences has become a key functionality in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) such as Yelp and Gowalla. Bayesian Personalised Ranking (BPR) is a popular pairwise recommendation technique that is used to generate the ranked list of venues of interest to a user, by leveraging the user's implicit feedback such as their check-ins as instances of positive feedback, while randomly sampling other venues as negative instances. To alleviate the sparsity that affects the usefulness of recommendations by BPR for users with few check-ins, various approaches have been proposed in the literature to incorporate additional sources of information such as the social links between users, the textual content of comments, as well as the geographical location of the venues. However, such approaches can only readily leverage one source of additional information for negative sampling. Instead, we propose a novel Personalised Ranking Framework with Multiple sampling Criteria (PRFMC) that leverages both geographical influence and social correlation to enhance the effectiveness of BPR. In particular, we apply a multi-centre Gaussian model and a power-law distribution method, to capture geographical influence and social correlation when sampling negative venues, respectively. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments using three large-scale datasets from the Yelp, Gowalla and Brightkite LBSNs. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of fusing both geographical influence and social correlation in our proposed PRFMC framework and its superiority in comparison to BPR-based and other similar ranking approaches. Indeed, our PRFMC approach attains a 37% improvement in MRR over a recently proposed approach that identifies negative venues only from social links.
Warming Reduces Carbon Losses from Grassland Exposed to Elevated Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

The flux of carbon dioxide (CO2) between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere may ameliorate or exacerbate climate change, depending on the relative responses of ecosystem photosynthesis and respiration to warming temperatures, rising atmospheric CO2, and altered precipitation. The combined effect of these global change factors is especially uncertain because of their potential for interactions and indirectly mediated conditions such as soil moisture. Here, we present observations of CO2 fluxes from a multi-factor experiment in semi-arid grassland that suggests a potentially strong climate – carbon cycle feedback under combined elevated [CO2] and warming. Elevated [CO2] alone, and in combination with warming, enhanced ecosystem respiration to a greater extent than photosynthesis, resulting in net C loss over four years. The effect of warming was to reduce respiration especially during years of below-average precipitation, by partially offsetting the effect of elevated [CO2] on soil moisture and C cycling. Carbon losses were explained partly by stimulated decomposition of soil organic matter with elevated [CO2]. The climate – carbon cycle feedback observed in this semiarid grassland was mediated by soil water content, which was reduced by warming and increased by elevated [CO2]. Ecosystem models should incorporate direct and indirect effects of climate change on soil water content in order to accurately predict terrestrial feedbacks and long-term storage of C in soil.
In the land of the blind, the one‐eyed man is king

A cautionary note is reported on the results and conclusions of McCrae et al. (this issue). The main counter argument to a straightforward interpretation of mean differences at a national level is the arbitrary nature of the metrics for personality traits. It is argued that this fundamental property lies behind potential threats to the interpretation of mean scores, such as frame‐of‐reference and accessibility effects. An empirical example of how accessibility can also have an influence on correlations is reported. The main message is that one should be very cautious in assuming that mean personality self‐reports are necessarily more accurate than national stereotypes. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Knowledge transfer to partners: a firm level perspective

Purpose – Firms at the center of an organizational network may benefit from educating and building up competencies of their partners. For that reason, centers often seek to transfer knowledge from the center to partner firms. They even set up systems of inter‐organizational knowledge transfer to plan, to coordinate, and to control such transfers on a firm level instead of managing single knowledge transfer projects individually. However, little systematic attention has yet been paid to such systems on a firm level. This paper seeks to analyze the managerial mechanism to decide what knowledge to transfer to what partners.Design/methodology/approach – To address this gap, data were gathered on nine leading multinational center firms. An explorative approach was adopted using case study research to look at the characteristics of network centers, network partners, knowledge, transfer channels, and programmes.Findings – It was found that center firms offered knowledge transfer products to partners and set up p.