Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Collaborative Filtering Based on the Latent Class Model for Attributes

In this manuscript, we investigate a collaborative filtering method to characterize consumption behavior of customers and services with various attributes for marketing. We assume that each customer and service have the invisible attribute which is called latent class. Assuming a combination of attribute values of a customer and service is classified to a latent class, furthermore, we propose a new Bayesian statistical model that consumption behavior is probabilistically arise based on a latent class combination of a customer, service and attribute values. Then, we show the method to estimate parameters of a statistical model based on the variational Bayes method and the mean field approximation. Consequently, we show the effectiveness of the proposed model and the estimation method by simulation.
A Simple Technique for Repair of Cupid's Bow

BACKGROUND. Reconstruction of the upper lip is among the most challenging problems faced by Mohs surgeons. Cupid's bow, with its marked variability among individuals, can be particularly difficult to recreate. Numerous complex reconstructive methods have been described in the literature. The authors present a novel technique for aesthetic reconstruction of Cupid's bow. METHODS. Retrospective case reviews of defects resulting from Mohs excision located at or near Cupid's bow are given. Repair was performed using our modified mucosal advancement flap technique. RESULTS. Acceptable or very good cosmesis was attained in all cases. CONCLUSION. The use of our simple modification of the mucosal advancement flap allows aesthetic reconstruction of Cupid's bow in select cases. Selection criteria for defects amenable to this technique are presented.
The cellular fatty acid composition of Campylobacter species isolated from cases of enteritis in man and animals

SUMMARY The cellular fatty acid composition of 41 strains of suspected Campylobacter jejuni, 23 from human cases of gastroenteritis and 18 from animals, was examined by gas-liquid chromatography. Three of the 23 human isolates and 2 of 18 animal isolates did not contain 19:0 cyclopropane fatty acid and were identified as C. laridis. The remaining 36 strains had cellular fatty acid profiles consistent with C. jejuni but could be divided into three groups on the ratio of the concentration of 18:1 and 19:0 eycloproprane. Most human isolates (85%) were in groups II or III whereas most animal isolates (56%) were in group I. It is proposed that gas-liquid chromatographic analysis of cellular fatty acids is a relatively easy method for epidemiological typing of C. jejuni isolates.
Modeling Musical Emotion Dynamics with Conditional Random Fields

Human emotion responses to music are dynamic processes that evolve naturally over time in synchrony with the music. It is because of this dynamic nature that systems which seek to predict emotion in music must necessarily analyze such processes on short-time intervals, modeling not just the relationships between acoustic data and emotion parameters, but how those relationships evolve over time. In this work we seek to model such relationships using a conditional random field (CRF), a powerful graphical model which is trained to predict the conditional probability p(y|x) for a sequence of labels y given a sequence of features x. Treating our features as deterministic, we retain the rich local subtleties present in the data, which is especially applicable to contentbased audio analysis, given the abundance of data in these problems. We train our graphical model on the emotional responses of individual annotators in an 11◊11 quantized representation of the arousal-valence (A-V) space. Our model is fully connected, and can produce estimates of the conditional probability for each A-V bin, allowing us to easily model complex emotion-space distributions (e.g. multimodal) as an A-V heatmap.
Organizational Justice As a Predictor of Organizational Silence.

In this study, relation between teachers’ perception for organizational justice and their organizational silence was examined. Sample of this study consists of 300 teachers who work at elementary schools in Siirt. Relational Scanning model was utilized in performance of this study. In this study, Organizational Justice Scale and Organizational Silence Scales were benefited from. For confirmative factor analyses and structural equity model of these scales, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) package sofwares were utilized. Results of the research showed that teachers’ distributive, procedural and interactional justice perceptions have negative relation with acquiescent silence and defensive silence, while having positive relation with prosocial silence. Regression analyse results confirms the thought that organizational justice is a significant variable that predicts teachers’ organizational silence. Results of developed structural equity model showed that organizational justice has a negative and significant impact on organizational silence.
Risk assessment of a new acceptance testing procedure for conventional linear accelerators

Purpose: New techniques and materials have recently been developed to expedite the conventional linac acceptance testing procedure (Med Phys. 2017;22), which use the electronic portal imaging device (EPID) for data collection. This new procedure is designed to be more efficient and robust than the conventional approach. The purpose of this work was to perform a comparative risk assessment of the two acceptance testing procedures (ATPs). Materials and Methods: Failure Modes and Effects Analysis was used to assess risks for both ATP approaches. Five domain experts (Medical Physicists) comprised the analysis team. The risk assessment method and ranking scales were adopted from the AAPM TG‐100. The number of failure pathways and associated risk priority numbers (RPNs) for the two ATP approaches were compared. RPNs > 100 were considered high‐priority failure modes. Results: Fewer failure pathways were determined for the new ATP (ATPEPID) compared to the conventional ATP (ATPconv) resulting in a 44% difference (n = 233 vs. n = 534, respectively). There were also 35% fewer RPNs > 100 for the ATPEPID (n = 40) compared to the ATPconv (n = 114). Failure pathways and RPNs > 100 for individual ATP tests were 2.0 and 3.5 times higher, on average, for the ATPconv compared to the ATPEPID, respectively. The EPID pixel sensitivity map was identified as a high risk failure for the ATPEPID. Conclusions: Potential errors due to human factors were decreased for the ATPEPID compared to ATPconv so it is possible that a largely automated linac ATP can mitigate many error occurrences. Manufacturers should be careful when designing an EPID‐based ATP to address errors in the EPID pixel sensitivity map which can potentially lead to a significant impact on patients’ treatment.
The structure of electrical networks: a graph theory based analysis

We study the vulnerability of electrical networks through structural analysis from a graph theory point of view. We measure and compare several important structural properties of different electrical networks, including a real power grid and several synthetic grids, as well as other infrastructural networks. The properties we consider include the minimum dominating set size, the degree distribution and the shortest path distribution. We also study the network vulnerability under attacks in terms of maximum component size, number of components and flow vulnerability. Our results suggest that all grids are more vulnerable to targeted attacks than to random attacks. We also observe that the electrical networks have low treewidth, which explains some of the vulnerability. We prove that with a small treewidth, a few important structural properties can be computed more efficiently.
A Longitudinal Study of the Psychological Well-Being of Unemployed Men and the Mediating Effect of Neuroticism

This paper proposes that the psychological experience of unemployed persons is determined by the stressfulness of the environment, but the relationships between the two is affected by certain conditioning variables, e.g., general health and social class, and by personal attributes such as their commitment to being employed and the tactics they use to cope with being unemployed. This model is tested empirically in a longitudinal study of 75 men who were studied on three occasions over a period of 2 years. Stepwise multiple regression was used to test the model on three occasions, and it was shown to be reasonably successful in predicting variations in psychological well-being. At time 3 of the study, trait neuroticism was measured to test the hypothesis that the large correlations among all negatively-toned scales found in the first two phases of the study were the result of a personality trait such as neuroticism. The results strongly supported this hypothesis. The implications of this for other self-report studies of stress are discussed.
A BIST technique for a frequency response and intermodulation distortion test of a sigma-delta ADC

Built-in-self-test (BIST) for VLSI systems is desirable for production-time testing and in the field diagnostics. This paper discusses a Mixed Analog Digital BIST (MADBIST) for a frequency response test and an intermodulation distortion test of an Analog-to-Digital converter. The MADBIST strategy for the FR and IMD tests of the ADC is introduced, accuracy issues are discussed, and preliminary experimental results are presented. <<ETX>>
A Study of the Influence of Handwriting upon Grades Using Examination Scripts

ABSTRACT Five English language scripts which had been part of a 16#pl external examination were all copied in a range of five contrasting styles of handwriting. Based upon a five by five Latin square design the twenty‐five versions were distributed as a marking exercise to groups of practising teachers. Most of the teachers were teachers of English and familiar with the standards of the external examination. Analysis of variance showed the differences in teacher marks to be 99% significant based upon essay content and 95% significant based upon handwriting style. Essays written in style K attracted most marks. Essays written in style S attracted least marks. The difference between these two extremes of style suggests a distinction between a pass and a fail for the writers.
Evaluating Association Rules by Quantitative Pairwise Property Comparisons

Evaluating association rules is an integral post process in association rule mining. Association rules are examined by measures for their interestingness. Different interestingness measures have been proposed. Given an association rule mining task, measures are assessed and selected against a set of user-specified properties. However, in practice, due to the subjectivity and imperfection in property specifications, it is a non-trivial task to make appropriate measure selection. In this work, we propose a novel measure selection approach that makes use of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a scheme for making complex decisions. Our approach captures a user¡¯s desired requirements quantitatively in an application domain to assess interestingness measures. It detects inconsistencies in property specifications, and is invariant to the number of association rules to be evaluated. The effectiveness of our approach is shown through case studies.
"Canadian Municipalities and Conditions of Fiscal Austerity in International Perspective: A Report and Some Observations"

Dans ce texte, les auteurs resument les conditions historiques bien connues, bases de la situation fiscale actuelle des municipalites canadiennes. A l’interieur de ce contexte global, les strategies d’austerite, utilisees par les fonctionnaires des administrations municipales ailleurs dans le monde, deviennent de plus en plus suggestives pour les administrateurs qui essaient desesperement de concilier les demandes de services avec la prudence fiscale. Les auteurs presentent des observations generales a partir de rapports recents sur l’Austerite fiscale vieille d’une generation et le projet d’Innovation urbaine en relation avec les resultats preliminaires de leurs propres recherches.
Developing Dialogic Learning Space: The Case of Online Undergraduate Research Journals

This paper explores the learning spaces associated with two geography undergraduate research journals. Wikis provide dedicated spaces for postgraduate reviewers to collaboratively develop constructive feedback to authors creating a supportive online learning environment. In becoming published authors, undergraduates reported that they gained not only academic recognition and curriculum vitae (CV) material but an ability to apply constructive criticism, a desire for more dialogue about their research and the motivation to publish further work in the future. This paper concludes that scaffolding the research writing process can be greatly enhanced by the strategic design of dialogic online learning space.
A new parallel meshing technique integrated into the conformal FDTD method for solving complex electromagnetic problems

A new efficient parallel finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) meshing algorithm, based on the ray tracing technique, is proposed in this paper. This algorithm can be applied to construct various FDTD meshes, such as regular and conformal ones. The Microsoft F# language is used for the algorithm coding, where all variables are unchangeable with its parallelization advantage being fully exploited. An improved conformal FDTD algorithm, also integrated with an improved surface current algorithm, is presented to simulate some complex 3D models, such as a sphere ball made of eight different materials, a tank, a J-10 aircraft, and an aircraft carrier with 20 aircrafts. Both efficiency and capability of the developed parallel FDTD algorithm are validated. The algorithm is applied to characterize the induced surface current distribution on an aircraft or a warship.
Adult-Child Interactions as Related to Adult’s Family History and Child’s Attachment

The objective of this study was to investigate separately the contribution of mother characteristics and child characteristics in dyadic interactions. This study was conducted in a unique setting, a co-operative nursery school in which each mother assumed the role of an assistant teacher once every three weeks. At the first stage, mother’s family history and child’s attachment were evaluated. Later on during school, mothers’ and children’s interactions were videotaped. The data allowed the analysis of interactions between mothers with different family histories and children from other families with different attachment types, as well as children’s interactions with different mothers. Results showed a complex interplay of mother and child characteristics within an adult-child interaction. Mothers were observed to be more involved with, and to express more anger toward, insecurely attached children, especially when their own child was classified as insecure. Inspection of children’s initiatives revealed that children preferred to turn to adults whose family history corresponded to the family history of their own mother. Results are discussed within the framework of attachment and family systems theories.
Optical Skin For Robots : Tactile Sensing And Whole-Body Vision

We explore combining optical tracking of skin deformation to implement tactile sensing, and seeing through transparent skin to implement proximity sensing, as well as additional sensing modalities including vibration sensing (accelerometers and gyros) and force sensing (strain gages). Issues for discussion in a workshop on Tactile Sensing For Manipulation include the importance of proximity sensing and imaging surfaces of objects and obstacles for manipulation, in addition to tactile sensing of actual contact; the viability of actually processing tens of video streams for a hand or hundreds of video streams for wholebody vision; whether future lenses and optical paths will be short enough to make optical skin practical; what the desirable mechanical characteristics of skin should be; whether better sensors are more important than advances in AI and learning; and how we should evaluate proposed sensing systems.
Economic Dependence in Marriage and Husbands’ Midlife Health

Prior research suggests that midlife husbands have worse health when they earn less than their wives; however, the mechanism(s) for this relationship have not been evaluated. In this study, the author analyzes 1,319 heterosexual married couples from the Health and Retirement Study to explore three theoretically grounded mechanisms. The author begins by assessing two well-established family relations theories (economic resource and marital dissatisfaction) to explore the mediating effect of marital power and relationship quality. The author then draws from gender relations theory, multiple masculinities literature, and cognitive dissonance research to test the possibility of a male breadwinner mechanism. The results demonstrate that family relations theories are insufficient explanations but provide strong support for the male breadwinner mechanism. Specifically, being the secondary earner is harmful for the health of highest-income men—who historically have the strongest expectation of male breadwinning. These findings suggest that stereotypes about male breadwinning can be dangerous for men’s health.
Ex Vivo and In Vivo Inhibition of Human Rhinovirus Replication by a New Pseudosubstrate of Viral 2A Protease

ABSTRACT Human rhinoviruses (HRVs) remain a significant public health problem as they are the major cause of both upper and lower respiratory tract infections. Unfortunately, to date no vaccine or antiviral against these pathogens is available. Here, using a high-throughput yeast two-hybrid screening, we identified a 6-amino-acid hit peptide, LVLQTM, which acted as a pseudosubstrate of the viral 2A cysteine protease (2Apro) and inhibited its activity. This peptide was chemically modified with a reactive electrophilic fluoromethylketone group to form a covalent linkage with the nucleophilic active-site thiol of the enzyme. Ex vivo and in vivo experiments showed that thus converted, LVLQTM was a strong inhibitor of HRV replication in both A549 cells and mice. To our knowledge, this is the first report validating a compound against HRV infection in a mouse model.
Comments on a Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol for Large Scale Networks

Buyer-seller watermarking are protocols guaranteeing the buyer prevents false infringement accusations and the seller protects the watermark secrets from the buyer. Most recently, Chang et al. proposed an e‐cient and fair buyer-seller watermarking scheme for large scale networks quite recently. In this correspondence, we flrst shows its three weaknesses: the buyer can easily remove the watermark, the buyer can easily destroy the forensic information and the adversary can possibly learn about personal privacy of some honest customers. Thereafter, we suggest some countermeasures to defeat our described attacks while its merits are left unchanged.
Evaluation of Antioxidant Properties of Phaulopsis fascisepala C.B.Cl. (Acanthaceae)

The antioxidant activities of crude extract of Phaulopsis fascisepala leaf were evaluated and compared with α-tocopherol and BHT as synthetic antioxidants and ascorbic acid as natural-based antioxidant. In vitro, we studied its antioxidative activities, radical-scavenging effects, Fe2+-chelating ability and reducing power. The total phenolic content was determined and expressed in gallic acid equivalent. The extract showed variable activities in all of these in vitro tests. The antioxidant effect of P. fascisepala was strongly dose dependent, increased with increasing leaf extract dose and then leveled off with further increase in extract dose. Compared to other antioxidants used in the study, α-Tocopherol, ascorbic acid and BHT, P. fascisepala leaf extract showed less scavenging effect on α,α,-diphenyl-β-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical and less reducing power on Fe3+/ferricyanide complex but better Fe2+-chelating ability. These results revealed the in vitro antioxidant activity of P. fascisepala. Further investigations are necessary to verify these activities in vivo.
Withholding Requests for Disability Accommodation

Prior research suggests that people with disabilities often do not request needed workplace accommodations, though relatively few studies address which factors influence the extent of such potentially self-limiting behavior. Drawing on workplace disability, help seeking, and social identity literature, this study proposes and tests a model of request withholding frequency using survey data from 279 people with hearing impairments. Consistent with expectations, older employees withheld requests less frequently; however, there was no main effect of gender. Moreover, the strength of the relationship between age and request withholding frequency was significantly weaker when the disability was more severe and when the age of disability onset was earlier. Similarly, disability severity influenced the strength of the relationship between gender and request withholding frequency, though the age of disability onset did not. These findings are consistent with social identity theory, in that those individual differences and disability attributes that shape social identities also appear to affect decisions to request disability accommodation. In practical terms, managers need to not only be supportive of disability accommodation requests but also recognize that some employees, such as young persons with disabilities, may need even more support, and support in a form that affirms or minimizes threats to other salient identities, such as their youth. Additional implications for management research and practice are discussed.
Assessment of Youthful Problem Drinkers: Validating the Drinking Context Scale (DCS-9) with Freshman First Offenders

The current study of 389 university freshman cited by the administration for underaged drinking examines gender and three drinking contexts (i.e., convivial, intimate, and negative coping) as differential predictors of personal problems (e.g., depressed, nervous) and social problems (e.g., unplanned sex, drove under the influence) that respondents attribute to their own alcohol use. Results demonstrated that more than one third of these respondents reported at least one personal problem, which they attributed to the use of alcohol in the previous year, and about half reported at least one social problem. However, when logistic regression was employed, results showed that drinking to cope with negative emotions was the only independent predictor of personal drinking-related problems. Drinking excessively in convivial circumstances, intimate encounters, drinking to cope with negative emotions, and being male were all independently predictive of social problems related to alcohol abuse. Implications for assessment and early intervention strategies are suggested.