Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teaching West in the East: An American University in China.

Having closed its door to Western ideas for centuries, China has always presented itself as a puzzle both for academicians and politicians. Westerners, though, have always been attracted by the natural resources and human power that China offers to the capitalistic world. This study explores the entrance of Western ideas in China from an educational perspective. The researcher spent 20052006 in China researching a Sino-U.S. Joint venture campus, exploring the academic challenges when teaching Chinese students. While being independent learners, Chinese students maintained their cultural roots and were proud of their long historical and cultural background. Chinese students were receptive and appreciative of American education, and Western capitalistic ideas did not cause any concern among the students.
Equivalencia semántica de la versión en portugués de la Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist - Civilian Version (PCL-C) para el rastreo del trastorno de estrés pos-traumático

INTRODUCCION: El trastorno de estres postraumatico (TEPT) es bastante comun, afectando del 2 al 5% de la poblacion en algunos paises. Quienes lo padecen presentan una inferior calidad de vida, un mayor numero de detenciones y problemas legales y recurren mas frecuentemente a los servicios de salud que los individuos no afectados. A pesar del incremento de la violencia urbana en Brasil, todavia no disponemos de ningun instrumento adaptado a nuestro idioma que sea capaz de rastrear el TEPT. Este articulo pretende traducir, adaptar y evaluar la aplicabilidad de la version en portugues de la Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist - Civilian Version (PCL-C), una escala auto-aplicable extensamente utilizada en todo el mundo para el rastreo del Trastorno de Estres Postraumatico. METODOS: Se comprobo la equivalencia semantica de la version en portugues de la PCL-C a traves de 4 etapas: traduccion; re-traduccion; apreciacion formal de la equivalencia y adaptacion; e interlocucion con la poblacion objetivo. RESULTADOS: : Se creo una version en Portugues de la PCL-C que mantuvo el significado semantico de la version original y se presento facilmente comprensible y aplicable. DEBATE: Se eligio la PCL-C para este estudio por ser un instrumento ampliamente utilizado en paises de lengua inglesa y por tener otras utilidades mas alla del rastreo del TEPT. La interlocucion con la poblacion objetivo, realizada con un numero relativamente pequeno de individuos (n = 21), mostro que algunos participantes interpretaron el termino "estres" como una rutina fatigante de vida. CONCLUSION: Una vez que se obtenga la equivalencia semantica de la version en portugues de la PCL-C, estudios posteriores deberan determinar sus caracteristicas psicometricas para la poblacion brasilena.
Constructing higher-dimensional convex hulls at logarithmic cost per face

We exhibit a new approach for dealing with higher dimensional convex hull problems, such as enumerating all facets of the convex hull of a finite point set or constructing the facial lattice of such a convex hull. For fixed dimensions our new algorithms have worst case time complexity O(m 2 -tFlogm), where m is the size of the input point set and F is the size of the output produced. Such a dependence on the output size is desirable since F can range between ~(1) and O(mld/2|). Our time bound is an improvement over the best previously achieved bounds for a large range of values of F. The main tool in our new approach is the notion of a straight line shelling of a polytope.
Psychometric properties of HeartQoL, a core heart disease-specific health-related quality of life questionnaire, in Danish implantable cardioverter defibrillator recipients

Background Patient-reported health-related quality of life is increasingly used as an outcome measure in clinical trials and as a performance measure to evaluate quality of care. The objective of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of the Danish HeartQoL questionnaire, a core heart disease-specific health-related quality of life questionnaire, in implantable cardioverter defibrillator recipients. Design This study involved cross-sectional and test-retest study designs. Method Implantable cardioverter defibrillator recipients in the cross-sectional study completed the HeartQoL, the Short-Form 36 Health Survey, and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. The HeartQoL structure, construct-related validity (convergent and discriminative) and reliability (internal consistency) were assessed. HeartQoL reproducibility (test-retest) was assessed in an independent sample of implantable cardioverter defibrillator recipients. Results Mokken scale analysis supported the bi-dimensional structure of HeartQoL among 358 implantable cardioverter defibrillator recipients. Convergent (r > 0.72) and discriminative validity were confirmed. The HeartQoL scales demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha > 0.90). Test-retest reliability (two weeks interval) was assessed in 89 implantable cardioverter defibrillator recipients and found to be acceptable for each scale (intra-class correlation > 0.90). Conclusion The Danish HeartQoL questionnaire demonstrated satisfactory key psychometric attributes of validity and reliability in this implantable cardioverter defibrillator population. This study adds support for the HeartQoL as a core heart-specific health-related quality of life questionnaire in a broad group of patients with heart disease including implantable cardioverter defibrillator recipients.
Kinetic analysis of F-actin depolymerization in the presence of platelet gelsolin and gelsolin-actin complexes

Platelet gelsolin (G), a 90,000-mol-wt protein, binds tightly to actin (A) and calcium at low ionic strength to form a 1:2:2 complex, GA2Ca2 (Bryan, J., and M. Kurth, 1984, J. Biol. Chem. 259:7480-7487). Chromatography of actin and gelsolin mixtures in EGTA-containing solutions isolates a stable binary complex, GA1Ca1 (Kurth, M., and J. Bryan, 1984, J. Biol. Chem. 259:7473-7479). The effects of platelet gelsolin and the binary gelsolin-actin complex on the depolymerization kinetics of rabbit skeletal muscle actin were studied by diluting pyrenyl F-actin into gelsolin or complex-containing buffers; a decrease in fluorescence represents disassembly of filaments. Dilution of F- actin to below the critical concentration required for filament assembly gave a biphasic depolymerization curve with both fast and slow components. Dilution into buffers containing gelsolin, as GCa2, increased the rate of depolymerization and gave a first order decay. The rate of decrease in fluorescence was found to be gelsolin concentration dependent. Electron microscopy of samples taken shortly after dilution into GCa2 showed a marked reduction in filament length consistent with filament severing and an increase in the number of ends. Conversely, occupancy of the EGTA-stable actin-binding site by an actin monomer eliminated the severing activity. Dilution of F-actin into the gelsolin-actin complex, either as GA1Ca1 or GA1Ca2, resulted in a decrease in the rate of depolymerization that was consistent with filament end capping. This result indicates that the EGTA-stable binding site is required and must be unoccupied for filament severing to occur. The effectiveness of gelsolin, GCa2, in causing filament depolymerization was dependent upon the ionic conditions: in KCI, actin filaments appeared to be more stable and less susceptible to gelsolin, whereas in Mg2+, actin filaments were more easily fragmented. Finally, a comparison of the number of kinetically active ends generated when filaments were diluted into gelsolin versus the number formed when gelsolin can function as a nucleation site suggests that gelsolin may sever more than once. The data are consistent with a mechanism where gelsolin, with both actin-binding sites unoccupied, can sever but not cap F-actin. Occupancy of the EGTA-stable binding site yields a gelsolin-actin complex that can no longer sever filaments, but can cap filament ends.
A Modal Logic of Epistemic Games

We propose some variants of a multi-modal of joint action, preference and knowledge that support reasoning about epistemic games in strategic form. The first part of the paper deals with games with complete information. We first provide syntactic proofs of some well-known theorems in the area of interactive epistemology that specify some sufficient epistemic conditions of equilibrium notions such as Nash equilibrium and Iterated Deletion of Strictly Dominated Strategies (IDSDS). Then, we present a variant of the logic extended with dynamic operators of Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL). We show that it allows to express the notion IDSDS in a more compact way. The second part of the paper deals with games with weaker forms of complete information. We first discuss several assumptions on different aspects of perfect information about the game structure (e.g., the assumption that a player has perfect knowledge about the players’ strategy sets or about the preference orderings over strategy profiles), and show that every assumption is expressed by a corresponding logical axiom of our logic. Then we provide a proof of Harsanyi’s claim that all uncertainty about the structure of a game can be reduced to uncertainty about payoffs. Sound and complete axiomatizations of the logics are given, as well as some complexity results for the satisfiability problem.
La documentación en el proceso de evaluación de Sistemas de Clasificación Automática

This paper offers a general view of evaluation in automatic document classification. We analyse both evaluation methods and test collections in which they are used, focusing in the later aspect, and especially in the use of documentary languages inside these collections. We have detected a set of imperfections that could undermine trust in evaluation process results, and propose some ways of solving them.
Semi-supervised verified feedback generation

Students have enthusiastically taken to online programming lessons and contests. Unfortunately, they tend to struggle due to lack of personalized feedback. There is an urgent need of program analysis and repair techniques capable of handling both the scale and variations in student submissions, while ensuring quality of feedback. Towards this goal, we present a novel methodology called semi-supervised verified feedback generation. We cluster submissions by solution strategy and ask the instructor to identify or add a correct submission in each cluster. We then verify every submission in a cluster against the instructor-validated submission in the same cluster. If faults are detected in the submission then feedback suggesting fixes to them is generated. Clustering reduces the burden on the instructor and also the variations that have to be handled during feedback generation. The verified feedback generation ensures that only correct feedback is generated. We implemented a tool, named CoderAssist, based on this approach and evaluated it on dynamic programming assignments. We have designed a novel counter-example guided feedback generation algorithm capable of suggesting fixes to all faults in a submission. In an evaluation on 2226 submissions to 4 problems, CoderAssist could generate verified feedback for 1911 (85%) submissions in 1.6s each on an average. It does a good job of reducing the burden on the instructor. Only one submission had to be manually validated or added for every 16 submissions.
Intelligibility Enhancement of Speech in Noise

Speech technology can facilitate human-machine interaction and create new communication interfaces. Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems provide speech output for dialogue, notification and reading applications as well as personalized voices for people that have lost the use of their own. TTS systems are built to produce synthetic voices that should sound as natural, expressive and intelligible as possible and if necessary be similar to a particular speaker. Although naturalness is an important requirement, providing the correct information in adverse conditions can be crucial to certain applications. Speech that adapts or reacts to different listening conditions can in turn be more expressive and natural. In this work we focus on enhancing the intelligibility of TTS voices in additive noise. For that we adopt the statistical parametric paradigm for TTS in the shape of a hidden Markov model (HMM-) based speech synthesis system that allows for flexible enhancement strategies. Little is known about which human speech production mechanisms actually increase intelligibility in noise and how the choice of mechanism relates to noise type, so we approached the problem from another perspective: using mathematical models for hearing speech in noise. To find which models are better at predicting intelligibility of TTS in noise we performed listening evaluations to collect subjective intelligibility scores which we then compared to the models’ predictions. In these evaluations we observed that modifications performed on the spectral envelope of speech can increase intelligibility significantly, particularly if the strength of the modification depends on the noise and its level. We used these findings to inform the decision of which of the models to use when automatically modifying the spectral envelope of the speech according to the noise. We devised two methods, both involving cepstral coefficient modifications. The first was applied during extraction while training the acoustic models and the other when generating a voice using pre-trained TTS models. The latter has the advantage of being able to address fluctuating noise. To increase intelligibility of synthetic speech at generation time we proposed a method for Mel cepstral coefficient modification based on the glimpse proportion measure, the most promising of the models of speech intelligibility that we evaluated. An extensive series of listening experiments demonstrated that this method brings significant intelligibility gains to TTS voices while not requiring additional recordings of clear or Lombard speech. To further improve intelligibility we combined our method with noise-independent enhancement approaches based on the acoustics of highly intelligible speech. This combined solution was as effective for stationary noise as for the challenging com-
Specifying concurrent systems with TSL

The Task Sequencing Language (TSL), which lets programmers specify constraints on the behavior of concurrent programs, is described. The constraints, specified by high-level annotations to Ada programs, are monitored at runtime; when a violation is detected, control is returned to the user, along with information about the nature of the violation. It is argued that such a tool is a necessary crutch for human reasoning capabilities when dealing with the complexities of concurrent process interaction. The first large-scale application of TSL, the specification and validation of a distributed tasking supervisor for Ada, is described. <<ETX>>
The Reissner-Nordstrom Solution Without Singularities ∗

A generalized form of the Reissner-Nordstrom solution for a charged mass point is obtained with a new free parameter same as in a case of the generalized Schwarzschild solution (gr-qc/9905102). At some values of this parameter the line element is free from the singularities. In the previous papers [1] [2] [3] I obtained a generalized version of the Schwarzschild’s static solution of the Einstein equations for a mass point: ds = (1 − rg r + ρ )cdt − (r + ρ)(dθ + sin θdφ) − (1 − rg r + ρ )dr (1) At ρ > rg the gravitational theory is free from singularities and the black holes not exist in the nature. The parameter ρ is a new physical constant of the gravitational field of the mass point same as rg (see also [4] ) and it can be determined from second order contributions to the standard gravitational effects [2] . In the present paper I shall consider by this method a solution for a static gravitational field of a charged mass point, which in standard case solved by Reissner [5] and Nordstrōm [6]. I follow the choice of an electric energy by Nordstrōm [6] . The general form for the spatially symmetric static line element of a mass point is: ds = gikdx dx = ecdt − e(dθ + sin θdφ) − edr (2) where x = ct, x = r, x = θ, x = φ, and ν(r), λ(r), μ(r) are some functions. One additional coordinate condition for the radial coordinate can be used for a simplification of the line element. In the case of the standard Reissner-Nordstrōm solution the choice is e = R with new radial coordinate R(r). Then the solution of the field equations for the line element: ds = ecdt − R(dθ + sin θdφ) − edR (3) gives ν(R) = −λ(R) and: e = 1 − rg R + q R2 (4) where rg = 2km/c 2 is the gravitational radius, q = ke/c, e is the electric charge. This line element has the singularities at R = 0 and e = 0. Since the coordinate condition e = R leads to the singular line element, we not restrict the function μ(R), but we use the property ν(R) = −λ(R) as an initial coordinate condition and then we find μ(R) by solving the field equations. As result, we shall obtain more general solution than the standard ReissnerNordstrōm case, since our solution will have the same restriction for ν(R) and λ(R), while μ(R) we take in general form without any restrictions. Our results are R = r + ρ and e = (r + ρ) with the same form of the line element as in Eq.(3)-(4). If ρ > ρ0, where ρ0 is the critical value for exp(ν(r, ρ) in case exp(ν(0, ρ0) = 0, the theory is free from the singularities. At ρ = 0 we return to the standard Reissner-Nordstrōm solution. Below we proof this solutions. The components of the metric tensor for the line element Eq.(1) are: g00 = e , g11 = −e , g22 = −e , g33 = −e μ(r) sin θ (5) We have the following field equations for this metrics [6] :
TGF-β-Mediated Sustained ERK1/2 Activity Promotes the Inhibition of Intracellular Growth of Mycobacterium avium in Epithelioid Cells Surrogates

Transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) has been implicated in the pathogenesis of several diseases including infection with intracellular pathogens such as the Mycobacterium avium complex. Infection of macrophages with M. avium induces TGF-β production and neutralization of this cytokine has been associated with decreased intracellular bacterial growth. We have previously demonstrated that epithelioid cell surrogates (ECs) derived from primary murine peritoneal macrophages through a process of differentiation induced by IL-4 overlap several features of epithelioid cells found in granulomas. In contrast to undifferentiated macrophages, ECs produce larger amounts of TGF-β and inhibit the intracellular growth of M. avium. Here we asked whether the levels of TGF-β produced by ECs are sufficient to induce a self-sustaining autocrine TGF-β signaling controlling mycobacterial replication in infected-cells. We showed that while exogenous addition of increased concentration of TGF-β to infected-macrophages counteracted M. avium replication, pharmacological blockage of TGF-β receptor kinase activity with SB-431542 augmented bacterial load in infected-ECs. Moreover, the levels of TGF-β produced by ECs correlated with high and sustained levels of ERK1/2 activity. Inhibition of ERK1/2 activity with U0126 increased M. avium replication in infected-cells, suggesting that modulation of intracellular bacterial growth is dependent on the activation of ERK1/2. Interestingly, blockage of TGF-β receptor kinase activity with SB-431542 in infected-ECs inhibited ERK1/2 activity, enhanced intracellular M. avium burden and these effects were followed by a severe decrease in TGF-β production. In summary, our findings indicate that the amplitude of TGF-β signaling coordinates the strength and duration of ERK1/2 activity that is determinant for the control of intracellular mycobacterial growth.
Fast event detection on big time series

Big data is exploding to facilitate our humans living by embedding smart devices everywhere, collecting realtime data, learning the daily habits and making the machines smarter. In addition to great advance in distributed computing with petabyte data, fast and real-time reaction on streaming data, which is know as fast event detection(FED) or anomaly detection, obtain wide attention which has a wide application in online fraud monitoring. In this paper, inspired by the time series analysis technique, a new algorithm of event detection is proposed to detect anomalous event. The proposed algorithm extensively reduce computation complexity of event detection from exponential to polynomial, which implies acceleration of more than thousand time. Verifications on four data sets confirm our theoretical prediction and promises fruitful results in further applications.
High-resolution enhanced product based on SMAP active-passive approach using Sentinel 1 data and its applications

SMAP project is working on a new and enhanced high-resolution (3km and 1km) soil moisture product. This product will combine SMAP radiometer data and Sentinel-1A and -1B data, and it will use the heritage SMAP active-passive approach. However, modifications in the SMAP active-passive algorithm are done to accommodate the Sentinel-1A and -1B C-band SAR data. Tests of the SMAP and Sentinel active-passive algorithm has been conducted and results show great promise for the high-resolution soil moisture data. The beta version of this product will be released to public in end of the March, 2017. This high-resolution (1 km and 3 km) soil moisture product will be useful for agriculture, flooding, watershed and rangeland management, and ecological and hydrological applications. Specific examples of interest will be shown from the proposed product for the above mention geophysical applications.
The Australian Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications

By working out an appropriate technique of relations and relators and extending the ideas of the direct methods of Z. Gajda and R. Ger, we prove some generalizations of the stability theorems of D. H. Hyers, T. Aoki, Th. M. Rassias and P. Gavruţǎ in terms of the existence and unicity of 2–homogeneous and additive approximate selections of generalized subadditive relations of semigroups to vector relator spaces. Thus, we obtain generalizations not only of the selection theorems of Z. Gajda and R. Ger, but also those of the present author.
The reuse cache: Downsizing the shared last-level cache

Over recent years, a growing body of research has shown that a considerable portion of the shared last-level cache (SLLC) is dead, meaning that the corresponding cache lines are stored but they will not receive any further hits before being replaced. Conversely, most hits observed by the SLLC come from a small subset of already reused lines. In this paper, we propose the reuse cache, a decoupled tag/data SLLC which is designed to only store the data of lines that have been reused. Thus, the size of the data array can be dramatically reduced. Specifically, we (i) introduce a selective data allocation policy to exploit reuse locality and maintain reused data in the SLLC, (ii) tune the data allocation with a suitable replacement policy and coherence protocol, and finally, (iii) explore different ways of organizing the data/tag arrays and study the performance sensitivity to the size of the resulting structures. The role of a reuse cache to maintain performance with decreasing sizes is investigated in the experimental part of this work, by simulating multi programmed and multithreaded workloads in an eight-core chip multiprocessor. As an example, we show that a reuse cache with a tag array equivalent to a conventional 4 MB cache and only a 1 MB data array would perform as well as a conventional cache of 8 MB, requiring only 16.7% of the storage capacity.