Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Paying research subjects: participants' perspectives

Objective—To explore the opinions of unpaid healthy volunteers on the payment of research subjects. Design—Prospective cohort. Setting—Southern Alberta, Canada. Participants—Medically eligible persons responding to recruiting advertisements for a randomised vaccine trial were invited to take part in a study of informed consent at the point at which they formally consented or refused trial participation. Of 72 invited, 67 (62 trial consenters, 5 trial refusers) returned questionnaires at baseline and 54 at follow-up. Outcome measures—Proportions of persons who agreed or disagreed with three close-ended statements on the payment of research subjects; themes and categories identified by content analysis of responses to an open-ended question. Results—A minority (43.3%) agreed with paying either patient or healthy volunteer participants. Opinions did not change over time. Participants' comments addressed: benefits and drawbacks to research participation; benefits and drawbacks to paying research participants; conditions under which payment of research subjects would be acceptable, and the nature of acceptable recognition. Acceptable conditions were to improve problematic recruitment, to reimburse costs, and to recognise participants, particularly for their time investment. Both non-monetary and monetary recognition of volunteers were thought to be appropriate. Conclusions—Most unpaid volunteers disagreed with paying research participants. The themes arising from their comments are similar to those that have been raised by ethicists and suggest that recognising the time and effort of participants should receive greater emphasis than presently occurs. (Journal of Medical Ethics 2000;26:126–130)
The Revision and Application of the Revision of the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire

Objective:To study an assessment instrument of the early adolescent's temperament and the temperament characteristics in Shanghai Chinese youth.Methods: The Revision of the Early Adolescent Temperament Questionnaire(EATQ-R) was adopted and modified into Chinese version.1761 11-15-year old adolescent's data were analyzed.Results:(1)The test-retest reliability of the Chinese version was from 0.51 to 0.70. Constructive validity was scrutinized with exploratory factors analysis,and five factors were reconstructed from the original dimensions(effortful control,affability,negative affect,surgency and shyness). Their inner coherence Cronbach alpha was from 0.61 to 0.78,with the average of 0.70. Aggression and depression mood were additional behavior factors.Their test-retest reliability respectively were 0.62 and 0.72(r=0.62,0.72),and Cronbach α=0.57,0.46. The five factors in Chinese youth were different from those in American youth. (2) Comparison of temperament characteristics and behavior tendencies by sex showed the girls were significantly higher than boys in terms of effortful control,affability,and negative mood and shyness;girls were lower on surgency and aggression(e g.effortful control 48.8±7.2/46.5±7.3),surgency 26.3±5.9/28.0±5.6,P0.001). (3)There were significantly age differences on temperament factors of effortful control,affability,negative mood and shyness(F=7.92～16.77,P0.01),but the correlation of all these factors with age was on a low level(0.09～0.19). Although the change amplitude of temperament factors with age was different between boys and girls,the tendencies were similar.The effortful control decreased with age.Affability was at the lowest level at thirteen year's old and increased with age later.Negative emotion increased with age.With an increasing tendency of shyness with age,there was a peak at fifteen years old.There was no significant age difference on Surgency. (4) Depression mood was significantly higher with age increasing in girls(F=7.11,P0.001). The highest level of depression was at age fifteen.Conclusions: The reliability of Chinese version of EATQ-R is an acceptable tool that can be used in the assessment of Chinese adolescent's temperament characteristics.There are sex and age differences on the early adolescent's temperament.The assessment of adolescent temperament can help us understand their behavioral styles and the occurring of psychological problems and provide suitable guidance.
Debugger Canvas: Industrial experience with the code bubbles paradigm

At ICSE 2010, the Code Bubbles team from Brown University and the Code Canvas team from Microsoft Research presented similar ideas for new user experiences for an integrated development environment. Since then, the two teams formed a collaboration, along with the Microsoft Visual Studio team, to release Debugger Canvas, an industrial version of the Code Bubbles paradigm. With Debugger Canvas, a programmer debugs her code as a collection of code bubbles, annotated with call paths and variable values, on a two-dimensional pan-and-zoom surface. In this experience report, we describe new user interface ideas, describe the rationale behind our design choices, evaluate the performance overhead of the new design, and provide user feedback based on lab participants, post-release usage data, and a user survey and interviews. We conclude that the code bubbles paradigm does scale to existing customer code bases, is best implemented as a mode in the existing user experience rather than a replacement, and is most useful when the user has a long or complex call paths, a large or unfamiliar code base, or complex control patterns, like factories or dynamic linking.
Yarrowia lipolytica Pex20p, Saccharomyces cerevisiae Pex18p/Pex21p and mammalian Pex5pL fulfil a common function in the early steps of the peroxisomal PTS2 import pathway

Import of peroxisomal matrix proteins is essential for peroxisome biogenesis. Genetic and biochemical studies using a variety of different model systems have led to the discovery of 23 PEX genes required for this process. Although it is generally believed that, in contrast to mitochondria and chloroplasts, translocation of proteins into peroxisomes involves a receptor cycle, there are reported differences of an evolutionary conservation of this cycle either with respect to the components or the steps involved in different organisms. We show here that the early steps of protein import into peroxisomes exhibit a greater similarity than was thought previously to be the case. Pex20p of Yarrowia lipolytica, Pex18p and Pex21p of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and mammalian Pex5pL fulfil a common function in the PTS2 pathway of their respective organisms. These non‐orthologous proteins possess a conserved sequence region that most likely represents a common PTS2‐receptor binding site and di‐aromatic pentapeptide motifs that could be involved in binding of the putative docking proteins. We propose that not necessarily the same proteins but functional modules of them are conserved in the early steps of peroxisomal protein import.
Automatic Tuning of Standard PSO Versions

We used a meta-optimization environment to compare two reference versions of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, namely Standard PSO 2006 and Standard PSO 2011, on the CEC 2013 benchmark. We first compared the performances of the two standard PSO versions using the parameter sets suggested in the literature. Then, we automatically tuned the parameter values of both algorithms, to allow the two versions to perform at their best.
Certified meshing of families of isosurfaces

Level sets are isosurfaces of an implicit function F: R3 rarr R K, that is the set of points satisfying F(x, y, z) = 0.In this paper we introduce an algorithm to move at interactive speed through the different level sets. Furthermore the meshes of the level sets are isotopic to the isosurface itself, as long as the surface stays away from singularities. When the surface moves close to singularities, the algorithm indicates arbitrarily small boxes where the topology is not certified. In this case, the user can decide to decrease the size of the boxes by further refinement. For special classes of functions, such as algebraic surfaces, other methods could be used to determine the topology inside the singular boxes.
A New System for Computer-Aided Preoperative Planning and Intraoperative Navigation During Corrective Jaw Surgery

A new system for computer-aided corrective surgery of the jaws has been developed and introduced clinically. It combines three-dimensional (3-D) surgical planning with conventional dental occlusion planning. The developed software allows simulating the surgical correction on virtual 3-D models of the facial skeleton generated from computed tomography (CT) scans. Surgery planning and simulation include dynamic cephalometry, semi-automatic mirroring, interactive cutting of bone and segment repositioning. By coupling the software with a tracking system and with the help of a special registration procedure, we are able to acquire dental occlusion plans from plaster model mounts. Upon completion of the surgical plan, the setup is used to manufacture positioning splints for intraoperative guidance. The system provides further intraoperative assistance with the help of a display showing jaw positions and 3-D positioning guides updated in real time during the surgical procedure. The proposed approach offers the advantages of 3-D visualization and tracking technology without sacrificing long-proven cast-based techniques for dental occlusion evaluation. The system has been applied on one patient. Throughout this procedure, we have experienced improved assessment of pathology, increased precision, and augmented control
Resolving Perceptual Aliasing In The Presence Of Noisy Sensors

Agents learning to act in a partially observable domain may need to overcome the problem of perceptual aliasing - i.e., different states that appear similar but require different responses. This problem is exacerbated when the agent's sensors are noisy, i.e., sensors may produce different observations in the same state. We show that many well-known reinforcement learning methods designed to deal with perceptual aliasing, such as Utile Suffix Memory, finite size history windows, eligibility traces, and memory bits, do not handle noisy sensors well. We suggest a new algorithm, Noisy Utile Suffix Memory (NUSM), based on USM, that uses a weighted classification of observed trajectories. We compare NUSM to the above methods and show it to be more robust to noise.
Cardinal Neighbor Quadtree: a New Quadtree-based Structure for Constant-Time Neighbor Finding

This paper presents a new quadtree structure: Cardinal Neighbor Quadtrees (CN-Quadtree), that allows finding neighbor quadrants in constant time regardless of their sizes. Gunter Schrack’s solution [1] was able to compute the location code of equal size neighbors in constant-time without guaranteeing their existence. The structure proposed by Aizawa [3][2][3]was able to determine the existence of equal or greater size neighbors and compute their location in constant time, to which the access-time complexity should be added. The proposed structure, the Cardinal Neighbor Quadtree, a pointer based data structure, can determine the existence, and access a smaller, equal or greater size neighbor in constant-time O(1). The time complexity reduction is obtained through the addition of only four pointers per leaf node in the quadtree. General Terms Spatial data structures; Image coding; spatial access methods; quadtree;
Stabilization of uncertain systems with finite data rates and Markovian packet losses

This research addresses stabilization of uncertain systems over data rate constrained and lossy channels. While many of the existing works assume that the packet loss process is independent and identically distributed, we model it as a two-state Markov chain, which can deal with more practical situations including bursty dropouts. For parametrically uncertain plants, a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for mean square stability are derived. These conditions are represented by the product of the eigenvalues of the nominal plants, the data rate, the transition probabilities of the channel states, and the upper bounds of uncertainties. In particular, for scalar plants, the conditions coincide with each other.
Single versus multiple inheritance in object oriented programming

Inheritance is one of the key elements of Object oriented programming. Inheritance is characterized as single or multiple depending on the number of classes a class can inherit from. Single inheritance is simple but restrictive. Multiple inheritance on the other hand is complex but allows a more natural definition of relationships between classes. There has been a significant amount of discussion on the value of multiple inheritance over single inheritance considering the complexity multiple inheritance adds. This paper reviews the two types of inheritance and examines their benefits. The paper then examines the issues and objections that have been raised on the two inheritance mechanisms. Graph, Linear, and Tree oriented implementations of multiple inheritance are reviewed to see how multiple inheritance issues are handled by various object oriented languages.
Ill-posed problems in early vision

Mathematical results on ill-posed and ill-conditioned problems are reviewed and the formal aspects of regularization theory in the linear case are introduced. Specific topics in early vision and their regularization are then analyzed rigorously, characterizing existence, uniqueness, and stability of solutions. A fundamental difficulty that arises in almost every vision problem is scale, that is, the resolution at which to operate. Methods that have been proposed to deal with the problem include scale-space techniques that consider the behavior of the result across a continuum of scales. From the point of view of regulation theory, the concept of scale is related quite directly to the regularization parameter lambda . It suggested that methods used to obtained the optimal value of lambda may provide, either directly or after suitable modification, the optimal scale associated with the specific instance of certain problems. >
Reconstructing genealogies of serial samples under the assumption of a molecular clock using serial-sample UPGMA.

Reconstruction of evolutionary relationships from noncontemporaneous molecular samples provides a new challenge for phylogenetic reconstruction methods. With recent biotechnological advances there has been an increase in molecular sequencing throughput, and the potential to obtain serial samples of sequences from populations, including rapidly evolving pathogens, is fast being realized. A new method called the serial-sample unweighted pair grouping method with arithmetic means (sUPGMA) is presented that reconstructs a genealogy or phylogeny of sequences sampled serially in time using a matrix of pairwise distances. The resulting tree depicts the terminal lineages of each sample ending at a different level consistent with the sample's temporal order. Since sUPGMA is a variant of UPGMA, it will perform best when sequences have evolved at a constant rate (i.e., according to a molecular clock). On simulated data, this new method performs better than standard cluster analysis under a variety of longitudinal sampling strategies. Serial-sample UPGMA is particularly useful for analysis of longitudinal samples of viruses and bacteria, as well as ancient DNA samples, with the minimal requirement that samples of sequences be ordered in time.
Molecular Genetics of Emericella nidulans Sexual Development

Abstract Many aspergilli that belongs to ascomycetes have sexuality. In a homothallic or self-fertile fungus, a number of fruiting bodies or cleistothecia are formed in a thallus grown from a single haploid conidia or ascospores. Genome-sequencing project revealed that two mating genes (MAT) encoding the regulatory proteins that are necessary for controlling partner recognition in heterothallic fungi were conserved in most aspergilli. The MAT gene products in some self-fertile species were not required for recognition of mating partner at pheromone-signaling stage but required at later stages of sexual development. Various environmental factors such as nutritional status, culture conditions and several stresses, influence the decision or progression of sexual reproduction. A large number of genes are expected to be involved in sexual development of Emericella nidulans (anamorph: Aspergillus nidulans), a genetic and biological model organism in aspergilli. The sexual development process can be grouped into several development stages, including the decision of sexual reproductive cycle, mating process, growth of fruiting body, karyogamy followed by meiosis, and sporulation process. Complicated regulatory networks, such as signal transduction pathways and gene expression controls, may work in each stage and stage-to-stage linkages. In this review, the components joining in the regulatory pathways of sexual development, although they constitute only a small part of the whole regulatory networks, are briefly mentioned. Some of them control sexual development positively and some do negatively. Regarding the difficulties for studying sexual differentiation compare to asexual one, recent progresses in molecular genetics of E. nidulans enlarge the boundaries of understanding sexual development in the non-fertile species as well as in fertile fungi.
Effect of Aging on the Blowout Time in Various Ocular Vessels

The blowout time (BOT) is an index for assessing vascular function based on pulse wave analysis using laser speckle flowgraphy (LSFG). The BOT in the optic nerve head (ONH) is reportedly correlated with age. The ONH contains various vessels with differing properties, and it is unclear whether aging affects these vessels at similar rates. With the aim of using the BOT for the early detection of vascular changes, this study investigated whether there are regional differences in the effect of aging on the BOTs among the vessel area (MV), tissue area (MT), and all areas (MA) of the entire ONH, retinal artery (RA), retinal and choroidal vessels (RCV), and retinal vein (RV). We measured the ocular blood flow velocity for 6 s in 14 young and 14 middle-aged males (20 ± 2 years and 51 ± 10 years) three times using LSFG. The BOTs in the MV, MT, MA, RA, RCV, and RV were determined separately as the full width at half maximum of the mean blue rate in a heartbeat by pulse wave analysis. The BOTs in all of the targeted areas were significantly smaller in the middle-aged group than the young group and were significantly correlated with age. There was no significant interaction of age and differences in area. There were significant correlations in the BOTs between the MA and other targeted areas. It is suggested that the BOT in the entire ONH reflects the age-related changes in BOTs over a wide range of ocular vessels.
Forecasting wind power - an ensemble technique with gradual coopetitive weighting based on weather situation

The prediction of the power generation of wind farms is a non-trivial problem with increasing importance during the last decade due to the rapid increase of wind power generation in the power grid. The prediction task is commonly addressed using numerical weather predictions, statistical methods, or machine learning techniques. Various articles have shown that ensemble techniques for forecasting can yield better results regarding forecasting accuracy than single techniques alone. Typical ensembles make use of a parameter, or data diversity approach to build the models. In this article, we propose a novel ensemble technique using both, cooperative and competitive characteristics of ensembles to gradually adjust the influences of single forecasting algorithms in the ensemble based on their individual strengths using a “coopetitive” weighting formula. The observed quality of the models during training is used to adaptively weigh the models based on the location in the input data space (i.e., depending on the weather situation). We compute the overall weights for a particular weather situation using both, a spatial as well as a global weighting term. The experimental evaluation is performed on a data set consisting of data from 45 wind farms, which is made publicly available. We demonstrate that the technique is among the best performing algorithms compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms and ensembles. Furthermore, the practical applicability of the proposed technique is discussed.
Finding Optimal Solutions to Backbone Minimisation Problems using Mixed Integer Programming

Attempts to evaluate heuristic algorithms are often hampered by the lack of known exact solutions with which to compare results. This is true, in particular, in the study of network backbone design - to date, a fairly undeveloped area in mathematical optimisation. This paper uses a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) approach to find optimal solutions to the problem of backbone minimisation in mesh networks. A simple model is formulated and then adapted to reduce the number of variables and constraints. Network reliability issues are then considered and a more complex model introduced. Finally the model is solved using a commercial solver to generate test instances with which to test the accuracy of a simulated annealing (SA) heuristic. The heuristic is shown to be accurate to within a very small error margin and the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches are discussed.
True Context-Dependent Preferences? The Causes of Market-Dependent Valuations

A central assumption of neoclassical economics is that reservation prices for familiar products express people’s true preferences for these products, that is, they represent the total benefit that a good confers to the consumers, and are thus, independent of actual prices in the market. Nevertheless, a vast amount of research has shown that valuations can be sensitive to other salient prices; particularly when individuals are explicitly anchored on them. In this paper, the authors extend previous research on single-price anchoring and study the sensitivity of valuations to the distribution of prices found for the product in the market. In addition, they examine its possible causes. They find that market-dependent valuations cannot be fully explained by rational inferences consumers draw about a product’s value, and are unlikely to be fully explained by true market-dependent preferences. Rather, the market dependence of valuations likely reflects consumers’ focus on something other than the total benefit that the product confers to them. Furthermore, this paper shows that market-dependent valuations persist when – as in many real-life settings – individuals make repeated purchase decisions over time and infer the distribution of the product’s prices from their market experience. Finally, the authors consider the implications of their findings for marketers and consumers.Former working paper title: "Price-Sensitive Preferences"
Using social networks for multicultural creative collaboration

Social networks can facilitate creative dialogue between participants whose geographical, cultural and social circumstances normally does not allow for such exchanges. In this paper, we present a case study of a collaborative process in which 19 participants from around the world created the multimedia, multi-language poem, "Our Digital Tapestry", on the Facebook social network. We identify and discuss the affordances of this platform with respect to support for play, control, diversity, inclusion of hypertext and multimedia, communication and relationship exploration. We also identify several restrictions of the medium that affected the project.