Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A STUDY OF METASTATIC RENAL CALCIFICATION AT THE CELLULAR LEVEL

Experimental metastatic calcification in the proximal convoluted tubules of rat kidney, produced by large doses of vitamin D, has been studied with a variety of techniques. These techniques include the examination of thin sections of Araldite-embedded material under the electron microscope, selected area electron diffraction, and several histochemical methods. Two types of mineral are found in relation to the proximal convoluted tubule. The first form consists of aggregates of elongated crystals within cytoplasmic vacuoles of the proximal tubular cells. The dimensions of these crystals are consistent with those of hydroxyapatite. The other type of mineral deposit is found in and adjacent to the extracellular phase of the basal infoldings of these tubules. The latter deposits are made up of smaller crystals arranged in layers. These crystals could not be definitely identified by means of selected area electron diffraction. The observations are discussed in relation to calcium transport by the proximal convoluted tubule and also in terms of mechanisms of pathological calcification.
When brain differentiates happy from neutral in prosody?

The effect of different intensities of vocal emotion on event related potentials has yet not been studied. We therefore investigated 16 healthy participants with emotion and sound decision on neutral and happy voice which varied continuously in intensity. The result found that neutral and happy voice can be differentiated on P2 component under both explicit and implicit condition. Moreover, the P2 parameters were linear correlated with the rate of happiness, suggesting a graded processing of vocal emotion in early stage. However, the brain distinguished neutral from happy in P3 interval when performing explicit task but exhibit a categorical feature.
A Model of American Indian School Administrators: Completing the Circle of Knowledge in Native Schools.

This study sought to understand the perceptions of American Indian educators as they made their way through a pre-service school administrator preparation program at a large, public research university. The Model of American Indian School Administrators, or Project MAISA,prepares American Indian/Alaska Native teachers to obtain Master’s degrees to become licensed principals or other administrators within school systems of the state and/or nearby areas. The study used the lens of cultural imperialism system (Downing, Mohammadi, & Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1995; Schiller, 1976) to view how these American Indian pre-service administrators viewed their world within the realm of a dominating culture. Data were collected through three focus group discussions based on an openended, semi-structured questionnaire. From analysis of the data emerged five major themes: Relationships, Outside influence, Getting prepared, Altruism, andConcern for Family. Interested in finding out whether the MAISA program was staying true to its mission, which was to provide a culturally relevant program with an American Indian/Alaska Native focus, we were hoping notto find utility in the theoretical framework of cultural imperialism. Although we were not disappointed, we, the researchers felt that we must be ever vigilant in the planning, preparation, and delivery of American Indian/Alaska Native programs like MAISA. Our schools and universities often mirror the greater society. We believe that cultural imperialism is found in many areas of our society; one of the major effects of globalization has been such cultural imperialism. Our research indicates that non-traditional programs such as MAISAare sorely needed.
Memory-Efficient Single-Pass GPU Rendering of Multifragment Effects

Rendering multifragment effects using graphics processing units (GPUs) is attractive for high speed. However, the efficiency is seriously compromised, because ordering fragments on GPUs is not easy and the GPU's memory may not be large enough to store the whole scene geometry. Hitherto, existing methods have been unsuitable for large models or have required many passes for data transmission from CPU to GPU, resulting in a bottleneck for speedup. This paper presents a stream method for accurate rendering of multifragment effects. It decomposes the model into parts and manages these in an efficient manner, guaranteeing that the parts can easily be ordered with respect to any viewpoint, and that each part can be rendered correctly on the GPU. Thus, we can transmit the model data part by part, and once a part has been loaded onto the GPU, we immediately render it and composite its result with the results of the processed parts. In this way, we need only a single pass for data access with a very low bounded memory requirement. Moreover, we treat parts in packs for further acceleration. Results show that our method is much faster than existing methods and can easily handle large models of any size.
A Factorized Model for Transitive Verbs in Compositional Distributional Semantics

We present a factorized compositional distributional semantics model for the representation of transitive verb constructions. Our model first produces (subject, verb) and (verb, object) vector representations based on the similarity of the nouns in the construction to each of the nouns in the vocabulary and the tendency of these nouns to take the subject and object roles of the verb. These vectors are then combined into a final (subject,verb,object) representation through simple vector operations. On two established tasks for the transitive verb construction our model outperforms recent previous work.
Frustum Casting for Progressive, Interactive Rendering Frustum Casting for Progressive, Interactive Rendering

EEcient visible surface determination algorithms have long been a fundamental goal of computer graphics. We discuss the well-known ray casting problem: given a geometric scene description, a synthetic camera, and a viewport which discretizes the camera lm plane into pixels, ray casting identiies the visible surface at each pixel, i.e., that scene primitive which is rst encountered by a n eye r a y directed through the pixel center. Interactive rendering systems have not ordinarily been based on ray casting, due to its computational cost. Instead, the dominant method for achieving interactive rendering is hardware-assisted rasterization and depth buuering of polygons, often produced by static or dynamic tesselation of higher-level objects. Modern polygon rasterization architectures are extremely powerful, having undergone an extensive development path. Several trends indicate, however, that alternatives to polygon rasterization and depth buuer-ing deserve examination in the design of future interactive rendering systems. The rst trend is the number and breadth of proposed algorithmic and hardware methods to lessen transformation, rasterizer and depth buuer load while viewing models of high complexity. A second, related trend is that geometric models are, increasingly often, larger than ordinary physical memories, lending greater importance to memory coherence considerations. Finally, general purpose processors have grown very powerful, enabling exible, dynamic retargeting of computational resources to diiering subtasks while maintaining responsiveness. A rendering system based on such processors could have signiicant advantages over dedicated hardware. In light of the above, we explored an alternative, general rendering architecture based on ray casting. In seeking to build an interactive software ray caster, we studied existing visible surface algorithms. Combining three such algorithms, we synthesized frustum casting, a novel algorithm for per-pixel visible surface identiication in general scenes. The algorithm samples discretely, but operates in object space, and is exact and eecient. We demonstrate a prototype software renderer based on frustum casting, which a c hieves interactivity through just-in-time" sampling, and progressive image improvement through deferral of intersection and shading operations. Frustum casting well addresses the technological trends listed above. We believe that it and other ray-based rendering methods may be practically incorporable by designers of future high-performance rendering architectures. We gratefully acknowledge the support of Intel Corporation, and of MURI Award SA 1524-258 2386. The opinions and conclusions expressed in this document are not necessarily those of any sponsoring company or agency.
All supersymmetric solutions of minimal supergravity in five- dimensions

All purely bosonic supersymmetric solutions of minimal supergravity in five dimensions are classified. The solutions preserve either one half or all of the supersymmetry. Explicit examples of new solutions are given, including a large family of plane-fronted waves and a maximally supersymmetric analogue of the Godel universe which lifts to a solution of 11-dimensional supergravity that preserves 20 supersymmetries.
Utilization of Superheroes Social Skills to Reduce Disruptive and Aggressive Behavior

The current pilot study investigated the effectiveness of the Superheroes Social Skills program in decreasing disruptive and aggressive behavior of elementary-age students with high-incidence disabilities. Six students in a self-contained classroom, identified as displaying high rates of disruptive and aggressive behavior toward peers, were included in the study. Social skills training was presented over 10 lessons that targeted instructional control and turn taking skills. Results indicate immediate improvements in disruptive and aggressive behavior. Additionally, follow-up observations revealed maintenance of intervention effects. Sociometric data were collected, with all participants increasing in social network salience. Although use of an ABC design resulted in limited experimental control, preliminary results indicate that the Superheroes Social Skills program may be useful for addressing disruptive and aggressive behaviors.
ReCast: boosting tag line buffer coverage in low-power high-level caches "for free"

We revisit the idea of using small line buffers in-front of caches. We propose ReCast, a tiny tag set cache that filters a significant number of tag probes to the L2 tag array thus reducing power. The key contribution in ReCast is S-Shift, a simple indexing function (no logic involved just wires) that greatly improves the utility of line buffers with no additional hardware cost. S-Shift can be viewed as a technique for emulating larger cache blocks and hence exploiting more spatial locality but without paying the penalties of actually using a larger L2 cache block. Using several SPEC CPU2000 applications and a model of an aggressive, dynamically-scheduled, superscalar processor we demonstrate that a practical ReCast organization can significantly reduce power in the L2. Specifically, a 64-entry ReCast comprising eight sub-banks of eight entries each can filter about 50% of all tag probes for a 1 Mbyte L2 cache. A conventional line buffer of the same size filters only 32% of all tag probes. The resulting average reduction in L2 tag power is 38% and 85% with writeback or writethrough LI caches respectively. This translates to a reduction of 16% or 52% of the overall L2 power respectively. We also analyze a few representative applications explaining why S-Shift works well.
The Content Pollution in Peer-to-Peer Live Streaming Systems: Analysis and Implications

There has been significant progress in the development and deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) live video streaming systems. However, there has been little study on the security aspect in such systems. Our prior experiences in Anysee exhibit that existing systems are largely vulnerable to intermediate attacks, in which the content pollution is a common attack that can significantly reduce the content availability, and consequently impair the playback quality. This paper carries out a formal analysis of content pollution and discusses its implications in P2P live video streaming systems. Specifically, we establish a probabilistic model to capture the progress of content pollution. We verify the model using a real implementation based on Anysee system; we evaluate the content pollution effect through extensive simulations. We demonstrate that (1) the number of polluted peers can grow exponentially, similar to random scanning worms. This is vital that with 1% polluters, the overall system can be compromised within minutes; (2) the effective bandwidth utilization can be sharply decreased due to the transmission of polluted packets; (3) Augmenting the number of polluters does not imply a faster progress of content pollution, in which the most influential factors are the peer degree and access bandwidth. We further examine several techniques and demonstrate that a hash-based signature scheme can be effective against the content pollution, in particular when being used during the initial phase.
Pulsar spin–velocity alignment from single and binary neutron star progenitors

The role of binary progenitors of neutron stars (NSs) in the apparent distribution of space velocities and spin-velocity alignment observed in young pulsars is studied. We performed a Monte Carlo synthesis of pulsar populations originated from single and binary stars with different assumptions about the NS natal kick (kick―spin alignment, kick amplitude and kick reduction in electron-capture supernovae in binary progenitors with initial main-sequence masses from the range 8-11 M ⊙ which experienced mass exchange due to Roche lobe overflow). The calculated spin-velocity alignment in pulsars is compared with data inferred from radio polarization measurements. The observed space velocity of pulsars is found to be mostly affected by the natal kick velocity form and its amplitude; the fraction of binaries is not important here for reasonably large kicks. The natal kick―spin alignment is found to strongly affect the spin-velocity correlation of pulsars. Comparison with the observed pulsar spin―velocity angles favours a sizeable fraction of binary progenitors and kick-spin angles ∼5°―20°.
Estrogen withdrawal induces macrophage invasion in the rabbit corpus luteum.

Macrophages within the corpus luteum are associated with spontaneous luteal regression in a number of species. However, an understanding of the consequences of macrophage recruitment on the functional capacity and responsiveness of the luteal tissue has remained elusive. Here we investigate the temporal appearance of macrophages and their potential impact in corpora lutea of rabbits, in which a rapid fall in progesterone synthesis and premature regression of the corpus luteum are initiated by withdrawal of the luteotropic hormone estradiol-17beta. Removal of estradiol implants, placed subcutaneously, induced a significant increase in the average number of macrophages per high-power field (hpf) in corpora lutea (p < 0.05) within 72 h. Replacement of the estradiol implants 48 h after their removal resulted in a marginal rebound of plasma progesterone and a variable number of luteal macrophages (range: 6-160 macrophages/hpf) among the 11 rabbits. A third experiment revealed that the relative numbers of macrophages within the corpora lutea have no apparent relationship to rates of progesterone synthesis in vitro: progesterone production (ng/mg tissue) did not differ (p > 0.05) between corpora lutea of estradiol-maintained rabbits and those of estradiol-replaced rabbits despite obvious differences in numbers of luteal macrophages (2 +/- 1 vs. 42 +/- 10 macrophages/hpf, respectively; p < 0.05). We conclude that the entry/recruitment of macrophages into the rabbit corpus luteum is sensitive to the luteotropic hormone estradiol-17beta and that the presence of macrophages does not preclude the continuation of progesterone production in surviving luteal tissue revitalized after estradiol removal/replacement.
Comprehensive evaluation of ciprofloxacin-aminoglycoside combinations against Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains

The in vitro activities of antibiotic combinations containing ciprofloxacin and either gentamicin, sisomicin, netilmicin, amikacin, or tobramycin were evaluated by checkerboard assay (agar dilution method). A total of 220 strains of Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (11 species, 20 strains each) were tested. Synergistic or antagonistic effects were observed in less than 1% of the tests performed; they appeared to represent method-dependent fluctuations rather than true antibiotic interactions. No significant differences among the five aminoglycosides tested were seen. Time-kill experiments performed with three representative strains of Escherichia coli and Serratia marcescens showed additive combination effects with respect to the kill rates and inhibition of bacterial regrowth. Exposure of Serratia strains to either ciprofloxacin or gentamicin before the addition of the second drug had little influence on the combination effects observed. No antagonistic drug interactions were seen in vivo when combination therapy with ciprofloxacin and gentamicin was evaluated in a model of E. coli thigh muscle infection in neutropenic mice. Comparable therapeutic effects were obtained, regardless of whether the two compounds were administered simultaneously or sequentially at 1- or 2-h intervals.
Collegiate Basketball Players’ Experiences of being Coached During a Turnaround Season

The primary purpose of this study was to examine basketball players’ experiences of being coached during a turnaround season. Participants included eight collegiate men’s basketball players (ages 18–23) and one staff member representing an NCAA Division I program at a large university in the United States. All participants were involved with the basketball program during back-to-back seasons in which the team experienced a losing record (14–17) followed by a coaching change, and then a winning record (22–8) and conference championship. Semistructured interviews (lasting between 30–90 min) were conducted and transcribed verbatim. Analyses of the transcripts revealed 631 meaning units that were further grouped into lower and higher order themes. This led to the development of five major dimensions which encompassed these basketball players’ experiences of being coached during this extraordinary turnaround season including their (a) Experiences of Coach’s Personality Characteristics; (b) Experiences of Coach.
Framing the news: an ethnographic view of business newswriting

Abstract This article is an ethnographic case study of a senior business reporter as he discovers, writes, and reflects on a news story. We “follow the story” from its entry in the newsroom through the review process during a story meeting and the writing process up to the point the story is filed for copy editing. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article sheds light on how a news story about Russian gas exports to France is discursively constructed. In this writing process, we focus in particular on a frame shift in the construction of the lead and argue that this shift is led primarily by technological rather than overt ideological concerns. The detailed description of one newswriting process supports the argument that framing is an interpretive practice achieved within the demands, relationships, and discourses that anchor business news as a social institution.
International Social Attitudes: The 10th Bsa Report

Foreword by Howard Newby introduction Disengaging from democracy, Michael Johnston The family way, Jacqueline Scott, Michael Braun and Duane Alwin Religion, morality and politics, Anthony Heath, Bridget Taylor and Gabor Toka What citizens want from the state, Peter Taylor-Gooby Satisfying work - if you can get it, John Curtice Class conflict and inequality, Geoffrey Evans Appendix I. Technical details of the surveys Appendix II. Notes on the tabulations Appendix III. The questionnaires.
State-of-charge estimation for batteries: A multi-model approach

Monitoring the state-of-charge (SoC) for batteries is challenging, especially when a battery has time-varying parameters. We propose to improve SoC estimation using an adaptive strategy and multiple models in this study, developing a unique algorithm called MM-AdaSoC. Specifically, two submodels in state-space form are generated from a modified Nernst battery model. Both are shown to be locally observable under mild conditions. The iterated extended Kalman filter (IEKF) is then applied to each submodel in parallel, estimating simultaneously the SoC variable and certain unknown parameters. The SoC estimates obtained from the two separately implemented IEKFs are fused to yield the final overall SoC estimates, which tend to have higher accuracy than those obtained from a single-model. Its effectiveness is demonstrated via experiments.
INFORMATION SYSTEMS PRE-EVALUATION PRACTICES IN CONTEXT

This paper documents an investigation of the extent to which information system (IS) pre-evaluation processes affecting the selection of such systems are influenced by the pre-existing organizational context in the Jordanian banking sector and the relationship of these processes to IS investment pre-evaluation practices. The study extends the existing knowledge in IS evaluation research by drawing on the interpretive case study to understand how pre-evaluation practices are being influenced by the developing country context of Jordan. The findings demonstrate that there are important contextual factors in all development and implementation activities that affect or frame the evaluation process. The paper also finds that more flexibility in preevaluation methodology would be preferable, as it would allow the innovative capacity of the actors to play a significant role in articulating the future of these practices in banking.
Goodput Analysis and Link Adaptation for IEEE 802.11a Wireless LANs

Link adaptation to dynamically select the data transmission rate at a given time has been recognized as an effective way to improve the goodput performance of the IEEE 802.11 wireless local-area networks (WLANs). Recently, with the introduction of the new high-speed 802.11a physical layer (PHY), it is even more important to have a well-designed link adaptation scheme work with the 802.11a PHY such that its multiple transmission rates can be exploited. In this paper, we first present a generic method to analyze the goodput performance of an 802.11a system under the distributed coordination function (DCF) and express the expected effective goodput as a closed-form function of the data payload length, the frame retry count, the wireless channel condition, and the selected data transmission rate. Then, based on the theoretical analysis, we propose a novel MPDU (MAC protocol data unit)-based link adaptation scheme for the 802.11a systems. It is a simple table-driven approach and the basic idea is to preestablish a best PHY mode table by applying the dynamic programming technique. The best PHY mode table is indexed by the system status triplet that consists of the data payload length, the wireless channel condition, and the frame retry count. At runtime, a wireless station determines the most appropriate PHY mode for the next transmission attempt by a simple table lookup, using the most up-to-date system status as the index. Our in-depth simulation shows that the proposed MPDU-based link adaptation scheme outperforms the single-mode schemes and the autorate fallback (ARF) scheme-which is used in Lucent Technologies' WaveLAN-II networking devices-significantly in terms of the average goodput, the frame drop rate, and the average number of transmission attempts per data frame delivery.