Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender Differences of Latvian Males and Females at the Stage of Adulthood

"Objective – In this research, gender differences of Latvian males and females in the stage of adulthood are determined and distinguished on the grounds of a theoretical analysis of socio-psychological, scientific and methodological literature and legislative documents as well as empirical findings. Methodology/Technique – A survey by Bem (1974) has been adapted in this study for measuring how an adult individual sees him-/herself from the gender perspective. This was done with an aim of determining the place of gender in the cultural context rather than in the personality of a separate individual. 109 women and men from different regions of Latvia aged 20 to 64 took part in the study. The data were processed with the 23.0 version of SPSS, the data processing program. Findings – The obtained results indicate that the gender patterns on male and female behavior are similar. No differences in male or female behaviour were established. The behavioral peculiarities of male and female gender are determined not by age, but by sex. It can also be concluded that research of Latvian male and female gender behavior led to Bem’s androgyny theory, which argues for the ability of men and women to execute both – male and female behavioral patterns in ontogenesis. Novelty – The understanding of gender as a discursive construction caused a confusion between these notions. This study contributes in literature of gender psychology with its original data. "
Delivering diverse BGP data in real-time and through multi-format archiving

The Internet relies on BGP for global routing, but there are many open questions related to BGP. Some researchers rely on BGP data to better understand routing behavior and develop new routing algorithms. Other researchers use BGP data to investigate issues that range from IP allocations to regional Internet connectivity in the face of political turmoil. And of course BGP data is used in routing security issue, both to detect issues, evaluate solutions, and even issue warnings or block invalid routes. All of these research challenges require access to a reliable set of BGP data from geographically diverse locations. This papers presents the BGPmon approach to collecting and distributing BGP data at global scale. BGPmon collects data from diverse set of peers and distributes the data in real-time to any interested client. BGPmon fulfills three main design objectives: it provides a scalable data collection solution, maintains data integrity despite traffic surges and slow client processing, and it provides a suite of associated tools in order to ease the overhead of developing BGP data processing tools. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework with a brief characterization of the data collected from direct peers.
Robotic Therapy: The Tipping Point

ABSTRACTThe last two decades have seen a remarkable shift in the neurorehabilitation paradigm. Neuroscientists and clinicians moved away from the perception that the brain is static and hardwired to a new dynamic understanding that plasticity is a fundamental property of the adult human brain and might be harnessed to remap or create new neural pathways. Capitalizing on this innovative understanding, the authors introduced a paradigm shift in the clinical practice in 1989 when they initiated the development of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Manus robot for neurorehabilitation and deployed it in the clinic in 1994 (Krebs et al. 1998). Since then, the authors and others have developed and tested a multitude of robotic devices for stroke, spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson disease. Here, the authors discuss whether robotic therapy has achieved a level of maturity to justify its broad adoption in the clinical realm as a tool for motor recovery.
SellTrend: Inter-Attribute Visual Analysis of Temporal Transaction Data

We present a case study of our experience designing SellTrend, a visualization system for analyzing airline travel purchase requests. The relevant transaction data can be characterized as multi-variate temporal and categorical event sequences, and the chief problem addressed is how to help company analysts identify complex combinations of transaction attributes that contribute to failed purchase requests. SellTrend combines a diverse set of techniques ranging from time series visualization to faceted browsing and historical trend analysis in order to help analysts make sense of the data. We believe that the combination of views and interaction capabilities in SellTrend provides an innovative approach to this problem and to other similar types of multivariate, temporally driven transaction data analysis. Initial feedback from company analysts confirms the utility and benefits of the system.
Green Tea Potentially Ameliorates Bisphenol A-Induced Oxidative Stress: An In Vitro and In Silico Study

The present investigation was an attempt to elucidate oxidative stress induced by bisphenol A on erythrocytes and its amelioration by green tea extract. For this, venous blood samples from healthy human adults were collected in EDTA vials and used for preparation of erythrocytes suspension. When erythrocyte suspensions were treated with different concentrations of BPA/H2O2, a dose-dependent increase in hemolysis occurred. Similarly, when erythrocytes suspensions were treated with either different concentrations of H2O2 (0.05–0.25 mM) along with BPA (50 μg/mL) or 0.05 mM H2O2 along with different concentrations of BPA (50–250 μg/mL), dose-dependent significant increase in hemolysis occurred. The effect of BPA and H2O2 was found to be additive. For the confirmation, binding capacity of bisphenol A with erythrocyte proteins (hemoglobin, catalase, and glutathione peroxidase) was inspected using molecular docking tool, which showed presence of various hydrogen bonds of BPA with the proteins. The present data clearly indicates that BPA causes oxidative stress in a similar way as H2O2 . Concurrent addition of different concentrations (10–50 μg/mL) of green tea extract to reaction mixture containing high dose of bisphenol A (250 μg/mL) caused concentration-dependent amelioration in bisphenol A-induced hemolysis. The effect was significant (P < 0.05). It is concluded that BPA-induced oxidative stress could be significantly mitigated by green tea extract.
Does Exclusion From Normative Peer Groups in Early Adolescence Predict the Development of Substance Use Problems in Early Adulthood

Much of the previous research pertaining to Problem Substance Use has examined genetic predisposition or personality traits associated with substance abuse or dependence. The current research examines a possible relationship between social exclusion and problem substance use. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (waves 1-3), I explore several indicators of social exclusion in adolescence, and examine how they may predict the onset of substance use problems by early adulthood. As discussed herein, there is evidence that suggests that adolescents who are rejected or excluded from normative peer groups are more likely to gravitate towards deviant peer groups, socialize with peers who abuse substances more frequently, and eventually experience more substance use problems in early adulthood. Implications of the current study could contribute to our understanding of environmental influences on adolescent substance use, as well as inform future prevention efforts.
Analysis of existing CBIR Systems: improvements and validation Using Color Features

Content-based image retrieval is a technique which utilizes visual contents to search images from large scale image databases according to user interest. A significant progress has been made in equally theoretical research and system development. Early methods were not generally based on visual features but on the textual naming or tagging of images. In other words, images were first tagged with text and then searched using a text-based approach from traditional database management systems. In this experimental paper, we propose an effective content-based image retrieval (searching) method based on simplest feature that is extracted from images such as combination of multi-resolution colour. The purpose of this paper is to explore a new possibility which enables searching of the images an easy and user friendly task which is rather cumbersome in nature. Mostly images are searched through its Meta data i.e. user enters either the name of the image, or relevant facts associated with it which works fine. But due to massively increasing databases of images currently makes it impossible to individually annotate the images. Primary goal of this paper is to understand basic concepts involved in image processing currently used and utilized the DCT algorithm in order to develop a GUI based application. The paper is of utmost importance as it will pave a path for users to understand new breakthroughs in field of image processing particularly and computer science at large.
Learning Adaptation Models Under Non-Determinism

Among the approaches that have been proposed to support dynamic adaptation, one can ﬁnd two distinct techniques that appear to be antagonistic. On the one hand, different adaptation models have been proposed as a mean to capture, in an intelligible way, the valuable knowledge that experts have about the system behavior and how to manage it. However, expert-deﬁned models are typically incomplete, often inaccurate and hard to keep up-to-date as the system evolves. On the other hand, the use of machine learning (ML) has been proposed to ﬁnd, in a fully automatic manner, the correct adaptation strategies. However, ML requires a large training set of observations, usually collected from long and comprehensive training phases to provide meaningful results. Furthermore, it is not trivial for ML to capture non-determinism in the learnt model, in particular with scenarios where a given adaptation may have different outcomes due to factors that have not been taken into account in the original model. In this thesis we present an approach that aims at combining the advantages of static models and machine learning tools as complementary techniques to drive the dynamic adaptation of systems. The approach consists in using the expert’s knowledge to bootstrap the adaptation process and use machine learning to revise, reﬁne, and update the adaptation models at run-time. The revision process is built to take non-determinism into account. The approach has been experimentally validated in a system that performs elastic scaling of RUBiS, a prototype of an auction web application.
Patterns and Outlier Analysis of Traffic Flow Using Data Signatures via IDIRBrG Method and Vector Fusion Visualization

In this paper, we used X-Means clustering algorithm, incorporated data images from a so-called Iterative Data Image Rotated Bar Graph (iDIRBrG) method (formerly referred as BC method) and used Vector Fusion Visualization to achieve better traffic data analysis results compared to our previous work by improving how data signatures are constructed from the raw data set. By doing so, we effectively identify more patterns, extracted known as well as unexpected outliers, and novel information from the data set. These results were validated by experts from the NCTS. Furthermore, we also show more simplistic frequency-domain 2D visualizations of the entire data set. These successfully expose the internal structure and relationship of each individual point as well as the clusters obtained from it. Hence, using the methods above, we provide an effective and efficient time series traffic analysis.
Conflicts in Higher Education and Perceived Quality of Education: Empirical Evidence from Pakistan.

Both public and private universities in Pakistan are playing vital role in developing human resources as per sectoral demand. It is observed that conflict in the public universities occur more frequently than in the past and as a result, has an impact on educational outcomes in terms of qualified potential human resources. This is a study of some selected public universities of Pakistan. This exploratory study has been undertaken to highlight the importance of higher education conflict among students and faculty and to identify its consequences on the organizational outcomes. A structured questionnaire survey was undertaken within the selected public universities in Pakistan, responses were obtained both from the faculty and students. In the sample universities, convenience and random sampling methods were used to obtain data and information. The sample size in this study is 202. The data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, and regression analysis, using 11.5 versions of SPSS, to test the formulated hypotheses. Based on the findings, it is found that conflict has an effect on the quality of education which is directly related to human resource potential development of the country.
Discovering Hidden Leaders through Email Log Based on Chance Discovery

Chance Discovery for making decisions is widely applied in complex real world. However, the complexity of the real world was sometimes beyond the reach of chance discovery of observable events. Some members in a community are dark, who are not frequently communicating to the others, but they create important impacts to the community, called hidden leaders. In this paper, we extend the Key Graph algorithm by the method of direct graph, called Key Graph_D, for analyzing the impact degree of members in the communication network. Furthermore, Key Graph_D evaluates the benefit of chance discovery and adaptively discovers the hidden leaders who issue orders as dark members. Analytically and illustrating with examples, we show that Key Graph_D achieves better performance of discovering hidden leaders than Key Graph.
Molecular characterization of Streptococcus mutans gtfB gene isolated from families

OBJECTIVE: Caries is a multifactorial infectious disease and the main etiological agent is the bacteria Streptococcus mutans due to its virulence factors, which enable the adherence to dental enamel and favours the formation of dental biofilm through the production of extracellular polysaccharides. The transmission of S. mutans can occur between people, often within families. The present study aimed to evaluate the intrafamily genetic pattern of S. mutans through partial sequencing of the gene that encodes the glucosyltransferase β (gtfB) enzyme.METHODS: We previously analyzed saliva samples from 40 individuals from nine families, and it was obtained 64 isolates biochemically characterized as S. mutans. The isolates were evaluated by random amplification of polymorphic DNA (RAPD). Those with greater similarity were characterized by partial sequence 16S rRNA gene and the gtfB gene sequencing.RESULTS: It was observed genetic similarity among strains isolated from individuals with caries activity; while isolates from individual without caries showed that they are genetically distinct, suggesting a different virulence pattern.CONCLUSION: The present results demonstrated that partial sequencing of the gtfB gene showed to be a potential marker to investigate genetic pattern and virulence of S. mutans, deserving further investigation in order to identify families at risk of caries.
Comparative analysis of musical-enlightenment concepts of L. Bernstein and D. Kabalevsky in Russian music education

The aim of this study is to compare the activities of Kabalevsky and Bernstein—two musicians who made a significant contribution to the musical education of the younger generation, reveals the principles, methods, forms of educational work and covers the subject of television programmes. In particular, the pedagogical and musical-enlightenment concept of the outstanding composer, scientist Dmitry Kabalevsky was widely spread in our country. Also, the achievements of American composer, lecturer, teacher Leonard Bernstein in the field of musical enlightenment differ in originality and are rarely used in Russian musical pedagogical practice. In accordance with the aim of the study, the following theoretical methods were used: analysis of the literature, epistolary texts, the repertoire of the concert programmes of the New York Philharmonic orchestra; generalisation of historical data on musical and educational activities of Kabalevsky and Bernstein, comparison of methods and techniques of music education, biographical method. Keywords: Conversation, enlightenment, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Leonard Bernstein, TV
Reciprocal learning in mathematics education: An interactive study between two Canadian and Chinese elementary schools

In this study, the researchers go beyond the back-and-forth debates on the East-West educational paradigms that often arise from comparative studies, and take a reciprocal learning approach to explore in-depth the commonalities and differences in mathematics education between two Canadian and Chinese elementary schools. Research data were collected through direct and indirect interactions between the pair of research schools, including Skype meetings; formal and informal conversations with teachers and administrators; and the sharing/exchange of documents, texts, teaching materials, and resources. Results show that there is a common emphasis on some thematic issues in the teaching and learning of mathematics including the use of manipulatives, multiple solutions to mathematical problems, and parental involvement, but also some differences between the two schools in teachers’ strategies for teaching problem solving, students’ learning tendencies and schools’ supports for Special Needs students. The researchers conclude that the dichotomies of the East-West educational paradigms need to be further, and more deeply re-examined.
A Survey on Trust Management Languages

Trust is an important aspect of decision making for Information Systems and particularly influences the specification of security policies. However, trust is a complex concept that is difficult to define precisely, and a wide variety of definition of trust have been put forward. Over last ten years, a number of trust management language have been developed to express security statements in a distributed system. Because of wide range in precision in the specification and the variety of trust management languages, it is difficult to compare them in order to intelligently decide which to apply to a new situation. The purpose of this survey is to examine various definitions of trust in literature.Based on these definitions, we delineate requirements for trust management languages, and evaluate some existing policy languages with respect to such requirements. We also point out a number of improvements and extension that would make these systems better suited to trust management.
Deterministic Learning and Rapid Dynamical Pattern Recognition

Recognition of temporal/dynamical patterns is among the most difficult pattern recognition tasks. In this paper, based on a recent result on deterministic learning theory, a deterministic framework is proposed for rapid recognition of dynamical patterns. First, it is shown that a time-varying dynamical pattern can be effectively represented in a time-invariant and spatially distributed manner through deterministic learning. Second, a definition for characterizing similarity of dynamical patterns is given based on system dynamics inherently within dynamical patterns. Third, a mechanism for rapid recognition of dynamical patterns is presented, by which a test dynamical pattern is recognized as similar to a training dynamical pattern if state synchronization is achieved according to a kind of internal and dynamical matching on system dynamics. The synchronization errors can be taken as the measure of similarity between the test and training patterns. The significance of the paper is that a completely dynamical approach is proposed, in which the problem of dynamical pattern recognition is turned into the stability and convergence of a recognition error system. Simulation studies are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach
Perceptions of inclusive education: A mixed methods investigation of parental attitudes in three Australian primary schools

ABSTRACT Growing numbers of families now enrol their children in inclusive schools. The purpose of this research was to investigate the perceptions of 44 Australian parents, eight parents had children with disabilities and 36 had children who are typically developing. Data were collected using a questionnaire incorporating the Attitudes Towards Inclusion/Mainstreaming scale and a focus group for parents of children with disabilities. Parents all agreed that inclusive education benefits their children. Satisfaction with inclusion scores was similar and although parents of typically developing children expressed greater satisfaction, the difference was not significant. Parents of children with disabilities were significantly more likely to strongly agree that children have the right to inclusive education. Most parents felt that teachers are not well prepared to support the diverse range of students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms. Four themes identified in the focus group related to discrimination, frustration, restrictive practices, and programme quality. Parents valued well-coordinated, consistency delivered, and individualised educational programmes. Parents perceived resource allocation is not well targeted or transparent. Implications for teacher education and classroom practices are explored.
Assertiveness, family history of hypertension and other psychological and biophysical variables as predictors of cardiovascular reactivity to social stress

This study was conducted to assess whether certain personality characteristics and a positive family history of hypertension are associated with excessive cardiovascular reactivity. Subjects (M = 28, F = 37) engaged in a laboratory task designed to serve as a social stressor. Subjects were separated into three groups based on their self-reports of assertiveness in social situations. It was hypothesized that high and low assertiveness groups would exhibit greater heart rate and cardiovascular reactivity than subjects with average assertiveness tendencies. This relationship was not supported although significant correlations were found between low assertiveness scores and increased systolic and diastolic reactivity measures. In addition, hostile assertive tendencies were significantly correlated to heart rate reactivity. Subjects with hypertensive parents exhibited significantly higher task anticipation reactivity than did children of normotensive parents. However, subjects with no family history of hypertension exhibited greater task performance reactivity than subjects with a family history of hypertension. The strongest predictors of resting blood pressure were biophysical variables while the best predictors of cardiovascular reactivity were psychological variables.