Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Correlation between Group Home Caregiver Gender and Organization Outcomes

When agencies such as the Child Protection Services, Department of Probation or Child Welfare Services place children in out-of-home care, there seems to be incidents where clients are not afforded adequate protection. Children and youths are further injured and a cycle of maltreatment by caregivers working at these care agencies starts. System-generated trauma from stressful and emotionally overwhelming experiences such as multiple placements, frequent changes in schools, and peer groups has called for the research of studies leading to evidenced-based practices that prove effective in the treatment of this population. The purpose of this quantitative research is to explore the correlation between caregiver gender and adolescents’ trauma related behaviors in nine group homes. Independent t-test procedures were conducted to determine the mean differences between genders. A two tailed significance level of . 05 was specified. The findings revealed that gender was significantly related to trauma related behaviors. Male staff members reported experiencing more client aggressive behaviors than female staff members. It is recommended that further study be conducted on group homes to understand how organization characteristics impact client successes while in out-of-home treatment and care.
Human implicit intent transition detection based on pupillary analysis

Interpretation of human implicit intention is crucial in the development of an efficient nonverbal human computer interaction system. According to cognitive visuo-motor theory, the human eye movements and pupillary responses are rich source of information about the human intention and behavior. It has been observed that under conditions of constant illumination and accommodation, pupil size varies systematically in relation to a variety of physiological and psychological factors, such as level of mental effort. It is well known that pupillary responses could be used to measure the differences in cognitive load under various tasks. In this paper, we try to detect the transition between the different human implicit intents based on the pupil state analysis. In real-world environment, the pupillary response can be influenced by various external factors like intensity and size of the image. To overcome the influence of the external factors, we develop a robust baseline model. The proposed approach detects the transition of the human's implicit intent from navigational intent to informational intent and vice versa during a visual stimulus. The approach also detects the transition among the different states of the informational intent such as informational intent generation, informational intent maintenance and informational intent disappear.
Interview with Douglas Biber

BG: During your career, you have used corpus linguistics to investigate a wide range of language varieties, both synchronically and diachronically, cross-linguistically, and in terms of their use of varying linguistic structures (including grammar, lexico-grammar, phraseology, and discourse structure). But underlying most of your research is the theme of register variation—that variation in language corresponds to differences in the characteristics of the situations in which it is used. How and when did you first become interested in register variation? DB: Once you’ve asked it, this is an obvious question. But oddly, it’s not a question that I’ve asked myself before. And it’s kind of hard to come up with a definitive answer. I guess the simplest answer is that my interest in register differences grew out of my early multi-dimensional studies. When I started out on these studies, I was mostly interested in the relationship between speech and writing. But what I ended up finding out was that the whole range of register differences matters. Based on my studies over the years, I have come to believe that the distinction between speech and writing is the most important parameter of register variation for predicting linguistic variation. But at the same time, these studies have consistently shown that all register differences matter; that there will be systematic patterns of linguistic variation associated with any situational parameter of register, including purpose, topic, production circumstances, relation between audience and addressee, etc. So, from this perspective, my interest in register variation emerged from the corpus studies themselves—I was repeatedly confronted with findings that demonstrated the importance of register differences, so I became “interested”! But when I think more about it, there were certainly earlier influences. When I first began to study linguistics, I developed interests in two areas that were not usually taught together: I enjoyed formal linguistics—analyzing phonological and grammatical structures and patterns—but I was also especially interested in the structure of texts and the analysis of natural discourse.
Primary Group Structures and Their Functions: Kin, Neighbors, and Friends

Simon, Herbert A. 1957 Administrative Behavior, 2nd edition. New York: Macmillan. Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1968 Constructing Social Reality. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Thompson, James D. 1967 Organizations in Action: Social Science Basis of Administrative Theory. New York: McGraw-Hill. Truman, David B. 1953 The Governmental Process. New York: Knopf. Weber, Max. 1947 The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reasoning about Time and Knowledge in Neural Symbolic Learning Systems

We show that temporal logic and combinations of temporal logics and modal logics of knowledge can be effectively represented in artificial neural networks. We present a Translation Algorithm from temporal rules to neural networks, and show that the networks compute a fixed-point semantics of the rules. We also apply the translation to the muddy children puzzle, which has been used as a testbed for distributed multi-agent systems. We provide a complete solution to the puzzle with the use of simple neural networks, capable of reasoning about time and of knowledge acquisition through inductive learning.
Determinants of Change in Maternal Sensitivity: Contributions of Context, Temperament, and Developmental Risk

SYNOPSIS Objective . Maternal sensitivity is a fundamental parenting construct and a determinant of positive child outcomes and healthy parent–child relationships. Few longitudinal studies have investigated determinants of sensitive parenting, particularly in a population of children at risk for developmental delay. Design . This study modeled trajectories of maternal sensitivity observed in two independent parenting contexts at child ages 3, 4, and 5 years. The sample included N = 247 mother–child dyads, with n = 110 children classified as at risk for developmental delays. Predictors included maternal distress, child anger proneness, and developmental risk status. Results . Maternal sensitivity changed during more demanding parenting tasks over the 3-year period but not during a low-demand task. Mothers of children with developmental risk, relative to mothers of typically developing children, and mothers of boys relative to mothers of girls, showed less sensitivity during more demanding parenting tasks. Conclusion . Early developmental risk and child gender contribute to the nature of maternal sensitivity over time, but their contributions depend on the situational demands of the interaction. This contextualized view of sensitivity provides further evidence in support of parenting as a dynamic developmental process.
Walking Activity of Older Patients in Rehabilitation: A Prospective Study.

OBJECTIVES To quantify, using accelerometry, walking activity of older rehabilitation inpatients and to examine the relationship between walking activity and functional outcomes. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING Inpatient geriatric rehabilitation unit. PARTICIPANTS Of 74 consecutive eligible patients, aged 60 years or older and able to walk independently or with assistance, 60 participants (32 males, 28 females) with a mean (SD) length of stay of 37 (26) days completed the study. Intervention Measures: An accelerometer was worn in daytime hours from study recruitment until discharge to monitor daily walking minutes. RESULTS On study entry, patients spent a median (IQR) of 33 (20 to 48) minutes (7%) of the daily monitored eight hour period walking. By discharge, this had increased to 43 (30 to 56) minutes (9%) (p< 0.001). Average daily walking activity over the week prior to discharge correlated with change in gait speed from admission to discharge (p<0.05). Walking activity prior to discharge was significantly different (p<0.05) between the slowest gait speed group (≤0.4 m/s) and the fastest gait speed group (≥0.8 m/s). Those with discharge gait speeds ≥0.8 m/s (associated with ability to be ambulant in the community) had median (IQR) daily walking times at discharge of 51 (33 to 78) minutes. CONCLUSION Activity monitoring has the potential to assist clinicians and patients set goals around activity levels to achieve better outcomes.
Design of Asynchronous Circuits Using Synchronous CAD Tools

Poor CAD support hinders wide acceptance of asynchronous methodologies, and asynchronous design tools are far behind synchronous commercial tools. A new design flow, NCL/spl I.bar/X, based entirely on commercial CAD tools, targets a subclass of asynchronous circuits called null convention logic. NCL/spl I.bar/X shows significant area improvement over other flows for this subclass.
Adult hypertrophic pyloric stenosis

Adult hypertrophic pyloric stenosis is an uncommon condition which when encountered is usually mistakenly diagnosed as carcinoma of the antrum. It is a benign disease resulting from hypertrophy of the circular fibres of the pyloric canal and is recognizable radiologically by narrowing and elongation of the pyloric canal. The aetiology is in doubt but the condition is probably congenital. The treatment of choice is partial gastrectomy.
Time may be compressed in sound representation as replicated in sensory memory

The flow of time in the real world may differ from the one in the neural representation of auditory scene stored in the sensory memory, because the encoded information is free from the rule of actual time. The sensory memory underlying the automatic discriminative system is reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN). The time-wise image of preceding sounds is integrated into the sensory memory as a 160–170 ms epoch. We measured the mismatch field (MMNm) and the reaction time responding to the omitted segments incorporated into a complex sound. The main result was that the encoded period from early to late omitted segment was shorter than the actual one, suggesting that time may be compressed in the sound representation.
Reconstruction of brain activity in EEG/MEG using reduced-rank nulling spatial filter

We consider the problem of reconstruction of brain activity from electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) using spatial filtering (beamforming). We assume the presence of interfering sources, whose activity may be highly correlated with activity of sources to be reconstructed. Such situation causes the celebrated linearly constrained minimum-variance (LCMV) filter to produce erroneous estimates due to source cancellation. This problem is especially acute if signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low. We propose a robust reduced-rank nulling spatial filter designed to overcome these drawbacks of the LCMV filter. The proposed filter is a natural reduced-rank extension of the recently introduced nulling spatial filter, which allows efficient implementation of nulling constraints in low-SNR regime. It is equipped with rank-selection criterion minimizing mean-square-error (MSE) of the resulting estimate. We verify its improved performance in the challenging conditions described above in comparison with established spatial filtering techniques.
School bullying episodes: attitudes and intervention in pre-service and in-service Italian teachers

Abstract We compared the respective attitudes of pre-service teachers (PST) and in-service teachers (IST) towards bullying. A questionnaire survey was administered to 110 PST and 128 IST. Self-efficacy beliefs, external locus of causality and empathy for the victims were higher in IST than PST. Perceived seriousness of bullying and likelihood of intervention were higher in IST, but only in the case of overt bullying. In both PST and IST the perceived seriousness of the episode, whether overt or covert, was associated with greater empathy for the victim and greater propensity to intervene. In IST, only in the case of covert bullying, the perceived seriousness of the episode, empathy with the victims, and likelihood of intervention were negatively related to the recommendation of maladaptive strategies. These results, and their consequences on teachers’ training programmes and school preventive intervention, are discussed.
Two-step based hybrid feature selection method for spam filtering

Feature selection, which can reduce the dimensionality of vector space without sacrificing the performance of the classifier, is commonly used in spam filtering. As many classifiers cannot deal with the features with large dimensions, the noisy, irrelevant and redundant data should be removed from the feature spaces. In this paper, a two-step based hybrid feature selection method, called TFSM, is proposed. Firstly, we select the most discriminative features by an existing document frequency based feature selection method (called ODFFS). Secondly, we select the remaining features by combining the ODFFS and a newly proposed term frequency based feature selection method (called NTFFS). Moreover, we propose a new optimizing meta-heuristic method, called GOPSO, to improve the convergence rate of standard particle swarm optimization. In the experiments, Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naive Bayesian (NB) classifiers are used on four corpuses: PU2, PU3, Enron-spam and Trec2007. The experimental results show that, TFSM is significantly superior to information gain, comprehensively measure feature selection, t-test based feature selection, term frequency based information gain and improved term frequency inverse document frequency method on four corpuses when SVM and NB are applied respectively.
miR-186 Inhibits Muscle Cell Differentiation through Myogenin Regulation*

Background: Myogenin is a major muscle transcription factor that induces muscle cell differentiation and controls the final differentiation step of myogenesis. Results: microRNA-186 was identified as a post-transcriptional regulator of myogenin, which binds specifically to its 3′-untranslated region resulting in its down-regulation. Conclusion: microRNA-186 causes inhibition of muscle cell differentiation through down-regulation of myogenin. Significance: miR-186 is a novel regulator of myogenic differentiation. The complex process of skeletal muscle differentiation is organized by the myogenic regulatory factors (MRFs), Myf5, MyoD, Myf6, and myogenin, where myogenin plays a critical role in the regulation of the final stage of muscle differentiation. In an effort to investigate the role microRNAs (miRNAs) play in regulating myogenin, a bioinformatics approach was used and six miRNAs (miR-182, miR-186, miR-135, miR-491, miR-329, and miR-96) were predicted to bind the myogenin 3′-untranslated region (UTR). However, luciferase assays showed only miR-186 inhibited translation and 3′-UTR mutagenesis analysis confirmed this interaction was specific. Interestingly, the expression of miR-186 mirrored that of its host gene, ZRANB2, during development. Functional studies demonstrated that miR-186 overexpression inhibited the differentiation of C2C12 and primary muscle cells. Our findings therefore identify miR-186 as a novel regulator of myogenic differentiation.
QDA-A Method for Systematic Informal Program Analysis

Formal verification of program properties may be infeasible or impractical, and informal analysis may be sufficient. Informal analysis involves the informal acceptance, by inspection, of the validity of program properties or steps in an analysis. Informal analysis may also involve abstraction. Abstraction can be used to eliminate details and concentrate on more general properties. Abstraction will result in informal analysis if it includes the use of undefined properties. A systematic, informal method for analysis called QDA (Quick Defect Analysis) is described. QDA is a comments analysis process based on facts and hypotheses. Facts are used to create an abstract program model, and hypotheses are selected, nonobvious program properties which are identified as needing verification. Hypotheses are proved from the facts that define an abstraction. QDA is hypothesis-driven in the sense that only those parts of an abstraction that are needed to prove hypotheses are created. The QDA approach was applied to a previously well tested operational flight program (OFP). The QDA method and the results of the OFP experiment are presented. The problems of incomplete or unsound informal analysis are analyzed, the relationship of QDA to other analysis methods is discussed, and suggested improvements to the QDA method are described. >
Private Giving Crowding Government Funding in Public Higher Education

Problem statement: Private giving and government funding are critical revenue sources for public colleges and universities. If increased private giving reduces government funding, then that type and extent of crowding out carries important managerial and public policy implications. Approach: The study used a government funding reaction function and an instrumental variable approach to empirically estimate the potential for crowding out. Results: The study examined the extent to which private giving reduces or crowds out state government funding of public colleges and universities. Government free riding was at question and investigated to determine how active it is in terms of private donations partially or wholly displacing state government funding. The findings suggested that the rate of crowding out was 43% on the dollar. That compares to the 45% political substitution of the 1960’s but is much diminished from the 1980’s dollar for dollar crowding out. Those are aggregate comparisons for all public institutions. A disaggregated approach in this study additionally revealed that doctoral universities were victims of the same 43% crowd out but that at two other levels, master degree granting and associate degree granting colleges, there was the opposite effect of crowding in. Those colleges received state funding augmentations of 32-92% on their dollar of privately provided donations. Conclusion/Recommendations: The study’s finding of the existence of both crowding out and crowding in can carry important policy implications for college and university funding. Future managerial and public policy decision making should take that into account. However, political sustainability and economy wide and localized effects over time of crowding out and in could prove fruitful avenues of inquiry for future research.
Fast Bayesian choice of phylogenetic models: prospecting data augmentation-based thermodynamic integration.

Fast Bayesian Choice of Phylogenetic Models: Prospecting Data Augmentation–Based Thermodynamic Integration NICOLAS RODRIGUE1,2,3,∗ AND STEPHANE ARIS-BROSOU1,4 1Department of Biology and Center for Advanced Research in Environmental Genomics, University of Ottawa, 30 Marie Curie Pvt., Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 6N5; 2Quebec Center for Biodiversity Science, McGill University, 1205 Drive, Penfield Avenue, Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 1B1; 3Eastern Cereal and Oilseeds Research Center, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, 960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1A 0C6; and 4Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 6N5; ∗Correspondence to be sent to: Eastern Cereal and Oilseeds Research Center, Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada, 960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1A 0C6; E-mail: nicolas.rodrigue@agr.gc. ca.
Astrocyte to spiking neuron communication using Networks-on-Chip ring topology

Hardware faults are becoming more frequent due to geometric scaling, reducing the reliability and lifespan of devices. Current fault-tolerant approaches use redundancy or a central controller to detect and/or repair faults. However, these methods are also susceptible to faults. Astrocytes have been shown to facilitate biological self-repair in silent or near silent neurons in the brain by increasing the Probability of Release (PR) in healthy synapses. Astrocytes modulate synaptic activity, which leads to increased or decreased PR. To date, this has been proven with computational modelling and therefore the next step is to replicate this self-repair process in hardware to provide self-repairing systems. One of the key challenges for hardware neuro-glia networks is the facilitation of scalable communication between interacting neurons and astrocyte cells. This paper contributes a low-level Networks-on-Chip (NoC) ring topology for astrocyte to neuron/synapse communication which provides a scalable solution to this interconnect challenge. It builds upon our previous FPGA-based Hierarchical Networks-on-Chip (HNoC) and establishes preliminary communication building blocks to facilitate the development of distributed self-repair hardware systems. FPGA results demonstrate that the new ring topology provides a good trade-off between low area/interconnect wiring overhead and communication speed for the relatively slow-changing data between astrocyte and neurons.
Influences of Chloride and Hypochlorite on Neutrophil Extracellular Trap Formation

Background The release by neutrophils of DNA-based extracellular traps (NETs) is a recently recognized innate immune phenomenon that contributes significantly to control of bacterial pathogens at tissue foci of infection. NETs have also been implicated in the pathogenesis of non-infectious diseases such as small vessel vasculitis, lupus and cystic fibrosis lung disease. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are important mediators of NET generation (NETosis). Neutrophils with reduced ROS production, such as those from patients with chronic granulomatous disease or myeloperoxidase (MPO) deficiency, produce fewer NETs in response to inflammatory stimuli. To better understand the roles of various ROS in NETosis, we explore the role of MPO, its substrates chloride ion (Cl−) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and its product hypochlorite (HOCl) in NETosis. Findings In human peripheral blood neutrophils, pharmacologic inhibition of MPO decreased NETosis. Absence of extracellular Cl−, a substrate for MPO, also reduced NETosis. While exogenous addition of H2O2 and HOCl stimulated NETosis, only exogenous HOCl could rescue NETosis in the setting of MPO inhibition. Neither pharmacological inhibition nor genetic deletion of MPO in murine neutrophils blocked NETosis, in contrast to findings in human neutrophils. Conclusions Our results pinpoint HOCl as the key ROS involved in human NETosis. This finding has implications for understanding innate immune function in diseases in which Cl− homeostasis is disturbed, such as cystic fibrosis. Our results also reveal an example of significant species-specific differences in NET phenotypes, and the need for caution in extrapolation to humans from studies of murine NETosis.