Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reliability and validity of the Life Oriention Test in college students

Objective:To examine the reliability and validity of a dispositional optimism scale,the Life Orientation Test(LOT),in Chinese college students.Methods:The Chinere Version of LOT was translated from English version and had same constructs to the original one.Totally 479 Chinese college students were selected and completed a battery of structured questionnaires,including the Chinese version of LOT,Satisfaction With Life Scale(SWLS),Positive Affect-Negative Affect Scale(PANAS),and Beck Depression Inventory(BDI). A lot of 152 students were selected randomly and assessed for the test-retest reliability.Results:The revised LOT scale consisted of 6 items and 2 subscales.All items' critical ratio was significant at 0.001 level,and the factors loadings ranged from 0.61 to 0.74. Confirmatory factor analysis showed good fit two-factors models of one optimism factor and one pessimism factor(χ2/df=1.90,RMSEA=0.059,NNFI=0.92,CFI=0.96). The dispositional optimism factors were significantly correlated with the index of subjective well-being and depression,which were largely consistent to our expectation.The optimism factor scores were positively correlated with SWLS scores and PANAS's "positive affect" scores(r=0.22,0.28,P0.01),while negatively correlated with PANAS' s "negative affect" and BDI scores(r=-0.17,-0.23,P0.01). The pessimism factor scores were negatively correlated with SWLS scores and PANAS' s "positive affect"(r=-0.22,-0.23,P0.01),while positively correlated with PANAS' s "negative affect" and BDI scores(r=0.15,0.12,P0.05). The internal consistencies were good for subscales(Cronbach' s alpha=0.73,0.82,respectively),and the two weeks test-retest reliability coefficients for subscales were 0.76 and 0.79. Conclusion:It suggests that the Chinese version of Life Orientation Test has good reliability and validity,and it could be used to assess the optimism of Chinese college students.
Interlock Formation and Coiling of Meiotic Chromosome Axes During Synapsis

The meiotic prophase chromosome has a unique architecture. At the onset of leptotene, the replicated sister chromatids are organized along an axial element. During zygotene, as homologous chromosomes pair and synapse, a synaptonemal complex forms via the assembly of a transverse element between the two axial elements. However, due to the limitations of light and electron microscopy, little is known about chromatin organization with respect to the chromosome axes and about the spatial progression of synapsis in three dimensions. Three-dimensional structured illumination microscopy (3D-SIM) is a new method of superresolution optical microscopy that overcomes the 200-nm diffraction limit of conventional light microscopy and reaches a lateral resolution of at least 100 nm. Using 3D-SIM and antibodies against a cohesin protein (AFD1/REC8), we resolved clearly the two axes that form the lateral elements of the synaptonemal complex. The axes are coiled around each other as a left-handed helix, and AFD1 showed a bilaterally symmetrical pattern on the paired axes. Using the immunostaining of the axial element component (ASY1/HOP1) to find unsynapsed regions, entangled chromosomes can be easily detected. At the late zygotene/early pachytene transition, about one-third of the nuclei retained unsynapsed regions and 78% of these unsynapsed axes were associated with interlocks. By late pachytene, no interlocks remain, suggesting that interlock resolution may be an important and rate-limiting step to complete synapsis. Since interlocks are potentially deleterious if left unresolved, possible mechanisms for their resolution are discussed in this article.
Exploring inexperienced user performance of a mobile tablet application through usability testing.

This paper explores inexperienced user performance through a usability testing of three alternative prototypes of a mobile tablet application. One key factor in inexperienced users adopting mobile technology is the ease of use of mobile devices. The interface layout one of the three prototypes was built on the basis of previous research conducted in collaboration with users. More specifically, our study involves five navigation tasks which novice users were required to complete with each of the three prototypes. Our results showed that participants displayed better task performance with the prototype F1, which was created in collaboration with participants, in contrast to prototypes F2 and F3, which both caused navigation problems.
Automatic emotion recognition using auditory and prosodic indicative features

In this paper, a new framework for the automatic recognition of human emotions from speech was proposed. Besides auditory indicative features, selected prosodic and voice quality parameters were optimally combined with Mel frequency coefficients to perform an automatic emotion classification. For this purpose, the Emotion Prosody Speech and Transcript database, a certified speech corpus, was used throughout this study. An extensive set of experiments have been carried out in order to assess the effectiveness of this original mixture of prosodic, perceptual and auditory features to perform the emotion recognition task. These features were selected by using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on the basis of their ability of discrimination. The selected features were used by the front-end processing stage of a hybrid Gaussian Mixture Model and Support Vector Machines (GSVMs) to perform the emotion classification. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed feature extraction framework to discriminate between different human emotions when the LDA-PCA-GSVM classifier was used.
Climate Change Impacts on Regional and Urban Air Quality in South Texas

Temperature changes are precursors to climate variability in a region. Climate change is emerging as an important ingredient of air quality and the link between the two issues will have a significant impact on air quality in the future. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report predicts significant temperature increases over the century. This modeling study presents results from a preliminary investigation, undertaken for a high ozone episode of September 16 to 19, 1999 that affected the South Texas region. The study determines the impact of such temperature perturbations on tropospheric ozone concentrations in this region. These temperature perturbations represented the worst case consequences of extreme climate change within the study region. Significantly large changes in peak ozone concentrations were predicted. Temperatures also had an appreciable spatial impact on the number and extent of eight-hour ozone exceedances with an average of 34% increase in area exceeding the National Ambient Air Quality standards for ozone in the study region for successive increase in temperature. In addition, transboundary flux from major industrialized urban areas also played a major role in supplementing the high ozone concentrations during the perturbed temperature scenarios. It is well known that nighttime temperatures have increased at almost twice the rate of daytime temperatures in context of climate change due to increased evaporative cooling during the daytime hours. A sensitivity run was conducted which dealt with the relative influence of daytime versus nighttime increases of temperatures on daily peak ozone concentrations. The nighttime perturbations of ambient temperatures resulted in a disproportionate increase of the daily maximum eight-hour averaged ozone concentration.
Point-sampled cell complexes

A piecewise smooth surface, possibly with boundaries, sharp edges, corners, or other features is defined by a set of samples. The basic idea is to model surface patches, curve segments and points explicitly, and then to glue them together based on explicit connectivity information. The geometry is defined as the set of stationary points of a projection operator, which is generalized to allow modeling curves with samples, and extended to account for the connectivity information. Additional tangent constraints can be used to model shapes with continuous tangents across edges and corners.
A Scaled Gradient Projection Method for Bayesian Learning in Dynamical Systems

A crucial task in system identification problems is the selection of the most appropriate model class and is classically addressed resorting to cross-validation or using order selection criteria based on asymptotic arguments. As recently suggested in the literature, this can be addressed in a Bayesian framework, where model complexity is regulated by a few hyperparameters, which can be estimated via marginal likelihood maximization. It is thus of primary importance to design effective optimization methods to solve the corresponding optimization problem. If the unknown impulse response is modeled as a Gaussian process with a suitable kernel, the maximization of the marginal likelihood leads to a challenging nonconvex optimization problem, which requires a stable and effective solution strategy. In this paper we address this problem by means of a scaled gradient projection algorithm, in which the scaling matrix and the steplength parameter play a crucial role to provide a meaningful solution in a computatio.
Signaling Lymphocytic Activation Molecule Family Member 7 Engagement Restores Defective Effector CD8+ T Cell Function in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus

Effector CD8+ T cell function is impaired in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and is associated with a compromised ability to fight infections. Signaling lymphocytic activation molecule family member 7 (SLAMF7) engagement has been shown to enhance natural killer cell degranulation. This study was undertaken to characterize the expression and function of SLAMF7 on CD8+ T cell subsets isolated from the peripheral blood of SLE patients and healthy subjects.
Population-Based Molecular Epidemiological Study of Tuberculosis in Malatya, Turkey

ABSTRACT This investigation describes drug resistance patterns and genotyping data on a total of 145 Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains isolated between 2000 and 2004 in Malatya, Turkey. Drug susceptibility results indicated a total of 20% resistant and 4.8% of multidrug-resistant isolates. Spoligotyping resulted in 25 unique patterns and 120 strains in 19 clusters (2 to 33 strains per cluster). When the results were compared to an international spoligotyping database, 19 of 25 unique patterns matched existing shared spoligotype international types (SITs). This led to the description of 38 SITs with 139 strains and 6 orphan patterns (not previously reported). Five of the SITs (SIT759, SIT1936, SIT1937, SIT1938, and SIT2285) were newly created. The most prevalent spoligotype was SIT41 (LAM7-TUR) with 33 (23.9%) isolates. The repartition of strains according to major M. tuberculosis clades (in decreasing order) was as follows: ill-defined T clade (45.7%) > Latin American and Mediterranean (LAM; 29%) > Haarlem (15.9%). Strains belonging to Central Asian (CAS), East-African Indian (EAI), Beijing, and Africanum clades were absent in this setting. IS6110-restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) resulted in 19 clusters (52 strains), with a final clustering rate of 35.9% and a recent transmission rate of 22.8%. Typing based on mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units (MIRUs) permitted us to identify 65 patterns (23 orphan patterns and 42 patterns that matched existing MIRU international types in an updated database). The combination of the three typing methods allowed us to calculate a final clustering rate of 22% and a significantly lower transmission rate of 13.1%. The discrimination achieved by IS6110-RFLP/MIRUs was not significantly improved by adding spoligotyping results (1.4%). We conclude that our patient population is infected by diverse M. tuberculosis populations; however, the majority of the ongoing transmission is due to “evolutionary recent” tuberculosis lineages belonging to principal genetic group 2 (PGG2; Haarlem and LAM) and PGG3 (ill-defined T clade), and most of it is attributable to the LAM7-TUR sublineage with an enhanced phylogeographical specificity for Turkey. An absence of lineages belonging to PGG1 clones (EAI, CAS, and Beijing, essentially found in Central, South, and Southeast Asia), is noteworthy.
Scheduling Congestion-Free Updates of Multiple Flows with Chronicle in Timed SDNs

The advent of more accurate synchronization in Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) in general and the notion of timed updates in particular, enables operators to fully exploit the potential of the more fine-grained and adaptive traffic engineering, by avoiding disruptions and inconsistencies during the update. However, little is known today about how to schedule the update of multiple flows in such timed SDNs: As flows compete for limited resources, implementing a congestion-free update remains algorithmically challenging, even in timed SDNs. This paper initiates the study of the fundamental problem of how to reroute the update of multiple network flows in a synchronized SDN in a congestion-free manner. We show that that the problem is NP-hard already for flows of unit size and network links with unit delay. Our main contribution is a first solution for this problem: Chronicle. Our approach is based on a time-extended network construction and resource dependency graph, which is implemented by Openflow 1.5 using the scheduled bundles feature. Evaluation results show that Chronicle can reduce the makespan by 63% and reduce the number of changed rules by 50% compared to state-of-the-art.
State Oriented Program Comprehension in legacy distributed telecommunication systems

Distributed telecommunication systems consist of several programs that spawn independent but collaborating processes during their execution. These processes are implementations of state-based systems. Understanding programs is a pre-requisite for the effective maintenance of a software system. Program comprehension aims at helping software maintainers understand programs by acquiring knowledge about them [15]. One of the approaches for program comprehension, is to provide maintainers with browsing tools that highlight elements in source code, show their relationships and infer high-level abstractions. This paper discusses how to consider the state-based dimension of distributed telecommunication systems in the design of program comprehension facilities.
HIGH-TECH POLYHOUSE ENVIRONMENT

Wireless Sensors Network is a novel field shows tremendous application potential. To monitor the environmental parameters of high-tech polyhouse the Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) is developed. The heart of this ubiquitous field is the Wireless Sensor Node. Moreover, the field of microcontroller based embedded technology is innovative and more reliable. Therefore, based on an embedded technology and the RF module Zigbee a wireless senor node is designed about highly promising AVR ATmega8L microcontroller and implemented for WSN development. Recently, the modern agriculturists are demanding sophisticated instrumentation for measurement and control of environmental parameters of the polyhouse. To enhance crop yield one has to provide controlled environment to the crop. The humidity is important parameter, which plays vital role on the crop yield. Therefore, a Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) is designed and implemented for monitoring of humidity of polyhouse and the results of implementation are interpreted in this paper.
Designable visual markers

Visual markers are graphic symbols designed to be easily recognised by machines. They are traditionally used to track goods, but there is increasing interest in their application to mobile HCI. By scanning a visual marker through a camera phone users can retrieve localised information and access mobile services. One missed opportunity in current visual marker systems is that the markers themselves cannot be visually designed, they are not expressive to humans, and thus fail to convey information before being scanned. This paper provides an overview of d-touch, an open source system that allows users to create their own markers, controlling their aesthetic qualities. The system runs in real-time on mobile phones and desktop computers. To increase computational efficiency d-touch imposes constraints on the design of the markers in terms of the relationship of dark and light regions in the symbols. We report a user study in which pairs of novice users generated between 3 and 27 valid and expressive markers within one hour of being introduced to the system, demonstrating its flexibility and ease of use.
A Representation of Variable Root Distribution in Dynamic Vegetation Models

Abstract Root distribution is treated as a static component in most current dynamic vegetation models (DVMs). While changes in leaf and stem biomass are reflected in leaf area index (LAI) and vegetation height via specific leaf area (SLA) and allometric relationships, most DVMs assume that changes in root biomass do not result in changes in the root distribution profile and rooting depth. That is, the fraction of roots in soil layers, which is used to estimate transpiration, is taken to be constant and independent of root biomass and/or vegetation age. A methodology for parameterizing root distribution as a function of root biomass is proposed for use in dynamic vegetation models. In this representation, root distribution and rooting depth evolve and increase as root biomass increases, as is expected intuitively and as is seen in observations. Root biomass data from temperate coniferous, tropical evergreen, and tundra sites show that the approach successfully represents, to the first order, the change of .
Focal Ca2+ Transient Detection in Smooth Muscle

Ca2+ imaging of smooth muscle provides insight into cellular mechanisms that may not result in changes of membrane potential, such as the release of Ca2+ from internal stores, and allows multiple cells to be monitored simultaneously to assess, for example, coupling in syncytial tissue. Subcellular Ca2+ transients are common in smooth muscle, yet are difficult to measure accurately because of the problems caused by their stochastic occurrence, over an often wide field of view, in an organ that it prone to contract. To overcome this problem, we've developed a series of imaging protocols and analysis routines to acquire and then analyse, in an automated fashion, the frequency, location and amplitude of such events. While this approach may be applied in other contexts, our own work involves the detection of local purinergic Ca2+ transients for locating transmitter release with submicron resolution. ATP is released as a cotransmitter from autonomic nerves, where it binds to P2X1 receptors on the smooth muscle of the detrusor and vas deferens. Ca2+ enters the smooth muscle, resulting in purinergic neuroeffector Ca2+ transients (NCTs). The focal Ca2+ transients allow the optical monitoring of neurotransmitter release in a manner that has many advantages over electrophysiology. Apart from the greatly improved spatial resolution, optical recording has the additional advantage of allowing the recording of transmitter release from many distinguishable sites simultaneously. Furthermore, the optical plane of focus is easier to maintain or correct during long recording series than is the repositioning of an intracellular sharp microelectrode. In summary, a method for imaging of Ca2+ fluorescence is outlined which details the preparation of tissue, and the acquisition and analysis of data. We outline the use of several scripts for the analysis of such Ca2+ transients.
Altered neurochemical coupling in the occipital cortex in migraine with visual aura

Background Visual aura is present in about one-third of migraine patients and triggering by bright or flickering lights is frequently reported. Method Using migraine with visual aura patients, we investigated the neurochemical profile of the visual cortex using magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Specifically, glutamate/creatine and GABA/creatine ratios were quantified in the occipital cortex of female migraine patients. Results GABA levels in the occipital cortex of migraine patients were lower than that of controls. Glutamate levels in migraine patients, but not controls, correlated with the blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the primary visual cortex during visual stimulation. Conclusion Migraine with visual aura appears to disrupt the excitation-inhibition coupling in the occipital cortex.
Wind-Driven Shifts in the Latitude of the Kuroshio–Oyashio Extension and Generation of SST Anomalies on Decadal Timescales*

Abstract The causes of decadal variations of North Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are examined using a hindcast performed with an ocean general circulation model thermodynamically coupled to an atmospheric mixed layer model (OGCM–AML model) and forced by the time history of observed surface winds. The “shift” in North Pacific Ocean climate that occurred around 1976/77 is focused on since this is the best observed example available. After the 1976/77 shift the Aleutian low deepened and moved to the southeast of its previous position. This placed anomalous cyclonic flow over the North Pacific. The SST response, as simulated by the ocean model, consisted of two components: a fast and local part and a delayed and remote part. In the central Pacific stronger westerlies cool the ocean by increased equatorward Ekman drift. Here the dynamical cooling is sufficiently large that the surface fluxes damp the SST anomaly. This Ekman response is fast and local and cools the SSTs beginning in 1977 and persistin.
Microglial P 2 X 7 receptor expression is accompanied by neuronal damage in the cerebral cortex of the APPswe / PS 1 dE 9 mouse model of Alzheimer ’ s disease

The possibility that P2X7 receptor (P2X7R) expression in microglia would mediate neuronal damage via reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was examined in the APPswe/PS1dE9 mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). P2X7R was predominantly expressed in CD11b-immunopositive microglia from 3 months of age before Aβ plaque formation. In addition, gp91, a catalytic subunit of NADPH oxidase, and ethidium fluorescence were detected in P2X7R-positive microglial cells of animals at 6 months of age, indicating that P2X7R-positive microglia could produce ROS. Postsynaptic density 95-positive dendrites showed significant damage in regions positive for P2X7R in the cerebral cortex of 6 month-old mice. Taken together, up-regulation of P2X7R activation and ROS production in microglia are parallel with Aβ increase and correlate with synaptotoxicity in AD.
A vectorial solver for free-form vector gradients

The creation of free-form vector drawings has been greatly improved in recent years with techniques based on (bi)-harmonic interpolation. Such methods offer the best trade-off between sparsity (keeping the number of control points small) and expressivity (achieving complex shapes and gradients). In this paper, we introduce a vectorial solver for the computation of free-form vector gradients. Based on Finite Element Methods (FEM), its key feature is to output a low-level vector representation suitable for very fast GPU accelerated rasterization and close-form evaluation. This intermediate representation is hidden from the user: it is dynamically updated using FEM during drawing when control points are edited. Since it is output-insensitive, our approach enables novel possibilities for (bi)-harmonic vector drawings such as instancing, layering, deformation, texture and environment mapping. Finally, in this paper we also generalize and extend the set of drawing possibilities. In particular, we show how to locally control vector gradients.