Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
USING EMOTIONS: BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL FACTORS INFLUENCING EMOTION UNDERSTANDING AND ANTISOCIALITY

People are guided by their emotions which in turn are a consequence of their understanding of others’ emotion expressions. Their skills to read and accurately identify others’ emotion expressions are a key ingredient for good emotion understanding. That is, accurate emotion identification can be considered as the first frontier of successful emotion understanding, and as the first step of a sequence which results in empathic responding. Impairment within this sequence might mean that the way people respond to their environment may not be appropriate or even cause harm to others. Children and adolescents with callous-unemotional traits have difficulties reading emotional cues correctly, specifically those cues which show others in distress. Such an impairment is thought to underlie a distinct pathway to severe and stable antisocial behaviour. Conventional methods of curbing the antisocial behaviour of children with high callous-unemotional traits such as punishment or time-out do not have the desired effect. Instead, this group of individuals seems to respond well to parental warmth and sensitive responding. Given that children start to learn early how to read and respond to emotions in an empathic manner through interactions, parents have a potential role by intervening early to foster good emotional and social skills even in children with high callous-unemotional traits. Study 1 tested whether adolescent boys with high callous-unemotional traits exhibit an impairment that is specific to distress cues such as fear, sadness or pain as difficulties to recognise such cues in others may impair typical inhibition to behave in an antisocial manner. In Study 2, it was expected that successful parental scaffolding is dependent on parent’s own emotion understanding skills, and therefore, study 2 investigated ways in which parents can scaffold emotion understanding in typically developing children, e.g. through talking about others’ emotion states and through engaging children in mutual eye gaze. Study 3 examined the impact that varying levels of child callous-unemotional traits have on parent-child interaction. Specifically, it was of interest whether children with high callous-unemotional traits are willing to engage with their parents on an emotional level permitting successful parental scaffolding. Parental understanding of emotions was tested in terms of promoting parental sensitive responsiveness. In sum, there are three main points the present thesis contributed: first, findings of Study 1 and 3 support a theory of emotion processing impairment that is not specific to fear or sadness, but describe a broader impairment of a failure to engage with the emotional environment and attend to salient emotional stimuli. Second, this thesis confirms the value of studying callous-unemotional traits in adolescents and young children as well as their parents. Third, findings of Studies 2 and 3 support the important role parents play in the lives of their children with callous-unemotional traits, specifically through their own emotion understanding.
Recent progress in electrical impedance tomography

We consider the inverse problem of finding cavities within some body from electrostatic measurements on the boundary. By a cavity we understand any object with a different electrical conductivity from the background material of the body. We survey two algorithms for solving this inverse problem, namely the factorization method and a MUSIC-type algorithm. In particular, we present a number of numerical results to highlight the potential and the limitations of these two methods.
Fast Cloth Animation on Walking Avatars

This paper describes a fast technique for animating clothing on walking humans. It exploits a mass‐spring cloth model but applies a new velocity directional modification approach to overcome its super‐elasticity. The algorithm for cloth‐body collision detection and response is based on image‐space interference tests, unlike the existing ones that use object‐space checks. The modern workstations' graphics hardware is used not only to compute the depth maps of the body but also to interpolate the body normal vectors and velocities of each vertex. As a result the approach is very fast and makes it possible to produce animation at a rate of three to four frames per second.
Immersive Rendering of Coded Audio Streams Using Reduced Rank Models of Subband-Domain Head-Related Transfer Functions

We consider immersive rendering of a set of sound sources, apparently positioned at different locations in three-dimensional (3-D) space around a listener. Each sound source is associated with a subband-coded audio stream. A low-complexity rendering approach, based on reduced-rank models of subband-domain head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), is proposed in this paper. HRTFs are approximated using a set of basis vectors in subband-domain. Immersive rendering of partially decoded audio stream is performed in subband-domain using the basis vectors. Perceptual objective error measurements and subjective test results indicate, despite low computational complexity, this technique is effective in rendering of coded audio streams in 3-D space
African Perceptions of Female Attractiveness

Little is known about mate choice preferences outside Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies, even though these Western populations may be particularly unrepresentative of human populations. To our knowledge, this is the first study to test which facial cues contribute to African perceptions of African female attractiveness and also the first study to test the combined role of facial adiposity, skin colour (lightness, yellowness and redness), skin homogeneity and youthfulness in the facial attractiveness preferences of any population. Results show that youthfulness, skin colour, skin homogeneity and facial adiposity significantly and independently predict attractiveness in female African faces. Younger, thinner women with a lighter, yellower skin colour and a more homogenous skin tone are considered more attractive. These findings provide a more global perspective on human mate choice and point to a universal role for these four facial cues in female facial attractiveness.
Western Blotting Inaccuracies with Unverified Antibodies: Need for a Western Blotting Minimal Reporting Standard (WBMRS)

Western blotting is a commonly used technique in biological research. A major problem with Western blotting is not the method itself, but the use of poor quality antibodies as well as the use of different experimental conditions that affect the linearity and sensitivity of the Western blot. Investigation of some conditions that are commonly used and often modified in Western blotting, as well as some commercial antibodies, showed that published articles often fail to report critical parameters needed to reproduce the results. These parameters include the amount of protein loaded, the blocking solution and conditions used, the amount of primary and secondary antibodies used, the antibody incubation solutions, the detection method and the quantification method utilized. In the present study, comparison of ubiquitinated proteins in rat heart and liver samples showed different results depending on the antibody utilized. Validation of five commercial ubiquitin antibodies using purified ubiquitinated proteins, ubiquitin chains and free ubiquitin showed that these antibodies differ in their ability to detect free ubiquitin or ubiquitinated proteins. Investigating proteins modified with interferon-stimulated gene 15 (ISG15) in young and old rat hearts using six commercially available antibodies showed that most antibodies gave different semi-quantitative results, suggesting large variability among antibodies. Evidence showing the importance of the Western blot buffer and the concentration of antibody used is presented. Hence there is a critical need for comprehensive reporting of experimental conditions to improve the accuracy and reproducibility of Western blot analysis. A Western blotting minimal reporting standard (WBMRS) is suggested to improve the reproducibility of Western blot analysis.
Querying concepts in product data by means of query expansion

The Web has become the primary source of information containing both structured and unstructured information. A good example is e-commerce where products are usually described by technical specifications structured data and textual user reviews unstructured data. Both sources of information complement each other, covering quantifiable as well as perceived aspects of each product. In fact, for most searches users will have more or less abstract concepts in mind, as opposed to clear cut categorical information. In this paper, we develop a novel approach to reveal implicit product features for querying, by combining structured product data with natural-language product reviews. Using a self-supervised learning technique we progressively build a query-aware representation of the product domain under consideration. This representation can then effectively be used for intuitive querying. We performed extensive experiments confirming the effectiveness of our approach over real world product data. In particular, our evaluations show vastly improved precision and recall over the respective IR techniques.
The seductive appeal of thin clients

Interest in thin clients is very high today because of frustration with the growing total cost of ownership of personal computers. Unfortunately, thin clients may not meet the usability goal of crisp interactive response. This paper shows that the adequacy of thin-client computing is highly variable, and depends on both the application and the available network quality. For intensely interactive applications, the tight control of end-to-end network latency required by thin clients may be hard to guarantee at large scale. The paper advocates the concept of stateless thick clients, and describes how they may reduce total cost of ownership while preserving good interactive performance. This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant numbers ANI-0081396 and CCR0205266, and by the Intel Corporation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF, the Intel Corporation or Carnegie Mellon University. All unidentified trademarks mentioned in the paper are properties of their respective owners. University. f. ^V;
Distance based neighbor correlation for the segmentation

This paper introduces the segmentation of point cloud with the distance-based connectivity that is originated from the connectivity of local convexity criterion to enhance its accuracy and singularity [1]. The proposed feature is applied to calculate the weighted normal vector and to partition ground and objects respectively through integrating it with other features. The performances of segmentations with the introduced criterion are demonstrated with the labeled simulation data and the real data from 3D LIDAR compared to the original connectivity.
Investigating Guiding Attributes in Visual Search for Medication Vials

Medical professionals must select from a vast array of medication vials to dispense the correct medication to a patient. The vials are often small and highly similar, potentially increasing the chance of committing a medical error. Over 400,000 people die every year due to medical errors according to recent studies; a third of which are thought to be medication related. We studied the visual characteristics of medication vial labels to identify properties leading to the fastest and most accurate search. In a visual search task, participants located a target vial among an array of similar looking vials whose labels varied along a set of specific attributes (color density, text size, and text orientation). Response time and accuracy data indicate that participants were faster and more accurate at finding vials with high color density and vertical text orientation, with the exception that when the text was large, there was no significant difference between these factors. Our research indicates that guiding attributes previously identified in basic visual search studies do in fact predict performance in search for medication vials.
Low-Power Saturated Arithmetic and its Application in VLSI Architectures for OFDM Modems

The impact or a modified saturated arithmetic on power dissipation and signal quality produced by building blocks of a multicarrier modem is studied in this paper. The proposed simplified saturation scheme is shown to significantly reduce the switching activity of the arithmetic circuits, while it requires reduced hardware complexity for its implementation. Power estimation of synthesized circuits reveals power savings of up to 20%, depending on signal quality. The proposed saturation scheme is shown to moderately increase the power of noise, therefore leaving signal quality practically unaffected. The applicability of the proposed saturation is demonstrated by quantifying signal noise power behavior for various types of digital filters and radix-2 FFT structures suitable for OFDM modems
Moment explosions in stochastic volatility models

In this paper, we demonstrate that many stochastic volatility models have the undesirable property that moments of order higher than 1 can become infinite in finite time. As arbitrage-free price computation for a number of important fixed income products involves forming expectations of functions with super-linear growth, such lack of moment stability is of significant practical importance. For instance, we demonstrate that reasonably parametrized models can produce infinite prices for Eurodollar futures and for swaps with floating legs paying either Libor-in-arrears or a constant maturity swap rate. We systematically examine the moment explosion property across a spectrum of stochastic volatility models. We show that lognormal and displaced-diffusion type models are easily prone to moment explosions, whereas CEV-type models (including the so-called SABR model) are not. Related properties such as the failure of the martingale property are also considered.
Transformation of TCP-Net Queries into Preference Database Queries

TCP-nets are a popular approach within the AI community for preference handling. Concurrently, within the database community lots of work has been done to integrate preference handling into database query languages like Preference SQL, building on a variety of preference constructors under a strict partial order semantics. Moreover, many sophisticated algebraic optimization techniques and preference query evaluation algorithms have been developed there. This paper attempts to build a bridge between these two disciplines. We show how to systematically transform TCPnet queries into database preference queries, introducing a special ceteris-paribus embedding preference constructor. Moreover, this transformation opens up options to enhance the expressiveness of TCP-nets. On the other hand, it forms a basis for future studies of advanced TCP-net optimization techniques that can benefit from known results for preference query optimization in database systems.
A Final Case Study of SCALE Activities at UW-Madison: The Influence of Institutional Context on a K-20 STEM Education Change Initiative. WCER Working Paper No. 2008-6.

Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that the above copyright notice appears on all copies. (2008). A final case study of SCALE activities at UW-Madison: The influence of institutional context on a K–20 STEM education change initiative The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the University of Wisconsin–Madison (EHR 0227016) for a Mathematics and Science Partnership project called System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators of Wisconsin–Madison. Any opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies, WCER, or cooperating institutions. Executive Summary The enduring lesson from SCALE activities at UW-Madison is that efforts to change the culture of teaching and learning in STEM departments should focus on illuminating and then shifting the pervasive cultural schemas that faculty hold for teaching and learning. One strategy for doing so is to create officially sanctioned venues where individuals from different disciplinary backgrounds are led by a skilled facilitator or " culture broker " to focus on commonly shared pedagogy-related challenges. Leaders would benefit from being aware of and sensitive to the deeply entrenched nature of cultural schemas and their embeddedness in the local institution. Institutions of higher education (IHEs) play an important role in math and science education by offering undergraduate instruction, operating teacher training programs, and providing in-service training for K–12 teachers. The National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded System-wide Change for All Learners and Education (SCALE) project sought to effect change in its partner IHEs by creating a transformative culture through cross-cultural working teams that operated at the intersections among K–12 districts, colleges of education, and colleges of mathematics, science, and engineering (SCALE, 2005). The SCALE goals for IHEs are as follows: 1. To improve science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate education; 2. To improve collaboration between STEM and education faculty on preservice programs; 3. To improve collaboration between IHE faculty and K–12 districts on in-service training; and 4. To improve institutional policies and practices that support these activities. As part of the SCALE IHE case studies line of work, this paper provides findings on the effects of the SCALE project at the cross-case analysis of the three IHE case studies will develop a diagnostic approach to evaluating STEM education interventions in complex organizations, with a particular …
Methodological Aspects and Case Studies of Business Intelligence Application Tools in Knowledge Management as Corporation’s Strategy Development

The study shows the evaluation of the conducted research and analysis regarding the methodology and case study of Business Intelligence application tools as part of the co-operation between science and organizations. As an example of Business Intelligence proficiency there are chose two representative companies from the region of Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Poland. The area of expertise of the first company is related to train and trams production, second is active in Information Technology services. There are also two areas of possible co-operation between science and business. The first one is preparing future employees by means of training them on post-graduate studies. The second area is using information regarding the effectiveness of the ERP system, obtained through questionnaires, by the management of a developing organization. In the paper there is also underlined the difficulties related to implementation of ERP system. The use of these solutions provides access to any personally identifiable information to a variety of information to enable an assessment of the impact of the parameters identified in the information system on the effectiveness of the company's operations.
An Aspect–Oriented Approach based on Multiparty Interactions to Specifying the Behaviour of a System

Isolating computation and coordination concerns into separate pure computation and pure coordination enhances modularity, understandability and reusability of parallel and/or distributed software. This can be achieved by moving interaction primitives, which are now commonly scattered in programs, into separate modules written in a language aimed at coordinating objects and expressing how information flows among them. The usual model for coordination is the client/server model, but it is not adequate when several objects need to collaborate simultaneously in order to solve a problem because natural multiparty interactions need to be decomposed into a set of low–level, binary interactions. In this paper, we introduce CAL, an IP–based language for the description of the coordination aspect of a system. We show that it can be successfully described in terms of simple multiparty interactions that can be animated and are also amenable to formal reasoning.
Detection of extragalactic H3O

Context. The H3O+ molecule probes the oxygen chemistry and the ionization rate of dense circumnuclear gas in galaxies. Aims. Recent H3O+ observations show variations in the cosmic-ray ionization rate, by factors of >10 within our Galaxy. Methods. Using the JCMT, we have observed the 364 GHz line of p-H3O+ in the centers of M 82 and Arp 220. Results. In Arp 220, the line profile suggests that the emission originates in the Western nucleus. In M 82, both the eastern molecular peak and the circumnuclear region contribute to the emission. The derived column densities, abundances, and H3O+/H2O ratios indicate ionization rates similar to or even exceeding that in the Galactic Center. Conclusions. Model calculations of the chemistry of irradiated molecular gas indicate a likely origin of this high ionization rate in the extended, evolved starburst of M 82. In contrast, irradiation by X-rays from the AGN disk is the most likely model for Arp 220.
Multiobjective Clustering with Metaheuristic Optimization Technology

We develop a metaheuristic procedure for multiobjective clustering problems. Our goal is to find good approximations of the efficient frontier for this class of problems and provide a means for improving decision making in multiple areas of application and in particular those related to marketing. The procedure is based on the tabu and scatter search methodologies. Clustering problems have been the subject of numerous studies; however, most of the work has focused on single-objective problems. Clustering using multiple criteria and/or multiple data sources has received limited attention in the OR and marketing literature. Our procedure is general and tackles several problems classes within this area of combinatorial data analysis. We conduct extensive experimentation with both artificial and real data (in a marketing-segmentation problem) to show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.
Effect of subinhibitory concentrations of four commonly used biocides on the conjugative transfer of Tn916 in Bacillus subtilis

Objectives Large amounts of biocides are used to reduce and control bacterial growth in the healthcare sector, food production and agriculture. This work explores the effect of subinhibitory concentrations of four commonly used biocides (ethanol, hydrogen peroxide, chlorhexidine digluconate and sodium hypochlorite) on the conjugative transposition of the mobile genetic element Tn916. Methods Conjugation assays were carried out between Bacillus subtilis strains. The donor containing Tn916 was pre-exposed to subinhibitory concentrations of each biocide for a defined length of time, which was determined by an analysis of the transcriptional response of the promoter upstream of tet(M) using β-glucuronidase reporter assays. Results Ethanol significantly (P = 0.01) increased the transfer of Tn916 by 5-fold, whereas hydrogen peroxide, chlorhexidine digluconate and sodium hypochlorite did not significantly affect the transfer frequency. Conclusions These results suggest that exposure to subinhibitory concentrations of ethanol may induce the transfer of Tn916-like elements and any resistance genes they contain.