Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Possibility of Virtue

ABSTRACT: To have a virtue is to possess a certain kind of trait of character that is appropriate in pursuing the moral good at which the virtue aims. Human beings are assumed to be capable of attaining those traits. Yet, a number of scholars are skeptical about the very existence of such character traits. They claim a sizable amount of empirical evidence in their support. This article is concerned with the existence and explanatory power of character as a way to assess the possibility of achieving moral virtue, with particular attention paid to business context. I aim to unsettle the so-called situationist challenge to virtue ethics. In the course of this article, I shall defend four claims, namely, that virtues are more than just behavioral dispositions, that at least some virtues may not be unitary traits, that psychologists cannot infer virtues from overt behavior, and that the situationist data do not account for the observational equivalence of traits. Since it rests on a misconception of what virtue is, the situationist objection remains unconvincing.
Keyword spotting in singing with duration-modeled HMMs

Keyword spotting in speech is a very well-researched problem, but there are almost no approaches for singing. Most speech-based approaches cannot be applied easily to singing because the phoneme durations in singing vary a lot more than in speech, especially the vowel durations. To represent expected phoneme durations, several duration modeling techniques have been developed over the years in the field of ASR. To the best of our knowledge, these approaches have not been used for keyword spotting yet. In this paper, we present a new approach for keyword spotting in singing. We first extract various features (MFCC, TRAP, PLP, RASTA-PLP) and generate phoneme posteriograms from these features. We then perform keyword spotting on these posteriograms using keyword-filler HMMs and test two different duration modeling techniques on these HMMs: Explicit-duration modeling and Post-processor duration modeling. We evaluate our approach on a small singing data set without accompaniment.
Psychological Sex Type and Preferences for Musical Instruments in Fourth and Fifth Graders

Music education researchers have found biological sex to be in important determinant of whether elementary students persevere in musical instrument training. Psychological sex type may also play an important role. A sample of 108 students from two elementary schools completed the Children's Sex Role Inventory (Boldizar, 1991) and, following a presentation of nine typical band instruments, completed a survey assessing most- and least-preferred instruments. Results showed that masculine sex-typed students preferred, masculine-stereotyped instruments, feminine sex-typed students preferred feminine-stereotyped instruments, and androgynous students preferred neutral instruments. The converse pattern was obtained for least-preferred instruments, with the exception that androgynous children disliked both categories of sex-typed instruments. These results suggest that to enhance retention in musical instrument education, children's psychosocial identity ought to be considered.
Farmers Bargaining: Buying and Selling as a Subject in American Genre Painting, 1835-1868

This article uses genre painting as a data source for investigating the exchange activities of buyers and sellers in nineteenth-century America. Examples of this art are broken down into three subject categories (rural bargaining, itinerant peddlers, and African-American marketing exchange) and are examined in terms of their narrative content and artistic context. To better understand the sociocultural meaning of exchange during this period, four interpretive themes that cross the subject categories—social typing, retrospection, emotion, and morality are also considered.
Disruption of brain connectivity in acute stroke patients with early impairment in consciousness

Impairment in consciousness is common in acute stroke patients and is correlated with the clinical outcome after stroke. The underlying mechanism is not completely understood, with little known about brain activity and connectivity changes in acute stroke patients having impaired consciousness. In this study, we investigated changes in regional brain activity and brain networks of consciousness impaired stroke patients, as well as the amplitude of spontaneous low frequency fluctuation (ALFF) of each time series. Regional homogeneity (ReHo) of each voxel was measured, and resting state network analysis was consequently conducted. Results from this study demonstrate that, compared to normal subjects, the intensities of ALFF and ReHo, as well as the strength of the default mode network (DMN) connectivity, were significantly decreased in the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex regions among stroke patients with impaired consciousness. Furthermore, the strength of the DMN was highly correlated with differences in the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) scores between the onset time and the scanning time. Results from this study suggest that the resting state fMRI is a feasible tool for the evaluation of acute stroke patients with an early impairment of consciousness. The detailed mechanisms, implications of these brain activities and networks exhibiting changes will require further investigation.
OCSP for Grids: Comparing Prevalidation versus Caching

Nowadays the computational grid uses X.509 digital certificates for a wide variety of security-related tasks, ranging from user authentication to job execution's delegation. However to ensure a comprehensive security framework such credentials need to be validated so that revoked, suspended and any other compromised certificate will not be allowed to access grid resources. To achieve such tasks great interest is being given to the online certificate status protocol (OCSP) in security workgroups from the global grid forum. In order to better understand the special requirements related with its use in previous work we introduced the Open GRid Ocsp API (OGRO), which provides OCSP support to the Globus toolkit 4. However that research concluded that the grid introduces some special requisites for OCSP's performance and security. As a follow-up to that work, this paper provides a comprehensive performance comparison between the novel prevalidation and caching mechanisms proposed by the authors to further improve Grid-OCSP. In addition, research about security compliance of both mechanisms around the newest proxy revocation concept is also presented in this work
Sibling Cooperative and Externalizing Behaviors in Families Raising Children With Disabilities

BackgroundRaising a child with a disability (CWD) in the home is increasing across the globe. Because of caregiver burden and the complexity of care, there is growing concern for typically developing sibling (TDS) outcomes. ObjectiveThe aim of the study was to examine whether caregiver burden, parenting style, and sibling relationships in families raising a CWD are associated with cooperative and externalizing behaviors in TDS. MethodsThis correlational study included 189 families raising both a CWD and a TDS. Multilevel modeling was used to identify which variables were most predictive of TDS outcomes and if there were parent gender effects. ResultsAuthoritative parenting was positively associated with cooperative behaviors. Authoritarian parenting was positively associated with externalizing behaviors. Multilevel modeling revealed caregiver burden was a significant predictor of sibling behaviors in the first model. When parenting style was added as a predictor, it was also significant. When sibling relationships were added as predictors, they were significant predictors for both cooperative and externalizing TDS behaviors; however, caregiver burden was no longer significant. Authoritarian parenting significantly predicted externalizing behaviors, and authoritative parenting was significantly related to cooperative behaviors. DiscussionIn families raising a CWD, positive sibling relationships may help negate the effects of caregiver burden and are more predictive of TDS outcomes than some parenting practices.
Magnitude and Diversity of Cytotoxic-T-Lymphocyte Responses Elicited by Multiepitope DNA Vaccination in Rhesus Monkeys

ABSTRACT In an effort to develop an AIDS vaccine that elicits high-frequency cytotoxic-T-lymphocyte (CTL) responses with specificity for a diversity of viral epitopes, we explored two prototype multiepitope plasmid DNA vaccines in the simian-human immunodeficiency virus/rhesus monkey model to determine their efficiency in priming for such immune responses. While a simple multiepitope vaccine construct demonstrated limited immunogenicity in monkeys, this same multiepitope genetic sequence inserted into an immunogenic simian immunodeficiency virus gag DNA vaccine elicited high-frequency CTL responses specific for all of the epitopes included in the vaccine. Both multiepitope vaccine prototypes primed for robust epitope-specific CTL responses that developed following boosting with recombinant modified vaccinia virus Ankara vaccines expressing complete viral proteins. The natural hierarchy of immunodominance for these epitopes was clearly evident in the boosted monkeys. These studies suggest that multiepitope plasmid DNA vaccine-based prime-boost regimens can efficiently prime for CTL responses of increased breadth and magnitude, although they do not overcome predicted hierarchies of immunodominance.
A simple method for oxygen-18 determination of milligram quantities of water using NaHCO3 reagent.

This paper presents a modified H(2)O-CO(2) equilibration method for stable oxygen isotopic composition (delta(18)O) analysis of water. This method enables rapid and simple delta(18)O analysis of milligram quantities of water, by employing solid reagent NaHCO(3) as the CO(2) source, a small (0.6 mL) glass vial for the equilibration chamber, and an isotope-monitoring gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (irm-GC/MS) system for delta 18O(CO2) analysis. This method has several advantages, including simple handling for the H(2)O-CO(2) equilibration (without purging and/or evacuation treatments), rapid and easy delta(18)O analysis of equilibrated CO(2), and highly sensitive and highly precise delta(18)O analysis of H(2)O, using samples as small as 10 mg and with a precision of less than +/-0.12 per thousand. The time needed to attain oxygen isotopic equilibration between CO(2) and water is also comparable (17 h for 10 mg H(2)O and 10 h for 100 mg H(2)O) to other previous methods using CO(2) gas for the CO(2) source. The extent of delta(18)O variation of sample water from its initial delta(18)O value due to isotope exchange with added NaHCO(3) is also discussed. It is concluded that the correction needed is negligible (less than 0.1 per thousand ) as long as the oxygen atom ratio (O(NaHCO3)/O(H2O)) is less than 3.3 +/- 10(-3) and provided the delta18O(H2O) determination is made by comparing delta(18)O of CO(2) equilibrated with sample water and that equilibrated with standard water of a moderately close delta(18)O value, less than 30 per thousand difference.
CALEB Binds via Its Acidic Stretch to the Fibrinogen-like Domain of Tenascin-C or Tenascin-R and Its Expression Is Dynamically Regulated after Optic Nerve Lesion*

Recently, we described a novel chick neural transmembrane glycoprotein, which interacts with the extracellular matrix proteins tenascin-C and tenascin-R. This protein, termed CALEB, contains an epidermal growth factor-like domain and appears to be a novel member of the epidermal growth factor family of growth and differentiation factors. Here we analyze the interaction between CALEB and tenascin-C as well as tenascin-R in more detail, and we demonstrate that the central acidic peptide segment of CALEB is necessary to mediate this binding. The fibrinogen-like globe within tenascin-C or -R enables both proteins to bind to CALEB. We show that two isoforms of CALEB in chick and rodents exist that differed in their cytoplasmic segments. To begin to understand the in vivo function of CALEB and since in vitro antibody perturbation experiments indicated that CALEB might be important for neurite formation, we analyzed the expression pattern of the rat homolog of CALEB during development of retinal ganglion cells, after optic nerve lesion and during graft-assisted retinal ganglion cell axon regeneration byin situ hybridization. These investigations demonstrate that CALEB mRNA is dynamically regulated after optic nerve lesion and that this mRNA is expressed in most developing and in one-third of the few regenerating (GAP-43 expressing) retinal ganglion cells.
A Review of Gender Differences Among Substance Abusers

This article provides a review of various types of literature on gender differences among substance abusers. The authors begin this literature review by summarizing the literature on the differing treatment needs of men and women. The authors continue with a review of the empirically based literature on gender differences in background characteristics of substance users. They conclude with a review of treatment outcome studies. This review provides a context for identifying the gaps in the literature and identifies a research agenda that will help improve treatment services for women in both community-based and prison settings.
UniCrawl: A Practical Geographically Distributed Web Crawler

As the wealth of information available on the web keeps growing, being able to harvest massive amounts of data has become a major challenge. Web crawlers are the core components to retrieve such vast collections of publicly available data. The key limiting factor of any crawler architecture is however its large infrastructure cost. To reduce this cost, and in particular the high upfront investments, we present in this paper a geo-distributed crawler solution, UniCrawl. UniCrawl orchestrates several geographically distributed sites. Each site operates an independent crawler and relies on well-established techniques for fetching and parsing the content of the web. UniCrawl splits the crawled domain space across the sites and federates their storage and computing resources, while minimizing thee inter-site communication cost. To assess our design choices, we evaluate UniCrawl in a controlled environment using the ClueWeb12 dataset, and in the wild when deployed over several remote locations. We conducted several experiments over 3 sites spread across Germany. When compared to a centralized architecture with a crawler simply stretched over several locations, UniCrawl shows a performance improvement of 93.6% in terms of network bandwidth consumption, and a speedup factor of 1.75.
An analysis of magnetic resonance coupling effects on wireless power transfer by coil inductance and placement

This paper presents an analysis of magnetic resonance coupling effects that can be considered for realizing a wireless power transfer (WPT) system. In this study, numerical analysis is applied to investigate the power transfer characteristics affected by coil inductance and placement. The simulations and experiments, using various coils and positions, are conducted to find the optimum power transfer condition. The experiment shows that the frequency bandwidth of the wireless power transfer at the optimum coupling condition is enlarged to 0.73 MHz and the transfer efficiency is maintained at over 80%.
Fault-tolerant preparation of approximate GKP states

Gottesman–Kitaev–Preskill (GKP) states appear to be amongst the leading candidates for correcting errors when encoding qubits into oscillators. However the preparation of GKP states remains a significant theoretical and experimental challenge. Until now, no clear definitions for fault-tolerantly preparing GKP states have been provided. Without careful consideration, a small number of faults can lead to large uncorrectable shift errors. After proposing a metric to compare approximate GKP states, we provide rigorous definitions of fault-tolerance and introduce a fault-tolerant phase estimation protocol for preparing such states. The fault-tolerant protocol uses one flag qubit and accepts only a subset of states in order to prevent measurement readout errors from causing large shift errors. We then show how the protocol can be implemented using circuit QED. In doing so, we derive analytic expressions which describe the leading order effects of the nonlinear dispersive shift and Kerr nonlinearity. Using these expressions, we show that to mitigate the nonlinear dispersive shift and Kerr terms would require the protocol to be implemented on time scales four orders of magnitude longer than the time scales relevant to the protocol for physically motivated parameters. Despite these restrictions, we numerically show that a subset of the accepted states of the fault-tolerant phase estimation protocol maintain good error correcting capabilities even in the presence of noise.
AI based Direct Torque Fuzzy Control of AC Drives

Fuzzy logic is recently getting increasing emphasis in soft control applications. This paper presents an application of fuzzy logic to control the speed of an AC drive system is proposed for space vector pulse width modulated (SVPWM) voltage source inverter-fed induction motor drive. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the suitability of a Direct Torque Fuzzy Control (DTFC) method for an induction motor drive system. Direct torque control is known to produce quick and robust response in AC drive system. However during steady state, torque, flux and current ripple occurs. An improvement of the AC electric dive speed regulation can be obtained using a new DTFC method based on space vector modulation (SVM) which reduces the torque and flux ripples. To validate the proposed method, the simulation has been carried out using MATLAB-SIMULINK. Simulated results presented in this paper shown to have low current distortion, low torque ripple, and a fast torque and speed responses. The simulation results verify the superiority of the proposed method to the conventional DTC method.
Understanding Teacher Change: Revisiting the Concerns Based Adoption Model

The Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) is a widely applied theory and methodology for studying the process of implementing educational change by teachers and by persons acting in change-facilitating roles. A review of recent research associated with CBAM in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in the world reveals a curious absence of theoretical critique and development of the model since the mid-1980s. The article identifies promising directions for continued research and development on CBAM theory. The author argues that further theoretically motivated—not just applied—research is needed to refine the CBAM model and to enhance its relevance to understanding teacher and school-level responses to contemporary focuses of educational change.
Observations on the high foetal haemogobin gene and its interaction with the thalassaemia gene

A family of mixed Indian-Portuguese ancestry is reported in which there is a hereditary persistence of foetal haemoglobin and ,B-chain tbalassaemia. The propositus, a 17-year-old boy, was found to have a mild haemolytic anaemia characterized by slight splenomegaly, microcytosis, numerous target cells, decreased osmotic fragility, a veiy high level of foetal haemoglobin (75 %), and normal haemoglobin A2 level. Examination of 12 other members of the family showed the following: Three individuals (father, sister, and nephew) had high levels of foetal haemoglobin (25%) but without other clinical or haematological abnormalities. Two individuals (mother and sister) had the features of tbalassaemia trait with increased haemoglobin A2 and normal levels of foetal haemoglobin. The condition in the propositus appears to be the result of heterozygosity for a gene which is responsible for the hereditary persistence of foetal haemoglobin (high F gene) combined with heterozygosity for a f3-thalassaemia gene and provides further evidence for allelism of these genes. The possible genetic basis for the high F state and /3-chain thalassaemia is discussed.
Aplicaciones del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural en la Recuperación de Información en Español

La relacion entre Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural y Recuperacion de Informacion viene dada por la variacion linguistica del idioma, es decir, como un mismo concepto se puede expresar de formas diferentes mediante modificaciones en la expresion, constituyendo el principal problema en el ambito de la Recuperacion de Informacion, El objetivo de esta tesis es el desarrollo de tecnologia de base para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural y el estudio de la viabilidad de su aplicacion en sistemas de Recuperacion de Informacion sobre documentos en espanol. Si bien existen estudios similares para otras lenguas, con un claro dominio del ingles, el espanol ha quedado relegado frecuentemente a un segundo plano. Ademas, su mayor complejidad linguistica no permite una extrapolacion inmediata de los resultados obtenidos para el ingles, demandando la realizacion de experimentos especificos. Sin embargo, hemos tenido que hacer frente a la carencia de recursos linguisticos libremente accesibles para el espanol. Para ello se ha debido restringir la complejidad de las soluciones propuestas, centrandose en la utilizacion de informacion lexica, de obtencion mas sencilla. Ademas, para minimizar el coste computacional de cara a la aplicacion en entornos practicos, se ha hecho amplio uso de tecnologia de estado finito. En este contexto se ha desarrollado, en primer lugar, un preprocesador avanzado de base linguistica para la tokenizacion y segmentacion de textos. A nivel flexivo, se ha estudiado la utilizacion de la lematizacion en la normalizacion de terminos simples. A nivel derivativo, se ha desarrollado una herramienta de generacion automatica de familias morfologicas - conjuntos de palabras ligadas derivativamente y que comparten la misma raiz - para su empleo en la normalizacion de terminos simples.
Antibody targeting of B-cell maturation antigen on malignant plasma cells

B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) is expressed on normal and malignant plasma cells and represents a potential target for therapeutic intervention. BCMA binds to two ligands that promote tumor cell survival, a proliferation inducing ligand (APRIL) and B-cell activating factor. To selectively target BCMA for plasma cell malignancies, we developed antibodies with ligand blocking activity that could promote cytotoxicity of multiple myeloma (MM) cell lines as naked antibodies or as antibody-drug conjugates. We show that SG1, an inhibitory BCMA antibody, blocks APRIL–dependent activation of nuclear factor-κB in a dose-dependent manner in vitro. Cytotoxicity of SG1 was assessed as a naked antibody after chimerization with and without Fc mutations that enhance FcγRIIIA binding. The Fc mutations increased the antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity potency of BCMA antibodies against MM lines by ∼100-fold with a ≥2-fold increase in maximal lysis. As an alternative therapeutic strategy, anti-BCMA antibodies were endowed with direct cytotoxic activity by conjugation to the cytotoxic drug, monomethyl auristatin F. The most potent BCMA antibody-drug conjugate displayed IC50 values of ≤130 pmol/L for three different MM lines. Hence, BCMA antibodies show cytotoxic activity both as naked IgG and as drug conjugates and warrant further evaluation as therapeutic candidates for plasma cell malignancies. [Mol Cancer Ther 2007;6(11):3009–18]