Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Moderating effect of religiosity on the relationship between social isolation and psychological well-being

It is known that social isolation is negatively associated to psychological well-being. Hence, it is imperative to identify factors that may moderate this association. This study aimed to examine the moderating effect of religiosity on the relationship between social isolation and psychological well-being among a sample of 1415 community-dwelling older Malay Muslims age 60 years and over. The data for this study came from a national survey entitled Patterns of Social Relationship and Psychological Well Being among Older Persons in Peninsular Malaysia, which was conducted using a cross-sectional research design. Three scales namely WHO-5 Well being Index, Revised Intrinsic Extrinsic Religiosity Scale, and Lubben Social Network Scale were utilised to measure psychological well-being, religiosity, and social isolation, respectively. A four-step moderated hierarchical regression analysis using SPSS (version-13) was employed to test moderating effect of religiosity. The results of this study demonstrated that religiosity significantly moderates relationship between social isolation and psychological well-being, after controlling for age, sex, marital status, level of education, employment status, household income, and place of residence. Based on the findings from this study, the possible educational and therapeutic implications are discussed.
Building the Ninapro database: A resource for the biorobotics community

This paper is about (self-powered) advanced hand prosthetics and their control via surface electromyography (sEMG). We hereby introduce to the biorobotics community the first version of the Ninapro database, containing kinematic and sEMG data from the upper limbs of 27 intact subjects while performing 52 finger, hand and wrist movements of interest. The setup and experimental protocol are distilled from existing literature and thoroughly described; the data are then analysed and the results are discussed. In particular, it is clear that standard analysis techniques are no longer enough when so many subjects and movements are taken into account. The database is publicly available to download in standard ASCII format. The database is an ongoing work lasting several years, which is planned to contain data from more than 100 intact subjects and 50 trans-radial amputees; characteristics of the amputations, phantom limbs and prosthesis usage will be stored. We therefore hope that it will constitute a standard, widely accepted benchmark for all novel myoelectric hand prosthesis control methods, as well as a fundamental tool to deliver insight into the needs of trans-radial amputees.
A New Technique for INS/GNSS Attitude and Parameter Estimation Using Online Optimization

Integration of inertial navigation system (INS) and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is usually implemented in engineering applications by way of Kalman-like filtering. This form of INS/GNSS integration is prone to attitude initialization failure, especially when the host vehicle is moving freely. This paper proposes an online constrained-optimization method to simultaneously estimate the attitude and other related parameters including GNSS antenna's lever arm and inertial sensor biases. This new technique benefits from self-initialization in which no prior attitude or sensor measurement noise information is required. Numerical results are reported to validate its effectiveness and prospect in high accurate INS/GNSS applications.
Language Testing; The Problem of Validation.

Foreign-language tests fall naturally into two classes according to the purposes for which they are used. In the first class are tests used for the control of instruction. They are the concern of the classroom teacher who wishes to find out how effective his teaching and the students' learning have been or to discover what needs to be taught. The second class are tests used in the control of a person's career. Used by administrators or counsellors, they are intended to help make decisions about someone's qualifications for a given task or about the type of training he should follow. Each of these classes may be further divided according to the temporal relation of the test to its goal. Tests of the first class concerned with testing what has been taught are achievement tests; those concerned with what is about to be taught are diagnostic tests. Tests of the second class concerned with what the subject can do now are achievement tests; those concerned with what he should be able to do in the future are predictive tests. But this temporal distinction is less important than the major functional one; exactly the same test can serve as a diagnostic test before
Cooperative localization with information-seeking control

We propose a Bayesian method for cooperative localization and control in mobile agent networks. Distributed, cooperative self-localization of each agent is supported by an information-seeking control of the movement of the agents. For cooperative localization, the SPAWN message passing scheme is used. Cooperative control is achieved by maximizing the negative joint posterior entropy of the agent states via a gradient ascent. The localization part of our method provides the control part with sample-based probabilistic information. Simulation results demonstrate intelligent behavior of the agents and excellent localization accuracy.
CL Research Experiments in TREC-10 Question Answering

CL Research's question-answering system (DIMAP-QA) for TREC-10 only slightly extends its semantic relation triple (logical form) technology in which documents are fully parsed and databases built around discourse entities. Time constraints did not allow us to make various changes planned from TREC-9. TREC-10 changes made fuller use of the integrated machine-readable lexical resources and extended the question-answering capability to handle list and context questions. Experiments to further exploit the dictionary resources were not fully completed at the time of the TREC-10 submission, affecting planned revisions in other QA components.
Game Theory: Can it Unify the Social Sciences?

Social theorists from many different fields have hailed Game Theory as a framework that can unify the social sciences on a bedrock of mathematical reasoning, which relegates all previous attempts to provide a unifying framework for economics, political science, anthropology, organization theory etc. to social science's prehistory. After discussing in detail the five crucial theorems on which such claims are based, this paper assesses critically: (a) Game Theory's main results, and (b) the extent to which Game Theory offers a common method that can, potentially, unify the social sciences.
Plant developmental biologists meet on stairways in Matera

The third EMBO Conference on Plant Molecular Biology, which focused on ‘Plant development and environmental interactions’, was held in May 2012 in Matera, Italy. Here, we review some of the topics and themes that emerged from the various contributions; namely, steering technologies, transcriptional networks and hormonal regulation, small RNAs, cell and tissue polarity, environmental control and natural variation. We intend to provide the reader who might have missed this remarkable event with a glimpse of the recent progress made in this blossoming research field.
Homing of annexin-labeled stem cells to apoptotic cells

Ischemic diseases are characterized by the presence of pro-apoptotic stimuli, which initiate a cascade of processes that lead to cell injury and death. Several molecules and events represent detectable indicators of the different stages of apoptosis. Among these indicators is phosphatidylserine (PS) translocation from the inner to the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane, which can be detected by annexinV (ANXA5) conjugation. This is a widely used in vivo and in vitro assay marking the early stages of apoptosis. We report here on an original method that employs PS-ANXA5 conjugation to target stem cells to apoptotic cells. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from GFP-positive transgenic rats were biotinylated on membrane surfaces with sulfosuccinimidyl-6-(biotinamido) hexanoate (sulfo-NHS-LC-biot) and then bound to avidin. The avidin-biotinylated MSCs were labeled with biotin conjugated ANXA5. Bovine aortic endothelial cells (BAE-1 cells) were exposed to UVC to induce caspasedependent apoptosis. Finally, we tested the ability of ANXA5-labeled MSCs to bind BAE-1 apoptotic cells: suspended ANXA5-labeled MSCs were seeded for 1 hour on a monolayer of UV-treated or control BAE-1 cells. After washing, the number of MSCs bound to BAE-1 cells was evaluated by confocal microscopy. Statistical analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the number of MSCs tagged to apoptotic BAE-1 cells. Therefore, stem cell ANXA5 tagging via biotin-avidin bridges could be a straightforward method of improving homing to apoptotic tissues.
Noise and Metadata Sensitive Bottleneck Features for Improving Speaker Recognition with Non-Native Speech Input

Recently, text independent speaker recognition systems with phonetically-aware DNNs, which allow the comparison among different speakers with “soft-aligned” phonetic content, have significantly outperformed standard i-vector based systems [912]. However, when applied to speaker recognition on a nonnative spontaneous corpus, DNN-based speaker recognition does not show its superior performance due to the relatively lower accuracy of phonetic content recognition. In this paper, noise-aware features and multi-task learning are investigated to improve the alignment of speech feature frames into the subphonemic “senone” space and to “distill” the L1 (native language) information of the test takers into bottleneck features (BNFs), which we refer to as metadata sensitive BNFs. Experimental results show that the system with metadata sensitive BNFs can improve speaker recognition performance by a 23.9% relative reduction in equal error rate (EER) compared to the baseline i-vector system. In addition, L1 info is just used to train the BNFs extractor, so it is not necessary to be used as input for BNFs extraction, i-vector extraction and scoring for the enrollment and evaluation sets, which can avoid the use of erroneous L1s claimed by imposters.
Human protein reference database as a discovery resource for proteomics

The rapid pace at which genomic and proteomic data is being generated necessitates the development of tools and resources for managing data that allow integration of information from disparate sources. The Human Protein Reference Database (http://www.hprd.org) is a web-based resource based on open source technologies for protein information about several aspects of human proteins including protein-protein interactions, post-translational modifications, enzyme-substrate relationships and disease associations. This information was derived manually by a critical reading of the published literature by expert biologists and through bioinformatics analyses of the protein sequence. This database will assist in biomedical discoveries by serving as a resource of genomic and proteomic information and providing an integrated view of sequence, structure, function and protein networks in health and disease.
HOMS: An Internet Media Distribution System Based on Overlay Multicast

A novel Internet media distribution system based on overlay multicast was studied and implemented. In the system, the nodes build the multicast route with a tree-first strategy and maintain the topology with an active strategy. In order to run the routing and topology algorithm effectively, a series of messages and protocols are designed as the core in the system. The implementation of the multicast system is object-oriented and modular. The experiments on Planet Lab in which the end hosts are all over the world have shown that, the system can construct and maintain the overlay multicast tree efficiently, and can also distribute the real-time streaming audio with high scalability.
Adaptive Structured Pooling for Action Recognition

We propose an adaptive structured pooling strategy to solve the action recognition problem in videos. Our method aims at individuating several spatio-temporal pooling regions each corresponding to a consistent spatial and temporal subset of the video. Each of them gives a pooling weight map and is represented as a Fisher vector computed from the soft weighted contributions of all dense trajectories evolving in it. We further represent each video through a graph structure, defined over multiple granularities of spatio-temporal subsets. The graph structures extracted from all videos are compared with an efficient graph matching kernel.
Johnson 2: Knowledge goes to Hollywood

Abstract This paper evaluates Tom Johnson's analysis of the causes of American uncompetitiveness which leads him now to recommend TOM where previously he endorsed the reform of management accounting. It argues that, although the prescriptions change, Johnson's early and late work is unified by a set of assumptions and assertions which identify management calculation as the major cause of US uncompetitiveness. The article then challenges this identification by presenting case study evidence on the US and Japanese car industries which establishes the importance of structural variables, especially differences in wage costs.
T-cell activation is required for efficient replication of human herpesvirus 6

We have investigated whether T-cell activation is required for the replication of the T-lymphotropic human herpesvirus 6. The virus did not replicate in quiescent peripheral blood lymphocytes but replicated efficiently following exposure of the cells to the polyclonal mitogen phytohemagglutinin (PHA). When purified T cells were treated with PHA in the absence of accessory cells, no virus replication was observed unless exogenous interleukin-2 (IL-2) was added to the medium, promoting cell division. Incubation of peripheral blood lymphocytes in the absence of PHA but in the presence of IL-2 resulted in delayed cell blastogenesis and virus replication. Cell blastogenesis and virus replication did not occur in the purified T-cell cultures incubated with IL-2 alone. Taken together, the results show that human herpesvirus 6 replication requires full progression of the cell cycle. This finding might have implications for the pathogenicity of the virus in the human host.
Stability of dynamical systems

A new definition of the stability of ordinary differential equations is proposed as an alternative to structural stability. It is particularly aimed at dissipative nonlinear systems, including those with chaos or strange attractors. The definition is as follows. Given a vector field nu on an oriented manifold X, and given epsilon <0, let u be the steady state of the Fokker-Planck equation for nu with epsilon -diffusion. The existence, uniqueness and global attraction of u is proved in the case when X is compact (in the non-compact case a suitable boundary condition on nu is required for the existence of u). Vector fields are defined to be equivalent, or stable, according to whether their steady states are. A similar theory is developed for diffeomorphisms. The new definition has a number of advantages over structural stability. Stable systems are dense, and therefore most strange attractors are stable, including non-hyperbolic ones. The equivalence extends the Thom classification of gradient systems to non-gradient systems. The theory is closely related to applications, because the steady state u is an epsilon -smoothing of the measure on the attractors of the flow of nu , and therefore in numerical and physical experiments u can be used to model the data with epsilon -error.
Performance of Virtual Full-Duplex Relaying on Cooperative Multi-path Relay Channels

We consider a cooperative multi-path relay channel (MPRC) where multiple half-duplex relays assist in the packet transmissions from a source to its destination. A virtual full-duplex (FD) relaying scheme is proposed that allows the source to transmit a new packet simultaneously with the selected best relay, with the rest of the relays attempting to decode this new packet. Thus, a new source packet can be served in each time slot, as in FD relay systems. Taking into account the effect of inter-relay interference (IRI) that is caused by simultaneous relay and source transmissions, a Markov chain analytical model is used to characterize the decoding performance at the relays, based on which the overall outage probability of MPRC is obtained in closed-form expressions. The asymptotic performance analysis reveals that in low rate scenarios, a close-to-full diversity order is achieved by the proposed scheme while substantially improving the spectrum efficiency. In high rate scenarios, the decoding performance of relays is limited by IRI and the system outage performance experiences an error floor. Simulation results demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed scheme by comparisons with existing half-duplex and FD relay systems in the literature.
The effect of dry shear aligning of nanotube thin films on the photovoltaic performance of carbon nanotube–silicon solar cells

Recent results in the field of carbon nanotube–silicon solar cells have suggested that the best performance is obtained when the nanotube film provides good coverage of the silicon surface and when the nanotubes in the film are aligned parallel to the surface. The recently developed process of dry shear aligning – in which shear force is applied to the surface of carbon nanotube thin films in the dry state, has been shown to yield nanotube films that are very flat and in which the surface nanotubes are very well aligned in the direction of shear. It is thus reasonable to expect that nanotube films subjected to dry shear aligning should outperform otherwise identical films formed by other processes. In this work, the fabrication and characterisation of carbon nanotube–silicon solar cells using such films is reported, and the photovoltaic performance of devices produced with and without dry shear aligning is compared.
A General Iterative Regularization Framework For Image Denoising

Many existing techniques for image denoising can be expressed in terms of minimizing a particular cost function. We address the problem of denoising images in a novel way by iteratively refining the cost function. This allows us some control over the tradeoff between the bias and variance of the image estimate. The result is an improvement in the mean-squared error as well as the visual quality of the estimate. We consider four different methods of updating the cost function and compare and contrast them. The framework presented here is extendable to a very large class of image denoising and reconstruction methods. The framework is also easily extendable to deblurring and inversion as we briefly demonstrate. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is illustrated on a variety of examples.
Role of Stoichiometry in the Dimer-Stabilizing Effect of AMPA Receptor Allosteric Modulators

Protein dimerization provides a mechanism for the modulation of cellular signaling events. In α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole-propionic acid (AMPA) receptors, the rapidly desensitizing, activated state has been correlated with a weakly dimeric, glutamate-binding domain conformation. Allosteric modulators can form bridging interactions that stabilize the dimer interface. While most modulators can only bind to one position with a one modulator per dimer ratio, some thiazide-based modulators can bind to the interface in two symmetrical positions with a two modulator per dimer ratio. Based on small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) experiments, dimerization curves for the isolated glutamate-binding domain show that a second modulator binding site produces both an increase in positive cooperativity and a decrease in the EC50 for dimerization. Four body binding equilibrium models that incorporate a second dimer-stabilizing ligand were developed to fit the experimental data. The work illustrates why stoichiometry should be an important consideration during the rational design of dimerizing modulators.
Mediation by Protein Kinases C and A of Go-Linked Slow Responses of Enteric Neurons to 5-HT

5-HT activates the peristaltic reflex and is the neurotransmitter of a subset of myenteric interneurons. Hyperpolarizing afterpotential (AH)/type 2 neurons respond to 5-HT with a long-lived depolarization that is caused by the inhibition of a Ca2+-activated K+ conductance (gKCa). This effect is mediated by a G-protein-coupled receptor, 5-HT1P. 5-HT1P agonists specifically activate Gαo, the immunoreactivity of which was found to be highly abundant and membrane-associated in almost all enteric neurons. Responses of hyperpolarizing AH/type 2 neurons to 5-HT were inhibited by intracellular injection of GDPβS or anti-Gαo Fab fragments but were potentiated and prolonged by intracellular GTPγS. Responses to 5-HT were antagonized by pertussis toxin, downregulation of protein kinase C (PKC) and inhibitors of phosphatidylcholine phospholipase C (PC-PLC), PKC (including pseudosubstrate peptides, chelerythrine, and the α/β isoform-specific inhibitor Gö 6976), protein kinase A (PKA), and adenylate cyclase. Responses to 5-HT were mimicked by activators of PKC, and 5-HT induced a concentration-dependent increase in the membrane-associated PKC activity in isolated myenteric ganglia. Immunocytochemical studies suggested that the most abundant isoforms of PKC in enteric neurons are α and δ. These data suggest that signal transduction of the 5-HT1P-mediated slow response to 5-HT involves activation of PC-PLC by Gαo to liberate diacylglycerol, which stimulates PKC (most likely α). PKC probably activates adenylate cyclase, which through cAMP, activates PKA. Activation of both PKA and PKC lead to closure of gKCa.
High-efficiency quasi-two-stage converter with current sharing for multi-channel LED driver

In this paper, a novel active current sharing method for multi-LED driver based on quasi-two-stage converter is proposed. In the presented structure, the DC/DC converter that operates current-loop regulation only processes a small portion of the total power. By employing the partial power control, high efficiency and low cost can be achieved due to the low voltage stress, high switching frequency and smaller size of passive components. Compared with passive method to achieve current balancing among the multi-output LED strings, the active method is simpler to control and has better load adaptability. Performance of the proposed scheme is validated by the experimental results from an 80W prototype with four LED strings.