Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of foster care on Hispanic/Latino foster mothers' marital relationship

This research project surveyed Los Angeles County licensed Hispanic/Latino Spanish speaking foster mothers to assess the impact of foster care services on their marital relationship and its effects on the foster mother's role. Among the areas explored in this project were the Hispanic/Latino women self-perception, the fluctuation of Latino women's dependency, and the level of marital satisfaction expressed by foster mothers after starting providing foster care service. The author developed an objective quantitative closed-ended survey questionnaire, the marital re-definition scale (COPE), which name derived from the researcher last name (Copenhaguen). This instrument was used to test the hypothesis and the data was scored by summing the items it contained. The sample of this study was composed by 30 Hispanic/Latino Spanish speaking licensed foster mothers who ranged in age from 26 to 67 years. Findings indicate that the areas that most impact the foster mother's marital relationship are: improved education and personal independence, participation in out of home activities, and increased marital changes after fostering. The results of this study demonstrate the need
A review of mentoring guidance for students on the autism spectrum

This paper reflects upon the initial stages of a project being conducted at London South Bank University (LSBU) regarding mentoring for young adults who are on the autism spectrum, locating problematic issues with current guidance, before giving an overview of the proposed project and its methodology. Much guidance that has been written for preparing and supporting people on the autism spectrum in post-compulsory education has been done so from a clinician’s perspective (VanBergeijk et al. 2008, Gelbar et al. 2014). Where there are some possibly valuable insights in such accounts, they would be open to criticism by a number of autistic scholars and activists (Milton, 2012a, 2014). Upon review of current practice guidance, this project will offer an alternative to student mentoring guided by the Personal Construct Theory (PCT) of George Kelly (1955).
Evaluation of Human Amniotic Membrane as a Wound Dressing for Split-Thickness Skin-Graft Donor Sites

Human amniotic membrane (HAM) has been used as a biomaterial in various surgical procedures and exceeds some qualities of common materials. We evaluated HAM as wound dressing for split-thickness skin-graft (STSG) donor sites in a swine model (Part A) and a clinical trial (Part B). Part A: STSG donor sites in 4 piglets were treated with HAM or a clinically used conventional polyurethane (PU) foil (n = 8 each). Biopsies were taken on days 5, 7, 10, 20, 40, and 60 and investigated immunohistochemically for alpha-smooth muscle actin (αSMA: wound contraction marker), von Willebrand factor (vWF: angiogenesis), Ki-67 (cell proliferation), and laminin (basement membrane integrity). Part B: STSG donor sites in 45 adult patients (16 female/29 male) were treated with HAM covered by PU foam, solely by PU foam, or PU foil/paraffin gauze (n = 15 each). Part A revealed no difference in the rate of wound closure between groups. HAM showed improved esthetic results and inhibitory effects on cicatrization. Angioneogenesis was reduced, and basement membrane formation was accelerated in HAM group. Part B: no difference in re-epithelialization/infection rate was found. HAM caused less ichor exudation and less pruritus. HAM has no relevant advantage over conventional dressings but might be a cost-effective alternative.
Super-fusion: a super-resolution method based on fusion

Reconstruction-based super-resolution algorithms require very accurate alignment and good choice of filters to be effective. Often these requirements are hard to satisfy, for example, when we adopt optical flow as the motion model. In addition, the condition of having enough sub-samples may vary from pixel to pixel. We propose an alternative super-resolution method based on image fusion (called super-fusion hereafter). Image fusion has been proven to be effective in many applications. Extending image fusion to super-resolve images, we show that super-fusion is a faster alternative that imposes less requirements and is more stable than traditional super-resolution methods.
Threshold Optimization with a Small Number of Samples in Adaptive Information Filtering

One special challenge in adaptive information filtering is the problem of extremely sparse data. So it is very important to learn optimal threshold while filtering the input textual stream. In this paper, an algorithm is presented for the threshold optimization. The algorithm learns fast by using few positive samples. Moreover, most of the quantities the algorithm requires can be updated incrementally, so its memory and computational power requirements are low. It also has the merits of effective, robust, and practically useful. Fudan University’s adaptive text filtering system used this algorithm for the first time and came in third in all runs of TREC10. Its T10U and T10F are 0.215 and 0.414 respectively.
Application-driven cross-layer optimization for mobile multimedia communication using a common application layer quality metric

This paper proposes a cross-layer optimization framework that provides efficient allocation of wireless network resources across multiple types of applications to maximize network capacity and user satisfaction. We define a novel optimization scheme based on the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as the unifying metric. Our experiments, applied to scenarios where users simultaneously run three types of applications, such as realtime voice, video conferencing and file download, confirm that MOS-based optimization leads to significant improvement in terms of user perceived quality when compared to throughput-based optimization.
Grounded Theory Methodology as the Research Strategy for a Developing Country

In diesem Beitrag wird zunachst aufgezeigt, wie die Grounded Theory Methodologie (GTM) in einem Entwicklungsland implementiert und verbreitet wird/werden kann. Dabei werden aktuelle Aktivitaten und einige Hindernisse diskutiert, die Forschenden in einem solchen Prozes begegnen (konnen). Danach wird die GTM kurz vorgestellt und es werden Verweise auf Webseiten, Online-Artikel, Mailinglisten usw. gegeben. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0001198
On Running Windowed Image Computations on a Pipeline

Many image processing operations manipulate an individual pixel using the values of other pixels in the given pixel's neighborhood. Such operations are called windowed operations. The size of the windowed operation is a measure of the size of the given pixel's neighborhood. A windowed computation applies a windowed operation on all pixels of the image. An image processing application is typically a sequence of windowed computations. While windowed computations admit high parallelism, the cost of inputting and outputting the image often restricts the computation to a few computational units. In this paper we analytically study the running of a sequence of z windowed computations, each of size w, on a z-stage pipelined computational model. For an N × N image and n × n input/output bandwidth per stage, we show that the sequence of windowed computations can be run in N2/n2 (1 + δ) steps, where δ = (n/N + 3n2/wN + zw/N). This produces a speed-up of z/1+δ over a single stage. Generally, N ≫ n >; z, w; so the overhead, δ, is dominated by the term which is typically small. This also indicates the time to be relatively independent of the number of stages z.
Efficient sampling for better OSN data provisioning

Data concerning the users and usage of Online Social Networks (OSNs) has become available externally, from public resources (e.g., user profiles), participation in OSNs (e.g., establishing relationships and recording transactions such as user updates) and APIs of the OSN provider (such as the Twitter API). APIs let OSN providers monetize the release of data while helping control measurement load, e.g. by providing samples with different cost-granularity tradeoffs. To date, this approach has been more suited to releasing transactional data, with graphical data still being obtained by resource intensive methods such a graph crawling. In this paper, we propose a method for OSNs to provide samples of the user graph of tunable size, in non-intersecting increments, with sample selection that can be weighted to enhance accuracy when estimating different features of the graph.
Non-temporal Mutliple Silhouettes in Hidden Markov Model for View Independent Posture Recognition

This paper introduces a non-temporal multiple silhouettes in Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for offering view independent human posture recognition. The multiple silhouettes are used to reduce the ambiguity problem of posture recognition. A simple feature extraction of the 2D shape contour based histogram is used for image encoding and K-Means algorithm is applied for clustering and code-wording of eight simple postures from multiple views. Therefore, 3D volume reconstruction is not required, in return helps to reduce the complexity of modeling and computational power of feature extraction. HMM is trained to obtain view independent recognition model using multiple silhouettes. A combination of non-temporal multiple silhouettes, code-wording and HMM methods in this proposed approach make it possible to recognize human posture in view independent. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of non-temporal multiple silhouettes in HMM for recognizing posture.
In vivo regulation of the Escherichia coli araC promoter

The ara pC promoter is known to be derepressed about fivefold for 20 to 30 min after the addition of arabinose. This transient derepression was studied by using araC::Mu lac insertions and araC-lacZ gene fusions. In strains containing increased levels of araC protein, the pC promoter became progressively less derepressible, but the ara pBAD promoter remained normally inducible. Repression of pC was reestablished 20 min after induction in araB mutants, but did not occur in arabinose-transport-deficient mutants. Finally, mutant araCc proteins which normally do not repress pC did so in the presence of arabinose.
Cytoprotective effect of selective small-molecule caspase inhibitors against staurosporine-induced apoptosis

Caspases are currently known as the central executioners of the apoptotic pathways. Inhibition of apoptosis and promotion of normal cell survival by caspase inhibitors would be a tremendous benefit for reducing the side effects of cancer therapy and for control of neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and Huntington’s diseases. The objective of this study was to discover small-molecule caspase inhibitors with which to achieve cytoprotective effect. We completed the high-throughput screening of Bionet’s 37,500-compound library (Key Organics Limited, Camelford, Cornwall, UK) against caspase-1, -3, and -9 and successfully identified 43 initial hit compounds. The 43 hit compounds were further tested for cytoprotective activity against staurosporine-induced cell death in NIH3T3 cells. Nineteen compounds were found to have significant cytoprotective effects in cell viability assays. One of the compounds, RBC1023, was demonstrated to protect NIH3T3 cells from staurosporine-induced caspase-3 cleavage and activation. RBC1023 was also shown to protect against staurosporine-induced impairment of mitochondrial membrane potential. DNA microarray analysis demonstrated that staurosporine treatment induced broad global gene expression alterations, and RBC1023 co-treatment significantly restored these changes, especially of the genes that are related to cell growth and survival signaling such as Egr1, Cdc25c, cdkn3, Rhob, Nek2, and Taok1. Collectively, RBC1023 protects NIH3T3 cells against staurosporine-induced apoptosis via inhibiting caspase activity, restoring mitochondrial membrane potential, and possibly upregulating some cell survival-related gene expressions and pathways.
Multimedia Summarization for Social Events in Microblog Stream

Microblogging services have revolutionized the way people exchange information. Confronted with the ever-increasing numbers of social events and the corresponding microblogs with multimedia contents, it is desirable to provide visualized summaries to help users to quickly grasp the essence of these social events for better understanding. While existing approaches mostly focus only on text-based summary, microblog summarization with multiple media types (e.g., text, image, and video) is scarcely explored. In this paper, we propose a multimedia social event summarization framework to automatically generate visualized summaries from the microblog stream of multiple media types. Specifically, the proposed framework comprises three stages, as follows. 1) A noise removal approach is first devised to eliminate potentially noisy images. An effective spectral filtering model is exploited to estimate the probability that an image is relevant to a given event. 2) A novel cross-media probabilistic model, termed Cross-Media-LDA (CMLDA), is proposed to jointly discover subevents from microblogs of multiple media types. The intrinsic correlations among these different media types are well explored and exploited for reinforcing the cross-media subevent discovery process. 3) Finally, based on the cross-media knowledge of all the discovered subevents, a multimedia microblog summary generation process is designed to jointly identify both representative textual and visual samples, which are further aggregated to form a holistic visualized summary. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world microblog datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Genomic and Metabolic Profiling of Nonulosonic Acids in Vibrionaceae Reveal Biochemical Phenotypes of Allelic Divergence in Vibrio vulnificus

ABSTRACT Nonulosonic acids (NulOs) encompass a large group of structurally diverse nine-carbon backbone α-keto sugars widely distributed among the three domains of life. Mammals express a specialized version of NulOs called sialic acids, which are displayed in prominent terminal positions of cell surface and secreted glycoconjugates. Within bacteria, the ability to synthesize NulOs has been demonstrated in a number of human pathogens and is phylogenetically widespread. Here we examine the distribution, diversity, evolution, and function of NulO biosynthesis pathways in members of the family Vibrionaceae. Among 27 species of Vibrionaceae examined at the genomic level, 12 species contained nab gene clusters. We document examples of duplication, divergence, horizontal transfer, and recombination of nab gene clusters in different Vibrionaceae lineages. Biochemical analyses, including mass spectrometry, confirmed that many species do, in fact, produce di-N-acetylated NulOs. A library of clinical and environmental isolates of Vibrio vulnificus served as a model for further investigation of nab allele genotypes and levels of NulO expression. The data show that lineage I isolates produce about 20-fold higher levels of NulOs than lineage II isolates. Moreover, nab gene alleles found in a subset of V. vulnificus clinical isolates express 40-fold higher levels of NulOs than nab alleles associated with environmental isolates. Taken together, the data implicate the family Vibrionaceae as a “hot spot” of NulO evolution and suggest that these molecules may have diverse roles in environmental persistence and/or animal virulence.
Socioeconomics of Urban Travel: Evidence from the 2001 NHTS

This article uses the 1995 NPTS (Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey) to examine the most important socioeconomic variations in urban travel behavior. The 1995 NPTS is the most recent and most comprehensive source of information on local travel in the U.S.; moreover, it is the only survey that includes both work and non-work trips. This is the third in a series of articles in this publication over the past two decades using the NPTS to analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of urban travelers.
Seifert Gm-bundles

Seifert fibered 3–manifolds were introduced and studied in [Sei32], see also [ST80]. Roughly speaking, these are 3–manifolds M which admit a differentiable map f : M → F to a surface F such that every fiber is a circle. Higher dimensional Seifert fibered manifolds were investigated in [OW75]. The authors observed that in many cases of interest Seifert fibered manifolds correspond to holomorphic Seifert C-bundles, and started to develop a general theory of holomorphic Seifert G-bundles for any complex Lie group G.
The power of memory in randomized broadcasting

In this paper we analyze the runtime and number of message transmissions generated by simple randomized broadcasting algorithms in random-like networks, and show that an apparently minor change in the ability of the nodes implies an exponential decrease in the average communication overhead produced by these algorithms at an arbitrary node. A natural randomized broadcasting protocol, called random phone call model, has been introduced by Karp et al. [20]. In this model it is assumed that in each time step, every node of G calls a neighbor, chosen uniformly at random, and establishes a communication channel with this neighbor. Any node u is then allowed to send/receive messages to/from all nodes which have established communication channels with u in the current time step. Karp et al. showed that some piece of information r, placed initially on one of the nodes of a complete graph of size n, can be spread with probability 1 - n-Ω(1) to all nodes of this graph within O(log n) time steps, by using O(n log log n) transmissions related to r. Furthermore, they proved that this result is asymptotically optimal among all address-oblivious broadcasting algorithms. In a recent paper [9], we analyzed the random phone call model in traditional random graphs Gn,p with p > log2 n/n, and showed that any address-oblivious broadcasting algorithm requires with high probability Ω(log n) time steps and Ω(n (log log n + log n/log(pn))) message transmissions to inform all nodes of such a graph. In this paper we consider two simple modifications of the random phone call model, and show that in both cases the number of total message transmissions can be reduced significantly (up to almost a logarithmic factor). In the first case, we allow each node of a random graph Gn,p with p > logΔ n/n, where λ is a properly chosen constant, to call in every time step four different neighbors, chosen uniformly at random, and we prove that the number of message transmissions decreases to O(n log log n). This can be viewed as a "power of multiple choices" type theorem for randomized broadcasting. Then we show that if in the random phone call model the nodes are provided with a little memory, i.e., they are able to remember the addresses of the nodes chosen in the most recent three time steps, then the communication overhead decreases substantially, too. Finally, we prove the optimality of our results. The algorithms presented in this paper can cope with restricted communication failures, only require rough estimates of the number of nodes, and are robust against slight topological changes. In addition, our results can be extended to the generalized random graph model of [6].
Bayesian posterior probabilities: revisited

Huelsenbeck and Rannala (2004, Systematic Biology 53, 904-913) presented a series of simulations in order to assess the extent to which the bayesian posterior probabilities associated with phylogenetic trees represent the standard frequentist statistical interpretation. They concluded that when the analysis model matches the generating model then the bayesian posterior probabilities are correct, but that the probabilities are much too large when the model is under-specified and slightly too small when the model is over-specified. Here, I take issue with the first conclusion, and instead contend that their simulation data show that the posterior probabilities are still slightly too large even when the models match. Furthermore, I suggest that the data show that the degree of this over-estimation increases as the sequence length increases, and that it might increase as model complexity increases. I also provide some comments on the authors' conclusions concerning whether bootstrap proportions over- or under-estimate the true probabilities.
Intrathecal SB366791 Prevents Spinal EphrinB1/EphB1 Signaling Activation-induced Acute Thermal Hyperalgesia

Recent studies reported that activation of spinal ephrinB1/EphB1 signaling induced pain-like behaviors, although the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. The present study investigated the functional role of transient receptor potential vanilloid receptor 1 (TRPV1) in intrathecal ephrinB1-Fc-induced acute thermal hyperalgesia. Intrathecal ephrinB1-Fc provoked significant decrease in thermal paw withdrawal latency (PWL) behavioral response, while intrathecal pretreatment with SB366791, a selective TRPV1 antagonist, markedly reversed this decrease in a dose-dependent manner. Immunohistochemical staining of spinal c-Fos activation, a widely-used neuronal marker in the central nervous system, further confirmed the behavioral finding. Taken together, these findings, for the first time, indicate that TRPV1 may be a potential downstream effector in spinal ephrinB/EphB system activation-induced thermal pain behavior in the mature nervous system.
Multichannel audio database in various acoustic environments

In this paper we describe a new multichannel room impulse responses database. The impulse responses are measured in a room with configurable reverberation level resulting in three different acoustic scenarios with reverberation times RT60 equals to 160 ms, 360 ms and 610 ms. The measurements were carried out in recording sessions of several source positions on a spatial grid (angle range of -90° to 90° in 15° steps with 1 m and 2 m distance from the microphone array). The signals in all sessions were captured by three microphone array configurations. The database is accompanied with software utilities to easily access and manipulate the data. Besides the description of the database we demonstrate its use in spatial source separation task.