Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parametrically controlled terrain generation

In this paper, we propose a novel approach towards parametrically controlled artificial terrain generation. Our proposed method focuses on generation of terrains having mountains of prespecified height and spread of base region and peak nearly at a prespecified location. Means of performing advanced tuning on the terrain to produce unusual artifacts on the terrain is also demonstrated and how our algorithm performs better in comparison with the well known terrain generation algorithms when used to solve the same problem is observed.
Extending In-Memory Relational Database Engines with Native Graph Support

The plethora of graphs and relational data give rise to many interesting graph-relational queries in various domains, e.g., finding related proteins retrieved by a relational subquery in a biological network. The maturity of RDBMSs motivated academia and industry to invest efforts in leveraging RDBMSs for graph processing, where efficiency is proven for vital graph queries. However, none of these efforts process graphs natively inside the RDBMS, which is particularly challenging due to the impedance mismatch between the relational and the graph models. In this paper, we propose to manage graphs as first-class citizens inside the relational engine. We realize our approach inside VoltDB [6], an opensource in-memory relational database, and name this realization GRFusion. The SQL and query engine of GRFusion are empowered to declaratively define graphs and execute cross-data-model query plans acting on graphs and relations, resulting in up to four orders-of-magnitude in query-time speedup w.r. t. state-of-the-art approaches.
At the Electronic Crossroads Once Again: The Myth of the Modern Computer Utility in the United States

The term "computer utility" has been perennially present in the history of computing, though a precise definition of the term has been fleeting, even when it first appeared in the Mid-1960s. The recent resurgence of interest in the remote provision of computing power has brought with it the historical jumble of definitions that make up that term, and "computer utility" is once again being applied to computer architectures though with little justification or exposition given regarding this use. This article attempts to determine whether past and present applications of the term share any commonalities and in doing so questions whether there has ever existed a true "computer utility. " To do so, incarnations of the "computer utility" are examined in two time periods--the 1960s and the 1970s--during which time computer time-sharing enjoyed significant prosperity and now as cloud computing has become increasingly popular and prolific.
Deviant Response Patterns and Comparability of Test Scores

This study deals with theoretical and methodological problems relating to the comparison of test results of individuals and groups with differing cultural backgrounds. An analysis of the score patterns on test items can be used to identify individuals and groups for whom the test scores have a deviant meaning. A statistic is developed by which the deviance of score patterns can be quantified and which indicates whether or not a person's test score can be compared with the scores in a specific group. In two simulation studies the discriminative power of deviance scores is investigated by means of computer-generated score patterns. The last part of the study deals with the application of deviance scores to cross-cultural research. It is shown that deviance scores can be used to identify individuals for whom the test scores give an underestimation of their capacities.
Participatory design in secondary education: is it a good idea? Students’ and teachers’ opinions on its desirability and feasibility

Research has shown the importance of students’ perceptions of a learning environment and the existence of discrepancies between students’ and teachers’ perceptions. Participatory design could be a helpful strategy to reduce such discrepancies and eventually improve the design of learning environments, as it has proven to be effective to optimize design in other domains. The current study investigated the desirability and feasibility of possible use of participatory design in education. Students and teachers in secondary education were interviewed about their opinions on the idea of participatory design of a learning environment. Both students and teachers displayed predominantly positive opinions towards possibly engaging in participatory design, supporting its desirability and feasibility. Practical suggestions for implementation are included.
In vitro biomechanical comparison of solid and tubular interlocking nails in neonatal bovine femurs.

This study biomechanically evaluates solid and tubular interlocking nails in bovine neonatal femurs. Paired femurs from 40 neonatal dairy calves were obtained for mechanical testing. Intact femurs and four combinations of experimentally manipulated femurs (intact or ostectomized femurs with either a solid or tubular interlocking nail) were tested in craniocaudal and lateromedial bending, eccentric axial compression, and external torsion to evaluate composite rigidity, local/gap stiffness, and load to failure (compression and torsion only). In torsional composite rigidity, femurs with tubular interlocking nails were more complaint than intact femurs or intact femurs with solid interlocking nails (P < .001). Ostectomized femurs with solid interlocking nails were similar to intact femurs with tubular interlocking nails. Within femurs with tubular interlocking nails, ostectomized femurs were more compliant than intact femurs (P < .0001). In craniocaudal and lateromedial bending rigidity, ostectomized femurs were more complaint than intact femurs, regardless of interlocking nail type (P < .001). Within ostectomized femurs, tubular interlocking nails were more complaint than solid interlocking nails in craniocaudal bending (P < .05) and there was a similar trend in lateromedial bending (P = .06). In eccentric axial compression, local/gap stiffness was significantly greater in intact femurs compared with intact femurs with solid (48% of intact bone) or tubular (45% of intact bone) interlocking nails and ostectomized femurs with solid (18% of intact bone) or tubular (11% of intact bone) interlocking nails (P < .0001). In torsional testing, local/gap stiffness was not significantly different between intact femurs and intact femurs with interlocking nails, but was significantly lower in ostectomized femurs with solid (2% of intact bone) and tubular (0.2% of intact bone) interlocking nails (P < .0001). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Estrogen-Dependent Gene Expression in the Mouse Ovary

Estrogen (E) plays a pivotal role in regulating the female reproductive system, particularly the ovary. However, the number and type of ovarian genes influenced by estrogen remain to be fully elucidated. In this study, we have utilized wild-type (WT) and aromatase knockout (ArKO; estrogen free) mouse ovaries as an in vivo model to profile estrogen dependent genes. RNA from each individual ovary (n = 3) was analyzed by a microarray-based screen using Illumina Sentrix Mouse WG-6 BeadChip (45,281 transcripts). Comparative analysis (GeneSpring) showed differential expression profiles of 450 genes influenced by E, with 291 genes up-regulated and 159 down-regulated by 2-fold or greater in the ArKO ovary compared to WT. Genes previously reported to be E regulated in ArKO ovaries were confirmed, in addition to novel genes not previously reported to be expressed or regulated by E in the ovary. Of genes involved in 5 diverse functional processes (hormonal processes, reproduction, sex differentiation and determination, apoptosis and cellular processes) 78 had estrogen-responsive elements (ERE). These analyses define the transcriptome regulated by E in the mouse ovary. Further analysis and investigation will increase our knowledge pertaining to how E influences follicular development and other ovarian functions.
Reconfigurable sparse/dense matrix-vector multiplier

We propose an ANSI/IEEE-754 double precision floating-point matrix-vector multiplier. Its main feature is the capability to process efficiently both Dense Matrix-Vector Multiplications (DMVM) and Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplications (SMVM). The design is composed of multiple processing elements (PE) and is optimized for FPGAs. We investigate theoretically the boundary conditions when the DMVM equals the SMVM performance with respect to the matrix sparsity. Thus, we can determine the most efficient processing mode configuration with respect to the input data sparsity. Furthermore, we evaluate our design both with simulations and on real hardware. We experimented on an Altix 450 machine using the SGI Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing (RASC) services, which couple Dual-Core Itanium-2 processors with Virtex-4 LX200 FPGAs. Our design has been routed and executed on the Altix 450 machine at 100 MHz. Experimental results suggest that only two PEs suffice to outperform the pure software SMVM execution. The performance improvement at the kernel level scales near linearly to the number of configured PEs both for the SMVM and DMVM. Compared to related work, the design does not indicate any performance degradation and performs equally or better than designs optimized either for SMVM or DMVM alone.
The role of silence on employees' attitudes “the day after” a merger

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the role of organizational silence and trust on employees' attitudes in a post‐merger stage.Design/methodology/approach – The results of two independent studies are presented; participants completed measures of organizational trust, organizational silence and merger attitudes (organizational commitment and employee satisfaction) a few months following the announcement of the merger. Hierarchical regression analyzes were used to explore the hypotheses.Findings – The results show that organizational trust is negatively related to organizational silence and positively to merger attitudes. Further, the significant role of organizational silence in a post‐merger state was also identified through the negative relationships with merger attitudes, but mainly through the significant mediating effect of silence between organizational trust and merger attitudes.Research limitations/implications – The study used self‐report measures, but necessary actions were taken in order to re.
Disruption of the FEN-1/PCNA Interaction Results in DNA Replication Defects, Pulmonary Hypoplasia, Pancytopenia, and Newborn Lethality in Mice

ABSTRACT The interaction between flap endonuclease 1 (FEN-1) and proliferation cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) is critical for faithful and efficient Okazaki fragment maturation. In a living cell, this interaction is probably important for PCNA to load FEN-1 to the replication fork, to coordinate the sequential functions of FEN-1 and other enzymes, and to stimulate its enzyme activity. The FEN-1/PCNA interaction is mediated by the motif 337QGRLDDFFK345 of FEN-1, such that an F343AF344A (FFAA) mutant cannot bind to PCNA but retains its nuclease activities. To determine the physiological roles of the FEN-1/PCNA interaction in a mammalian system, we knocked the FFAA Fen1 mutation into the Fen1 gene locus of mice. FFAA/FFAA mouse embryo fibroblasts underwent DNA replication and division at a slower pace, and FFAA/FFAA mutant embryos displayed significant defects in growth and development, particularly in the lung and blood systems. All newborn FFAA mutant pups died at birth, likely due to pulmonary hypoplasia and pancytopenia. Collectively, our data demonstrate the importance of the FEN-1/PCNA complex in DNA replication and in the embryonic development of mice.
Classification-based resource selection

In some retrieval situations, a system must search across multiple collections. This task, referred to as federated search, occurs for example when searching a distributed index or aggregating content for web search. Resource selection refers to the subtask of deciding, given a query, which collections to search. Most existing resource selection methods rely on evidence found in collection content. We present an approach to resource selection that combines multiple sources of evidence to inform the selection decision. We derive evidence from three different sources: collection documents, the topic of the query, and query click-through data. We combine this evidence by treating resource selection as a multiclass machine learning problem. Although machine learned approaches often require large amounts of manually generated training data, we present a method for using automatically generated training data. We make use of and compare against prior resource selection work and evaluate across three experimental testbeds.
Aurora B and Cdk1 mediate Wapl activation and release of acetylated cohesin from chromosomes by phosphorylating Sororin

Sister chromatid cohesion depends on Sororin, a protein that stabilizes acetylated cohesin complexes on DNA by antagonizing the cohesin release factor Wings-apart like protein (Wapl). Cohesion is essential for chromosome biorientation but has to be dissolved to enable sister chromatid separation. To achieve this, the majority of cohesin is removed from chromosome arms in prophase and prometaphase in a manner that depends on Wapl and phosphorylation of cohesin’s subunit stromal antigen 2 (SA2), whereas centromeric cohesin is cleaved in metaphase by the protease separase. Here we show that the mitotic kinases Aurora B and Cyclin-dependent kinase 1 (Cdk1) destabilize interactions between Sororin and the cohesin subunit precocious dissociation of sisters protein 5 (Pds5) by phosphorylating Sororin, leading to release of acetylated cohesin from chromosome arms and loss of cohesion. At centromeres, the cohesin protector shugoshin (Sgo1)-protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) antagonizes Aurora B and Cdk1 partly by dephosphorylating Sororin and thus maintains cohesion until metaphase. We propose that the stepwise loss of cohesion between chromosome arms and centromeres is caused by local regulation of Wapl activity, which is controlled by the phosphorylation state of Sororin.
Performance Analysis and Optimisation of the OP 2 Framework on Many-core Architectures

This paper presents a benchmarking, performance analysis and optimisation study of the OP2 “active” library, which provides an abstraction framework for the parallel execution of unstructured mesh applications. OP2 aims to decouple the scientific specification of the application from its parallel implementation, and thereby achieve code longevity and near-optimal performance through retargeting the back-end to different hardware. Runtime performance results are presented for a representative unstructured mesh application on a variety of manycore processor systems, including traditional X86 architectures from Intel (Xeon based on the older Penryn and current Nehalem micro-architectures) and GPU offerings from NVIDIA (GTX260, Tesla C2050). Our analysis demonstrates the contrasting performance between the use of CPU (OpenMP) and GPU (CUDA) parallel implementations for the solution on an industrial sized unstructured mesh consisting of about 1.5 million edges. Results show the significance of choosing the correct partition and thread-block configuration, the factors limiting the GPU performance and insights into optimizations for improved performance.
Factors associated with negative emotional expression: a study of mothers of young infants

This interview study of mothers with 3‐month‐old infants sought to determine factors associated with maternal negative emotional expression regarding their infants. In a cross‐sectional study, 179 mothers were given a shortened version of the Five Minute Speech Sample technique, requesting that they speak for only 2 minutes about their child and their relationship. Negative comments about the infant, maternal health prior to and since the birth, and the impact of the infant on her life were coded. They also completed attitudinal questionnaires and reported on marital relationships and the infant's health and temperament. A Caesarean section, infant illness, current maternal depressive symptoms, fussy infant temperament, and lack of enjoyment of feeding were all independently associated with negative remarks. Depression, infant illness and fussy temperament were all independent predictors of negative remarks about the infant, and Caesarean section and time in Special Care Baby Unit were independent predictors of negative remarks about maternal health and well‐being. This kind of open‐ended enquiry could be adapted for use in routine clinical contact with mothers of new infants to identify those who may need support.
Self-Reported Co-Morbidity of Depression, ADHD, and Alcohol/Substance Use Disorders in Male Youth Offenders Residing in an Alternative Sentencing Program

Abstract Self-reports of previous diagnoses of depression (24.8%), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, 19.5%), and/or a substance use disorder (30.6%) were obtained in male youth offenders (N = 159), aged 13 to 18 years. The correlates of individual as well as co-morbid mental health diagnoses were investigated. As predicted, male youth offenders self-reporting any of these disorders had more negative self-concepts than male youth offenders not self-reporting any of these disorders. Youth indicating an ADHD diagnosis were significantly more hopeless than youth without an ADHD diagnosis. Youth offenders reporting any two of the psychological disorders (i.e., co-morbidity) were more likely to have negative self-concepts, and increased hopelessness and symptomology on intake than youth reporting no or one disorder. The treatment implications of these findings for adolescents in alternative sentencing programs in the juvenile justice system were then explored.
A Biographical Turn in the Social Sciences? A British-European View

Biographical research is increasingly used for understanding current historical and cultural changes and for purposes of education, training, and policy development. This "biographizing" movement is part of a broader picture of shifting configurations of concerns, concepts, and methodologies. In 2000, the introduction to the authors' The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Science attempted such a picture. The authors wanted to promote greater mutual awareness and partnership between a "German" approach, seen as having a more explicit conceptual and methodological apparatus, and a "British" approach that had a greater concern for power relations around the interview relationship and in processing, interpreting, and reporting. In that text, cultural studies was relatively neglected and treated rather dismissively. The authors welcome the opportunity in this shortened, revised version to include a more extended and reflective treatment of cultural studies. They invite others to tell different stories, to supplement or correct their own
A Review of Lung cancer Prediction System using Data Mining Techniques and Self Organizing Map ( SOM ) 1

Cancer is the most important cause of death for both men and women. The early detection of cancer can be helpful in curing the disease completely. So the requirement of techniques to detect the occurrence of cancer nodule in early stage is increasing. Earlier diagnosis of Lung Cancer saves enormous lives, failing which may lead to other severe problems causing sudden fatal end. Data mining is a powerful technique to help the people in their health, Scientific and Engineering. Those techniques are extracting the hidden information from the large databases which helps to find the relationships and patterns from the data. This proposal is used to develop a software based Self Organizing Map (SOM) structure which is used to discover the hidden patterns in the lung disorder CT images by using the data mining techniques. This approach starts by extracting the lung regions from the CT image using image processing techniques, including bit Image Slicing, Erosion and Weiner filtering. The bit plane slicing technique is used in the extraction process to convert the CT image into a binary image. Bit plane slicing technique is faster, data and user independent. So many algorithms were developed to detect lung cancer but they are not proved if the in dependent assumptions are taken into consideration. In the era of algorithms used for detecting lung cancer, a Software based SOM structure is not developed. This paper starts with visualizing the closed structure of the Lung regions and then the disorder dataset is process using SOM Toolbox to create a learned SOM using K-means clustering. By using this data mining technique with SOM, it has the advantages of robust to analysis and cost effective method. Data mining technique uses learning method to understand the data patterns. The SOM can be used within the data mining and exploratory data analysis process.
Grammatical Categorization in Mandarin-Chinese-Learning Infants

In previous perceptual studies infants showed emerging grammatical categorization during the preverbal and early verbal stage. The issue has only been studied with European-language-learning infants. We inquired whether categorization is a general ability in infants regardless of language background, and whether function words in bigram distribution are sufficient for guiding grammatical category learning. In a preferential looking task, Mandarin-Chinese 12-month-olds were familiarized with two categories of novel words with preceding function words in Mandarin. Test trials presented new combinations that were grammatical versus ungrammatical. Grammaticality depended on the distributional patterns between the novel words and the function words in the familiarization. Infants discriminated the test trials, showing emerging categorization ability. We suggest that function words are special anchors for learning and that the ability to use them for grammatical categorization is fundamental and general in human infants.
Screening for Developmental Risks at 4 Years of Age

The present study explored the continuity of normal development between the ages of 4 and 6 and also examined the permanence of any developmental problems. A comprehensive neurodevelopmental screening test (the Lene test) was administered to a sample of 434 children at the age of 4 and again at the age of 6 (n=394). The results suggest significant continuity in development from age 4 to age 6. Normal development is most likely to continue along a predetermined developmental path. The co-occurrence and severity of developmental problems increases the probability that they will persevere. No single developmental factor at age 4 could reliably predict developmental status at age 6. However, overall development at age 4 reliably predicted 78% of the variance of developmental outcome at age 6. For the most part, the results indicated that it is possible to recognise developmental problems at age 4, one year earlier than the current age for screening in the Finnish health care system.
Refined Spatial Error Concealment with Directional Entropy

A refined error concealment method for intra frame in H. 264 is proposed in this work. Directional entropy of neighboring edges is used to classify the content of the lost block. Some techniques aimed to shorten the computation time without degrading quality of reconstructed video are presented to enforce multi-directional interpolation. As for block with high texture, either bilinear or multi-directional interpolation alone is not so well to recover, we integrate the two methods to get the final result. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and better performance of proposed method as compared to other interpolation based methods.