Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Humility in learning: A Confucian perspective*

Abstract Little research exists on humility in human learning and from a cultural perspective. This article reviews current research and conceptualizes humility as a basic human potential that can become a virtue when cultivated. But the cultivation depends on the cultural values placed on humility. Although humility is recognized in the West, ambivalence toward it exists because it may contradict important Western values of self-esteem and self-confidence in learning. By contrast, the Confucian conception of humility is geared toward moral self-cultivation in learning. In discussing this type of humility, the West appeals more to cognitive considerations of correctness or wrongness of one’s beliefs and acceptance of one’s fallibilities as a knower/learner. Quite differently, the Confucian view presumes the learner as never-full and warns about the trap of conceit, appealing to one’s constant need to self-improve. The more one achieves, the greater the need to remain humble. The condition for fostering such humility and a likely developmental process are entertained.
Nonuniform Cellular Automata for Cryptography

Cryptography is a basic requirement in today’s distributed information storage and transmission systems. A single key cryptographic system based on cellular automata is described. The approach employs highquality pseudorandom bit sequences produced by oneand two-dimensional nonuniform cellular automata. The robustness of the scheme against cryptanalytic attacks is discussed and it is shown that direct cryptanalysis requires an exponential amount of computational resources. A further advantage of the proposed scheme is that it is eminently suitable for hardware implementation.
Symptoms of cybersex addiction can be linked to both approaching and avoiding pornographic stimuli: results from an analog sample of regular cybersex users

There is no consensus regarding the phenomenology, classification, and diagnostic criteria of cybersex addiction. Some approaches point toward similarities to substance dependencies for which approach/avoidance tendencies are crucial mechanisms. Several researchers have argued that within an addiction-related decision situation, individuals might either show tendencies to approach or avoid addiction-related stimuli. In the current study 123 heterosexual males completed an Approach-Avoidance-Task (AAT; Rinck and Becker, 2007) modified with pornographic pictures. During the AAT participants either had to push pornographic stimuli away or pull them toward themselves with a joystick. Sensitivity toward sexual excitation, problematic sexual behavior, and tendencies toward cybersex addiction were assessed with questionnaires. Results showed that individuals with tendencies toward cybersex addiction tended to either approach or avoid pornographic stimuli. Additionally, moderated regression analyses revealed that individuals with high sexual excitation and problematic sexual behavior who showed high approach/avoidance tendencies, reported higher symptoms of cybersex addiction. Analogous to substance dependencies, results suggest that both approach and avoidance tendencies might play a role in cybersex addiction. Moreover, an interaction with sensitivity toward sexual excitation and problematic sexual behavior could have an accumulating effect on the severity of subjective complaints in everyday life due to cybersex use. The findings provide further empirical evidence for similarities between cybersex addiction and substance dependencies. Such similarities could be retraced to a comparable neural processing of cybersex- and drug-related cues.
Toxicities and outcomes of 616 ibrutinib-treated patients in the United States: a real-world analysis

Clinical trials that led to ibrutinib’s approval for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia showed that its side effects differ from those of traditional chemotherapy. Reasons for discontinuation in clinical practice have not been adequately studied. We conducted a retrospective analysis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients treated with ibrutinib either commercially or on clinical trials. We aimed to compare the type and frequency of toxicities reported in either setting, assess discontinuation rates, and evaluate outcomes. This multicenter, retrospective analysis included ibrutinib-treated chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients at nine United States cancer centers or from the Connect® Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Registry. We examined demographics, dosing, discontinuation rates and reasons, toxicities, and outcomes. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival. Six hundred sixteen ibrutinib-treated patients were identified. A total of 546 (88%) patients were treated with the commercial drug. Clinical trial patients were younger (mean age 58 versus 61 years, P=0.01) and had a similar time from diagnosis to treatment with ibrutinib (mean 85 versus 87 months, P=0.8). With a median follow-up of 17 months, an estimated 41% of patients discontinued ibrutinib (median time to ibrutinib discontinuation was 7 months). Notably, ibrutinib toxicity was the most common reason for discontinuation in all settings. The median progression-free survival and overall survival for the entire cohort were 35 months and not reached (median follow-up 17 months), respectively. In the largest reported series on ibrutinib- treated chronic lymphocytic leukemia patients, we show that 41% of patients discontinued ibrutinib. Intolerance as opposed to chronic lymphocytic leukemia progression was the most common reason for discontinuation. Outcomes remain excellent and were not affected by line of therapy or whether patients were treated on clinical studies or commercially. These data strongly argue in favor of finding strategies to minimize ibrutinib intolerance so that efficacy can be further maximized. Future clinical trials should consider time-limited therapy approaches, particularly in patients achieving a complete response, in order to minimize ibrutinib exposure.
WaveScript: A Case-Study in Applying a Distributed Stream-Processing Language

Applications that combine live data streams with embedded, parallel, and distributed processing are becoming more commonplace. WaveScript is a domain-specific language that brings high-level, type-safe, garbage-collected programming to these domains. This is made possible by three primary implementation techniques. First, we employ a novel evaluation strategy that uses a combination of interpretation and reification to partially evaluate programs into stream dataflow graphs. Second, we use profile-driven compilation to enable many optimizations that are normally only available in the synchronous (rather than asynchronous) dataflow domain. Finally, we incorporate an extensible system for rewrite rules to capture algebraic properties in specific domains (such as signal processing). We have used our language to build and deploy a sensornetwork for the acoustic localization of wild animals, in particular, the Yellow-Bellied marmot. We evaluate WaveScript’s performance on this application, showing that it yields good performance on both embedded and desktop-class machines, including distributed execution and substantial parallel speedups. Our language allowed us to implement the application rapidly, while outperforming a previous C implementation by over 35%, using fewer than half the lines of code. We evaluate the contribution of our optimizations to this success.
Location Privacy in Location-Based Services: Beyond TTP-based Schemes

Location-Based Services (LBS) are gaining importance due to the advances in mobile networks and positioning technologies. Nevertheless, the wide deployment of LBS can jeopardise the privacy of their users, so ensuring user privacy is paramount to the success of those services. This article surveys the most relevant techniques for guaranteeing location privacy to LBS users. The rigid dichotomy between schemes which rely on Trusted Third Parties (TTP-based) and those which do not (TTP-free) is emphasised. Also, the convenience of both approaches is discussed and some ideas on the future of location privacy in these services are sketched.
Mouse Invariant Monoclonal Antibody NKT14: A Novel Tool to Manipulate iNKT Cell Function In Vivo

Invariant Natural Killer T (iNKT) cells are a T cell subset expressing an invariant T Cell Receptor (TCR) that recognizes glycolipid antigens rather than peptides. The cells have both innate-like rapid cytokine release, and adaptive-like thymic positive selection. iNKT cell activation has been implicated in the pathogenesis of allergic asthma and inflammatory diseases, while reduced iNKT cell activation promotes infectious disease, cancer and certain autoimmune diseases such as Type 1 diabetes (T1D). Therapeutic means to reduce or deplete iNKT cells could treat inflammatory diseases, while approaches to promote their activation may have potential in certain infectious diseases, cancer or autoimmunity. Thus, we developed invariant TCR-specific monoclonal antibodies to better understand the role of iNKT cells in disease. We report here the first monoclonal antibodies specific for the mouse invariant TCR that by modifying the Fc construct can specifically deplete or activate iNKT cells in vivo in otherwise fully immuno-competent animals. We have used both the depleting and activating version of the antibody in the NOD model of T1D. As demonstrated previously using genetically iNKT cell deficient NOD mice, and in studies of glycolipid antigen activated iNKT cells in standard NOD mice, we found that antibody mediated depletion or activation of iNKT cells respectively accelerated and retarded T1D onset. In BALB/c mice, ovalbumin (OVA) mediated airway hyper-reactivity (AHR) was abrogated with iNKT cell depletion prior to OVA sensitization, confirming studies in knockout mice. Depletion of iNKT cells after sensitization had no effect on AHR in the conducting airways but did reduce AHR in the lung periphery. This result raises caution in the interpretation of studies that use animals that are genetically iNKT cell deficient from birth. These activating and depleting antibodies provide a novel tool to assess the therapeutic potential of iNKT cell manipulation.
Towards the implementation of a MPC-based planner on an autonomous All-Terrain Vehicle

Planning and control for a wheeled mobile robot are challenging problems when poorly traversable terrains, including dynamic obstacles, are considered. To accomplish a mission, the control system should firstly guarantee the vehicle integrity, for example with respect to possible roll-over/tip-over phenomena. A fundamental contribution to achieve this goal, however, comes from the planner as well. In fact, computing a path that takes into account the terrain traversability, the kinematic and dynamic vehicle constraints, and the presence of dynamic obstacles, is a first and crucial step towards ensuring the vehicle integrity. The present paper addresses some of the aforementioned issues, describing the hardware/software architecture of the planning and control system of an autonomous All-Terrain Mobile Robot and the implementation of a real-time path planner.
WoZ Simulation of Interactive Question Answering

QACIAD (Question Answering Challenge for Information Access Dialogue) is an evaluation framework for measuring interactive question answering (QA) technologies. It assumes that users interactively collect information using a QA system for writing a report on a given topic and evaluates, among other things, the capabilities needed under such circumstances. This paper reports an experiment for examining the assumptions made by QACIAD. In this experiment, dialogues under the situation that QACIAD assumes are collected using WoZ (Wizard of Oz) simulating, which is frequently used for collecting dialogue data for designing speech dialogue systems, and then analyzed. The results indicate that the setting of QACIAD is real and appropriate and that one of the important capabilities for future interactive QA systems is providing cooperative and helpful responses.
A soft-decision approach for structural analysis of handwritten mathematical expressions

An efficient system for structural analysis of handwritten mathematical expressions is proposed. To handle the problems caused by handwriting, this system is based on a soft-decision approach. This means that alternatives for the solution are generated during the analysis process if the relation between two symbols within the expression is ambiguous. Finally a string containing the mathematical information is generated and syntactical verified for each alternative. Strings failing this verification are considered as invalid.
High-Speed Non-Volatile Optical Memory: Achievements and Challenges

We have proposed, fabricated, and studied a new design of a high-speed optical non-volatile memory. The recoding mechanism of the proposed memory utilizes a magnetization reversal of a nanomagnet by a spin-polarized photocurrent. It was shown experimentally that the operational speed of this memory may be extremely fast above 1 TBit/s. The challenges to realize both a high-speed recording and a high-speed reading are discussed. The memory is compact, integratable, and compatible with present semiconductor technology. If realized, it will advance data processing and computing technology towards a faster operation speed.
Ambiguity in the Presentation of Decellularized Tissue Composition: The Need for Standardized Approaches

Abstract Decellularization offers great potential to the field of tissue engineering, as this method gives rise to scaffold material with the native organ architecture by removing all cellular material and leaving much of the extracellular matrix (ECM) intact. However, many parameters may affect decellularization efficacy and ECM retention and, therefore, decellularization protocols need to be optimized for specific needs. This requires robust methods for comparison of decellularized tissue composition. Various representation methods are used in literature to express tissue composition (DNA, glycosaminoglycans, collagen, other ECM proteins, and growth factors). Here, we present and compare the various methods used and demonstrate that normalization to either dry or wet decellularized weight might be misleading and may overestimate true component retention. Moreover, the magnitude of the confounding effect is likely to be decellularization treatment dependent. As a result, we propose alternative comparison strategies: normalization to whole organ or to a unit of whole initial organ weight. We believe proper assessment of decellularized tissue composition is paramount for the successful comparison of different decellularization protocols and clinical translation.
Automated Suggestion of Tests for Identifying Likelihood of Adverse Drug Events

Adverse drug events (ADE) caused by use, misuse or sudden discontinuation of medications trigger hospital emergency room visits. Information about a wide range of drugs and associated ADEs is provided in online drug databases in the form of narrative texts. Even though some ADEs can be detected by observable symptoms, several others can only be confirmed by laboratory tests. In this paper, we present a system that provides automated suggestion of tests to identify the likelihood of ADEs. Given a patient's medications and an optional list of signs and symptoms, our system automatically produces the laboratory tests needed to confirm possible ADEs associated with these drugs. The basis of our application is to map clinical symptoms to medical problems and laboratory tests. Towards that, we use template-based extraction and shallow parsing techniques from natural language processing to extract information from narrative texts. We employ relevance ranking measures to establish correspondence between the tests and ADEs. Our evaluation based on a sample set of 40 drugs shows that this system achieves relatively high sensitivity.
Dose-Response Analysis of Chemotactic Signaling Response in Salmonella typhimurium LT2 upon Exposure to Cysteine / Cystine Redox Pair

The chemotaxis system enables motile bacteria to search for an optimum level of environmental factors. Salmonella typhimurium senses the amino acid cysteine as an attractant and its oxidized dimeric form, cystine, as a repellent. We investigated the dose-response dependence of changes in chemotactic signaling activity upon exposure to cysteine and cystine of S. typhimurium LT2 using in vivo fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) measurements. The dose-response curve of the attractant response to cysteine had a sigmoidal shape, typical for receptor-ligand interactions. However, in a knockout strain of the chemoreceptor genes tsr and tar, we detected a repellent response to cysteine solutions, scaling linearly with the logarithm of the cysteine concentration. Interestingly, the magnitude of the repellent response to cystine also showed linear dependence to the logarithm of the cystine concentration. This linear dependence was observed over more than four orders of magnitude, where detection started at nanomolar concentrations. Notably, low concentrations of another oxidized compound, benzoquinone, triggered similar responses. In contrast to S. typhimurium 14028, where no response to cystine was observed in a knockout strain of chemoreceptor genes mcpB and mcpC, here we showed that McpB / McpC-independent responses to cystine existed in the strain S. typhimurium LT2 even at nanomolar concentrations. Additionally, knocking out mcpB and mcpC did not affect the linear dose-response dependence, whereas enhanced responses were only observed to solutions that where not pH neutral (>100 μM cystine) in the case of McpC overexpression. We discuss that the linear dependence of the response on the logarithm of cystine concentrations could be a result of a McpB / C-independent redox-sensing pathway that exists in S. typhimurium LT2. We supported this hypothesis with experiments with defined cysteine / cystine mixed solutions, where a transition from repellent to attractant response occurred depending on the estimated redox potential.
Utilizing corpus statistics for hindi word sense disambiguation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task of computational assignment of correct sense of a polysemous word in a given context. This paper compares three WSD algorithms for Hindi WSD based on corpus statistics. The first algorithm, called corpus-based lesk, uses sense definitions and a sense tagged training corpus to learn weights of Content Words (CWs). These weights are used in the disambiguation process to assign a score to each sense. We experimented with four metrics for computing weight of matching words Term Frequency (TF), Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Term Frequency-Inverse Document frequency (TF-IDF) and CW in a fixed window size. The second algorithm uses conditional probability of words and phrases co-occurring with each sense of an ambiguous word in disambiguation. The third algorithm is based on the classification information model. The first method yields an overall maximum precision of 85.87% using TF-IDF weighting scheme. The WSD algorithm using word co-occurrence statistics results in an average precision of 68.73%. The WSD algorithm using classification information model results in an average precision of 76.34%. All the three algorithms perform significantly better than direct overlap method in which case we achieve an average precision of 47.87%.
A novel, multi-parallel, real-time polymerase chain reaction approach for eight gastrointestinal parasites provides improved diagnostic capabilities to resource-limited at-risk populations.

Diagnosis of gastrointestinal parasites has traditionally relied on stool microscopy, which has low diagnostic sensitivity and specificity. We have developed a novel, rapid, high-throughput quantitative multi-parallel real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) platform. Species-specific primers/probes were used for eight common gastrointestinal parasite pathogens: Ascaris lumbricoides, Necator americanus, Ancylostoma duodenale, Giardia lamblia, Cryptosporidium spp. , Entamoeba histolytica, Trichuris trichiura, and Strongyloides stercoralis. Stool samples from 400 13-month-old children in rural Ecuador were analyzed and the qPCR was compared with a standard direct wet mount slide for stool microscopy, as were 125 8-14-year-old children before and after anthelmintic treatment. The qPCR showed higher detection rates for all parasites compared with direct microscopy, Ascaris (7.0% versus 5.5%) and for Giardia (31.5% versus 5.8%). Using an enhanced DNA extraction method, we were able to detect T. trichiura DNA. These assays will be useful to refine treatment options for affected populations, ultimately leading to better health outcomes.
Religiosity and depression in older people: Evidence from underprivileged refugee and non-refugee communities in Lebanon

Religiosity is an important aspect of the life of older people, particularly in the Arab region where religiosity is an important part of daily social and political life. Studies have documented the relationship between religiosity and depression among older people, but none in the region. A total of 740 persons aged 60 + were interviewed in three poor urban areas of Lebanon, one of which was a Palestinian refugee camp. The questionnaire included five items on religiosity covering organizational and intrinsic religiosity. Depression was assessed using the 15-item Geriatric Depression Score (GDS-15). Depression was prevalent in 24% of the older persons interviewed with the highest proportion being from the Palestinian refugee camp (31%). Results suggest that only organizational religiosity was related to depression and this pattern was only significant among the refugee population. Religious practice is discussed as an indicator of social solidarity rather than an aspect of religiosity. Minority groups may rely on religious stratagems to cope with their distress more than other groups.
Summarizing Information Graphics Textually

Information graphics (such as bar charts and line graphs) play a vital role in many multimodal documents. The majority of information graphics that appear in popular media are intended to convey a message and the graphic designer uses deliberate communicative signals, such as highlighting certain aspects of the graphic, in order to bring that message out. The graphic, whose communicative goal (intended message) is often not captured by the document's accompanying text, contributes to the overall purpose of the document and cannot be ignored. This article presents our approach to providing the high-level content of a non-scientific information graphic via a brief textual summary which includes the intended message and the salient features of the graphic. This work brings together insights obtained from empirical studies in order to determine what should be contained in the summaries of this form of non-linguistic input data, and how the information required for realizing the selected content can be extracted from the visual image and the textual components of the graphic. This work also presents a novel bottom–up generation approach to simultaneously construct the discourse and sentence structures of textual summaries by leveraging different discourse related considerations such as the syntactic complexity of realized sentences and clause embeddings. The effectiveness of our work was validated by different evaluation studies.