Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing and testing an integrative model of binge drinking behaviour in a student population

Binge drinking (BD) is a pressing social and public health concern in the United Kingdom, especially among university students. Several psychological constructs have been associated with BD behaviour in student populations, including adult attachment style, dispositional mindfulness (DM), alcohol expectancies, and approach motivations. However, as yet, there has been little attempt to study these constructs together in a theoretically-coherent model, which the current study aimed to do. Three hundred and twenty-two students at a UK university in north-west England completed an online questionnaire to assess their drinking behaviour and the psychological constructs of interest. Structural equation modelling results supported a model whereby preoccupied and fearful insecure adult attachment styles predicted an affect-regulation strategy characterised by an inability to be ‘non-judgmental’ towards, and to ‘act with awareness’ in relation to internal and external experiences (elements of DM), and lower levels of these DM variables in turn were associated with positive expectancies about the consequences of alcohol use. Strong positive expectancies about drinking alcohol were related to the presence of strong approach motivations towards drinking, which in turn predicted increased BD behaviour. The results are supportive of the proposed integrated model of BD behaviour in students. The model helps to highlights areas where harm-reduction and intervention strategies aimed at reducing BD in students can be targeted.
The Value of Crime Scene and Site Visitation by Forensic Psychologists and Psychiatrists

Site visits and crime scene visitation by forensic psychologists and psychiatrists may enhance the accuracy and credibility of their forensic work in criminal, civil, and other important contexts. This ethically sound technique of after‐the‐fact data collection and verification offers numerous potential benefits to the forensic mental health professional: clarifying the subject's actions, assessing the reliability of witness reports, identifying contextual determinants of behavior, and more fully illuminating subject motivation and decision‐making. Limitations and suggested guidelines for conducting site visits are offered. Guidelines include preplanning, arranging for an informed guide to accompany and narrate the visit, and conducting the site visit prior to forensic examinations.
A Theory of Local Matching: SIFT and Beyond

Why has SIFT been so successful? Why its extension, DSP-SIFT, can further improve SIFT? Is there a theory that can explain both? How can such theory benefit real applications? Can it suggest new algorithms with reduced computational complexity or new descriptors with better accuracy for matching? We construct a general theory of local descriptors for visual matching. Our theory relies on concepts in energy minimization and heat diffusion. We show that SIFT and DSP-SIFT approximate the solution the theory suggests. In particular, DSP-SIFT gives a better approximation to the theoretical solution; justifying why DSP-SIFT outperforms SIFT. Using the developed theory, we derive new descriptors that have fewer parameters and are potentially better in handling affine deformations.
A Phrase Table without Phrases: Rank Encoding for Better Phrase Table Compression

This paper describes the first steps towards a minimum-size phrase table implementation to be used for phrase-based statistical machine translation. The focus lies on the size reduction of target language data in a phrase table. Rank Encoding (REnc), a novel method for the compression of word-aligned target language in phrase tables is presented. Combined with Huffman coding a relative size reduction of 56 percent for target phrase words and alignment data is achieved when compared to bare Huffman coding without R-Enc. In the context of the complete phrase table the size reduction is 22 percent.
Some Implementation Issues of Heuristic Methods for Motif Extraction from DNA Sequences

Frequently, a set of conserved (common) motifs in a group of functionally related biological sequences (DNA/RNA or proteins) has a specific biological function. Determination of compact groups of these common patterns is a prerequisite for their efficient modeling. We discuss some of the most crucial aspects of computer implementation of three heuristic algorithms which can be used in computational extraction of such conserved motifs from a set of unaligned DNA/RNA sequences. The algorithms included are tabu search, simulated annealing and a population-based genetic algorithm. A server with these algorithms implemented is available as a public web application free for academic and non-profit users at http://sdmc.i2r. a-star.edu. sg/DRAGON/Motif_Search/. This tool can be directly applied in determination of functional patterns in DNA and RNA.
Compliance control of a humanoid arm based on force feedback

Humanoid robots are expected to take an important role in human daily environments such as offices, homes and hospitals. The flexibility of the humanoid motion is a fundamental requirement for human-robot interaction. In this paper, a compliance control for humanoid grasping objects is proposed. The force/torque of the end-effector is measured by a 6-axis force sensor located at the wrist. Using the proposed method, it is possible for the humanoid robot to grasp the object with a small interference force and keeping the desired hand's posture. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated through the experiment of object grasping.
Neonatal Urinary Cotinine Correlates With Behavioral Alterations in Newborns Prenatally Exposed to Tobacco Smoke

Altered behavior due to prenatal smoke exposure was examined in 25 neonates born from smoking mothers who consumed at least 5 cigarettes/d during the entire gestation. Data were compared with 25 matched neonates born from nonsmoking mothers. Neonatal behavior was evaluated using the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (BNBAS). Antenatal exposure to tobacco smoke at the end of the pregnancy was determined by measurement of urinary cotinine. Newborns from smoking mothers showed significant lower scores in various BNBAS items compared with neonates from nonsmoking mothers. A strong correlation was observed between infant irritability and urinary cotinine in newborns from smoker and nonsmoking mothers and with number of daily smoked cigarettes and maternal nicotine daily intake of infants exposed to active maternal smoking. Linear regression analysis showed that urinary cotinine was the best predictor of infant irritability (r2 = 0.727). The latter was also associated to the neonate's low level of attention and poor response to inanimate auditory stimuli. Among infants from nonsmoking mothers, paternal smoking significantly correlated with infant urinary cotinine and infant irritability, being also the best predictor of irritability (r2 = 0.364). Neonatal behavior can be significantly altered in a dose-dependent manner even after modest prenatal exposure to tobacco smoke.
SaaS Integration for Software Cloud

Software as a Service (SaaS) has been adopted in a fast pace for applications and services on software clouds. However, the success of SaaS in software cloud cannot obscure the integration challenges faced by developers and enterprise infrastructure IT. Among those challenges, firewall/NAT traversal and security issues often pose a serious bottleneck as enterprises may not be entirely comfortable running mission critical applications outside the corporate firewall. On the other hand, SaaS applications in the cloud need to access enterprise on-premise applications for data exchange and on-premises services. The current approaches through opening special pin-holes on firewall or using dedicated VPNs have encountered a number of limitations and drawbacks. This paper presents a Proxy-based firewall/NAT traversal solution for SaaS integration (PASS). It allows SaaS applications to integrate with on-premise applications without firewall reconfiguration, while maintaining the security of on-premise applications. In addition, this approach is platform and application independent, making the SaaS integration seamless. Moreover, PASS is consistent with the enterprise web browsing infrastructure, and it requires little or no change to enterprise firewall/NAT configurations. In this paper we present the architecture of PASS and address SaaS integration challenges in software cloud, such as security/firewall, performance, and scalability. Experimental study based on our implemented system shows that the proposed approach of PASS is promising to resolve firewall/NAT traversal for SaaS integration with on-premise services.
Physiological stressors : the effects of sleep disruption, energy restriction and prolonged exercise on thermoregulation and immune function

The purpose of this thesis was to examine; the effects of various stressors on human thermoregulation and immune function, a functional link between these two systems and the potential of novel measurement techniques. A valid, un-obtrusive measure of skin temperature was desirable for a majority of studies in this thesis. Wireless iButtons® provided such a method. Both iButtons® and conventional thermistors displayed high validity correlation (r > 0.999) and mean bias (iButtons® = +0.121°C, thernistors = +0.045°C) with a reference thermometer. A reliable measure of in vivo immunity in response to stressors, was also desirable. Contact sensitization with diphenylcyclopropenone proved a simple and robust method. Results demonstrate that exercise-induced-stress impairs both phases of in vivo T-cell-mediated immunity (oedema: induction -53%; elicitation -19%). Two-nights total sleep deprivation, with or without energy-restriction did not impair thermoregulation during cold exposure, nor appear to increase the risk of hypothermia. Core temperature, skin temperature and time to reach 35.9°C core temperature were not significantly different between trials. Three-nights sleep disruption (SDIS) did not affect core temperature at rest or during exercise-heat-stress. However, SDIS upper-body skin temperature was higher during exercise and forearm-sweating lower (-21%). Thus, alterations to heat-loss pathways were observed, but with no increase in thermal strain. Concurrent examination of the effects of SDIS, demonstrated enhanced in vivo T-cell-mediated immunity (oedema +98%). In vitro markers were unaltered by SDIS, suggesting these markers may not reveal the true effect of stressors on the co-ordinated immune response. Significant differences between sleep deprivation and control proximal and distal skin temperatures lends evidence to the functional, mechanistic coupling between circadian variations in skin temperature and skin immunity, as prolonged periods of increased skin blood flow observed during sleep disruption provides enhanced maintenance of skin immunity and thus likely to account for the observed increase in T-cell-mediated immune responses. The purpose of this thesis was to examine the effects of various stressors on thermoregulation and immune function, and to examine the functional link between these two systems, utilizing conventional, as well as examining the potential future usage of novel techniques and methods in humans.
2.3 A 4.2µs-settling-time 3rd-order 2.1GHz phase-noise-rejection PLL using a cascaded time-amplified clock-skew sub-sampling DLL

Ring-VCO-based PLLs are popular because of their compact chip area and wide tuning range compared with LC-VCO-based PLLs. However, they typically have higher jitter and larger frequency drift due to high sensitivity to PVT variations. Several PLL architectures were proposed to reject the phase noise and reduce the frequency drift [1,2]. However, due to an architecture-level limitation, these phase-noise-rejection PLLs inevitably degrade the settling time. To suppress large phase noise (PN) and supply sensitivity, a Type-III PLL was proposed to provide a large low-frequency loop gain by using a 3rd-order feedback loop [1]. However, high-order feedback loop degrades stability and requires low-frequency compensation zero, which needs a large loop filter and reduces the PN suppression bandwidth. To suppress the phase noise over a wide frequency offset, injection-locked (IL) PLL was proposed by injecting a clean reference into a noisy VCO [2]. But a sub-harmonic injection into a ring-VCO requires a pulse generator, which enhances harmonics but generates large reference spurs. Besides, a race condition between the injection-locking path and the PLL path weakens the locking strength and prolongs settling time by 5 times [2]. In order to reject the phase noise and to minimize supply sensitivity and frequency drift of ring-VCO-based PLLs without compromising other parameters, this paper proposes a 3rd-order PLL employing a cascaded time-amplified clock-skew-sub-sampling DLL, measuring a 4. 2μs settling time, 1.05ps integrated jitter, and -113dBc/Hz in-band phase noise with a 3.84mW power consumption at a 2.1GHz output frequency.
Infiltration of Helicobacter pylori in the gastric mucosa.

It is our hypothesis that if Helicobacter pylori could be demonstrated conclusively to have transgressed the mucosal surface into the lamina propria, this would help explain how H pylori recruits inflammatory cells. We report our immunohistochemical and electron microscopic findings that demonstrate that H pylori can be detected in the lamina propria of the stomach, offering evidence of its invasive potential. We stained 67 endoscopic gastric biopsy specimens with Warthin-Starry silver and immunoperoxidase stains for H pylori. In addition, transmission electron microscopy was performed on 1 case. The presence of surface H pylori was associated significantly with active (P < .0001) and chronic (P < .0001) inflammation. H pylori could not be identified in the lamina propria using the Warthin-Starry silver stain alone. Immunoreactivity for H pylori in the lamina propria was detected in 20 (30%) of 67 gastric biopsy specimens. Transmission electron microscopy confirmed the immunohistochemical findings. H pylori can infiltrate the lamina propria of the gastric mucosa, thereby proving morphologic evidence of its invasive capability.
Mutations in AGBL5, Encoding α-Tubulin Deglutamylase, Are Associated With Autosomal Recessive Retinitis Pigmentosa.

Purpose AGBL5, encoding ATP/GTP binding protein-like 5, was previously proposed as an autosomal recessive retinitis pigmentosa (arRP) candidate gene based on the identification of missense variants in two families. In this study, we performed next-generation sequencing to reveal additional RP cases with AGBL5 variants, including protein-truncating variants. Methods Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) or whole-exome sequencing (WES) was performed in three probands. Subsequent Sanger sequencing and segregation analysis were performed in the selected candidate genes. The medical history of individuals carrying AGBL5 variants was reviewed and additional ophthalmic examinations were performed, including fundus photography, fundus autofluorescence imaging, and optical coherence tomography. Results AGBL5 variants were identified in three unrelated arRP families, comprising homozygous variants in family 1 (c.1775G>A:p.(Trp592*)) and family 2 (complex allele: c.[323C>G; 2659T>C]; p.[(Pro108Arg; *887Argext*1)]), and compound heterozygous variants (c.752T>G:p.(Val251Gly) and c.1504dupG:p.(Ala502Glyfs*15)) in family 3. All affected individuals displayed typical RP phenotypes. Conclusions Our study convincingly shows that variants in AGBL5 are associated with arRP. The identification of AGBL5 and TTLL5, a previously described RP-associated gene encoding the tubulin tyrosine ligase-like family, member 5 protein, highlights the importance of poly- and deglutamylation in retinal homeostasis. Further studies are required to investigate the underlying disease mechanism associated with AGBL5 variants.
Intrinsic Ability of Adult Stem Cell in Skeletal Muscle: An Effective and Replenishable Resource to the Establishment of Pluripotent Stem Cells

Adult stem cells play an essential role in mammalian organ maintenance and repair throughout adulthood since they ensure that organs retain their ability to regenerate. The choice of cell fate by adult stem cells for cellular proliferation, self-renewal, and differentiation into multiple lineages is critically important for the homeostasis and biological function of individual organs. Responses of stem cells to stress, injury, or environmental change are precisely regulated by intercellular and intracellular signaling networks, and these molecular events cooperatively define the ability of stem cell throughout life. Skeletal muscle tissue represents an abundant, accessible, and replenishable source of adult stem cells. Skeletal muscle contains myogenic satellite cells and muscle-derived stem cells that retain multipotent differentiation abilities. These stem cell populations have the capacity for long-term proliferation and high self-renewal. The molecular mechanisms associated with deficits in skeletal muscle and stem cell function have been extensively studied. Muscle-derived stem cells are an obvious, readily available cell resource that offers promise for cell-based therapy and various applications in the field of tissue engineering. This review describes the strategies commonly used to identify and functionally characterize adult stem cells, focusing especially on satellite cells, and discusses their potential applications.
HornDroid: Practical and Sound Static Analysis of Android Applications by SMT Solving

We present HornDroid, a new tool for the static analysis of information flow properties in Android applications. The core idea underlying HornDroid is to use Horn clauses for soundly abstracting the semantics of Android applications and to express security properties as a set of proof obligations that are automatically discharged by an off-the-shelf SMT solver. This approach makes it possible to fine-tune the analysis in order to achieve a high degree of precision while still using off-the-shelf verification tools, thereby leveraging the recent advances in this field. As a matter of fact, HornDroid outperforms state-of-the-art Android static analysis tools on benchmarks proposed by the community. Moreover, HornDroid is the first static analysis tool for Android to come with a formal proof of soundness, which covers the core of the analysis technique: besides yielding correctness assurances, this proof allowed us to identify some critical corner-cases that affect the soundness guarantees provided by some of the previous static analysis tools for Android.
Intelligent design enables architectural evolution

What does it take for an Internet architecture to be evolvable? Despite our ongoing frustration with today's rigid IP-based architecture and the research community's extensive research on clean-slate designs, it remains unclear how to best design for architectural evolvability. We argue here that evolvability is far from mysterious. In fact, we claim that only a few "intelligent" design changes are needed to support evolvability. While these changes are definitely nonincremental (i.e., cannot be deployed in an incremental fashion starting with today's architecture), they follow directly from the well-known engineering principles of indirection, modularity, and extensibility.
Some remarks on the Annotation of Quantifying Noun Groups in Treebanks

This article is devoted to the problem of quantifying noun groups in German. After a thorough description of the phenom ena, the results of corpus-based investigations are described. Moreover, some examples are given that underline the necessity of integrating some kind of information other than grammar sensu stricto into the treebank. We argue that a more sophisticated and fine-grained annotation in the treebank would have very positve effects on stochastic parsers trained on the treebank and on grammars induced from the treebank, and it would make the treebank more valuable as a source of data for theoretical linguistic investigations. The information gained from corpus research and the analyses that are proposed are realized in the framework of SILVA, a parsing and extraction tool for German text corpora.
Toward a Black Habitus: African Americans Navigating Systemic Inequalities within Home, School, and Community

Abstract:This article explores the Black habitus of African American students and parents by revealing systemic inequalities in their home, school, and community, as well as illuminating the agency and cultural knowledge in their community. Using ethnographic case study data from 38 African American students and 26 parents who lived in a poor Black neighborhood and attended a predominantly White middle school, the researchers contend that out-of-school time provided context for distinct struggles and experiences that heavily influenced the students’ educational experiences. The negative perceptions of their neighborhood and intergenerational tracking were implicated in an unequal distribution of knowledge, resources, and opportunities in the students’ homes and community. Moreover, the agency and cultural knowledge of African Americans were unacknowledged, thereby contributing to systemic inequalities.
A high-efficiency interleaved DC-DC converter with input/output current sources

The aim of this paper is to develop a high-efficiency switching power supply with input/output current sources. This interleaved converter is composed of two shunted elementary boost conversion units, including five switches, a three windings transformer and two inductors in series input/output terminals. Due to the inductor in series the input source, the duty ratio of two main switches can be controlled over 50% so that the voltage gain is higher than the turns ratio. The proposed converter, only applied a winding and a capacitor in series on secondary side, can be auto balanced the currents of the interleaved two phases without an additional current-sharing module. The leakage inductance problem of transformer is solved by the active clamped circuit that results the switches with the ZVS and synchronous property. The experiment results based on 0~500V/4A 2kW DC/DC prototypes and the maximum efficiency of the entire high-efficiency power conversion system is over 96.5% to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis.
3D Action Recognition by Learning Sequences of Poses

Action recognition from 3D depth maps/skeleton has been an active research area in computer vision in the recent past. In this paper, we propose a method for action recognition by learning the sequence of various poses involved while performing an action. Each pose in the sequence is represented as a set of 3D edge vectors connecting important joint points in the skeleton and 3D trajectory vectors connecting the joint point locations in the previous frame with that in the current frame. The training samples of each action class, represented as sequences of poses, are time normalized using Dynamic Time Warping(DTW) and average pooled to construct the model sequence representing the action. Action recognition on a test sequence is achieved by finding its nearest model sequence in terms of a proposed distance measure. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on two challenging datasets: Berkeley Multimodal Human Action Database and MSR Action 3D dataset.