Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On bootstrap validity for specification tests with weak instruments

This paper investigates the asymptotic validity of the bootstrap for Durbin-Wu-Hausman (DWH) specification tests when instrumental variables (IVs) may be arbitrary weak. It is shown that under strong identification, the bootstrap offers a better approximation than the usual asymptotic chi-square distributions. However, the bootstrap provides only a first-order approximation when instruments are weak. This indicates clearly that unlike the Wald-statistic based on a k-class type estimator (Moreira et al., 2009), the bootstrap is valid even for the Wald-type of DWH statistics in the presence of weak instruments.
Trust as Noncognitive Security about Motives

Examinant les approches cognitive et non-cognitive de la confiance dans le domaine de la theorie politique contemporaine, l'A. souligne la pertinence de la seconde pour le gouvernement, ainsi que l'importance d'un sens de la securite concernant la bienveillance, le caractere consciencieux et la reciprocite des acteurs politiques dans la vie publique moderne
Mammaglobin B expression in human endometrial cancer

Mammaglobin B (MGB-2) is an uteroglobin gene family member recently found highly differentially expressed in ovarian cancer by gene expression profiling. To evaluate its potential as a novel endometrial cancer biomarker, in this study we quantified and compared MGB-2 expression at messenger RNA and protein levels in endometrial tumors (endometrioid endometrial cancer [EEC]) with different grades of differentiation. MGB-2 expression was evaluated by real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and immunohistochemistry (IHC) in fresh frozen biopsies and paraffin-embedded tissues derived from a total of 70 patients including 50 primary EEC and 20 normal endometria (NECs). High levels of MGB-2 gene expression were detected in 10 of 11 EEC G1 cases (91%), 16 of 17 EEC G2 cases (94%), and 6 of 22 EEC G3 cases (27%) by real-time PCR. In contrast, normal endometrial cells expressed low to negligible levels of MGB-2 by real-time PCR (P= 0.002 EEC vs NEC). Well- and moderately differentiated EECs overexpressed MGB-2 gene at significant higher levels when compared to NECs (P< 0.01). Pairwise differences between both G2 and G1 vs G3 cases for MGB-2 relative gene expression values were also statistically significant (G2 vs G3 P< 0.001, G1 vs G3 P= 0.016). MGB-2 protein expression was detected in 31 (86%) of 36 EEC and 0 of 5 atrophic NEC controls, while seven of eight (88%) of the proliferative/secretory/hyperplastic NECs focally expressed MGB-2 by IHC. MGB-2 is highly expressed in EEC, particularly in well- and moderately differentiated tumors, and may represent a novel molecular marker for EEC.
Hardware intrinsic security from D flip-flops

In this paper we describe the results of our investigations Supported by EU FP7 project UNIQUE on the randomness and reliability of D flip-flops when used as a Physically Unclonable Function (PUF). These D flip-flops are hardware components which present a random start-up value when powered up. We show that against all odds, enough randomness exists in such elements when implemented on an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) to turn the responses of a number of D flip-flops into a secret random sequence allowing to derive keys for use in conjunction with cryptographic algorithms. In addition to being unpredictable, these flip-flops have the advantage that they can be spread over random locations in an ASIC. This makes them very difficult to reverse-engineer when used to hide a secret key in a design at a relatively small cost in resources.
A Case Study of Co-Teaching in an Inclusive Secondary High-Stakes World History I Classroom

Abstract In order to provide increasing support for students with disabilities in inclusive classrooms in high-stakes testing contexts, some schools have implemented co-teaching models. This qualitative case study explores how 1 special education teacher (Anna) and 1 general education history teacher (John) make sense of working together in an inclusive World History I course in a high-stakes testing context (Virginia). Data collected included observations, interviews, curricular materials, and reflective memos. Analysis of these data indicate that John and Anna were “ambitious” collaborators—they offer an exemplary case of a special education teacher and a general education teacher developing a positive and productive working relationship, especially in coordinating their pedagogical performance within the classroom. However, in terms of how they made sense of instruction, it appeared as though Anna, the special educator, elucidated a slightly more ambitious vision in terms of her ability to think about how to connect history to students and how to teach beyond the test. John, on the other hand, appeared to be aware of, and concerned with, the high-stakes testing context. His concerns about behavior management and his narrow focus on his students' test scores appeared to influence every aspect of his thinking about history instruction. Implications for teacher education are discussed.
Friend similarity in attitudes toward bullying and sense of responsibility to intervene

This study investigated reciprocal friends’ similarity in attitudes toward bullying and responsibility for intervention in favor of the victim among 1485 Italian children (mean age = 10 years, 3 months) and adolescents (mean age = 13 years, 2 months). Findings of two linear regressions confirmed that friend homophily exists in relation to both students’ attitudes and responsibility. This result was retained even after individual and friends’ bullying and defending behavior were controlled. Similarity between friends emerged particularly when the proportion of reciprocal friends in the classroom was high. Finally, age and gender moderated the relation between individual's and friends’ attitudes. These results significantly expand previous findings related to social influences in the bullying phenomenon and have potential interest for researchers and educators.
Global warming, Bergmann's rule and body mass – are they related? The chukar partridge (Alectoris chukar) case

Using museum specimens collected in Israel during the second half of the 20th century, no support was found for the hypothesis that body mass and tarsus length of chukar partridges Alectoris chukar has changed as a result of global warming. Body mass showed fluctuations during the year, reaching a maximum in late winter and spring and a minimum in summer. Bergmann's rule predicts that in warm-blooded animals, races from warm regions will be smaller than races from colder regions, and a wider explanation states that body size is positively related to latitude. Because of its topography and varied climate, Israel provides a unique opportunity to separate partly the effect of latitude from that of ambient temperature, thus testing if Bergmann's rule is related to latitude or to climatic variables. We found that body mass (and marginally also tarsus length) declined significantly with decreasing latitude in accordance with the wider explanation of Bergmann's rule, but ambient temperature explained a much smaller fraction of the variation in body mass than latitude. These results weaken the traditional explanation to Bergmann's rule that a heat conservation mechanism causes the latitudinal size variation.
Whatever Happened to the IT Plan?

The IT Plan is generally seen as a cornerstone of the IS/IT presence in an organisation. Researchers have outlined various approaches to IT planning and many have suggested categorising such plans in terms of an evolutionary model detailing the degree of integration with organisational business plans. To determine how IT plans are developed in practice and the actual forces at play the study in this paper uses an evolutionary model to examine the development of the IT plan over a five year period in a large governmental organisation. The case study highlights some of the pain and disruption evident within the IT department of a large governmental organization as it moves through the various business stages of "corporatisation", "privatisation" and "down-sizing". The findings highlight that IT plans do not always evolve through stages of closer integration with the business plan; that the IT plan can be viewed as a political manifesto often with the intention of cementing the IT Department’s place in the organisation; and that an overly rational approach to planning appears to achieve very little. A complex interplay of structural and agency factors determine the success of IT plans at any particular stage and when both conspire in opposition a likely outcome is its complete obliteration.
A Metamodelling-based Approach for Method Fragment Comparison

Several different approaches to Situational Method Engineering exist. They differ in terms of the primary element of the paradigm: the method fragment definition. Here, we introduce four method fragment definitions from the literature and compare their metamodels according to structural and functional criteria. The structural comparison showed a general alignment of some concepts that are sometimes referred with different names while the study of the compositional aspects results in evidence of substantial differences
Acoustic correlates of linguistic rhythm: perspectives

The empirical grounding of a typology of languages' rhythm is again a hot issue. The currently popular approach is based on the durations of vocalic and intervocalic intervals and their variability. Despite some successes, many questions remain. The main findings still need to be generalised to much larger corpora including many more languages. But a straightforward continuation of the current work faces many difficulties. Perspectives are outlined for future work, including proposals for the cross-linguistic control of speech rate, improvements on the statistical analyses, and prospects raised by automatic speech processing.
Situated performances in a graduate teacher education course: an inquiry into the impact of Cultural and Political Vignettes (CPVs)

This inquiry investigates teachers’ perceptions regarding the impact of Cultural and Political Vignettes (CPVs) and situated performance activities in their graduate teacher education course, Literacy Instruction for Diverse Learners, at a large urban university in New York City. The study involved a pedagogical strategy that the author created for use in her own teacher education courses which she terms Cultural and Political Vignettes (CPVs). CPVs are cultural and political situations that are presented to teachers so that they can practice the decision‐making skills that they need to use with students, parents, colleagues, and administrators in the diverse classrooms of the New York City public schools. They deal with sensitive cultural and political issues, such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, school politics, sexual preference, and religion and are designed to help teachers to reflect upon their values, ideologies, biases, and educational philosophies. What sets this research apart and makes it of interest to other teacher educators is that although much has been written about the challenge of working with diverse student populations and its impact on the field of teacher education, the majority of the research in this area has focused on the attitudes and lack of knowledge of teachers, rather than pedagogical practices that actually prepare teachers to be successful. The findings of the study suggest that one way in which teacher educators can help beginning teachers view their field as a series of complex and dynamic exchanges between culturally, linguistically, and politically positioned human beings is by having them actively participate in writing activities and situated performances that highlight and unpack these hidden challenges of the teaching profession. This study has implications regarding further research about the use of CPVs and situated performance in teacher education programs. It would be worthwhile to replicate the present study (or modified, improved versions) in other teacher preparation courses and institutions in urban, suburban, and rural areas to see if future participants in a variety of settings find these pedagogical strategies equally effective. Further research in this area will help to address the challenges in teacher education regarding better preparing teachers to deal with cultural and political issues in their classrooms and schools because rather than simply discussing these challenges, these studies will contribute to filling a void in the literature in this area by actually advocating specific pedagogical methods and practices for addressing them.
Clathrin Facilitates the Morphogenesis of Retrovirus Particles

The morphogenesis of retroviral particles is driven by Gag and GagPol proteins that provide the major structural component and enzymatic activities required for particle assembly and maturation. In addition, a number of cellular proteins are found in retrovirus particles; some of these are important for viral replication, but many lack a known functional role. One such protein is clathrin, which is assumed to be passively incorporated into virions due to its abundance at the plasma membrane. We found that clathrin is not only exceptionally abundant in highly purified HIV-1 particles but is recruited with high specificity. In particular, the HIV-1 Pol protein was absolutely required for clathrin incorporation and point mutations in reverse transcriptase or integrase domains of Pol could abolish incorporation. Clathrin was also specifically incorporated into other retrovirus particles, including members of the lentivirus (simian immunodeficiency virus, SIVmac), gammaretrovirus (murine leukemia virus, MLV) and betaretrovirus (Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, M-PMV) genera. However, unlike HIV-1, these other retroviruses recruited clathrin primarily using peptide motifs in their respective Gag proteins that mimicked motifs found in cellular clathrin adaptors. Perturbation of clathrin incorporation into these retroviruses, via mutagenesis of viral proteins, siRNA based clathrin depletion or adaptor protein (AP180) induced clathrin sequestration, had a range of effects on the accuracy of particle morphogenesis. These effects varied according to which retrovirus was examined, and included Gag and/or Pol protein destabilization, inhibition of particle assembly and reduction in virion infectivity. For each retrovirus examined, clathrin incorporation appeared to be important for optimal replication. These data indicate that a number of retroviruses employ clathrin to facilitate the accurate morphogenesis of infectious particles. We propose a model in which clathrin contributes to the spatial organization of Gag and Pol proteins, and thereby regulates proteolytic processing of virion components during particle assembly.
Mathematics in Children's Thinking

The human mind inevitably comprehends the world in mathematical terms (among others). Children's informal and invented mathematics contains on an implicit level many of the mathematical ideas that teachers want to promote on a formal and explicit level. These ideas may be innate, constructed for the purpose of adaptation, or picked up from an environment that is rich in mathematical structure, regardless of culture. Teachers should attempt to uncover the mathematical ideas contained in their students' thinking because much, but not all, of the mathematics curriculum is immanent in children's informal and invented knowledge. This mathematical perspective requires a focus not only on the child's constructive process but also on the mathematical content underlying the child's thinking. Teachers then can use these crude ideas as a foundation on which to construct a significant portion of classroom pedagogy. In doing this, teachers should recognize that children's invented strategies are not an end in themselv.
Forecasting for Grid and Cloud Computing On-Demand Resources Based on Pattern Matching

The Cloud phenomenon brings along the cost-saving benefit of dynamic scaling. As a result, the question of efficient resource scaling arises. Prediction is necessary as the virtual resources that Cloud computing uses have a setup time that is not negligible. We propose an approach to the problem of workload prediction based on identifying similar past occurrences of the current short-term workload history. We present in detail the Cloud client resource auto-scaling algorithm that uses the above approach to help when scaling decisions are made, as well as experimental results by using real-world traces from Cloud and Grid platforms. We also present an overall evaluation of this approach, its potential and usefulness for enabling efficient auto-scaling of Cloud user resources.
An improved method for segmentation of point cloud using Minimum Spanning Tree

With the development of low-cost 3D sensing hardware such as the Kinect, three dimensional digital images have become popular in medical diagnosis, robotics etc. One of the difficult task in image processing is image segmentation. The problem become simpler if we add the depth channel along with height and width. The proposed algorithm uses Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) for the segmentation of point cloud. As a pre processing step, first level clustering is done which gives group of cluttered objects. Each of this cluttered group is subjected to more finite level of segmentation using MST based on distance and normal. In our method, we build a weighted planar graph of each of the clustered cloud and construct the MST of the corresponding graph. By taking the advantage of normal, we can separate the surface from the object. The proposed method is applied to different 3D scenes and the results are discussed.
Computing Osmotic Permeabilities of Aquaporins AQP4, AQP5, and GlpF from Near-Equilibrium Simulations

Measuring or computing the single-channel permeability of aquaporins/aquaglyceroporins (AQPs) has long been a challenge. The measured values scatter over an order of magnitude but the corresponding Arrhenius activation energies converge in the current literature. Osmotic flux through an AQP was simulated as water current forced through the channel by kilobar hydraulic pressure or theoretically approximated as single-file diffusion. In this paper, we report large scale simulations of osmotic current under sub M gradient through three water channels (the water-specific AQP4 and AQP5 along with aquaglyceroporin GlpF) using the mature particle mesh Ewald technique (PME) for which the established force fields have been optimized with known accuracy. These simulations were implemented with hybrid periodic boundary conditions devised to avoid the artifactitious mixing across the membrane in a regular PME simulation. The computed single-channel permeabilities at 5°C and 25°C are in agreement with recently refined experiments on GlpF. The Arrhenius activation energies extracted from our simulations for all the three AQPs agree with the in vitro measurements. The single-file diffusion approximations from our large-scale simulations are consistent with the current literature on smaller systems. From these unambiguous agreements among the in vitro and in silico studies, we observe the quantitative accuracy of the all-atom force fields of the current literature for water-channel biology. We also observe that AQP4, that is particularly rich in the central nervous system, is more efficient in water conduction and more temperature-sensitive than other water-specific channel proteins.
FTSPlot: Fast Time Series Visualization for Large Datasets

The analysis of electrophysiological recordings often involves visual inspection of time series data to locate specific experiment epochs, mask artifacts, and verify the results of signal processing steps, such as filtering or spike detection. Long-term experiments with continuous data acquisition generate large amounts of data. Rapid browsing through these massive datasets poses a challenge to conventional data plotting software because the plotting time increases proportionately to the increase in the volume of data. This paper presents FTSPlot, which is a visualization concept for large-scale time series datasets using techniques from the field of high performance computer graphics, such as hierarchic level of detail and out-of-core data handling. In a preprocessing step, time series data, event, and interval annotations are converted into an optimized data format, which then permits fast, interactive visualization. The preprocessing step has a computational complexity of ; the visualization itself can be done with a complexity of and is therefore independent of the amount of data. A demonstration prototype has been implemented and benchmarks show that the technology is capable of displaying large amounts of time series data, event, and interval annotations lag-free with ms. The current 64-bit implementation theoretically supports datasets with up to bytes, on the x86_64 architecture currently up to bytes are supported, and benchmarks have been conducted with bytes/1 TiB or double precision samples. The presented software is freely available and can be included as a Qt GUI component in future software projects, providing a standard visualization method for long-term electrophysiological experiments.
Metabolism of 125I-labeled lipoproteins by the isolated rat lung

The capacity of the isolated perfused rat lung to metabolize the protein moieties of serum lipoproteins was assessed using homologous (rat) and heterologous (human) plasma lipoproteins. The protein and lipid moieties of the plasma lipoproteins were labeled in vivo with Na[125I]. In selected cases the lipoprotein peptides were labeled in vivo with 14C- or 3H-labeled amino acids. Uptake of lipoprotein label during perfusion was monitored by measure of losses in perfusate label and by rises in pulmonary tissue labeling as shown by radioassay and by light and electron microscope radioautography. Lipoprotein degradation was assessed by fractionation of perfusate and lung tissue radioactive material into trichloroacetic acid (TCA)-isoluble, TCA-soluble, and ether-ethanol-soluble fractions. When heparin was included in the perfusion medium, there was selective degradation of the protein portion of very low density lipoprotein (VLDL) in the perfusate and concomitant uptake of radioactive label by the lungs. Low density lipoprotein (LDL)) was neither taken up nor catabolized by the isolated rat lung in the absence or presence of heparin. By light and electron microscopy, the label was localized over the interalveolar septa, predominantly the capillary endothelium. Disappearance of TCA-insoluble radioactivity from the perfusate was associated with the generation of both TCA-soluble iodide and noniodide radioactivity. Greater than 50% of the radioactive label taken up by the lungs was found in the delipidated TCA-insoluble fraction. This study provides in vitro evidence for pulmonary catabolism of VLDL apolipoproteins and uptake of peptide catabolic products of VLDL by the lung.
Virtual reality system in conjunction with neurorobotics and neuroprosthetics for rehabilitation in cerebrovascular accidents and spinal cord injuries

Cerebrovascular accidents (CVA) and spinal cord injuries (SCI) are the most common causes of paralysis and paresis with reported prevalence of 12,000 cases per million and 800 cases per million, respectively. Disabilities that follow CVA (hemiplegia) or SCI (paraplegia, tetraplegia) severely impair motor functions (e.g., standing, walking, reaching and grasping) and thereby prevent the affected individuals from healthy-like, full and autonomous participation in daily activities. We present our research inside the Hyper1 project (Hybrid Neuroprosthetic and Neurorobotic devices for Functional Compensation and Rehabilitation of Motor Disorders) focused on the development of a new virtual reality (VR) system combined with wearable neurorobotic (NR) and motor neuroprosthetic (MNP) to overcome the major limitations of current rehabilitation solutions.