Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensory language (SDM) to foster empathy in social work students

ABSTRACT Assessment and management of emotional situations are generally discussed in academic studies in the field of social work through verbal interventions, while the art of developing awareness to nonverbal feelings has yet to see widespread use. Sensory experience based on nonverbal communication and body language can highlight complex feelings and problems that the social worker confronts. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of an intervention of sensory body language using a modified Sherborne Developmental Movement (SDM) model, in a course for social work students. The course’s multidimensional process involved cognitive and affective components of understanding and identifying thoughts, feelings, and emotional states of others. The intervention combined art activity and focusing to foster empathy among social work students in the group setting. Twenty social work students attending college in the north of Israel participated in the course, writing reflective diaries throughout the course, which were collected and analyzed. The findings suggest that sensory language and movement through the group experience enhanced social work students’ empathy and their awareness of its importance for practice. Learning to be empathic through nonverbal communication also challenged perceived barriers to empathy such as cultural and language differences.
A Meta-Analysis of School-Based Social Skills Interventions for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Social skills deficits are a central feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This meta-analysis of 55 single-subject design studies examined the effectiveness of school-based social skills interventions for children and adolescents with ASD. Intervention, maintenance, and generalization effects were measured by computing the percentage of non-overlapping data points. The results suggest that social skills interventions have been minimally effective for children with ASD. Specific participant, setting, and procedural features that lead to the most effective intervention outcomes are highlighted, and implications for school personnel are discussed. Finally, the results are compared to the outcomes of similar meta-analyses involving social skills interventions with other populations of children. IMPAIRMENT IN SOCIAL FUNCTIONING IS A CENTRAL feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and has been well documented in the literature (Attwood, 1998; Myles et al., 2005; Rogers, 2000). Thus, individuals with ASD have difficulty communicating with others, processing and integrating information from the environment, establishing and sustaining social relationships with others, and participating in new environments. Specific social skills deficits include difficulties with initiating interactions, maintaining reciprocity, sharing enjoyment, taking another person’s perspective, and inferring the interests of others. Although social skills deficits are a central feature of ASD, few children receive adequate social skills programming (Hume, Bellini, & Pratt, 2005). This is a troubling reality, especially considering that the presence of social impairments may portend the development of more detrimental outcomes, such as poor academic achievement, social failure and peer rejection, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and other forms of psychopathology (Bellini, 2006; La Greca & Lopez, 1998; Tantam, 2000; Welsh, Park, Widaman, & O’Neil, 2001). Most important, social skills deficits impede one’s ability to establish meaningful social relationships, which often leads to withdrawal and a life of social isolation. Social skills are critical to successful social, emotional, and cognitive development. As such, effective social skills programming should be an integral component of educational programming for children with ASD. SOCIAL SKILLS INTERVENTIONS FOR CHILDREN WITH ASD A number of qualitative reviews have examined the effectiveness of social skills interventions for children with ASD (Hwang & Hughes, 2000; McConnell, 2002; Rogers, 2000). Hwang and Hughes (2000) reviewed 16 studies involving social skills programming for children with ASD between the
Title of Dissertation: Aging, Illusory Conjunctions, and Attention

Title of dissertation: AGING, ILLUSORY CONJUNCTIONS, AND ATTENTION Lisa Jean Murphy, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Ellin K. Scholnick Department of Psychology Elderly adults do not perform as well as young adults on complex tasks. Elderly adults' poorer performance may be partly due to an age-related increase in the occurrence of illusory conjunctions. To investigate this possibility, this research is designed to examine the relationship between attention and illusory conjunctions in young and old adult performance. Experiment 1 is modeled after Cohen and Ivry (1989; Experiment 3) and requires participants to perform concurrent digit-matching and letter identification tasks. The digit-matching task manipulates the spread of attention, i.e., narrow vs. wide; and the letter identification task provides opportunity for illusory conjunctions, because both a target and non-target letter differing in color and identity appear in the display. The results suggest that selective attention affects the formation of illusory conjunctions in young but not elderly adults. In young adults illusory conjunctions are more likely to be formed within the attentional window. The elderly are just as likely to form illusory conjunctions inside and outside the attentional window. Because the design of Experiment 1 requires the participants to identify two properties of the target letter simultaneously (i.e., the subject must determine the color and the shape of the target letter) this experiment is a dual property experiment. Since elderly performance often suffers when required to complete simultaneous tasks (Craik, 1977; Hartley, 1992; McDowd & Shaw, 2000), it is possible that an agedifference in the occurrence of illusory conjunctions in Experiment 1 was due to age differences in ability to handle dual task performance. Experiment 2 was used to investigate this possibility. Thus, Experiment 2 consisted of two conditions. In the dual property condition, the participants were required to determine both the color and the identity of the target letter. In the single property condition, the subject only reported the color of the target letter. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the results of Experiment 1 were not due to the dual property nature of Experiment 1. The pattern of illusory conjunctions was similar whether the requirements of the task were to identify one or two properties of the target letter. AGING, ILLUSORY CONJUNCTIONS, AND ATTENTION
Alternative fates of newly formed PrPSc upon prion conversion on the plasma membrane

Summary Prion diseases are fatal neurodegenerative diseases characterised by the accumulation of misfolded prion protein (PrPSc) in the brain. They are caused by the templated misfolding of normal cellular protein, PrPC, by PrPSc. We have recently generated a unique cell system in which epitope-tagged PrPC competent to produce bona fide PrPSc is expressed in neuroblastoma cells. Using this system we demonstrated that PrPSc forms on the cell surface within minutes of prion exposure. Here, we describe the intracellular trafficking of newly formed PrPSc. After formation in GM1-enriched lipid microdomains at the plasma membrane, PrPSc is rapidly internalised to early endosomes containing transferrin and cholera toxin B subunit. Following endocytosis, PrPSc intracellular trafficking diverges: some is recycled to the plasma membrane via Rab11-labelled recycling endosomes; the remaining PrPSc is subject to retromer-mediated retrograde transport to the Golgi. This pathway leads to lysosomal degradation, and we show that this is the dominant PrPSc degradative mechanism in the early stages of prion infection.
Infrared Echoes Reveal the Shock Breakout of the Cas A Supernova

Through the serendipitous discovery of infrared echoes around the Cas A supernova remnant, the Spitzer satellite has provided astronomers with a unique opportunity to study the properties of the echoing material and the history and nature of the outburst that generated these echoes. In retrospect, we find that the echoes are also clearly visible as infrared “hot spots” in IRAS images of the region. The spectra of the echoes are distinct from that of the dust in the general diffuse interstellar medium (ISM), revealing hot silicate grains that are either stochastically heated to temperatures in excess of ~150 K or radiating at an equilibrium temperature of this value. We show that the maximum luminosity that can be generated by the radioactive decay of 56Ni is not capable of producing such spectra, and could therefore not have given rise to the echoes. Instead, we find that the echoes must have been generated by an intense and short burst of EUV-UV radiation associated with the breakout of the shock through the surface of the exploding star. The inferred luminosity of the burst depends on the amount of attenuation in the intervening medium to the clouds, and we derive a burst luminosity of ~1.5 × 1011 L☉ for an assumed H-column density of 1.5 × 1019 cm−2. The average H-column density of the IR-emitting region in the echoing clouds is about 5 × 1017 cm−2. Derivation of their density requires knowledge of the width of the echo that is sweeping through the ISM, which in turn is determined by the duration of the burst. A burst time of ~1 day gives a cloud density of ~400 cm−3, typical of dense IR cirrus.
TCP Fast Start: A Technique For Speeding Up Web Transfers

Web browsing is characterized by short and bursty data transfers interspersed by idle periods. The TCP protocol yields poor performance for such a workload because the TCP slow start procedure, which is initiated both at connection start up and upon restart after an idle period, usually requires several round trips to probe the network for bandwidth. When a transfer is short in length, this leads to poor bandwidth utilization and increased latency, which limit the performance benefits of techniques such as P-HTTP. In this paper, we present a new technique, which we call TCP fast start, to speed up short Web transfers. The basic idea is that the sender caches network parameters to avoid paying the slow start penalty for each page download. However, there is the risk of performance degradation if the cached information is stale. The two key contributions of our work are in addressing this problem. First, to shield the network as a whole from the ill-effects of stale information, packets sent during the fast start phase are assigned a higher drop priority than other packets. Second, to prevent the connection attempting fast start from experiencing degraded performance under such adverse conditions, the standard TCP loss recovery procedure is augmented with new algorithms. Performance results, obtained from both simulation and experiments using our BSD/OS implementation, show a reduction in latency by up to a factor of 2-3.
Channel characterization and system design in wireless communications.

Preface We introduce parameters called normalized mean square covariance (NMSV), normalized mean square correlation (NMSR), re-centered normalized mean square correlation (RC-NMSR), and stochastic degree of freedom (SDF) to efficiently characterize the correlation properties of Ä ¾ stochastic processes. We show that these parameters are very useful to characterize wireless communication channels. In particular, we show that there are very close relationships between the parameters and the performance of various wireless communication systems. Due to such close relationship, the parameters are very useful to evaluate the quality of wireless communication channels. We show that the parameters are very effective in wireless communication system design. In particular, we can obtain direct relations between the quality of channel and the performance of various wireless communication systems. Due to the fundamental nature of the parameters, we believe that they will be very helpful in other branches of science and engineering in which stochastic modeling is useful.
CMOS Leakage and Glitch Minimization for Power-Performance Tradeoff

A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) technique simultaneously minimizes the leakage and glitch power consumption of a static CMOS circuit for any specified input to output delay. Using dual-threshold devices the number of high-threshold devices is maximized and a minimum number of delay elements are inserted to reduce the differential path delays below the inertial delays of incident gates. The key features of the method are that the constraint set size for the MILP model is linear in the circuit size and power-performance tradeoff is allowed. Experimental results show 96%, 40%, and 70% reductions of leakage power, dynamic power, and total power, respectively, for the benchmark circuit C7552 implemented in the 70 nm BPTM CMOS technology.
Generalised Thurston-bennequin Invariants for Real Algebraic Surface Singularities

A generalised Thurston-Bennequin invariant for a Q-singularity of a real algebraic variety is defined as a linking form on the homologies of the real link of the singularity. The main goal of this paper is to present a method to calculate the linking form in terms of the very good resolution graph of a real normal unibranch singularity of a real algebraic surface. For such singularities, the value of the linking form is the Thurston-Bennequin number of the real link of the singularity. As a special case of unibranch surface singularities, the behaviour of the linking form is investigated on the Brieskorn double points x m + y n ± z 2 = 0.
Facilitating collaborative knowledge construction in computer- mediated learning with structuring tools

Collaborative knowledge construction in computer-mediated learning environments puts forward difficulties regarding what tasks learners work on and how learners interact with each other. For instance, learners who collaboratively construct knowledge in computer-mediated learning environments sometimes do not participate actively or engage in off-task talk. Computer-mediated learning environments can be endorsed with sociocognitive structuring tools that structure the contents to be learned and suggest specific interactions for collaborative learners. In this article, two studies will be reported that applied content- and interaction-oriented structuring tools in computer-mediated learning environments based on electronic bulletin boards and videoconferencing technologies. In each study the factors "content-oriented structuring tool" and "interaction-oriented structuring tool" have been independently varied in a 2X2-factorial design. Results show that interactionoriented structuring tools substantially foster the processes of collaborative knowledge construction as well as learning outcomes. The content-oriented structuring tools facilitate the processes of collaborative knowledge construction, but have no or negative effects on learning outcome. The findings will be discussed against the background of recent literature.
JPEG XR an Image Coding Standard

 Abstract—JPEG XR is an emerging image coding standard, based on HD Photo developed by Microsoft technology. It supports high compression performance twice as high as the de facto image coding system, namely JPEG, and also has an advantage over JPEG 2000 in terms of computational cost. JPEG XR is expected to be widespread for many devices including embedded systems in the near future. This review-based paper proposes a novel architecture for JPEG XR encoding. This paper gives discussion of image partition and windowing techniques. Further frequency transform and quantization is also addressed. A brief insight into Predication, Adaptive Encode and Packetization has been provided in the paper.
International Journal of Emerging Electric Power Systems Vulnerability Assessment of Power Grid Using Graph Topological Indices

This paper presents an assessment of the vulnerability of the power grid to blackout using graph topological indexes. Based on a FERC 715 report and the outage reports, the cascading faults of summer WSCC 1996 are reconstructed, and the graphical property of the grid is compared between two cases: when the blackout triggering lines are removed simulating the actual sequence of cascading outages and when the same number of randomly selected lines are removed. The investigation finds that the critical path lengths of the triggering events of the July and August outages of 1996 WSCC blackout are higher than those of no-outage and arbitrary events. In addition, the small world-ness index for each of the outage triggering events is much smaller than that of normal or any no-outage scenario, indicating that events of shifting a network from small world to a random network would be more likely cascaded to wide area outage.
Diabetes mellitus among HIV-infected individuals in follow-up care at University of Gondar Hospital, Northwest Ethiopia

Objective To assess the prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) and associated factors among HIV-infected adults in northwest Ethiopia. Design Hospital-based cross-sectional study. Setting HIV clinic of the University of Gondar Hospital, Ethiopia. Participants All HIV-infected adults who visited the HIV clinic from December 2013 to the end of February 2014 were the source population. Measures A structured and pretested questionnaire incorporating the WHO STEPwise approach was used. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was applied to assess factors associated with DM. Results The overall prevalence of type 2 DM was 8% (95% CI 5.5% to 10.5%). The prevalence of DM was higher (13.2%; 95% CI 8.0% to 18.3%) among subjects receiving pre-antiretroviral treatment (pre-ART) than among those taking ART (5.1%; 95% CI 2.6% to 7.6%). Thirteen (35.1%) of the DM cases were newly identified during the study. Obesity (adjusted OR (AOR) 6.55; 1.20 to 35.8), hypertension (AOR 3.45; 1.50 to 7.90), being in the pre-ART group (AOR 4.47; 1.80 to 11.08), hypertriglyceridaemia (AOR 2.24; 1.02 to 49.5) and tertiary-level education (AOR 11.8; 2.28 to 61.4) were associated with DM. Conclusions Overall DM prevalence was high, particularly among subjects in the pre-ART group. More educated, hypertensive and obese HIV-infected adults were more likely to have DM as a comorbidity. Health policy and the clinical management of HIV-infected individuals should take into account the rising DM.
Electroless Nickel / Electroless Palladium / Immersion Gold Process For Multi-Purpose Assembly Technology

As the second part to a paper presented at the 2004 SMTA Pan Pacific Symposium, this paper further summarizes the results from technical qualification of the Ni/Pd/Au process. Whereas the previous paper examined the wire bonding capabilities of this surface finish, this second paper focuses specific attention to BGA applications. In these investigations, the solder joint integrity is measured using ball shear testing of BGAs as test vehicles. Ball shear performance of BGA solder joints is examined using both eutectic solder and a tin-silver-copper (SAC) alloy. Testing of eutectic Sn-Pb solder joints demonstrates the impact of thermo-cycling (500 cycles of -55°C to +125°C) on the Ni/Pd/Au surface in comparison to other selective finish methodologies (i.e. electroless nickel/gold and organic solderability preservatives). Similarly, ball shear testing of the SAC-alloy solder joints shows the impact of thermal aging (+150°C for 1000 hours) on the Ni/Pd/Au surface, compared to the performance of the more conventional electrolytic nickel/electrolytic gold process under the same test conditions. The overall reliability of solder ball attachment is characterized by both mechanical ball shear test results and visual inspection.
Optimizing blocks in an SoC using symbolic code-statement reachability analysis

Optimizing blocks in a System-on-Chip (SoC) circuit is becoming more and more important nowadays due to the use of third-party Intellectual Properties (IPs) and reused design blocks. In this paper, we propose techniques and methodologies that utilize abundant external don't-cares that exist in an SoC environment for block optimization. Our symbolic code-statement reachability analysis can extract don't-care conditions from constrained-random testbenches or other design blocks to identify unreachable conditional blocks in the design code. Those blocks can then be removed before logic synthesis is performed to produce smaller and more power-efficient final circuits. Our results show that we can optimize designs under different constraints and provide additional flexibility for SoC design flows.
On the Use of Scale-Free Networks for Information Network Modelling

The notion of scale-free networks was created in the late 1990s when researchers at the University of Notre Dame investigated the distribution of the number of links connected to a node, i.e. the degree distribution of a network. For many real-world networks, they found a strong deviation from the random network model based on random graphs that had prevailed in network modelling until then. This finding led to the development of a novel approach which models the evolution of a network and is able to reproduce the observed degree distribution. In this paper, we briefly review the underlying principles of random graphs and scale-free networks. Furthermore, we give an overview of real world examples of scale-free networks from a biological and applicational perspective and present briefly an application of scale-free networks for the analysis of two types of information networks.