Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Scanning the Intracellular S6 Activation Gate in the Shaker K+ Channel

In Kv channels, an activation gate is thought to be located near the intracellular entrance to the ion conduction pore. Although the COOH terminus of the S6 segment has been implicated in forming the gate structure, the residues positioned at the occluding part of the gate remain undetermined. We use a mutagenic scanning approach in the Shaker Kv channel, mutating each residue in the S6 gate region (T469-Y485) to alanine, tryptophan, and aspartate to identify positions that are insensitive to mutation and to find mutants that disrupt the gate. Most mutants open in a steeply voltage-dependent manner and close effectively at negative voltages, indicating that the gate structure can both support ion flux when open and prevent it when closed. We find several mutant channels where macroscopic ionic currents are either very small or undetectable, and one mutant that displays constitutive currents at negative voltages. Collective examination of the three types of substitutions support the notion that the intracellular portion of S6 forms an activation gate and identifies V478 and F481 as candidates for occlusion of the pore in the closed state.
Measuring the impacts of administrative policies on student performance in higher education

Abstract In this study, we investigate the joint impacts of class size, modality of content delivery and instructor workloads on 1078 student performances from 2010 through 2014 in a required College of Business Administration Information Systems (IS) course at a public Midwestern university, controlling for 11 demographic and other factors that might impact student performance. Class size, modality of delivery and instructor assignments are strategic college decisions affected by and subject to administrative policies that can impact the probabilities of student performance. Using the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) and Chi-square significance tests, we construct a parsimonious binary logit model of individual student performance in the IS course and examine the effects of the administratively controllable factors on student performance. We find that the class size and the assignment of instructors to teach the course significantly impact student performance while modality of delivery does not. We offer and evaluate administrative policy recommendations likely to improve student performances.
Soluble CD40L and Cardiovascular Risk in Women

Background—The immune-signaling dyad CD40/CD40L promotes atherogenesis, and patients with unstable angina have elevated plasma levels of soluble CD40L (sCD40L) and membrane-bound CD40L. It is unknown, however, whether elevations of circulating sCD40L precede the onset of acute cardiovascular symptoms. Methods and Results—In a prospective, nested case-control evaluation of healthy middle-aged women, mean concentrations of sCD40L at baseline were significantly higher among 130 participants who subsequently developed myocardial infarction, stroke, or cardiovascular death (cases), compared with 130 age- and smoking-matched women who remained free of cardiovascular disease (controls) during a 4-year follow-up (2.86 ng/mL for cases versus 2.09 ng/mL for controls;P =0.02). Women with concentrations above the 95th percentile of the control distribution (>3.71 ng/mL) had a significantly increased relative risk (RR) of developing future cardiovascular events (RR, 3.3; 95% CI, 1.2 to 8.6;P =0.01) that remained after adjustment for usual cardiovascular risk factors (multivariate RR, 2.8; 95% CI, 0.9 to 8.0;P =0.05). Conclusions—High plasma concentrations of sCD40L may be associated with increased vascular risk in apparently healthy women.
Breaking the silence: The role of emotional labour in qualitative research

In recent years there have been trends towards scholars being more reflexive about the process of conducting qualitative research. Scholars writing about reflexivity in research have analysed the role of bodies, personality and emotions in research but many aspects of the emotional labour involved in research remain underacknowledged in existing literature. This paper explores two researchers’ experiences of conducting sensitive, personally-significant research projects. We offer reflections on the emotional labour involved in research, sharing some of our experiences of fear, guilt and sadness during the research process. We note that few support mechanisms exist for supporting qualitative researchers in dealing with the emotional labour of research and discuss some explanations for these gaps. We argue that there is a need to acknowledge the emotional labour involved in doing qualitative research and to assist researchers by providing support in the form of debriefing or counselling. Some of the potential consequences of failing to establish a more systematic approach to the provision of support for researchers are highlighted.
Skeleton Extraction of Cerebrovascular Image Based on Topological Nodes

Skeleton extraction is a very challenging subject, and has an important application value. Because of the ambiguity and complexity of cerebrovascular image, the skeleton gained by conventional skeleton algorithms is discontinuous. This paper proposes a cerebrovascular image skeleton extraction algorithm based on topological nodes. This algorithm first determines the important topological nodes from the starting point of the skeleton, then calls the extraction algorithm for a single skeleton from every topological node until the arrival of the source point. This algorithm avoids the locating and classifying of the skeleton connection points which guide the skeleton extraction. Because all its parameters are gotten by the analysis and reasoning, no artificial interference is needed. Index Terms—skeleton extraction, cerebrovascular image, topological nodes, Level Set model
Ultrawide Foveated Video Extrapolation

Consider the task of creating a very wide visual extrapolation, i.e., a synthetic continuation of the field of view much beyond the acquired data. Existing related methods deal mainly with filling in holes in images and video. These methods are very time consuming and often prone to noticeable artifacts. The probability for artifacts grows as the synthesized regions become more distant from the domain of the raw video. Therefore, such methods do not lend themselves easily to very large extrapolations. We suggest an approach to enable this task. First, an improved completion algorithm that rejects peripheral distractions significantly reduces attention-drawing artifacts. Second, a foveated video extrapolation approach exploits weaknesses of the human visual system, in order to enable efficient extrapolation of video, while further reducing attention-drawing artifacts. Consider a screen showing the raw video. Let the region beyond the raw video domain reside outside the field corresponding to the viewer's fovea. Then, the farther the extrapolated synthetic region is from the raw field of view, the more the spatial resolution can be reduced. This enables image synthesis using spatial blocks that become gradually coarser and significantly fewer (per unit area), as the extrapolated region expands. The substantial reduction in the number of synthesized blocks notably speeds the process and increases the probability of success without distracting artifacts. Furthermore, results supporting the foveated approach are obtained by a user study.
Second Screening and Political Persuasion on Social Media

This article seeks to explain political persuasion in relation to second screening—people’s use of a second screen (i.e., smartphone/laptop) while watching television to access further information or discuss TV programs. Employing a two-wave-panel survey in the United States, results show this emergent practice makes people more open to changing their political opinions, particularly among those who habitually use social media for news or frequently interact with others in social media contexts.
Low-Profile Wideband Circularly Polarized Patch Antenna Using Asymmetric Feeding

A low-proflle wideband circularly polarized aperture stacked patch (ASP) antenna without air dielectric layers is presented. The new circular ASP antenna, which is fed by two orthogonal dual-ofiset lines through an asymmetric crossed slot, delivers a wide bandwidth of 80% for the 10-dB return loss and similar input impedance characteristics for the two ports. Then, a novel broadband 90 - hybrid feed network is employed to achieve good impedance matching, balanced power splitting and consistent 90 - (§9 - ) phase shifting across the wide operating band. The two unbalanced feed lines are connected to the respective ports of the feed network comprising a three-section Wilkinson power divider and a broadband 90 - phase shifter. It is found that the proposed antenna can achieve a measured impedance bandwidth of 91.3% (2.44{6.54GHz), measured 3-dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 86.4% (2.5{6.3GHz), and measured gain bandwidth of 60.9% from 3.2 to 6.0GHz for the gain > 4dBic. In addition, a comparison between the proposed wideband CP antenna and related wideband CP and ASP antennas in the literature is made.
Academic and neuroimaging outcomes of school-based reading interventions

ii LAY ABSTRACT . iii PREFACE . iv TABLE OF CONTENTS . v LIST OF TABLES . vii LIST OF FIGURES . viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . ix CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION . 1 Reading Development . 1 Reading Disabilities . 2 Reading Interventions . 4 Standardized Reading Programs . 4 Evaluation of Intensive Reading Interventions . 7 Neurobiological Model of Reading . 9 Brain Function . 10 Brain Structure . 12 Neuroimaging Studies of Reading Interventions . 14 Standardized Programs . 15 Intensive Programs . 15 Response to Intervention . 16 Current Research Goals . 18 CHAPTER 2. LONGITUDINAL OUTCOMES OF AN INDIVIDUALIZED AND INTENSIVE READING INTERVENTION . 20 Introduction . 20 Method . 20 Participants . 21 Reading Programs . 21 Study Design . 23 Measures . 24 Results . 27 Demographics . 27 Intervention Outcomes . 28 Predictors of Reading Outcome . 33 Discussion . 34 Improved Reading Skills After Intensive Intervention . 34 Predictors of Persistent Reading Deficits . 35 Skills Not Improved After Intensive Intervention . 35 Considerations and Conclusions . 36 CHAPTER 3. EFFECT OF INTERVENTION AND TASK DIFFICULTY ON ORTHOGRAPHIC AND PHONOLOGICAL READING SYSTEMS IN THE BRAIN . 37 Introduction . 37 Methods . 38 Participants . 38 Screening, Literacy, and Cognitive Measures . 39 MRI Measures . 39
Adaptive Keyframing Animation on the GPU Using Triangle Strips

Deforming surfaces are present in scientific applications, movies and video games. In these fields, polygonal meshes are preferred to represent them. However, these meshes are usually complex and contain much more detail than is necessary for a given frame. A possible solution to efficiently manage such a large amount of information consists in using multiresolution modeling or level of detail. However, most of the work carried out in this respect has focused on managing static meshes, and only a few take advantage of using optimized primitives such as triangle strips or the new capabilities of current GPUs. In this paper, we present a view-dependent method for interactive rendering of keyframing animations in the GPU. Our strip-based approach is capable of managing the level of detail of this type of deforming meshes. We demonstrate the successful use of this method on the GPU. We can generate adaptive levels of detail during all frames of an animation in real-time while providing, at the same time, accurate approximations.
Morpheme segmentation by optimizing two-part MDL codes

In many real-world NLP applications, a compact yet representative vocabulary is a necessary ingredient. Words are often thought of as basic units of representation. In highly-inflecting and compounding languages, words can consist of long sequences of meaningful segments, such as prefixes, stems and suffixes: kahvi + n + juo + ja + lle + kin (also for the coffee drinker). Overlooking regularities caused by the common elements accentuates the problem of data sparsity, which is a serious problem for the accurate estimation of statistical language models. In statistical language modeling the task is to estimate probabilities of word sequences. The state-of-the art approach in applications such as speech recognition, is to model word sequences as Markov chains, i.e. using the ngram model. However, while it obtains reasonable performance in English, with languages like Finnish the n-gram model runs into serious problems having to do with data sparsity. The reason may be understood by looking at how the vocabulary size increases with corpus size in different languages, as shown in Fig. 1. If complete word forms are the basic linguistic segments, the size of the vocabularies that are needed for NLP applications become very large, especially for highly inflecting and compounding languages. Finding a better segmentation of the linguistic data is therefore useful. From a linguistic point of view, Finnish frequently employs inflecting (e.g. ’sorme+t’, ’finger+s’) and compounding (e.g. ’vasen+katinen’, ’left+handed’). It is thus very productive on the word level: any number of new words can easily be produced in this manner by a competent language user. Since many word forms in a sentence are thus rare, obtaining reasonable probability estimates for longer word sequences becomes very hard. In contrast, if these long, compound and inflected word forms can be split automatically into reasonable segments, then even if the complete compound has not been seen before, each segment may be familiar, and therefore obtain at least a unigram probability estimate that is more accurate than the probability estimate reserved for predicting out-of-vocabulary items.
An efficient features-based processing technique for supergraph queries

Graphs are widely used for modeling complicated data such as social networks, chemical compounds, protein interactions, XML documents and multimedia databases. To be able to effectively understand and utilize any collection of graphs, a graph database that efficiently supports elementary querying mechanisms is crucially required. Supergraph query is an important type of graph queries which has many practical applications. Given a graph database D, the answer set of a supergraph query q is computed by retrieving all graphs in D which are fully contained in q. A primary challenge in computing the answers of graph queries is that pair-wise comparisons of graphs are usually hard problems. For example, subgraph isomorphism is known to be NP-complete. Clearly, the success of any graph database application is directly dependent on the efficiency of the graph indexing and query processing mechanisms. In this paper, we study the problem of using the relational infrastructure to achieve an efficient evaluation of supergraph queries. We rely on an effective and efficient layer of features-based summary structures, called graph features knowledge, to reduce the required number of pair-wise graph comparisons and boost the efficiency of query processing. Finally, we conduct an extensive set of experiments on real and synthetic data sets to demonstrate the efficiency and the scalability of our approach.
Quality of Life, Firm Productivity, and the Value of Amenities Across Canadian Cities

We estimate quality‐of‐life and productivity differences across Canada's metropolitan areas in a hedonic general‐equilibrium framework. These are based on the estimated willingness‐to‐pay of heterogeneous households and firms to locate in various cities, which differ in their wage levels, housing costs, and land values. Using 2006 Canadian Census data, our metropolitan quality‐of‐life estimates are somewhat consistent with popular rankings, yet find Canadians care more about climate and culture. Quality of life is highest in Victoria for anglophones, Montreal for francophones, and Vancouver for allophones, and lowest in more remote cities. Toronto is Canada's most productive city; Vancouver is the overall most valuable city. Qualite de vie, productivite des entreprises, et la valeur des avantages dans les diverses villes canadiennes. On evalue les differences entre la qualite de vie et la productivite des entreprises entre les zones metropolitaines au Canada a l'aide d'un cadre d'analyse d'equilibre general hedonique. Ces metriques sont basees sur l'estimation de la volonte de payer de menages et d'entreprises heterogenes pour se localiser dans diverses villes, qui different tant pour ce qui est des niveaux de salaires, des couts de l'habitation, et des prix des terrains. A l'aide des donnees du recensement canadien de 2006, on construit des evaluations de la qualite de vie des diverses zones metropolitaines qui s'arriment convenablement aux ordonnancements en vogue, mais on decouvre que les Canadiens portent une attention particuliere au climat et a la culture. La qualite de vie est la plus elevee a Victoria pour les anglophones, a Montreal pour les francophones, et a Vancouver pour les allophones, et la plus faible pour les villes eloignees des grands centres. Toronto est la ville la plus productive; Vancouver est generalement la plus appreciee.
Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Modeling of Schistosoma japonicum Prevalence Data in the Absence of a Diagnostic ‘Gold’ Standard

Background Spatial modeling is increasingly utilized to elucidate relationships between demographic, environmental, and socioeconomic factors, and infectious disease prevalence data. However, there is a paucity of studies focusing on spatio-temporal modeling that take into account the uncertainty of diagnostic techniques. Methodology/Principal Findings We obtained Schistosoma japonicum prevalence data, based on a standardized indirect hemagglutination assay (IHA), from annual reports from 114 schistosome-endemic villages in Dangtu County, southeastern part of the People's Republic of China, for the period 1995 to 2004. Environmental data were extracted from satellite images. Socioeconomic data were available from village registries. We used Bayesian spatio-temporal models, accounting for the sensitivity and specificity of the IHA test via an equation derived from the law of total probability, to relate the observed with the ‘true’ prevalence. The risk of S. japonicum was positively associated with the mean land surface temperature, and negatively correlated with the mean normalized difference vegetation index and distance to the nearest water body. There was no significant association between S. japonicum and socioeconomic status of the villages surveyed. The spatial correlation structures of the observed S. japonicum seroprevalence and the estimated infection prevalence differed from one year to another. Variance estimates based on a model adjusted for the diagnostic error were larger than unadjusted models. The generated prediction map for 2005 showed that most of the former and current infections occur in close proximity to the Yangtze River. Conclusion/Significance Bayesian spatial-temporal modeling incorporating diagnostic uncertainty is a suitable approach for risk mapping S. japonicum prevalence data. The Yangtze River and its tributaries govern schistosomiasis transmission in Dangtu County, but spatial correlation needs to be taken into consideration when making risk prediction at small scales.
Paratactic Conditionals in Syrian Arabic: A Study Based on Deir Ezzor Dialect

It is not always necessary to have a conditional particle to express conditionality; there are some conditional constructions called paratactic conditionals (PCs) that can express conditionality though no conditional particle is used. This study sheds some light on the structure of these constructions, gives a descriptive account of their meanings, shows that imperative clauses used in forming PCs do not always express order or command, and discusses the two main types of PCs. The examples show that PCs can be similar to typical conditionals and suggest that further research is needed to show that PCs can be a language universal. This study can also assist linguists to conclude that PCs in English show a considerable degree of similarity to their Deir Ezzor dialect (DED) counterpart with respect to the ways they are structured and interpreted.
Predictors of parent-teacher communication during infant transition to childcare in Portugal

ABSTRACT Although literature reports associations between parent-teacher communication and childcare quality, little is known about how such communications are related to family, child and childcare characteristics. This study examines whether child, family and childcare experience characteristics predict the level of parent-teacher communication, and differences between parents’ and teachers’ reports of communication. Participants were mothers of 90 infants and their teachers in childcare in Portugal. Results show that both parents and teachers report higher levels of communication in higher-quality programmes. Teachers reported more frequent communication than parents. Teachers, but not parents, reported more frequent communication when children spent fewer hours in childcare. Discussion highlights the relevance of monitoring the quality of childcare contexts, especially in early ages, and to increase parent-teacher communication when children spend more time in childcare. The importance of promoting high-quality childcare and accounting for variables at the mesosystemic level of development in teacher training are also discussed.
A dual-band circularly polarized aperture-coupled stacked microstrip antenna for global positioning satellite

This paper describes the design and testing of an aperture-coupled circularly polarized antenna for Global Positioning System (GPS) applications. The antenna operates at both the L1 and L2 frequencies of 1575 and 1227 MHz, which is required for differential GPS systems in order to provide maximum positioning accuracy. Electrical performance, low-profile, and cost were equally important requirements for this antenna. The design procedure is discussed, and measured results are presented. Results from a manufacturing sensitivity analysis are also included.
A Network Calculus With Effective Bandwidth

This paper establishes a link between two principal tools for the analysis of network traffic, namely, effective bandwidth and network calculus. It is shown that a general version of effective bandwidth can be expressed within the framework of a probabilistic version of the network calculus, where both arrivals and service are specified in terms of probabilistic bounds. By formulating well-known effective bandwidth expressions in terms of probabilistic envelope functions, the developed network calculus can be applied to a wide range of traffic types, including traffic that has self-similar characteristics. As applications, probabilistic lower bounds are presented on the service given by three different scheduling algorithms: static priority, earliest deadline first, and generalized processor sharing. Numerical examples show the impact of specific traffic models and scheduling algorithms on the multiplexing gain in a network.
The E avesdropper's Dilemma

This paper examines the problem of surreptitious Internet interception from the eavesdropper’s point of view. We introduce the notion of ‘fidelity” in digital eavesdropping. In particular, we formalize several kinds of “network noise” that might degrade fidelity, most notably “confusion,” and show that reliable network interception may not be as simple as previously thought or even always possible. Finally, we suggest requirements for “high fidelity” network interception, and show how systems that do not meet these requirements can be vulnerable to countermeasures, which in some cases can be performed entirely by a third party without the cooperation or even knowledge of the communicating parties.