Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Symbiont Diversity in Reticulitermes santonensis (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae): Investigation Strategy Through Proteomics

ABSTRACT The complex microbial community living in the hindgut of lower termites includes prokaryotes, flagellates, yeasts, and filamentous fungi. Many microorganisms are found in the termite gut, but only a few are thought to be involved in symbiotic association to participate in cellulose digestion. Proteomics provides analyses from both taxonomical and functional perspectives. We aimed to identify symbiont diversity in the gut of Reticulitermes santonensis (Feytaud), via complementary electrospray ionization associated to ion trap tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) and twodimensional gel electrophoresis associated to matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry analysis. One specific challenge to the study of lower termites is the relatively few data available on abundant symbiotic flagellates. Analysis based on LC-MS/MS revealed few protein families showing assignments to eukaryotes and the taxonomic origin of highly represented actins could not be established. Tubulins proved to be the most suitable protein family with which to identify flagellate populations from hindgut samples using LC-MS/MS, compared with other protein families, although this method targeted few prokaryotes in our assay. Similarly, two-dimensional gel electrophoresis associated to matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry did not succeed in identifying flagellate populations, but did permit the identification of most of the prokaryotic components of the symbiotic system. Finally, fungi and yeasts were identified by both methods. Owing to the lack of sequenced genes in flagellates, targeting tubulins for LC-MS/MS could allow fingerprints of flagellate populations to be established. Experimental and technical improvements might increase the efficiency of identification of prokaryotic populations in the near future, based on metaproteomic development.
Discriminability of Fingerprints of Twins

A study of the discriminability of fingerprints of twins is presented. The fingerprint data used is of high quality and quan- tity because of a predominantly young subject population of 298 pairs of twins whose tenprints were captured using a livescan device. Discriminability using level 1 and level 2 features is independently reported. The level 1 study was to visually classify by humans each fingerprint into one of six categories (right loop, left loop, whorl, arch, twin loop, and tented arch). It was found that twins are much more likely (55%) to have the same level 1 classification when compared to the general population (32%). The level 2 study was to compare minutiae (ridge endings and bifurcations). This was done by a minu- tiae-based automatic fingerprint identification algorithm that provided a score (0-350) given a pair of fingerprints. Scores were computed for corresponding fingers from both twins and non-twins. Five distribu- tions of scores were determined: twins, non-twins, identical twins, fraternal twins, and genuine scores from the same finger. Using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to compare distributions, the following inferences are made: twins are different from genuines, twins are different from non-twins, and identical twins are the same as fraternal twins. The main conclusion is that, although the patterns of minutiae among twins are more similar than in the general population, they are still discriminable.
Assessing Student Performance in Civics: The NAEP 1998 Civics Assessment

Abstract Students' ignorance of civics is often viewed with alarm, as in interpretations of the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); yet adults' incomplete knowledge of government is considered by many to be reasonable and acceptable. We show that aggregate distributions of political knowledge are actually quite similar for students and adults. However, the types of questions differ greatly: Where adults are typically asked about contemporary politics, students are asked about political institutions. We also show that the construction of NAEP does not permit comparative identification of knowledge levels across sub-topics. Moreover, we note that levels of performance are determined only after the results of the test are known, making it difficult to evaluate the success of civic education. We conclude that understanding student knowledge levels—and thus evaluating civic education—requires careful scrutiny of the content and construction of the NAEP test, and perhaps requires changes that more readily permit comparison of students' performance against preestablished criteria; across topics, states, or time; or between today's students and various generations of adults.
Rat hepatocytes in serum-free primary culture elaborate an extensive extracellular matrix containing fibrin and fibronectin

Adult rat hepatocytes cultured on type IV collagen, fibronectin, or laminin and maintained in serum-free medium were examined by indirect immunofluorescence using polyclonal antibodies against extracellular matrix proteins. An extensive fibrillar matrix containing fibronectin and fibrin was detected in all hepatocyte cultures irrespective of the exogenous matrix substratum used to support cell adhesion. Fibrils radiated from the cell periphery and covered the entire culture substratum. In addition, thicker fibers or bundles of fibers were localized on top of hepatocytes. This matrix did not contain laminin or the major types of collagen found in the liver biomatrix (types I, III, and IV). Isolation of the fibrillar matrix and analysis on polyacrylamide gels under reducing conditions demonstrated a major 58- kD polypeptide, derived from beta-fibrinogen as indicated by immunoblotting and two-dimensional peptide mapping. Plasmin rapidly dissolved the matrix. Deposition of the fibrin matrix in hepatocyte cultures was arrested by hirudin, by specific heparin oligosaccharides that potentiate thrombin inhibition by antithrombin III, and by dermatan sulfate, an activator of heparin cofactor II-mediated inhibition of thrombin. The results indicate that hepatocytes in culture synthesize and activate coagulation zymogens. In the absence of inhibitory and fibrinolytic mechanisms, a fibrin clot is formed by the action of thrombin on fibrinogen. Fibronectin attaches to this fibrin clot but fails to elaborate a fibrillar matrix on its own in the presence of coagulation inhibitors.
Reading in the Real World and Its Correlates.

Resultats d'une enquete effectuee aupres de 217 personnes dans une salle de depart d'un aeroport. Les sujets ont ete classes en lecteurs et en non lecteurs. L'investissement dans les activites de lecture a ete correle avec l'âge et l'education, le contact avec l'ecrit est apparu comme un bon predicteur du vocabulaire et des connaissances culturelles. Ces resultats, joints aux conclusions de plusieurs etudes voisines, invitent a conferer un role plus important aux contacts avec l'ecrit dans les theories relatives aux differences interindividuelles du developpement cognitif. (Ext. Res. d'A.)
Method for evaluating battery size based on loss of load probability concept for a remote PV system

Solar photovoltaic power is one of the potential renewable energy generation technologies which have recently received considerable attention globally. However, the stochastic nature of these energy sources makes the power output difficult to predict and control exactly and hence energy storage device is expected to coordinate with such energy sources to maintain system reliability. This paper presents a realistic evaluation model of photovoltaic power and battery storage which can be used in Monte Carlo simulation. The highly intermittent nature of solar radiation, charge/discharge constraints of battery storage and operating coordination between energy storage and system are incorporated while modeling. The developed models are applied for calculating battery size of photovoltaic system based on reliability criteria such as Loss of load probability (LOLP) for a remote case study area. Finally, the system performance is assessed by increasing the peak demand of the study area.
The Problem of Metrics: Assessing Progress and Effectiveness in the Vietnam War

During the Vietnam War the complex nature of fighting an insurgency posed significant problems for US Army officers attempting to measure progress and military effectiveness. While much of the Vietnam historiography maintains that ‘body counts’ served as the primary, if not only, indicator of wartime success, such arguments overlook the vast numbers of reports attempting to measure progress and performance. Problems in evaluating progress stemmed not from a lack of effort on the part of army officers or from a single-minded commitment to counting bodies. Rather, complications arose from attempting to collect too many facts, figures, and statistics without evaluating how accurately such data reflected progress in a complex political-military environment.
The mepsMAP Server. Mapping Epitopes on Protein Surface: Mining Annotated Proteins

For a growing number of biologists DNA or protein data are typically retrieved and managed on the Web, and not in the laboratory. A large number of bioinformatics datasets from primary and (thousands of) secondary databases are scattered on the Web in various formats. A biologist end-user might need to access and use tens of databases and tools every day. For this reason, the bioinformatics community is developing more and more service-oriented architectures (SOAs): software architecture of loosely coupled software services that can be accessed without knowledge of, or control over, their internal architecture. Data-processing and analysis tasks can be automated by having free access to bioinformatics Web services (WSs) that are the building blocks of the SOAs. In this paper we introduce a new bioinformatics Web server, mepsMAP (mapping epitopes on protein surface: Mining Annotated Proteins), developed to identify the recognition sites between antibodies and their cognate antigens. In some cases, the recognition site is represented by a continuous segment of the antigen sequence, but much more often the epitope is "conformational," i.e. the antibody recognizes the location and type of exposed antigen side chains that are not necessarily contiguous in the antigen's sequence, but brought together by its three-dimensional structure. A facility on the server allows the user to search putative conformational epitopes on protein surface, querying the system for proteins with a given annotation. The mepsMAP server has been implemented as a SOA composed by a database and a set of four WSs. We present here the software architecture of the system with a detailed description of the WS dataflow that has been optimized to provide the best computing performance while maintaining the easiest end-user access to the system via a Web interface.
Transfer Learning to Learn with Multitask Neural Model Search

Deep learning models require extensive architecture design exploration and hyperparameter optimization to perform well on a given task. The exploration of the model design space is often made by a human expert, and optimized using a combination of grid search and search heuristics over a large space of possible choices. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a Reinforcement Learning approach that has been proposed to automate architecture design. NAS has been successfully applied to generate Neural Networks that rival the best human-designed architectures. However, NAS requires sampling, constructing, and training hundreds to thousands of models to achieve well-performing architectures. This procedure needs to be executed from scratch for each new task. The application of NAS to a wide set of tasks currently lacks a way to transfer generalizable knowledge across tasks. In this paper, we present the Multitask Neural Model Search (MNMS) controller. Our goal is to learn a generalizable framework that can condition model construction on successful model searches for previously seen tasks, thus significantly speeding up the search for new tasks. We demonstrate that MNMS can conduct an automated architecture search for multiple tasks simultaneously while still learning well-performing, specialized models for each task. We then show that pre-trained MNMS controllers can transfer learning to new tasks. By leveraging knowledge from previous searches, we find that pre-trained MNMS models start from a better location in the search space and reduce search time on unseen tasks, while still discovering models that outperform published human-designed models.
Instrumental Variable Estimation in Social Work Research: A Technique for Estimating Causal Effects in Nonrandomized Settings

Social work researchers should become familiar with an econometric approach, known as instrumental variable estimation, to estimate causal effects when the variable of interest is not randomly assigned and is, therefore, nonignorable or endogenous. In this article, we introduce instrumental variable estimation and describe how this method is used in model estimation. We focus on the critical assumptions needed to support causal inferences using instrumental variable estimation, provide clear examples of instruments, and describe how these assumptions promote the validity of inference with instruments. We compare the instrumental variable approach to causal estimation with the path model, which is a familiar approach in most social work research, and provide a balanced appraisal of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.
An Application of Structural Equation Modeling for Developing Good Teaching Characteristics Ontology

Ontology is a knowledge representation technique which aims to make knowledge explicit by defining the core concepts and their relationships. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is a statistical technique which aims to explore the core factors from empirical data and estimates the relationship between these factors. This article presents an application of Structural Equation Modeling to construct a lightweight ontology of good teaching characteristics. The prin- cipal factors from SEM are used as concepts of the proposed ontology. The OAsys approach is used as an ontology development process. The proposed ontology consists of three levels: super-class level consists of 6 components of teaching; the first-level sub-class consists of 12 latent factors from SEM; and the second-level sub-class consists of 66 classes of questionnaire items. The experi- mental result indicated that the proposed ontology which constructs from the core factors of SEM is well-structured, free from a node with multiple parent classes. There is no cycles loop between sub-classes. Having well-balanced of ratio between parent classes and sub-classes. The structure of this proposed ontology corresponds to the principle of conceptual balance.
Spanish-Speaking Parent–Child Emotional Narratives and Children's Social Skills

We examined whether parents' content and style when discussing past positive and negative emotional experiences with their children were concurrently and predictively linked to prekindergarteners' social skills. Sixty-five low-income Spanish-speaking parent–child dyads discussed a past positive and negative emotional experience at the beginning of prekindergarten. Narratives were coded for parents' elaborative style and emotion resolution, cause, and attribution. Children's emotional and cognitive-processing words were also coded. Children's social problem-solving skills and prosocial behaviors were assessed at the beginning and at the end of prekindergarten. Concurrently, children's social problem-solving skills were related to parents' elaborative style when discussing positive emotional experiences and children's use of cognitive-processing words when discussing negative emotional experiences. Predictively, children whose parents offered resolutions when discussing negative emotional experiences at the beginning of prekindergarten had better social problem-solving skills at the end of prekindergarten. Parents who talked about causes or attributed emotions when discussing past emotional experiences did not necessarily have children with better social skills. Findings suggest that parents' scaffolding when discussing past positive and negative emotional experiences offers opportunities for prekindergarteners to develop social abilities crucial for school readiness.
Literacy practices in Schome Park: a virtual literacy ethnography

In this paper I deploy a synthesis of methods I term virtual literacy ethnography to investigate the diverse literacy practices of the project Schome Park. Participants have been engaging over a 15-month period in an innovative out-of-school project centred on use of the (Teen) Second Life three-dimensional virtual world. Some ethical aspects of working with children in virtual worlds are briefly discussed. I analyse evidence from the three main communicative domains of the project: chat logs, wiki and forum, demonstrating the complexity and creativity of student literacy practices. I include in my data selection exemplars that draw on persistently valued literacy texts and demonstrate that attentive examination to literacy practices may be more fruitful than maintaining overly dichotomised boundaries between new literacies and those more established.
evaluation : Criticisms and recommendations

We survey the evaluation methodology adopted in Information Extraction (IE), as defined in the MUC conferences and in later independent efforts applying machine learning to IE. We point out a number of problematic issues that may hamper the comparison between results obtained by different researchers. Some of them are common to other NLP tasks: e.g., the difficulty of exactly identifying the effects on performance of the data (sample selection and sample size), of the domain theory (features selected), and of algorithm parameter settings. Issues specific to IE evaluation include: how leniently to assess inexact identification of filler boundaries, the possibility of multiple fillers for a slot, and how the counting is performed. We argue that, when specifying an information extraction task, a number of characteristics should be clearly defined. However, in the papers only a few of them are usually explicitly specified. Our aim is to elaborate a clear and detailed experimental methodology and propose it to the IE community. The goal is to reach a widespread agreement on such proposal so that future IE evaluations will adopt the proposed methodology, making comparisons between algorithms fair and reliable. In order to achieve this goal, we will develop and make available to the community a set of tools and resources that incorporate a standardized IE methodology.
Dynamic Maintenance in semiconductor manufacturing using Bayesian networks

In semiconductor manufacturing, in order to guarantee an optimal production flow it is necessary to perform a quick and correct equipment repair when an error message occurs. Since most equipment types are very complex, maintenance engineers are provided with manuals of troubleshooting flow charts. These manuals offer guidelines for finding the cause of the problem. Since such manuals are often static, clumsy and difficult to extend, it might be hard for maintenance engineers to efficiently perform cause-effect testing. For this reason, we employed a Bayesian network model that is developed from troubleshooting flow charts, which is able to overcome these deficiencies. The network is built as a self-learning diagnostic system. Troubleshooting sessions are used to train the network, so that the order of potential root causes is dynamically updated by actual maintenance experience. An Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is used to update the network. Furthermore, by ordering symptoms according to a mutual information criterion, it is possible to provide maintenance engineers with a ranking of the most informative and efficient tests to run.
Reliability and Validity in Field Research: Some Strategies and Tactics

This article is concerned with issues of validity and reliability in field research. It examines the nature of, and threats to validity and reliability in field studies and documents some strategies and tactics that may be employed to counter those threats. At a time when field research is becoming an increasingly important and necessary method for more accounting researchers, it is hoped that an article such as this may provide useful reference for the conduct, communication and evaluation of field research in accounting.
From a Distance …

Egocentric anchoring, that is, overimputing one’s own perspective onto others constitutes a major obstacle for successful perspective taking. Accordingly, differentiating between the self and others is beneficial for perspective taking because it highlights the inadequacy of egocentric anchoring. The current research tested whether activating avoidance motivational orientation enhances perspective-taking performance (compared to approach motivational orientation), because self-other differentiation is facilitated under avoidance orientation. Supporting these predictions, two experiments showed that inducing avoidance motivational orientation (compared to approach orientation) either via goal framing or via the respective arm position enhances perspective-taking performance. Using experimental causal chain design, Study 3a supported the hypothesis that avoidance motivational orientation fosters self-other differentiation, while Study 3b showed that fostering self-other differentiation experimentally enhanced perspective-taking performance. The findings are discussed with regard to the role of psychological distance in perspective taking.
Direct versus Indirect Treatment for Preschool Children who Stutter: The RESTART Randomized Trial

Objective Stuttering is a common childhood disorder. There is limited high quality evidence regarding options for best treatment. The aim of the study was to compare the effectiveness of direct treatment with indirect treatment in preschool children who stutter. Methods In this multicenter randomized controlled trial with an 18 month follow-up, preschool children who stutter who were referred for treatment were randomized to direct treatment (Lidcombe Program; n = 99) or indirect treatment (RESTART-DCM treatment; n = 100). Main inclusion criteria were age 3–6 years, ≥3% syllables stuttered (%SS), and time since onset ≥6 months. The primary outcome was the percentage of non-stuttering children at 18 months. Secondary outcomes included stuttering frequency (%SS), stuttering severity ratings by the parents and therapist, severity rating by the child, health-related quality of life, emotional and behavioral problems, and speech attitude. Results Percentage of non-stuttering children for direct treatment was 76.5% (65/85) versus 71.4% (65/91) for indirect treatment (Odds Ratio (OR), 0.6; 95% CI, 0.1–2.4, p = . 42). At 3 months, children treated by direct treatment showed a greater decline in %SS (significant interaction time x therapy: β = -1.89; t(282.82) = -2.807, p = . 005). At 18 months, stuttering frequency was 1.2% (SD 2.1) for direct treatment and 1.5% (SD 2.1) for indirect treatment. Direct treatment had slightly better scores on most other secondary outcome measures, but no differences between treatment approaches were significant. Conclusions Direct treatment decreased stuttering more quickly during the first three months of treatment. At 18 months, however, clinical outcomes for direct and indirect treatment were comparable. These results imply that at 18 months post treatment onset, both treatments are roughly equal in treating developmental stuttering in ways that surpass expectations of natural recovery. Follow-up data are needed to confirm these findings in the longer term. Trial Registration isrctn.org ISRCTN24362190