Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Negotiating Power, Developing Trust: Transgressing Race and Status in the Academy.

Exploring the experiences of African American students engaged in doctoral studies reveals disturbing realities. In this article, we use narrative inquiry to engage in a collaborative project between two White faculty members and three African American graduate students. Transgressive pedagogy provided a conceptual framework for both our initial study and our subsequent reflections on the need to create supportive networks for graduate students of color in the academy. In the project we conversed and reflected about how our understanding of race and status had an impact on our experiences in the academy. Our study contrasted student experiences in environments in which students expressed feeling like ‘‘casualties of war’’ with those in which they expressed feeling like valued colleagues. We found that unspoken assumptions about race and status often created a turbulent climate for the participating African American doctoral students and White faculty members who shared values of inclusivity.
LYR3, a high‐affinity LCO‐binding protein of Medicago truncatula, interacts with LYK3, a key symbiotic receptor

LYR3, LYK3, and NFP are lysin motif‐containing receptor‐like kinases (LysM‐RLKs) from Medicago truncatula, involved in perception of symbiotic lipo‐chitooligosaccharide (LCO) signals. Here, we show that LYR3, a high‐affinity LCO‐binding protein, physically interacts with LYK3, a key player regulating symbiotic interactions. In vitro, LYR3 is phosphorylated by the active kinase domain of LYK3. Fluorescence lifetime imaging/Förster resonance energy transfer (FLIM/FRET) experiments in tobacco protoplasts show that the interaction between LYR3 and LYK3 at the plasma membrane is disrupted or inhibited by addition of LCOs. Moreover, LYR3 attenuates the cell death response, provoked by coexpression of NFP and LYK3 in tobacco leaves.
Dimension reduction of technical indicators for the prediction of financial time series - Application to the BEL20 Market Index

Prediction of financial time series using artificial neural networks has been the subject of many publications, even if the predictability of financial series remains a subject of scientific debate in the financial literature. Facing this difficulty, analysts often consider a large number of exogenous indica- tors, which makes the fitting of neural networks extremely difficult. In this paper, we analyze how to aggregate a large number of indicators in a smaller number using -possibly nonlinear- projection methods. Nonlinear projection methods are shown to be equivalent to the linear Principal Component Analysis when the prediction tool used on the new variables is linear. Furthermore, the computation of the nonlinear projection gives an objective way to evaluate the number of resulting indicators needed for the prediction. Finally, the advantages of nonlinear projection could be further exploited by using a subsequent nonlinear prediction model. The methodology developed in the paper is validated on data from the BEL20 market index, using systematic cross-validation results. Classification Codes: G00, G14.
Transgenic zebrafish expressing fluorescent proteins in central nervous system neurons

Zebrafish is a powerful model system for investigations of vertebrate neural development. The animal has also become an important model for studies of neuronal function. Both in developmental and functional studies, transgenic zebrafish expressing fluorescent proteins in central nervous system neurons have been playing important roles. We review here the methods for producing transgenic zebrafish. Recent advances in transposon‐ or bacterial artificial chromosome‐based transgenesis greatly facilitate the creation of useful lines. We also present our study on alx‐positive neurons to reveal how transgenic zebrafish expressing fluorescent proteins in a specific class of neurons can be used to investigate their development and function.
How to define anorectic weight

Different definitions of weight criteria for the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa have been introduced, and all of them are problematic. For example, ICD-10 (World Health Organization, 1992) suggests using 17.5 BMI instead of 85 per cent expected weight. It is shown that any weight-for-height indices (including BMI) are inadequate corrections for body size. Furthermore BMI is not an optimum weight-for-height index, but is rather an approximation of relative weight. Data from several countries indicate that the proportion of the population with weight below 17.5 BMI depends on age, sex and race. We suggest returning to Benn's definition of relative weight. It gives a clinically meaningful intra-individual scale, on which patients may be compared across populations. We show that BMI may be used to calculate relative weight and suggest a diagnostic criterion of 85 per cent of median BMI from sex-, age- and country-specific tables. Such tables are already provided for German, English, French, Swedish, Italian, Japanese and (white) US populations. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and Eating Disorders Association.
Students’ experiences and engagement with SMS for learning in Higher Education

This article presents an evaluation of students’ experiences and engagement with Short Message Service (SMS) (text) messages. SMS was used to support learning through engaging students in formative assessment objective questions with feedback, as well as SMS‐based collaborative learning tasks. The rationale was derived from a perceived benefit of amalgamating an all pervasive technology with established pedagogic techniques. Students’ experiences and engagement were investigated through qualitative and quantitative data. Findings showed experiences and engagement to be mixed, the quantitative data differing somewhat from the qualitative. Positive experiences were reported for administrative communications, learning support (in the quantitative data) and suggested uses for student to tutor texts. Negative factors in students’ experiences were: intrusion into personal time; the culture of immediacy in texting; costs; and lack of perceived pedagogic benefit. Implications for the use of SMS for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and for the future of such approaches in making learning mobile are discussed.
Authentic Leadership Structural Validity: Higher Education Staff Notion on Authentic Leadership

Contemporary leadership theory and practice describes authentic leadership (AL) in relation to self-awareness, relational transparency, internalized moral perspective, and balance processing of information (Walumbwa et al., 2008). A total of 580 academic, management and professional staffs were asked to rate the AL behaviours of their administrative heads using the rater version of authentic leadership questionnaire (Walumbwa et al., 2008). The present paper examines, if there are distinction among the measures of AL, if the latentvariables correlate with each other and then confirm the factor structure. Findings from Principal component Analysis (PCA) revealed the presence of three dimensions of AL -self-awareness, internalized moral perspective and relational transparency. The result also provides evidence that supports discriminant and convergent validity. We also present finding from the confirmatory factor analyses (CFA’s) which supports the adequacy of AL. The CFA’s Goodness of Fit Indices results reached acceptable level for some tested models. Based on the prior findings and the current findings we concluded that Walumbwa’s AL scales is an appropriate tool for assessing AL at a general level, though the extent of replication across population will be influenced by sampling characterization as espoused in this study.
A Mixed-Signal GFSK Demodulator Based on Multithreshold Linear Phase Quantization

An ultralow-power Gaussian frequency-shift keying (GFSK) demodulator with large tolerance for process variations and wide coverage of data rate for low-intermediate-frequency (low-IF) wireless receivers is presented. A novel multithreshold linear phase quantization technique is proposed to improve the demodulator sensitivity and relax the tradeoff between the selection of the IF and the data rate. A dynamic threshold slicer is employed to efficiently overcome the dc drifts caused by the input frequency offset. The demodulator achieves 490-mV input dc offset cancellation, 800-kHz frequency offset tolerance, and data rate coverage from 100 kb/s to 2 Mb/s. The measured signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is 16.0 dB for a 0.1% bit error rate (BER) and a 0.25 modulation index. The demodulator has been fabricated in a 0.18-mum complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor process with only 0.14-mm2 active area and 450-muA current drawn from a 1.8-V power supply.
Functional Characterization of the Putative Hepatitis B Virus Core Protein Late Domain Using Retrovirus Chimeras

The hepatitis B virus (HBV) Core protein encodes a late (L)-domain like motif (129PPAYRPPNAP138) that has been purported to serve as a docking site for recruitment of host factors such as Nedd4 that can mediate viral particle release from infected cells. However, mutation of this region of Core typically disrupts nucleocapsid formation in the cytoplasm, making it difficult to ascertain if the Core PPAY motif constitutes a functional L-domain that mediates HBV release in the context of replicating virus. Since many viral L-domains are functionally interchangeable between different virus families, and such swapping experiments have been used as a tool to identify other viral sequences with L-domain activity, we generated chimeric constructs between murine leukemia virus (MLV) Gag and HBV Core to determine if the potential HBV L-domain motif is sufficient to stimulate virus release. We found that the HBV Core PPAY motif, but not the PNAP motif, demonstrates L-domain activity in the context of MLV replication to direct virus release and infectious virion production. Additionally, we found that overexpression of the cellular Nedd4 or WWP1 ubiquitin ligases stimulates release of a partially defective PPAY domain mutant, providing further evidence supporting a role for the Nedd4 ubiquitin ligase in promoting HBV release. These studies lend further insight into the mechanisms used by HBV to mediate its release from infected cells.
Transitivity performance, relational hierarchy knowledge and awareness: Results of an instructional framing manipulation

The transitive inference (TI) paradigm has been widely used to examine the role of the hippocampus in generalization. Here we consider a surprising feature of experimental findings in this task: the relatively poor transitivity performance and levels of hierarchy knowledge achieved by adult human subjects. We focused on the influence of the task instructions on participants' subsequent performance—a single‐word framing manipulation which either specified the relation between items as transitive (i.e., OLD‐FRAME: choose which item is “older”) or left it ambiguous (i.e., NO‐FRAME: choose which item is “correct”). We show a marked but highly specific effect of manipulating prior knowledge through instruction: transitivity performance and levels of relational hierarchy knowledge were enhanced, but premise performance unchanged. Further, we show that hierarchy recall accuracy, but not conventional awareness scores, was a significant predictor of inferential performance across the entire group of participants. The current study has four main implications: first, our findings establish the importance of the task instructions, and prior knowledge, in the TI paradigm—suggesting that they influence the size of the overall hypothesis space (e.g., to favor a linear hierarchical structure over other possibilities in the OLD‐FRAME). Second, the dissociable effects of the instructional frame on premise and inference performance provide evidence for the operation of distinct underlying mechanisms (i.e., an associative mechanism vs. relational hierarchy knowledge). Third, our findings suggest that a detailed measurement of hierarchy recall accuracy may be a more sensitive index of relational hierarchy knowledge, than conventional awareness score—and should be used in future studies investigating links between awareness and inferential performance. Finally, our study motivates an experimental setting that ensures robust hierarchy learning across participants—therefore facilitating study of the neural mechanisms underlying the learning and representation of linear hierarchies. © 2013 The Authors. Hippocampus Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Regulating the regulators: How ribonucleases dictate the rules in the control of small non-coding RNAs

Gene regulation was long thought to be controlled almost entirely by proteins that bind to DNA and RNA. Over the last years, it has become clear that small non-coding RNAs (sRNAs) are important in almost every facet of gene regulation. Understanding how they are matured and degraded has therefore become of maximum importance, in order to know how to “regulate the regulators”. Ribonucleases perform a key role in the biogenesis and processing of sRNAs, as well as in controlling their cellular levels through regulation of their turnover. Accordingly, RNases can have a major impact on sRNAs regulatory pathways. In this review, we present an overview of what is presently known about the main RNases, as well as other factors involved in sRNA processing and turnover, in essence contributing to the assembly of the increasing number of pieces in the puzzling global mechanism of sRNA regulation. Although the primary focus will be on bacterial sRNAs, parallels will be made with the siRNAs and miRNAs in eukaryotes.
News on the Jorá (Tupí-Guaraní): sociolinguistics, description, and classification

With 45 languages, the Tupi family is one of South America's largest families. However, several gaps still remain. Some languages are already extinct and there are others for which data can no longer be collected. The situation of Jora has reached this point. This article aims to summarize all data concerning the Jora people and their language, parts of which were collected by the anthropologists Hanke (1959) and Beghin (1980) and other parts by the authors. On the basis of sparse data from several sources of differing reliability we attempt to classify the Jora language using the phoneme inventory, grammatical evidence and lexical comparison. Jora is classified as Tupi-Guarani, closely related to Siriono and Yuki.
Accelerating divergent applications on SIMD architectures using neural networks

In this work, we investigate neural-network-based solutions to the well-known problem of branch divergence in Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architectures. Our approach isolates code regions with performance degradation due to branch divergence, trains neural networks (NNs) offline to approximate these regions, and replaces the regions with their NN approximations. By directly manipulating source code, this platform-agnostic methodology translates control flow into non-divergent computation, trading-off precision for performance and energy gains. We present the Neuralizer (our automated software flow), and evaluate our approach on various divergent GPU applications, achieving average performance gains of 13.6× and energy savings of 14.8× with 96% accuracy.
Lung Function in Wheezing Infants after Acute Lower Respiratory Tract Infection and Its Association with Respiratory Outcome

Background: Wheezing is common in early childhood and remains an important health concern. The aim of this study was to assess the lung function of wheezing infants and to investigate the relationship between lung function and respiratory outcome. Methods: Infants <2 years of age with acute lower respiratory tract infection (ALRTI) who had undergone lung function tests were included in the study. They were assigned to wheeze or no wheeze group based on physical examination. Infants without any respiratory diseases were enrolled as controls. Lung function was measured during the acute phase and 3 months after ALRTI. One-year follow-up for infants with ALRTI was achieved. Results: A total of 252 infants with ALRTI who had acceptable data regarding tidal breathing were included in the final analysis. Compared with the control and the no wheeze groups, infants in the wheeze group had significantly decreased time to peak tidal expiratory flow as a percentage of total expiratory time (TPTEF/TE) (20.1 ± 6.4% vs. 34.4 ± 6.2% and 26.4 ± 8.3%, respectively, P < 0.0001) and significantly increased peak tidal expiratory flow (PTEF) (90.7 ± 26.3 ml/s vs. 79.3 ± 18.4 ml/s and 86.1 ± 28.0 ml/s, respectively, P < 0.01), sReff and Reff. The infants in the wheeze group still had lower TPTEF/TE and volume to peak tidal expiratory flow as a percentage of total expiratory volume (VPTEF/VE) than the no wheeze infants 3 months after the ALRTI. Moreover, there was a significant inverse relationship between TPTEF/TE, VPTEF/VE, and the recurrence of wheezing and pneumonia. Conclusions: Impaired lung function was present in wheezing infants with ALRTI and the deficits persisted. In addition, the lower level of TPTEF/TE and VPTEF/VE was a risk factor for poor respiratory outcome.
Biological toxicities of emissions from an unmodified engine fueled with diesel and biodiesel blend

Conventional diesel and palm oil methyl esters were blended in 6 ratios (0, 10, 30, 50, 75 and 100% of biodiesel by volume) and fed into an unmodified 4-stroke engine with a constant output power. The semi-volatile and particulate products in the exhaust were collected separately and their biological toxicities evaluated by both Microtox test and the 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay. The Microtox test indicates that the TUVs (toxicity unit per liter exhaust sampled, TU/L-exhaust) in the semi-volatile extracts were 3 to 5 times those of the particulate extracts. Diesel particulates had the highest unit toxicity, TUW (toxicity unit per μ g soluble organic fraction of particulate, TU/μ g particle SOF) of all of the other biodiesel blends. According to the Microtox tests results, the effect of biodiesel blending in MTT assay demonstrated higher toxicity in the semi-volatile products than the particulates.
Physical activity and body composition outcomes of the GreatFun 2 Run intervention at 20 month follow-up

Background: Physical inactivity is recognised as a public health concern within children and interventions to increase physical activity are needed. GreatFun2Run was a school-based healthy lifestyles intervention that showed positive changes in physical activity levels and body composition immediately post-intervention. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether these changes in physical activity and body composition were maintained 1820 months after the intervention ended. Method: Participants (n = 589, aged 7-11 yrs) from 4 intervention and 4 control schools took part in the 10-month intervention, of which 421 (71%) were present for follow-up. The intervention comprised a CD-rom learning and teaching resource for teachers; an interactive website for pupils, teachers and parents; two highlight physical activity events (1 mile school runs/walks); a local media campaign; and a summer activity wall planner and record. Randomisation was not possible because of local media content. Outcome measures were objectively measured physical activity (pedometers and accelerometers) and body composition variables (body mass index, waist circumference, estimated percent body fat, and sum of skinfolds). Teacher interviews and participant focus groups were conducted. Multi-level modelling was employed for the data analysis. Results: Both control and intervention participants had increased their physical activity at follow-up but there was no group by time interaction (control: 2726 steps per day increase; intervention 3404 steps per day increase, p > .05). There were significant increases in estimated percent body fat, sum of skinfolds, waist circumference and body mass index (BMI) with increasing age. In the control group, there was evidence for a plateauing in the rate of change in all body composition variables with increasing age, except BMI. In contrast, significant interaction terms suggest that the rate of change in waist circumference, BMI and BMISDS continued to increase with age in the intervention group. Teacher interviews suggested that because of time pressures, competing resources, curriculum demands and staff changes the majority of teachers had not continued to use the resources. Conclusions: While the intervention initially produced positive changes in physical activity levels and body composition, these changes were not sustained once the intervention ended. Facilitating long-term health behaviour change in children remains a challenge.
Exploiting Rateless Codes in Cloud Storage Systems

Block-level cloud storage (BLCS) offers to users and applications the access to persistent block storage devices (virtual disks) that can be directly accessed and used as if they were raw physical disks. In this paper we devise ENIGMA, an architecture for the back-end of BLCS systems able to provide adequate levels of access and transfer performance, availability, integrity, and confidentiality, for the data it stores. ENIGMA exploits LT rateless codes to store fragments of sectors on storage nodes organized in clusters. We quantitatively evaluate how the various ENIGMA system parameters affect the performance, availability, integrity, and confidentiality of virtual disks. These evaluations are carried out by using both analytical modeling (for availability, integrity, and confidentiality) and discrete event simulation (for performance), and by considering a set of realistic operational scenarios. Our results indicate that it is possible to simultaneously achieve all the objectives set forth for BLCS systems by using ENIGMA, and that a careful choice of the various system parameters is crucial to achieve a good compromise among them. Moreover, they also show that LT coding-based BLCS systems outperform traditional BLCS systems in all the aspects mentioned before.
Analysis of semiconductor sensor for detecting dissolved gases in power transformers

Three hypotheses for steady-state responding, transient responding and resuming behavior of semiconductor gas sensors are proposed, according to which, the logarithm of the steady-state resistance value and the logarithm of the gases concentration obey a tangent function; the transient response is decided by the current resistance of the sensor and the gases concentration; and the resuming behavior is decided by the current resistance of the sensor and gases concentration at the next time. In order to validate the hypotheses, a gases separating function is modeled on the basis of stage model. Relative coefficients are obtained by experiment and mathematical methods. The gases separating model and the hypotheses about the sensor are validated by comparing the simulating results with the experiment results, and the comparing results show that the hypotheses are reasonable when applied in the semiconductor of the monitoring system for dissolved gases in insulating oil