Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AMERICAN STUDIESAND INTERDISCIPLINARITY: A TALE OF TWO PROGRAMS

by Charise Paulette DeBerry M.A. Washington State University August 2010 Chair: Scott Frickel To what extent do American Studies programs at Brown University and Washington State University engage in interdisciplinarity as demonstrated through their faculty and publication structures? Using an institutionalist lens and following a template provided by Fabio Rojas‘ 2008 study on Africana Studies faculty publications, this study evaluates content from the curriculum vitae of faculty from both schools and the content found in journal descriptions in which faculty have published. Contextualized within the history of American Studies and disciplinarity within academia, findings show that interdisciplinarity is engaged in on moderate to low levels at both institutions based on characteristics such as faculty age and field structure, and publication age and field structure. Despite the levels indicated, findings suggest that Washington State University leans more toward engaging in interdisciplinarity than Brown University when noting faculty and publication age structures of both schools. Discussion of the implications of the extent to which interdisciplinarity is engaged in follows, with a look at the proportion of men versus women that participate in each school‘s American Studies program. From this collective of information further inquiry regarding the engagement in interdisciplinarity for all Ph.D. granting American Studies programs is pondered along with what it means to practice interdisciplinarity in academia for those in the humanities and social sciences.
Problem Statement: Overlays for Network Virtualization

This document describes issues associated with providing multi-tenancy in large data center networks and how these issues may be addressed using an overlay-based network virtualization approach. A key multi- tenancy requirement is traffic isolation so that one tenant's traffic is not visible to any other tenant. Another requirement is address space isolation so that different tenants can use the same address space within different virtual networks. Traffic and address space isolation is achieved by assigning one or more virtual networks to each tenant, where traffic within a virtual network can only cross into another virtual network in a controlled fashion (e.g., via a configured router and/or a security gateway). Additional functionality is required to provision virtual networks, associating a virtual machine's network interface(s) with the appropriate virtual network and maintaining that association as the virtual machine is activated, migrated, and/or deactivated. Use of an overlay-based approach enables scalable deployment on large network infrastructures.
Visual methods in social research (2nd Ed.), by Marcus Banks and David Zeitlyn [Book Review]

It was a pleasure to take up the invitation to review this second edition of Visual Methods in Social Research, as I had gained so much from reading the first edition and looked forward to returning to the updated volume. In the original book, Marcus Banks (2001, p. 7) argued that ‘our initial understandings or readings of images are always pre-scripted’ and he suggested that we ask particular questions about found images, ‘what the image is of, what is its context? , who took it or made it, when and why? , how do other people come to have it, how do they read it, what do they do with it? ’. Drawing on Hindu philosophy, Banks encouraged readers to locate this more productive seeing in relation to ‘darshan’; the ability to see and understand multiple points of view and schools of thoughts; and I have carried this philosophy in my own work with visual and creative methodologies (Mannay 2016).
Computer Vision Based Hand Gesture Interfaces for Human-Computer Interaction

The paper gives an overview of the field of computer vision based hand gesture interfaces for Human-Computer Interaction, and describes the early stages of a project about gestural command sets, an issue that has often been neglected. Currently we have built a first prototype for exploring the use of pieand marking menus in gesture-based interaction. The purpose is to study if such menus, with practice, could support the development of autonomous gestural command sets. The scenario is remote control of home appliances, such as TV sets and DVD players, which in the future could be extended to the more general scenario of ubiquitous computing in everyday situations. Some early observations are reported, mainly concerning problems with user fatigue and precision of gestures. Future work is discussed, such as introducing flow menus for reducing fatigue, and control menus for continuous control functions. The computer vision algorithms will also have to be developed further.
Spatial and Temporal Variation in PM2.5 Chemical Composition in the United States for Health Effects Studies

Background Although numerous studies have demonstrated links between particulate matter (PM) and adverse health effects, the chemical components of the PM mixture that cause injury are unknown. Objectives This work characterizes spatial and temporal variability of PM2.5 (PM with aerodynamic diameter < 2.5 μm) components in the United States; our objective is to identify components for assessment in epidemiologic studies. Methods We constructed a database of 52 PM2.5 component concentrations for 187 U.S. counties for 2000–2005. First, we describe the challenges inherent to analysis of a national PM2.5 chemical composition database. Second, we identify components that contribute substantially to and/or co-vary with PM2.5 total mass. Third, we characterize the seasonal and regional variability of targeted components. Results Strong seasonal and geographic variations in PM2.5 chemical composition are identified. Only seven of the 52 components contributed ≥ 1% to total mass for yearly or seasonal averages [ammonium (NH4+), elemental carbon (EC), organic carbon matter (OCM), nitrate (NO3−), silicon, sodium (Na+), and sulfate (SO42−)]. Strongest correlations with PM2.5 total mass were with NH4+ (yearly), OCM (especially winter), NO3− (winter), and SO42− (yearly, spring, autumn, and summer), with particularly strong correlations for NH4+ and SO42− in summer. Components that co-varied with PM2.5 total mass, based on daily detrended data, were NH4+, SO42−, OCM, NO32−, bromine, and EC. Conclusions The subset of identified PM2.5 components should be investigated further to determine whether their daily variation is associated with daily variation of health indicators, and whether their seasonal and regional patterns can explain the seasonal and regional heterogeneity in PM10 (PM with aerodynamic diameter < 10 μm) and PM2.5 health risks.
Diagnosis of canine leptospirosis using an immunomagnetic separation-PCR method

Diagnosis of leptospirosis by PCR is hampered due to the presence of substances on biological fluids. Here, we report an immunomagnetic separation step prior to PCR which improved the detection of Leptospira spp. in blood and urine samples from dogs. It resulted in a significant improvement on sensitivity for diagnosis of canine leptospirosis.
Segmentation of Breast Cancer Tissue Microarrays for Computer-Aided Diagnosis in Pathology

Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems for pathologists can act as an intelligent digital assistant supporting automated grading and morphometric-based discovery of tissue features that are important in cancer diagnosis and patient prognosis. Automated image segmentation is an essential component of computer-based grading in CAD. We describe a novel tissue segmentation algorithm using local feature-based active contours in a globally convex formulation. Preliminary results using the Stanford Tissue MicroArray database shows promising stromal/epithelial superpixel segmentation.
Culture-specific items : Translation procedures for a text about Australian and New Zealand children's literature

The aim of this study is to analyse the problems met when translating culture-specific items in a text about Australian and New Zealand colonial and post-colonial children’s literature into Swedish. The analysis quantifies and describes the different translation procedures used, and contrasts different strategies when there was more than one possible choice. It also outlines the reasons for the choices made when creating a text adapted for a Swedish audience.The translation methods applied are dynamic equivalence and domestication. As for the categorization of the material, the theories of Newmark (1988) have primarily been followed.The study shows that the frequency of each translation procedure depends on the type of culture-specific item, and the chosen translation method. It is argued that transference is the most commonly used procedure, and recognized translations are not as frequent as could have been expected with the choice of domestication. This is the case for proper nouns and references to literary works, where transference and dynamic equivalence has been given priority over domestication whenever the factual content was considered to be the most important aspect to follow. As for culture-specific items of the category social culture, neutralisation is the most commonly used procedure. In such cases the domestication method was more influential than dynamic equivalence as the consideration of ethics as well as avoidance of cultural taboos in the target culture were considered to be more important than content.
14‐3‐3 inhibits insulin‐like growth factor‐I‐induced proliferation of cardiac fibroblasts via a phosphatidylinositol 3‐kinase‐dependent pathway

1. Insulin‐like growth factor (IGF)‐I plays an important role in the pathogenesis of heart disease and has been shown to strongly induce the proliferation of cardiac fibroblasts (CFs). It remains unknown whether 14‐3‐3 proteins, which are associated the regulation of signal transduction, affect IGF‐I‐induced CF proliferation.
Risk Assessment of Gastric Cancer Caused by Helicobacter pylori Using CagA Sequence Markers

Background As a marker of Helicobacter pylori, Cytotoxin-associated gene A (cagA) has been revealed to be the major virulence factor causing gastroduodenal diseases. However, the molecular mechanisms that underlie the development of different gastroduodenal diseases caused by cagA-positive H. pylori infection remain unknown. Current studies are limited to the evaluation of the correlation between diseases and the number of Glu-Pro-Ile-Tyr-Ala (EPIYA) motifs in the CagA strain. To further understand the relationship between CagA sequence and its virulence to gastric cancer, we proposed a systematic entropy-based approach to identify the cancer-related residues in the intervening regions of CagA and employed a supervised machine learning method for cancer and non-cancer cases classification. Methodology An entropy-based calculation was used to detect key residues of CagA intervening sequences as the gastric cancer biomarker. For each residue, both combinatorial entropy and background entropy were calculated, and the entropy difference was used as the criterion for feature residue selection. The feature values were then fed into Support Vector Machines (SVM) with the Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel, and two parameters were tuned to obtain the optimal F value by using grid search. Two other popular sequence classification methods, the BLAST and HMMER, were also applied to the same data for comparison. Conclusion Our method achieved 76% and 71% classification accuracy for Western and East Asian subtypes, respectively, which performed significantly better than BLAST and HMMER. This research indicates that small variations of amino acids in those important residues might lead to the virulence variance of CagA strains resulting in different gastroduodenal diseases. This study provides not only a useful tool to predict the correlation between the novel CagA strain and diseases, but also a general new framework for detecting biological sequence biomarkers in population studies.
Determination of the frequency bands for heart rate variability: Studies on the intact and isolated rabbit hearts

There are many different methods for diagnosis of cardiac disorders. One of them is spectral analysis of heart rate variability (HRV). Its frequency bands are standardized only for human hearts. The present study is focused on definition of frequency bands in isolated hearts of New Zealand rabbits and on analysis of changes of these bands caused by myocardial ischemia. The results of the study show that HRV of isolated hearts differs from that of intact hearts and the changes depend on the experiment phase (control, ischemia, and reperfusion). In particular, the limit between LF (low frequency) and HF (high frequency) bands is not constant in ischemic periods and reaches the same value in each reperfusion period. Thus, it is necessary to take into consideration anatomical and physiological differences between intact and isolated hearts when analysis of HRV is used for studying the heart function.
Antibodies against the two serotypes of vesicular stomatitis virus measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay: immunodominance of serotype-specific determinants and induction of asymmetrically cross-reactive antibodies

The serological relationship between the two vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) strains Indiana (VSV-Ind) and New Jersey (VSV-NJ) were analyzed by using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Immunoglobulin G responses, defined by their resistance to treatment with 2-mercaptoethanol, were assessed by ELISA by using sucrose gradient-purified VSV or purified VSV glycoproteins (G) as antigens. When low doses (10(6) PFU) of live VSV or 10(8) PFU of UV-inactivated virus were given intraperitoneally (i.p.), only non-cross-reactive antibody responses were observed in a primary immune response. However, when 10(6) PFU of live VSV were injected intravenously (i.v.), cross-reactive antibodies were generated; anti-VSV-NJ antibodies cross-reacted more against VSV-Ind than did anti-VSV-Ind antibodies against VSV-NJ. When 10(8) PFU of live VSV or UV-inactivated VSV mixed with complete Freund adjuvant was given i.p., high levels of cross-reactive antibodies detectable by ELISA were induced in primary and secondary responses. When purified G protein was used instead of purified whole virus in the ELISA, the cross-reactivity was found to be asymmetrical after immunization with live VSV given i.v. but not after i.p. inoculation; anti-VSV-NJ sera bound almost equally well to VSV-Ind G protein, whereas anti-VSV-Ind sera bound virtually exclusively to the G protein of the homologous serotype. The data suggest that immunization with VSV given i.p. results in a more specific, i.e., less cross-reactive, response than that either after i.v. infection or after the virus antigen is made available in great amounts or if it persists for prolonged periods when given i.p. together with complete Freund adjuvant. The unique determinants were immunodominant because they induced antibodies preferentially, whereas partially shared determinants induced antibody responses asymmetrically, more slowly, and with lower titers. Interestingly, the asymmetric cross-reactivity of anti-VSV antibodies, as measured by ELISA, against purified VSV G was opposite that observed for cytotoxic T cells.
An eigenanalysis interference canceler

Eigenanalysis methods are applied to interference cancellation problems. While with common array processing methods the cancellation is effected by global optimization procedures that include the interferences and the background noise, the proposed technique focuses on the interferences only, resulting in superior cancellation performance. Furthermore, the method achieves full effectiveness even for short observation times, when the number of samples used for processing is of the the order of the number of interferences. Adaptive implementation is obtained with a simple, fast converging algorithm. >
Review of Upper Extremity Nerve Transfer in Cervical Spinal Cord Injury

Abstract Objective Several nerve transfers have now been successfully performed for upper limb reanimation in tetraplegia. This study was performed to review the use of nerve transfers for upper limb reanimation in tetraplegia. Methods Medline and Embase (1950 to February 11, 2015) were searched using a search strategy designed to include any studies that reported cases of nerve transfer in persons with cervical spinal cord injury (SCI). Results A total of 103 manuscripts were selected initially and full-text analysis produced 13 studies with extractable data. Of these manuscripts, 10 reported single cases and 3 reported case series. Eighty-nine nerve transfers have been performed in 57 males and 2 females with a mean age of 34 years. The mean SCI level was C6 (range: C5–7), time to surgery post-SCI was 19.9 months (range: 4.1–156 months), and follow-up time was 18.2 months (range: 3–60 months). All case reports recorded a Medical Research Council (MRC) score of 3 or 4 for recipient muscle power, but two early case series reported more variable results. Conclusion This review documents the current status of nerve transfer surgery for upper limb reanimation in tetraplegia and summarizes the functional results in 59 cases with 89 nerve transfers performed, including 15 cases of double-nerve transfer and 1 case of triple-nerve transfer.
Compressive Covariance Sensing: Structure-based compressive sensing beyond sparsity

Compressed sensing deals with the reconstruction of signals from sub-Nyquist samples by exploiting the sparsity of their projections onto known subspaces. In contrast, this article is concerned with the reconstruction of second-order statistics, such as covariance and power spectrum, even in the absence of sparsity priors. The framework described here leverages the statistical structure of random processes to enable signal compression and offers an alternative perspective at sparsity-agnostic inference. Capitalizing on parsimonious representations, we illustrate how compression and reconstruction tasks can be addressed in popular applications such as power-spectrum estimation, incoherent imaging, direction-of-arrival estimation, frequency estimation, and wideband spectrum sensing.
Mothers' orientations to infants' moral, prudential, and pragmatic transgressions

Author(s): Dahl, Audun | Advisor(s): Campos, Joseph J.; Turiel, Elliot | Abstract: The moral prohibition against harming others is fundamental to any social unit, including families with young children. Yet, infants appear less averse to harming others than do older children and adults. Infants' harmful actions may in turn elicit strong reactions from others that could contribute to the acquisition of morality. The present study investigated two main propositions: 1) mothers respond differently to infants' harmful acts against others (moral transgressions) than when intervening on transgressions related to infants' own well-being (prudential transgressions) or the creation of inconvenience, such as spilling (pragmatic transgressions). 2) Most infants harm others even without provocation. Twenty-six infants and their families participated in a 2.5-hour naturalistic home observation when the infant was 14 months old. Most of the families participated in additional visits when the infant was 19 (N = 24) and 24 (N = 22) months of age. All infants who participated in three visits had at least one instance of purposefully harming others and 82 percent did so without any provocation or sign of distress. The hourly frequency of unprovoked purposeful harm showed a curvilinear relation to age (Visit 1: 0.85, Visit 2: 1.42, Visit 3: 1.27). Compared to their interventions on prudential and pragmatic transgressions, mothers' interventions on moral transgressions involved increased use of physical interventions and direct commands, decreased use of softening interventions or distractions, and decreased relenting or compromising. Mothers also rated it as more important to discourage their children from moral transgressions than to discourage their children from prudential transgressions. These findings suggest that caregiver responses to transgressions provide unique opportunities for the early acquisition of the moral prohibition against harming others.
Helium diffusion from apatite: General behavior as illustrated by Durango fluorapatite

High-precision stepped-heating experiments were performed to better characterize helium diffusion from apatite using Durango fluorapatite as a model system. At temperatures below 265°C, helium diffusion from this apatite is a simple, thermally activated process that is independent of the cumulative fraction of helium released and also of the heating schedule used. Across a factor of ∼4 in grain size, helium diffusivity scales with the inverse square of grain radius, implying that the physical grain is the diffusion domain. Measurements on crystallographically oriented thick sections indicate that helium diffusivity in Durango apatite is nearly isotropic. The best estimate of the activation energy for He diffusion from this apatite is E_a = 33±0.5 kcal/mol, with log(D_0) = 1.5±0.6 cm^2/s. The implied He closure temperature for a grain of 100 μm radius is 68°C assuming a 10°C/Myr cooling rate; this figure varies by ±5°C for grains ranging from 50 to 150 μm radius. When this apatite is heated to temperatures from 265 to 400°C, a progressive and irreversible change in He diffusion behavior occurs: Both the activation energy and frequency factor are reduced. This transition in behavior coincides closely with progressive annealing of radiation damage in Durango apatite, suggesting that defects and defect annealing play a role in the diffusivity of helium through apatite.
Evaluating Patient Anxiety Levels During Contact Lens Fitting

Purpose. Patient anxiety has been shown to be detrimental to many aspects of primary healthcare consultations. However, to date, the subject has received minimal attention within optometric practice. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate patient anxiety during a commonly conducted type of optometric examination, namely a contact lens fit. Methods. Forty participants (15 male, 25 female; mean age 28.3 ± 9.5) underwent a full contact lens fitting consultation. Skin conductance was recorded continuously to measure participant arousal; the physiological correlate of anxiety. A short form of the Speilberger state anxiety scale was also completed by participants before and after the contact lens fit. Results. Skin conductance analysis identified arousal levels peak during history and symptoms, contact lens insertion and removal and practitioner advice. The Wilcoxen test identified a significant reduction in participant anxiety measured with the shortened Speilberger state anxiety scale after the consultation. Conclusions. Patient arousal levels fluctuate in a characteristic way throughout the contact lens fitting examination. Peak arousal levels occur during periods of ‘communicative interaction’ between the patient and the optometrist. Since anxiety is associated with poor attention, this suggests that optometrists should not assume that patients remember what they are told during the consultation. Furthermore, patient anxiety is significantly reduced after the examination, which may indicate that patient anxiety is moderated by experience.
Reinforcement learning for appearance based visual servoing in robotic manipulation

The objective of this paper is to develop a new appearance based visual servoing method that needs no prior structuring of the environment and also eliminates the correspondence problem associated with conventional visual servoing methods. Detailed description of object appearance and its generation are provided in this paper. In addition, owing to the non-linear and high dimensional nature of the object appearance a Machine Learning method known as Reinforcement Learning is to generate the controller.