Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Avatar Creation and Video Game Enjoyment

Based on the model of complex entertainment experiences (Vorderer, Klimmt, & Ritterfeld, 2004), the competitiveness of a computer game (media prerequisite) and the individual life satisfaction (user prerequisite) are hypothesized to influence game enjoyment. Avatar-player similarity was hypothesized to determine identification with the avatar, which in turn was suggested to enhance the enjoyment experience. In a quasi-experimental study, (N = 666) participants were asked to choose the personality features of an avatar for six different game scenarios. The results demonstrate that the games’ competitiveness as well as the participants’ life satisfaction influenced avatar choice and identification. In noncompetitive games, similar avatars were created, whereas in competitive games, dissimilar avatars were created. Participants who were well satisfied with their lives created avatars that resemble themselves in terms of personality factors, whereas dissatisfied users created dissimilar avatars. Player-avatar.
Arsenic exposure from drinking water and dyspnoea risk in Araihazar, Bangladesh: a population-based study

Bangladesh has high well water arsenic exposure. Chronic arsenic ingestion may result in diseases that manifest as dyspnoea, although information is sparse. Baseline values were obtained from an arsenic study. Trained physicians ascertained data on dyspnoea among 11,746 subjects. Data were collected on demographic factors, including smoking, blood pressure and arsenic exposure. Logistic regression models estimated odds ratios and confidence intervals for the association between arsenic exposure and dyspnoea. The adjusted odds of having dyspnoea was 1.32-fold (95% CI 1.15–1.52) greater in those exposed to high well water arsenic concentrations (≥50 &mgr;g·L−1) compared with low-arsenic-exposed nonsmokers (p<0.01). A significant dose–response relationship was found for arsenic (as well as smoking) in relation to dyspnoea. In nonsmokers, the adjusted odds of having dyspnoea were 1.36, 1.96, 2.34 and 1.80-fold greater for arsenic concentrations of 7–38, 39–90, 91–178 and 179–864 &mgr;g·L−1, respectively, compared with the reference arsenic concentration of <7 &mgr;g·L−1 (p<0.01; Chi-squared test for trend). Arsenic exposure through well water is associated with dyspnoea, independently of smoking status. This study suggests that mandated well water testing for arsenic with reduction in exposure may significantly reduce diseases that manifest as dyspnoea, usually cardiac or pulmonary.
Does the applicability of Bacillus strains in probiotics rely upon their taxonomy?

The taxonomic position and biological activities of two Bacillus strains used in veterinary probiotics were studied in this work. These microorganisms inhibit growth of a broad spectrum of pathogenic cultures. They synthesize proteolytic enzymes and other biologically active metabolites, and to some extent, supplement each other with probiotic activities. It is not clear whether these versatile activities are properties of individual strains or bacterial taxa as whole. 16S rRNA comparisons were conducted and illustrated the relatedness of these strains to Bacillus amyloliquefaciens . Their cell wall fatty acid contents were consequently analysed and specified a relation to the " Bacillus velezensis " ecomorph. On account of the previous observations, a simple method of 16S rRNA profiling by polymorphic nucleotides was proposed to determine a group of organisms closely related to "B. velezensis" and B. amyloliquefaciens subsp. plantarum, for they are biologically active strains suitable for use in biotechnology. The extreme genetic plasticity of these bacteria endowed each strain with a unique spectrum of antagonistic activity.
Municipal Solid Waste Landfills and Wood Pallets - What's Happening in the United States

Editor’s Note: This article on pallet disposal and Municipal Solid Waste sites includes material presented by Dr. Bush at the recent NWPCA Recycling Meeting. This is the first in a two-part series; the second will discuss pallet disposal in construction and demolition sites. Summary We estimate that 185 million pallets went through Municipal Solid Waste landfill gates in 1995. About 17 percent of these were recovered, but to low or no revenue uses. About 1/3 would not accept pallets as-is.
Induction of β-Defensin Expression by Porphyromonas gingivalis-Infected Human Gingival Graft Transplanted in nu/nu Mouse Subdermis

It is important to understand the onset of periodontal disease in terms of bacterial infection and host factors. Host-bacteria interactions can be elicited in human cultured cells and animal models, but these models provide only limited biological information about human host reactions against bacterial attacks. Development of an in vivo model using human gingival tissue is needed. We established an in vivo model using nu/nu mice and evaluated host defense following bacterial infection in human gingiva. Human gingival samples were collected from periodontitis patients and transplanted in nu/nu mouse subdermis. After 2 weeks, human characteristics were confirmed by positive immunohistochemical reactions for human-specific markers. We used this model to investigate human β-defensin-2 (hBD-2), an antimicrobial peptide that contributes to initial defense against bacterial invasion. Using real-time polymerase chain reaction, in situ hybridization, and immunohistochemistry, we investigated whether hBD-2 expression was induced in human gingiva as a response to Porphyromonas gingivalis as a periodontal pathogen. Two hours after infection with bacteria, we detected increased expression of hBD-2 mRNA, which was localized in the epithelium of human gingiva. Using our in vivo model, we concluded that increased hBD-2 may play an important role in early defense from bacterial infection in human gingival epithelium.
The Social Validity Manual: A Guide to Subjective Evaluation of Behavior Interventions in Applied Behavior Analysis

Applied Behavior Analysis is the science of applying experimentally derived principles of behavior to improve socially significant behavior. The research and application of ABA contributes to a wide range of practical areas, including AIDS prevention, education, gerontology, language acquisition and parenting, and ABA-based interventions have gained particular popularity in the last 20 years related to teaching students with autism spectrum disorders. Social Validity, a concept used in such behavioral intervention research, focuses on whether the goals of treatment, the intervention techniques used and the outcomes achieved are acceptable, relevant, and useful to the individual in treatment. Judgments are made (often via clinical trials) about the effects of the intervention based on statistical significance and magnitude of effect. Essentially, social validity alerts us as to whether or not the ABA-based intervention has had a palpable impact and actually helped people in ways that are evident in everyday life. This clinical research volume offers a detailed evaluation of the extant findings on Social Validity, as well as discussion of newly emerging factors which reemphasize the need for well-developed methods of examining SV. Basic conceptualizations, measurement, research findings, applications, ethics, and future implications are discussed in full, and novel recommendations relating back to clinical treatment are provided. The volume will give readers a firm understanding of the general concept of SV, help them become familiar with the research methods and findings, and teach them how to establish and evaluate the Social Validity of individual interventions and treatment programs. The book consolidates literature broadly distributed across journals and book chapters into single source; provides discussion of SV in greater depth and breadth than is found in other sources, which generally just focus on general conceptualization and broad research findings; and, describes how concept of SV can be influential in numerous areas of clinical practice.
Can Parents' Involvement with Homework Moderate the Relation between Children's Cognitive Abilities and School Achievement?.

This investigation tested the influence of parents' involvement with homework as a moderator variable in the relation between children's cognitive abilities (predictor variable) and their school achievement (outcome variable). Participants were 55 French-speaking second graders and their parents. Two dimensions (quantity and quality) of parents' involvement were investigated. Parents were distinguished as primary or secondary helpers with homework. For each group, regression analyses were conducted to test the moderator effect of each dimension of parent involvement: (1) between children's verbal abilities and achievement in French; and (2) between children's nonverbal abilities and achievement in mathematics. Results indicated a positive relation between children's verbal abilities and their achievement in French, but not between children's nonverbal abilities and their achievement in mathematics. A negative relation between the duration of primary parent involvement with homework and children's achievement in French and mathematics was observed. Data also indicated a positive relation between the quality of involvement with homework of the secondary parents and children's achievement. The quality of involvement by the secondary parent was the only variable that acted as a moderator between children's verbal abilities and their achievement in French. Results suggested that both parents have complementary roles in supporting their child's school-related activities. (Contains 19 references.) (Author) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. ° Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. CAN PARENTS' INVOLVEMENT WITH HOMEWORK MODERATE THE RELATION BETWEEN CHILDREN'S COGNITIVE ABILITIES AND SCHOOL ACHIEVEMENT? NADON, Isabelle and NORMANDEAU, Sylvie, Universite de Montreal, Canada. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
A Tele-home Care System Exploiting the DVB-T Technology and MHP

Summary Objectives: The aim of this research work is the development of a low-cost system for telemedicine based on the DVB-T technology. The diffusion of DVB-T standard and the low cost of DVB-T set-top boxes bring the vision of a capillary distribution of tele-home care monitoring systems with easy-to-use patient’s interface. Methods: Exploiting the potentiality of the DVB-T settop box, we transformed it into an “on-demand telehome care interface”. The Xlet we developed is able to govern the functionality of an external microcontrollerbased unit for the acquisition of the bio-signals of interest. The uplink connection is used to send the exam results to a remote care center. Results: The Xlet providing the patient interface on the set-top box is uploaded by a DVB-T broadcaster without any intervention in the patient’s home. A prototypal low-cost base station for the acquisition of the patient’s signals (1-lead ECG) has been developed. It is able to be connected to the set-top box via an infrared link. A smart-card-based system is in charge for the customization of the Xlet for every patient. Conclusions: The proposed system, based on a currently widespread infrastructure, is able to allow the patients monitoring from home without any installation procedure. Even untrained (or elderly) people can easily use such system due to their practice with the basic DVB-T home-entertainment equipments.
Dynamic Response to Environmental Regulation in the Electricity Industry

In the eort to curb carbon dioxide emissions, the electricity sector will undoubtedly be subject to substantial environmental regulation. The response of generators to regulation occurs in markets with volatile electricity prices where generators face substantial costs of starting up and shutting down generators. This paper, recovers the cost parameters of the industry and solves for new dynamic competitive equilibria under potential environmental policies. The results show that for modest carbon prices, short-run reductions in emissions are negligible. However, the impact on rm prots is substantial which encourages appropriate investment in the long-run. Climate change has become an important political and economic issue in recent years. Governments seeking to curb carbon dioxide emissions are implementing environmental regulations that put a price on carbon dioxide emissions or signicantly increase renewable energy production. Since electricity gener
Attitudes towards unethical behaviours in organizational settings: an empirical study

Employee misconduct is prevalent in organizations and may be counterproductive in social and material terms. It is thus important to better understand how misconduct is construed by employees and the factors that determine its ethical acceptability in specific cases. This study explores attitudes towards unethical and minor deviant behaviours by examining the degree of acquiescence towards them in a sample of employees. Based on previous studies it was hypothesized that both organizational commitment and job satisfaction would be negatively related to the acceptance of such behaviours in organizational settings. Results show that there is a relationship between the degree of acquiescence and organizational commitment and a more modest relationship with job satisfaction. They further indicate that organizational tenure impacts very significantly on the degree of acceptance. Although differences were found for age, neither gender nor organizational variables were found to be significant.
A Review of Unsupervised Approaches of Opinion Target Extraction from Unstructured Reviews

Opinion targets identification is an important task of the opinion mining problem. Several approaches have been employed for this task, which can be broadly divided into two major categories: supervised and unsupervised. The supervised approaches require training data, which need manual work and are mostly domain dependent. The unsupervised technique is most popularly used due to its two main advantages: domain independent and no need for training data. This study presents a review of the state of the art unsupervised approaches for opinion target identification due to its potential applications in opinion mining from web documents. This study compares the existing approaches that might be helpful in the future research work of opinion mining and features extraction.
Nearly Optimal Scheduling of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks in Polynomial Time

In this paper, we address the scheduling problem in wireless ad hoc networks by exploiting the computational advantage that comes when such scheduling problems can be represented by claw-free conflict graphs where we consider a wireless broadcast medium. It is possible to formulate a scheduling problem of network coded flows as finding maximum weighted independent set (MWIS) in the conflict graph of the network. Finding MWIS of a general graph is NP-hard leading to an NP-hard complexity of scheduling. In a claw-free conflict graph, MWIS can be found in polynomial time leading to a throughput-optimal scheduling. We show that the conflict graph of certain wireless ad hoc networks are claw-free. In order to obtain claw-free conflict graphs in general networks, we suggest introducing additional conflicts (edges) while keeping the decrease in MWIS size minimal. To this end, we introduce an iterative optimization problem to decide where to introduce edges and investigate its efficient implementation. Besides, we exemplify some physical modifications to manipulate the conflict graph of a network and also propose a mixed scheduling strategy for specific networks. We conclude that claw breaking method by adding extra edges can perform nearly optimal under the necessary assumptions.
Investigating the links of internal and external reliability with the system conditionality in Gauss-Markov models with uncorrelated observations

: The relationship between internal response-based reliability and conditionality is investigated for Gauss-Markov (GM) models with uncorrelated observations. The models with design matrices of full rank and of incomplete rank are taken into consideration. The formulas based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the design matrix are derived which clearly indicate that the investigated concepts are independent of each other. The methods are presented of constructing for a given design matrix the matrices equivalent with respect to internal response-based reliability as well as the matrices equivalent with respect to conditionality. To analyze conditionality of GM models, in general being inconsistent systems, a substitute for condition number commonly used in numerical linear algebra is developed, called a pseudo-condition^number. Also on the basis of the SVD a formula for external reliability is proposed, being the 2-norm of a vector of parameter distortions induced by minimal detectable error in a particular observation. For systems with equal nonzero singular values of the design matrix, the formula can be expressed in terms of the index of internal response-based reliability and the pseudo-condition^number. With these measures appearing in explicit form, the formula shows, although only for the above speci ﬁ c systems, the character of the impact of internal response-based reliability and conditionality of the model upon its external reliability. Proofs for complementary properties concerning the pseudo-condition^number and the 2-norm of parameter distortions in systems with minimal constraints are given in the Appendices. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the theory.
Energy-Aware Web Browsing in 3G Based Smartphones

Smartphone based web browsing wastes a lot of power when downloading webpages due to the special characteristics of the 3G radio interface. In this paper, we identify these special characteristics, and address power consumption issues through two novel techniques. First, we reorganize the computation sequence of the web browser when loading a webpage, so that the web browser can first run the computations that will generate new data transmissions and retrieve these data from the web server. Then, the web browser can put the 3G radio interface into low power state, release the radio resource, and then run the remaining computations. Second, we introduce a practical data mining based method to predict the user reading time of webpages, based on which the smartphone can switch to low power state when the reading time is longer than a threshold. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our energy-aware approaches, we develop a testbed with Android phones on T-Mobile UMTS network. Experimental results show that our approach can reduce the power consumption of smartphone by more than 30% during web browsing, and reduce the webpage loading time by 17%.
On the Use of Time–Frequency Reassignment and SVM-Based Classifier for Audio Surveillance Applications

In this paper, we propose a robust environmental sound spectrogram classification approach. Its purpose is surveillance and security applications based on the reassignment method and log-Gabor filters. Besides, the reassignment method is applied to the spectrogram to improve the readability of the time- frequency representation, and to assure a better localization of the signal components. Our approach includes three methods. In the first two methods, the reassigned spectrograms are passed through appropriate log-Gabor filter banks and the outputs are averaged and underwent an optimal feature selection procedure based on a mutual information criterion. The third method uses the same steps but applied only to three patches extracted from each reassigned spectrogram. The proposed approach is tested on a large database consists of 1000 sounds belonging to ten classes. The recognition is based on Multiclass Support Vector Machines.
Understanding and Addressing the Challenges of Assessing College Student Growth in Student Affairs.

Asking college students how much they have learned or grown is a common assessment practice in student affairs and elsewhere. Unfortunately, recent research suggests that these self-reported gains do a very poor job of measuring actual student learning and growth. This paper provides an overview of the psychological process of how students likely respond to such questions and why their responses can be seriously flawed. It also discusses circumstances in which self-reported gains are somewhat more valid and offers concrete suggestions for student affairs professionals and other higher education constituents who seek to accurately measure student outcomes. AUTHOR Nicholas A. Bowman, Ph.D.
Meta-Analysis of Various Methods of Recording Centric Jaw Relation- A Literature Review

Centric relation is the most difficult, yet, most important step in fabrication of a successful prosthesis. It is a complex relationship which exists in 3 dimensions and variations may occur in any direction – vertical, anteroposterior or mediolateral. Thus, it is essential to record this relationship with the least possible error to obtain a successful prosthesis. However when relating the maxillary and mandibular dental casts, the ultimate accuracy depends on the technique used to record the maxillomandibular relationship and accuracy and dimensional stability of the material
Derivation and spontaneous differentiation of human embryonic stem cells *

Embryonic stem (ES) cells are unique cells derived from the inner cell mass of the mammalian blastocyst. These cells are immortal and pluripotent, retain their developmental potential after prolonged culture, and can be continuously cultured in an undifferentiated state. Many in vitro differentiation systems have been developed for mouse ES cells, including reproducible methods for mouse ES cell differentiation into haematopoietic and neural precursors, cardiomyocytes, insulin‐secreting cells, endothelial cells and various other cell types. The derivation of new human ES cell lines provides the opportunity to develop unique models for developmental research and for cell therapies. In this review we consider the derivation and spontaneous differentiation of human ES cells.
Exploring crisis and its effects on workers in child protective services work

ABSTRACT An inquiry into child welfare protective services workers’ perceptions and experiences in the United States was conducted in order to examine their perceptions of crisis and crisis intervention, and the emotional impact of working with children who endured significant maltreatment. As there is presently little research that has explored these issues specifically from the point of view of the workers, a qualitative grounded theory approach was utilized. Four themes emerged from the data: workers perceived crisis as a result of biopsychosocial breakdown; workers routinely triage when faced with crises; workers are subject to vicarious traumatization; and workers’ personal lives are affected by their work. The findings add to an existing body of knowledge about secondary trauma in child welfare by providing information about the investigative workers’ subjective experience of it. This research adds a unique contribution to understanding workers’ subjective experience of crisis on the job, how it manifests, and whether they feel knowledgeable in the area of crisis intervention.