Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Internalized Homonegativity and the Double Bind for Lesbians: Those with Higher Need Perceive More Barriers to Mental Health Treatment

This research uses internalized homonegativity (IH) to understand factors influencing mental health treatment need and treatment seeking in self-identified lesbians (N = 223). Results indicated that IH has significant negative associations with social support, psychological, and social well-being. At the same time, IH has significant positive connections to perceived treatment barriers specifically related to sexual orientation. The authors assert that this can result in a “double bind” for lesbians with high IH, where they perceive treatment need, yet experience their lesbianism as a barrier to accessing help. Implications for counselors, as well as study limitations and suggestions for future research, are presented.
The Intragroup Stigmatization of Skin Tone Among Black Americans

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which racial contexts moderate the importance and function of intragroup skin-tone stigma among Black Americans. One hundred and thirty-two Black students were recruited from both a predominantly Black university and a predominantly White university and completed measures on skin tone, skin-tone importance, peer-group acceptance, self-esteem, and racial identification. The authors found that Black students in the predominantly Black university placed significantly higher importance on skin tone than Black students in the predominantly White university. Furthermore, both higher perceived peer acceptance and higher self-esteem were correlated with darker skin tone at the Black university but not at the White university. However, stronger racial identity was equally correlated with darker skin tone in both contexts. The results of this study suggest that the importance of skin tone is moderated by racial context.
Participant Experiences in a Special Sporting Event: the Case of the United Games in Bathurst, Australia

Special events are a widely studied phenomenon. An analysis of previous studies of special sporting events indicates a heavy emphasis on their economic and tourism impacts, but minimal information about the motivations and experiences of those involved as participants. This case-study examined the experiences of people who attended the 1997 Eastern Conference [University] Games (called the United Games), held in Bathurst, NSW, Australia. Data were collected through informal interviews, a questionnaire survey, participant observation and a reflective journal and were analysed using such techniques as constant comparison analysis and content analysis. Participant experiences in the United Games were interpreted under four salient themes: Socialising; Spectatorship; Sports Participation; and Team Bonding. The results reflect the interpersonal impacts of a special sporting event on its participants and provide evidence to support key arguments put forward in the literature on special events. The findings contribute to knowledge about the social psychology of participation in special events, and have implications for event planners.
A 31 GHz SURVEY OF LOW-FREQUENCY SELECTED RADIO SOURCES

The 100 m Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope and the 40 m Owens Valley Radio Observatory telescope have been used to conduct a 31 GHz survey of 3165 known extragalactic radio sources over 143 deg2 of the sky. Target sources were selected from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey in fields observed by the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI); most are extragalactic active galactic nuclei (AGNs) with 1.4 GHz flux densities of 3–10 mJy. The resulting 31 GHz catalogs are presented in full online. Using a maximum-likelihood analysis to obtain an unbiased estimate of the distribution of the 1.4–31 GHz spectral indices of these sources, we find a mean 31–1.4 GHz flux ratio of 0.110 ± 0.003 corresponding to a spectral index of α = −0.71 ± 0.01 (Sν ∝ να); 9.0% ± 0.8% of sources have α > − 0.5 and 1.2% ± 0.2% have α > 0. By combining this spectral-index distribution with 1.4 GHz source counts, we predict 31 GHz source counts in the range 1 mJy < S31 < 4 mJy, N(>S31) = (16.7 ± 1.7) deg-2(S31/1 mJy)−0.80±0.07. We also assess the contribution of mJy-level (S1.4 GHz < 3.4 mJy) radio sources to the 31 GHz cosmic microwave background power spectrum, finding a mean power of ℓ(ℓ + 1)Csrcℓ/(2π) = 44 ± 14 μK2 and a 95% upper limit of 80 μK2 at ℓ = 2500. Including an estimated contribution of 12 μK2 from the population of sources responsible for the turn-up in counts below S1.4 GHz = 1 mJy, this amounts to 21% ± 7% of what is needed to explain the CBI high-ℓ excess signal, 275 ± 63 μK2. These results are consistent with other measurements of the 31 GHz point-source foreground.
Personhood: Including the Chinese Person with Dementia in Research, Policy, and Practice

Literature indicates that dementia caring is difficult and challenging. This literature is scarce for ethnic minorities and lacking most acutely, despite its huge diasporic population, for the Chinese group. Where available, the focus is mostly on the Chinese carer, with the regular absence of the person with dementia and the interactions of the care-partners. From an interpretive phenomenological perspective, this in-depth case study of four Chinese immigrant families takes Kitwood’s (1997) personhood approach to include the Chinese person with dementia. Findings show how this inclusion is possible and important for better understanding and effecting dementia care in research, policy, and practice.
Semi-automated enhanced breast tumor segmentation for CT image

Accurate detection of breast cancer region is essential for treatment. X-ray computed tomography (CT) is an effective diagnostic method of breast cancer besides MRI and ultrasound. In this paper, a semi-automated breast cancer segmentation method was proposed to CT images. First, maximum region searching was used to find the rough boundary of the lesion. Then, a modified Histogram Equalization with Iterative-Filling was adopted to enhance the lesion and avoid the unbalanced intensity in the target region. Finally, a four-seeds Random Walk was used for accurate segmentation. The method was validated on a clinical dataset with 50 cases containing 630 slices in total. The experiments showed that the Dice Coefficient of our method was 88.6%, which was higher than that of Random Walk (76.9%) and Graph-Cut (79.8%).
Effect of levofloxacin on neutrophilic airway inflammation in stable COPD: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Rationale Airway inflammation persists after smoking cessation in established chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), suggesting that other factors drive the airway inflammatory response. Objectives We tested the hypothesis that high levels of bacterial colonization are associated with increased levels of neutrophilic airway inflammation in stable COPD by examining the cross-sectional relationship between these measurements and by conducting a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study of the effect of levofloxacin in patients with stable COPD. Methods Patients were randomized to receive either levofloxacin 500 mg daily or placebo for 7 days and underwent sputum induction for a differential cell count and quantitative bacterial analysis at baseline and at days 7, 14, and 28. Results Sputum percentage neutrophil count correlated with airway bacterial load at baseline (r=0.56; P=0.003). Levofloxacin reduced bacterial load compared with placebo by 4.9-fold (95% confidence interval, 1.4–25.7; P=0.02) at day 7 but had no effect at any point on any marker of neutrophilic airway inflammation. In patients with a baseline bacterial load of more than 106 cfu/mL, levofloxacin treatment was associated with a 26.5% (95% confidence interval, 1.8%–51.3%; P=0.04) greater reduction in the percentage neutrophil count compared with placebo at day 7. Change in percentage neutrophil count correlated significantly with baseline airway bacterial load and change in airway bacterial load. Conclusion In stable COPD, levofloxacin treatment causes a short-term reduction in bacterial load. This is associated with a reduction in neutrophilic airway inflammation in patients with high bacterial loads. Further studies are required to investigate whether this effect is clinically advantageous.
Self-consciousness and the processing of self-relevant information.

Three experiments were conducted to examine cognitive processes involved in self-conscious behavior. According to Hull and Levy (1979), self-consciousness is associated with processes involved in self-referent encoding. The present studies advance the more specific hypothesis that self-consciousness is involved with the aspect of self-reference associated with the activation of knowledge about the self. Experiment I used a self-reference paradigm and found that self-consciousness increased the extent to which a manipulation of accessible self-knowledge influenced self-refereni encoding. Experiment 2 used a self-perception paradigm and found that self-consciousness increased the extent to which a manipulation of accessible self-knowledge affected subsequent self-perception. Experiment 3 used a correlational design to demonstrate how cognitive processes associated with selfreference may mediate self-conscious behavior. Individual differences in self-referent encoding were associated with individual differences in self-consciousness; both variables were associated with increased affective reactions to self-relevant feedback; and partial ing out individual differences in selfreferent encoding eliminated the effects of self-consciousness. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for reconciling various theories of self-consciousness.
Web Based Cross Language Semantic Plagiarism Detection

As the Internet help us cross language and cultural border and with different types of translation tools, cross language plagiarism is bound to rise. Besides that, semantic plagiarism, where the student reconstructs the sentence or changes some terms into its corresponding synonyms, also raises concerns in the academic field. Both of this plagiarism is hardly detected due to the difference in their fingerprints. Plagiarism detection tools available are not capable to detect such plagiarism cases. In this research, we propose a new approach in detecting both cross language and semantic plagiarism. We consider Bahasa Melayu as the input language of the submitted document and English as a target language of similar, possibly plagiarised documents. In this system we shorten the query document by utilising fuzzy swarm-based summarisation approach. Our point of view is that using the summary will give us the most important keywords in the document. Input summary documents are translated into English using Google Translate Application Programming Interface (API) before the words are stemmed and the stop words are removed. Tokenized documents are sent to the Google AJAX Search API to detect similar documents throughout the World Wide Web. We integrate the use of Stanford Parser and Word Net to determine the semantic similarity level between the suspected documents with candidate source documents. Stanford parser assigns each terms in the sentence to their corresponding roles such as Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives. Based on these roles, we represent each sentence in a predicate form and similarity is measured based on those predicates using information content value from Word Net taxonomy. Our testing dataset is built up from two sets of Malay documents which are produced based on different plagiarism techniques. The result of our proposed semantic based similarity measurement shows that it can achieve higher precision, recall and F-Measure compared to the conventional Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) approach.
Separation of coal fly ash using continuous steric field-flow fractionation.

The principles and advantages of continuous steric field-flow fractionation (CStFFF) for the size separation of complex environmental samples is briefly reviewed. Following prefractionation according to magnetic and density properties, CStFFF was successfully applied to four well-characterized fly ash samples. The mode size of ash particles in different fractions followed the theoretical prediction. Fractionation was observed to be best for samples that were prefractionated.
Philosophical Principles of Systemicity and the Systems Approach

The systems approach and systems research as a whole are currently experiencing a period of intensive development, which is due both to widening of their areas of application and incorporation into this area of various kinds of practical activity connected with science and technology and to a more intensive treatment of certain aspects of this approach. All of this inevitably demands further development of the philosophical range of inquiry into the systems approach.
Infrared Spectroscopy During Electrocatalytic Turnover Reveals the Ni-L Active Site State During H2 Oxidation by a NiFe Hydrogenase

A novel in situ IR spectroscopic approach is demonstrated for the characterization of hydrogenase during catalytic turnover. E. coli hydrogenase 1 (Hyd-1) is adsorbed on a high surface-area carbon electrode and subjected to the same electrochemical control and efficient supply of substrate as in protein film electrochemistry during spectral acquisition. The spectra reveal that the active site state known as Ni-L, observed in other NiFe hydrogenases only under illumination or at cryogenic temperatures, can be generated reversibly in the dark at ambient temperature under both turnover and non-turnover conditions. The observation that Ni-L is present at all potentials during turnover under H2 suggests that the final steps in the catalytic cycle of H2 oxidation by Hyd-1 involve sequential proton and electron transfer via Ni-L. A broadly applicable IR spectroscopic technique is presented for addressing electrode-adsorbed redox enzymes under fast catalytic turnover.
Isoform Specificity in the Relationship of Actin to Dendritic Spines

Dendritic spines contain high concentrations of actin, but neither the isoforms involved nor the mechanism of accumulation is known.In situ hybridization with specific probes established that β- and γ-cytoplasmic actins are selectively expressed at high levels by spine-bearing neurons. Transfecting cultured hippocampal neurons with epitope-tagged actin isoforms showed that cytoplasmic β- and γ-cytoplasmic actins are correctly targeted to spines, whereas α-cardiac muscle actin, which is normally absent from neurons, formed aggregates in dendrites. The transfected actin cDNAs contained only coding domains, suggesting that spine targeting involves amino acid sequences in the proteins, an interpretation supported by experiments with chimeric cDNAs in which C-terminal actin sequences were found to be determinative in spine targeting. By contrast to actin, microtubule components, including tubulin and MAP2, were restricted to the dendritic shaft domain. The close association of cytoplasmic actins with spines together with their general involvement in cell surface motility further supports the idea that actin motility-based changes in spine shape may contribute to synaptic plasticity.
Improved tetracycline repressors for gene silencing in mycobacteria

Tetracycline repressor (TetR)-controlled expression systems have recently been developed for mycobacteria and proven useful for the construction of conditional knockdown mutants and their analysis in vitro and during infections. However, even though these systems allowed tight regulation of some mycobacterial genes, they only showed limited or no phenotypic regulation for others. By adapting their codon usage to that of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome, we created tetR genes that mediate up to ∼50-fold better repression of reporter gene activities in Mycobacterium smegmatis and Mycobacterium bovis BCG. In addition to these repressors, for which anhydrotetracycline (atc) functions as an inducer of gene expression, we used codon-usage adaption and structure-based design to develop improved reverse TetRs, for which atc functions as a corepressor. The previously described reverse repressor TetR only functioned when expressed from a strong promoter on a multicopy plasmid. The new reverse TetRs silence target genes more efficiently and allowed complete phenotypic silencing of M. smegmatis secA1 with chromosomally integrated tetR genes.
Reverse Top-k Search using Random Walk with Restart

With the increasing popularity of social networks, large volumes of graph data are becoming available. Large graphs are also derived by structure extraction from relational, text, or scientific data (e.g., relational tuple networks, citation graphs, ontology networks, protein-protein interaction graphs). Node-to-node proximity is the key building block for many graph-based applications that search or analyze the data. Among various proximity measures, random walk with restart (RWR) is widely adopted because of its ability to consider the global structure of the whole network. Although RWR-based similarity search has been well studied before, there is no prior work on reverse top-k proximity search in graphs based on RWR. We discuss the applicability of this query and show that its direct evaluation using existing methods on RWR-based similarity search has very high computational and storage demands. To address this issue, we propose an indexing technique, paired with an on-line reverse top-k search algorithm. Our experiments show that our technique is efficient and has manageable storage requirements even when applied on very large graphs.
Acoustic Features for Robust ASR in Cellular Network Applications

This article handles possibilities of integrating speech technology in to robust wireless technology, allowing voice input for wireless devices. To improve the robustness of speech frontends we introduce, in this paper, a new set of feature vector which is estimated according to the impact of the proposed multidimensional acoustical features on the performance of the Mel-frequency based-advanced frontend. From the denoised acoustic frame using the wiener filter, we optimize the stream weights of multi-in a multi-stream scheme using Karhunen-Loeve Transform (KLT). The proposed frontend is shown to exhibit a stream HMM (Hidden Markov Model) by deploying a discriminative approach based in Likelihood-Ratio Maximization (LRM). Finally, this feature are adequately transformed and reduced relative error rate reduction and provides comparable recognition performance compared with the current DSR-FE (Distributed Speech Recognition FrontEnd) available in wireless communication systems.
The Intubation Difficulty Scale (IDS): Proposal and Evaluation of a New Score Characterizing the Complexity of Endotracheal Intubation

Background: A quantitative scale of intubation difficulty would be useful for objectively comparing the complexity of endotracheal intubations. The authors have developed a quantitative score that can be used to evaluate intubating conditions and techniques with the aim of determining the relative values predictive factors of intubation difficulty and of the techniques used to decrease such difficulties. Methods: An Intubation Difficulty Scale (IDS) was developed, based on parameters known to be associated with difficult intubation. It was then evaluated prospectively in a group of 311 consecutive prehospital intubations and 315 intubations in an operating room. In the operating room, the IDS was compared with two other parameters: the time to completion of intubation and the visual analog scale (VAS). Time was measured by an independent observer. Operators in both groups completed a checklist regarding the conditions of intubation. Results: There is a good correlation between the IDS scale and the VAS assessment of difficulty and time to completion of intubation. VAS and time to completion have a significant but lesser correlation to each other. Comparison of IDS with operator‐assessed subjective categorical impression of difficulty by Kruskall‐Wallis was statistically significant. Conclusions: The IDS correlates with but is less subjective than the VAS and categorical classification. IDS correlates with time to intubation, but it offers details regarding the difficulty encountered that time alone does not. This score may not only aid in evaluation of factors linked to difficult intubations, but it may provide a uniform approach to comparing studies related to this subject.
Steroid avoidance with early intensified dosing of enteric-coated mycophenolate sodium: a randomized multicentre trial in kidney transplant recipients.

BACKGROUND Short-term intensified dosing using enteric-coated mycophenolate sodium (EC-MPS) reduces rejection after kidney transplantation without compromising safety and may facilitate steroid avoidance. METHODS In a 6-month, multicentre open-label trial, 222 de novo kidney transplant recipients at low-immunological risk were randomized to steroid avoidance or maintenance steroids with interleukin (IL)-2 receptor antibody (IL-2RA) induction, EC-MPS (2160 mg/day to Week 6, 1440 mg/day thereafter) and cyclosporine. RESULTS The primary end point; treatment failure at Month 6 [biopsy-proven acute rejection (BPAR), graft loss, death or loss to follow-up], occurred in 17.9% (20/112) of steroid-avoidance patients and 14.5% (16/110) of controls (difference 3.4%, 95% confidence interval -6.3 to 13.1, P = 0.47 for superiority testing). BPAR occurred in 11.6 and 7.3% of patients in the steroid-avoidance and control arms, respectively (P = 0.27). Creatinine clearance was similar at Month 6 (steroid-avoidance 56 ± 18 mL/min/1.73 m(2), controls 60 ± 22 mL/min/1.73 m(2), P = 0.34). Cytomegalovirus infection, as reported by investigators, occurred in 12.5% of steroid-avoidance patients and 22.7% of controls (P = 0.045). CONCLUSIONS A regimen of early intensified EC-MPS dosing with calcineurin inhibitor and IL-2RA induction permits oral steroid avoidance in adult kidney transplant patients at low-immunological risk without compromising efficacy at 6 months' follow-up.