Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dispositional forgiveness among homicide offenders

The study compared dispositional forgiveness among homicide offenders and non-incarcerated people, living in the same geographic areas, and matched regarding educational level and religious involvement. Forty-seven prisoners and 294 lay people were presented with questionnaires measuring aggression, dispositional forgiveness, and conceptualizations regarding forgiveness. Compared to the control group, homicide offenders reported stronger resentment toward others, lower ability at seeking forgiveness, lower capacity at unconditionally forgiving others, and a stronger tendency at considering that forgiveness is an immoral behavior. Offenders' higher level of aggressiveness did not fully explain these differences in dispositional forgiveness.
Generalized Optimal Reverse Prediction

Recently it has been shown that classical supervised and unsupervised training methods can be unified as special cases of so-called “optimal reverse prediction”: predicting inputs from target labels while optimizing over both model parameters and missing labels. Although this perspective establishes links between classical training principles, the existing formulation only applies to linear predictors under squared loss, hence is extremely limited. We generalize the formulation of optimal reverse prediction to arbitrary Bregman divergences, and more importantly to non-linear predictors. This extension is achieved by establishing a generalized form of forwardreverse minimization equivalence that holds for arbitrary matching losses. Several benefits follow. First, a new variant of Bregman divergence clustering can be recovered that incorporates a non-linear data reconstruction model. Second, normalized-cut and kernel-based extensions can be formulated coherently. Finally, a new semi-supervised training principle can be recovered for classification problems that demonstrates some advantages over the state of the art.
Parental Involvement and Children's School Achievement

This study used path analytic techniques and an ecological framework to examine the association between children's perceptions of their parents' educational involvement, children's personal characteristics, and their school achievement. Fathers' academic pressure was predictive of lower achievement, whereas mothers' encouragement and support predicted higher achievement. Both parents used more academic pressure with their sons, whereas using more encouragement and support with their daughters. The effects of parental involvement were mediated through children's academic competence. This study demonstrates the interactive influences of parents' educational involvement and children's personal characteristics in predicting school achievement. Implications for practice and research in school psychology are presented. Cette étude a utilisé la méthode d'analyse des pistes causales et un cadre théorique écologique afin d'examiner l'association entre la perception qu'ont les enfants de l'implication parentale dans leur éducation, les caractéristiques personnelles des enfants, et leur succès scolaire. La pression provenant du père prédit une réussite scolaire moins élevée, tandis que l'encouragement et l'appui scolaire de la mère prédit une réussite plus élevée. Les mères et les pères exercent tous les deux plus de pressions académiques sur leurs fils, tout en utilisant plus d'encouragement et d'appui avec leurs filles. L'effet de la participation parentale sur la réussite scolaire était modéré par la compétence académique des jeunes. Cette étude démontre l'interaction entre la participation parentale dans l'éducation de l'enfant et les caractéristiques personnelles de l'enfant dans l'analyse de la réussite scolaire. Nous présentons les implications que ceci représente dans la pratique et la recherche en psychologie scolaire.
Pathogenesis of shigella diarrhea. XI. Isolation of a shigella toxin- binding glycolipid from rabbit jejunum and HeLa cells and its identification as globotriaosylceramide

A glycolipid that specifically binds shigella toxin was isolated from both HeLa cells and rabbit jejunal mucosa and identified as globotriaosylceramide (Gb3) by its identical mobility on HPTLC to authentic erythrocyte Gb3. Toxin also bound to a band tentatively identified as alpha-hydroxylated Gb3. In addition, toxin bound to P1 antigen present in group B human erythrocyte glycolipid extracts. The common feature of the three binding glycolipids is a terminal Gal alpha 1----4Gal disaccharide linked beta 1----4 to either Glc or GlcNAc. Globoisotriaosylceramide, which differs from Gb3 only in possessing a Gal alpha 1----3Gal terminal disaccharide, and LacCer, which lacks the terminal Gal residue of Gb3, were incapable of binding the toxin. Binding was shown to be mediated by the B subunit by the use of isolated toxin A and B subunits and monoclonal subunit-specific antibodies. Gb3-containing liposomes competitively inhibited the binding of toxin to HeLa cell monolayers but did not inhibit toxin- induced cytotoxicity. These studies show an identical carbohydrate- specific glycolipid receptor for shigella toxin in gut and in HeLa cells. The toxin B subunit that mediates this binding has also been shown to recognize a glycoprotein receptor with different sugar specificity. Thus, we have demonstrated that the same small (Mr 6,500) B subunit polypeptide has two distinctive carbohydrate-specific binding sites. The Gal alpha 1----4Gal disaccharide of the glycolipid toxin receptor is also recognized by the Gal-Gal pilus of uropathogenic E. coli. This suggests the possibility that the pilus and toxin B subunit contain homologous sequences. If this is true, it may be possible to use the purified Gal-Gal pilus to produce toxin-neutralizing antibodies.
Is it possible to train a speech recognition system on text only ?

According to speech recognition literature, one cause of recognition error is the difference in training and testing conditions. One cause of this is the use of speakers with different accents in training and testing. This is because, in the stochastic and deterministic approaches, the system is trained on pairs of acoustic signallinguistic units. This pape r describes the development of a training system that employs only graphemes and studies the feasibility of a model that employs the speech signal, a bigram model, frequencies of four grams and a distance measure of a text from a specific language to recognize speech. This system should be independent of variations in pronunciation and employable in languages for which a corpus has not yet been developed. A model was specified in the class of shallow languages and an experiment was carried out using a phonotypical transcription in Italian with a 22% WER. The input of the system was not the acoustic signal but phonemes to reduce the computational complexity in this preliminary phase. The algorithm employed in the test maps from phonemes to graphemes using a map that dynamically changes to minimise the distance of the output from the expected language. The difference between conventional phoneme parsing and our method is that in the conventional method the mapping phoneme grapheme is given before the recognition procedure, whereas in our method the map that is chosen is the one that minimises the distance between the output and the expected language.
Performance monitoring framework for service oriented system lifecycle

Service oriented systems are highly dynamic systems composed of several web services. One of the most important challenges in service oriented systems is to deliver acceptable quality of service. For this purpose, it is required to monitor quality of service along different activities of service oriented system. Existing research focuses on specific activities but do not take into account all the activities of service oriented system together at the infrastructure level. In this paper, we present performance monitoring framework to provide support for the whole service oriented system lifecycle. Our framework integrates several ontologies to monitor the performance of service oriented systems in order to ensure their sustainability. We design a base Service Monitoring Ontology that captures all the information about the service domain. Along with that we design ontologies for technical indicators at service level, binding level, composition level and server level. We conduct a performance evaluation over real web services using suitable estimators for response time, delay, loss and more.
An Empirical Analysis of the Contribution of Agriculture and Petroleum Sector to the Growth and Development of the Nigerian Economy from 1960-2010

This paper investigates the contribution of agricultural sector and petroleum sector to the economic growth and development (GDP) of the Nigerian economy between 1960 and 2010 through the application of Augmented DickeyFuller technique in testing the unit root property of the series; after which Chow breakpoint test was conducted to test the presence of structural change or break in the economy. The results of unit root suggest that all the variables in the model are stationary and the results of Chow breakpoint test suggest that there is no structural change or break in the period under review. The results also revealed that agricultural sector is contributing higher than the petroleum sector, though they both possessed a positive impact on economic growth and development of the economy. A good performance of an economy in terms of per capita growth may therefore be attributed to a welldeveloped agricultural sector capital. A major policy implication of this result is that concerted effort be made by policy makers to increase the level of productivity of agricultural sector in Nigeria by improving expenditure on the sector so as to boost the growth of the economy. Since the agricultural sector is the major contributor to GDP in Nigeria which is capable of changing social indictors of the economy, policies aimed at adequate financing of agricultural sector by government in order to boast its output, may result into a way forward. Government evolves policies toward diversifying the economy and encouraged the campaign for improvements in the non-oil sectors of the economy especially agricultural.
Educational Development and Developmental Research in Mathematics Education

In light of anticipated changes in mathematics education, an alternative for the well- known "research-development-diffusion" model is presented. It is based on an integration of curriculum research and design embedded in "educational development. " In this context curriculum development is described as purposeful and sensible tinker- ing. It is argued that the theory production implied in this process may be exploited in "developmental research. " However, developmental research is not yet well established as a research discipline. The core of this article is an effort to explicate the characteris- tics of developmental research and to discuss its methodological aspects.
Per-VM page cache partitioning for cloud computing platforms

Cloud computing has become popular for shared hosting of third-party applications. A cloud platform may multiplex virtual machines running different customer applications onto a single physical server, raising the potential for performance interference between such applications. In particular, when a hypervisor shares the file system page cache between virtual machines, as is common in Linux environments, it is possible for one VM to impact the performance seen by other co-located VMs. To address this drawback and improve performance isolation, we design a page cache which is partitioned by VMs. Such a design provides the ability to control fine-grained caching parameters such as cache size and eviction policies individually. Furthermore, the deterministic cache allocation and partitioning provides improved performance isolation among VMs. We provide dynamic cache partitioning by using utility derived from the miss-ratio characteristics. We implement our page cache architecture in the Linux kernel and demonstrate its efficacy using disk image files of virtual machines and different types of file access patterns by applications. Experimental results show that the utility-based partitioning can reduce the cache size by up to an order of magnitude while increasing cache hit ratios by up to 20%. Among other features, the per-file page cache has fadvise integration, a scan-resistant eviction algorithm (ARC) and reduced lock-contention and overhead during the eviction process.
The School-to-Work Transition from a Learning Theory Perspective.

Learning is essential not only for students to develop the basic employability skills required for the school-to-work transition, but also for the development of work habits, beliefs, interests, and values. Career development counselors can apply a learning perspective to (a) use assessment instruments for stimulating new learning, not merely for matching existing characteristics to current environments, (b) achieve emotional and performance outcomes as well as cognitive outcomes, and (c) measure success by the extent to which clients continue to be engaged in learning activities leading to the creation of satisfying lives for themselves, not merely by measures of decisiveness and congruence.
Use of Green Fluorescent Protein To Tag Lactic Acid Bacterium Strains under Development as Live Vaccine Vectors

ABSTRACT The lactic acid bacteria (LAB) are safe microorganisms which are mainly used for the preparation of fermented foods and for probiotic applications. The potential of LAB as live vehicles for the production and delivery of therapeutic molecules such as antigens is also being actively investigated today. However, very little is known about the fate of live LAB when administered in vivo and about the interaction of these microorganisms with the nasal or gastrointestinal ecosystem. For future applications, it is essential to be able to discriminate the biotherapeutic strain from the endogenous microflora and to unravel the mechanisms underlying the postulated health-beneficial effect. We therefore started to investigate both aspects in a mouse model with two LAB species presently under development as live vaccine vectors, i.e.,Lactococcus lactis and Lactobacillus plantarum. We have constructed different expression vectors carrying thegfp (green fluorescent protein [GFP]) gene from the jellyfish Aequoria victoria, and we found that this visible marker was best expressed when placed under the control of the inducible strong nisA promoter from L. lactis. Notably, a threshold amount of GFP was necessary to obtain a bright fluorescent phenotype. We further demonstrated that fluorescentL. plantarum NCIMB8826 can be enumerated and sorted by flow cytometry. Moreover, tagging of this strain with GFP allowed us to visualize its phagocytosis by macrophages in vitro and ex vivo and to trace it in the gastrointestinal tract of mice upon oral administration.
A MIKE + UVES survey of sub-damped Lyman α systems at z < 1.5

We have combined the results from our recent observations of damped and sub-damped Lyman α (sub-DLA) systems with the Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle and Ultraviolet Visual Echelle Spectrograph on the Magellan Clay and Very Large Telescopes with ones from the literature to determine the N H -weighted mean metallicity of these systems based both on Fe, a depleted element in quasi-stellar object absorbers and the local interstellar medium, and Zn a relatively undepleted element. In each case, the N HI -weighted mean metallicity is higher and shows faster evolution in sub-DLAs than the classical DLA systems. Large grids of photoionization models over the sub-DLA N HI range with CLOUDY show that the ionization corrections to the abundances are in general small, however the fraction of ionized H can be up to ~90 per cent. The individual spectra have been shifted to the rest frame of the absorber and averaged together to determine the average properties of these systems at z < 1.5. We find that the average abundance pattern of the sub-DLA systems is similar to the gas in the halo of the Milky Way, with an offset of ~0.3 dex in the overall metallicity. Both DLAs and sub-DLAs show similar characteristics in their relative abundances patterns, although the DLAs have smaller ([Mn/Zn]) as well as higher ([Ti/Zn]) and ([Cr/Zn]). We calculate the contribution of sub-DLAs to the metal budget of the Universe, and find that the sub-DLA systems at z < 1.5 contain a comoving density of metals Ω met ~ (3.5-15.8) x 10 5 M ⊙ Mpc -3 , at least twice the comoving density of metals in the DLA systems. The sub-DLAs do, however, track global chemical evolution models much more closely than do the DLAs, perhaps indicating that they are a less dust biased metallicity indicator of galaxies at high redshifts than the DLA systems.
Clinical, radiological and pathological features of ABCA3 mutations in children

Background: Mutations in the ABCA3 gene can result in fatal surfactant deficiency in term newborn infants and chronic interstitial lung disease in older children. Previous studies on ABCA3 mutations have focused primarily on the genetic abnormalities and reported limited clinical information about the resultant disease. A study was undertaken to analyse systematically the clinical presentation, pulmonary function, diagnostic imaging, pathological features and outcomes of children with ABCA3 mutations. Methods: The records of nine children with ABCA3 mutations evaluated at Texas Children’s Hospital between 1992 and 2005 were reviewed and their current clinical status updated. Previous diagnostic imaging studies and lung biopsy specimens were re-examined. The results of DNA analyses were confirmed. Results: Age at symptom onset ranged from birth to 4 years. Cough, crackles, failure to thrive and clubbing were frequent findings. Mean lung function was low but tended to remain static. CT scans commonly revealed ground-glass opacification, septal thickening, parenchymal cysts and pectus excavatum. Histopathological patterns included pulmonary alveolar proteinosis, desquamative interstitial pneumonitis and non-specific interstitial pneumonitis, and varied with age. Dense abnormalities of lamellar bodies, characteristic of ABCA3 mutations, were seen by electron microscopy in all adequate specimens. Outcomes varied with the age at which the severity of lung disease warranted open lung biopsy, and some patients have had prolonged survival without lung transplantation. Conclusions: The presentation and course of interstitial lung disease due to ABCA3 mutations are variable, and open lung biopsy and genetic testing are warranted early in the evaluation of children with a consistent clinical picture.
Higher order methylation features for clustering and prediction in epigenomic studies

MOTIVATION DNA methylation is an intensely studied epigenetic mark, yet its functional role is incompletely understood. Attempts to quantitatively associate average DNA methylation to gene expression yield poor correlations outside of the well-understood methylation-switch at CpG islands. RESULTS Here, we use probabilistic machine learning to extract higher order features associated with the methylation profile across a defined region. These features quantitate precisely notions of shape of a methylation profile, capturing spatial correlations in DNA methylation across genomic regions. Using these higher order features across promoter-proximal regions, we are able to construct a powerful machine learning predictor of gene expression, significantly improving upon the predictive power of average DNA methylation levels. Furthermore, we can use higher order features to cluster promoter-proximal regions, showing that five major patterns of methylation occur at promoters across different cell lines, and we provide evidence that methylation beyond CpG islands may be related to regulation of gene expression. Our results support previous reports of a functional role of spatial correlations in methylation patterns, and provide a mean to quantitate such features for downstream analyses. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION https://github.com/andreaskapou/BPRMeth CONTACT G.Sanguinetti@ed.ac. uk SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Substantial expression of mature elastin in arterial constructs

Mature elastin synthesis is a key challenge in arterial tissue engineering. Most engineered vessels lack elastic fibers in the medial layer and those present are poorly organized. The objective of this study is to increase mature elastin synthesis in small-diameter arterial constructs. Adult primary baboon smooth muscle cells (SMCs) were seeded in the lumen of porous tubular scaffolds fabricated from a biodegradable elastomer, poly(glycerol sebacate) (PGS) and cultured in a pulsatile flow bioreactor for 3 wk. We tested the effect of pore sizes on construct properties by histological, biochemical, and mechanical evaluations. Histological analysis revealed circumferentially organized extracellular matrix proteins including elastin and the presence of multilayered SMCs expressing calponin and α-smooth muscle actin. Biochemical analysis demonstrated that the constructs contained mature elastin equivalent to 19% of the native arteries. Mechanical tests indicated that the constructs could withstand up to 200 mmHg burst pressure and exhibited compliance comparable to native arteries. These results show that nontransfected cells in PGS scaffolds in unsupplemented medium produced a substantial amount of mature elastin within 3 wk and the elastic fibers had similar orientation as those in native arteries. The 25–32 μm pore size supported cell organization and elastin synthesis more than larger pore sizes. To our knowledge, there was no prior report of the synthesis of mature and organized elastin in arterial constructs without exogenous factors or viral transduction.