Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast-food intake and diet quality in black and white girls: the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Growth and Health Study.

OBJECTIVE To examine trends in fast-food consumption and its relationship to calorie, fat, and sodium intake in black and white adolescent girls. DESIGN A longitudinal multicenter cohort study of the development of obesity and cardiovascular risk factors in black and white female adolescents. Data collection occurred annually using a validated 3-day food record and a food-patterns questionnaire. SUBJECTS AND SETTINGS A biracial and socioeconomically diverse group of 2379 black and white girls recruited from 3 centers. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Three-day food records and a food-patterns questionnaire were examined for intake of fast food and its association with nutrient intake. We compared patterns of exposure to fast food and its impact on intake of calories, fat, and sodium. RESULTS Fast-food intake was positively associated with intake of energy and sodium as well as total fat and saturated fat as a percentage of calories. Fast-food intake increased with increasing age in both races. With increasing consumption of fast food, energy intake increased with an adjusted mean of 1837 kcal for the low fast-food frequency group vs 1966 kcal for the highest fast-food frequency group (P<.05). Total fat in the low fast-food frequency group was 34.3% as opposed to 35.8% in the highest fast-food frequency group (P<.05). Saturated fat went from 12.5% to 13% and sodium increased from 3085 mg to 3236 mg in the lowest vs the highest fast-food frequency group (P<.001). CONCLUSIONS Dietary intake of fast food is a determinant of diet quality in adolescent girls. Efforts to reduce fast-food consumption may be useful in improving diet and risk for future cardiovascular disease.
Flt3 Ligand-Generated Murine Plasmacytoid and Conventional Dendritic Cells Differ in Their Capacity to Prime Naive CD8 T Cells and to Generate Memory Cells In Vivo1

Mature dendritic cells (DCs) have the capacity to induce efficient primary T cell response and effector cell differentiation. Thus, these cells are a major tool in the design of various immunotherapeutic protocols. We have tested the capacity of different subsets of matured DCs pulsed with a peptide to induce the differentiation of naive CD8 T cells into memory cells in vivo. Flt3 ligand (FL) induces the differentiation of conventional DCs (cDCs) and plasmacytoid DCs (PDCs) from murine bone marrow precursors in vitro. After maturation, both subsets become strong stimulators of Ag-specific T cell responses in vitro. However, the in vivo T cell stimulatory capacity of these DC subsets has not been studied in detail. In the present study, we demonstrate that mature FL-generated DCs induce efficient peptide-specific CD8 T cell response and memory cell differentiation in vivo. This is mainly due to the cDC subset because the PDC subset induced only a negligible primary CD8 response without detectable levels of memory CD8 T cell differentiation. Thus, in vitro FL-generated mature cDCs, but not PDCs, are potent stimulators of peptide-specific CD8 T cell responses and memory generation in vivo.
Transforming schools: illusion or reality?1

This paper explores the claim that appropriately trained heads can motivate teachers and students to achieve challenging targets and transform the prospects of future generations. Theory derived from the leadership literature is tested against the experience of three headteachers in the field. Case study evidence is used to examine how Hillside School was improved. Applying recommended styles, the heads won the commitment of their colleagues and built the capacity for further progress, despite adverse circumstances that included social disadvantage. Although the ‘turn around’ was achieved quickly, the interpersonal styles adopted by the heads were only part of a leadership repertoire that included beliefs, values, professional knowledge and micro-politics. Variations in the combination of context, leaders and followers seem to have been more significant than the common elements emphasized by the school improvement literature and national training programmes. OfSTED reported that the school's effectiveness was greatly enhanced. Test and examination results were more or less unchanged, however, confirming recent studies that have found little evidence of leadership impact on student outcomes. This supports the suggestion that intake mix may influence results more than the organizational characteristics shaped by heads. The paper concludes that while leadership training may improve school climate, a transformation in performance is unlikely.
Living in the basement of the ivory tower: a graduate student's perspective of participatory action research within academic institutions

Abstract As academic interest grows around participatory action research there is a need to reflect on the ways in which universities are adapting to the presence of alternative research methodologies. This article examines the rapidly expanding field of participatory action research (PAR) as it relates to academic involvement in community research and dialogue. The article concentrates on the advantages and disadvantages of the PAR approach as a research practice in academic institutions. Untimately, this article raises a number of questions for academics to consider including the possible outcomes and implications for implementing PAR within graduate school curriculum.
An Examination of the Effect of Extrinsic Reinforcers on Intrinsically Motivated Behavior: Experimental and Theoretical.

A review of the literature in the area of intrinsic-extrinsic motivation revealed several experimental and theoretical problems. The current study provided a series of three conditions under which intrinsic motivation was tested, a true control, a directions only condition and a direction plus reinforcement condition. Both the directions and the directions plus reinforcement groups were observed to have increased their time on the task during the experimental phases, and when extrinsic reinforcement and directions were removed, the subjects in these two conditions maintained intrinsically motivated behaviors at levels significantly above the levels observed during the baseline phase and significantly higher than the control group. These results were in contrast to those previously reported in the literature. The discussion portion of the paper examined the faulty logic, and understanding of operant theory implicit in the literature in extrinsic-intrinsic motivation, and provided suggestions for alternative means of supplanting operant theory with more effective, workable theories of behavior.
The mediating role of engagement and burnout in the relationship between employees' emotion regulation strategies and customer outcomes

Service employees' emotional display plays an important role in service interactions, but little is known about the effects of employee's emotional regulation strategies on customer outcomes. This study examines a model in which emotion regulation is associated with customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions as mediated by employee burnout and engagement. Data collected from 135 employee–customer dyads following service interactions was analysed with structural equation modelling. The results show that engagement fully mediates the relationship of deep acting, and burnout partially mediates the relationship of surface acting, with customer satisfaction and loyalty intentions.
Arrhythmias in cardiac sarcoidosis: diagnosis and treatment

Purpose of review Sarcoidosis is a granulomatous disease of unclear cause and variable presentation. Cardiac involvement can result in life-threatening conditions including heart block, ventricular tachycardia, sudden cardiac death, and heart failure. There is no consensus on the diagnosis and management of cardiac sarcoidosis and a practical update is needed to provide clinicians with guidance. Recent findings Three recent studies have described cardiac manifestations as the first presentation of sarcoidosis. In one study, cardiac sarcoidosis was found to be the underlying cause in 19% of adults aged less than 55 years presenting with new onset unexplained atrioventricular block. Also, there are increasing reports of patients with isolated cardiac sarcoidosis (i.e., without sarcoid in other organs). Finally, advances in imaging have enhanced our ability to detect myocardial involvement and perhaps follow response to treatment. Summary Cardiac sarcoidosis should be considered in patients aged less than 55 years presenting with unexplained atrioventricular block and in patients with idiopathic cardiomyopathy and sustained ventricular tachycardia. Much remains to be learned about the condition, including the role of steroids and devices in treatment, and the place of advanced imaging in following the response to treatment. Collaborative multicenter studies are required to answer these important clinical questions.
Data Quality Assessment of Company's Maintenance Reporting: A Case Study

Businesses are increasingly using their enterprise data for strategic decision-making activities. In fact, information, derived from data, has become one of the most important tools for businesses to gain competitive edge. Data quality assessment has become a hot topic in numerous sectors and considerable research has been carried out in this respect, although most of the existing frameworks often need to be adapted with respect to the use case needs and features. Within this context, this paper develops a methodology for assessing the quality of enterprises' daily maintenance reporting, relying both on an existing data quality framework and on a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique. Our methodology is applied in cooperation with a Finnish multinational company in order to evaluate and rank different company sites/office branches (carrying out maintenance activities) according to the quality of their data reporting. Based on this evaluation, the industrial partner wants to establish new action plans for enhanced reporting practices.
Very high temperature operation of diamond Schottky diode

For the first time, the operating temperature of a Schottky diode structure has been pushed to 1000/spl deg/C. The diode structure consists of a Si-based Schottky material deposited onto a homoepitaxial boron doped diamond surface. At high temperatures, the forward I-V characteristics are dominated by the thermionic emission (n/spl ap/1.01) across a barrier of 1.9 eV height. The reverse characteristics are still dominated by thermally activated defects. The series resistance shows thermal activation associated with the boron doping.
Wav2Letter: an End-to-End ConvNet-based Speech Recognition System

This paper presents a simple end-to-end model for speech recognition, combining a convolutional network based acoustic model and a graph decoding. It is trained to output letters, with transcribed speech, without the need for force alignment of phonemes. We introduce an automatic segmentation criterion for training from sequence annotation without alignment that is on par with CTC (Graves et al., 2006) while being simpler. We show competitive results in word error rate on the Librispeech corpus (Panayotov et al., 2015) with MFCC features, and promising results from raw waveform.
Optimal data transmission and battery charging policies for solar powered sensor networks using Markov decision process

An optimal data transmission and battery charging policy for sensor networks, with solar powered nodes, is proposed. A sensor node with multiple battery charging levels and solar radiation states is considered. To model the sensor node behavior we employ constrained Markov decision process, which achieves an optimal stochastic policy, allowing sensor node to prolong its battery lifetime with minimum data transmission rate constraint. The Markov decision process based model is evaluated using reported energy measurements for the existing platforms. The performance evaluation results reveal, how the data transmission rate should be controlled for different data arrival rates, while taking into account the current battery state and the solar radiation pattern. The proposed model is flexible and can accommodate different number of charging/discharging levels as well as radiation patterns.
Catch-up growth in children with late-diagnosed coeliac disease

Anthropometric parameters and catch-up growth were prospectively evaluated in fifty late-diagnosed children with coeliac disease aged 2·25–10 years after 1–4 years of adhering to a strict gluten-free diet (GFD). The anthropometric parameters were expressed as Z scores relative to National Centre for Health Statistics standards using Epi Info 2000 (weight-for-height Z score (WHZ) and height-for-age Z score (HAZ)). Catch-up growth was evaluated by repeated measures. ANOVA, overall significance by an F test and pair-wise comparisons for estimated marginal means using the least significant difference. At the time of enrolment, no significant difference was observed in WHZ and HAZ between children diagnosed before (group 1) or after (group 2) 4 years of age. On follow-up, HAZ was significantly higher in group 1 after the first and third years of the GFD (P=0·04 and 0·02, respectively), with a non-significant increase after completing 4 years of the GFD (P=0·22). Feeding the GFD resulted in an overall significant (F=3·99, P=0·011) increase in HAZ up to 4 years of follow-up. However, the catch-up in height was incomplete, with stunting in sixteen (55·4 %) of twenty-nine children after 3 years and in seven (46·6 %) of fifteen children after 4 years on the GFD. Pair-wise comparisons demonstrated a linear catch-up growth during the initial follow-up on GFD. Treatment with the GFD did not result in an overall significant increase in WHZ up to 4 years of follow-up (F=1·01, P=0·42). Our results suggest that, in children with late-diagnosed coeliac disease, treatment with a GFD leads to a normalisation of body mass and a significant but incomplete recovery in HAZ during 4 years of follow-up.
Variation-aware adaptive tuning for nanophotonic interconnects

Short-reach nanophotonic interconnects are promising to solve the communication bottleneck in data centers and chip-level scenarios. However, the nanophotonic interconnects are sensitive to process and thermal variations, especially for the microring structures, resulting in significant variation of an optical link's bit error rate (BER). In this paper, we propose a power-efficient adaptive tuning approach for nanophotonic interconnects to address the variation issues. During the adaptive tuning process, each nanophotonic interconnect is adaptively allocated just enough power to meet the BER requirement. The proposed adaptive tuning approach could reduce the photonic receiver power by 8% - 34% than the worst-case based fixed design while achieving the same BER. Our evaluation results show that the adaptive tuning approach scales well with the process variation, the thermal variation and the number of communication nodes, and can accommodate different types of NoC architectures and lasers.
The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War

accumulated’ in these sectors. It was a problem they could not easily remedy. No matter how meagre the returns on cotton, Valley planters could not afford to grow anything else for fear of alienating British creditors. Nor could they liquidate their investments in slaves. After all, as Johnson notes, human capital ‘would not simply rust or lie fallow. It would starve. It would steal. It would revolt’ (13). Caught between a ravenous global economy and a restive work force, Mississippi Valley planters began looking for a way out. For many, the solution was to ‘go global’. As Johnson shows, Southern commercialists like J.D. B. De Bow and Matthew Maury promoted expansion as a panacea for economic dysfunction and racial anxiety. These Deep South imperialists believed that new markets, new territory and new sources of slaves would reinvigorate the Southern economy and allow it to transcend its internal contradictions. Their vision of a proslavery ‘spatial fix’ inspired a variety of imperial misadventures in the 1850s, from filibustering expeditions in Cuba and Nicaragua to an abortive attempt to reopen the Atlantic slave trade (310). Historians often present these events as sidelights to the ‘coming of the Civil War’, incidental to the standard narrative of escalating sectional conflict. But Johnson rejects this framing. By reducing the complexity of lived history to simple foreshadowing, he contends, scholars have overlooked what many in the Deep South of the 1850s cared about most: not Kansas, but Cuba; not secession, but expansion. Like few books in recent memory, River of Dark Dreams moves seamlessly between the local and the global, the material and the cultural, revealing how these different levels of historical process impinge on one another. Johnson relates this complex story with intelligence, mordant wit and evocative prose. However, River of Dark Dreams is not without shortcomings. Johnson’s analyses of Mississippi Valley life, though vividly quotidian, lack a sense of change over time. The result is a curiously static picture of the Deep South that at times echoes the same shopworn social history River of Dark Dreams sets out to revise. Johnson’s account of proslavery globalism also gives pause. Johnson presents globalism as a dominant concern for ‘a very large proportion of Valley slaveholders’ – as even more pressing than sectional issues like Bleeding Kansas (17). But his sources, drawn mostly from the writings of elite politicians and intellectuals (some from outside the Mississippi Valley) demonstrate no such broad consensus. Despite these qualms, Johnson has written a book with which all historians of the USA, slavery and capitalism will need to reckon.
Synaesthesia: A corpus-based study of cross-modal directionality

In the existing literature on synaesthetic metaphors in poetry it is proposed that transfers tend to go from the ‘lower’ (touch, smell, taste) to the ‘higher’ (sight, hearing) sensory modalities. The purpose of this article is to establish if the same directionality also holds for synaesthetic associations found in other text types. To this end, a method for the semi-automatic extraction of synaesthesia is introduced and applied to general-purpose corpora of English (ukWaC) and Italian (itWaC). In the data collected for these languages, most transfers proceed in the expected direction, e.g. sweet voice, but instances of ‘backward’ transfers are also found, e.g. bitter cold. Based on these results, it is claimed that the ‘directionality principle’ reflects the frequency of association types, rather than representing universal constraints on synaesthetic transfers, as has often been more or less explicitly assumed. It is here argued that both properties of human perception and more strictly linguistic factors can account for the frequency tendencies observed in synaesthesia. The proposed interpretation is also shown to account for apparently contradictory evidence coming from typological studies on verbs of perception.
Phylogenetic analysis of rubella viruses identified in Uganda, 2003–2012

Molecular data on rubella viruses are limited in Uganda despite the importance of congenital rubella syndrome (CRS). Routine rubella vaccination, while not administered currently in Uganda, is expected to begin by 2015. The World Health Organization recommends that countries without rubella vaccination programs assess the burden of rubella and CRS before starting a routine vaccination program. Uganda is already involved in integrated case‐based surveillance, including laboratory testing to confirm measles and rubella, but molecular epidemiologic aspects of rubella circulation have so far not been documented in Uganda. Twenty throat swab or oral fluid samples collected from 12 districts during routine rash and fever surveillance between 2003 and 2012 were identified as rubella virus RNA positive and PCR products encompassing the region used for genotyping were sequenced. Phylogenetic analysis of the 20 sequences identified 19 genotype 1G viruses and 1 genotype 1E virus. Genotype‐specific trees showed that the Uganda viruses belonged to specific clusters for both genotypes 1G and 1E and grouped with similar sequences from neighboring countries. Genotype 1G was predominant in Uganda. More epidemiological and molecular epidemiological data are required to determine if genotype 1E is also endemic in Uganda. The information obtained in this study will assist the immunization program in monitoring changes in circulating genotypes. J. Med. Virol. 86:2107–2113, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Elucidating the Relationship Between Satisfaction and Citizen Involvement in Public Administration

Abstract This study analyzes the relationships between public administration satisfaction (PAS), political efficacy (PE), and active citizen involvement (ACI). The study group consists of 345 respondents residing in Taiwan. Respondents are interviewed by phone to obtain their perceptions regarding local municipality operations (i.e. professionalism and sympathy (PS), ambition to improve (AI), neutrality and morality (NM)), PAS, ACI, and PE). These relationships are verified by conducting path analysis. Results of this study demonstrate that AI and NM positively affect PAS, that PAS positively affects PE and ACI, and that PE plays a mediating role in the relationship between PAS and ACI.
Whole-Brain In-vivo Measurements of the Axonal G-Ratio in a Group of 37 Healthy Volunteers

The g-ratio, quantifying the ratio between the inner and outer diameters of a fiber, is an important microstructural characteristic of fiber pathways and is functionally related to conduction velocity. We introduce a novel method for estimating the MR g-ratio non-invasively across the whole brain using high-fidelity magnetization transfer (MT) imaging and single-shell diffusion MRI. These methods enabled us to map the MR g-ratio in vivo across the brain's prominent fiber pathways in a group of 37 healthy volunteers and to estimate the inter-subject variability. Effective correction of susceptibility-related distortion artifacts was essential before combining the MT and diffusion data, in order to reduce partial volume and edge artifacts. The MR g-ratio is in good qualitative agreement with histological findings despite the different resolution and spatial coverage of MRI and histology. The MR g-ratio holds promise as an important non-invasive biomarker due to its microstructural and functional relevance in neurodegeneration.
Utilizing higher order statistics of packet interarrival times for bottleneck detection

This paper introduces a new approach for determining bottleneck link locations in a network. The considered measurement model is passive monitoring of a backbone link. We analyze the properties of packet interarrival time (PIT) distribution functions of network segments and make decisions whether the extracted properties of a link suggest bottleneck behavior or not. The correlation between bottleneck behavior and packet interarrival time distribution is demonstrated through simulations featuring tighter and tighter bottleneck connections. Locating shared bottlenecks with passive monitoring requires effective metrics for distinguishing seriously congested links from normal or underutilized connections. The current paper presents the third and fourth central moments (skewness and kurtosis, respectively) of PIT distribution as possible and promising metrics for bottleneck detection. According to the simulation results, kurtosis of PITs is found to be a powerful measure of bottleneck behavior. This is further validated by investigation of real measurement data.