Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reducing mental illness stigma and fostering empathic citizenship: Community arts collaborative approach

ABSTRACT An art therapy-informed community arts project to reduce stigma towards people living with mental illness in Hong Kong included three phases: 1) a public exhibition to raise awareness; 2) a workshop for viewers to create response art and generate approaches to alleviate stigma; and 3) a forum for people living with mental illness and viewers to create art and discuss programmatic recommendations. Results suggested that: 1) art exhibits paired with reflection fostered empathy; 2) creating art promoted a wider perspective and initiated dialogue; and 3) collaborative art making facilitated meaningful interaction. These findings offer promising strategies for art and social change.
Computation of graph spectra of protein-protein interaction networks

Complex systems from many areas such as biology, sociology, technology appear in form of large networks. These networks are represented usually in form of graphs and their structural properties are analyzed using the methods of graph theory. The so called Laplacian matrix became an important tool of spectral graph theory for the investigation of structural properties of large biological networks. Many important features of the underlying structure and dynamics of systems can be extracted from the analysis of the spectral density of graphs. The Laplacian matrices of empirical networks are unstructured large sparse matrices. The spectra of the Laplacian matrices of large protein-protein interaction networks (PPIN's) are computed using sparse eigenvalue solvers with high accuracy.
An attention model and its application in man-made scene interpretation

The ultimate aim of research into computer vision is designing a system which interprets its surrounding environment in a similar way the human can do effortlessly. However, the state of technology is far from achieving such a goal. In this thesis different components of a computer vision system that are designed for the task of interpreting man-made scenes, in particular images of buildings, are described. The flow of information in the proposed system is bottom-up i.e., the image is first segmented into its meaningful components and subsequently the regions are labelled using a contextual classifier. Starting from simple observations concerning the human vision system and the gestalt laws of human perception, like the law of “good (simple) shape” and “perceptual grouping”, a blob detector is developed, that identifies components in a 2D image. These components are convex regions of interest, with interest being defined as significant gradient magnitude content. An eye tracking experiment is conducted, which shows that the regions identified by the blob detector, correlate significantly with the regions which drive the attention of viewers. Having identified these blobs, it is postulated that a blob represents an object, linguistically identified with its own semantic name. In other words, a blob may contain a window a door or a chimney in a building. These regions are used to identify and segment higher order structures in a building, like facade, window array and also environmental regions like sky and ground. Because of inconsistency in the unary features of buildings, a contextual learning algorithm is used to classify the segmented regions. A model which learns spatial and topological relationships between different objects from a set of hand-labelled data, is used. This model utilises this information in a MRF to achieve consistent labellings of new scenes.
Factors Leading to Substance Abuse, and Implications for Gambling in New Zealand

While much is known about the development of substance abuse, very few studies have examined how social gambling progresses to problem gambling for some individuals. Patterns of development might be similar to the patterns leading to alcohol misuse. This paper briefly reviews the literature on the association between problem gambling and substance abuse. The cultural, sociodemographic, social and personal factors that contribute to the initiation and continuation of the use of addictive substances, including alcohol, marijuana, tobacco and illicit drugs, are examined, with special reference to two longitudinal New Zealand studies. A synopsis of the development of substance use, abuse and recovery is outlined. Questions regarding the implications for the changes from social to problem gambling and to recovery are presented. Possible key indicators of the changes are suggested.
The Role of Interaction Histories in Mental Model Building and Knowledge Sharing in the Legal Domain

This paper reports on a study examining attorneys’ and law librarians’ use of their memory and information they record externally in searching for, using, and sharing legal information. The paper suggests automatically and manually recording search histories and basing user interface tools on this information to support mental model building and knowledge sharing in the legal information domain. The research described is part of the author’s dissertation research [1] that examined the use of search histories in legal information seeking and use, and proposed interface design recommendations for information systems. While searching for and using information, attorneys learn about legal topics and use this knowledge in their work. They create mental models and share their new knowledge with colleagues. Computers can automatically record human-computer interaction events. This information can help searchers represent and share new knowledge. The recorded information can be provided back to the user through the user interface to support searching for and using information, learning about the subject matter and sharing this knowledge with others. In this study, attorneys and law librarians were interviewed and observed to assess their use of their memory and external memory aids while searching for and using legal information. The results reported here focus on the role of interaction histories and history-based interface tools in supporting mental model development of legal information seekers of a topical area and sharing this information with other users. Search Histories, Information Retrieval, Legal Informatics SD D2.2. 2, H.3. 3 The research reported in this paper examined the information-seeking behavior of attorneys and law librarians in the American legal system with special attention to their internal memory use and external history-keeping practices. Attorneys and law librarians in the U.S. legal system search for and use legal information stored in online databases on a day-to-day basis. Precedent-based legal practice requires legal professionals to refer to court opinions to establish the current interpretation of the law. The precedent-based legal domain is highly information and knowledge-intensive. Legal litigation work is highly dependent on the proper identification, retrieval, and management of up-to-date information. Legal information is historically based, it develops over time and builds on previous information: in the American legal system, the law is interpreted through court opinions written by judges in courtrooms. These court opinions often cite other previous court opinions and legal cases, strongly building on earlier information. Keeping up-todate with new developments and locating relevant information is a professional and ethical responsibility of attorneys. Helping attorneys with searching for, finding, managing, and using this information is a challenge for information and knowledge
Mental fatigue detection based on the functional near infrared spectroscopy

Mental fatigue can be induced by long time mental work, mental fatigue caused worse performance and accidents. As a non-invasive technique, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) can measure blood oxygen activity in the cerebral cortex which reflect the cognitive function of brain indirectly. Aiming at investigating whether fNIRS can measure the mental fatigue and study the spatial pattern of hemodynamic response for mental fatigue, we used three sessions of verbal 2-back working memory task for a total of 120 minutes to induce mental fatigue, 15 healthy subjects were recruited and 30 channels including prefrontal cortex (PFC) and motor cortex (MC) were measured by fNIRS. The mean oxyhemoglobin feature for 20s was extracted as well as subjective fatigue level and performance. The results showed significant increase of subjected fatigue level as well as significant decrease performance from session one to three task. With the increased level of fatigue, oxyhemoglobin in PFC increase significantly and the spatial pattern of hemodynamic response in the all 30 channels varied with task duration as well. These findings indicated the potential of fNIRS measured hemodynamic as a mental fatigue indicator.
ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE AND EMPLOYEE’S JOB DISSATISFACTION: A MODERATING ROLE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL EMPOWERMENT

This investigation focuses on measuring the perception of employees regarding organizational justice (OJ) and job dissatisfaction in the presence of interactive effect of psychological empowerment. The data have been collected from the employees of private universities in Lahore division using cluster sampling through random approach. The results of this investigation reveal that OJ has a negative association with the level of job dissatisfaction in the workplace. Moreover, the moderating role of psychological empowerment has weakened the negative relationship between OJ and the level of job dissatisfaction. There is scant literature found on the relationship between OJ and job dissatisfaction especially in the presence of interactive effect of psychological empowerment in the developed and the developing countries.
QUANTIFYING THE IMPORTANCE OF RECOGNIZING TONES

Some of the results reported here are akin to those in earlier work (Surendran & Levow (2004a), Surendran & Niyogi (2003), Surendran (2003)) but they were done here with improved computational techniques and a larger dataset. All calculations in this chapter were done using an automatically transcribed corpus of 949 111 words in 151 940 sentences from the Mandarin VOA TDT 2 collection. It contained 1020 syllable tokens and 19 788 word tokens.
ERGENLER İÇİN SOSYAL DIŞLANMA ÖLÇEĞİ: TÜRKÇE GEÇERLİK VE GÜVENİRLİĞİ

Bu calismanin amaci Gilman, Carter-Sowell, DeWall, Adams, and Carboni (2013) tarafindan gelistirilen Ergenler Icin Sosyal Dislanma Yasantisi Olcegi (SDYO)’nin Turkce uyarlama calismasini yapmaktir. Calisma Istanbul ilinde 14-17 yas araliginda toplam 461 ergen ile yurutulmustur. Dogrulayici ve Acimlayici faktor analizleri sonucunda olcegin orijinal calismadaki faktor yapisini koruyarak Turkiye’de de kullanilabilecek bir olcme araci niteligi tasidigi gorulmustur. Toplam 11 maddeden olusan olcekte iki alt boyut mevcuttur. Oz-degerlendirme biciminde, 5’li likert tipinde bir olcek olup, sosyal dislanmanin iki alt boyutunu degerlendirmektedir. Birinci boyut gormezden gelinme (5 madde) ikinci boyut ise dislanma (6 madde) deneyimini olcmektedir. Maddelerin faktor yukleri . 83 ile . 59 arasinda degismektedir. Olcegin madde toplam korelasyon katsayilari . 83 ile . 75 arasinda degismektedir. Olcegin ic tutarlilik Cronbach alfa katsayilari gormezden gelinme alt boyutu icin.82, dislanma alt boyutu icin . 83 olarak hesaplanmistir. Olcegin test tekrar test guvenirlilik katsayilari gormezden gelinme alt boyutu icin . 65, dislanma alt boyutu icin . 63 olarak hesaplanmistir. Dis olcut gecerliligini sinamak amaciyla UCLA yalnizlik olcegi farkli bir gruba (n= 343) uygulanmis, korelasyon katsayisi gormezden gelinme alt boyutu icin . 55, dislanma alt boyutu icin . 45 olarak elde edilmistir
Direct and Indirect Effects of the Physical Aspects of the Environment on Mental Well-Being

This study investigated the mediating role of neighborhood satisfaction and use of outdoor spaces in the effects of the physical environment on mental well-being. Four planning/design-related aspects of the environment were examined: perceived proximity of home to green/social spaces, open lawn with trees, and building-dominated spaces as well as perceived barriers to neighborhood use. A random sample of 434 Chicago residents participated in a photo survey. The results of linear regression modeling and mediation analyses support the hypothesis that satisfaction with quality of public space and frequency of use of green/social spaces have a significant mediating role in the relationship between nearby environmental attributes and mental well-being. Perceived barriers were also found to have both direct and indirect effects on mental well-being. Recognition of the differential roles played by environmental attributes, neighborhood satisfaction, and use patterns can help guide planners/designers to create outdoor spaces that enhance urban residents’ mental well-being.
Performance Evaluation of Cloud Computing Centers with General Arrivals and Service

Cloud providers need to size their systems to determine the right amount of resources to allocate as a function of customer's needs so as to meet their SLAs (Service Level Agreement), while at the same time minimizing their costs and energy use. Queueing theory based tools are a natural choice when dealing with performance aspects of the QoS (Quality of Service) part of the SLA and forecasting resource utilization. The characteristics of a cloud center lead to a queueing system with multiple servers (nodes) in which there is potentially a very large number of servers and both the arrival and service process can exhibit high variability. We propose to use a G/G/c-like model to represent a cloud system and assess expected performance indices. Given the potentially high number of servers in a cloud system, we present an efficient, fast and easy-to-implement approximate solution. We have extensively validated our approximation against discrete-event simulation for several QoS performance metrics such as task response time and blocking probability with excellent results. We apply our approach to examples of system sizing and our examples clearly demonstrate the importance of taking into account the variability of the tasks arrivals and thus expose the risk of under- or over-provisioning if one relies on a model with Poisson assumptions.
An Improved Genetic Algorithm for Fast Face Detection Using Neural Network as Classifier

This paper presents a novel method to speed up neural network (NN) based face detection systems. NN-based face detection can be viewed as a classification and search problem. The proposed method formulates the search problem as an integer nonlinear optimization problem (INLP) and develops an improved genetic algorithm (IGA) to solve it. Each individual in the IGA represents a subwindow in an input image. The subwindows are evaluated by how well they match a NN-based face filter. A face is indicated when the filter response of the best particle is above a given threshold. Experimental results show that the proposed method leads to a speedup of 83 on 320×240 images compared to the traditional exhaustive search method.
How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words

Writing about emotional experiences is associated with a host of positive outcomes. This study extended the expressive-writing paradigm to the realm of romantic relationships to examine the social effects of writing. For 3 consecutive days, one person from each of 86 dating couples either wrote about his or her deepest thoughts and feelings about the relationship or wrote about his or her daily activities. In the days before and after writing, instant messages were collected from the couples. Participants who wrote about their relationship were significantly more likely to still be dating their romantic partners 3 months later. Linguistic analyses of the instant messages revealed that participants and their partners used significantly more positive and negative emotion words in the days following the expressive-writing manipulation if the participants had written about their relationship than if they had written about their daily activities. Increases in positive emotion words partially mediated the relation between expressive writing and relationship stability.
An Examination of the Health Promoting Behavior of African American Women

There is a sparse amount of data to substantiate the relationship between the African American women’s ability to practice preventative healthcare, reduce their risk to chronic disease, and improve their quality of life. A phenomenological approach was employed in this qualitative study to examine the factors that influence African American women’s health promoting behaviors and lifestyle choices such as regular physical activity, good nutrition, routine health screenings, and other health-promoting behaviors. These factors included the women’s perceived benefits and barriers to health promoting behaviors, self-efficacy, interpersonal and situational influences. In order to gain insight into the factors associated with health promotion, two focus groups were used to examine the lived experiences of the women. Using body mass index (BMI) as a guide, the researcher was able to compare and contrast the health promoting behaviors of one group that had a BMI within the normal range verses the other group of women with a BMI in the obese range. A purposeful sample of eight African American women between the ages of 30 45 years were used. The women in this study experienced continuous challenges implementing and sustaining health promotion activities to benefit their overall health over a long period of time. The factors that interfered were cultural traditions, competing demands on their time, and their own desire and ability to adhere to health promoting activities. With this information, the researcher made recommendations to implement future culturally appropriate interventions and health promotion programming to promote good health and lower the risk of chronic diseases in this population. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Education (EdD) Department Executive Leadership First Supervisor Janice Girardi Subject Categories Education This dissertation is available at Fisher Digital Publications: http://fisherpub.sjfc. edu/education_etd/269 An Examination of the Health Promoting Behavior of African American Women
A Novel Enhanced Weighted Clustering Algorithm for Mobile Networks

Many applications of mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) adopt hierarchical structure for the scalability and simplify of management. Clustering is the most popular method to impose a hierarchical structure in MANETs. As a newly proposed weighing based clustering algorithm, the Weighted Clustering Algorithm (WCA) has improved performance compared with other previous clustering algorithms. However, the high mobility of nodes will lead to high frequency of reaffiliations which will increase the network overhead and minimize the network lifetime. To solve this problem, we propose an improved weight based clustering algorithm, namely enhanced weighted clustering algorithm (EWCA). The goals of the algorithm are maintaining stable clustering structure, minimizing the overhead for the clustering set up, maximizing lifespan of mobile nodes in the system, and achieving good end-to-end performance. Through simulations we have compared the performance of the proposed algorithm with that of WCA in terms of the number of clusters formed, number of re-affiliations, and the lifespan of the network. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm.
The Sensitive Tapestry: Built Architecture as a Platform for Information Visualization and Interaction

This paper presents 'The Sensitive Tapestry', an interactive installation using body-input as a nontraditional user interface. The technical basis for this kind of media-enabled environment is a thermal imager that captures the activities in public areas at a large scale. The installation has been developed as a prototypical example in architectural education at the ETH Zurich, Science City. The aim of the project is to generate a novel experience, which shows the potential of merging physical architecture and digital information. The article newly develops architecture as an interface that reveals information about the building itself, its occupants, and/or its environment. It describes the research that employs design experimentation and information visualization with the use of computer supported,interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition. This questions the way in which one perceives the own body spatiality and motility in physical and augmented environments and how the particular experience created by this juxtaposition evokes one’s awareness of the motility in the public. The paper suggests that introducing this kind of display in asocial scenario can enrich the casual interaction of people nearby and this might enhance social awareness and engagement.
On the nature of the EIS candidate clusters: Confirmation of $z\lesssim$ 0.6 candidates

We use publicly available V -band imaging data from the wide-angle surveys conducted by the ESO Imaging Survey project (EIS) to further investigate the nature of the EIS galaxy cluster candidates. These were originally identified by applying a matched-filter algorithm which used positional and photometric data of the galaxy sample extracted from the I -band survey images. In this paper, we apply the same technique to the galaxy sample extracted from V -band data and compare the new cluster detections with the original ones. We find that ~75% of the low-redshift cluster candidates ($z\lesssim0.6$) are detected in both passbands and their estimated redshifts show good agreement with the scatter in the redshift differences being consistent with the estimated errors of the method. For the "robust" I -band detections the matching frequency approaches ~85% . We also use the available $(V-I)$ color to search for the red sequence of early-type galaxies observed in rich clusters over a broad range of redshifts. This is done by searching for a simultaneous overdensity in the three-dimensional color-projected distance space. We find significant overdensities for ~75% of the "robust" candidates with $z_I\lesssim0.6$. We find good agreement between the characteristic color associated to the detected "red sequence" and that predicted by passive evolution galaxy models for ellipticals at the redshift estimated by the matched-filter. The results presented in this paper show the usefulness of color data, even of two-band data, to both tentatively confirm cluster candidates and to select possible cluster members for spectroscopic observations. Based on the present results, we estimate that ~150 EIS clusters with $z_I\lesssim0.6$ are real, making it one of the largest samples of galaxy clusters in this redshift range currently available in the southern hemisphere.