Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interviewer as Instrument

This methodological study examines an original data collection model designed to incorporate human factors and enhance data richness in qualitative and evaluation research. Evidence supporting this model is drawn from in-depth youth and adult interviews in one of the largest policy/ programevaluations undertaken in the United States, the Drug, Alcohol, and Tobacco Education evaluation (77 districts, 118 schools). When applying the explicit observation technique (EOT)—the strategic and nonjudgmental disclosure of nonverbal human factor cues by the interviewer to the respondent during interview—data revealed the observation disclosure pattern. Here, respondents linked perceptions with policy or program implementation or effectiveness evidence. Although more research is needed, it is concluded that the EOT yields richer data when compared with traditional semistructured interviews and, thus, holds promise to enhance qualitative and evaluation research methods. Validity and reliability as well as qualitative and evaluation research considerations are discussed.
The Block in Immunoglobulin Class Switch Recombination Caused by Activation-Induced Cytidine Deaminase Deficiency Occurs Prior to the Generation of DNA Double Strand Breaks in Switch μ Region 1

Affinity maturation of the Ab repertoire in germinal centers leads to the selection of high affinity Abs with selected heavy chain constant regions. Ab maturation involves two modifications of the Ig genes, i.e., somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination. The mechanisms of these two processes are not fully understood. As shown by the somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination-deficient phenotype of activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID)-deficient patients (hyperIgM type 2 syndrome) and mice, both processes require the AID molecule. Somatic DNA modifications require DNA breaks, which, at least for class switch recombination, lead to dsDNA breaks. By using a ligation-mediated PCR, it was found that class switch recombination-induced dsDNA breaks in Sμ switch regions were less frequent in AID-deficient B cells than in AID-proficient B cells, thus indicating that AID acts upstream of DNA break induction.
INTERACTING PHENOTYPES AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS: I. DIRECT AND INDIRECT GENETIC EFFECTS OF SOCIAL INTERACTIONS

Interacting phenotypes are traits whose expression is affected by interactions with conspecifics. Commonly‐studied interacting phenotypes include aggression, courtship, and communication. More extreme examples of interacting phenotypes—traits that exist exclusively as a product of interactions—include social dominance, intraspecific competitive ability, and mating systems. We adopt a quantitative genetic approach to assess genetic influences on interacting phenotypes. We partition genetic and environmental effects so that traits in conspecifics that influence the expression of interacting phenotypes are a component of the environment. When the trait having the effect is heritable, the environmental influence arising from the interaction has a genetic basis and can be incorporated as an indirect genetic effect. However, because it has a genetic basis, this environmental component can evolve. Therefore, to consider the evolution of interacting phenotypes we simultaneously consider changes in the direct genetic contributions to a trait (as a standard quantitative genetic approach would evaluate) as well as changes in the environmental (indirect genetic) contribution to the phenotype. We then explore the ramifications of this model of inheritance on the evolution of interacting phenotypes. The relative rate of evolution in interacting phenotypes can be quite different from that predicted by a standard quantitative genetic analysis. Phenotypic evolution is greatly enhanced or inhibited depending on the nature of the direct and indirect genetic effects. Further, unlike most models of phenotypic evolution, a lack of variation in direct genetic effects does not preclude evolution if there is genetic variance in the indirect genetic contributions. The available empirical evidence regarding the evolution of behavior expressed in interactions, although limited, supports the predictions of our model.
In vivo Labeling of Constellations of Functionally Identified Neurons for Targeted in vitro Recordings

Relating the functional properties of neurons in an intact organism with their cellular and synaptic characteristics is necessary for a mechanistic understanding of brain function. However, while the functional properties of cortical neurons (e.g., tuning to sensory stimuli) are necessarily determined in vivo, detailed cellular and synaptic analysis relies on in vitro techniques. Here we describe an approach that combines in vivo calcium imaging (for functional characterization) with photo-activation of fluorescent proteins (for neuron labeling), thereby allowing targeted in vitro recording of multiple neurons with known functional properties. We expressed photo-activatable GFP rendered non-diffusible through fusion with a histone protein (H2B–PAGFP) in the mouse visual cortex to rapidly photo-label constellations of neurons in vivo at cellular and sub-cellular resolution using two-photon excitation. This photo-labeling method was compatible with two-photon calcium imaging of neuronal responses to visual stimuli, allowing us to label constellations of neurons with specific functional properties. Photo-labeled neurons were easily identified in vitro in acute brain slices and could be targeted for whole-cell recording. We also demonstrate that in vitro and in vivo image stacks of the same photo-labeled neurons could be registered to one another, allowing the exact in vivo response properties of individual neurons recorded in vitro to be known. The ability to perform in vitro recordings from neurons with known functional properties opens up exciting new possibilities for dissecting the cellular, synaptic, and circuit mechanisms that underlie neuronal function in vivo.
LITMUS^RT : A Testbed for Empirically Comparing Real-Time Multiprocessor Schedulers

We present a real-time, Linux-based testbed called LITMUS, which we have developed for empirically evaluating multiprocessor real-time scheduling algorithms. We also present the results from such an evaluation, in which partitioned earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheduling, preemptive and nonpreemptive global EDF scheduling, and two variants of the global PD2 Pfair algorithm were considered. The tested algorithms were compared based on both raw performance and schedulability (with real overheads considered) assuming either hard- or soft-real-time constraints. To our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt by anyone to compare partitioned and global real-time scheduling approaches using empirical data
The interplay between consumer self-view, cognitive style, and creative visual metaphors in print advertising

Abstract This paper examines the use of an advertising rhetoric technique – visual metaphor, and its persuasion effects in light of consumers’ cultural and individual dispositional characteristics when processing visually relational information. Of particular interest are the culturally driven self-views and individuals’ cognitive thinking styles. An experimental study involving visual metaphor manipulations in the context of print advertising was conducted. Results showed that, visual metaphor techniques significantly enhanced the persuasion outcomes through consumers’ evaluation of the advertising message and the brand. Both consumers’ self-construal orientation and their analytic-holistic processing style, moderate the effects of visual metaphors in print ads for low-involvement products, but not for high-involvement products. Implications for academics and practitioners, as well as future research directions suggested through the current experiment, are discussed.
Parental Divorce and Attitudes and Feelings toward Marriage and Divorce in Emerging Adulthood: New Insights from a Multiway-Frequency Analysis

Experiencing parental divorce can exert long-term consequences on children’s attitudes toward marriage and divorce. Participants’ opinions on marriage and divorce were qualitatively coded and two themes selected based on Willoughby’s theoretical framework. Multiway frequency analyses (MFA) were used to investigate associations between empirically based factors (derived from previous empirical studies) and participants’ endorsement of the two themes. Four hundred and forty six participants between 18 and 25 years-old, including 217 participants from divorced households, were interviewed. Young adults’ optimism toward marital relationships was related to more proximal factors and a lesser number of factors than young adults’ positive attitude toward divorce. Religious affiliation and parental conflict stood out as important factors. Recommendations are offered for future research.
Explaining the substantial inter-domain and over-time correlations in student achievement: the importance of stable student attributes

ABSTRACT Multi-domain and longitudinal studies of student achievement routinely find moderate to strong correlations across achievement domains and even stronger within-domain correlations over time. The purpose of this study is to examine the sources of these patterns analysing student achievement in 5 domains across Years 3, 5 and 7. The analysis is of longitudinal population data of over 22,000 students and utilizes fixed-effects models to incorporate stable general and domain-specific latent factors. These latent factors correspond to a general cognitive-ability-like factor and specific aptitudes in particular, or types of, subject areas. The preferred model incorporates both general and domain-specific latent factors with stronger effects for the general factor, although the domain-specific factors are particularly strong for spelling and numeracy. When taking into account general and domain-specific latent factors, the effects of student’s socioeconomic status (SES) and school SES are trivial.
Combining Text- and Link-based Retrieval Methods for Web IR

The characteristics of Web search environment, namely the document characteristics and the searcher behavior on the Web, confound the problems of Information Retrieval (IR). The massive, heterogeneous, dynamic, and distributed Web document collection as well as the unpredictable and less than ideal querying behavior of a typical Web searcher exacerbate conventional IR problems and diminish the effectiveness of retrieval approaches proven in the laboratory conditions of traditional IR. At the same time, the Web is rich with various sources of information that go beyond the contents of documents, such as document characteristics, hyperlinks, Web directories (e.g. Yahoo), and user statistics. Fusion IR studies have repeatedly shown that combining multiple sources of evidence can improve retrieval performance. Furthermore, the nature of the Web search environment is such that retrieval approaches based on single sources of evidence suffer from weaknesses that can hurt the retrieval performance in certain situations. For example, content-based IR approaches have difficulty dealing with the diversity in vocabulary and quality of web documents, while link-based approaches can suffer from incomplete or noisy link topology. The inadequacies of singular Web IR approaches coupled with the fusion hypothesis (i.e. “fusion is good for IR”) make a strong argument for combining multiple sources of evidence as a potentially advantageous retrieval strategy for Web IR. Among the various source of evidence on the Web, we focused our TREC-10 efforts on leveraging document text and hyperlinks, and examined the effects of combining result sets as well as those of various evidence source parameters.
Marrying Content and Process in Clinical Method Teaching: Enhancing the Calgary–Cambridge Guides

Communication skills training is now internationally accepted as an essential component of medical education. However, learners and teachers in communication skills programs continue to experience problems integrating communication with other clinical skills, ensuring that clinical faculty support and teach communication beyond the formal communication course, extending communication training coherently into clerkship and residency, and applying communication skills in medical practice at a professional level of competence. One factor contributing to these problems is that learners confront two apparently conflicting models of the medical interview: a communication model describing the process of the interview and the “traditional medical history” describing the content of the interview. The resulting confusion exacerbates the above dilemmas and interferes with learners using communication skills training to advantage in real-life practice. The authors propose a comprehensive clinical method that explicitly integrates traditional clinical method with effective communication skills. To implement this more comprehensive approach, they have modified their own Calgary–Cambridge guides to the medical interview by developing three diagrams that visually and conceptually improve the way communication skills teaching is introduced and that place communication process skills within a comprehensive clinical method; devising a content guide for medical interviewing that is more closely aligned with the structure and process skills used in communication skills training; and incorporating patient-centered medicine into both process and content aspects of the medical interview. These enhancements help resolve ongoing difficulties associated with both teaching communication skills and applying them effectively in medical practice.
Interleukin-1 and acute brain injury

Inflammation is the key host-defense response to infection and injury, yet also a major contributor to a diverse range of diseases, both peripheral and central in origin. Brain injury as a result of stroke or trauma is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide, yet there are no effective treatments, resulting in enormous social and economic costs. Increasing evidence, both preclinical and clinical, highlights inflammation as an important factor in stroke, both in determining outcome and as a contributor to risk. A number of inflammatory mediators have been proposed as key targets for intervention to reduce the burden of stroke, several reaching clinical trial, but as yet yielding no success. Many factors could explain these failures, including the lack of robust preclinical evidence and poorly designed clinical trials, in addition to the complex nature of the clinical condition. Lack of consideration in preclinical studies of associated co-morbidities prevalent in the clinical stroke population is now seen as an important omission in previous work. These co-morbidities (atherosclerosis, hypertension, diabetes, infection) have a strong inflammatory component, supporting the need for greater understanding of how inflammation contributes to acute brain injury. Interleukin (IL)-1 is the prototypical pro-inflammatory cytokine, first identified many years ago as the endogenous pyrogen. Research over the last 20 years or so reveals that IL-1 is an important mediator of neuronal injury and blocking the actions of IL-1 is beneficial in a number of experimental models of brain damage. Mechanisms underlying the actions of IL-1 in brain injury remain unclear, though increasing evidence indicates the cerebrovasculature as a key target. Recent literature supporting this and other aspects of how IL-1 and systemic inflammation in general contribute to acute brain injury are discussed in this review.
Traffic scene recognition based on deep CNN and VLAD spatial pyramids

Traffic scene recognition is an important and challenging issue in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Recently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have achieved great success in many applications, including scene classification. The remarkable representational learning capability of CNN remains to be further explored for solving real-world problems. Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) encoding has also proved to be a powerful method in catching global contextual information. In this paper, we attempted to solve the traffic scene recognition problem by combining the features representational capabilities of CNN with the VLAD encoding scheme. More specifically, the CNN features of image patches generated by a region proposal algorithm are encoded by applying VLAD, which subsequently represent an image in a compact representation. To catch the spatial information, spatial pyramids are exploited to encode CNN features. We experimented with a dataset of 10 categories of traffic scenes, with satisfactory categorization performances.
Gene Targeting in NOD Mouse Embryos Using Zinc-Finger Nucleases

Studies in NOD mice have provided important insight into the genetics and pathogenesis of type 1 diabetes (T1D). Our goal was to further explore novel methods of genetic manipulation in this mouse model. We tested the feasibility of using zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs) to knock out a gene directly in a pure NOD background, bypassing the need of embryonic stem cells. We report here the successful application of ZFN pairs to specifically and efficiently knock out Tnfrsf9 (encoding CD137/4–1BB) directly in the NOD mouse by embryo microinjection. Histology and T1D incidence studies indicated that CD137 was dispensable for the development of insulitis but played a role to promote progression to overt diabetes in NOD mice. We also demonstrated that CD137-deficient T-cells were less diabetogenic than their wild-type counterpart when adoptively transferred into NOD.Rag1−/− recipients, even when CD25+ cells were predepleted. In vitro assays suggested that CD137 deficiency had a limited effect on the suppressive function of CD4+CD25+ regulatory T-cells (Tregs). Therefore, CD137 deficiency predominately affected effector T-cells rather than Tregs. Our study demonstrates the ability to generate gene-targeted knockouts in a pure NOD background by using ZFNs without potential confounding factors introduced by contaminating genetic materials obtained from other strains.
Case Study : UML to CSP Transformation

The aim of this case study is to introduce a transformation from activity diagrams [1] to Communicating Sequential Processes [2]. As the de-facto standard for software design, the UML [1] activity diagram is used to describe low level behaviour of software components or to represent workflow aspect of business processes. In both cases, the verification of the behaviour can be important. The purpose of verification can run from a simple liveness or termination check to the verification of refinement between redesigned model instances. To verify any aspect of behaviour, the activity diagrams have to be provided with a formal semantics. We are using CSP as a semantic domain, defining the mapping from activity diagram to CSP processes by means of graph transformation. The paper is organised as follows. In Section 2 we introduce the metamodels used for the source and target of the transformation. The details of the transformation method is presented in Section 3. In Section 4 the possible challanges are introduces for the tool environment. And finally in Section 5 an example transformation is presented.
Generating Vectors for the Lattice Structures of Tubular and Conical Viral Capsids

Abstract Retrovirus capsid is a fullerene-like lattice consisting of capsid protein hexamers and pentamers. Mathematical models for the lattice structure help understand the underlying biological mechanisms in the formation of viral capsids. It is known that viral capsids could be categorized into three major types: icosahedron, tube, and cone. While the model for icosahedral capsids is established and well-received, models for tubular and conical capsids need further investigation. This paper proposes new models for the tubular and conical capsids based on an extension of the Capser-Klug quasi-equivalence theory. In particular, two and three generating vectors are used to characterize respectively the lattice structures of tubular and conical capsids. Comparison with published HIV-1 data demonstrates a good agreement of our modeling results with experimental data.
Frequency-Dependent Attenuation of Porous, Fluid-Filled Graphite

With the precise digital processing of ultrasonic signals through a thin graphite sample, amplitude and phase spectra are obtained and shown to be a useful tool in the evaluation of lossy , fluidfilled porous materials. Spectra of porous graphite, obtained from a thinned sample, agree with the findings of our previous work and further extend the useful data range into the high attenuation domain, doubling the useable bandwidth from 6MHz to 12 MHz. We can now measure the attenuation coefficient down to 550 dB/cm before the signal disappears into an "aperiodic" noise region at high frequency. This enhanced data exhibits a power law representation for cr,which can be understood as a type of phase scattering which fits the microstructure. Its elastic behavior is manifested in the spectroscopic data obtained.
Bridging Gaps: An application of feature warping to online signature verification

The use of (online) signatures for the purpose of verifying a subject's identity is highly accepted within society and perceived as a noninvasive and nonthreatening biometric characteristic by most users. However, signature biometrics is typically characterized by a high intra-class variability, being influenced by several physical and emotional conditions, i.e. identity verification based on online signature biometrics represents an extremely challenging task. Online signature verification systems mainly utilize time-discrete signal processing techniques for biometric signature authorship verification. The vast majority of state-of-the-art approaches to online signature verification construct subject-specific probabilistic models during feature extraction, e.g. Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). Focusing on the construction of these models feature normalization turns out to be vital in order to achieve robustness against noise. In this work we propose the very first application of a feature normalization technique, referred to as Feature Warping (FW), which is well-established within the speaker recognition community, to a GMM-based online signature verification system. Experimental evaluations, which are carried out on the MCYT signature corpus, demonstrate that the presented adaptation of FW significantly improves the biometric performance of the underlying online signature verification system, achieving relative gains of approximately 47% in terms of equal error rates.
Ecological parameters of habitat of Diptera Chironomidae in Southern Ivory Coast, West Africa

Une etude a ete menee dans 5 fermes piscicoles du sud de la Cote d’Ivoire en vue de contribuer a la connaissance des Chironomidae. L’echantillonnage a ete effectue tous les mois de Decembre 2007 a Novembre 2008. Dans chaque ferme, 3 etangs ont ete choisi au hasard. Dans chaque etang, 6 echantillons de sediment ont ete preleves a l’aide d’une benne Van Veen. Les variables environnementales telles que la transparence, temperature, le pH, l’oxygene dissouset la conductivite ont ete mesurees in situ. Les six echantillons de sediment ont ete melanges pour constituer un seul echantillon de chaque etang. Au total 11 taxons appartenant a 3 sous-familles (Chironominae, Orthocladiinae and Tanypodinae) ont ete identifiees. La faune Chironomidienne est quantitativement et qualitativement dominee par les Chironominae. Nilodorum fractilobus, Chironomus imicola, Stictochironomus sp. et Tanypus fuscus sont les taxons les plus abondants. Les valeurs de l’indice de diversite de Shannon-Wiener et de l’equitabilite ont ete enregistrees a la station d’Anyama II. Une analyse canonique a ete effectuee pour montrer l’influence des parametres environnementaux sur la distribution des taxons. Les Chironomidae peuvent etre utilises en tant que potentiel instrument d’une prochaine etude ecologique dans les ecosystemes aquatiques ivoiriens.