Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hardware acceleration in the IBM PowerEN processor: architecture and performance

Computation at the edge of a datacenter has unique characteristics; it deals with streaming data from multiple sources, often requiring repeated application of several standard algorithmic kernels. The demand for high data rates and power efficiency points toward hardware acceleration of key functions. These accelerators must be tightly integrated with general purpose computation to keep invocation overhead and latency low. The accelerators must be easy for software to use, and the system must be flexible enough to support evolving networking standards.
Advances in learning analytics and educational data mining

The growing interest in recent years towards Learning An- alytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) has enabled novel ap- proaches and advancements in educational settings. The wide variety of research and practice in this context has enforced important possibilities and applications from adaptation and personalization of Technology En- hanced Learning (TEL) systems to improvement of instructional design and pedagogy choices based on students needs. LA and EDM play an im- portant role in enhancing learning processes by oering innovative methods of development and integration of more personalized, adaptive, and inter- active educational environments. This has motivated the organization of the ESANN 2015 Special Session in Advances in Learning Analytics and Educational Data Mining. Here, a review of research and practice in LA and EDM is presented accompanied by the most central methods, bene- ts, and challenges of the eld. Additionally, this paper covers a review of novel contributions into the Special Session.
Reducing Direct and Structural Violence: The Human Needs Theory

Human needs theory offers insights into a range of peacebuilding processes that are involved in the reduction of both direct and structural violence. Human needs theory helps explain why needs for security and identity are often prepotent in interstate wars and in destructive identity conflicts. Because these needs are built into the organism, 1 challenge for peace psychologists is to invent peaceful means for people to satisfy their security and identity needs. In contrast to direct violence, structural violence occurs when economic and political structures systematically deprive need satisfaction for certain segments of society. When economic deprivation occurs, the need for well-being is not satisfied, resulting in deficits in human growth and development. Politically, structural violence engenders the systematic deprivation of the need for self-determination. Six propositions on direct and structural violence are advanced, including the proposition that a just and sustainable peace will require, at a .
Another Hierarchical Topic Model

We describe a hierarchical topic model. We assume that there are various levels of specificity in a document collection. For example, a collection of mailing list posts might be organized according to sentence, paragraph, post and thread. We describe a model that captures the structure at each level of the hierarchy. We use a trace norm penalty on a matrix composed of natural parameters for the multinomial model. 1 The Basic Model We consider a probabilitistic model of text. We assume that a set of documents is generated in two stages. First, a set of document models are generated according to a prior model. Then, words for each document are generated according to that document’s model. We assume that a document’s term frequencies are generated independently of other documents’, when conditioning on the document’s model. We use a trace norm to penalize document models’ divergence from the prior model, effectively placing a Gaussian prior on the singular vectors of the matrix composed of stacked document model parameter vectors. We use the rest of this section to describe the model in detail. Let φ be the multinomial natural parameter vector for the “prior” model; φ represents somewhat of a “center” from which the individual document models emanate. Each document has its own multinomial model, with a natural parameter vector, θi. We define the prior on the document models as a characterization of where the document models are located with respect to the prior
Efficacy of Rivastigmine in Alzheimer’s Disease Patients with Rapid Disease Progression: Results of a Meta-Analysis

Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients experiencing more rapid symptom progression are likely to have a poorer prognosis than those experiencing slow symptom progression. In a recent retrospective analysis, treatment effects of rivastigmine were more pronounced in AD patients with rapid cognitive decline than in those with slow cognitive decline. This warranted further investigation. Methods: Rapidly and slowly progressing patients were identified by rates of cognitive decline [≧4 points and <4 points, respectively, on the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale – cognitive subscale (ADAS-cog)] during 26 weeks of placebo treatment in four randomized controlled trials (weeks 0–26). This meta-analysis evaluated rates of cognitive decline in both subgroups during subsequent open-label rivastigmine 26-week extension studies (weeks 26–52). A longitudinal mixed effects model compared cognitive decline in rapidly and slowly progressing patients, including correction for possible regression to the mean. Results: 180 (75%) rapidly and 337 (78%) slowly progressing patients provided ADAS-cog data after 26 weeks of open-label rivastigmine treatment. Improvements in cognitive symptoms were observed during the first 12 weeks, which were more pronounced in patients with rapid progression than in those with slow progression. Rapidly progressing patients experienced significantly greater cognitive benefits than slowly progressing patients (p = 0.029), who experienced a modest decline in cognitive symptoms at the end of the study. Comment: Patients experiencing rapid symptom progression may receive greater benefit from rivastigmine than those with slow progression. In this study, cholinesterase inhibition appeared to be of particular utility in the management of AD patients whose symptoms were rapidly worsening.
Interaction between seed dormancy-release mechanism, environment and seed bank strategy for a widely distributed perennial legume, Parkinsonia aculeata (Caesalpinaceae).

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Parkinsonia aculeata (Caesalpinaceae) is a perennial legume with seeds that have hard-seeded (physical) dormancy and are potentially very long-lived. Seed dormancy is a characteristic that can both help maximize the probability of seedling establishment and spread the risk of recruitment failure across years (bet-hedging). In this study, dormancy-release patterns are described across the diverse environments in which this species occurs in order to test whether wet heat (incubation under wet, warm-to-hot, conditions) alone can explain those patterns, and in order to determine the likely ecological role of physical dormancy across this species distribution. METHODS A seed burial trial was conducted across the full environmental distribution of P. aculeata in Australia (arid to wet-dry tropics, uplands to wetlands, soil surface to 10 cm deep). KEY RESULTS Wet heat explained the pattern of dormancy release across all environments. Most seeds stored in the laboratory remained dormant throughout the trial (at least 84 %). Dormancy release was quickest for seeds buried during the wet season at relatively high rainfall, upland sites (only 3 % of seeds remained dormant after 35 d). The longest-lived seeds were in wetlands (9 % remained dormant after almost 4 years) and on the soil surface (57 % after 2 years). There was no consistent correlation between increased aridity and rate of dormancy release. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that physical dormancy in P. aculeata is a mechanism for maximizing seedling establishment rather than a bet-hedging strategy. However, seed persistence can occur in environmental refuges where dormancy-release cues are weak and conditions for germination and establishment are poor (e.g. under dense vegetation or in more arid micro-environments) or unsuitable (e.g. when seeds are inundated or on the soil surface). Risks of recruitment failure in suboptimal environments could therefore be reduced by inter-year fluctuations in microclimate or seed movement.
The Evaluation of Oxidative Stress in the Serum and Tissue Specimens of Patients With Chronic Otitis Media

Objectives To underline the effect of oxidative stress in chronic otitis media with and without cholesteatoma and to compare the oxidative stress values in the serum and tissue specimens in these two forms. Methods The study included a total of 75 individuals, 35 cases with chronic otitis media (COM; 16 females and 19 males) and a healthy control group of 40 cases (20 females and 20 males). The COM patient group was comprised of 18 patients with cholesteatoma and 17 patients without cholesteatoma. All patients underwent mastoidectomy. Serum specimens were taken prior to surgery and diseased tissue specimens from the ear were obtained during surgery from all patients. Only serum specimens were taken from the healthy control cases. The malondialdehyde (MDA), superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (GHPx) were measured in the serum and tissue samples of the patient group and in the serum specimens of the control group. Results The age ranged from 14 to 48 years in the patient group (mean age, 20.4±12.2 years) and from 19 to 40 years in the control group (mean age, 26.4±4.64 years). When the serum values of all COM patients were compared with those of the control group, in the patient group MDA, which reflects lipid peroxidation, was found to be significantly higher (P<0.01) whereas the antioxidant enzymes SOD, CAT, and GHPx were found to be significantly lower (P<0.01). When the serum and tissue MDA, SOD, CAT, and GHPx values in patients with and without cholesteatoma were compared, no significant difference was found these parameters (P>0.01). Conclusion Although oxidative stress plays a role in the pathogenesis of COM with or without cholesteatoma, it may not reflect the severity of the disease. In patients with COM, the evaluation of only serum oxidative stress values without tissue evaluation may be sufficient for assessing oxidative stress.
Proteome Analysis of Arabidopsis Leaf Peroxisomes Reveals Novel Targeting Peptides, Metabolic Pathways, and Defense Mechanisms[W]

We have established a protocol for the isolation of highly purified peroxisomes from mature Arabidopsis thaliana leaves and analyzed the proteome by complementary gel-based and gel-free approaches. Seventy-eight nonredundant proteins were identified, of which 42 novel proteins had previously not been associated with plant peroxisomes. Seventeen novel proteins carried predicted peroxisomal targeting signals (PTS) type 1 or type 2; 11 proteins contained PTS-related peptides. Peroxisome targeting was supported for many novel proteins by in silico analyses and confirmed for 11 representative full-length fusion proteins by fluorescence microscopy. The targeting function of predicted and unpredicted signals was investigated and SSL>, SSI>, and ASL> were established as novel functional PTS1 peptides. In contrast with the generally accepted confinement of PTS2 peptides to the N-terminal domain, the bifunctional transthyretin-like protein was demonstrated to carry internally a functional PTS2. The novel enzymes include numerous enoyl-CoA hydratases, short-chain dehydrogenases, and several enzymes involved in NADP and glutathione metabolism. Seven proteins, including β-glucosidases and myrosinases, support the currently emerging evidence for an important role of leaf peroxisomes in defense against pathogens and herbivores. The data provide new insights into the biology of plant peroxisomes and improve the prediction accuracy of peroxisome-targeted proteins from genome sequences.
Penile Myointimoma in Children and Adolescents: A Clinicopathologic Study of 5 Cases Supporting a Distinct Entity

Penile myointimoma is a rare benign myointimal proliferation occurring exclusively within the corpus spongiosum of the glans penis and is most commonly described in adult patients. To date, there is only one reported series of 10 penile myointimomas plus one case report, representing a total of 8 adults and 3 children/adolescents. We report 5 penile myointimomas occurring in 5 patients less than 18 years of age (age range 4 to 15 y). All patients presented with a mass lesion on the glans penis ranging in size from 0.4 to 1.8 cm. All 5 lesions had the classic morphologic appearance: myointimal proliferation of the preexisting vascular spaces of the corpus spongiosum, creating a multinodular/plexiform architecture. Immunohistochemically, all stained cases showed strong cytoplasmic immunoreactivity for smooth muscle actin in the lesional cells and a collarette of native smooth muscle highlighted by desmin. None of the lesions appeared completely excised, but all 5 patients were clinically free of disease at last clinical follow-up (2 to 45 mo). In summary, we report only the second series of this distinctive, relatively rare myointimal proliferation within the corpus spongiosum of the glans penis, expand the number of published cases occurring in the pediatric/adolescent population, and confirm the benign clinical course after a marginal or incomplete excision.
Subjectivity, social change and the reform problematic

The theme of ‘new directions for research in relation to social justice and teacher education’ raises questions about not only the broad economic and cultural shifts which now frame education (what types of exclusions and unfairnesses are being created? ), and not only about the changing construction of inequalities in education in the reshaped education institutions (what is social justice? ). It also raises the very difficult issue of how older research and reform agendas meet, or fail to meet, the subjectivity of students today; and the problem of how adequately the (human) subject, subject formation and the historical specificity of human subjects is now considered in the reform agendas. This paper will illustrate some of these questions by drawing on a seven-year longitudinal, qualitative study, now nearing completion, of students going through school. It will argue for the continued utility of this form of more traditional academic research, in addition to the types of action-directed and ‘partnership’ research that are commonly seen as the task of ‘teacher education’ now. From this study of the current generation of students at school, the paper will point to some continuities and some shifts regarding how winners and losers are being created through schooling today. It will also revisit the old issue for researchers and reformers in education, about who is speaking to whom and with what effects.
Novel and Recurring Class Detection using Ensemble of Classiers: A Class-based Approach

Over the recent years, concept-evolution has received a lot of attention to the research community because of its importance in the context of mining data streams. Mining data stream has become a crucial task due to its wide range of applications such as network intrusion detection, credit card fraud identification, identifying trends in the social networks etc. Concept-evolution means introduction of novel class in the data stream. Many recent works address this phenomenon. In addition, a class may appear in the stream, disappears for a while and then reemerges. This scenario is known as recurring classes and also remained unaddressed in most of the cases. As a result, generally where a novel class detection system is present, any recurring class is falsely detected as novel class. This results in unnecessary waste of human and computational resources. In this paper, we have investigated the idea of a class-based ensemble of classification model addressing the issues of recurring and novel class in the presence of concept drift. Our approach has shown impressive performance compared to the state-of-art methods in the literature.
Rhetoric and Rational Enterprises

Commentary: It is easier to articulate the issues addressed in this piece today than it was when Written Communication first published it in 1985; we now have the familiar idioms of postmodernism, cultural studies, and reception theory to help illuminate the paradigm that we were arguing governs everyday communication behavior in organizations. In particular, while terms such as contingency, intersubjectivity, shared understandings, social construction of meaning, and discourse communities were familiar enough at the time in the fields of philosophy and critical theory, they had not yet influenced textbooks in organizational communication. Instead, these textbooks were dominated by the human resource and social systems models of the organization at work and by prescriptive approaches to writing. We drew on the work of contemporary theorists (Polanyi, Popper, Kuhn, Toulmin, Perelman, and others) to support the notion that, like scientific communities, organizational communities are “rational enterprises” that develop rules and protocols for the admission and analysis of evidence—criteria which individual practitioners internalize unevenly, imperfectly, and tacitly, and which evolve over time in response to new situations, but which govern the construction of meaning. Through the analysis of a particular case of strategic communication (and one that was deliberately ordinary, not exceptional), we were interested in demonstrating how important the larger context is in shaping communication, how meaning is negotiated by writer and audience, how “good writing” depends less on transmitting a “message” or even adapting a specific format than on tapping (or reenvisioning) shared but tacit recognitions about what is important in the organizational context. Looking back, we are gratified that these observations now seem commonplace, and also that we addressed them in humanistic, cognitive, and philosophical terms to argue the centrality—and complexity—of consensus making. One of the closing sentences still seems like an appropriate call to continue such an inquiry: “In a world marked by divergent values, galloping change, and the need for ethical approaches to problem solving, a rhetoric that both acknowledges the human complexity of decision making and suggests a practical rationale for producing consensus is needed. ”
Expression of neuromodulin (GAP‐43) and its regulation by basic fibroblast growth factor during the differentiation of O‐2A progenitor cells

In a recent work we have shown that neuromodulin (Nm, also known as GAP‐43), a protein kinase C substrate, previously believed to be expressed exclusively in neurons, is also present in glial cells. Here we investigated the expression of Nm and its mRNA in O‐2A glial progenitor cells (common precursor for oligodendrocytes and type‐2 astrocytes) during their development in secondary culture and under the influence of basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF). The different stages of oligodendrocyte development were characterized by the expression of surface markers: A2B5, which identifies O‐2A glial precursor cells, and O4 and galactocerebroside (GC), which characterize later developmental stages. The number of cells expressing Nm (about 90% at culture initiation) decreased rapidly during the first 2 days and reached a plateau at around 30–40%. The level of Nm mRNA followed a similar kinetic. Immunocytochemistry demonstrated that at 4 days in vitro about 25–30% cells were A2B5,+, 30–40% Nm+, a high percentage (60–70%)O4 +, and 35–40% GC+. Nearly all of the morphologically immature A2B5+ cells expressed also the Nm antigen, very few of the O4+ cells still expressed Nm and almost no cells expressed both GC and Nm. Most O4+ cells developed a typical oligodendrocyte morphology and were essentially GC+. This study also showed that in the presence of serum, the A2B5+ Nm and 04+ Nm+ (GC−)xs cells retained their bipotentiality and differentiated into GFAP+ (glial fibrillary acidic protein) Nm+ type‐2 astrocytes.
A general theory of crime.

Preface Part I. Crime: 1. Classical theory and the idea of crime 2. The nature of crime Part II. Criminality: 3. Biological positivism 4. Psychological, economic, and sociological positivism 5. The nature of criminality: low self-control Part II. Applications of the Theory: 6. Criminal events and individual propensities: age, gender, and race 7. The social consequences of low self-control 8. Culture and crime 9. White-collar crime 10. Organization and crime Part IV. Research and Policy: 11. Research design and measurement 12. Implications for public policy Index.
Clutched Elastic Actuators

This paper identifies the class of actuators called clutched elastic actuators (CEAs). CEAs use clutches to control the energy flow into springs. CEAs in exoskeletons, prostheses, legged robots, and robotic arms have shown the ability to reduce the energy consumption and motor requirements, such as peak torque and peak power. Because of those abilities, they are increasingly used in robotics. In this paper, we categorize existing CEA designs, identify trends in those designs, and provide a method to analyze their functionality. Based on a literature survey, current CEA designs are placed in nine categories, depending on their morphology. The main trend is that CEA designs are becoming more complex, meaning that the number of clutches and springs increases. We show with the introduced mathematical analysis that the functionality can be analyzed with a constraint matrix, a stiffness matrix, and multiplication of a clutch-dependent diagonal matrix with an oriented incidence matrix. This method eases the analysis of the functionality of CEAs. Furthermore, it can lead to new CEA designs in which the number of resulting stiffnesses grows exponentially with the number of springs and clutches.
HER-2 overexpression/amplification in Barrett’s oesophagus predicts early transition from dysplasia to adenocarcinoma: a clinico-pathologic study

Barrett’s oesophagus (BO) is the primary precursor lesion for oesophageal adenocarcinoma (ADC). The natural history of metaplasia‐dysplasia‐carcinoma sequence remains largely unknown. HER2/neu oncogene results overexpressed/amplified in preneoplastic lesions and in ADC of the oesophagus and it has been associated with poor prognosis. Our aim was to evaluate the role of HER2 overexpression/amplification in predicting the conversion from precursor lesions to ADC. We retrospectively evaluated by univariate analysis of single variables clinical records and histological specimens of 21 patients with a confirmed diagnosis of BO and/or oesophageal dysplasia. Clinical variables included age, gender, alcohol and smoking intake, presence of symptoms (pyrosis, disphagia) and endoscopic features (length). HER2 status was studied by immunohistochemistry and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) on paraffin‐embedded tissue. The end‐points were the occurrence of progression and the time‐to‐progression (TTP) from the initial histologic lesion to the worst pathological pattern. Median age at diagnosis was 63 years (range 37–84). BO median length was 4.5 cm. Progression occurred in 11 of 21 patients and median TTP was 24 months. HER2 was overexpressed/amplified in 8 of 21 (38%) patients. HER2 overexpression/ amplification and the presence of dysplasia were statistically associated with progression (P= 0.038). This study provides evidence for a possible role of HER2 in the transition from dysplasia to ADC of the oesophagus. This fact could help in identifying patients at high risk of malignant transformation.