Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Neuroticism and self-esteem as indices of the vulnerability to major depression in women

Background. Neuroticism and self-esteem, two commonly used personality constructs, are thought to reflect a person's underlying vulnerability to major depression. The relative strength of these predictors is not known. Method. Information was gathered on 2163 individual women from an epidemiological sample of female–female twin pairs. Neuroticism was assessed by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and global self-esteem by the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. Major depression (DSM-III-R criteria) and stressful life events were also assessed. The personality constructs were studied in relation to major depression by logistic regression and structural equation modelling. Results. Both cross-sectionally and prospectively, examined individually, neuroticism was a stronger predictor of risk for major depression than was self-esteem. When examined together, the predictive power of neuroticism remained substantial, while that of self-esteem largely disappeared. The same pattern of findings was obtained when a subset of subjects who had recently experienced stressful life events was analysed. By trivariate twin modelling, we found that the covariation of self-esteem, neuroticism and major depression was due largely to genetic factors. When self-esteem was the ‘upstream’ variable, a substantial genetic correlation remained between neuroticism and major depression. By contrast, when neuroticism was the ‘upstream’ variable, the genetic correlation between self-esteem and major depression disappeared. Conclusions. The personality construct of neuroticism is a substantially better index of a woman's underlying vulnerability to major depression than is self-esteem. These findings suggest that overall emotionality or emotional reactivity to the environment reflects risk for depression better than does global self-concept.
A model-based approach to finding substitute tools in 3D vision data

A robot can feasibly be given knowledge of a set of tools for manipulation activities (e.g. hammer, knife, spatula). If the robot then operates outside a closed environment it is likely to face situations where the tool it knows is not available, but alternative unknown tools are present. We tackle the problem of finding the best substitute tool based solely on 3D vision data. Our approach has simple hand-coded models of known tools in terms of superquadrics and relationships among them. Our system attempts to fit these models to point clouds of unknown tools, producing a numeric value for how good a fit is. This value can be used to rate candidate substitutes. We explicitly control how closely each part of a tool must match our model, under direction from parameters of a target task. We allow bottom-up information from segmentation to dictate the sizes that should be considered for various parts of the tool. These ideas allow for a flexible matching so that tools may be superficially quite different, but similar in the way that matters. We evaluate our system's ratings relative to other approaches and relative to human performance in the same task. This is an approach to knowledge transfer, via a suitable representation and reasoning engine, and we discuss how this could be extended to transfer in planning.
Service Learning and the Preparation of English Teachers

In this article, service learning is explored as a pedagogical third space from which preservice teachers learn to teach the New English education. We argue that such a space has the potential to foster preservice English teachers’ understanding of their role and identity as future teachers and how this identity is always relative to the students they teach. Drawing from a study of 19 preservice English teachers’ experiences with service learning, we discuss three themes relevant to service learning and the preparation of English teachers: (1) service learning as a pedagogical third space for English teachers, (2) service learning as fostering the disruption of a teaching mythology, and (3) service learning as promoting a recognition of the New English education. Further, we propose that service learning can encourage prospective English teachers to complicate notions of teacher/student, official/unofficial language, singular authority/pluralistic power, and server/served.
The structure of prior knowledge

The phenomenon of prior knowledge is deep rooted in the rhetoric of education. There is much discourse within pedagogy about its value and pivotal role in the formulation of new learning. However teachers are not able to use prior knowledge effectively as they do not have a working sense of it, but are using it intuitively and colloquially. While researchers provide a multitude of definitions of prior knowledge, no one has examined its elemental structure in a way that provides a model for teachers to use and support learning. This deficit is surprising as prior knowledge is a universally accepted pedagogical notion. The aim of this thesis is to fill the deficit and establish a structure of prior knowledge. The research was situated within Year 1 primary mathematics classrooms following eight teachers across five schools over one academic year. Using naturalistic research methodology, the data were gathered through audio recordings of the interactions between teachers and children during mathematics lessons. These recordings were analysed using grounded theory and content analysis. The research explored and produced a partial model of prior knowledge emerging from the data which includes at least eight interconnected elements – abstraction, acculturation, cognition, context, individual motivation, metacognition, perception and social group. These can be seen as elements which can shape children’s memory – the central feature of the prior knowledge that they bring to each mathematical task. Children may manifest different degrees of these elements, and possibly of others which did not appear in these data, in different proportions and balances. Such a prior knowledge model, even though it remains partial, gives a deeper understanding to a common but widely misunderstood term. The implications of knowing and understanding more and in more depth about the structure of prior knowledge are potentially far-reaching for children, schools, teachers and curriculum development.
Subharmonic Oscillations Induced by Continuous Wave Electromagnetic Interference on a Microwave Phase-Locked Loop

This paper presents measurements, simulations, and a theoretical basis to support the observation of spurious peaks on the output spectrum of a microwave phase-locked loop (PLL) exposed to a continuous wave electromagnetic interference (EMI). It is shown that high-power EMI combined to nonlinear characteristics of the PLL may induce subharmonic oscillation phenomena, which provoke the appearance of spurious peaks on the output spectrum. Measurements show that in addition to their dependence on the EMI power and frequency, these spurious peaks depend also on the natural frequency of the PLL and on its stability. Transient circuit simulations of the PLL allowing the prediction of these spurious peaks are presented. Finally, a theoretical explanation based on an analysis of a second-order PLL is given.
Data Profiling with Metanome

Data profiling is the discipline of discovering metadata about given datasets. The metadata itself serve a variety of use cases, such as data integration, data cleansing, or query optimization. Due to the importance of data profiling in practice, many tools have emerged that support data scientists and IT professionals in this task. These tools provide good support for profiling statistics that are easy to compute, but they are usually lacking automatic and efficient discovery of complex statistics, such as inclusion dependencies, unique column combinations, or functional dependencies. We present Metanome, an extensible profiling platform that incorporates many state-of-the-art profiling algorithms. While Metanome is able to calculate simple profiling statistics in relational data, its focus lies on the automatic discovery of complex metadata. Metanome's goal is to provide novel profiling algorithms from research, perform comparative evaluations, and to support developers in building and testing new algorithms. In addition, Metanome is able to rank profiling results according to various metrics and to visualize the, at times, large metadata sets.
Curvature Based Corner Detector for Discrete, Noisy and Multi-Scale Contours

Estimating curvature on digital shapes is known to be a difficult problem even in high resolution images 10,19. Moreover the presence of noise contributes to the instability of the estimators and limits their use in many computer vision applications like corner detection. Several recent curvature estimators 16,13,15, which come from the discrete geometry community, can now process damaged data and integrate the amount of noise in their analysis. In this paper, we propose a comparative evaluation of these estimators, testing their accuracy, efficiency, and robustness with respect to several type of degradations. We further compare the best one with the visual curvature proposed by Liu et al.14, a recently published method from the computer vision community. We finally propose a novel corner detector, which is based on curvature estimation, and we provide a comprehensive set of experiments to compare it with many other classical corner detectors. Our study shows that this corner detector has most of the time a better behavior than the others, while requiring only one parameter to take into account the noise level. It is also promising for multi-scale shape description.
Stress enhancement concept on replacement gate technology with top-cut stress liner for nFETs

Electron mobility enhancement using a top-cut stress liner and the replacement gate process is demonstrated and the concept of stress localization is proposed, for the first time. Eliminating a dummy gate after tensile stress liner formation enhances lateral stress at the channel region and achieves good mobility improvement. A detailed analysis using stress and mobility calculation based on a band model is performed. It is found that this new mobility enhancement technology has potential advantages in the shorter gate length region in comparison with the conventional gate-first process.
The Dynamics of Domestic Violence

The 0. J. Simpson affair is only the latest in a series of events that have focused attention on domestic violence. Using data collected by Murray Strauss and his colleagues, Lawrence Sherman (1992) estimates that each year there are 18 million incidents of domestic violence fitting the criminal-justice classification of an assault and that police officers handle at least two million cases of violence involving a spouse or lover. Domestic-violence assault is more common than all other forms of violence combined. Recognizing that domestic violence is a social as well as a private issue, a number of police departments have participated in experiments designed to learn how they can best handle domestic-violence calls. In this paper, we use data from the experiment in Minneapolis to determine how police treatments in cases of domestic violence affect the couple's subsequent violence. We also examine how socioeconomic factors such as age and employment are related to domestic violence. These factors are considered in part because they may affect the police actions. Our model is a stochastic dynamic model that allows the effects of the police actions to vary over time. In brief, we find that arrest is more effective than advising or short-term separation but that the differential effect is transitory.
Chemical and Biological Entity Recognition System from Patent Documents

It is crucial to explore the chemical and biological space covered by patent documents. In order to recognize chemical and biological entities, a recognition system is developed on the basis of open-source machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) toolkits. The system processing pipeline consists of three major components: pre-processing (sentence detection, tokenization), recognition (conditional random field (CRF) based approach), and post-processing (rule-based approach). The paper introduces each part in detail. Finally, extensive experiments on annotated chemical patent corpus are conducted, and the balanced-F measure is 69.20% with 10-fold cross validation. The results indicate that the performance on patent documents is slightly lower than that of counterpart on paper and news corpus.
Beyond boredom and anxiety

Preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition. Acknowledgements to the First Edition. Enjoyment and Intrinsic Motivation. Rewards of Autotelic Activities. Structure of Autotelic Activities. A Theoretical Model for Enjoyment. Enjoying Games: Chess. Deep Play and the Flow Experience in Rock Climbing. Measuring the Flow Experience in Rock Dancing. Enjoying Work: Surgery. Flow Patterns in Everyday Life. Effects of Flow Deprivation. Politics of Enjoyment. Tests and Procedures Used in Microflow. Experiments. References. Index.
Adiposity, Biological Markers of Disease, and Insulin Resistance in Mexican American Adolescents, 2004-2005

Introduction Rates of obesity and overweight, which frequently lead to type 2 diabetes, have increased dramatically among US children during the past 30 years. We analyzed associations between insulin resistance and other markers of disease in a sample of Mexican American adolescents from a severely disadvantaged community on the Texas-Mexico border. Methods We analyzed results from 325 students from 1 high school in this descriptive study. We measured height, weight, waist circumference, blood pressure, blood glucose, and lipids; calculated body mass index; and estimated insulin resistance. Results Approximately 50% of our sample (mean age, 16 y) were overweight or obese, and more participants were obese than overweight. More than 40% had high waist circumference, and 66% had elevated high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. These characteristics were already present in the youngest participants (aged 12 y). Although only 1% of participants had elevated fasting blood glucose, 27% exhibited insulin resistance and most of these were also obese. Similarly, participants with high waist circumference were more likely to exhibit insulin resistance than those with normal waist circumference. Conclusion Participants in this sample had insulin resistance, a potent predictor of diabetes. Two markers, low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and high waist circumference, were strongly linked to insulin resistance; the surrogate for central adiposity, waist circumference, exhibited strong association. We identified high levels of obesity and markers for future disease in our sample. These findings emphasize the need to address insulin resistance at least as early as adolescence to prevent adverse economic, social, and health consequences.
Comparison and evaluation of retrospective intermodality brain image registration techniques.

PURPOSE The primary objective of this study is to perform a blinded evaluation of a group of retrospective image registration techniques using as a gold standard a prospective, marker-based registration method. To ensure blindedness, all retrospective registrations were performed by participants who had no knowledge of the gold standard results until after their results had been submitted. A secondary goal of the project is to evaluate the importance of correcting geometrical distortion in MR images by comparing the retrospective registration error in the rectified images, i.e., those that have had the distortion correction applied, with that of the same images before rectification. METHOD Image volumes of three modalities (CT, MR, and PET) were obtained from patients undergoing neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center on whom bone-implanted fiducial markers were mounted. These volumes had all traces of the markers removed and were provided via the Internet to project collaborators outside Vanderbilt, who then performed retrospective registrations on the volumes, calculating transformations from CT to MR and/ or from PET to MR. These investigators communicated their transformations again via the Internet to Vanderbilt, where the accuracy of each registration was evaluated. In this evaluation, the accuracy is measured at multiple volumes of interest (VOIs), i.e., areas in the brain that would commonly be areas of neurological interest. A VOI is defined in the MR image and its centroid c is determined. Then, the prospective registration is used to obtain the corresponding point c' in CT or PET. To this point, the retrospective registration is then applied, producing c" in MR. Statistics are gathered on the target registration error (TRE), which is the distance between the original point c and its corresponding point c". RESULTS This article presents statistics on the TRE calculated for each registration technique in this study and provides a brief description of each technique and an estimate of both preparation and execution time needed to perform the registration. CONCLUSION Our results indicate that retrospective techniques have the potential to produce satisfactory results much of the time, but that visual inspection is necessary to guard against large errors.
A new locus for autosomal dominant high myopia maps to 4 q 22-q 27 between D 4 S 1578 and D 4 S 1612

Myopia, affecting an average of about 30% (3%-84%) of people throughout the world, is a leading cause of visual impairment [1-3], and Chinese populations residing in industrialized or urban/suburban areas have a significantly higher incidence of myopia than other populations [1-5]. Both genetic and environment factors have been implicated in the etiology of myopia, but the precise molecular mechanisms responsible for myopia are as yet unknown [1,2,6]. High myopia, its extreme form, is associated with vision threatening retinal detachment and macular degeneration and is the fourth most common cause of blindness [7]. Identifying genetic markers for myopia would be a useful first step towards identifying and understanding the molecular defects that lead to the pathophysiology of myopia. High myopia, occurring in 1-2% of the general population [8-10], is a common hereditary variation. It may be inherited as an autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive, or as Xlinked recessive trait. The possibility of complex genetic traits should also be considered for some high myopia. Five loci for high myopia have been reported, including 4 autosomal dominant loci on 18p11.31, 12q21-q23, 7q36, and 17q21-q22, and one X-linked recessive on Xq28 [7,9-12]. However, it is estimated that these loci are responsible for only a small portion of high myopia [13]. Additional loci remain to be identified, as do the genes in the known loci causing high myopia. Several loci contributing to common myopia were also suggested by a twin study and linkage analysis of a group of Ashkenazi Jewish families [14,15]. In this study we describe a Chinese family with high myopia and map the disease to a novel locus on chromosome 4q22-q27 between D4S1578 and D4S1612. This region contains no known loci for common or high myopia.
Host Response to Environmental Hazards: Using Literature, Bioinformatics, and Computation to Derive Candidate Biomarkers of Toxic Industrial Chemical Exposure

Abstract : It is essential to protect Service Members from toxic and hazardous chemicals and materials across the entire range of deployment missions, from humanitarian to theater-level combat. Tools that rapidly and accurately quantify exposure-induced health effects would enable Commanders to make informed decisions on return-to-duty and allow service members to thrive in environments of uncertainty and danger. Currently, U.S. Forces lack a suitable method to rapidly screen and assess risk of toxic end organ injury following chemical exposures in the field. Markers of end-organ injury and toxicity and other health effects markers, particularly those used in a clinical setting, could be integrated into a lab-on-a-chip fieldable detection cartridge for molecular indicators of injury following chemical exposure or for routine surveillance when operating in dangerous environments. We utilized large public repositories of drug toxicity data to infer biomarkers of toxic industrial chemicals exposure. Using a computational and relational approach we prioritized militarily relevant toxic industrial chemicals and their anticipated adverse health effects, to include potential threats related to megacities. Initially, we focused on liver and kidney toxicity because these organs are particularly susceptible to toxic injury, often used in drug toxicity studies with large amounts of publically available data, and in some cases have established FDA-qualified biomarker panels or clinical assays. We mined the literature and databases (e.g., DrugMatrix and the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database) for candidate gene targets to make predictions about biomarkers related to toxic industrial chemicals that cause the same adverse health effects. We identified 78 and 244 gene modules associated with liver and kidney injury, respectively, and qualified some of these targets in independent animal studies.
Beyond waged work: The everyday politics of alternative socio-economic practices

Within geography and beyond there has been much discussion about how to best respond to the mounting inequalities, pressing environmental concerns and socio-economic precarity that appear to characterise current neoliberal capitalist societies. Kathi Weeks (2011) suggests that contemporary forms of precarity are linked to dominant discourses around waged labour which she terms the ‘work society’. This work society is characterised by three inter-related expectations that frame waged work as morally necessary, as the primary right to citizenship, and as the main way to participate in wider society. Weeks argues that these expectations have increased since the global financial crisis, yet paradoxically there are fewer secure and meaningful waged jobs available. In response to these socio-economic and environmental concerns, feminist autonomous geographers like J-K Gibson-Graham (2006) argue that the best way to respond is to ‘take back the economy’ at local scales. Rather than ‘overthrowing’ global neoliberal capitalism, Gibson-Graham and groups such as the Community Economies Collective have been engaged in ongoing projects which foster and enact alternative practices and subjectivities. In this thesis I draw on the work of J-K Gibson-Graham, the Community Economies Collective and others to explore two examples of collective social action in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. These two examples are the relational arts platform, Letting Space, and the Wellington Timebank. I employ a post-structural approach drawing on ethnographic methods to explore how these collectives foster and enact alternative forms of exchange and community in response to the dominant discourses of the work society. I draw on the ideas of Jacques Rancière (2001; 2004) to show how the practices associated with Letting Space and the Wellington Timebank create political moments which disrupt the work society. I complement these discussions about political moments by drawing on the work of Judith Butler (2006b) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1991; 2000) to show how subjects enact forms of community that are not based on fixed identities. In this thesis I provide an important contribution to geographic literature by illustrating the potential of relational art and Timebanking practices to move beyond the melancholy affects associated with leftist politics over the last 30 years. I argue that the forms of social action explored in this research provide one practical way for subjects to partially negotiate the contradictions of the work society while simultaneously fostering forms of community that are more open and not premised on exclusionary identity categories.