Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Change is conflict: Exploring relationships between preferred cognitive styles and conflict management styles of university administrators at a large flagship university

OF DISSERTATION CHANGE IS CONFLICT: EXPLORING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PREFERRED COGNITIVE STYLES AND CONFLICT MANAGEMENT STYLES OF UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATORS AT A LARGE FLAGSHIP UNIVERSITY As pressures continue for colleges and universities to find new ways of doing business, the calls for change heighten and the potential for conflict ensues. The purpose of the research study was to explore change as conflict via an exploration of organizational change related to preferred cognitive style, as measured by the Kirton Adaption-Innovation (KAI) instrument, and conflict management style, as measured by the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II (ROCI-II) instrument. The two instruments were administered to 72 university administrators at a large flagship university. The results indicate that the preferred cognitive style of university administrators is not significantly different from that of the general population. In addition, there were no statistically significant differences in style when comparing functional reporting area, gender, or education level. University administrators were found to prefer using the integrating conflict management style, followed by the compromising and obliging styles. Dominating and avoiding styles were the least used by university administrators. An understanding of cognitive styles and conflict management styles may help university administrators to be more self-aware and to know when each style is appropriate for use, particularly as it relates to problem-solving in teams with a diversity of styles to manage change and enhance organizational effectiveness.
Characterization of the Nqo5 subunit of bacterial complex I in the isolated state

The subunits that comprise bacterial complex I (NADH:ubiquinone oxidoreductase) are also found in more complicated mitochondrial enzymes in eukaryotic organisms. Although the Nqo5 subunit is one of these conserved components and important for the formation of complex, it has been little studied. Here, we report structure analyses of isolated Nqo5 from Thermus thermophilus. Biochemical studies indicated that the C‐terminal region following the 30‐Kd subunit motif is disordered in the isolated state, while the remaining portion is already folded. Crystallographic studies of a trypsin‐resistant fragment revealed detailed structural differences in the folded domain between the isolated and complexed states.
Effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy augmentation in major depression treatment (ECAM study): study protocol for a randomised clinical trial

Introduction Major depression is a serious mental disorder that causes substantial distress and impairment in individuals and places an enormous burden on society. Although antidepressant treatment is the most common therapy provided in routine practice, there is little evidence to guide second-line therapy for patients who have failed to respond to antidepressants. The aim of this paper is to describe the study protocol for a randomised controlled trial that measures the clinical effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as an augmentation strategy to treat patients with non-psychotic major depression identified as suboptimal responders to usual depression care. Methods and analysis The current study is a 16-week assessor-blinded randomised, parallel-groups superiority trial with 12-month follow-up at an outpatient clinic as part of usual depression care. Patients aged 20–65 years with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) Major Depressive Disorder who have experienced at least one failed trial of antidepressants as part of usual depression care, will be randomly assigned to receive CBT plus treatment as usual, or treatment as usual alone. The primary outcome is the change in clinician-rated 17-item GRID-Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (GRID-HAMD) score at 16 weeks, and secondary outcomes include severity and change in scores of subjective depression symptoms, proportion of responders and remitters, safety and quality of life. The primary population will be the intention-to-treat patients. Ethics and dissemination All protocols and the informed consent form comply with the Ethics Guideline for Clinical Research (Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare). Ethics review committees at the Keio University School of Medicine and the Sakuragaoka Memorial Hospital approved the study protocol. The results of the study will be disseminated at several research conferences and as published articles in peer-reviewed journals. The study will be implemented and reported in line with the CONSORT statement. Trial registration number UMIN Clinical Trials Registry: UMIN000001218.
Using Theory Formation Techniques for the Invention of Fictional Concepts

We introduce a novel method for the formation of fictional concepts based on the non-existence conjectures made by the HR automated theory formation system. We further introduce the notion of the typicality of an example with respect to a concept into HR, which leads to methods for ordering fictional concepts with respect to novelty, vagueness and stimulation. To test whether these measures are correlated with the way in which people similarly assess the value of fictional concepts, we ran an experiment to produce thousands of definitions of fictional animals. We then compared the software’s evaluations of the non-fictional concepts with those obtained through a survey consulting sixty people. The results show that two of the three measures have a correlation with human notions. We report on the experiment, and we compare our system with the well established method of conceptual blending, which leads to a discussion of automated ideation in future Computational Creativity projects.
Combining SURF-based local and global features for road obstacle recognition in far infrared images

This paper describes a road obstacle classification system that recognizes both vehicles and pedestrians in far-infrared images. Different local and global features based on Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) were investigated and then selected in order to extract a discriminative signature from the infrared spectrum. First, local features representing the local appearance of an obstacle, are extracted from a codebook of scale and rotation-invariant SURF features. Second, global features were used since they provide complementary information by characterizing shape and texture. When compared with the state-of-the-art Haar and Gabor wavelet features, our method provides significant improvement of recognition performances. Moreover, since our SURF based representation is invariant to the scale and the number of local features extracted from objects, our system performs the recognition task without resizing images. Our system was evaluated on a set of far-infrared images where obstacles occur at different scales and in difficult recognition situations. By using a multi-class SVM approach, accuracy rates of 91.51% has been achieved on Surf-based representation, while a maximum rate of 89.11% was achieved on wavelet-based representation.
Psychometric properties of the inventory of callous-unemotional traits short version (ICU-12) among detained female juvenile offenders and community youths*

ABSTRACT The presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits delineates a subgroup of male youth with severe conduct problems and antisocial behavior. To date however, existing research into these features among females is markedly limited. Drawing on 377 female adolescents (103 selected from forensic settings and 274 selected from school settings) from Portugal, the current study is the first to simultaneously examine the psychometric properties of the 12-item shortened version of the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU-12) in incarcerated and community female youth. Results provide support for the construct validity and reliability of the ICU-12 among this unique sample. Findings from this study also reveal evidence of convergent and discriminant validity with a number of theoretically relevant constructs (e.g. psychopathic features, aggression, and substance use). Clinical implications for using the ICU-12 with females are discussed.
Desertification, Drought, and Surface Vegetation: An Example from the West African Sahel

Many assumptions have been made about the nature and character of desertification in West Africa. This paper examines the history of this issue, reviews the current state of our knowledge concerning the meteorological aspects of desertification, and presents the results of a select group of analyses related to this question. The common notion of desertification is of an advancing “desert,” a generally irreversible anthropogenic process. This process has been linked to increased surface albedo, increased dust generation, and reduced productivity of the land. This study demonstrates that there has been no progressive change of either the Saharan boundary or vegetation cover in the Sahel during the last 16 years, nor has there been a systematic reduction of “productivity” as assessed by the water-use efficiency of the vegetation cover. While it also showed little change in surface albedo during the years analyzed, this study suggests that a change in albedo of up to 0.10% since the 1950s is conceivable.
Operational characteristics of multi-memristor circuits

A circuit with multiple memristors can have various configurations including serial and parallel connections like R, L and C. When input voltage/current is supplied to a circuit with multiple memristors, the composite behavior of the memristor circuit goes through a transition state period before it enters a steady state period. During the transient state period, the behavior is very complex and not predictable due to each memristor's different action depending upon its connection polarity and initial state. In this paper, the transient characteristics of a composite memristor are analyzed via the relationships of charge, flux and memristance of each memristor.
Mobile Sensor Control Methods for Reducing Power Consumption in Sparse Sensor Network

In mobile sensor networks with a small number of nodes, because nodes' radio communication range does not cover the whole sensing area, every node has to move closer to the data sink to deliver its sensed data. Thus, the power consumption to deliver the sensed data to the data sink becomes large. In this paper, we propose two novel methods that nodes construct a temporal network to deliver the sensed data with low power consumption. We also show the simulation results to evaluate our methods. We confirmed that our methods reduce the power consumption of nodes for moving to the data sink to deliver the sensed data.
A computationally efficient algorithm for the 2D covariance method

The estimated covariance matrix is a building block for many algorithms, including signal and image processing. The Covariance Method is an estimator for the covariance matrix, favored both as an estimator and in view of the convenient properties of the matrix that it produces. However, the considerable computational requirements limit its use. We present a novel computation algorithm for the covariance method, which dramatically reduces the computational complexity (both ALU operations and memory access) relative to previous algorithms. It has a small memory footprint, is highly parallelizable and requires no synchronization among compute threads. On a 40-core X86 system, we achieve 1200X speedup relative to a straightforward single-core implementation; even on a single core, 35X speedup is achieved.
Travel-Time Prediction Using Gaussian Process Regression: A Trajectory-Based Approach

This paper is concerned with the task of travel-time prediction for an arbitrary origin-destination pair on a map. Unlike most of the existing studies, which focus only on a particular link (road segment) with heavy traffic, our method allows us to probabilistically predict the travel time along an unknown path (a sequence of links) if the similarity between paths is defined as a kernel function. Our first innovation is to use a string kernel to represent the similarity between paths. Our second new idea is to apply Gaussian process regression for probabilistic travel-time prediction. We tested our approach with realistic traffic data.
Configuring simulation algorithms with ParamILS

Simulation algorithms often expose various numerical parameters, e.g., to control the size of auxiliary data structures or to configure certain heuristics. While this allows to fine-tune a simulator to a given model, it also makes simulator configuration more complex. For example, determining suitable default parameters from a multi-dimensional parameter space is challenging, as these parameters shall work well on a broad range of models. Instead of manually selecting parameter values, the configuration space of a simulation algorithm can also be searched automatically. We investigate how well ParamILS (Hutter et al. 2009), an iterated local search algorithm for algorithm configuration, can be applied to simulation algorithms, and discuss its implementation in context of the open-source modeling and simulation framework JAMES II.
A molecular phylogeny of Polyommatus s. str. and Plebicula based on mitochondrial COI and nuclear ITS2 sequences (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae)

The phylogenetic relationships of the subgenera Polyommatus and Plebicula, within the Palaearctic butterfly genus Polyommatus, were inferred from a combined analysis of the nuclear marker ITS2 and the barcoding section of the mitochondrial gene COI. Eight major clades were recovered within Polyommatus s. l. , which correspond closely to subgenera based on traditional systematics and are of late Pliocene to early Pleistocene origin. Extraordinary chromosomal evolution occurred independently in three of these clades. The disputed position of several species formerly placed in the subgenus Plebicula is clarified. A group of Cen- tral Asian species (Bryna) was recovered as a monophyletic clade within Polyommatus s. str. The Kurdistanian endemic P. buzul- mavi appears as a sister species to P. icarus. P. celina replaces P. icarus in NW Africa and the Canary Islands, and split from the last common ancestor with P. icarus back in the early Pleistocene.
On the Work of Madhu Sudan: the 2002 Nevalinna Prize Winner

Madhu Sudan's work spans many areas of computer science theory including computational complexity theory, the design of efficient algorithms, algorithmic coding theory, and the theory of program checking and correcting. Two results of Sudan stand out in the impact they have had on the mathematics of computation. The first work shows a probabilistic characterization of the class NP -- those sets for which short and easily checkable proofs of membership exist, and demonstrates consequences of this characterization to classifying the complexity of approximation problems. The second work shows a polynomial time algorithm for list decoding the Reed Solomon error correcting codes. This short note will be devoted to describing Sudan's work on probabilistically checkable proofs -- the so called {\it PCP theorem} and its implications.
Monitoring and Discussing Health-Related Quality of Life in Adolescents With Type 1 Diabetes Improve Psychosocial Well-Being

OBJECTIVE—To test the effects of monitoring and discussing of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in adolescents with type 1 diabetes in a multicenter randomized controlled trial. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Four centers were randomly assigned to the HRQoL intervention (46 adolescents) or control (45 adolescents) group, with three regular visits scheduled within 12 months in both groups. In the HRQoL intervention group, HRQoL of adolescents was assessed using the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory, and outcomes were discussed face-to-face during the consultation. The control group received care as usual. Mean differences between the groups at 12 months in physical and psychosocial well-being (Child Health Questionnaire [CHQ]-CF87/PF50, Diabetes-Specific Family Conflict Scale, and Center for Epidemiological Studies Scale for Depression), satisfaction with care (Patients’ Evaluation of the Quality of Diabetes Care), and A1C were determined, controlling for baseline scores. RESULTS—Mean scores on the CHQ subscales of psychosocial health (P < 0.001), behavior (P < 0.001), mental health (P < 0.001), and family activities (P < 0.001) improved in the HRQoL intervention group, except for adolescents with the highest A1C values. Adolescents in the HRQoL intervention group reported higher self-esteem (CHQ) at follow-up (P = 0.016), regardless of A1C, and were more satisfied with care (P = 0.009) than control subjects. No significant differences between the two groups over time were observed in A1C levels. CONCLUSIONS—Periodic monitoring and discussion of HRQoL in adolescents with diabetes is appreciated and has positive effects on their psychosocial well-being, except for those in poorest control.
Hybrid Wired/Wireless On-Chip Network Design for Application-Specific SoC

Hybrid wired/wireless on-chip network is a promising communication architecture for multi-/many-core SoC. For application-specific SoC design, it is important to design a dedicated on-chip network architecture according to the application-specific nature. In this paper, we propose a heuristic wireless link allocation algorithm for creating hybrid on-chip network architecture. The algorithm can eliminate the performance bottleneck by replacing multi-hop wired paths by high-bandwidth single-hop long-range wireless links. The simulation results show that the hybrid on-chip network designed by our algorithm improves the performance in terms of both communication delay and energy consumption significantly.
Adaptive Ranging Code Allocation Scheme in IEEE 802.16 Networks

IEEE 802.16 uses the code division multiple access (CDMA) method as the channel access method to decrease the collision probability of data delivery. However, IEEE 802.16 does not regulate a ranging code allocation scheme in its specification. In this paper, we propose the adaptive ranging code allocation (ARCA) scheme, a novel ranging code allocation scheme for IEEE 802.16. According to the traffic sent to the base station (BS) from the mobile station (MS), the ARCA scheme not only forecasts the traffic quantity of the MS but also finds the optimal ranging code allocation value for the MS to improve the transmission success rate next time. The ARCA scheme is verified with simulation and compared with other schemes in performance differences. According to the simulation results, the ARCA scheme is proved to have better performance than other schemes.
A tool to study affective touch

Touch is an important part of many forms of emotional communication, but has been studied far less than visual and auditory expressions of affect. We are developing the Haptic Creature to investigate fundamentals of affective touch, and its applications in companionship and anxiety management. This small robot senses the world solely by being touched, and communicates its internal state via vibrotactile purring, stiffening its ears, and modulating its breathing. This paper outlines the motivation for its creation and design, and overviews the current version of its architecture and mechatronics.
The effects of computer-mediated communication anxiety on student perceptions of instructor behaviors, perceived learning, and quiz performance

ABSTRACT Online environments increasingly serve as contexts for learning. Hence, it is important to understand how student characteristics, such as student computer-mediated communication anxiety (CMCA) affects learning outcomes in mediated classrooms. To better understand how student CMCA may influence student online learning experiences, we tested a proposed model based on the instructional beliefs model (IBM) to determine how CMCA influenced perceptions of instructor credibility, electronic propinquity, and learning outcomes (i.e. perceived learning and quiz performance). This model was compared with the IBM and the newly proposed model provided a better fit to the data. This model helps explicate the direct and indirect effects of CMCA in online learning environments.
Complications of total hip arthroplasty: MR imaging-initial experience.

PURPOSE To investigate the use of standard magnetic resonance (MR) imaging sequences with simple parameter modifications for the detection and characterization of total hip arthroplasty (THA) complications. MATERIALS AND METHODS An initial phantom study was performed with cobalt-chrome and titanium prostheses to establish the imaging parameters for a subsequent clinical study. In the clinical study, coronal and transverse MR imaging of 14 THA prostheses was performed before and after intravenous contrast material administration in 12 patients who were being considered for revision arthroplasty. The images were reviewed for evidence of juxtaarticular or periprosthetic abnormalities, patterns of contrast enhancement, and quality of periprosthetic tissue depiction. RESULTS Phantom study results showed improved periprosthetic tissue depiction with use of thin sections, increased frequency-encoding gradient strength, and fast spin-echo sequences. The clinical study results demonstrated periprosthetic abnormalities in 11 cases: mechanical loosening in two cases (including one case with an associated periprosthetic fracture); granulomatosis, eight; and infection, one. In 100% of cases, tissue depiction around the femoral component was judged to be of "diagnostic quality. " Tissue depiction around the acetabular component was of diagnostic quality in five (36%) cases. In all seven surgically confirmed cases, a correct diagnosis was made preoperatively with MR imaging. CONCLUSION By using simple modifications to standard MR imaging sequences, diagnostic-quality MR imaging of THA complications can be performed, particularly around the femoral prosthetic stem.
Automated recognition of event scenarios for digital forensics

The authors have previously developed the ECF (Event Correlation for Forensics) framework for scenario matching in the forensic investigation of activity manifested in digital transactional logs. ECF incorporated a suite of log parsers to reduce event records from heterogeneous logs to a canonical form for lodging in an SQL database. This paper presents work since then, the Auto-ECF system, which represents significant advances on ECF. The paper reports on the development and implementation of the new event abstraction and scenario specification methodology and on the development of the Auto-ECF system which builds on that to achieve the automated recognition of event scenarios. The paper also reports on the evaluation of Auto-ECF using three scenarios including one from the well known DARPA test data.