Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Peripheral artery disease as a manifestation of cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL) and practical implications.

48-year-old white man was seen in November in the emergency room of a county hospital in Houston with cold blue toes on both feet after exposure to temperatures that were above freezing, and with no snow on the ground. Besides the blue toes, the foot pulses were diminished. The skin over the feet was intact. An arteriogram revealed the absence of flow in multiple digital arteries (Figure 1). Subsequently over the following 2 months, the worst affected toes developed dry gangrene (Figure 2). One month earlier, in October, the patient had been admitted to the same hospital with migranous headaches and memory loss. He had severe dementia on cognitive testing, ataxia, and resting tremors. He had mildly impaired renal function that reversed with hydration. We noted transient, easy to control hypertension and asymptomatic bradycardia. A 12-lead ECG showed sinus bradycardia with no evidence of conduction pathway abnormalities or ongoing acute ischemia (Figure 3). A pharmacological stress test suggested nonreversible single vessel disease in the right coronary artery territory. MRI of the brain showed chronic ischemic changes involving the watershed areas of the frontal and the parietal lobes (Figure 4). On direct questioning, the patient recalled a half-brother who volunteered that they shared the same father, also with severe dementia.With this history of a familial dementia, and ruling out other commoner causes of dementia, a skin biopsy was performed. Electron microscopy showed granular osmiophilic material, confirming the diagnosis of cerebral autosomal dominant arte-riopathy with subcortical infarcts and leukoencephalopathy (CADASIL; Figure 5). At 3 months follow-up after the first encounter, the patient was still severely demented and with dry gangrene of the right 1st through 3rd toes. Unfortunately, he left unannounced from a personal care home before completion of the process of making him a ward of state.
Motion Compression for Telepresence Locomotion

A telepresence system enables a user in a local environment to maneuver in a remote or virtual space through a robotic operator (agent). In order to ensure a high degree of telepresence realism, it is critical that the local user has the ability to control the remote agent's movement through the user's own locomotion. The required motion of the remote agent is determined according to its environment and the specific task it is to perform. The local user's environment is usually different from that of the remote agent in terms of the shapes and dimensions. A motion mapping is needed from the remote agent to the local user to ensure the similarity of the paths in the two environments. In particular, the terminal position of the local user after a segment of movement is also an important portion in such a motion mapping. This paper progressively addresses these issues from the optimization point of view. Two strategies are suggested for solving the motion mapping problem for the single user case. The resulting solutions are then extended to the multiuser case where several local users share a local environment to control different remote agents. Extensive simulations and comparisons show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Resisting Moral Disengagement in Support for War: Use of the "Peace Test" Scale Among Student Groups in 21 Nations

Through the cognitive process of moral disengagement, people make excuses for inflicting suffering on others while maintaining a clear conscience. The "Peace Test" scale to measure moral disengagement in support for war was tested in surveys of medical, university, and secondary school students in 21 nations. The scale showed acceptable reliability and was a valid predictor of opinions about specific military threats. Although the survey sites were not representative of nations, mean scale scores among high school students were related to national levels of defense spending. Moral disengagement is a valid tool for peace psychologists because it can help evaluate education efforts to increase support for peace.
Megane/Heslike is required for normal GABAergic differentiation in the mouse superior colliculus

The mouse Mgn protein (Helt) is structurally related to the neurogenic Drosophila hairy and Enhancer of split [h/E(spl)] proteins, but its unique structural properties distinguish it from other members of the family. Mgn expression shows a spatiotemporal correlation with GABAergic markers in several brain regions. We report here that homozygous Mgn-null mice die between the second and the fifth postnatal week of age, and show a complete depletion of Gad65 and Gad67 expression in the superior colliculus and a reduction in the inferior colliculus. Other brain regions, as well as other neural systems, are not affected. The progenitor GABAergic cells appear to be generated in right numbers but fail to become GABAergic neurons. The phenotype of the mice is consistent with reduced GABAergic activity. Thus, our in vivo study provides evidence that Mgn is the key regulator of GABAergic neurons, controlling their specification in the dorsal midbrain. Another conclusion from our results is that the function of Mgn shows a previously unrecognized role for h/E(spl)-related transcription factors in the dorsal midbrain GABAergic cell differentiation. Vertebrate h/E(spl)-related genes can no longer be regarded solely as a factors that confer generic neurogenic properties, but as key components for the subtype-neuronal identity in the mammalian CNS.
English Language Learners’ Writing Practices and Attitudes

This study of English language learners, six Mandarin-speaking and five Spanish-speaking elementary students, revealed that students engaged in a variety of writing practices at home and school. A continuum of attitudes, from positive to negative, characterized students’attitudes toward writing in English and their native languages. Students’ writing practices and attitudes toward writing were influenced by home backgrounds and classroom contexts. Home background influences included parents’ educational backgrounds and income levels, plans for staying in the United States, support for writing at home, and cultural expectations. School and classroom factors included frequency and quality of opportunities for writing and teachers’ expectations for writing tasks. Implications of the study include the necessity to provide multiple opportunities for students to write for purposeful audiences in their native language as well as in English.
Improving sexual health for young people: making sexuality education a priority

How well do young people understand their developing sexuality and what this means? This paper reports on findings from the Our Lives: Culture, Context and Risk project, which investigated sexual behaviour and decision-making in the context of the everyday life experience and aspirations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous young people (16–25 years) in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and in South Australia. Using qualitative data, this paper focuses on what participating young people thought was necessary to improve the quality of sexuality education. Participants suggest that current forms of sexuality education are too clinical, didactic and unengaging, and are missing in relevant content. Young people requested more information on relationships, first sexual experiences and negotiating condom use. These requests indicate that young people realise that they need more knowledge in order to have healthy relationships, which conflicts with the popular belief that providing young people with open, honest information around sex will encourage them to have sex or increase sexual risk taking. Making sexuality education more of a priority and listening to the needs of young people could be a positive step towards improving sexual health and well-being.
Reduction in sugar-sweetened beverages is not associated with more water or diet drinks

Abstract Objective The Dutch Obesity Intervention in Teenagers (DOiT) is a school-based randomised controlled trial that was effective in decreasing the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages among adolescents. The present study examined, using mediation analysis, whether this decrease in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages could be explained by an increase in the consumption of water or diet drinks. Design Participants completed a questionnaire about their beverage consumption at baseline and at 8 months (immediately post-intervention), 12- and 20-month follow-ups. A series of multi-level linear regression analyses were performed to examine water and diet drink consumption as potential mediators of the intervention effect on the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages. Setting Eighteen Dutch secondary schools. Subjects A total of 747 adolescents (mean age: 12·7 years). Results In addition to the DoiT intervention effect of a reduction in the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages at 8 months (−284 ml/d; 95 % CI −420, −148) and 12 months (−260 ml/d; 95 % CI −360, −160), there was also a significant reduction in diet drinks at 8 months (−52 ml/d; 95 % CI −89, −16). There was no significant difference in water consumption at any follow-up. The decrease in sugar-sweetened beverage consumption could not be explained by an increase in water or diet drink consumption at any time point. Conclusions Interventions aimed at reducing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption may be effective without changing consumption of other beverages. Reducing sugar-sweetened beverages was, however, a main message of the DOiT intervention. It is possible that a concomitant promotion of water may have resulted in a greater increase in water intake and replacement of sugar-sweetened beverages with water.
Learning Knowledge Base Inference with Neural Theorem Provers

In this paper we present a proof-of-concept implementation of Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), end-to-end differentiable counterparts of discrete theorem provers that perform first-order inference on vector representations of symbols using function-free, possibly parameterized, rules. As such, NTPs follow a long tradition of neural-symbolic approaches to automated knowledge base inference, but differ in that they are differentiable with respect to representations of symbols in a knowledge base and can thus learn representations of predicates, constants, as well as rules of predefined structure. Furthermore, they still allow us to incorporate domainknowledge provided as rules. The NTP presented here is realized via a differentiable version of the backward chaining algorithm. It operates on substitution representations and is able to learn complex logical dependencies from training facts of small knowledge bases.
Factors Influencing the Adoption of the Internet by Public Relations Professionals in the Private and Public Sectors of Saudi Arabia

Managers from Western cultures tend to assume that efficiency and profitability will drive the adoption of new technologies by multinational conglomerates. The present study shows that for non-Western organizations, the sector that the organization operates in (public or private) and its decision-making style are also relevant factors. The research employs the diffusion of innovation model to explore Internet adoption by public relations professionals in Saudi Arabian organizations. A survey of 354 public relations professionals revealed that 93% of the professionals in the private sector had adopted the Internet, compared to 83% of their counterparts in the public sector. Professionals in the private sector ascribed relative advantage as critical for adoption. Regression analyses revealed that authoritarian decision making and organizational encouragement were predictors of adoption.
Interleaved operation of parallel neutral-point clamped inverters with reduced circulating current

Parallel inverters are commonly adopted in high power applications, for instance wind energy system, smart transformer, and power conditioners. Meanwhile, interleaved PWM is usually considered as an optimal approach to reduce the current ripple and harmonics of the parallel inverters. However, in case of a common dc-link, the problem of circulating current emerges and leads to performance degradation. This paper aims at investigating the influence of different modulation techniques on the circulating current of parallel Neutral-Point Clamped (NPC) inverters under interleaved operation. Two modulation techniques: Phase Disposition (PD) and Alternative Phase Opposite Disposition (APOD), have been studied and compared in terms of current ripple, spectrum quality, and circulating current. Though the PD modulation was regarded as the optimum solution in most single NPC cases, it offers worse performance in the parallel NPC application due to higher circulating current. Simulation and experimental validations are provided and show that the APOD leads to much lower circulating current and similar current ripple as well as spectrum quality compared to the PD.
Confabulating reasons for behaving bad: The psychological consequences of unconsciously activated behaviour that violates one's standards

Numerous studies have been conducted to demonstrate that behaviours are frequently activated unconsciously. The present studies investigate the downstream psychological consequences of such unconscious behaviour activation, building on work on the explanatory vacuum and post-priming misattribution. It was hypothesized that unconsciously activated behaviours trigger a negative affective response if the behaviour violates a personal standard and that this negative affect subsequently motivates people to confabulate a reason for the behaviour. Results provided evidence for this mediated moderation model. Study 1 showed that participants who were primed to act less prosocially indeed reported increased levels of negative affect and, as a result, were inclined to confabulate a reason for their behaviour. Study 2 replicated these findings in the domain of eating and provided evidence for the moderating role of personal standards as well as the entire mediated moderation model. These findings have relevant theoretical implications as they add to the modest number of studies that demonstrate that the effect of unconscious priming may extend well beyond performing the primed behaviour itself to influence subsequent affect and attribution processes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Extension Schemes for the Alignment Model of English-Malayalam Statistical Machine Translator

In Statistical Machine Translation from English to Malayalam, an unseen English sentence is translated into its equivalent Malayalam sentence using statistical models. A parallel corpus of English-Malayalam is used in the training phase. Word to word alignments has to be set among the sentence pairs of the source and target language before subjecting them for training. This paper deals with certain techniques which can be adopted for improving the alignment model of SMT. Methods to incorporate the parts of speech information into the bilingual corpus has resulted in eliminating many of the insignificant alignments. Also identifying the name entities and cognates present in the sentence pairs has proved to be advantageous while setting up the alignments. Presence of Malayalam words with predictable translations has also contributed in reducing the insignificant alignments. Moreover, reduction of the unwanted alignments has brought in better training results. Experiments conducted on a sample corpus have generated reasonably good Malayalam translations and the results are verified with F measure, BLEU and WER evaluation metrics.
Effective flash-based SSD caching for high performance home cloud server

In the home cloud environment, the storage performance of home cloud servers, which govern connected devices and provide resources with virtualization features, is critical to improve the end-user experience. To improve the storage performance of virtualized home cloud servers in a cost-effective manner, caching schemes using flash-based solid state drives (SSD) have been widely studied. Although previous studies successfully narrow the speed gap between memory and hard disk drives, they only focused on how to manage the cache space, but were less interested in how to use the cache space efficiently taking into account the characteristics of flash-based SSD. Moreover, SSD caching is used as a read-only cache due to two well-known limitations of SSD: slow write and limited lifespan. Since storage access in virtual machines is performed in a more complex and costly manner, the limitations of SSD affect more significantly the storage performance. This paper proposes a novel SSD caching scheme and virtual disk image format, named sequential virtual disk (SVD), for achieving high-performance home cloud environments. The proposed techniques are based on the workload characteristics, in which synchronous random writes dominate, while taking into consideration the characteristics of flash memory and storage stack of the virtualized systems. Unlike previous studies, SSD is used as a read-write cache in the proposed caching scheme to effectively mitigate the performance degradation of synchronous random writes. The prototype was evaluated with some realistic workloads, through which the developed scheme was shown to allow improvement of the storage access performance by 21% to 112%, with reduction in the number of erasures on SSD by about 56% on average.
Techniques of Data Perturbation for Privacy Preserving Data Mining

The technology of data mining is used in extraction of useful knowledge from large data sets . The process of data collection and data dissemination m ay however result in inherent risk of privacy threats. So to maintain privacy, confidentiality and security in d ata mining is biggest issue now days. Before publishing or sharin g private information about individual businesses and organiz ation has to be suppressed. Privacy preserving data mining is study of valid mining models and patterns which mask private information and thus preserves privacy of data. The success of privacy preserving data mining algorithm is measure d in terms of its performance, data utility, level of uncertai nty or resistance to data mining algorithms etc. Keywords— Data mining, Privacy preserving Data Mining, Data Perturbation
Readers as Audiences

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. “Reading,” an instantly recognizable and socially valued activity, has boundaries that are difficult to discern. Changes in both the delivery of written words and the breadth of access to them have drawn attention to the instability of concepts like “the reader” and “the book/text. ” There is nothing new about this. When a letter from a student abroad in London arrived in a colonial Nigerian village, a literate community member would transmit its contents to the nonliterate parents. Who is the reader here? Is it the person who mechanically translates the letter from written to oral form, or the parents who memorize the contents and scrutinize the words for what is said and left unsaid? What is the text, the words on paper or the set of connotations and implications drawn by the parents? Online reading and electronic media present such questions in a different technological form and context, but they remain the same questions. The analyst may take an expansive or restrictive view of the process and practices, but the absence of bright lines between reading and some other activity (e.g. scanning blogs or downloading podcasts of news reports) is a constant. That being the case, the following discussion is shaped by several choices. First, we are not focusing on literacy – as in who develops the capacity to decode writing – but on the practices of reading. Second, in keeping with most of the social scientific and indeed the popular uses of the term, we define reading to be leisure time reading; literacy is required for an increasing percentage of occupations worldwide, but to say someone is “a reader” or “likes to read” refers to their leisure pursuits rather than to their occupational requirements. Third, we draw primarily on the research involving traditional genres, especially “the book. ” While the ways in which texts can reach their potential audience are rapidly evolving and multiplying, books continue to be the model that new media emulate, as when electronic reading devices, like Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle, replicate the printed page. 1
Embedding-based representation of signal distances

Traditional signal representation and coding theory is focused on how to most efficiently represent and encode a signal with the goal of preserving it as best as possible. However, very often, the processing only concerns specific information in the signal and does not require conserving the signal itself. In this work we examine the problem of representing signals such that some function of their distance is preserved. For that goal, we consider randomized embeddings as a representation mechanism and provide a framework to design them and analyze their performance. This work generalizes previously developed universal embeddings, already proven quite successful in practice.
Does Cultural Capital Really Affect Academic Achievement? New Evidence from Combined Sibling and Panel Data

This article provides new estimates of the causal effect of cultural capital on academic achievement. The author analyzes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth–Children and Young Adults and uses a fixed effect design to address the problem of omitted variable bias, which has resulted in too optimistic results in previous research. After controlling for family and individual fixed effects, the author reports that (1) six indicators of cultural capital have mostly positive direct effects on children’s reading and math test scores, (2) the effect of cultural capital is smaller than previously reported, and (3) the effect of cultural capital varies in high and low socioeconomic status (SES) environments. Results mostly support cultural reproduction theory (cultural capital more important in high SES environments) for cultural capital indicators capturing familiarity with legitimate culture and mostly support cultural mobility theory (cultural capital more important in low SES environments) for indicators capturing “concerted cultivation. ”
Use Case Maps for Object-Oriented Systems

Object-oriented and real time together the behavioural fabric of systems a context for designing with use case maps a simple example basic use case map model case study - a conventional object-oriented application advanced use case map model case study - high level design of a real-time, distributed system detailed design notation case study - rounding out the real-time, distributed system example macro and micro patterns supplementing familiar design methods. Appendix: notation summary some coding examples.