Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Relation between Uncertainty in Latent Class Membership and Outcomes in a Latent Class Signal Detection Model

Latent class variables are often used to predict outcomes. The conventional practice is to first assign observations to one of the latent classes based on the maximum posterior probabilities. The assigned class membership is then treated as an observed variable and used in predicting the outcomes. This widely used classify-analyze strategy ignores the uncertainty of being in a certain latent class for the observations. Once an observation is classified to the latent class with the highest posterior probability, its probability of being in the assigned class is treated as being one. In addition, once observations are classified to the latent class with the highest posterior probability, their representativeness of the class becomes the same because they will all have a probability of one of being in the assigned class. Finally, standard errors are underestimated because the residual uncertainty about the latent class membership is ignored. This dissertation used simulation studies and an analysis of a real-world data set to compare five commonly adopted approaches (most likely class regression, probability regression, probability-weighted regression, pseudo-class regression, and the simultaneous approach) for measuring the association between a latent class variable and outcome variables to see which one can better account for the uncertainty in latent class membership in such a situation. The model considered in the study was a latent class extension of the signal detection model (LC-SDT) by DeCarlo, which has proved to be able to address certain measurement issues in the educational field, more specifically, rater issues involved in essay grading such as rater effects and rater reliability. An LC-SDT model has the potential for wide applications in education as well as other areas. Therefore it is important to explore the issue of accounting for uncertainty in latent class membership within this framework. Three ordinal outcome variables having a negative, weak, and strong association with the latent class variable were considered in the simulations. Results of the simulations showed that the simultaneous approach performed best in obtaining unbiased parameter estimates. It also yielded larger standard errors than the other approaches which have been found by previous research to underestimate standard errors. Even though the simultaneous approach has its advantages, including outcome variables in a latent class model can affect parameters of the response variables. Therefore, cautions need to be taken when using this approach. The analysis results of the real-world data set confirmed the trends observed in the simulation studies.
A new electroplating mask for deep wet etching on glass

In this paper, a new electroplating mask regarding deep etching on glass was revealed. It consisted of sputtered Chromium and Copper layer with electroplated Chromium and Gold layer, in combination with hard baked thick photoresist AZ4620 mask layer. After more than 3 hours' immerging in the HF etching solution, the etching depth attained more than 500μm. By using hard baking photoresist, the smoother surface was achieved. In addition, increasing the pattern width may help to reduce the undercut etching level and to accelerate the etching process. Compared with other masks in the literature, this new electroplating mask was simple, low cost and compatible with lithography technology, it can be widely used in MEMS applications.
A Domain Decomposition Method for Computing Bivariate Spline Fits of Scattered Data

A domain decomposition method for solving large bivariate scattered data fitting problems with bivariate minimal energy, discrete least-squares, and penalized least-squares splines is described. The method is based on splitting the domain into smaller domains, solving the associated smaller fitting problems, and combining the coefficients to get a global fit. Explicit error bounds are established for how well our locally constructed spline fits approximate the global fits. Some numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.
Gonadotropin-Activated Androgen-Dependent and Independent Pathways Regulate Aquaporin Expression during Teleost (Sparus aurata) Spermatogenesis

The mediation of fluid homeostasis by multiple classes of aquaporins has been suggested to be essential during spermatogenesis and spermiation. In the marine teleost gilthead seabream (Sparus aurata), seven distinct aquaporins, Aqp0a, -1aa, -1ab, -7, -8b, -9b and -10b, are differentially expressed in the somatic and germ cell lineages of the spermiating testis, but the endocrine regulation of these channels during germ cell development is unknown. In this study, we investigated the in vivo developmental expression of aquaporins in the seabream testis together with plasma androgen concentrations. We then examined the in vitro regulatory effects of recombinant piscine gonadotropins, follicle-stimulating (rFsh) and luteinizing (rLh) hormones, and sex steroids on aquaporin mRNA levels during the spermatogenic cycle. During the resting phase, when plasma levels of androgens were low, the testis exclusively contained proliferating spermatogonia expressing Aqp1ab, whereas Aqp10b and -9b were localized in Sertoli and Leydig cells, respectively. At the onset of spermatogenesis and during spermiation, the increase of androgen plasma levels correlated with the additional appearance of Aqp0a and -7 in Sertoli cells, Aqp0a in spermatogonia and spermatocytes, Aqp1ab, -7 and -10b from spermatogonia to spermatozoa, and Aqp1aa and -8b in spermatids and spermatozoa. Short-term in vitro incubation of testis explants indicated that most aquaporins in Sertoli cells and early germ cells were upregulated by rFsh and/or rLh through androgen-dependent pathways, although Aqp1ab in proliferating spermatogonia was also activated by estrogens. However, expression of Aqp9b in Leydig cells, and of Aqp1aa and -7 in spermatocytes and spermatids, was also directly stimulated by rLh. These results reveal a complex gonadotropic control of aquaporin expression during seabream germ cell development, apparently involving both androgen-dependent and independent pathways, which may assure the fine tuning of aquaporin-mediated fluid secretion and absorption mechanisms in the seabream testis.
The Amygdala: Neurobiological Aspects of Emotion, Memory, and Mental Dysfunction

on the back shelves of medical school libraries. During a critical period of time, however, there is an urgent need for the information contained in this book. I, and others interested in getting the latest update of a rapidly changing field, might do well to push our local libraries to obtain this handy and informative volume. Both William James and Sigmund Freud believed in their time that the neural basis of emotion and memory is a most compelling but elusive area of study. Despite the great advances made in the neurosciences in the last decade, the study of psychobiology is still an unsettled frontier. A wealth of new techniques have, however, finally opened this fundamental area of research to experimental analysis. John Aggleton, of the University of Durham, has assembled a formidable group of clinical and laboratory investigators to present the latest and most exciting findings in the field of psychobiology in The Amygdala: Neurobiological Aspects of Emotion, Memory, and Mental Dysfunction. The amygdala complex, a mass of gray matter located in the medial part of the temporal lobe, is a critical structure in the generation of emotion and memory. Despite abundant evidence implicating the amygdala in affect and memory formation , stress responsivity, epilepsy, senile dementia, schizophrenia, pathologic aggression , and even stomach ulceration, it has been a decade since a book devoted to the subject has been published. But it has been worth the wait. Dr. Aggleton's The Amygdala is an authoritative and comprehensive volume, which is essential reading for anyone, whether expert or newcomer, who is interested in emotion and memory. The name of this subcortical structure (from the Latin for almond, a somewhat obscure reference to this structure's anatomical appearance) may be less familiar than its better studied cortical cousin, the hippocampus. Nevertheless, both brain areas have been considered allied structures since the time of Pierre Paul Broca, who included both in his le grand lobe limbique over a century ago (and indeed, modern neuroanatomical techniques have revealed abundant connections between the amyg-dala and the hippocampus). In 1952, Paul MacLean, then at Yale University, reintroduced Broca's term "limbic" for those structures which form an annular ring of tissue on the medial aspect of the cerebral hemispheres. MacLean elaborated on the Papez theory of 1937 that these limbic structures are involved in the generation of emotion. But how do the amygdala and other limbic structures give rise …
The Relationship between Speed and Technical Development in Young Speed Skaters

The Long Term Athletic Development Plan (LTAD) defines the first ‘window of accelerated adaptation to speed’ or a ‘critical’ period of speed development as occurring during the FUNdamentals stage, age six to eight for girls and seven to nine for boys respectively. However, technical sport specific skill development is not recommended until the Learn to Train Stage. Utilizing a model of body composition, this study looks at the relationship between technical and speed development in young speed skaters ages 3 – 15. The results indicate that in both females and males, individuals with larger body composition had faster speeds but individuals with smaller body composition and with greater technical skill were as fast as or faster than those with larger body composition regardless of technical skill. The results support the conclusion that no “windows of trainability” for speed development need to exist as long as technical components are taught early to build neurological connections and fortify coordination to develop speed prepubescent, and technical development is maintained to allow skaters to adjust to increased muscular strength during pubescence and post-pubescence.
Social Media Strategies for School Principals

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe, analyze, and interpret the experiences of school principals who use multiple social media tools with stakeholders as part of their comprehensive communications practices. Additionally, it examined why school principals have chosen to communicate with their stakeholders through social media. Four themes emerged from the 12 qualitative interviews with the school principals and from the Internet data regarding their social media use. The four emergent themes included the following: (1) Social media tools allow for greater interactions between school principals and their stakeholders. (2) Social media tools provide stronger connections to local stakeholders, to fellow educators, and to the world. (3) Social media use can have a significant impact on a school principal’s personal and professional growth. (4) Social media use is an expectation; it is no longer optional.
Mainstreaming Open Textbooks: Educator Perspectives on the Impact of OpenStax College open textbooks

This paper presents the results of collaborative research between OpenStax College, who have published 16 open textbooks to date, and the OER Research Hub, a Hewlett funded open research project examining the impact of open educational resources (OER) on learning and teaching. The paper focuses primarily on the results of two surveys that were conducted with educators during 2013 and 2014/2015. These surveys focused on use and perceptions of OER and OpenStax College materials, financial savings and perceptions of impact on both educators and students. This paper reports on the research findings related to the impact of OER on educator practice and make a series of specific recommendations based on these findings.
Cognitive function following stroke and vascular cognitive impairment

Purpose of reviewThis review of the cognitive status following stroke and vascular cognitive impairment starts by questioning the concept of vascular dementia and related concepts. Our position is that in many cases these labels promote a superficial conceptualization of an inherently complex and heterogeneous phenomenon hampering a more detailed understanding. Recent findingsAfter stroke or disease of the cerebral vasculature, the cognitive and emotional outcome is dependent on a combination of three factors with the relative importance differing between causes. First, focal damage may lead to selective impairments that are dependent on the localization of the (grey matter) lesion. Second, diffuse neuronal dysfunction produces a more uniform profile of a decrease in mental speed, memory problems, and reduced executive functioning. Third, cognitive outcome is further modulated – notably in terms of severity – by patient variables such as age, sex, premorbid level of functioning, and comorbidity (e.g. hypertension). SummaryThe complex character of the cognitive repercussions of stroke can be better harnessed by employing modern neuropsychological assessment procedures. This allows both a detailed categorization of the patients for the selection and effectiveness of therapeutic intervention, as well as the construction of reliable prognostic models.
Software Design Conflicts: Maintainability versus Performance and Availability

A major goal in software engineering is to reduce the cost of maintaining software systems. Finding design methods which make software more easily maintainable has thus been one of the most prioritized challenges during the past decade. While mainstream software design has concentrated on maintainability, other software disciplines e.g. high-performance computing and high-availability systems, have developed other design methods which primarily support the quality attributes that are more important in their areas. More recently, demands have been made for high performance and high availability in typical mainstream software. At the same time, traditional high-performance and high-availability systems tend to incorporate more advanced business functionality, i.e. different software disciplines have started to converge. The situation is not unproblematic since the software design methods developed for achieving performance and availability may have been developed with a limited influence from maintainability, and vice versa. It is thus important to identify and analyze emerging design conflicts. In this thesis I have studied conflicts between maintainability design methods onthe one hand, and performance and availability methods and techniques on the other. I present the results of four case-studies involving four different applications. It is a characteristic of these applications that half of the system can be regarded as a telecommunications system and the other as a typical main-stream system, i.e. all systems make high demands on performance and availability but also very high demands on high maintainability. In studying these applications, I have identified two major conflicts: granularity in dynamic memory usage and source code size. My results show that these two conflicts can cause problems of such amplitude that some applications become unusable. I found that conflicts in certain situations are inherent; in other cases they can be avoided - or at least reduced - by adjusting the design methods used. I have also shown that conflicts may quite simply be a matter of misconceptions. Ten guidelines have been combined into a simple process with the aim of helping software designers to avoid and reduce conflicts. A method which automatically reduces the dynamic memory conflict in object-oriented applications written in C++ has been developed, implemented and evaluated. Finally, I have defined optimal recovery schemes for high availability clusters.
Medical Marijuana Laws and Illegal Marijuana Use

More and more states have passed laws that allow individuals to use marijuana for medical purposes.There is an ongoing, heated policy debate over whether these laws have increased marijuana use amongnon-patients. In this paper, I address that question empirically by studying marijuana possession arrests incities from 1988 to 2008. I estimate fixed effects models with city-specific time trends that can conditionon unobserved heterogeneities across cities in both their levels and trends. I find that these laws increasemarijuana arrests among adult males by about 15–20%. These results are further validated by findingsfrom data on treatment admissions to rehabilitation facilities: marijuana treatments among adult malesincreased by 10–20% after the passage of medical marijuana laws.
Impedance control with inner PI torque loop: Disturbance attenuation and impedance emulation

This paper investigates the performance of impedance control utilizing an inner loop PI torque controller. Stiffness and damping shaping vary within a specified range of values. The impedance control problem is formulated taking into account a specified range of stiffness and damping parameters. The analysis and design is carried out in discrete time. Stability, passivity, impedance emulation as well as disturbance (friction/torque ripple) attenuation properties are discussed. The controller is evaluated on a series elastic actuator and some experimental results are presented.
DOLCE ROCKS: Integrating Geoscience Ontologies with DOLCE

Conceptual representations are being developed within many geoscience domains to aid semantic-enabled scientific computing, e.g. geology, geophysics, hydrology, marine science, planetary science. These representations often make different ontological assumptions, causing their integration to be impeded. This is particularly problematic for science issues that involve crossdomain knowledge, such as those related to climate change, biodiversity, and hazards risk. Emerging foundational ontologies have the potential to alleviate this problem by providing a coherent and complete conceptual basis for domain representations. In this paper we present work-in-progress in which the DOLCE foundational ontology is used to integrate two geoscience knowledge representations, the GeoSciML schema and SWEET ontology, to enable cross-domain scientific computing. The preliminary results indicate good conceptual coverage by the foundational ontology, minimal conflict and overlap between the domain ontologies, alternative approaches for aligning with the foundational ontology, and several issues with the domain and foundational ontologies. An OWL-DL encoding is in progress and testing via data integration is planned.
Adaptation and Intelligent Retrieval of Learning Content to Enhance On-line Courses

Enhancing on-line courses is one of the most important issues of current e-Learning platforms. These platforms try to upgrade from simple environments where learners can download documents and take tests to complex environments where the learning content is adapted and intelligently retrieved. This paper presents a methodology for achieving such goals in an attempt to enhance on-line courses. The methodology makes intensive use of well structured content, embedded logging mechanism for learner’s performed activities and usage of state-of-the-art algorithms for proper knowledge acquisition.
A New Approach For TSK-Type Fuzzy Model Design

In this paper a new fuzzy modeling approach is proposed, which is devoted to discover knowledge from data and represent it in the form of fuzzy rules. In this approach, the structure identification and parameter optimization are carried out automatically without any assumption about the structure of the data, which is capable of finding the optimal number of the rules with an acceptable accuracy. The proposed fuzzy modeling approach has three significant modules: (1) generate initial rule-base, (2) Construct a new rule and add to rule-base, (3) tune rule-base. The proposed approach has been successfully applied to benchmark data sets. The results show the superiority of the model in comparison with the other fuzzy models in terms of error reduction and simplicity.
Fungal Endophytes from Three Cultivars of Panax ginseng Meyer Cultivated in Korea

In order to investigate the diversity of endophytes, fungal endophytes in Panax ginseng Meyer cultivated in Korea were isolated and identified using internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences of ribosomal DNA. Three cultivars of 3-year-old ginseng roots (Chunpoong, Yunpoong, and Gumpoong) were used to isolate fungal endophytes. Surface sterilized ginseng roots were placed on potato dextrose agar plates supplemented with ampicilin and streptomycin to inhibit bacterial growth. Overall, 38 fungal endophytes were isolated from 12 ginseng roots. According to the sequence analysis of the ITS1-5.8S-ITS2, 38 fungal isolates were classified into 4 different fungal species, which were Phoma radicina, Fusarium oxysporum, Setophoma terrestris and Ascomycota sp. 2-RNK. The most dominant fungal endophyte was P. radicina in 3 cultivars. The percentage of dominant endophytes of P. radicina was 65.8%. The percentage of colonization frequency of P. radicina was 80%, 52.9%, and 75% in Chunpoong, Yunpoong, and Gumpoong, respectively. The second most dominant fungal endophyte was F. oxysporum. The diversity of the fungal endophytes was low and no ginseng cultivar specificity among endophytes was detected in this study. The identified endophytes can be potential fungi for the production of bioactive compounds and control against ginseng pathogens.
Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing 2014 Designing N-polyvector Fields with Complex Polynomials

1% 0% Figure 1: A smooth 4-PolyVector field is generated from a sparse set of principal direction constraints (faces in light blue). We optimize the field for conjugacy and use it to guide the generation of a planar-quad mesh. Pseudocolor represents planarity. Abstract We introduce N-PolyVector fields, a generalization of N-RoSy fields for which the vectors are neither necessarily orthogonal nor rotationally symmetric. We formally define a novel representation for N-PolyVectors as the root sets of complex polynomials and analyze their topological and geometric properties. A smooth N-PolyVector field can be efficiently generated by solving a sparse linear system without integer variables. We exploit the flexibility of N-PolyVector fields to design conjugate vector fields, offering an intuitive tool to generate planar quadrilateral meshes.
Random Vectors of Bounded Weight and Their Linear Dependencies

Let μ be a probability distribution on a vector space V . When m vectors u1, . , um are drawn from μ, how likely are they to be linearly dependent? How is the dimension of their linear span distributed? Such questions have been addressed in a number of papers (e.g. [1],[2],[3],[6],[7]). Our work is motivated by problems in coding theory, and we address these problems in the following context: Here V = F q , the n-dimensional vector space over the field of order q and the distribution μ is uniform over the set of vectors with Hamming weight ≤ w. Let Mm×n be a random matrix whose rows u1, . , um are sampled independently from μ. We investigate two associated random variables: (i) The rank of such a random matrix M , (ii) The cardinality of kernel(M). Finally, we consider the distribution of random sums of such randomly chosen vectors u1, . , um. Of particular interest to us is to find the least Hamming weight w where the restriction on the vectors’ weights hardly matters. Namely, where the answers become nearly identical with the case w = n, in which vectors are selected uniformly from the entire space. Institute of Computer Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel. Work supported in part by grants from the Binational Israel-US Science Foundation and the Israel Academy of Science. Institute of Computer Science, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91904, Israel.