Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Collected and connected : mindfulness and the early adolescent

Using an event sampling procedure with a sample of 114 early adolescent boys and girls, the present study investigated three fundamental questions about the associations between mindfulness, social relations, stress, and emotional well-being. These questions concerned (a) the defining features of mindfulness as a state and trait construct, (b) whether mindfulness is naturally occurring or cultivated exclusively through "formal" practice, and (c) whether or not mindfulness is related to social functioning. Following a review of four conceptually- and empirically-related areas of inquiry, specifically perceived stress, emotion, mindfulness, and peer relations, a set of hypotheses were proposed and examined. As expected, mindfulness was observed to be both a state and trait. At the state level, perceived stress partially mediated between mindfulness and negative emotion. At the trait level, mindfulness was: positively correlated with positive emotion, friendship extensivity, and popularity; negatively correlated with perceived stress, negative emotion, anxiety, and depression. Trait mindfulness was observed to moderate the associations between (a) negative emotion and friendship extensivity, (b) depression and friendship extensivity, and (c) negative emotion and popularity. Trait mindfulness predicted state mindfulness, and it predicted state stress and state negative emotion, though not as well as state mindfulness. The following results were contrary to expectation. At the trait level, mindfulness: was not associated with age, did not moderate between perceived stress and emotional well-being, and did not moderate between perceived stress and social functioning. Finally, an unexpected and noteworthy finding was that mindfulness loaded on the same factor as stress, negative emotion, and depression ( preoccupied non-acceptance ; mindfulness loaded negatively, the other traits positively), and this factor was negatively associated with another factor, social competence . This finding suggests that mindfulness is associated with both emotional well-being and social functioning. In sum, these results suggest that mindfulness is a state and trait, naturally occurring, and related to interpersonal functioning in early adolescence. Implications, study limitations, and future directions are discussed.
Visible rodent brain-wide networks at single-neuron resolution

There are some unsolvable fundamental questions, such as cell type classification, neural circuit tracing and neurovascular coupling, though great progresses are being made in neuroscience. Because of the structural features of neurons and neural circuits, the solution of these questions needs us to break through the current technology of neuroanatomy for acquiring the exactly fine morphology of neuron and vessels and tracing long-distant circuit at axonal resolution in the whole brain of mammals. Combined with fast-developing labeling techniques, efficient whole-brain optical imaging technology emerging at the right moment presents a huge potential in the structure and function research of specific-function neuron and neural circuit. In this review, we summarize brain-wide optical tomography techniques, review the progress on visible brain neuronal/vascular networks benefit from these novel techniques, and prospect the future technical development.
View-Independent Facial Action Unit Detection

Automatic Facial Action Unit (AU) detection has drawn more and more attention over the past years due to its significance to facial expression analysis. Frontal-view AU detection has been extensively evaluated, but cross-pose AU detection is a less-touched problem due to the scarcity of the related dataset. The challenge of Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis (FERA2017) just released a large-scale videobased AU detection dataset across different facial poses. To deal with this challenging task, we develop a simple and efficient deep learning based system to detect AU occurrence under nine different facial views. In this system, we first crop out facial images by using morphology operations including binary segmentation, connected components labeling and region boundaries extraction, then for each type of AU, we train a corresponding expert network by specifically fine-tuning the VGG-Face network on cross-view facial images, so as to extract more discriminative features for the subsequent binary classification. In the AU detection sub-challenge, our proposed method achieves the mean accuracy of 77.8% (vs. the baseline 56.1%), and promotes the F1 score to 57.4% (vs. the baseline 45.2%).
Co-located storage systems with renewable energy sources for voltage support in distribution networks

Recently, new standards and incentives are spreading the installation of energy storage systems (ESSs) to promote, inter alia, the renewable energy sources (RES) penetration. ESSs can be used for supporting producers and distribution system operators to give more flexibility to the grid in terms of dispatching capability of RES, load shifting, peak shaving, ancillary services. This paper proposes a local voltage control method based on the capability of ESSs to exchange power with the network in order to maximize, as much as possible, the active power production avoiding the disconnection of generators when voltage limits are violated. The method is applied to a real Italian test MV network and the obtained results are encouraging.
The Revolving Door and Worker Flows in Banking Regulation

This paper traces career transitions of federal and state U.S. banking regulators from a large sample of publicly available curricula vitae, and provides basic facts on worker flows between the regulatory and private sector resulting from the revolving door. We find strong countercyclical net worker flows into regulatory jobs, driven largely by higher gross outflows into the private sector during booms. These worker flows are also driven by state-specific banking conditions as measured by local banks’ profitability, asset quality and failure rates. The regulatory sector seems to experience a retention challenge over time, with shorter regulatory spells for workers, and especially those with higher education. Evidence from cross-state enforcement actions of regulators shows gross inflows into regulation and gross outflows from regulation are both higher during periods of intense enforcement, though gross outflows are significantly smaller in magnitude. These results appear inconsistent with a “quid-pro-quo” explanation of the revolving door, but consistent with a “regulatory schooling” hypothesis.
Polygenic Risk for Externalizing Psychopathology and Executive Dysfunction in Trauma-Exposed Veterans

The frequent co-occurrence of antisocial behavior and other disinhibited phenotypes reflects a highly heritable externalizing spectrum. We examined the molecular genetic basis of this spectrum by testing polygenic associations with psychopathology symptoms, impulsive traits, and cognitive functions in two samples of primarily military veterans (n = 537, n = 194). We also investigated whether polygenic risk for externalizing moderated the effects of trauma on these phenotypes. As hypothesized, polygenic risk positively predicted externalizing psychopathology and negatively predicted performance on inhibitory control tasks. Gene-by-environment effects were also evident, with trauma exposure predicting greater impulsivity and less working memory capacity, but only at high levels of genetic liability. As expected, polygenic risk was not associated with internalizing psychopathology or episodic memory performance. This is the first independent replication of the polygenic score as a measure of genetic predispositions for externalizing and provides preliminary evidence that executive dysfunction is a heritable vulnerability for externalizing psychopathology.
TREC-8 Ad-Hoc, Query and Filtering Track Experiments using PIRCS

In TREC-8, we participated in automatic ad-hoc retrieval as well as the query and filtering tracks. The theme of our participation is ‘retrieval lists combination’, and the technique is applied throughout our experiments to various degree. It is pointed out that our PIRCS system may be considered as a combination of probabilistic retrieval model and a language model approach. For ad-hoc, three types of experiments were done with short, medium and long queries as before. General approach is similar to TREC-7, but combination of retrieval lists from different query types were used to boost effectiveness. For query track, we submitted one short-query set, and performed retrieval for twenty one natural language query vairants. For filtering track, experiments for adaptive, batch filtering, and routing were performed. For adaptive, historical selected document list was used to train profile term weights and dynamically vary retrieval status value (rsv) threshold for deciding document selection during the course of filtering. For batch filtering, Financial Times FT92 data was used to define 6 retrieval profiles whose results were combined based on coefficients trained via a genetic algorithm. Logistic regression transforms rsv`s to probabilities. Routing was similarly done with additional training data obtained from non-FT collections and two additional profiles were defined and combined
Modeling in Branding: a critical ethnography approach

Purpose – This paper aims to shed light on the potential of ethnography to provide a dialectical approach to modeling the process of branding as its focus widens from managerial to social.Design/methodology/approach – A critical approach to ethnography is adopted and implemented in light of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's ethnographic modeling technique of “participant objectification”. Findings – The paper demonstrates from the customer standpoint, of a case of a grocery retailer, the ability of critical ethnography to dialectically model the branding process as an organic cultural whole, which envelops an intricate set of different, yet interdependent, social and managerial systems, functioning in a coherent and complementary manner.Research limitations/implications – The empirical evidence is limited to the area of grocery retailing. Thus, widening the application of the technique in other areas would be desirable.Practical implications – The dialectical nature of the critical approach to model.
Remove Noise and Reduce Blurry Effect From Degraded Document Images Using MATLAB Algorithm

Digital images are subjected to blurring due to many hardware limitations such as atmospheric disturbance, device noise and poor focus quality. In order to reveal the detailed information carried in the digital image, image de-blurring or restoration is necessary. Image de-blurring have wide applications, from consumer photography, e.g., remove motion blur due to camera shake, to radar imaging and tomography, e.g., remove the effect of imaging system response. This research is aimed to provide a basic knowledge of image degradation and restoration process. Offline handwriting recognition approaches proceed by segmenting characters into smaller pieces which are recognized separately. The recognition result of a word is then the composition of the individually recognized parts. Inspired by results in cognitive psychology, researchers have begun to focus on holistic word recognition approaches. Here we present a holistic word recognition approach for degraded documents, which is motivated by the fact that for severely degraded documents a segmentation of words into characters will produce very poor results. The quality of the original documents does not allow us to recognize them with high accuracy our goal here is to produce transcriptions that will allow successful retrieval of images, which has been shown to be feasible even in such noisy environments. We believe that this is the first systematic approach to recognizing words in historical manuscripts with extensive experiments. Our experiment is to clear the degraded documents using some filter approach. We will use wiener filter for removing noise partials from different images using wiener filter algorithm. Keywords— Degraded documents, noise, de-noising, Wiener filter algorithm, Mean Square Error, PSNR.
Evaluating academic and student affairs partnerships: the impact of living-learning communities on the development of critical thinking skills in college freshmen

This dissertation was the first study to estimate the direct and indirect effects of living-learning community (LLC) participation on a standardized measure of critical thinking using a multi-institution longitudinal research design. It is possible that despite being lauded nationally as an effective institutional intervention, LLCs may simply cluster students predisposed to be more engaged with their environment, more academically prepared, and more open to growth compared with traditional residence hall peers. Recent studies have demonstrated a positive relationship between LLC participation and self-reported growth in critical thinking. The findings of this study demonstrate markedly different conclusions from previous LLC studies exploring the outcome of critical thinking. The results of this study suggest that net of academic ability and background and institutional characteristics, students who participated in LLCs did not demonstrate greater gains on a standardized measure of critical thinking than their peers in traditional residence hall environments. To investigate the relationship between LLC participation and growth in critical thinking, I performed secondary data analysis from the 2006, 2007, and 2008 cohorts of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education – a longitudinal study of teaching practices, programs, and institutional structures that support liberal arts education. From the initial 53 colleges and universities in the WNSLAE study, I selected a sub-sample of 19 institutions with formal LLC programs to make a more conservative estimate of the reliability of participation in an LLC. The final sub-sample included 435 (25%) students in the experimental group (students participating in LLCs) and 1,282 (75%) students in the control group (students living in traditional residence halls). This study makes four important contributions to the literature on LLC. First, the longitudinal nature of the WNSLAE data allowed for an estimate of growth during the first-year of college and controls for students’ self-selection into the experimental or control groups. Second, the critical thinking module of the Collegiate Assessment of
A novel polymorphism in a FOXA1 binding site of the human UDP glucuronosyltransferase 2B17 gene modulates promoter activity and is associated with altered levels of circulating androstane-3α, 17β-

Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Flinders University School of Medicine, Flinders Medical Centre, Bedford Park, SA 5042, Australia (DGH, DGS, PIM), Cancer Epidemiology Centre, Cancer Council Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (GS, GGG, DRE), Centre for Molecular, Environmental, Genetic, and Analytic Epidemiology, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia (GS, GGG, DRE, JLH), Centre for Cancer Biology, SA Pathology, Adelaide, SA 5000, Australia and Discipline of Medicine, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia 5005 (PAG), Dame Roma Mitchell Cancer Research Laboratories, Discipline of Medicine, University of Adelaide, Hanson Institute, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia (JT, WDT). Molecular Pharmacology Fast Forward. Published on July 13, 2010 as doi:10.1124/mol.110. 065953
SAR I CE IMAGE CLASSIFICATION USING PARALLELEPIPED CLASSIFIER BASED ON GRAM -SCHMIDT SPECTRAL TECHNIQUE

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a special type of imaging radar that involves advanced technology and complex data processing to obtain detailed images from the lake surface. Lake ice typically reflects more of the radar energy emitted by the sensor than the surrounding area, which makes it easy to distinguish between the water and the ice surface. In this research work, SAR images are used for ice classification based on supervised and unsupervised classification algorithms. In the pre-processing stage, Hue saturation value (HSV) and Gram–Schmidt spectral sharpening techniques are applied for sharpening and resampling to attain highresolution pixel size. Based on the performance evaluation metrics it is proved that GramSchmidt spectral sharpening performs better than sharpening the HSV between the boundaries. In classification stage, Gram–Schmidt spectral technique based sharpened SAR images are used as the input for classifying using parallelepiped and ISO data classifier. The performances of the classifiers are evaluated with overall accuracy and kappa coefficient. From the experimental results, ice from water is classified more accurately in the parallelepiped supervised classification algorithm.
Select actionable positive or negative sequential patterns

Negative sequential patterns (NSP) refer to sequences with non-occurring and occurring items, and can play an irre- placeable role in understanding and addressing many business applications. However, some problems occur after mining NSP, the most urgent one of which is how to select the actionable positive or negative sequential patterns. This is due to the following factors: 1) positive sequential patterns (PSP) mined before considering NSP may mislead decisions; and 2) it is much more difficult to select actionable patterns after mining NSP, as the number of NSPs is much greater than PSPs. In this paper, an improved method of pruning uninteresting itemsets to fit for a selecting actionable sequential pattern (ASP) is proposed. Then, a novel and efficient method, called SAP, is proposed to select the actionable positive and negative sequential patterns. Experimental results indicate that SAP is very efficient in the selection of ASP. To the best of our knowledge, SAP is the best method for the selection of actionable positive and negative sequential patterns.
Human Hemoglobin Shares Bioactivities Ascribed to Human Tumor Necrosis Factor‐α

Hemoglobin mediated cytotoxicity and apoptosis has been evaluated in Tumor necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α) sensitive cell line, U937 and compared with TNF‐α. Both species of hemoglobin, Hemoglobin A2 and Hemoglobin A0 induced apoptosis and cytotoxicity in U937 cell as measured by flow cytometry and 3‐(4,5‐dihydro‐6‐(4‐(3,4‐dimethoxybenzooyl)‐1‐piperazinyl)‐2(1H)‐quinoline (MTT) assay respectively. Different concentration of Hemoglobin A0 (4 ng/mL to 4000 ng/mL) induced apoptosis ranging from 9% to 16% in U937 cells. 4000 ng/mL hemoglobin A0 showed maximal apoptotic cells. TNF‐α showed 87% apoptotic U937 cells at concentration of 1 pg/mL. HbA0 displayed cytotoxicity in U937 cell line at higher concentration in comparison to TNF‐α. 4000 ng/mL of hemoglobin A0 showed optimal cytotoxic response in U937 cells. A dose response curve was also observed with varying doses of hemoglobin A0. U937 cells pretreated with serum activated LPS for 1 hr and incubated with different concentration of hemoglobin or human TNF‐α for 24 h reduced the cytotoxic effect on U937. Dexamethasone treatment of U937 cells helped in protecting the HbA0 and HbA2 mediated cytotoxicity and anti‐TNF‐α antibody neutralized the hemoglobin mediated apoptosis and cytotoxicity. It is therefore apparent that human hemoglobin shares some of the bioactivities previously ascribed to TNF‐α. Sharing of bioactivities of TNF‐α by hemoglobin is interesting and suggests that cell free hemoglobin can mimic TNF‐α functionally.
Per-residue energy decomposition pharmacophore model to enhance virtual screening in drug discovery: a study for identification of reverse transcriptase inhibitors as potential anti-HIV agents

A novel virtual screening approach is implemented herein, which is a further improvement of our previously published “target-bound pharmacophore modeling approach”. The generated pharmacophore library is based only on highly contributing amino acid residues, instead of arbitrary pharmacophores, which are most commonly used in the conventional approaches in literature. Highly contributing amino acid residues were distinguished based on free binding energy contributions obtained from calculation from molecular dynamic (MD) simulations. To the best of our knowledge; this is the first attempt in the literature using such an approach; previous approaches have relied on the docking score to generate energy-based pharmacophore models. However, docking scores are reportedly unreliable. Thus, we present a model for a per-residue energy decomposition, constructed from MD simulation ensembles generating a more trustworthy pharmacophore model, which can be applied in drug discovery workflow. This work is aimed at introducing a more rational approach to the field of drug design, rather than comparing the validity of this approach against those previously reported. We recommend additional computational and experimental work to further validate this approach. This approach was used to screen for potential reverse transcriptase inhibitors using the pharmacophoric features of compound GSK952. The complex was subjected to docking, thereafter, MD simulation confirmed the stability of the system. Experimentally determined inhibitors with known HIV-reverse transcriptase inhibitory activity were used to validate the protocol. Two potential hits (ZINC46849657 and ZINC54359621) showed a significant potential with regard to free binding energy. Reported results obtained from this work confirm that this new approach is favorable in the future of the drug design industry.
Defects in the synthetic pathway prevent DIF-1 mediated stalk lineage specification cascade in the non-differentiating social amoeba, Acytostelium subglobosum

ABSTRACT Separation of somatic cells from germ-line cells is a crucial event for multicellular organisms, but how this step was achieved during evolution remains elusive. In Dictyostelium discoideum and many other dictyostelid species, solitary amoebae gather and form a multicellular fruiting body in which germ-line spores and somatic stalk cells differentiate, whereas in Acytostelium subglobosum, acellular stalks form and all aggregated amoebae become spores. In this study, because most D. discoideum genes known to be required for stalk cell differentiation have homologs in A. subglobosum, we inferred functional variations in these genes and examined conservation of the stalk cell specification cascade of D. discoideum mediated by the polyketide differentiation-inducing factor-1 (DIF-1) in A. subglobosum. Through heterologous expression of A. subglobosum orthologs of DIF-1 biosynthesis genes in D. discoideum, we confirmed that two of the three genes were functional equivalents, while DIF-methyltransferase (As-dmtA) involved at the final step of DIF-1 synthesis was not. In fact, DIF-1 activity was undetectable in A. subglobosum lysates and amoebae of this species were not responsive to DIF-1, suggesting a lack of DIF-1 production in this species. On the other hand, the molecular function of an A. subglobosum ortholog of DIF-1 responsive transcription factor was equivalent with that of D. discoideum and inhibition of polyketide synthesis caused developmental arrest in A. subglobosum, which could not be rescued by DIF-1 addition. These results suggest that non-DIF-1 polyketide cascades involving downstream transcription factors are required for fruiting body development of A. subglobosum.