Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Suspending and Reinstating Collaborative Activities

There is an interest in how people coordinate multiple activities with multiple partners, and in particular, how people deal with interruptions. Interruptions happen unexpectedly. They can cause errors and loss of productivity. Effects of interruptions have been studied in individual tasks, but not in collaborative tasks. When pairs deal with an interruption, they have to jointly suspend their activity, address the matter, and later jointly reinstate their activity. The main goal of the dissertation was to define a model of suspensions and to measure constrains on the suspension and the reinstatement steps. Pairs suspend momentarily without taking leave of each other. This requires the coordination of two important processes: Politeness and common ground. First, politeness is often involved in suspensions, because asking one's partner to wait while one does something else is facethreatening. Two factors affect politeness: The degree of personal responsibility of participants proposing suspensions and durations of suspensions. Second, continuing tasks requires reconstructing joint representations of the tasks (common ground). Several factors affect the reconstruction of common ground: The persons interrupted the timing of suspension and the availability of cues about the state of the task. Five studies were conducted. Study 1 used naturally-occurring suspensions in telephone conversations from a corpus data. Study 2 & 3 used suspensions triggered with a cover story in laboratory. Study 2 & 3 manipulated participants’ roles in conversations and durations of interruptions. Results revealed that participants were more polite when suspension lasted longer, and it took more collaborative effort to reinstate conversations. Also, initiators of suspensions were more polite when they were listening than speaking. Study 4 & 5 manipulated the duration and the timing of interruptions during a goal-oriented task. Additionally, Study 4 manipulated the participants’ role during interruptions, and Study 5 manipulated the visibility of workspace between participants. Results showed that participants took more time to reinstate tasks when interruptions lasted longer and when it happened in the middle of sub-tasks, compared to when interruptions were brief and happened between sub-tasks. Also, they took more time to reinstate when both participants were distracted during interruptions, rather than when just one was distracted, and when participants did not share their workspace, rather than when they did share a workspace.
Amphibian Lens Histones and Their Relation to the Cell Cycle

Histones have been electrophoretically separated from acid extracts of the frog lens for the first time. The five conventional histone fractions, representing four electrophoretic bands (f1; f2b, f3; f2a2; and f2a1), are present in both the epithelial and fiber cells. In addition, a fifth fraction was isolated from both sources and the evidence suggests that it may be a tissue-specific histone, possibly related to the lysine-rich f2c fraction found previously only in nucleated erythrocytes. The epithelial cells contain a substantially greater amount of histone than the fiber cells. Moreover, the fibers, unlike the epithelium, manifest no net histone synthesis or turnover following lenticular explantation. Microspectrophotometric, radioautographic, and gel electrophoretic studies indicate that the histones are synthesized in frog lenses concurrently with DNA. Inhibition of DNA synthesis does not completely abolish that of histones but reduces it by about one-half. In the early stages of culture (prior to their synthesis and that of DNA) the histones appear to undergo alterations which are prevented by treatment with cycloheximide.
Capacity analysis of downlink MRT-SC in distributed antenna system

This paper investigates the downlink capacity of maximal ratio transmission-selection combining (MRT-SC) in the distributed antenna system (DAS). Composite fading channels are assumed, which include path loss, lognormal shadowing and multi-path Rayleigh fading. Analytical approximation of the capacity's cumulative distribution function (CDF) is derived by means of a moment generation function (MGF) based approach. The influence of transmit/receive antenna number on the capacity distribution and the impact of receiver location on the 10% outage capacity are investigated. Simulation results agree with the analytical approximations well. Furthermore, it shows that the 10% outage capacity of MRT-SC presents an approximately uniform distribution over most of the interested area, and its value is almost the same with maximal ratio transmission-maximal ratio combining (MRT-MRC).
Microcirculation - a tool for the study of pain in neonates and infants?

The relationship between pain and the newborn’s microcirculation has been a poorly understood field of research. Introduction of orthogonal polarization spectral (OPS) imaging and sidestream dark field (SDF) imaging to clinical medicine has opened a new field of monitoring and target treatment in various neonatal diseases and states. The non-invasiveness and safety of these bedside technologies make them very favorable in bringing us closer to a better understanding of the impact of pain on the newborn’s microcirculation. Early and long term impact of neonatal/infant pain syndrome, current tools of pain assessment in neonates and infants as well as infant microcirculation will be discussed.
The Effect of Speed of Processing Training on Microsaccade Amplitude

Older adults experience cognitive deficits that can lead to driving errors and a loss of mobility. Fortunately, some of these deficits can be ameliorated with targeted interventions which improve the speed and accuracy of simultaneous attention to a central and a peripheral stimulus called Speed of Processing training. To date, the mechanisms behind this effective training are unknown. We hypothesized that one potential mechanism underlying this training is a change in distribution of eye movements of different amplitudes. Microsaccades are small amplitude eye movements made when fixating on a stimulus, and are thought to counteract the “visual fading” that occurs when static stimuli are presented. Due to retinal anatomy, larger microsaccadic eye movements are needed to move a peripheral stimulus between receptive fields and counteract visual fading. Alternatively, larger microsaccades may decrease performance due to neural suppression. Because larger microsaccades could aid or hinder peripheral vision, we examine the distribution of microsaccades during stimulus presentation. Our results indicate that there is no statistically significant change in the proportion of large amplitude microsaccades during a Useful Field of View-like task after training in a small sample of older adults. Speed of Processing training does not appear to result in changes in microsaccade amplitude, suggesting that the mechanism underlying Speed of Processing training is unlikely to rely on microsaccades.
Comparison of Traditional and Subcutaneous Patellar Tendon Harvest

Our goal was to compare the results after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction using either the traditional one-incision or the subcutaneous two-incision technique to harvest the central third of the patellar tendon, particularly concerning disturbances in anterior knee sensitivity and the patient's ability to walk on his or her knees. One surgeon performed anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction on 124 patients with unilateral ruptures and no history of previous incisions in the anterior knee region. The traditional one-incision graft harvesting technique was used in 58 patients and the subcutaneous two-incision technique was used in 66 patients. At 2 years, the International Knee Documentation Committee classification, Lysholm score, arthrometry side-to-side difference, and single-legged hop test showed no significant differences between groups. The area of insensitivity was a median of 24 cm2 in the traditional harvest group and 0 cm2 in the subcutaneous harvest group. The patients with subcutaneous harvest had a tendency toward fewer problems during walking on their knees than did the patients with traditional harvest. Our conclusion is that the subcutaneous two-incision graft harvesting technique caused less disturbance in anterior knee sensitivity and a tendency of less discomfort during walking on one's knees than the traditional one-incision technique.
Regulation of Immune Cells by Eicosanoid Receptors

Eicosanoids are potent, bioactive, lipid mediators that regulate important components of the immune response, including defense against infection, ischemia, and injury, as well as instigating and perpetuating autoimmune and inflammatory conditions. Although these lipids have numerous effects on diverse cell types and organs, a greater understanding of their specific effects on key players of the immune system has been gained in recent years through the characterization of individual eicosanoid receptors, the identification and development of specific receptor agonists and inhibitors, and the generation of mice genetically deficient in various eicosanoid receptors. In this review, we will focus on the receptors for prostaglandin D2, DP1 and DP2/CRTH2; the receptors for leukotriene B4, BLT1 and BLT2; and the receptors for the cysteinyl leukotrienes, CysLT1 and CysLT2, by examining their specific effects on leukocyte subpopulations, and how they may act in concert towards the development of immune and inflammatory responses.
Iloprost therapy acutely decreases oxidative stress in patients affected by systemic sclerosis.

BACKGROUND Oxidative stress has been considered a leading factor in the pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis (SSc). Consistently with this hypothesis the determination of urinary isoprostanes, a reliable method for evaluation of oxidative stress, has recently showed increased levels of isoprostanes in SSc patients. Data about the effect on oxidative stress of accepted therapies for SSc such as iloprost therapy are lacking. OBJECTIVE The aim of this prospective study was to verify whether iloprost therapy in patients with SSc acutely reduces oxidative stress assessed by determination of 8-Iso PGF2alpha urinary levels. METHODS urine samples were obtained before and after a five-day cycle of iloprost infusion and urinary 8-Iso PGF2alpha levels were determined using a commercially available enzyme immunoassay. RESULTS Consistent with previous reports, we found an increased level of oxidative stress in SSc patients with respect to healthy controls. Basal urinary 8-iso PGF2alpha levels in SSc patients were significantly higher than those in healthy controls [2002(1122-3575) pg/mg creatinine vs. 334(225.7-441) pg/mg creatinine, p<0.001]. Moreover, as expected, urinary 8-iso PGF2alpha levels after iloprost therapy were significantly lower than basal levels [1277.5 pg/mg creatinine (742.7-2017.3) vs. 2002 pg/mg creatinine (1122-3575), p=0.001] but persisted significantly elevated respect to the levels of healthy controls (p<0.001). The effect of iloprost on oxidative stress appeared significant in patients with early and limited form of disease. CONCLUSIONS This prospective open-label explorative study suggests that standard course of iloprost therapy may acutely reduce oxidative stress in SSc patients. This effect appears to be more consistent in the early phases and in the limited subset of disease. Further larger trials are needed to confirm our results and to explain the pathway of such reduction, its clinical significance and potential therapeutic implications.
SCAD: collective discovery of attribute values

Search engines today offer a rich user experience, no longer restricted to "ten blue links". For example, the query "Canon EOS Digital Camera" returns a photo of the digital camera, and a list of suitable merchants and prices. Similar results are offered in other domains like food, entertainment, travel, etc. All these experiences are fueled by the availability of structured data about the entities of interest. To obtain this structured data, it is necessary to solve the following problem: given a category of entities with its schema, and a set of Web pages that mention and describe entities belonging to the category, build a structured representation for the entity under the given schema. Specifically, collect structured numerical or discrete attributes of the entities. Most previous approaches regarded this as an information extraction problem on individual documents, and made no special use of numerical attributes. In contrast, we present an end-to-end framework which leverages signals not only from the Web page context, but also from a collective analysis of all the pages corresponding to an entity, and from constraints related to the actual values within the domain. Our current implementation uses a general and flexible Integer Linear Program (ILP) to integrate all these signals into holistic decisions over all attributes. There is one ILP per entity and it is small enough to be solved in under 38 milliseconds in our experiments. We apply the new framework to a setting of significant practical importance: catalog expansion for Commerce search engines, using data from Bing Shopping. Finally, we present experiments that validate the effectiveness of the framework and its superiority to local extraction.
Exploiting temporal coherence in real-time rendering

Temporal coherence (TC), the correlation of contents between adjacent rendered frames, exists across a wide range of scenes and motion types in practical real-time rendering. By taking advantage of TC, we can save redundant computation and improve the performance of many rendering tasks significantly with only a marginal decrease in quality. This not only allows us to incorporate more computationally intensive shading effects to existing applications, but also offers exciting opportunities of extending high-end graphics applications to reach lower-spec consumer-level hardware. This course aims to introduce participants to the concepts of TC, and provide them the working practical and theoretical knowledge to exploit TC in a variety of shading tasks. It begins with an introduction of the general notion of TC in rendering, as well as an overview of the recent developments in this field. Then it focuses on a key data structure - the reverse reprojection cache, which is the foundation of many applications. The course proceeds with a number of extensions of the basic algorithm for assisting in multi-pass shading effects, shader antialiasing, casting shadows and global-illumination effects. Finally, several more general coherence topics beyond pixel reuse are introduced, including visibility culling optimization and object-space global-illumination approximations. For all the major techniques and applications covered, implementation and practical issues involved in development are addressed in detail. In general, we emphasize "know how" and the guidelines related to algorithm choices. After the course, participants are encouraged to find and utilize TC in their own applications and rapidly adapt existing algorithms to meet their requirements. The version of the course notes you are currently reading was created at September 23, 2010. The newest version of these course notes can be downloaded from this URL.
Can Biosignals be Expressive?

We are exploring the concept of expressive biosignals: leveraging wearable technologies to introduce sensed physiological data as cues for social perception. Biosignals can help us achieve a deeper understanding of each other by revealing or clarifying the psychological processes that underlie our subjective experience. We conducted an exploratory study investigating expressive biosignals, comparing the influence of a variety of brain activity visualizations on impression formation. Results revealed that while participants readily infer emotional and cognitive states from visualized brain activity, the ambiguity of the data can lead to diverse perceptions and interpretations. Participants also expressed concerns that the observation of another individual's data during interaction might be invasive or distracting. We present a set of design considerations addressing issues of interpretability, integration, and privacy of biosignals in interpersonal contexts.
Food and beverage choices contributing to dietary guidelines adherence in the Lower Mississippi Delta

Abstract Objectives The objectives of the present study were to evaluate diet quality among Lower Mississippi Delta (LMD) residents using the Healthy Eating Index-2005 (HEI-2005) and to identify the top five dietary sources contributing to HEI-2005 components. Demographic differences in HEI-2005 scores were also explored. Design Diet quality was evaluated using HEI-2005. Demographic differences in HEI-2005 scores were investigated using multivariable regression models adjusting for multiple comparisons. The top five dietary sources contributing to HEI-2005 components were identified by estimating and ranking mean MyPyramid equivalents overall and by demographic characteristics. Setting Dietary data, based on a single 24 h recall, from the Foods of Our Delta Study 2000 (FOODS 2000) were used in the analyses. Subjects FOODS 2000 adult participants 18 years of age or older. Results Younger age was the largest determinant of low diet quality in the LMD with HEI-2005 total and seven component scores declining with decreasing age. Income was not a significant factor for HEI-2005 total or component scores. The top five dietary sources differed by all five of the demographic variables, particularly for total vegetables and energy from solid fats, alcoholic beverages and added sugars (SoFAAS). Soft drinks were the leading source of SoFAAS energy intake for all demographic groups. Conclusions The assessment of diet quality and identification of top dietary sources revealed the presence of demographic differences for selected HEI-2005 components. These findings allow identification of food patterns and culturally appropriate messaging and highlight the difficulties of treating this region as a homogeneous population.
Healthy Video Gaming: Oxymoron or Possibility?

Data from the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System reveal that 28.8% of American adolescentswere overweight or at risk of being overweight (Eaton et al. 2006), and the percentage of overweightadolescents in the United States has more than doubled in the past twenty years (Centers for DiseasePrevention and Control 2004). Video games have been singled out as a major culprit in this increase; theamount of time that young people spent playing video games nearly doubled between 1999 and 2003, from29 to 49 minutes per day (Roberts, Foehr, and Rideout 2005), occupying time that may otherwise have beenspent engaging in physical activity (Vandewater, Shim, and Caplovitz 2004). Interventions designed to reducethe time that children spend playing video games have yielded significant reductions in obesity-related healthmeasures (Robinson 1999). Video games, then, have been identified as a large part of the problem of rising rates of child obesity;however, a new genre of video games, aptly termed exergames or exertainment, could become part of thesolution. While traditional video games are controlled with handheld keypads, exergames rely on sensingtechnologies that integrate physical movement with virtual activities. For instance, low-cost cameras andadvanced video-processing algorithms allow video games to be controlled with body movements, andtouch-sensitive floor mats allow players to dance in virtual spaces. Although such games are admittedly notan ideal solution to the complex problem of childhood obesity, exergames are arguably a healthier alternativeto traditional video games. Furthermore, exergames may provide motivation for youngsters who do nottypically exercise. Children who are already video game enthusiasts may voluntarily engage in physicalactivity when it becomes part of a virtual experience; those who find traditional exercise boring or intimidatingmay be motivated to play video games that ask them to dance, do yoga with a virtual trainer, or ride virtualsurfboards. In this way, exergaming offers a means of channeling in healthy directions behaviors that usuallyexclude physical exertion. This article considers how exergaming can improve the health and fitness of children. A survey of currentexergames is followed by a consideration of how exergames could connect this generation of children withhealthy physical activity. The article concludes with a discussion of issues in need of further research.
Estimating Informational Frictions in Sticky Relationships

This paper introduces a novel empirical approach to estimate the effects of an informational friction limiting the reallocation of credit after a shock to banks. Because lenders rely on private information when deciding which relationship to end, borrowers looking for a new lender are adversely selected. I show how to identify private information separately from information common to all lenders, but unobservable to the econometrician, by using bank shocks within a discrete-choice model of relationships. Applying this approach to the U.S. corporate loan market during the recent crisis, this informational friction can explain 10% of the decrease in lending.
A middleware framework coordinating processor/power resource management for multimedia applications

It is challenging to reduce the processor power consumption while meeting the processor resource requirement of distributed multimedia applications in portable computers. This paper presents a middleware framework coordinating the processor/power resource management (PPRM) in a mobile computing environment. Our framework has four major contributions: (1) providing a power-aware resource reservation mechanism, where admission control is based on the processor utilization and power availability; (2) adjusting the speed and corresponding power consumption of the processor depending upon events and triggered by the change of the system workload or power availability; (3) updating reservation contracts of multimedia applications to maintain their resource requirements while adjusting the processor speed; (4) notifying applications about the change of resource status to enable them to adapt their behavior and complete tasks before the power drains. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of the coordinating PPRM framework to save energy and maintain the resource requirements of multimedia applications.
De zelf-determinatie theorie: Kwalitatief goed motiveren op de werkvloer

The call for a positive psychology has stimulated research on optimal functioning both in general and in the context of work. The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) might provide a useful framework in which positive work and organisational psychology can be grounded and might stimulate theoretical developments in this field. Starting from a positive concept of man, ZDT reflects upon different aspects of motivation. In the current paper, we describe ZDT and touch upon its relationships with other, and perhaps more well-known, work and organisational theories. We furthermore discuss the empirical evidence in favour of ZDT and illustrate its practical relevance in the context of work.