Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Properties of case/pseudocontrol analysis for genetic association studies: Effects of recombination, ascertainment, and multiple affected offspring

The case/pseudocontrol approach is a general framework for family‐based association analysis, incorporating several previously proposed methods such as the transmission/disequilibrium test and log‐linear modelling of parent‐of‐origin effects. In this report, I examine the properties of methods based on a case/pseudocontrol approach when applied to a linked marker rather than (or in addition to) the true disease locus or loci, and when applied to sibships that have been ascertained on, or that may simply contain, multiple affected sibs. Through simulations and analytical calculations, I show that the expected values of the observed relative risk parameters (estimating quantities such as effects due to a child's own genotype, maternal genotype, and parent‐of‐origin) depend crucially on the ascertainment scheme used, as well as on whether there is non‐negligible recombination between the true disease locus and the locus under study. In the presence of either recombination or ascertainment on multiple affected offspring, methods based on conditioning on parental genotypes are shown to give unbiased genotype relative risk estimates at the true disease locus (or loci) but biased estimates of population genotype relative risks at a linked marker, suggesting that the resulting estimates may be misleading when used to predict the power of future studies. Methods that allow for exchangeability of parental genotypes are shown (in the presence of either recombination or ascertainment on multiple affected offspring) to produce false‐positive evidence of maternal genotype effects when there are true parent‐of‐origin or mother‐child interaction effects, even when analyzing the true locus. These results suggest that care should be taken in both the interpretation and application of parameter estimates obtained from family‐based genetic association studies. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Altruism and the Decision to Vote

A core problem at the foundation of rational-actor models for politics is the seeming irrationality of voting, i.e. that it is irrational for voters to vote and to be informed about politics. Myerson has shown that only low turnouts are feasible if we just assume citizens vote on the basis of self interest, and there is uncertainty as to the number of voters. I modify the standard analysis by arguing that individuals are motivated by weak altruistic considerations when deciding whether to vote. First, I present a formal analysis of voting that has a unique, symmetric Bayes–Nash equilibrium for the voting game. It is a mixedstrategy equilibrium which also specifies the conditions under which high turnouts (in excess of 50% of the potential voters) will result. Second, I present an empirical test of the hypothesis using a unique data set (the National Election Survey Pilot Study in 1995) which includes various measures of ‘humanitarianism. ’ I am able to integrate that survey with the 1994 NES election survey to provide evidence that weak altruism is the single most important determinant of the decision to vote.
Motivation and engagement in computer-based learning tasks: investigating key contributing factors

This paper, drawing on a research project concerning the educational use of digital mind games with primary school students, aims at giving a contribution to the understanding of which are the main factors influencing student motivation during computer-based learning activities. It puts forward some ideas and experience based reflections, starting by considering digital games that are widely recognized as the most promising ICT tools to enhance student motivation. The project results suggest that student genuine engagement in learning activities is mainly related to the actual possession of the skills and of the cognitive capacities needed to perform the task. In this perspective, cognitive overload should be regarded as one of the main reasons contributing to hinder student motivation and, consequently, should be avoided. Other elements such as game attractiveness and experimental setting constraints resulted to have a lower effect on student motivation.
Validation of the mantle cell lymphoma international prognostic index: A single‐center retrospective analysis

Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) is a unique, recently recognized entity with a variable clinical course [1]. Its historical grouping as an indolent lymphoma belies its common behavior, which is generally aggressive and incurable, with a median survival of about 5 years with modern therapy [2]. In an effort to improve outcomes in MCL, intensified therapies, including the rituximab plus HyperCVAD regimen [3] and incorporation of hematopoetic progenitor cell transplantation (HPCT) [4-6], have been used. However, although capable of inducing remissions in most patients, there is little proof that intensive first-line therapy prolongs overall survival (OS), and a continual relapse pattern is commonly observed [4,7-10].
Some Results on the Function and Quality of Citations

Citations of scientific articles have been used in recent years as measures of scientific accomplishments of an individual, a group, an institution, or a country, as well as for following the temporal evolution of science in general, or a certain field of science in particular. ' The use of citations for this purpose has evoked a certain amount of criticism from some who have felt that, for a variety of reasons, such measures give an ambiguous or even misleading picture of scientific developments.2 Most of these critiques, however, have lacked the
Self-Adaptive Differential Evolution for Bio-Inspired Neuromorphic Collision Avoidance

We present the optimisation of a neuromorphic adaptation of a spiking neural network model of the locust Lobula Giant Movement Detector (LGMD), which detects looming objects and can be used to facilitate obstacle avoidance in robotic applications. Our model is constrained by the parameters of a mixed signal analogue-digital neuromorphic device and is driven by the output of a neuromorphic vision sensor DVS. Due to the number of user-defined parameters and the difficulty to find values that perform well we investigate the use of Differential Evolution and self-adaptive DE (SADE) to find optimal values. We demonstrate that these optimisation algorithms are suitable candidates to find suitable parameters for an obstacle avoidance system on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
A Neuro Fuzzy based conditional shortest path routing protocol for wireless mesh network

A modified nuero fuzzy based conditional shortest path routing protocol for wireless mesh network is simulated and studied. In wireless mesh networks many routing protocols used for conditional shortest path routing like AODV, by considering only the shortest route to destination . The data transfer in wireless mesh networks is to and from the AP. These protocol congested the routes and overloaded AP's to reduce the congestion by avoiding a traffic aware process and to improving the network performance on the system. However, major problem based on routing, such as traffic, delay and low network performance. To make a efficient routing based on CSPR for wireless mesh network, a Neuro fuzzy logic routing is proposed in this paper. Neuro fuzzy logic to perform high level data to reach the destination, this one to choose the path from distance and time efficiency, network throughput, reduce delay on the network. Simulation results in ns-2 verify that they perform better than the existing fuzzy logic routing protocol.
Build a Human Project: Improving Attitude and Increasing Anatomy Content Knowledge and Skills for Middle-Level Students.

For four years middle-level students and science teachers have participated in a two-week summer workshop outreach project collaboratively designed and implemented by School of Medicine and Department of Education faculty. The project’s goals included improving the attitude of student participants toward the study of science; increasing participants’ knowledge of the structure, function, and care of the human organism through inquiry-based hands-on exploration; and developing participants’ process skills through hands-on activities. Formative and summative assessment of the program’s effectiveness in reaching its goals included quantitative and qualitative strategies. Student attitudes remained high, and even improved significantly during two of the years. Content knowledge was assessed through a K-W-L chart, a multiple choice pre- and posttest, and student feedback forms. Authentic assessment techniques were used to evaluate development of process skills. The triangulated results develop a rich picture of success in meeting project goals.
Treatment of borderline personality disorder and co-occurring anxiety disorders

Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent among individuals with borderline personality disorder, with comorbidity rates of up to 90%. Anxiety disorders have been found to reduce the likelihood of achieving remission from borderline personality disorder over time and to increase the risk of suicide and self-injury in this population. Evidence-based treatments for borderline personality disorder have not sufficiently focused on targeting anxiety disorders, and their effects on these disorders are either limited or unknown. Conversely, evidence-based treatments for anxiety disorders typically exclude suicidal, self-injuring, and seriously comorbid patients, thereby limiting their generalizability to individuals with borderline personality disorder. To address these limitations, recent research has begun to emerge focused on developing and evaluating treatments for individuals with co-occurring borderline personality disorder and anxiety disorders, specifically posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with promising initial results. However, there is a need for additional research in this area, particularly studies evaluating the treatment of anxiety disorders among high-risk and complex borderline personality disorder patients.
Chemistry-Climate Model Simulations of Twenty- First Century Stratospheric Climate and Circulation Changes

The response of stratospheric climate and circulation to increasing amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and ozone recovery in the twenty-first century is analyzed in simulations of 11 chemistry–climate models using near-identical forcings and experimental setup. In addition to an overall global cooling of the stratosphere in the simulations (0.59 6 0.07 K decade 21 at 10 hPa), ozone recovery causes a warming of the Southern Hemisphere polar lower stratosphere in summer with enhanced cooling above. The rate of warming correlates with the rate of ozone recovery projected by the models and, on average, changes from 0.8 to 0.48 K decade 21 at 100 hPa as the rate of recovery declines from the first to the second half of the century. In the winter northern polar lower stratosphere the increased radiative cooling from the growing abundance of GHGs is, in most models, balanced by adiabatic warming from stronger polar downwelling. In the Antarctic lower stratosphere the models simulate an increase in low temperature extremes required for polar stratospheric cloud (PSC) formation, but the positive trend is decreasing over the twenty-first century in all models. In the Arctic, none of the models simulates a statistically significant increase in Arctic PSCs throughout the twentyfirst century. The subtropical jets accelerate in response to climate change and the ozone recovery produces a westward acceleration of the lower-stratospheric wind over the Antarctic during summer, though this response is sensitive to the rate of recovery projected by the models. There is a strengthening of the Brewer–Dobson
Distributed Reconfigurable Hardware for Image Processing Acceleration

Lately, the use of GPUs is dominant in the field of high performance computing systems for computer graphics. However, since there is "not good for everything" solution, GPUs have also some drawbacks that make them not the best choice in certain scenarios: poor performance per watt ratio, difficulty to rewrite code to explode the parallelism and synchronization issues between computing cores, for example. In this work, we present the R-GRID approach based on the grid computing paradigm, with the purpose of integrating heterogenous reconfigurable devices under the umbrella of the distributed object paradigm. With R-GRID the aim is to offer an easy way to non experience hardware developers for building image processing applications using a component model. Deployment, communication, resource sharing, data access and replication of the processing cores is handled in an automatic and transparent manner, so coarse grained parallelism can be exploited effortless in R-GRID, accelerating image processing operations.
Fractalkine Promotes Human Monocyte Survival via a Reduction in Oxidative Stress

Objective— The CX3C chemokine fractalkine (CX3CL1) has a critical role in the development of atherogenesis because apolipoprotein-E–deficient mice lacking CX3CL1 or its receptor CX3CR1 develop smaller plaques and polymorphisms in CX3CR1 are associated with altered risk of cardiovascular disease. CX3CR1 is found on numerous cell types involved in atherogenesis but seems to have a key role in monocyte function. We aimed to elucidate the role of CX3CL1 in human monocyte survival and determine the mechanism by which CX3CL1 spares monocytes from apoptosis. Approach and Results— Primary human monocytes were prepared from healthy donors and subjected to serum-starvation to induce spontaneous apoptosis. The addition of CX3CL1, but not other chemokines tested, promoted monocyte survival in a dose-dependent manner with full-length CX3CL1 (including the mucin stalk) having a more potent antiapoptotic effect than chemokine-domain CX3CL1. The prosurvival effect of CX3CL1 was evident in both monocyte subsets although nonclassical monocytes were more prone to spontaneous apoptosis. In addition, we found that the effect of CX3CL1 was independent of CX3CR1 genotype. Serum-starvation increased the level of intracellular reactive oxygen species, and this was reduced by the addition of CX3CL1. Inhibition of oxidative stress with an antioxidant prevented monocyte apoptosis, indicating that this is the dominant mechanism of cell death targeted by CX3CL1. Conclusions— CX3CL1 has a substantial and highly reproducible antiapoptotic effect on human monocytes, via a mechanism involving a reduction in oxidative stress. This suggests that CX3CL1 is likely to play a key role in human atherogenesis and may provide a novel therapeutic target in cardiovascular disease.
A greedy approach to Linear Prediction with sparse residuals

This paper focuses on the problem of Linear Prediction (LP) constrained by sparse residuals. After reformulating the problem to finding the largest linear correlated strict subset in a given vector set, a greedy method is proposed to determine the support of the sparse residuals iteratively by testing each entry with respective temporary prediction error. The greedy method is then simplified to reduce computational cost. Compared with reference algorithms and conventional LP model, the proposed methods are tested in the speech coding scenario. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed greedy methods work well and suggest that LP with sparse residuals provides accurate estimation, and is much practical in the scenarios that more bits are allocated for coding residuals.
Challenges to and Forms of Complementarity Between Performance Management and Evaluation

This chapter situates findings and insights from the case studies in this issue of New Directions for Evaluation in relation to ongoing debates among evaluators pertaining to performance management. It highlights ways in which the complementarity between evaluation and performance management has been described in the case studies and identifies five types of complementarity between performance measurement and evaluation: sequential, informational, organizational, methodical, and hierarchical. It concludes with a survey of the literature on the challenges in implementing performance management and argues that evaluators need to take a more active role in performance‐management efforts. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.
Triage of Women with Minor Cervical Lesions: Data Suggesting a “Test and Treat” Approach for HPV E6/E7 mRNA Testing

Background Human papillomavirus (HPV) testing is included in the cervical cancer screening program in the triage of women with equivocal (ASC-US) or low-grade (LSIL) cytological lesions. These women have an increased risk for developing high grade dysplasia and cancer (CIN2+) compared to women with normal cytology. However, in order to avoid unnecessary follow-up, as well as overtreatment, a high positive predictive value (PPV) of the triage test is important. Methodology/Principal Findings The HPV test PreTect HPV-Proofer, detecting E6/E7 mRNA from the HPV types 16, 18, 31, 33 and 45, is used as triage test together with repeat cytology. PPV data for HPV E6/E7 mRNA testing during the period from January 2006 up to June 2009 are reported. In total, 406 of 2099 women (19.3%) had a positive HPV test result. Of the women with a positive test result and with a histological diagnosis (n = 347), 243 women had histological high-grade dysplasia or cancer (CIN2+), giving a PPV of 70.0% (95% confidence interval [CI], 65.2%–74.8%). For HPV 16 or HPV 33 positive women above 40 years of age, the PPV was 83.7% (95% CI, 73.3%–94.0%) and 84.6% (95% CI, 65.0%–100.0%) respectively. The PPV of test positive women with HSIL cytology was 94.2% (95% CI, 88.7%–99.7%). Conclusions When the result in triage is HPV mRNA positive, our data suggest direct treatment for women above 40 years of age or for women with a concurrent cytological HSIL diagnosis, contributing to better clinical safety for these women. In addition, by decreasing the time to treatment, thereby reducing the number of recalls, the patient management algorithm will be considerably improved, in turn reducing follow-up costs as well as unnecessary psychological stress among patients.
Poisson image editing extended

(a) (b) (c) (d) Figure 1: (a): Mixed Seamless Cloning image of a sand spiral applied to a g rassy field. Notice the abrupt end of the spiral. (b): Alpha Interpolation in RGB space. Notice the brightly colored artifacts. (c): Alpha Interpolation in YIQ space, copying IQ channels directly from the target image. Shimmer effect from (b) has been removed, but the re ar unnatural bright/dark spots on the spiral. (d): Alpha Interpolation in YIQ space, with Luminance Rescaling ( γ = 0.6). The texture is much more subltle than in (c), and the pots have been rem oved
Shift Coding: Efficient State Update in Mobile Peer-to-Peer Multiplayer Games

The rapid advancement in wireless communications and mobile computing devices has opened a wide door for developing interesting mobile peer-to-peer multi-player games (MMGs). In this paper we study an important problem of game state update in MMGs. Based on the network coding theory, we design the shift coding algorithm. Shift coding is running on a finely regulated ring overlay and lets each node exchange coded state information with its two immediate neighbors. After a few rounds of exchange, every node is guaranteed to receive the state information of all the other game members. The results of experimental results have shown that shift coding can significantly reduce network traffic under various network configurations.
Distribution of single-particle strength due to short-range and tensor correlations.

The distribution of single-particle strength in nuclear matter is calculated for a realistic nucleon-nucleon interaction. The influence of the short-range repulsion and the tensor component of the nuclear force on the spectral functions is to move approximately 13% of the total strength for all single-particle states beyond 100 MeV into the particle domain. This result is related to the abundantly observed quenching phenomena in nuclei which include the reduction of spectroscopic factors observed in ({ital e},{ital e}{prime}{ital p}) reactions and the missing strength in low energy response functions.
Lexical stress detection for L2 English speech using deep belief networks

This paper investigates lexical stress detection for L2 English speech using Deep Belief Networks (DBNs). The features of the DBN used in this work include the syllable-based prosodic features (assumed to have Gaussian distribution) and their expected lexical stress (assumed to have Bernoulli distribution). As stressed syllables are more prominent than their neighbors, the two preceding and two following syllables are taken into consideration. Experimental results show that the DBN achieves an accuracy of about 80% in syllable stress classification (primary/secondary/no stress) for words with three or more syllables. It outperforms the conventional Gaussian Mixture Model and our previous Prominence Model by an absolute accuracy of about 8% and 4%, respectively.
Beliefs about Social Fluidity and Preferences for Social Policies

Abstract Several studies have shown that attitudes toward social policy are influenced by expectations of social mobility at the individual level and perceptions of social fluidity at the aggregate level. If individuals think of inequalities as the result of inherited disadvantages, they will be more willing to distribute resources from the rich to the poor. However, one important question remains open: How do individuals perceive the distribution of opportunities in society? In this paper we argue that individuals believe a society to be fair if opportunities for reaching the top of the social ladder are equally distributed among the population. That is, the distribution of resources is fair to the extent that individual outcomes do not depend on social origins. To address this issue, we asked a representative sample of individuals in the Spanish region of Andalusia what they think the chances are for persons of different social origins to achieve a high social status. We have found that those who think the chances for reaching the top are unequally distributed are those who support greater government responsibility and oppose meritocracy and competition, as they believe the initial distribution of opportunities to be unfair.