Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implicit Learning and Dyslexia

Several studies have reported an association between dyslexia and implicit learning deficits. It has been suggested that the weakness in implicit learning observed in dyslexic individuals may be related to sequential processing and implicit sequence learning. In the present article, we review the current literature on implicit learning and dyslexia. We describe a novel, forced‐choice structural “mere exposure” artificial grammar learning paradigm and characterize this paradigm in normal readers in relation to the standard grammaticality classification paradigm. We argue that preference classification is a more optimal measure of the outcome of implicit acquisition since in the preference version participants are kept completely unaware of the underlying generative mechanism, while in the grammaticality version, the subjects have, at least in principle, been informed about the existence of an underlying complex set of rules at the point of classification (but not during acquisition). On the basis of the “mere exposure effect,” we tested the prediction that the development of preference will correlate with the grammaticality status of the classification items. In addition, we examined the effects of grammaticality (grammatical/nongrammatical) and associative chunk strength (ACS; high/low) on the classification tasks (preference/grammaticality). Using a balanced ACS design in which the factors of grammaticality (grammatical/nongrammatical) and ACS (high/low) were independently controlled in a 2 × 2 factorial design, we confirmed our predictions. We discuss the suitability of this task for further investigation of the implicit learning characteristics in dyslexia.
Joint Center for Housing Studies Harvard University Eliminating Credit Barriers To Increase Homeownership : How Far Can We Go ?

Using data from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), this paper estimates homeownership rates that would prevail in the United States if borrowing constraints were eliminated. These estimates are obtained by first identifying a group of unconstrained households in the SCF based on a unique set of survey questions. Housing tenure preferences are then estimated over unconstrained households controlling for sample selection effects, and results are used to forecast owner-occupancy rates that would prevail in the absence of borrowing constraints. If all borrowing constraints were removed, ceteris paribus, the owneroccupancy rate among non-farm families in the United States would increase just over four percentage points. In contrast, borrowing constraints have a comparatively small effect on the percentage of current renters who expect to own a home in the next 10 years. This pattern suggests that borrowing constraints depress owner-occupancy rates primarily by delaying homeownership rather than permanently excluding families from owner-occupied housing. Additional analysis confirms that household social and financial stability, ability to care for a property, and wealth are all very important determinants of whether families prefer to own. On balance, therefore, evidence suggests that there is room for further relaxation of borrowing constraints to expand access to homeownership. However, such efforts are likely to be more fruitful if attention is given to mortgage products that alleviate borrowing constraints in the early years of the mortgage and if mortgage product innovation is coupled with policies designed to enhance the social and financial stability of families.
Brain Atrophy and Cerebral Small Vessel Disease: A Prospective Follow-Up Study

Background and Purpose— Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) is the most common cause of vascular dementia. Interest in the use of surrogate markers is increasing. The aims of this study were to determine if brain volume was different between patients with SVD and control subjects, whether it correlated with cognition in SVD, and whether changes in brain volume could be detected during prospective follow-up. Methods— Thirty-five patients (mean age, 68.8 years) who had a lacunar stroke and radiological evidence of confluent leukoaraiosis and 70 age- and gender-matched control subjects were recruited. Whole-brain T1-weighted imaging and neuropsychological testing were performed after 1 year on all patients and after 2 years for the control subjects. Fully automated software was used to determine brain volume and percentage brain volume change. An executive function score was derived. Results— There was a significant difference in brain volume between the patients with SVD and control subjects (mean±SD [mL] 1529±84 versus 1573±69, P=0.019). In the patients with SVD, there was a significant association between brain volume and executive function (r=0.501, P<0.05). The mean±SD yearly brain atrophy rate for patients with SVD and control subjects was significantly different (−0.914%±0.8% versus −0.498%±0.4%, respectively, P=0.017). No change in executive function score was detected over this period. Conclusions— Brain volume is reduced in SVD and a decline is detectable prospectively. The correlation with executive function at a cross-sectional level and the change in brain volume with time are both promising for the use of brain atrophy as a surrogate marker of SVD progression.
International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems Smooth Jerk-Bounded Optimal Path Planning of Tricycle Wheeled Mobile Manipulators in the Presence of Environmental Obstacles Regular Paper

In this work, a computational algorithm is developed for the smooth‐jerk optimal path planning of tricycle wheeled mobile manipulators in an obstructed environment. Due to a centred orientable wheel, the tricycle mobile manipulator exhibits more steerability and manoeuvrability over traditional mobile manipulators, especially in the presence of environmental obstacles. This paper presents a general formulation based on the combination of the potential field method and optimal control theory in order to plan the smooth point‐to‐point path of the tricycle mobile manipulators. The nonholonomic constraints of the tricycle mobile base are taken into account in the dynamic formulation of the system and then the optimality conditions are derived considering jerk restrictions and obstacle avoidance. Furthermore, by means of the potential field method, a new formulation of a repulsive potential function is proposed for collision avoidance between any obstacle and each part of the mobile manipulator. In addition, to ensure the accurate placement of the end effector on the target point an attractive potential function is applied to the optimal control formulation. Next, a mixed analytical‐ numerical algorithm is proposed to generate the point‐to‐ point optimal path. Finally, the proposed method is verified by a number of simulations on a two‐link tricycle manipulator.
The effects of alpha-tocopherol supplementation on fracture healing in a postmenopausal osteoporotic rat model

OBJECTIVE: Osteoporosis increases the risk of bone fractures and may impair fracture healing. The aim of this study was to investigate whether alpha-tocopherol can improve the late-phase fracture healing of osteoporotic bones in ovariectomized rats. METHOD: In total, 24 female Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into three groups. The first group was sham-operated, and the other two groups were ovariectomized. After two months, the right femora of the rats were fractured under anesthesia and internally repaired with K-wires. The sham-operated and ovariectomized control rat groups were administered olive oil (a vehicle), whereas 60 mg/kg of alpha-tocopherol was administered via oral gavage to the alpha-tocopherol group for six days per week over the course of 8 weeks. The rats were sacrificed, and the femora were dissected out. Computed tomography scans and X-rays were performed to assess fracture healing and callus staging, followed by the assessment of callus strengths through the biomechanical testing of the bones. RESULTS: Significantly higher callus volume and callus staging were observed in the ovariectomized control group compared with the sham-operated and alpha-tocopherol groups. The ovariectomized control group also had significantly lower fracture healing scores than the sham-operated group. There were no differences between the alpha-tocopherol and sham-operated groups with respect to the above parameters. The healed femora of the ovariectomized control group demonstrated significantly lower load and strain parameters than the healed femora of the sham-operated group. Alpha-tocopherol supplementation was not able to restore these biomechanical properties. CONCLUSION: Alpha-tocopherol supplementation appeared to promote bone fracture healing in osteoporotic rats but failed to restore the strength of the fractured bone.
Vital tasks and roles of frontline workers facilitating job inclusion of vulnerable youth

ABSTRACT Researchers and others are worried about the marginalization of vulnerable youth who drop out of school and work. Frontline workers are key support givers for vulnerable youth, but they have been described as professionals who lack a recognized body of knowledge they can rely on. This article investigates vital frontline roles and tasks related to job inclusion of vulnerable youth. Qualitative data are drawn from 16 Norwegian pilot projects aimed at developing social work approaches among vulnerable youth. The challenges and the support provided resemble those in other European countries. Cross-case analysis suggests four main support roles: (1) administration and securing of basic needs, (2) connection and relationship building, (3) job enabling, and (4) job customisation. Combining roles 1 and 2 with roles 3 or 4 seems to improve the outcomes, meaning that they improve the capabilities of vulnerable youth to find and master a job when that is something they have reason to value. Since this topic has been little explored for vulnerable youth, this article contributes to further developing job inclusion support for this target group in particular.
Using fuzzy policies to improve context interpretation in adaptive systems

Adaptation is an increasingly important requirement for software systems executing in large-scale, heterogeneous, and dynamic environments. A central aspect of the adaptation methodology is management of contextual information needed to support the adaptation process. A major design challenge of managing contextual data lies in the fact that the information is partial, uncertain, and inherently suitable for diverging interpretations. While existing adaptation solutions focus on techniques, methods, and tools, the challenge of managing and interpreting ambiguous contextual information remains largely unresolved. In this paper, we present a new approach to knowledge management in adaptation feedback control loops that aims to overcome these issues by applying fuzzy set theory and approximate reasoning. Our new knowledge management scheme interprets imprecise information and effectively integrates this information into the adaptation feedback control loop. To test and evaluate our solution, we implemented it in an adaptation engine to perform rate control for media streaming applications. The evaluation results show the benefits of our approach in terms of flexibility and performance when compared to more traditional methods, such as TCP-friendly rate control.
An Extended Topic-Based Pub/Sub Broker for Cooperative Mobile Services

The convergence between the network and service levels in mobile distributed systems allows content distribution in the Internet of Things. Distributed executing tasks exchange control and data events for enabling service cooperation. Event correlation addresses the correct identification of received events and the message delivery to the accurate task. However, it still remains as a major issue in these systems. We propose an extended-topic based model that targets Cooperative Mobile Services through the publish/subscribe primitives. It contributes to solve the event correlation challenge in distributed event-based systems. Finally, we evaluate our model by implementing a topic-based broker with multi-topic intersection support.
Knowledge-lean projection of coreference chains across languages

Common technologies for automatic coreference resolution require either a language-specific rule set or large collections of manually annotated data, which is typically limited to newswire texts in major languages. This makes it difficult to develop coreference resolvers for a large number of the so-called low-resourced languages. We apply a direct projection algorithm on a multi-genre and multilingual corpus (English, German, Russian) to automatically produce coreference annotations for two target languages without exploiting any linguistic knowledge of the languages. Our evaluation of the projected annotations shows promising results, and the error analysis reveals structural differences of referring expressions and coreference chains for the three languages, which can now be targeted with more linguistically-informed projection algorithms.
The bystander effect from the other side : the psychological effects of passive bystanders and apologizing on the victim’s outcomes of a victimization experience

Although the bystander effect and has been subject to extensive research, the victim’s perspective has been neglected until now. This study aimed to extend previous research focusing on the psychological consequences the victim experiences in a bystander victimization situation. Moreover the alleviating effects of an apology offered by the perpetrator were examined and additionally explorative research on a moderating effect of Locus of Control was conducted. Applying a 2x2 experimental setup (bystanders vs. no bystanders and apology vs. no apology) with 122 participants between the age of 18 and 58, who were placed in a mild victimization situation, the effects of passive bystanders on blame-attribution, need satisfaction, safety perceptions and affect were assessed. The results revealed that bystander presence and the offer of an apology have an effect on blame-attribution, safety perceptions and need satisfaction. While bystander presence results in lowered self-blame, heightened perpetrator-blame and lowered safety perceptions, the offer of an apology resulted in higher need violation. The additional moderating effect of LOC was only found for self-blame. It seems as if Bystander Presence, Apology Condition and LOC exert a joint influence on the degree of self-blame the victim experiences.
A Report of Recent Progress in Transformation-Based Error-Driven Learning

Most recent research in trainable part of speech taggers has explored stochastic tagging. While these taggers obtain high accuracy, linguistic information is captured indirectly, typically in tens of thousands of lexical and contextual probabilities. In [Brill 92], a trainable rule-based tagger was described that obtained performance comparable to that of stochastic taggers, but captured relevant linguistic information in a small number of simple non-stochastic rules. In this paper, we describe a number of extensions to this rule-based tagger. First, we describe a method for expressing lexical relations in tagging that stochastic taggers are currently unable to express. Next, we show a rule-based approach to tagging unknown words. Finally, we show how the tagger can be extended into a k-best tagger, where multiple tags can be assigned to words in some cases of uncertainty.
Weight sensation affected by vibrotactile stimulation with a handheld vision-tactile-force display device

In this study, a technique designed to enhance virtual reality (VR) effects by stimulating multiple sensations simultaneously is investigated and significant interactions among such perceptions are evoked under various multiple-simultaneous stimulation conditions. To accomplish this, we developed a handheld multimodal display device capable of presenting visual, weight, and vibrotactile information simultaneously. The device incorporates a liquid crystal display (LCD) panel, a back-mounted moveable weight, and vibration motors in the handgrips. The weight movements are produced by a linear motor controlled by a personal computer (PC). Using this handheld device, it was determined that VR perceptions could be enhanced by the interactions taking place among multimodal perceptions. In this paper, experiments on weight perception along with the affects of vibrotactile stimulation are described. Using our developed handheld vision-tactile-force display device, we investigated the interactions between force and vibrotactile perceptions that were stimulated simultaneously. This indicates that when strong vibration stimulations were given in the direction of weight movement, the weight seemed heavier. The experimental results and conclusions show that weight perception and vibrotactile stimulation could be enhanced using our handheld multimodal display device.
Geometry surface simplication and reconstruction of FEM point cloud

Grid partition of geometry model in finite element analysis results in massive redundant geometry points, comprising of point cloud, which is tend to be rendered in various aspects to analyze result in the post-processing. In order to deal with point cloud in real-time application, a novel algorithm is presented to simplify the redundant data and reconstruct the surface of geometry model from point cloud. First, points inside the model is removed by using element connection flag to reduce geometry data, and then local coplanar points is linked to a contour to construct a surface element to reduce geometry points further, finally the constructed surface elements are divide into different groups by using topology relationship to build up surfaces of geometry model. The point cloud of finite element analysis result is greatly reduced and geometry model surface is accurately reconstructed based on reduced point cloud by using the algorithm.
Using Trackback to Support Citation Notification Services

The notion of Linkbacks between websites has been developed to enable authors to keep track of who is linking to their pages. Authors receive notifications when other authors link to their pages, which is especially useful in the blogging community. One of the most well-known of several protocols which has been developed for Linkbacks is Trackback which has been developed within the blogging system, MoveableType.
An analysis of EEG signal power spectrum density generated during writing in children with dyslexia

Power spectral density is one of the possible feature extraction methods to identify differences in the brain electrophysiological processing in children with dyslexia. Known to be a neurological disorder, dyslexia causes learning deficiencies mostly related to reading, although research has shown that writing problems also poses significant challenge and is a good indicator to identify a child to be dyslexic. This research looks into the analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) signal power spectrum density (PSD) during resting and writing activities of a poor dyslexic and capable dyslexic children. Activities include writing of known words based on cues from a computer. Eight electrodes position were localized that are based on pathway known for reading and writing, which are C3, C4, P3, P4, T7, T8, FC5 and FC6, where location of the right hemisphere were mirrored. Analysis showed that the PSD of the frontal right hemispheric locations in capable dyslexic children is significantly higher if compared to the left while poor dyslexics showed higher results in areas to the left. This can be viewed as the brain is compensating its left deficiencies with creating a new pathway that involved areas of the frontal right hemisphere.
Gene encoding a deubiquitinating enzyme is mutated in artesunate- and chloroquine-resistant rodent malaria parasites§

Artemisinin‐ and artesunate‐resistant Plasmodium chabaudi mutants, AS‐ART and AS‐ATN, were previously selected from chloroquine‐resistant clones AS‐30CQ and AS‐15CQ respectively. Now, a genetic cross between AS‐ART and the artemisinin‐sensitive clone AJ has been analysed by Linkage Group Selection. A genetic linkage group on chromosome 2 was selected under artemisinin treatment. Within this locus, we identified two different mutations in a gene encoding a deubiquitinating enzyme. A distinct mutation occurred in each of the clones AS‐30CQ and AS‐ATN, relative to their respective progenitors in the AS lineage. The mutations occurred independently in different clones under drug selection with chloroquine (high concentration) or artesunate. Each mutation maps to a critical residue in a homologous human deubiquitinating protein structure. Although one mutation could theoretically account for the resistance of AS‐ATN to artemisinin derivates, the other cannot account solely for the resistance of AS‐ART, relative to the responses of its sensitive progenitor AS‐30CQ. Two lines of Plasmodium falciparum with decreased susceptibility to artemisinin were also selected. Their drug‐response phenotype was not genetically stable. No mutations in the UBP‐1 gene encoding the P. falciparum orthologue of the deubiquitinating enzyme were observed. The possible significance of these mutations in parasite responses to chloroquine or artemisinin is discussed.
Curriculum spaces for connecting to children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases

Abstract Elementary mathematics curriculum materials can serve as a lever for instructional change. In this paper, we promote a particular kind of instructional change: supporting teachers in learning to integrate children’s multiple mathematical knowledge bases (MMKB), including children’s mathematical thinking and children’s home and community-based mathematical funds of knowledge, in instruction. A powerful means of supporting pre-service teachers in integrating children’s MMKB in instruction may be to scaffold teachers’ noticing of potential spaces in elementary mathematics curriculum materials for connecting to children’s MMKB and then developing practices for leveraging these spaces during instruction. We focus on existing and potential spaces in written curriculum materials, or curriculum spaces, so as to better support teachers in enacting curriculum that opens spaces for connecting to children’s MMKB.
Efficient and Scalable Hardware-Based Multicast in Fat-Tree Networks

This article presents an efficient and scalable mechanism to overcome the limitations of collective communication in switched interconnection networks in the presence of faults. Considering that current trends in supercomputing are moving toward massively parallel computers, with many thousands of components, reliability becomes a challenge. In such scenario, fat-tree networks that provide hardware support for collective communication suffer from serious performance degradation due to the presence of, even, a single faulty node. This paper describes a new mechanism to provide high-performance collective communication in such situations. The feasibility of the proposed technique is formally demonstrated. We present the design of a new hardware-based routing algorithm for multicast, that is at the base of our proposal. The proposed mechanism is implemented and experimentally evaluated. Our experimental results show that hardware-based multicast trees provide an efficient and scalable solution for collective communication in fat-tree networks, significantly outperforming traditional solutions.