Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Age Differences in Leisure Physical Activity by Adult Wheelchair Users

ABSTRACT Background: Despite the need for engagement in occupations to enhance physical health and well-being, individuals with mobility limitations are less likely to participate in leisure-time physical activity. Purpose: This secondary analysis evaluated the correlation of intrinsic and extrinsic contextual factors to leisure-time physical occupations in individuals with mobility limitations. Methods: The study examined a sample of 123 noninstitutionalized wheelchair recipients; the participants were primarily white (62%), male (92%), and aged (mean age = 64.8, SD = 13). Findings: Separate multivariate models were developed for younger and older wheelchair users to explore how intrinsic and extrinsic factors related to hours of leisure-time physical activity. For individuals aged 26–64, education (β = −0.42) and unpaid personal assistance (β = −0.80) were significant in the model, and for individuals ≥ 65, living alone (β = −0.27) was significant. Implications: Unpaid personal assistance has important effects on engagement in leisure-time physical occupations; however, its significance varies across age groups.
PREDICTING INTERNET NON-USERS' ADOPTION INTENTION AND ADOPTION BEHAVIOR

A conceptual framework based on theory of planned behavior is developed to examine the impacts of social and psychological variables on Internet non-users' adoption intention and adoption behavior. A two-wave revolving panel design is adopted in the study based on the data collected from a longitudinal telephone survey conducted in Hong Kong. The study finds incongruence between individuals' attitude toward the Internet and adoption behavior and congruence between adoption intention and adoption behavior, which are, respectively, known as ‘evaluative inconsistency’ and ‘literal consistency’ in social psychology. Internet non-users' perceived popularity of the Internet is a significant predictor of their subsequent behavior, whose impact is mediated by adoption intention. Internet non-users' subsequent adoption behavior is only influenced by their perceived capacity to adopt the Internet (i.e. self-efficacy) and not influenced by external constraints (i.e. time availability and facilitating resources).
Head tilting for interaction in mobile contexts

Developing interfaces for mobile situations requires that devices are useable on the move. Here, we explore head tilting as an input technique to allow a user to interact with a mobile device 'hands free'. A Fitts' Law style evaluation is described where a user acquires targets, moving the cursor by head tilt. We explore d position and velocity control cursor mechanisms in both static and mobile situations to see which provided the best level of performance. Results show that participants could successfully acquire targets using head tilting. Position control was shown to be si gnificantly faster and more accurate in a static context, but exhi bited significantly poorer accuracy and longer target acquisition times when the user was on the move. We further demonstrate how analysis of user's gait shows consistent targeting biases at different stages in the gait cycle.
Professional discourse in winning images: objectivity and professional boundaries in environmental news images in the World Press Photo contest, 1992–2011

This article applies the ecological theory of professions to analyze professional discourse in the World Press Photo (WPP) contest, an international photojournalism contest held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The article analyzes the content of 148 photojournalism works that received environmental awards in the period 1992 to 2011, the two decades after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The article seeks to understand the representation and negotiation of objectivity and the claims of professional boundaries by the media of both developed and developing countries as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It also seeks to interpret the professional discourse of the WPP in relation to ideologies and power dynamics in both journalism and global environmental politics. The results suggested that the media of developed countries dominated the discourse, and the conventional notion of journalistic objectivity remained intact. However, the results also showed that global environmental politics and the situation of journalism created openings for the media of developing countries and NGOs to enlarge jurisdictional claims in the area of natural disaster reporting and to challenge the conventional notion of objectivity. The results also showed that the conventional notion of objectivity did not necessarily hinder explanations of the complexity of environmental issues, which was made possible by choosing unique angles of storytelling, planning multiple shots, and using richly suggestive, naturalistic images.
Part Two: Design and Analysis Issues

Robert L. Linn is Professor of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Co-director at the UCLA National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST). The work reported herein was supported under the Educational Research and Development Centers Program, PR/Award Number R305B960002, as administered by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and the U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of the National Center for Education Research, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), or the U.S. Department of Education. Part Two DESIGN AND ANALYSIS ISSUES
Child-care quality and children's social development.

This study examined the influence on children's social development of variation in the quality of their child-care environments. The sample consisted of 166 children attending representative childcare centers that varied widely in quality. Possible relations associated with age, child-care experience, and family background were controlled using hierarchical multiple regression. Both global estimates of child-care quality and specific program features, such as director experience, ratios, and verbal interactions, were obtained from observational measures and staff questionnaires. Measures of social development were derived from parent and caregiver ratings of the children. Of greatest importance is the finding that overall quality, caregiver-child verbal interactions, and director experience were each highly predictive of the children's social development in child care. Family background measures were also significantly predictive of several of the social outcomes, whereas childcare experience showed few significant effects. The implications for social policies and future research in child care are discussed. The developmental effects of child care have long held interest for psychologists, first because child care represented an intriguing exception to parental care, and now because some form of child care is the norm for over half of all American children. Parallel with these demographic trends, the research literature has shifted from questions that entail comparisons of home-reared children and those enrolled in child care to more sophisticated questions about how children in child care are affected by differences in program quality (Belsky, 1984; Clarke-Stewart & Fein, 1983). A related issue concerns the identification of specific quality indicators that affect child development. A third, relatively new, empirical focus is on the joint effects of child care and family variables (Everson, Sarnat, &
Shape Analysis Methods for 3D Brain and Skull Imaging

Anatomical shape analysis problems are ubiquitous in medical imaging. In brain MRI imaging, the problem arises when comparing cortical features of functional importance, such as gray matter thickness, as well as when performing fine-grained analysis of sub-cortical structures. Two general types of approaches have been developed over the years to perform quantitative shape comparison of anatomy: the first, and more intuitive approach, attempts to bring surface models into dense point-to-point correspondence; the alternative approach avoids the need for dense registration by exploring intrinsic global properties of the shape. Each of these methods has their advantages and disadvantages, and I explore examples from each in applications to brain imaging. The general underlying theme of my work has been spherical parametric shape registration, and other descriptions based on spherical maps. Several times throughout this work I utilize the theory of spherical harmonics, both in their scalar and vector form as a means of parameterizing and describing brain anatomy. Using this theory, I develop several algorithms for rigid and non-rigid shape registration for a variety of brain shapes, which are described in Chapters 1-4. In Chapter 5, I present an application of the methods developed in previous chapters to developing brain imaging biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease. I show that using the new surface-based features and statistical learning, it is possible to develop biomarkers which outperform all others to date in terms of sensitivity to disease-modifying effects and disease specificity. A more recent field of application for shape-based analysis comes from human skull models generated from conical CT imaging. The general registration problems are similar in spirit to brain imaging. However, the much lower signal-to-noise ratio and greater topological variability of the shape models require a new set of tools to deal with these shapes in practice. In Chapter 6, I develop an approach to modify the topology of a skull surface while preserving useful features, and again return to the sphere for dense registration and the creation of shape atlases. Due to the noisy nature of the data, a fast non-local non-linear correspondence search is developed for pairs of skull shapes from different subjects. I show that this search is crucial for high-quality registration based on resulting population-based averages and individualized shape analyses.
Reflecting Caring and Power in Early Childhood Education: Recalling Memories of Educational Practices

The aim of this study is to examine how early childhood education teachers recall educational situations concerning caring and power in their childhoods and in their work. The purpose is to study how caring and power are constructed and intertwined in educational practices. The intention is to examine how teachers reflect their work concerning caring and power. The theoretical framework is based on feminist post-structural theories and the data were collected using the memory-work method. The issues of caring and power were found within everyday practices, and were often invisible in routine activities, which are seen as teachers’ reflections of their activities. Power and caring were spread in and through the educational situations, which involved continuous and multifaceted decision-making.
Visual Person Tracking Using a Cognitive Observation Model

onigs 2 Abstract— In this article we present a cognitive approach to person tracking from a mobile platform. The core of the technique is a biologically inspired observation model that combines several feature channels in an object and background dependent way, in order to optimally separate the object from the background. This observation model can be learned quickly from a single training image and is easily adaptable to different objects. We show how this model can be integrated into a visual object tracker based on the well known Condensation algorithm. Several experiments carried out with a mobile robot in an office environment illustrate the advantage of the approach compared to the Camshift algorithm which relies on fixed features for tracking.
Cyr61 Induces IL-6 Production by Fibroblast-like Synoviocytes Promoting Th17 Differentiation in Rheumatoid Arthritis

Cysteine-rich protein 61 (Cyr61)/CCN1 is a product of an immediate early gene and functions in mediating cell adhesion and inducing cell migration. We previously showed that increased production of Cyr61 by fibroblast-like synoviocytes (FLS) in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) promotes FLS proliferation and participates in RA pathogenesis with the IL-17–dependent pathway. However, whether Cyr61 in turn regulates Th17 cell differentiation and further enhances inflammation of RA remained unknown. In the current study, we explored the potential role of Cyr61 as a proinflammatory factor in RA pathogenesis. We found that Cyr61 treatment dramatically induced IL-6 production in FLS isolated from RA patients. Moreover, IL-6 production was attenuated by Cyr61 knockdown in FLS. Mechanistically, we showed that Cyr61 activated IL-6 production via the αvβ5/Akt/NF-κB signaling pathway. Further, using a coculture system consisting of purified CD4+ T cells and RA FLS, we found that RA FLS stimulated Th17 differentiation, and the pro-Th17 differentiation effect of RA FLS can be attenuated or stimulated by Cyr61 RNA interference or addition of exogenous Cyr61, respectively. Finally, using the collagen-induced arthritis animal model, we showed that treatment with the anti-Cyr61 mAb led to reduction of IL-6 levels, decrease of Th17 response, and attenuation of inflammation and disease progression in vivo. Taken together, our results reveal a novel role of Cyr61 in promoting Th17 development in RA via upregulation of IL-6 production by FLS, thus adding a new layer into the functional interplay between FLS and Th17 in RA pathogenesis. Our study also suggests that targeting of Cyr61 may represent a novel strategy in RA treatment.
Perinatal events which precede periventricular haemorrhage and leukomalacia in the newborn

Summary. Ultrasound brain scans were obtained daily for the first 5 days after birth, on day 7 and then weekly until discharge from hospital in 86 babies during a 12‐month period. The babies weighed <1501 g or were <34 weeks gestational age. Fifty‐one (59%) had normal scans. 34 (40%) developed periventricular haemorrhage, and seven (8%) developed periventricular cysts (associated with periventricular haemorrhage in six). Factors associated with periventricular haemorrhage were perinatal hypoxia, acidosis, hypercapnia and hypoxia after birth. Babies who developed periventricular cysts (periventricular leukomalacia) were more likely to have been hypoxic at birth and in four of the seven there had been a maternal antepartum haemorrhage. The association of perinatal hypoxia with periventricular haemorrhage and leukomalacia suggests that intraparturm events may predispose to the onset of these lesions which then develop postnatally. Prevention of perinatal hypoxia may play an important role in diminishing the disability caused by these conditions.
Reduction of Lift-Off Effects in Pulsed Eddy Current for Defect Classification

Pulsed eddy-current (PEC) testing is an electromagnetic nondestructive testing & evaluation (NDT&E) technique and defect classification is one of the most important steps in PEC defect characterization. With pulse excitation, the PEC response signals contain more features in time domain and rich information in frequency domain. This paper investigates feature extraction techniques for PEC defect classification including rising time, differential time to peak and differential time to zero, spectrum amplitude, and differential spectrum amplitude. Experimental study has been undertaken on Al-Mn 3003 alloy samples with artificial surface defects, sub-surface defects, and defects in two-layer structures under different lift-off. Experimental results show that methods are effective to classify the defects both in single-layer structures and two-layer structures. Comparing the results of different methods, it is found that differential process can eliminate the lift-off in defect classification in both time domain and frequency domain. The study can be extended to defect classification in complex structures, where lift-off effects are significant.
Radial Basis Function-Sparse Partial Least Squares for Application to Brain Imaging Data

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data is an invaluable tool in brain morphology research. Here, we propose a novel statistical method for investigating the relationship between clinical characteristics and brain morphology based on three-dimensional MRI data via radial basis function-sparse partial least squares (RBF-sPLS). Our data consisted of MRI image intensities for multimillion voxels in a 3D array along with 73 clinical variables. This dataset represents a suitable application of RBF-sPLS because of a potential correlation among voxels as well as among clinical characteristics. Additionally, this method can simultaneously select both effective brain regions and clinical characteristics based on sparse modeling. This is in contrast to existing methods, which consider prespecified brain regions because of the computational difficulties involved in processing high-dimensional data. RBF-sPLS employs dimensionality reduction in order to overcome this obstacle. We have applied RBF-sPLS to a real dataset composed of 102 chronic kidney disease patients, while a comparison study used a simulated dataset. RBF-sPLS identified two brain regions of interest from our patient data: the temporal lobe and the occipital lobe, which are associated with aging and anemia, respectively. Our simulation study suggested that such brain regions are extracted with excellent accuracy using our method.
Demystifying multicore throughput metrics

Several different metrics have been proposed for quantifying the throughput of multicore processors. There is no clear consensus about which metric should be used. Some studies even use several throughput metrics. We show that there exists a relation between single-thread average performance metrics and throughput metrics, and that throughput metrics inherit the meaning or lack of meaning of the corresponding single-thread metric. We show that two popular throughput metrics, the weighted speedup and the harmonic mean of speedups, are inconsistent: they do not give equal importance to all benchmarks. Moreover we demonstrate that the weighted speedup favors unfairness. We show that the harmonic mean of IPCs, a seldom used throughput metric, is actually consistent and has a physical meaning. We explain under which conditions the arithmetic mean or the harmonic mean of IPCs can be used as a strong indicator of throughput increase.
Relay-Aided Amplify-and-Forward Powerline Communications

Powerline communications (PLC) is a favorable technique for many smart grid applications. By transmitting information over the existing powerline infrastructure, PLC has the benefit of low deployment cost. However, due to low transmit power, limited bandwidth, and harsh channel conditions, reliable long-distance and high-capacity PLC is challenging. Relay-aided (RA-) PLC is promising in addressing these issues. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the amplify-and-forward (AF) RA-PLC system from an information-theoretic perspective. The capacity of AF-based RA-PLC is analyzed for frequency-selective PLC channels. The capacity bounds are derived, and the optimal power allocation between the transmitting nodes and the optimal power distribution over the signal frequency band are obtained. The capacity benefits and features of AF-based RA-PLC are evaluated with two prevalent powerline channel models. Based on the signal attenuation model, the capacity of AF-based RA-PLC is compared with direct-link (DL-)PLC, and the effect of relay location is revealed. In addition, based on the transmission line (TL) model, the effects of branch density and load impedance on the capacity of AF-based RA-PLC are evaluated.
Study of NGEP expression in androgen sensitive prostate cancer cells: A potential target for immunotherapy

Background: Prostate cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths among men. New gene expressed in prostate (NGEP), is a prostate-specific gene expressed only in normal prostate and prostate cancer tissue. Because of its selective expression in prostate cancer cell surface, NGEP is a potential immunotherapeutic target. To target the NGEP in prostate cancer, it is essential to investigate its expression in prostate cancer cells. Methods: In the present study, we investigated NGEP expression in LNCaP and DU145 cells by real time and RT-PCR, flow cytometric and immunocytochemical analyses. Results: Real time and RT-PCR analyses of NGEP expression showed that NGEP was expressed in the LNCaP cells but not in DU145 cells. The detection of NGEP protein by flow cytometric and immunocytochemistry analyses indicated that NGEP protein was weakly expressed only in LNCaP cell membrane. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate that LNCaP cell line is more suitable than DU145 for NGEP expression studies; however, its low-level expression is a limiting issue. NGEP expression may be increased by androgen supplementation of LNCaP cell culture medium.
Functional array fusion

This paper introduces a new approach to optimizing array algorithms in functional languages. We are specifically aiming at an efficient implementation of irregular array algorithms that are hard to implement in conventional array languages such as Fortran. We optimize the storage layout of arrays containing complex data structures and reduce the running time of functions operating on these arrays by means of equational program transformations. In particular, this paper discusses a novel form of combinator loop fusion, which by removing intermediate structures optimizes the use of the memory hierarchy. We identify a combinator named loop P that provides a general scheme for iterating over an array and that in conjunction with an array constructor replicate P is sufficient to express a wide range of array algorithms. On this basis, we define equational transformation rules that combine traversals of loop P and replicate P as well as sequences of applications of loop P into a single loop P traversal. Our approach naturally generalizes to a parallel implementation and includes facilities for optimizing load balancing and communication. A prototype implementation based on the rewrite rule pragma of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler is significantly faster than standard Haskell arrays and approaches the speed of hand coded C for simple examples.
Summarizing Email Threads

Summarizing threads of email is different from summarizing other types of written communication as it has an inherent dialog structure. We present initial research which shows that sentence extraction techniques can work for email threads as well, but profit from email-specific features. In addition, the presentation of the summary should take into account the dialogic structure of email communication.