Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Religious Involvement and 6-Year Course of Depressive Symptoms in Older Dutch Citizens:

Objectives: Expanding on cross-sectional studies, associations are examined between religious involvement and the 6-year course of depressive symptoms in older adults. Methods: Subjects are 1,840 community-dwelling older adults (aged 55 to 85) participating in three measurement cycles of the Longitudinal Aging Study, Amsterdam. Assessments include aspects of religious involvement, depressive symptoms, physical health, self-perceptions, social integration, urbanization, and alcohol use. Results: Church attendance is negatively associated with the course of depressive symptoms, also after adjustment for explanatory variables. Among respondents with functional limitations, lower depression scores are found for those who attend church on a regular basis. For respondents who are bereaved or nonmarried, however, slightly higher depression scores are found for those with high levels of orthodox beliefs. Discussion: There is a consistent negative association over time between church attendance and depressive symptoms in older Dutch citizens. Both stress-buffering as well as depression-evoking effects of religious involvement are found.
Decentralized flocking protocol of multi-agent systems with predictive mechanisms

This paper presents a novel decentralized predictive flocking protocol of discrete-time multi-agent systems, where every agent is driven by a predictive controller with the local information of its neighbors. The feasibility of the decentralized protocol and system convergence is demonstrated by numerical simulations, where the effects of sampling period, prediction horizon and control horizon, the three parameters for predictive controllers, on the flocking performance are verified with the supportive illustrations of convergence rate and lattice regularity.
Excessive Humeral External Rotation Results in Increased Shoulder Laxity

Background The quantitative relationship between increased anterior shoulder laxity and increased humeral external rotation observed in throwers remains unclear. Hypothesis An elongated anterior capsule, especially the anterior band of the inferior glenohumeral ligament, produced by excessive humeral external rotation will result in increased anterior shoulder laxity and increased humeral external rotation. Study Design Controlled laboratory study. Methods Seven cadaveric shoulders were tested to measure the humeral rotational range of motion, glenohumeral translations, and length of the anterior band of the inferior glenohumeral ligament. Data were collected for the intact shoulders and after nondestructive stretching of 10%, 20%, and 30% beyond maximum humeral external rotation. Results Nondestructive excessive external rotational stretching resulted in a significant increase in superior (30%, 3.3 mm) and inferior (30%, 2.3 mm) length of the anterior band of the inferior glenohumeral ligament, external rotation (30%, 35°), and anterior (30%, 2.4 mm), inferior (30%, 2.2 mm), and anterior-posterior (30%, 5.1 mm) translations. There were significant positive linear correlations between the length of the anterior band of the inferior glenohumeral ligament, external rotation, and anterior translation. Conclusions Excessive humeral external rotation results in an elongation of the anterior band of the inferior glenohumeral ligament and an increase in anterior and inferior glenohumeral translations and humeral external rotation. Clinical Relevance Repetitive excessive humeral external rotation observed in throwers may be one of the biomechanical causes for increased shoulder laxity and increased humeral external rotation.
Acquiring Collocations for Lexical Choice between Near-Synonyms

We extend a lexical knowledge-base of near-synonym differences with knowledge about their collocational behaviour. This type of knowledge is useful in the process of lexical choice between near-synonyms. We acquire collocations for the near-synonyms of interest from a corpus (only collocations with the appropriate sense and part-of-speech). For each word that collocates with a near-synonym we use a differential test to learn whether the word forms a less-preferred collocation or an anti-collocation with other near-synonyms in the same cluster. For this task we use a much larger corpus (the Web). We also look at associations (longer-distance co-occurrences) as a possible source of learning more about nuances that the near-synonyms may carry.
Trends in Menarcheal Age between 1955 and 2009 in the Netherlands

Aim To assess and compare the secular trend in age at menarche in Dutch girls (1955–2009) and girls from Turkish and Moroccan descent living in the Netherlands (1997–2009). Methods Data on growth and maturation were collected in 20,867 children of Dutch, Turkish and Moroccan descent in 2009 by trained health care professionals. Girls, 9 years and older, of Dutch (n = 2138), Turkish (n = 282), and Moroccan (n = 295) descent were asked whether they had experienced their first period. We compared median menarcheal age in 2009 with data from the previous Dutch Nationwide Growth Studies in 1955, 1965, 1980 and 1997. Age specific body mass index (BMI) z-scores were calculated to assess differences in BMI between pre- and postmenarcheal girls in different age groups. Results Median age at menarche in Dutch girls, decreased significantly from 13.66 years in 1955 to 13.15 years in 1997 and 13.05 years in 2009. Compared to Dutch girls there is a larger decrease in median age of menarche in girls of Turkish and Moroccan descent between 1997 and 2009. In Turkish girls age at menarche decreased from 12.80 to 12.50 years and in Moroccan girls from 12.90 to 12.60 years. Thirty-three percent of Turkish girls younger than 12 years start menstruating in primary school. BMI-SDS is significantly higher in postmenarcheal girls than in premenarcheal girls irrespective of age. Conclusion There is a continuing secular trend in earlier age at menarche in Dutch girls. An even faster decrease in age at menarche is observed in girls of Turkish and Moroccan descent in the Netherlands.
Analyzing data from a fuzzy rating scale-based questionnaire. A case study.

BACKGROUND The fuzzy rating scale was introduced to cope with the imprecision of human thought and experience in measuring attitudes in many fields of Psychology. The flexibility and expressiveness of this scale allow us to properly describe the answers to many questions involving psychological measurement. METHOD Analyzing the responses to a fuzzy rating scale-based questionnaire is indeed a critical problem. Nevertheless, over the last years, a methodology is being developed to analyze statistically fuzzy data in such a way that the information they contain is fully exploited. In this paper, a summary review of the main procedures is given. RESULTS The methods are illustrated by their application on the dataset obtained from a case study with nine-year-old children. In this study, children replied to some questions from the well-known TIMSS/PIRLS questionnaire by using a fuzzy rating scale. The form could be filled in either on the computer or by hand. CONCLUSIONS The study indicates that the requirements of background and training underlying the fuzzy rating scale are not too demanding. Moreover, it is clearly shown that statistical conclusions substantially often differ depending on the responses being given in accordance with either a Likert scale or a fuzzy rating scale.
Multi-Timescale Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network for Modelling Sentences and Documents

Neural network based methods have obtained great progress on a variety of natural language processing tasks. However, it is still a challenge task to model long texts, such as sentences and documents. In this paper, we propose a multi-timescale long short-termmemory (MT-LSTM) neural network to model long texts. MTLSTM partitions the hidden states of the standard LSTM into several groups. Each group is activated at different time periods. Thus, MT-LSTM can model very long documents as well as short sentences. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms the other neural models in text classification task.
A null mutation in SERPINE1 protects against biological aging in humans

Humans with a rare gene mutation in SERPINE1 live longer and show evidence of protection from aging-related morbidity. Plasminogen activator inhibitor–1 (PAI-1) has been shown to be a key component of the senescence-related secretome and a direct mediator of cellular senescence. In murine models of accelerated aging, genetic deficiency and targeted inhibition of PAI-1 protect against aging-like pathology and prolong life span. However, the role of PAI-1 in human longevity remains unclear. We hypothesized that a rare loss-of-function mutation in SERPINE1 (c.699_700dupTA), which encodes PAI-1, could play a role in longevity and metabolism in humans. We studied 177 members of the Berne Amish community, which included 43 carriers of the null SERPINE1 mutation. Heterozygosity was associated with significantly longer leukocyte telomere length, lower fasting insulin levels, and lower prevalence of diabetes mellitus. In the extended Amish kindred, carriers of the null SERPINE1 allele had a longer life span. Our study indicates a causal effect of PAI-1 on human longevity, which may be mediated by alterations in metabolism. Our findings demonstrate the utility of studying loss-of-function mutations in populations with geographic and genetic isolation and shed light on a novel therapeutic target for aging.
XML Information Retrieval: An overview

Locating and distilling the valuable relevant information continued to be the major challenges of Information Retrieval (IR) Systems owing to the explosive growth of online web information. These challenges can be considered the XML Information Retrieval challenges as XML has become a de facto standard over the Web. The research on XML IR starts with the classical IR strategies customized to XML IR. Later novel IR strategies specific to XML IR are evolved. Meanwhile literatures reveal development of the rapid and intelligent IR systems. Despite their success in their specified constrained domains, they have additional limitations in the complex information space. The effectiveness of IR systems is thus unsolved in satisfying the most. This article attempts an overview of earlier efforts and the gaps in XML IR.
Beyond cultural imperialism : globalization, communication and the new international order

Moving beyond notions of cultural imperialism, this book furthers our understanding of the implications of global media culture and politics in the 1990s. Leading scholars from a range of fields bring different perspectives to bear on the role of the state, the range of culture beyond the media, the contribution of international organizations, and the potential for resistance and alternatives. They reflect on the `New World International Communications Order' as delineated since the 1970s, and examine its changing nature. Throughout, they connect analysis of the flows and forces which form the world media and communications with the fundamental themes of social science, and illuminate the ways in which underlying questions of inequality, power and control reappear within new media environments.
Large Page Address Mapping in Massive Parallel Processor Systems

Large and sparse are the prominent characteristics of small-world graph. In many scientific domains, such as biomedical science and scientific computing, as small-word graph grows in scale, processing small-world graph poses severe challenges to address mapping in Massive Parallel Processing. Data driven computation, unstructured data organization, which are poor in spatial and temporal locality, which are high frequency of memory access, leads to large RAM footprint on address mapping management. This paper proposes a novel approach with special Implementation for massive parallel processors. In our technique, The block level address mapping table is stored in large pages in DDR3 memory. Considering the highly frequency in accessing memory, we maintain a big cache in RAM to store address mapping entries of data array recently searching. The search algorithm in searching the cache is binary search. The goal is to reduce address mapping overhead without excessively compromising system response time. This scheme is designed for our massive parallel coprocessor system. For reducing power consumption, we have an attempt to implement address mapping of each massive parallel coprocessor in Field-Programmable Gate Array(FPGA). The experiment have been conducted on a real System on chip(Soc). The result shows that when the number of processor node is 4096 and its frequency is 233MHz, The RAM cost is 2.4 MB in each processor, when there is missing, the largest response time is 160us, which is less than the mainstream software implementation in address translation. In the case of making full use of available storage resources, The hit ratio in graph problem could be achieve 100%.
A Taxonomy of Future Higher Thinking Skills

Our future society will be different from that we have known in the last fifty years. Futurists foresee that in the near couple decades the world's community will traverse through a period of rapid technological innovations that will change the foundations of society as we used to know it (Tapscott, 1997; Wallace, 1999; Borgmann; 1999). Changes will engulf all aspects of life (Gleick, 1999). These changes will have great impact on society, work, culture and art. People will have to innovate or evaporate (Higgins, 1995). They will have to adapt continuously to never-ending permutations and engage in a never-ending adaptation.It makes sense, therefore, to assume that the graduates of today's schooling will need a different set of cognitive and learning skills reflecting the profound change that they will encounter. This paper traces the basic nature of future society and proposes a relevant taxonomy of future cognitive skills that will provide our students with appropriate tools to succeed in the future. We have used Bloom's taxonomy as a working ground and expanded his categories to reflect the needs of the future. This paper suggests an additional cognitive category to add to our teaching procedures named melioration, which we believe, is not addressed in today's curriculum.
Partial Parsing from Bitext Projections

Recent work has shown how a parallel corpus can be leveraged to build syntactic parser for a target language by projecting automatic source parse onto the target sentence using word alignments. The projected target dependency parses are not always fully connected to be useful for training traditional dependency parsers. In this paper, we present a greedy non-directional parsing algorithm which doesn't need a fully connected parse and can learn from partial parses by utilizing available structural and syntactic information in them. Our parser achieved statistically significant improvements over a baseline system that trains on only fully connected parses for Bulgarian, Spanish and Hindi. It also gave a significant improvement over previously reported results for Bulgarian and set a benchmark for Hindi.
Monitoring Satellite Radiance Biases Using NWP Models

Radiances measured by satellite radiometers are often subject to biases due to limitations in their radiometric calibration. In support of the Global Space-based Inter-Calibration System project, to improve the quality of calibrated radiances from atmospheric sounders and imaging radiometers, an activity is underway to compare routinely measured radiances with those simulated from operational global numerical weather prediction (NWP) fields. This paper describes the results obtained from the first three years of these comparisons. Data from the High-resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder, Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager, Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer, Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit, and Microwave Humidity Sounder radiometers, together with the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, a spectrometer, and the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer, an interferometer, were included in the analysis. Changes in mean biases and their standard deviations were used to investigate the temporal stability of the bias and radiometric noise of the instruments. A double difference technique can be employed to remove the effect of changes or deficiencies in the NWP model which can contribute to the biases. The variation of the biases with other variables is also investigated, such as scene temperature, scan angle, location, and time of day. Many of the instruments were shown to be stable in time, with a few exceptions, but measurements from the same instrument on different platforms are often biased with respect to each other. The limitations of the polar simultaneous nadir overpasses often used to monitor biases between polar-orbiting sensors are shown with these results due to the apparent strong dependence of some radiance biases on scene temperature.
Investigating Focal Connectivity Deficits in Alzheimer's Disease Using Directional Brain Networks Derived from Resting-State fMRI

Connectivity analysis of resting-state fMRI has been widely used to identify biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease (AD) based on brain network aberrations. However, it is not straightforward to interpret such connectivity results since our understanding of brain functioning relies on regional properties (activations and morphometric changes) more than connections. Further, from an interventional standpoint, it is easier to modulate the activity of regions (using brain stimulation, neurofeedback, etc.) rather than connections. Therefore, we employed a novel approach for identifying focal directed connectivity deficits in AD compared to healthy controls. In brief, we present a model of directed connectivity (using Granger causality) that characterizes the coupling among different regions in healthy controls and Alzheimer's disease. We then characterized group differences using a (between-subject) generative model of pathology, which generates latent connectivity variables that best explain the (within-subject) directed connectivity. Crucially, our generative model at the second (between-subject) level explains connectivity in terms of local or regionally specific abnormalities. This allows one to explain disconnections among multiple regions in terms of regionally specific pathology; thereby offering a target for therapeutic intervention. Two foci were identified, locus coeruleus in the brain stem and right orbitofrontal cortex. Corresponding disrupted connectivity network associated with the foci showed that the brainstem is the critical focus of disruption in AD. We further partitioned the aberrant connectomic network into four unique sub-networks, which likely leads to symptoms commonly observed in AD. Our findings suggest that fMRI studies of AD, which have been largely cortico-centric, could in future investigate the role of brain stem in AD.
Simfrastructure: A Flexible and Adaptable Middleware Platform for Modeling and Analysis of Socially Coupled Systems

Socially coupled systems are comprised of interdependent social, organizational, economic, infrastructure and physical networks. Today's urban regions serve as an excellent example of such systems. People and institutions confront the implications of the increasing scale of information becoming available due to a combination of advances in pervasive computing, data acquisition systems as well as high performance computing. Integrated modeling and decision making environments are necessary to support planning, analysis and counter factual experiments to study these complex systems. Here, we describe SIMFRASTRUCTURE - a flexible coordination middleware that supports high performance computing oriented decision and analytics environments to study socially coupled systems. Simfrastructure provides a multiplexing mechanism by which simple and intuitive user-interfaces can be plugged in as front-end systems, and high-end computing resources can be plugged in as back-end systems for execution. This makes the computational complexity of the simulations completely transparent to the users. The decoupling of user interfaces and data repository from simulation execution allows users to access simulation results asynchronously and enables them to add new datasets and simulation models dynamically. Simfrastructure enables implementation of a simple yet powerful modeling environment with built-in analytics-as-a service platform, which provides seamless access to high end computational resources, through an intuitive interface for studying socially coupled systems. We illustrate the applicability of Simfrastructure in the context of an integrated modeling environment to study public health epidemiology.
Image segmentation and adaptive superpixel generation based on harmonic edge-weighted centroidal Voronoi tessellation

In this paper, we extend the basic edge-weighted centroidal Voronoi tessellation (EWCVT) for image segmentation to a new advanced model, namely harmonic edge-weighted centroidal Voronoi tessellation (HEWCVT). This extended model introduces a harmonic form of clustering energy by combining the image intensity with cluster boundary information. Improving upon the classic centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) and EWCVT methods, the HEWCVT algorithm can not only overcome the sensitivity to the seed point initialisation and noise, but also improve the accuracy and stability of clustering results, as verified in several types of images. We then present an adaptive superpixel generation algorithm based on HEWCVT. First, an innovative initial seed sampling method based on quadtree decomposition is introduced, and the image is divided into small adaptive segments according to a density function. Then, the local HEWCVT algorithm is applied to generate adaptive superpixels. The presented algorithm is capable of generating adaptive superpixels while preserving local image features efficiently.
A Load-Balancing Algorithm for Hadoop Distributed File System

Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is developed to store a huge volume of data. Files are divided into blocks and the replicated blocks are then stored on many DataNodes in a distributed manner. Although doing so makes HDFS fault tolerant, the random nature of the default block placement strategy may lead to load imbalance among the DataNodes. Moreover, the built-in load-balancing algorithm Balancer may reduce the performance and consume lots of network resources. Therefore in this paper we consider all the situations that may influence the load-balancing state and propose a new load-balancing algorithm. In the proposed algorithm a new role named BalanceNode is introduced to help in matching heavy-loaded and light-loaded DataNodes, so those light-loaded nodes can share part of the load from heavy-loaded ones. The simulation results show that our algorithm can achieve a good load-balancing state in the HDFS compared with two existing algorithms.
Spatial and temporal patterns of cell division during early Xenopus embryogenesis.

We describe the spatial and temporal patterns of cell division in the early Xenopus embryo, concentrating on the period between the midblastula transition and the early tailbud stage. Mitotic cells were identified using an antibody recognising phosphorylated histone H3. At least four observations are of interest. First, axial mesodermal cells, including prospective notochord, stop dividing after involution and may not divide thereafter. Second, cell division is more pronounced in the neural plate than in nonneural ectoderm, and the pattern of cell division becomes further refined as neurogenesis proceeds. Third, cells in the cement gland cease proliferation completely as they begin to accumulate pigment. Finally, the precursors of peripheral sensory organs such as the ear and olfactory placode undergo active cell proliferation when they arise from the sensorial layer of the ectoderm. These observations and others should provide a platform to study the relationship between the regulation of developmental processes and the cell cycle during Xenopus embryogenesis.