Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Triangulation-Invariant Method for Anisotropic Geodesic Map Computation on Surface Meshes

This paper addresses the problem of computing the geodesic distance map from a given set of source vertices to all other vertices on a surface mesh using an anisotropic distance metric. Formulating this problem as an equivalent control theoretic problem with Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman partial differential equations, we present a framework for computing an anisotropic geodesic map using a curvature-based speed function. An ordered upwind method (OUM)-based solver for these equations is available for unstructured planar meshes. We adopt this OUM-based solver for surface meshes and present a triangulation-invariant method for the solver. Our basic idea is to explore proximity among the vertices on a surface while locally following the characteristic direction at each vertex. We also propose two speed functions based on classical curvature tensors and show that the resulting anisotropic geodesic maps reflect surface geometry well through several experiments, including isocontour generation, offset curve computation, medial axis extraction, and ridge/valley curve extraction. Our approach facilitates surface analysis and processing by defining speed functions in an application-dependent manner.
The influence of intergenerational relationships on marital quality following the death of a parent in adulthood

Bereavement not only is an individual psychological experience but also has meaningful social and familial impacts. This article examines how relationship quality with both a deceased and a surviving parent influence adult children’s marital quality over time and whether this differs by gender. Data were drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, a study of three- and four-generation families from Southern California. The sample included married adult children who experienced the death of a parent between survey waves (N = 304). A series of multilevel random effects models were estimated using a before/after loss framework. Analyses revealed that improvements and declines in relationship quality with a surviving parent were related with improvements and declines in marital quality following the death of a first parent, regardless of gender. High pre-loss relationship quality with a deceased parent resulted in improved marital quality only for sons who lost mothers. Findings support the linked lives framework and offer some evidence for the “greedy marriage” thesis.
An Enterprise-ontology based Conceptual-modeling Grammar for Representing Value Chain and Supply Chain Scripts

In business modeling the focus is shifting from the enterprise to the supply chain as the prime context. Contemporary business modeling grammars should allow each enterprise taking part in a supply chain to develop its own information system and at the same time support the creation of system interoperability and information sharing amongst business partners in the supply chain. This paper presents a conceptual modeling grammar for representing business scripts in a way that is observer-independent. That is, rather than presenting value chain information from the perspective of any partner in the supply chain (e.g., enterprise, supplier, customer, customer’s customer, supplier’s supplier) or from a completely neutral third party. This observer-independent conceptual-modeling grammar, which is given strength by grounding it in the mature Resource-Event-Agent model, is shown to represent information about business phenomena of diverse supply chain partners such that it can be integrated across enterprise boundaries.
Blind Homologous R2R3 Myb Genes Control the Pattern of Lateral Meristem Initiation in Arabidopsis[W]

In seed plants, shoot branching is initiated during postembryonic development by the formation of secondary meristems. These new meristems, which are established between the stem and leaf primordia, develop into vegetative branches or flowers. Thus, the number of axillary meristems has a major impact on plant architecture and reproductive success. This study describes the genetic control of axillary meristem formation in Arabidopsis thaliana by a group of three R2R3 Myb genes, which are homologous to the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) Blind gene and were designated REGULATORS OF AXILLARY MERISTEMS (RAX). rax mutants show new phenotypes that are characterized by defects in lateral bud formation in overlapping zones along the shoot axis. RAX genes are partially redundant in function and allow a fine-tuning of secondary axis formation. As revealed by monitoring of SHOOT MERISTEMLESS transcript accumulation, the RAX genes control a very early step of axillary meristem initiation. The RAX1 and RAX3 expression domains specifically mark a cell group in the center of the leaf axil from which the axillary meristem develops. Double mutant combinations of lateral suppressor and rax1-3 as well as expression studies suggest that at least two pathways control the initiation of axillary meristems in Arabidopsis.
Using Text in Pre-school: A learning environment

The purpose of this study is to observe and describe the use of texts in the pre-school, to document the interaction between the child, the teacher and the environment and the emergent literacy in the daily practices. The presentation of the results is a description of two different textual environments: the narrative and the passive. The frame of reference in this study is the Vygotskij theory (1982) about thought and language in a cultural and historic perspective. The frame of reference is also the phenomenographic research in learning in general and learning the written language in a perspective of meta-cognition (Marton and Booth, 1997; Dahlgren and Olsson, 1985; Pramling, 1983; 1994). The immediate background to this study is an action research inspired developmental project to implement the curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1998) in the pre-school.
The Unfinished Story of the Ugly Duckling: Polish Regions under the Realm of Europeanization

The article provides an analysis of the changing role of elected regional governments in regional policy making in Poland from their creation in 1998 until 2013. The analysed period shows the gradual empowerment of regional governments, initially established as politically, functionally and financially very weak institutions. The change is explained through the process of Europeanization, and in particular through their expanding role in the management of EU structural funds. The situation in Poland is characterised by a much weaker position of regional governments than is the case in other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The article also raises the question of the role of regions following the end of the EU 2014–2020 financial
CWC: Compressed Write Cache for Improving Storage System Performance

Fast non-volatile storage, such as non-volatile RAM and battery-backed volatile RAM, is widely deployed as the write cache in the storage controller to hide the latency of writes and prevent data loss. Due to the high cost of nonvolatile RAM and the short life of battery, the write cache is always much smaller than the read cache. To extend the size of write cache, we propose a Compressed Write Cache (CWC) in the storage controller using an adaptive compression scheme. Our prototype implementation of CWC and extensive trace-driven evaluation results show that the average user response time reduces by up to 30.1% and the destage count reduces by up to 31.3%. The benchmark experiments show that CWC gets improvement up to 32% in IOPS and 24.2% in average response time while degrades performance by 1.2% in the sequential access case.
Cell-specific activity of cis-acting regulatory elements in the promoter of the mouse multidrug resistance gene mdr1

To define cis-acting elements implicated in transcriptional regulation of the mouse multidrug resistance gene mdr1, we have cloned and characterized the 5' end of the gene. Nucleotide sequence analysis identified TATA, GGGCGG, and CCAAT consensus sequence elements at positions -27, -47, and -83, respectively. The transcriptional activities of 5' deletion fragments from the promoter linked to a reporter gene were tested in mouse cell lines of different tissue origins shown to express different levels of endogenous mdr1 RNA. Sequences located between nucleotides -93 and +84 were able to confer basal promoter activity and cell specificity to the reporter gene. The addition to the basal promoter of sequences upstream of position -141 was found to up or down regulate the basal level of expression of the reporter gene in a cell-specific manner.
Folks in Folksonomies: social link prediction from shared metadata

Web 2.0 applications have attracted a considerable amount of attention because their open-ended nature allows users to create lightweight semantic scaffolding to organize and share content. To date, the interplay of the social and semantic components of social media has been only partially explored. Here we focus on Flickr and Last.fm, two social media systems in which we can relate the tagging activity of the users with an explicit representation of their social network. We show that a substantial level of local lexical and topical alignment is observable among users who lie close to each other in the social network. We introduce a null model that preserves user activity while removing local correlations, allowing us to disentangle the actual local alignment between users from statistical effects due to the assortative mixing of user activity and centrality in the social network. This analysis suggests that users with similar topical interests are more likely to be friends, and therefore semantic similarity measures among users based solely on their annotation metadata should be predictive of social links. We test this hypothesis on the Last.fm data set, confirming that the social network constructed from semantic similarity captures actual friendship more accurately than Last.fm's suggestions based on listening patterns.
Ethics in Food Advertising to Children in India—A Parental Perspective

Marketers are seen to bombard children with advertisements for unhealthy foods using sophisticated promotion techniques that have serious negative effects on health and overall well-being of children. So parents try to mediate children’s exposure to media content and call for governmental regulations in an attempt to shield them. The extent to which they mediate further determines whether they contemplate food advertisements as being ethical or unethical. Therefore, the present study tries to uncover the antecedents to ethical versus unethical perceptions of Indian parents about food advertisements directed at children. No study, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, has been conducted so far in India in this regard. Using binary logistic regression with mothers, it is found that the mothers who view food advertisements as unethical report their children to watch fewer hours of TV during weekdays and hold negative attitudes toward advertising to children. These mothers, however, do not feel that the government needs to impose restrictions on food advertisements aired on TV since they themselves indulge in mediation of TV advertising as a general parenting responsibility. The implications of the article are finally discussed.
Towards a Universal Taxonomy of Many Concepts

Knowledge is indispensable to understanding. The ongoing information explosion highlights the need to enable machines to better understand electronic text in natural human language. The challenge thus lies in how to transfer human knowledge to machines. Much work has been devoted to creating universal ontologies for this purpose. However, none of the existing ontologies has the necessary depth and breadth to offer “universal understanding. ” In this paper, we present a universal, probabilistic ontology that is more comprehensive than any of the existing ontologies. Currently, it contains 2.7 million concepts harnessed automatically from a corpus of 1.68 billion web pages and two years’ worth of search log data. Unlike traditional knowledge bases that treat knowledge as black and white, it enables probabilistic interpretations of the information it contains. The probabilistic nature then enables it to incorporate heterogeneous information in a natural way. We present details of how the core ontology is constructed, and how it models knowledge’s inherent uncertainty, ambiguity, and inconsistency. We also discuss potential applications, e.g., understanding user intent, that can benefit from the taxonomy.
On the Syntax of Prepositional Phrases

(2007) in Spath, A. (ed.) Interface and Interface Conditions. Berlin. de Gruyter. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT The standard view about the uniformity of Case assignment by verbs and prepositions is challenged with data from German and an analysis according to which P has a feature structure which involves a Case feature that may not only participate in Case checking but may supply the Case that is missing in the complement of P. Adopting a probe/goal relation of agreement a fair number of peculiarities of the syntax of PPs can be explained such as obligatory pied piping, semantic selection, copy movement, operator scope and the role of adverbial proforms in pronominal PPs. Finally, the asymmetry in Case assignment between V and P is supported by novel data from sentence processing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maternal Self-Discrepancies, Interrole Conflict, and Negative Affect among Married Professional Women with Children

This study applied self-discrepancy theory (E. T. Higgins, R. N. Bond, R. Klein, & T. Strauman, 1986) to the study of the maternal self-concept and interrole conflict for married professional women with children. The participants, 103 married professional women with young children, completed questionnaires. Each of the 4 self-discrepancy variables was a positive predictor of positive interrole conflict and, with one exception (actual-own:ought-own self-discrepancy), a negative predictor of coping effectiveness. Both structural role redefinition and superwoman coping strategies were positively related to coping effectiveness. Use of the structural role redefinition strategy was positively associated with work support, spousal support, and social support. Work support was negatively related to anxiety and depression, but no significant relations were found between spousal support and other variables. In regression models, self-discrepancy was related to both anxiety and depression.
‘We’re not faggots!’: Masculinity, Homosexuality and the Representation of Afrikaner Men Who have Sex with Men in the Film Skoonheid and Online

ABSTRACT This article employs the film Skoonheid (Beauty) to explore the manner in which normative, white Afrikaner masculinity still operates to expel gayness from its self-definition. What is particularly vexing to this investigation, however, is the occurrence of behavioural homosexuality among white Afrikaner men who possess a compartmentalised identity constructed from notions of nationalism, puritanism, patriarchy and homophobia. Oliver Hermanus's Skoonheid casts its main character, Francois van Heerden, as the archetypal disenfranchised white Afrikaner man, whose repressed homosexuality amplifies the anxiety and disempowerment he experiences in a post-apartheid world. His masculine identity is constantly under threat from racial and sexual 'Others', who highlight the hypocrisy and constructedness of the outmoded model of patriarchy that he reveres. The goal of this critique is ultimately to position such representations of 'ideal' Afrikaner masculinity (and its problematic relationship with homosexuality) in popular visual culture as indicative of related sociological issues that permeate the South African landscape. The article, for example, also briefly considers virtual or 'online' communities such as Kaalgat 24 (Buck Naked 24) that exist on the peripheries of mainstream culture and serve to facilitate connections among white, 'heterosexual' Afrikaner men who have sex with men (MSM). Ultimately, the author sets out to illustrate that for men like Francois homosexual behaviour is categorically disconnected from gayness, whether in terms of a commercial 'lifestyle' or sexual orientation: The act of having sex with men, in no way suggests belonging to the gay community or buying into any particular lifestyle. Homosexuality (or stereotypical, imagined ideas surrounding it) is still treated contemptuously in certain contexts, resulting in acts of expulsion and violence that re-inscribe the stigmas associated with 'faggots' in traditional Afrikaner, heteronormative rhetoric.
Meiotic cohesin REC8 marks the axial elements of rat synaptonemal complexes before cohesins SMC1β and SMC3

In meiotic prophase, the sister chromatids of each chromosome develop a common axial element (AE) that is integrated into the synaptonemal complex (SC). We analyzed the incorporation of sister chromatid cohesion proteins (cohesins) and other AE components into AEs. Meiotic cohesin REC8 appeared shortly before premeiotic S phase in the nucleus and formed AE-like structures (REC8-AEs) from premeiotic S phase on. Subsequently, meiotic cohesin SMC1β, cohesin SMC3, and AE proteins SCP2 and SCP3 formed dots along REC8-AEs, which extended and fused until they lined REC8-AEs along their length. In metaphase I, SMC1β, SMC3, SCP2, and SCP3 disappeared from the chromosome arms and accumulated around the centromeres, where they stayed until anaphase II. In striking contrast, REC8 persisted along the chromosome arms until anaphase I and near the centromeres until anaphase II. We propose that REC8 provides a basis for AE formation and that the first steps in AE assembly do not require SMC1β, SMC3, SCP2, and SCP3. Furthermore, SMC1β, SMC3, SCP2, and SCP3 cannot provide arm cohesion during metaphase I. We propose that REC8 then provides cohesion. RAD51 and/or DMC1 coimmunoprecipitates with REC8, suggesting that REC8 may also provide a basis for assembly of recombination complexes.
A numerical and experimental study of delamination of polymer-metal interfaces in plastic packages at solder reflow temperatures

This paper describes a numerical and experimental study of the failure of polymer-metal interfaces in plastic-encapsulated IC packages subjected to hygrothermal loading during solder reflow. All the analyses performed are under plane strain conditions. A finite element fracture mechanics approach was employed in conjunction with the Interaction Integral Method to predict the temperature at which a small delamination in the polymer-metal interface of an IC package will propagate. In order to confirm the accuracy of the above prediction, actual package specimens were fabricated and subjected to various levels of moisture preconditioning followed by thermal loading at varying temperatures. The specimens were then examined to determine the temperature at which the interface failed. Very good agreement was found between numerical prediction and experiment.
Emotional intelligence and mediation training

Does mediation training sufficiently teach how to effectively manage strong emotions in mediation? What specific training in emotional self-awareness and self-regulation skills and approaches could prove useful? This research explores the role of emotional intelligence in mediation and describes approaches and strategies suggested by mediation trainers for working with emotions. Analysis of how emotional intelligence currently informs mediation training pedagogy, and how it could be better incorporated, is presented.
What Do the Average Twitterers Say: A Twitter Model for Public Opinion Analysis in the Face of Major Political Events

Social media platforms have become a forum for giving a voice to the masses with a significant proportion of those masses coming from the developing world. This was largely evidenced through the significant role played by social media platforms in the recent uprisings in the Arab world. In this paper, we take up a study of social media engagement patterns of users from the developing world through a study of Twitter's role during the recent Tunisian uprising. Motivated by the results of a user survey conducted mainly for users from the developing world who tweeted heavily during the uprisings in the Arab world, we propose a novel method for subjectivity analysis of tweets corresponding to political events in the developing world. Our proposed method differs from previous subjectivity analysis approaches in that it is the first method that takes into account social features of social media platforms for the subjectivity classification task. Through experimental evaluations, we observe the accuracy of the proposed method to be 83.3% which demonstrates a promising outcome for large-scale application of our proposed subjectivity analysis technique.
A Comparative Study of Stress Profiles in Mothers of Children with Autism and those of Children with Down's Syndrome

Background The purpose of the present study was to determine the stress in mothers whose children have autism and to compare it with the stress in mothers whose children have Down's syndrome. Method Fifty mothers whose children had autism (n = 25) or Down's syndrome (n = 25) completed the Questionnaire on Resources and Stress (QRS) and answered some demographic questions. Results The mothers of children with autism presented higher stress levels on seven of the 15 scales of the QRS. Conclusion The results are discussed in the context of the unsatisfactory care system for children with autism in Poland.
The Utility of the Correctional Tour: Student Perceptions and the Propensity for Academic Growth

The utility of taking students on tours of correctional facilities remains an unexplored topic within criminal justice. Yet, there is ample justification for reinforcing the pedagogical link between theory and practice through direct observation of criminal justice processes. This becomes particularly salient in the area of corrections, a highly isolated, self‐sustaining, and misunderstood criminal justice system. In this study, 69 students attending criminal justice classes were asked to complete pre‐visit and post‐visit questionnaires associated with tours of correctional institutions. Key themes of the study include students' perceptions of institutional punishment philosophy, and student perceptions of select facility and offender characteristics. Almost 86% of students changed their views in some manner, with a significant portion of students identifying rehabilitation and incapacitation as key philosophies following a prison tour. Stereotypes of prisoners and correctional settings were frequently based on media representations and changed following exposure to the prison tour. These findings are presented with pedagogical implications.
Transfer of the UAP56 Interaction Motif of Human Cytomegalovirus pUL69 to Its Murine Cytomegalovirus Homolog Converts the Protein into a Functional mRNA Export Factor That Can Substitute for pUL69 during Viral Infection

ABSTRACT Nucleocytoplasmic shuttling and interaction with the cellular mRNA export factor UAP56 are prerequisites for the mRNA export activity of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) pUL69. Although the murine cytomegalovirus homolog pM69 shuttles, it fails to export mRNAs due to its inability to recruit UAP56. However, chimeric proteins comprising pM69 fused to N-terminal pUL69 fragments, including its UAP56 interaction motif, acquire mRNA export activity. Importantly, growth curves of recombinant HCMVs illustrate that such a chimeric protein, but not pM69, substitutes for pUL69 during HCMV infection.