Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Internet as a facilitator of cultural hybridization and interpersonal relationship management for Asian international students in South Korea

This study suggests that Internet-mediated communication played an important role for Asian international students in South Korea in maintaining and strengthening tightly knit, emotionally close relationships such as family and close friends. Alternatively, Internet-mediated communication allowed these students to make connections with members of the same ethnic groups in South Korea as well as South Korean students; however, the main goal of these new connections was to gain informational resources. Interview data disclosed that Asian international students maintained a transcultural space in the online world. Because the Internet is an open space, the respondents had navigated among numerous South Korean sites before arriving in South Korea and had become regular consumers of contents on some of those sites. They simultaneously continued to use their home country-based sites for entertaining and informational content. Three interrelated characteristics of the Internet consumption emerged from the interview data: (1) the respondents’ Internet consumption pattern did not change significantly before and after their arrival in South Korea; (2) the Hallyu phenomenon was evident; and (3) the respondents’ Internet consumption was not based on the criteria, such as country of origin, but on their personal interests. The Internet has become the hybridized space where, without synthesizing differences, these students could manage complex interactions of cultural norms and values between their home countries and the host country, and could carry out an uninhibited cultural navigation amid the distinct yet connected zones.
Molecular anatomy of the gut-brain axis revealed with transgenic technologies: implications in metabolic research

Neurons residing in the gut-brain axis remain understudied despite their important role in coordinating metabolic functions. This lack of knowledge is observed, in part, because labeling gut-brain axis neurons and their connections using conventional neuroanatomical methods is inherently challenging. This article summarizes genetic approaches that enable the labeling of distinct populations of gut-brain axis neurons in living laboratory rodents. In particular, we review the respective strengths and limitations of currently available genetic and viral approaches that permit the marking of gut-brain axis neurons without the need for antibodies or conventional neurotropic tracers. Finally, we discuss how these methodological advances are progressively transforming the study of the healthy and diseased gut-brain axis in the context of its role in chronic metabolic diseases, including diabetes and obesity.
Overproduction of transposon Tn10-encoded tetracycline resistance protein results in cell death and loss of membrane potential

High-level expression of the Tn10 tetracycline resistance protein TetA in Escherichia coli caused partial collapse of the membrane potential, arrest of growth, and killing of the cells. Since alpha-methylglucoside transport was not affected, the overproduced TetA protein may cause not destruction of membrane structure but rather unrestricted translocation of protons and/or ions across the membrane.
Constrained maximum-likelihood detection in CDMA

The detection strategy usually denoted optimal multiuser detection is equivalent to the solution of a (0, 1)-constrained maximum-likelihood (ML) problem, a problem which is known to be NP-hard. In contrast, the unconstrained ML problem can be solved quite easily and is known as the decorrelating detector. In this paper, we consider the constrained ML problem where the solution vector is restricted to lie within a closed convex set (CCS). Such a design criterion leads to detector structures which are ML under the constraint assumption. A close relationship between a sphere-constrained ML detector and the well-known minimum mean square error detector is found and verified. An iterative algorithm for solving a CCS constraint problem is derived based on results in linear variational inequality theory. Special cases of this algorithm, subject to a box-constraint, are found to correspond to known, nonlinear successive and parallel interference cancellation structures, using a clipped soft decision for making tentative decisions, while a weighted linear parallel interference canceler with signal-dependent weights arises from the sphere constraint. Convergence issues are investigated and an efficient implementation is suggested. The bit-error rate performance is studied via computer simulations and the expected performance improvements over unconstrained ML are verified.
Evaluation of Tumor Heterogeneity of Prostate Carcinoma by Flow- and Image DNA Cytometry and Histopathological Grading

Background. Heterogeneity of prostate carcinoma is one of the reasons for pretreatment underestimation of tumor aggressiveness. We studied tumor heterogeneity and the probability of finding the highest tumor grade and DNA aneuploidy with relation to the number of biopsies. Material and methods. Specimens simulating core biopsies from five randomly selected tumor areas from each of 16 Böcking’s grade II and 23 grade III prostate carcinomas were analyzed for tumor grade and DNA ploidy by flow‐ and fluorescence image cytometry (FCM, FICM). Cell cycle composition was measured by FCM. Results. By determination of ploidy and cell cycle composition, morphologically defined tumors can further be subdivided. Heterogeneity of tumor grade and DNA ploidy (FCM) was 54% and 50%. Coexistence of diploid tumor cells in aneuploid specimens represents another form of tumor heterogeneity. The proportion of diploid tumor cells decreased significantly with tumor grade and with increase in the fraction of proliferating cell of the aneuploid tumor part. The probability of estimating the highest tumor grade or aneuploidy increased from 40% for one biopsy to 95% for 5 biopsies studied. By combining the tumor grade with DNA ploidy, the probability of detecting a highly aggressive tumor increased from 40% to 70% and 90% for one and two biopsies, respectively. Conclusion. Specimens of the size of core biopsies can be used for evaluation of DNA ploidy and cell cycle composition. Underestimation of aggressiveness of prostate carcinoma due to tumor heterogeneity is minimized by simultaneous study of the tumor grade and DNA ploidy more than by increasing the number of biopsies. The biological significance of coexistent diploid tumor cell in aneuploid lesions remains to be evaluated.
SQL for SRL: Structure Learning Inside a Database System

The position we advocate in this paper is that relational algebra can provide a unified language for both representing and computing with statistical-relational objects, much as linear algebra does for traditional single-table machine learning. Relational algebra is implemented in the Structured Query Language (SQL), which is the basis of relational database management systems. To support our position, we have developed the FACTORBASE system, which uses SQL as a high-level scripting language for statistical-relational learning of a graphical model structure. The design philosophy of FACTORBASE is to manage statistical models as first-class citizens inside a database. Our implementation shows how our SQL constructs in FACTORBASE facilitate fast, modular, and reliable program development. Empirical evidence from six benchmark databases indicates that leveraging database system capabilities achieves scalable model structure learning.
Effect of Socioeconomic Status on Surgery Waiting Times and Mortality After Hip Fractures in Italy

Background: Reducing inequities is a main goal of the Italian healthcare system. We evaluated socioeconomic differences in delayed surgery and postoperative mortality after a hip replacement after a fracture in Piedmont Region (Italy). Methods: Cohort study including all people aged ≥65 years hospitalized for a hip fracture in 2007–2010 (n = 21,432). Study outcomes were the following: (1) surgery waiting times >2 days; (2) 30-day, 90-day, and 1-year mortality from admission. Log-binomial models were used to evaluate the effect of socioeconomic status on waiting time, adjusting for age, sex, comorbidities, biennium, and Local Health Unit. Logistic models were fitted for mortality, adjusting also for the type of intervention (prosthesis/reduction) and waiting time. Results: Seventy percent of surgeries were performed beyond 2 days from admission; 30-day mortality was 4.1%, 90-day was 10.8%, and 1-year was 21.9%. Lower socioeconomic levels were associated with higher risk of waiting >2 days (Adjusted Relative Risk: 1.14) and higher odds for 90-day (Adjusted Odds Ratio: 1.18) and 1-year (Adjusted OR: 1.27) mortality. Conclusions: We found socioeconomic inequities in access to hip replacement and postoperative outcomes. Strengthening the connection between hospital, primary care and rehabilitation services, improving regional monitoring systems and taking into account quality of care in funding health system, may contribute to guarantee uniform levels of healthcare quality in Italy.
An MTF‐based blind restoration of temporal power envelopes as a front‐end processor for automatic speech recognition systems in reverberant environments

To reduce speech degradation in reverberant environments, we previously proposed a modulation transfer function (MTF) based method for speech dereverberation. It is based on the MTF relation that the sub‐band temporal power envelope of reverberant speech can be represented as the convolution between temporal power envelopes of clean speech and the room impulse response. Therefore, the sub‐band power envelope of clean speech can be estimated using inverse MTF filtering without measuring the room impulse response. We tested the effectiveness of this method as a front‐end for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in both artificial and real reverberant environments. Reverberant speech signals were created by simple convolution of clean speech (AURORA‐2J) and artificially‐produced or real room impulse responses. The relative spectral filtering of the auditory‐power‐spectrum based method was used as a baseline. Compared with the baseline, our proposed method had 36.64% and 21.68% improvements in error reduction r.
The Effects Of Justice And Cooperation On Team Effectiveness

This study investigates the relation between two distributive justice rules (equity and equality) and team effectiveness, and the relation between procedural justice (PJ) and team effectiveness. The extent to which cooperation mediates these relations is examined. Results from 132 teams working on an interdependent task indicate that teams operating under equality rules were more cooperative, which led to fewer errors and better quality. Results also indicate that teams exposed to higher PJ were more cooperative. The increased cooperation in teams exposed to higher PJ led to better quality and higher ratings of team viability; these effects occurred regardless of whether an equity rule or an equality rule was used to allocate rewards. Areas for future research and implications for team rewards are discussed.
Korean Transnational Students’ School Adjustment: An Ecological Perspective

This research explored Korean early study abroad students’ school adjustment in the United States, as well as how their microsystems (family, peer, school) affect their experiences. To understand their experience, we posed two research questions: 1) What are Korean early study abroad students’ experience like in adjusting to American middle schools? and 2) How do these students’ microsystems (family, peer, and school) affect their experiences in the process of adjustment? Four Korean early study abroad students participated in a collective case study. Each student was interviewed three times and observed in both their content area and ESL classes. All students described tremendous challenges in adjusting to their new school in the US. Specifically, their challenges were pertaining to different aspects of learning experiences as well as school belonging. While their limited English proficiency was a primary factor in these challenges, a lack of support from their peers, parents, teachers and school also seemed to affect their school adjustment. Moreover, findings indicated disconnections among their microsystems, contributing to a lack of support in their school adjustment.
Innovation and Discretion

Drug courts emerged in the late 1980s as a solution to the mutual person-processing needs of the criminal justice and substance abuse treatment systems. In this article, the author draws on a rich body of observational data gathered during a 2-year period to illustrate the ways in which drug courts process program participants. I focus on the challenges faced by a drug court work group in shepherding new program participants into treatment. Specific processing activities include (a) locating appropriate eligible participants, (b) discovering an adequate diagnosis, (c) aligning resources necessary for placement, and (d) monitoring placements. The article identifies ways in which the interdisciplinary drug court model is optimally designed to address people-processing objects and simultaneously limited by conceptual and organizational ambiguities. The author concludes with a discussion of the unintended policy consequences of the drug court model and suggestions for future research.
Directed Evolution of Bacillus subtilis Lipase A by Use of Enantiomeric Phosphonate Inhibitors: Crystal Structures and Phage Display Selection

Phage display can be used as a protein‐engineering tool for the selection of proteins with desirable binding properties from a library of mutants. Here we describe the application of this method for the directed evolution of Bacillus subtilis lipase A, an enzyme that has important properties for the preparation of the pharmaceutically relevant chiral compound 1,2‐O‐isopropylidene‐sn‐glycerol (IPG). PCR mutagenesis with spiked oligonucleotides was employed for saturation mutagenesis of a stretch of amino acids near the active site. After expression of these mutants on bacteriophages, dual selection with (S)‐(+)‐ and (R)‐(−)‐IPG stereoisomers covalently coupled to enantiomeric phosphonate suicide inhibitors (SIRAN Sc and Rc inhibitors, respectively) was used for the isolation of variants with inverted enantioselectivity. The mutants were further characterised by determination of their Michaelis–Menten parameters. The 3D structures of the Sc and Rc inhibitor–lipase complexes were determined and provided structural insight into the mechanism of enantioselectivity of the enzyme. In conclusion, we have used phage display as a fast and reproducible method for the selection of Bacillus lipase A mutant enzymes with inverted enantioselectivity.
A Sequential Monte-Carlo and DSmT Based Approach for Conflict Handling in case of Multiple target Tracking

In this paper, we propose an efficient and robust multiple target tracking method based on particles filtering and Dezert-Smarandache theory. A model of cue combination is designed with plausible and paradoxical reasoning. The proposed model can resolve the conflict and paradoxes that arise between measured cues due to the partial or total occlusion. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the model in case of tracking with multiple cue.
Analysis of SEU Propagation in Combinational Circuits at RTL Based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories

The vulnerability of VLSI designs to soft errors grows with technology scaling. In order to allow a cost-effective reliability aware design process, it is critical to assess soft error reliability parameters in early design stages. This paper presents a new methodology to estimate digital circuit vulnerability to soft errors of circuits described at Register Transfer Level (RTL). Single Event Upsets (SEUs) propagation through RTL bit-vector operations is modeled and analyzed based on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). For instance, the bit-vector reduction operators and arithmetic operators were modeled using SMT to include their fault propagation properties. In order to illustrate the practical utilization of our work, we have analyzed different RTL combinational circuits. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is on average about 4 times faster than other comparable contemporary techniques. Moreover, it provides more accurate and detailed results of the circuit vulnerability allowing a more efficient applicability of fault tolerance techniques.
A Flexible Inventory Model for MSW Recycling

Most of the United States have laws mandating the recycling of municipal solid waste (MSW). In order to comply, municipalities recycle quotas of materials, without regard to fluctuating prices. An inventory system is proposed that allows municipalities to be sensitive to materials prices as they recycle in accordance with state mandates. A dynamic model is developed; it uses historical secondary material prices as exogenous inputs to minimize the net present value of MSW recycling system cost. The model provides a cost-effective method for municipalities to achieve their MSW recycling targets. The savings is approximately $1.43 per ton of MSW generated based on total MSW management costs of $13.5 per ton. The model also allows one to investigate the effectiveness of various strategies for increasing the recycling rate. These strategies include: reducing the transportation cost for recyclables, supporting the market price of selected secondary materials, and landfill bans on selected materials. This model may also be used to investigate the effect of market price changes on the portfolio of materials held in inventory for recycling.
Conditions beyond treewidth for tightness of higher-order LP relaxations

Linear programming (LP) relaxations are a popular method to attempt to find a most likely configuration of a discrete graphical model. If a solution to the relaxed problem is obtained at an integral vertex then the solution is guaranteed to be exact and we say that the relaxation is tight. We consider binary pairwise models and introduce new methods which allow us to demonstrate refined conditions for tightness of LP relaxations in the Sherali-Adams hierarchy. Our results include showing that for higher order LP relaxations, treewidth is not precisely the right way to characterize tightness. This work is primarily theoretical, with insights that can improve efficiency in practice.
Link Adaptive Techniques of OFDM-Based Wireless System

According to the channel's fading characteristics, power control, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), and auto request retransmission (ARQ) techniques for link adaptive are systematically studied for OFDM-based wireless systems in this paper. Furthermore, simulations and analyses are performed by combing these link adaptive techniques with PF scheduling algorithm. It is shown that there are sufficient performance improvements for system throughput and time delay when these link adaptive techniques are applied.
Regulation of arterial thrombolysis by plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 in mice.

BACKGROUND Platelet-rich arterial thrombi are resistant to lysis by plasminogen activators. However, the mechanisms underlying thrombolysis resistance are poorly defined. Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), which is present in plasma, platelets, and vascular endothelium, may be an important determinant of the resistance of arterial thrombi to lysis. However, in vitro studies examining the regulation of platelet-rich clot lysis by PAI-1 have yielded inconsistent results. METHODS AND RESULTS We developed a murine arterial injury model and applied it to wild-type (PAI-1 [+/+]) and PAI-1-deficient (PAI-1 [-/-]) animals. FeCl3 was used to induce carotid artery thrombosis. Thrombi consisted predominantly of dense platelet aggregates, consistent with the histology of thrombi in large-animal arterial injury models and human acute coronary syndromes. To examine the role of PAI-1 in regulating endogenous clearance of platelet-rich arterial thrombi, thrombi were induced in 22 PAI-1 (+/+) mice 14 PAI-1 (-/-) mice. Twenty-four hours later, the amount of residual thrombus was determined by histological analysis of multiple transverse sections of each artery. Residual thrombus was detected in 55 of 85 sections (64.7%) obtained from PAI-1 (+/+) mice compared with 19 of 56 sections (33.9%) from PAI-1 (-/-) mice (P=.009). Computer-assisted planimetry analysis revealed that mean thrombus cross-sectional area was 0.033+/-0.0271 mm2 in PAI-1 (+/+) mice versus 0.016+/-0.015 mm2 in PAI-1 (-/-) mice (P=.048). CONCLUSIONS PAI-1 is an important determinant of thrombolysis at sites of arterial injury. Application of this model to other genetically altered mice should prove useful for studying the molecular determinants of arterial thrombosis and thrombolysis.
Dynamics of an ensemble of noisy bistable elements with global time delayed coupling.

The dynamics of an ensemble of bistable elements with global time-delayed coupling under the influence of noise is studied analytically and numerically. Depending on the noise level, the system undergoes ordering transitions and demonstrates multistability. That is, for a strong enough positive feedback it exhibits a nonzero stationary mean-field,and a variety of stable oscillatory mean-field states are accessible for positive and negative feedback. The regularity of the oscillatory states is maximal for a certain noise level; i.e., the system demonstrates coherence resonance. While away from the transition points the system dynamics is well described by a Gaussian approximation, near the bifurcation points a description in terms of a dichotomous theory is more adequate.
Risk of spontaneous preterm birth in relation to maternal depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms.

OBJECTIVE To examine the risk of preterm birth (PTB) in relation to maternal psychiatric symptoms during pregnancy in Peruvian women. STUDY DESIGN This case-control study included 479 PTB cases and 480 term controls. In-person interviews were conducted to assess women's depressive, anxiety, and stress symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21). Multivariable logistic regression procedures were used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). RESULTS Compared with women reporting no or minimal depressive symptoms, the aOR (95% CI) for PTB associated with consecutive severity of depressive symptoms based on the PHQ-9 assessment method were as follows: mild, 2.22 (95% CI 1.64-3.00) and moderate-severe, 3.67 (95% CI 2.09-6.46). The corresponding aORs for normal, mild, and moderate-severe depressive symptoms based on the DASS-21 assessment were 1.00 (reference), 3.82 (95% CI 1.90-7.66), and 2.90 (95% CI 1.66-5.04), respectively. A positive gradient was observed for the odds of PTB with severity of anxiety (Ptrend < 0.001) and stress symptoms (Ptrend < 0.001). CONCLUSION The odds of PTB increased in pregnant Peruvian women with psychiatric symptoms. Efforts to screen and treat affected women may modify risks of PTB and possibly other associated disorders.
Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status in a Normal, Geriatric Sample

Abstract This investigation examined selected internal psychometric properties of the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS; Randolph, 1998) in a sample of 631 geriatric patients with no documented or reported history of central nervous system dysfunction. Consistent with previous findings, results revealed a high degree of internal reliability consistency in the measure. Similar to data obtained from analyses of the normative sample, index score intercorrelations were found to range from . 25 to . 79, with the overall pattern suggesting that indices do indeed assess relatively distinct neurocognitive constructs. Results provide evidence supporting the internal psychometric validity and reliability of the RBANS.