Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BLOOD VOLUME AND ITS REGULATION.

emphasized a primary interest of investiga­ tors in development of adequate methods for determination of blood volume and for establishment of ranges of values in healthy and in diseased states. By 1960, there was fairly general agreement that the available methods gave a reasonable measure of the blood volume; Reeve, Allen & Roberts (3), work­ ing on this assumption, devoted their review to an elegant mathematically oriented discussion, based on a simplified model, of the factors controlling plasma volume. They were concerned chiefly with factors affecting the steady state distribution of water, prot ein, and soluble fluxes through the organism, regulation of total erythrocyte volume, and interactions between red cell and plasma volume. Their concluding paragraph on "Integration of Factors Controlling Blood Volume" indicated various possibilities for the interaction of reflex and humoral factors, a discussion which presaged the later more de­ tailed review by Farrell & Taylor (4). These authors emphasized the neuro­ endocrine aspects of blood volume regulation and "the emergence of a unify­ ing concept that certain elements of blood volume regulation (the control of water and electrolyte balance) may be by systems analogous to those for the maintenance of arterial
Effects of Online Problem-Based Learning on Teachers' Technology Perceptions and Planning.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the ways in which the experience of learning through an online problem-based learning (PBL) model affect teachers’ perceptions of integrating technology. Participant reflections were collected and analyzed to identify the pros, cons, and challenges of learning technology integration through this online instructional method. Participant perceptions were also examined across variables such as gender, age, level of technology expertise, level of pedagogical expertise, and teaching status. The study also examined the ways in which the experience of learning through an online PBL model affect teachers’ planning of technology integration. A qualitative content analysis was conducted in order to assess whether the online PBL method helped teachers plan activities that utilized real world scenarios, multiple disciplines, and technology as a partner in the learning process. Through analysis of study data, themes emerged that revealed the positive, negative, and challenges of this approach. Several positive themes were identified: the need for integration, the PBL process, professional growth, peer interaction, and leadership. Group dynamics and communication technologies were mentioned as negative aspects of the online (PBL) model. Additionally, participants indicated that the following issues represent challenges of learning technology integration through online PBL: group dynamics, scheduling and time issues, use of multiple disciplines, and pushing the boundaries of student learning. Upon completion of the qualitative content analysis, all online PBL groups experienced significant growth from one level to another, with all groups making progress in the area of multiple disciplines. Examination of participant attributes reflected positive attitudes towards the use on online PBL for learning technology integration and planning. iii Dedication I dedicate this work to my wife Cheryl, my best friend, whose constant support and devotion allowed me to pursue this accomplishment. Unselfishly and quietly, you accepted all family responsibilities allowing me to focus on this dream. For this, I will be forever grateful. Without you and your love, this would not have been possible.
Assessment of how internalized forms of motivation mediate the relationship between supports for basic psychological needs and physical activity behaviors

The prevalence of obesity has increased steadily over the last 30 years and it is a growing concern for school health and recreation providers. Decreases in time spent in physical activity and increased participation in sedentary activities are linked to the steady rise of obese and overweight youth (Rossner 2002). Guided by Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan 2000) the purpose of this study was to examine how supports for the basic psychological needs of autonomy competence and relatedness are related to the performance of physical activity behaviors among youth. This study specifically examined how intrinsic motivation mediates the relationship between supports for basic psychological needs and performance of physical activity behaviors. The study acquired data from a rural county school district in eastern North Carolina. School administrators collected responses from 115 students attending grades 6-10 using electronic questionnaires. Data were collected as part of an on-going community health initiative aimed at increasing physical activity within the county. Physical activity participation was measured using the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Children (PAC-Q) while measures for motivation and support of basic psychological needs came from a study conducted by Ntoumanis (2001). Results demonstrate the importance of perceived competence in the support for intrinsic motivation and the indirect effect of perceived competence on physical activity participation. The discussion reviews the results in the context of the literature and emphasizes the need to support competence in programs designed for early adolescents.
On the convergence of a modified version of SVM light algorithm

In this work, we consider the convex quadratic programming problem arising in support vector machine (SVM), which is a technique designed to solve a variety of learning and pattern recognition problems. Since the Hessian matrix is dense and real applications lead to large-scale problems, several decomposition methods have been proposed, which split the original problem into a sequence of smaller subproblems. SVM light algorithm is a commonly used decomposition method for SVM, and its convergence has been proved only recently under a suitable block-wise convexity assumption on the objective function. In SVM light algorithm, the size q of the working set, i.e. the dimension of the subproblem, can be any even number. In the present paper, we propose a decomposition method on the basis of a proximal point modification of the subproblem and the basis of a working set selection rule that includes, as a particular case, the one used by the SVM light algorithm. We establish the asymptotic convergence of the method, for any size q ≥ 2 of the working set, and without requiring any further block-wise convexity assumption on the objective function. Furthermore, we show that the algorithm satisfies in a finite number of iterations a stopping criterion based on the violation of the optimality conditions.
Tag-based Semantic Website Recommendation for Turkish Language

With the dramatic increase in the number of websites on the internet, tagging has become popular for finding related, personal and important documents. When the potentially increasing internet markets are analyzed, Turkey, in which most of the people use Turkish language on the internet, found to be exponentially increasing. In this paper, a tag-based website recommendation method is presented, where similarity measures are combined with semantic relationships of tags. In order to evaluate the system, an experiment with 25 people from Turkey is undertaken and participants are firstly asked to provide websites and tags in Turkish and then they are asked to evaluate recommended websites.
Artificial general intelligence through recursive data compression and grounded reasoning: a position paper

This paper presents a tentative outline for the construction of an artificial, generally intelligent system (AGI). It is argued that building a general data compression algorithm solving all problems up to a complexity threshold should be the main thrust of research. A measure for partial progress in AGI is suggested. Although the details are far from being clear, some general properties for a general compression algorithm are fleshed out. Its inductive bias should be flexible and adapt to the input data while constantly searching for a simple, orthogonal and complete set of hypotheses explaining the data. It should recursively reduce the size of its representations thereby compressing the data increasingly at every iteration. Abstract Based on that fundamental ability, a grounded reasoning system is proposed. It is argued how grounding and flexible feature bases made of hypotheses allow for resourceful thinking. While the simulation of representation contents on the mental stage accounts for much of the power of propositional logic, compression leads to simple sets of hypotheses that allow the detection and verification of universally quantified statements. Abstract Together, it is highlighted how general compression and grounded reasoning could account for the birth and growth of first concepts about the world and the commonsense reasoning about them.
Financial Reforms, Growth and Regional Disparity in Post-reform China

In this paper, by employing the Generalized Method of Moment (GMM) techniques and Chinese provincial level data from 1991 to 2003, we empirically investigate the relationship between finance and growth in post-reform China. We find that financial development significantly promotes economic growth in coastal regions but not in inland regions; the weak finance-growth nexus in inland provinces has exacerbated China's regional disparity.
PEDALE - A Peer Education Diagnostic and Learning Environment

The basis for individual students’ instructional support by teachers is an individual diagnosis of one’s learning advances and difficulties. Even though sophisticated diagnostic tools exist, it remains an open question how diagnosis and learning can be merged into a consistent pedagogical method to support both teachers and students with feedback about the learning process. Aspects like the usage of open format questions, social interdependencies and heterogeneity, group-forming processes and the teachers supervision issue are taken into account. We propose a model for integration of peer assessment functionality for learning into a computer-based Adaptive Diagnostic Learning Environment to solve central problems of classroom diagnostic assessment, adaptive learning and knowledge transfer between peers in a classroom environment. The research approach focused on math learning scenarios for evaluation, but is expected to be applicable for other educational content as well. In the following paragraphs we identify several problems in classroom scenarios to be addressed, describe the model of the underlying approach, show the implementation details and explain the evaluation setup.
Automatic lemmatization of Persian words*

Abstract This study presents a rather novel method for suffix and prefix stripping of Persian words. The method presented is a language independent one and mostly relies on a specially arranged corpus composed of a list of roots, word-forms, prefixes, and suffixes which has been manually compiled. Applying an algorithm, the morphemes of each word including root, prefix, and suffixes are separated from each other specifying their place and order in the given word. The degree of accuracy and precision of this program is dependent on the representative characteristics and richness of the corpus. The present method for which Persian words have been tested represents an accuracy of 87.24% in Persian. Although the main application of this algorithm is in the field of information retrieval, it can be used in a machine translation system from Persian into any other language. In this case a stem dictionary for morphological analysis should be used.
Vreteno, a gonad-specific protein, is essential for germline development and primary piRNA biogenesis in Drosophila

In Drosophila, Piwi proteins associate with Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs) and protect the germline genome by silencing mobile genetic elements. This defense system acts in germline and gonadal somatic tissue to preserve germline development. Genetic control for these silencing pathways varies greatly between tissues of the gonad. Here, we identified Vreteno (Vret), a novel gonad-specific protein essential for germline development. Vret is required for piRNA-based transposon regulation in both germline and somatic gonadal tissues. We show that Vret, which contains Tudor domains, associates physically with Piwi and Aubergine (Aub), stabilizing these proteins via a gonad-specific mechanism that is absent in other fly tissues. In the absence of vret, Piwi-bound piRNAs are lost without changes in piRNA precursor transcript production, supporting a role for Vret in primary piRNA biogenesis. In the germline, piRNAs can engage in an Aub- and Argonaute 3 (AGO3)-dependent amplification in the absence of Vret, suggesting that Vret function can distinguish between primary piRNAs loaded into Piwi-Aub complexes and piRNAs engaged in the amplification cycle. We propose that Vret plays an essential role in transposon regulation at an early stage of primary piRNA processing.
Development of a C-Band Klystron With a 360-MHz Instantaneous Bandwidth

This paper presents the design considerations, the simulation results, and the test results for a C-band klystron design with a 360-MHz instantaneous bandwidth, which was developed from March 2005 to June 2008. Five klystrons were built and tested. Over 800 kW peak output power with a 400-MHz instantaneous bandwidth (constant RF input drive over frequency) was measured at a 0.525% RF duty cycle. The measured electron beam-to-RF conversion efficiency is 30%, and the output power fluctuation over frequency is less than ±0.75 dB. The technological problems, including gain/power dip over frequency and low electron-beam transmission, are also discussed.
Characterization of Human DNA Topoisomerase II as an Autoantigen Recognized by Patients With IDDM

Autoantibodies against several cytoplasmic autoantigens such as glutamic acid decarboxylase, heat shock protein 65, insulin, and carboxypeptidase H have been identified in the sera of patients with IDDM. To investigate whether type II DNA topoisomerase (TopII) is an autoantigen in IDDM patients, we have constructed a series of overlapping DNA TopII fragments that covered the entire length of this enzyme. These fragments were used as antigens to screen sera of IDDM patients. We have examined 195 Chinese IDDM patients (mean age 14.2 ± 7.5 years, age at onset 9.2 ± 6.4 years, duration of diabetes 4.6 ± 3.4 years) and 51 nondiabetic individuals. The results showed that DNA TopII autoantibodies were detected in 49.2 and 47.2% of IDDM patients using purified TopII fragments and full-length TopII as antigens, respectively. The frequency of anti-TopII positivity was relatively stable irrespective of sex and disease duration. The patients were slightly older at onset and the prevalence of anti-thyroglobulin/anti-microsomal autoantibodies was twice that in the IDDM subgroup positive for anti-TopII than in IDDM patients who were negative for anti-TopII. We also characterized the epitopes of DNA TopII that were recognized by IDDM sera. Those epitopes resided mostly in three distinct domains. One resided in amino acid residues 1–147, another in amino acid residues 286–472, and the third in the COOH-terminal one-third of DNA TopII. Intriguingly, we found that these epitopes shared similarity (up to 36% identity and 63.6% homology) to previously identified epitopes of IDDM autoantigens.
Apolipoprotein CIII links islet insulin resistance to β-cell failure in diabetes

Significance Insulin resistance and β-cell failure are the major defects in type 2 diabetes. We now demonstrate that local insulin resistance-induced increase in apolipoprotein CIII (apoCIII) within pancreatic islets causes promotion of an intraislet inflammatory milieu, increased mitochondrial metabolism, deranged regulation of β-cell cytoplasmic free Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i), and apoptosis. Decreasing apoCIII in vivo in animals with insulin resistance improves glucose tolerance, and apoCIII knockout islets transplanted into diabetic mice, with high systemic levels of apoCIII, demonstrate a normal [Ca2+]i response pattern and no hallmarks of inflammation. Hence, under conditions of islet insulin resistance, locally produced apoCIII is an important diabetogenic factor involved in impairment of β-cell function and may thus constitute a novel target for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Insulin resistance and β-cell failure are the major defects in type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, the molecular mechanisms linking these two defects remain unknown. Elevated levels of apolipoprotein CIII (apoCIII) are associated not only with insulin resistance but also with cardiovascular disorders and inflammation. We now demonstrate that local apoCIII production is connected to pancreatic islet insulin resistance and β-cell failure. An increase in islet apoCIII causes promotion of a local inflammatory milieu, increased mitochondrial metabolism, deranged regulation of β-cell cytoplasmic free Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) and apoptosis. Decreasing apoCIII in vivo results in improved glucose tolerance, and pancreatic apoCIII knockout islets transplanted into diabetic mice, with high systemic levels of the apolipoprotein, demonstrate a normal [Ca2+]i response pattern and no hallmarks of inflammation. Hence, under conditions of islet insulin resistance, locally produced apoCIII is an important diabetogenic factor involved in impairment of β-cell function and may thus constitute a novel target for the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus.
Sibling Incest: Adjustment in Adult Women Survivors

To measure adjustment of women survivors of sibling incest, 35 adult female survivors and a matched comparison group of 21 women were interviewed and completed questionnaires regarding their adult adjustment. Sibling incest survivors reported significantly higher anxiety, depression, hostility, and adult victimization and lower self-esteem. Beliefs about child sexual abuse mediated the relationship between sibling incest and depression and anxiety for survivors, the majority of whom believed that men cannot be trusted, it is dangerous to let others get close, and that a normal life is not possible for them because of the abuse they suffered. Other forms of child abuse were significantly associated with self-esteem and depression, but not anxiety, among survivors. Adult victimization was also associated with increased depression and anxiety in survivors.
Nonparametric Spatial Rainfall Characterization Using Adaptive Kernel Estimator

A nonparametric statistical tool based on kernel function estimation is developed for spatial rainfall characterization. In this method, observations closer to the point of estimate are weighted higher using kernel function with a prescribed bandwidth. The kernel bandwidth is local and it extends only to the K th Nearest Neighbor, KNN, observation. An optimal value for KNN is selected by cross validation. Unlike Kriging, the underlying stochastic process is not assumed to be stationary. An application of this model using rainfall data is presented.
Mobile robot mapping in populated environments

The problem of learning maps with mobile robots has received considerable attention over the past years. Most of the approaches, however, assume that the environment is static during the data-acquisition phase. In this paper we consider the problem of creating maps with mobile robots in populated environments. Our approach uses a probabilistic method to track multiple people and to incorporate the estimates of the tracking technique into the mapping process. The resulting maps are more accurate since the number of spurious objects is reduced and since the robustness of range registration is improved. Our approach has been implemented and tested on real robots in indoor and outdoor scenarios. We present several experiments illustrating the capabilities of our approach to generate accurate two- and three-dimensional maps.
Social Participation During Transition to Adult Life Among Young Adults With High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders: Experiences From an Exploratory Multiple Case Study

This study aimed to explore the social participation of young adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) during their transition to adult life. A multiple case study was conducted using semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 10 participants (n = 10) composed of three adults with HFASD, their caregivers, and two representatives of community organizations. Four themes emerged: (1) access to services, (2) orientation to integrated life goals, (3) engagement in meaningful activities, and (4) gap in services before reaching independent living. Properly preparing and orienting the families could help them have a more satisfying social participation.
In Situ Biodiesel Production from Fast-Growing and High Oil Content Chlorella pyrenoidosa in Rice Straw Hydrolysate

Rice straw hydrolysate was used as lignocellulose-based carbon source for Chlorella pyrenoidosa cultivation and the feasibility of in situ biodiesel production was investigated. 13.7 g/L sugar was obtained by enzymatic hydrolyzation of rice straw. Chlorella pyrenoidosa showed a rapid growth in the rice straw hydrolysate medium, the maximum biomass concentration of 2.83 g/L was obtained in only 48 hours. The lipid content of the cells reached as high as 56.3%. In situ transesterification was performed for biodiesel production. The optimized condition was 1 g algal powder, 6 mL n-hexane, and 4 mL methanol with 0.5 M sulfuric acid at the temperature of 90°C in 2-hour reaction time, under which over 99% methyl ester content and about 95% biodiesel yield were obtained. The results suggested that the method has great potential in the production of biofuels with lignocellulose as an alternative carbon source for microalgae cultivation.
A forensic phonetic study of the vocal responses of individuals in distress

The production and perception of emotional speech is of growing importance to forensic speech scientists. They are often asked by instructing parties to provide an opinion as to whether recordings representing a violent attack are genuine, and whether speech material reflects real distress. However, they are prohibited from making statements regarding the psychological states of speakers by the International Association of Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics Code of Practice (IAFPA 2004). This study investigates two principal questions. First, it investigates how distress speech can be manifested acoustically. In so doing it proposes a taxonomy for comparing distress speech across speakers, assists in delimiting the boundaries of the vocal repertoire, and considers the extent to which acoustic measures of distress speech can distinguish between the vocalisations of real victims and actors. Second, it investigates whether listeners can discriminate between genuine and acted distress portrayals, and to what extent familiarity with forensic material increases listeners’ ability. Recordings from authentic criminal cases involving violent attack are compared with re-enactments by trained actors. Acoustic analyses examine F0, intensity, vowel formant frequencies and articulation rate. The recordings are also used as stimuli in a perceptual listening test, comparing the performance of lay listeners, police call takers and forensic practitioners. The findings lend support to the view that assessments of distress should be exercised with extreme caution. On the one hand, acoustic parameters can distinguish between non-distress and distress conditions, but cannot discriminate between acted and authentic distress, and so IAFPA’s refrain from such an assessment is justified. On the other, listeners who are familiar with authentic distress data, such as police call takers and forensic practitioners, are better able to differentiate between acted and authentic distress than lay listeners. Thus, if an assessment were to be made, the forensic practitioners may be the best group to do so.