Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-sectional and longitudinal study protocols of the ‘ADIposity and BOne metabolism: effects of eXercise-induced weight loss in obese adolescents’ (ADIBOX) project

Introduction A need exists for sustainable and clinically effective weight management interventions, suitable for preventing well-linked chronic disease such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease and some less investigated secondary conditions such as bone alteration. The ADIposity and BOne metabolism: effects of eXercise-induced weight loss in obese adolescents (ADIBOX) protocol was designed to provide a better understanding of the interaction between adipokines and bone hormones in adolescents with obesity and how a 10-month physical activity programme may affect these interactions. Methods and analysis The ADIBOX protocol combines 2 studies. The first study involves a total of 68 adolescents aged 12–16 years. This cross-sectional study will include both males and females (1:1 ratio), either living with obesity/overweight (n=34; body mass index (BMI) ≤97th centile and ≥85th centile) or normal weight (n=34; BMI<85th centile). The second study is a longitudinal study that will include 50 obese adolescent girls and track them over a period of 42 weeks. Weight loss programme will consist of a combination of physical activity and a normocaloric diet. Bone and adiposity-related measurements will be performed every 14 weeks. Both studies will assess participants' anthropometric profile, nutrition and physical activity, body composition, bone densitometry and blood markers of bone, growth and adiposity. Ethics and dissemination The ADIBOX protocol complies with the ethics guidelines for clinical research and has been approved by their respective ethics committee (Australian Catholic University Committee Ethic, Australia and Hospital Sud Est 1 committee, France). Findings from this protocol are expected to clarify the possible interactions between adiposity and bone in childhood obesity and will be disseminated at several research conferences and published articles in peer-reviewed journals. Trial registration number NCT02626273; Pre-results.
The Baby and the Bath Water: Improving Metaphors and Analogies in High School Biology Texts

IV BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH SUBJECT . 1 METAPHORS IN SCIENCE . 2 SIMILES, METAPHORS AND ANALOGIES . 5 PEDAGOGICAL METAPHORS AND ANALOGIES . 7 TAKING A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE . 16 THESIS ROADMAP . 18 METHODS . 19 SAMPLE . 19 PROCEDURES . 22 PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS . 24 REINFORCING METAPHORS . 28 INFORMATION METAPHORS . 28 DNA AS LANGUAGE . 29 DNA AS BLUEPRINT . 35 DNA AS A MACHINE OR SOFTWARE . 38 SUMMARY OF INFORMATION METAPHORS . 40 MACHINE METAPHORS . 41 MACHINE METAPHOR EXAMPLES IN THE TEXTS . 43 MACHINE-INFORMATION-BUSINESS METAPHORS . 47 BUSINESS METAPHORS . 51 COMPETITION AND WAR METAPHORS . 55 COMPETITION METAPHORS IN THE TEXTS . 55 EXAMPLES OF COMPETITION AND WAR METAPHORS IN MICROBIOLOGY . 57 CASE STUDY: REINFORCING METAPHORS AND NATURAL SELECTION . 62 OTHER FINDINGS . 70 COMPARISON WITH FINDINGS OF PAST TEXTBOOK ANALYSES . 70 METAPHORS AND ANALOGIES ILLUSTRATING PHYSICAL STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION . 71 PRESENTATION FORMAT OF METAPHORS AND ANALOGIES . 72 LEVEL OF ENRICHMENT OF METAPHORS AND ANALOGIES . 72 IS THE ANALOGUE EXPLAINED? 72 IS A COGNITIVE STRATEGY PRESENT TO ALERT THE STUDENT TO THE PRESENCE OF THE METAPHOR? 73 ARE LIMITATIONS IN THE ANALOGY DESCRIBED? 74 ANALOGIES AND METAPHORS IN PROBLEM SETS . 75 MIXED OR LAYERED METAPHORS . 77 OTHER IMPORTANT METAPHORS: GEOLOGICAL TIME . 78
Association between Job Satisfaction, Motivation and Five Factors of Organizational Citizenship Behavior

The research aims to study the association between job satisfaction, motivation and the five factors of organizational citizenship behavior (i.e. Altruism, Conscientiousness, Sportsmanship, Courtesy and Civic virtue) among Public Sector Employees in Pakistan. In this research Structure Equation Modeling with confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the relationship between two independent and five dependent variables. Data was collected through questionnaire survey from 152 Public Servants Working in Gujrat District-Pakistan in different capacities. Stratified Random Sampling Technique was used to conduct this survey. The results of the study indicate that five factors of OCB have positive significant relation with both motivation and job satisfaction except the relationship of Civic Virtue with Motivation. The research findings implicate that factors other than motivation and job satisfaction may also affect OCB. Likewise, all the five factors of OCB may not be present in all populations. Thus, Managers must concentrate on increasing motivation and job satisfaction to increase OCB. Furthermore, the present research gives a direction to future researchers to use more independent variables (e.g. Culture, leadership, workplace environment, various job attitudes, types of motivation, etc.) on different types of populations with larger sample size in order to find the reasons behind insignificant relationship of civic virtue with Motivation in the research in hand and to generalize the tested model. Keywords—Five Factors of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB), Motivation, Job Satisfaction, Public Sector Employees in Pakistan.
A scheme for simulating one-dimensional diffusion processes with discontinuous coefficients

The aim of this article is to provide a scheme for simulating diffusion processes evolving in one-dimensional discontinuous media. This scheme does not rely on smoothing the coefficients that appear in the infinitesimal generator of the diffusion processes, but uses instead an exact description of the behavior of their trajectories when they reach the points of discontinuity. This description is supplied with the local comparison of the trajectories of the diffusion processes with those of a Skew Brownian Motion.
Moving-part-free microfluidic systems for lab-on-a-chip

Microfluidic systems are part of an emerging technology which deals with minute amounts of liquids (biological samples and reagents) on a small scale. They are fast, compact and can be made into a highly integrated system to deliver sample purification, separation, reaction, immobilization, labelling, as well as detection, thus are promising for applications such as lab-on-a-chip and handheld healthcare devices. Miniaturized micropumps typically consist of a moving-part component, such as a membrane structure, to deliver liquids, and are often unreliable, complicated in structure and difficult to be integrated with other control electronics circuits. The trend of new-generation micropumps is moving-part-free micropumps operated by advanced techniques, such as electrokinetic force, surface tension/energy, acoustic waves. This paper reviews the development and advances of relevant technologies, and introduces electrowetting-on-dielectrics and acoustic wave-based microfluidics. The programmable electrowetting micropump has been realized to dispense and manipulate droplets in 2D with up to 1000 addressable electrodes and electronics built underneath. The acoustic wave-based microfluidics can be used not only for pumping, mixing and droplet generation but also for biosensors, suitable for single-mechanism-based lab-on-a-chip applications.
A nonlinear terrain-following controller for a VTOL unmanned aerial vehicle using translational optical flow

This paper presents a nonlinear controller for terrain following of a vertical take-off and landing vehicle (VTOL). The VTOL vehicle is assumed to be a rigid body, equipped with a minimum sensor suite (camera and IMU) along with a measure of the forward speed from another sensor such as global positioning system, maneuvering over a textured terrain made of planar surfaces. Assuming that the forward velocity is separately set to a desired value, the proposed control approach ensures terrain following and guaranties the vehicle does not collide with the ground during the task. The proposed control acquires an optical flow from three spatially separate observation points, typically obtained via three cameras or three non collinear directions in a unique camera. The proposed control algorithm has been tested extensively in simulation and then implemented on a quadrotor UAV to demonstrate the performance of the closed loop system.
Maintainable management and access of lexical knowledge for multimodal virtual reality interfaces

This poster presents a maintainable method to manage lexical information required for multimodal interfaces. It is tailored for the application in real-time interactive systems, specifically for Virtual Reality, and solves three problems commonly encountered in this context: (1) The lexical information is defined on and grounded in a common knowledge representation layer (KRL) based on OWL. The KRL describes application objects and possible system functions in one place and avoids error-prone redundant data management. (2) The KRL is tightly integrated into the simulator platform using a semantically enriched object model that is auto-generated from the KRL and thus fosters high performance access. (3) A well-defined interface provides application wide access to semantic application state information in general and the lexical information in specific, which greatly contributes to decoupling, maintainability, and reusability.
Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition

1 Action based on attributes or aspects Situational perception still limited All aspects are given equal importance Copes with crowdedness Sees actions partially in terms of LT goals Has standardized and routinized procedures Sees what is most important in a situation Perceives deviations from the normal pattern Maxims vary according to situation No longer relies on rules / guidelines / maxims Grasp of situations & decision making intuitive Vision of what is possible Characteristics
Extended Dynamic Programming and Fast Multidimensional Search Algorithm for Energy Minization in Stereo and Motion

This paper presents a novel extended dynamic programming approach for energy minimization (EDP) to solve the correspondence problem for stereo and motion. A significant speedup is achieved using a recursive minimum search strategy (RMS). The mentioned speedup is particularly important if the disparity space is 2D as well as 3D. The proposed RMS can also be applied in the well-known dynamic programming (DP) approach for stereo and motion. In this case, the general 2D problem of the global discrete energy minimization is reduced to several mutually independent sub-problems of the one-dimensional minimization. The EDP method is used when the approximation of the general 2D discrete energy minimization problem is considered. Then the RMS algorithm is an essential part of the EDP method. Using the EDP algorithm we obtain a lower energy bound than the graph cuts (GC) expansion technique on stereo and motion problems. The proposed calculation scheme possesses natural parallelism and can be realized on graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms, and can be potentially restricted further by the number of scanlines in the image plane. Furthermore, the RMS and EDP methods can be used in any optimization problem where the objective function meets specific conditions in the smoothness term.
Reproductive protein evolution within and between species: maintenance of divergent ZP3 alleles in Peromyscus

In a variety of animal taxa, proteins involved in reproduction evolve more rapidly than nonreproductive proteins. Most studies of reproductive protein evolution, however, focus on divergence between species, and little is known about differentiation among populations within a species. Here we investigate the molecular population genetics of the protein ZP3 within two Peromyscus species. ZP3 is an egg coat protein involved in primary binding of egg and sperm and is essential for fertilization. We find that amino acid polymorphism in the sperm‐combining region of ZP3 is high relative to silent polymorphism in both species of Peromyscus. In addition, while there is geographical structure at a mitochondrial gene (Cytb), a nuclear gene (Lcat) and eight microsatellite loci, we find no evidence for geographical structure at Zp3 in Peromyscus truei. These patterns are consistent with the maintenance of ZP3 alleles by balancing selection, possibly due to sexual conflict or pathogen resistance. However, we do not find evidence that reinforcement promotes ZP3 diversification; allelic variation in P. truei is similar among populations, including populations allopatric and sympatric with sibling species. In fact, most alleles are present in all populations sampled across P. truei's range. While additional data are needed to identify the precise evolutionary forces responsible for sequence variation in ZP3, our results suggest that in Peromyscus, selection to maintain divergent alleles within species contributes to the pattern of rapid amino acid substitution observed among species.
Science Fiction and Macdonald's Polynomials

This work studies the remarkable relationships that hold among certain m-tuples of the Garsia-Haiman modules $ {\bf M}_\mu$ and corresponding elements of the Macdonald basis. We recall that ${\bf M}_\mu$ is defined for a partition $\mu\part n$, as the linear span of derivatives of a certain bihomogeneous polynomial $\Delta_ \mu(x,y)$ in the variables $x_1,x_2,. , x_n, y_1,y_2,. , y_n$. It has been conjectured by Garsia and Haiman that ${\bf M}_\mu$ has $n! $ dimensions and that its bigraded Frobenius characteristic is given by the symmetric polynomial ${\widetilde{H}}_\mu(x;q,t)=\sum_{\lambda\part n} S_\lambda(X) {\widetilde{K}}_{\lambda\mu}(q,t)$ where the ${\widetilde{K}}_{\lambda\mu}(q,t)$ are related to the Macdonald $q,t$-Kostka coefficients $ K_{\lambda\mu}(q,t)$ by the identity ${\widetilde{K}}_{\lambda\mu}(q,t)=K_{\lambda\mu}(q,1/t)t^{n(\mu)}$ with $n(\mu)$ the x-degree of $\Delta_ \mu(x;y)$. Computer data has suggested that as $\nu$ varies among the immediate predecessors of a partition $\mu$, the spaces ${\bf M}_\nu$ behave like a boolean lattice. We formulate a number of remarkable conjectures about the Macdonald polynomials. In particular we obtain a representation theoretical interpretation for some of the symmetries that can be found in the computed tables of $q,t$-Kostka coefficients.
Blending Mobile Programming and Liberal Education in a Social-Economic High School

Mobile programming is one of the fastest growing approaches in many fields, such as marketing or e-commerce. From the educational perspective, this means that students should understand that they can build mobile applications (apps) without being professionals, and at the same time recognize their own potential to use technology in any professional path they choose. This goal is not trivial, even if students are in general curious and open to learn about the creation of apps. Indeed, especially in liberal education, students get discouraged upfront as they perceive programming as a difficult task. This paper describes a course that was cre- ated to fit the educational needs of a social-economic high school. Students take part of an interdisciplinary project in which the Software Engineering process is used to promote CT skills. The course was repeated twice and involved 29 students (8th and 9th grade).
Psychosocial therapies in diabetes: report of the Psychosocial Therapies Working Group.

OBJECTIVE To review key advances in the behavioral science literature related to psychosocial issues and therapies for persons with diabetes, to discuss barriers to research progress, and to make recommendations for future research. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Key findings from the literature on psychosocial research in diabetes are reviewed separately for children and adults. Specific issues covered include psychosocial adjustment and psychiatric disorders, neurocognitive functioning, quality of life, and psychosocial therapies. Barriers that must be addressed to allow research in this area to progress are discussed. Recommendations are then made concerning high-priority areas for advancing research in the field. CONCLUSIONS A substantial amount of behavioral science research has demonstrated that psychosocial factors play an integral role in the management of diabetes in both children and adults. Research has also shown the efficacy of a number of psychosocial therapies that can improve regimen adherence, glycemic control, psychosocial functioning, and quality of life. More research in this area is needed to develop psychosocial intervention programs for specific patient populations and to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of these approaches.
The 3DP: a processor architecture for three-dimensional applications

The 3DP (3-Dimensional Processor), a parallel-computing architecture that targets problems that have a 3-D numerical structure and require numerous calculations on 3-D vectors, is described. The 3DP architecture differs from traditional scalar architectures in that it operates directly on vectors. It differs from general parallel architectures in that it can solve problems that predict the behavior of highly coupled systems, and it differs from vector architectures in that it runs efficiently on length-3 vectors. Object-oriented programming on the 3DP and programming the 3DP in C++ are discussed. 3DP performance is reviewed, and the current implementation of the 3DP architecture, as an attached processor that plugs directly into Sun host VMEbus, is described. <<ETX>>
Creator: general and efficient multilevel concurrent fault simulation

Accuracy, generality and efficiency are critical factors when fault simulation of VLSI circuits is the target. The concurrent algorithm is the only approach that satisfies these requirements. In the paper the minimal information concept is discussed, and its applications on the key algorithms for concurrent event-driven simulation are shown. New advanced generalized techniques are presented for the first time in a truly unified context. They are not related to a specific abstraction level, and lead to an intrinsic multilevel concurrent simulation algorithm. The implementation in the fault simulator Creator is described.
Automatic Adaptation of Annotation Standards: Chinese Word Segmentation and POS Tagging – A Case Study

Manually annotated corpora are valuable but scarce resources, yet for many annotation tasks such as treebanking and sequence labeling there exist multiple corpora with different and incompatible annotation guidelines or standards. This seems to be a great waste of human efforts, and it would be nice to automatically adapt one annotation standard to another. We present a simple yet effective strategy that transfers knowledge from a differently annotated corpus to the corpus with desired annotation. We test the efficacy of this method in the context of Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging, where no segmentation and POS tagging standards are widely accepted due to the lack of morphology in Chinese. Experiments show that adaptation from the much larger People's Daily corpus to the smaller but more popular Penn Chinese Treebank results in significant improvements in both segmentation and tagging accuracies (with error reductions of 30.2% and 14%, respectively), which in turn helps improve Chinese parsing accuracy.
Combinatorial effects of splice variants modulate function of Aiolos

The transcription factor Aiolos (also known as IKZF3), a member of the Ikaros family of zinc-finger proteins, plays an important role in the control of B lymphocyte differentiation and proliferation. Previously, multiple isoforms of Ikaros family members arising from differential splicing have been described and we now report a number of novel isoforms of Aiolos. It has been demonstrated that full-length Ikaros family isoforms localize to heterochromatin and that they can associate with complexes containing histone deacetylase (HDAC). In this study, for the first time we directly investigate the cellular localization of various Aiolos isoforms, their ability to heterodimerize with Ikaros and associate with HDAC-containing complexes, and the effects on histone modification and binding to putative targets. Our work demonstrates that the cellular activities of Aiolos isoforms are dependent on combinations of various functional domains arising from the differential splicing of mRNA transcripts. These data support the general principle that the function of an individual protein is modulated through alternative splicing, and highlight a number of potential implications for Aiolos in normal and aberrant lymphocyte function.
First Evidence of Genetic Association Between AKT2 and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

OBJECTIVE—Insulin resistance has been reported in up to 70% of women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Physiologic and genetic data currently implicate post–insulin receptor signaling defects in substrates such as glycogen synthase kinase 3β (GSK3β). The AKT2 gene was chosen as a candidate for PCOS because its product affects glucose metabolism and mitogenic signaling, interacts with GSK3β, and mediates cell survival in the ovary. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Subjects were recruited from the reproductive endocrinology clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and control subjects were recruited from the surrounding community; 287 white women with PCOS and 187 white control subjects were genotyped for four single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in AKT2. Genotyping took place at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. SNPs and haplotypes were tested for association with PCOS risk and phenotypic markers of PCOS. RESULTS—Minor allele carriers of SNPs rs3730051 and rs8100018 had increased odds of PCOS (odds ratio [OR] 2.2, P = 0.004, and 2.4, P = 0.001, respectively). The haplotype T-G-C-T was significantly associated with PCOS (OR 2.0, P = 0.01). Carriers of the risk haplotypes for both AKT2 and GSK3B had a further increased odds of PCOS (OR 3.1, P = 0.005). CONCLUSIONS—These data suggest that polymorphisms in two components of the insulin signaling pathway, AKT2 and GSK3B, are associated with PCOS. The presence of multiple lesions in a single pathway may confer increased risk.
An Improved Non-local Means Filter for Image Denoising

This paper proposes a improved non-local means (NLM) filter for image denoising. Due to the drawback that the similarity is computed based on the noisy image, the traditional NLM method easily generates the artifacts in case of high-level noise. The proposed method first preprocesses the noisy image by Gaussian filter. Then, a moving window at each pixel of the noisy image is chosen as the search window, and meanwhile, a improved calculation method of spatial distance based on the preprocessed image is used for computing the similarity. Finally, combining the improved distance with search window based on the noisy image, the intensity of each pixel is restored as the traditional NLM method. The standard images are used to evaluate restoration performance of the proposed method. Additionally, the application on medical image denoising also demonstrates that our method is practical.
PAC-like upper bounds for the sample complexity of leave-one-out cross-validation

When designing a pattern classifier it is often the case that we have available a supervised learning technique and a collection of training data, and we would like to gain some idea of what the error probability of our classifier will be after training. A popular way of approaching this problem in practice is to use some form of error estimate, one of the most popular estimates being the cross-validation estimate. In this paper we address the following question: if we have n training examples what is the probability that the leave-one-out cross-validation estimate differs from the actual error probability by more than a constant c? We derive upper bounds on this probability for the closure algorithm and the deterministic l-inclusion graph prediction strategy.