Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing capacity building: reflections on Chicago's Field Museum, USA

This article explores one aspect of the debate concerning the role of museums in contemporary society. From dusty storage facilities for ancient artefacts that are considered important by a handful of scholars, museums have become ‘social agents’, able not only to assume social responsibility, but also to trigger changes by developing capacity building. This idea is an evolution and an active expression of the school of thought known as ‘New Museology’ that emerged between the 1960s and 1970s. New museology focused on how museums might assist disadvantaged communities and boost processes of societal, cultural and environmental transformation. In order to discuss, how museums are changing their role in the contemporary society and are tackling new challenges, an analysis of the Cultural Connection Programme implemented in 1998 by The Field Museum (Chicago, IL, USA) and the Chicago Cultural Alliance consortium is presented.
Ability versus effort revisited: The moral determinants of achievement evaluation and achievement as a moral system

This article examines the moral determinants of achievement evaluation. Conceptual analyses of the distinction between ability and effort are offered in which responsibility inferences and affective reactions play key roles mediating the relations between causal attributions and evaluation. Three new research directions are then pointed out that pertain to a distinction between onset and offset responsibility for achievement failure, the perceived fairness of achievement evaluation, and what adolescents communicate to peers after achievement outcomes. The article next examines the function of punishing lack of effort. Finally, achievement is viewed as a moral system, which suggests different research directions from those which have dominated the field. This research thrust focuses on achievement values and social obligations.
Comparison of the Developmental Potential and Clinical Results of In Vivo Matured Oocytes Cryopreserved with Different Vitrification Media

Background:Oocyte vitrification is widely used throughout the world, but its clinical efficacy is inconsistent and depends on the vitrification media. This study compared the developmental potential and clinical results of in vivo matured oocytes cryopreserved with different vitrification media. Methods:This retrospective study involved vitrified-warmed oocytes at one in vitro fertilization laboratory. Vitrification media kits comprised the MC kit (ethylene glycol [EG] plus 1,2-propanediol [PROH]), the KT kit (EG plus dimethyl sulphoxide [DMSO]), and the Modified kit (EG plus DMSO and PROH kit). Rates of oocyte survival and subsequent developmental potential were recorded and analyzed. The t-test and the Chi-square test were used to evaluate each method's efficacy. Results:Oocyte survival rate was significantly higher for the Modified kit (92.0%) than for the MC kit (88.2%) (P < 0.05) and the KT kit (77.3%) (P < 0.001). The rate of high-quality embryo development in the Modified kit group (35.8%) was significantly higher than in the MC kit group (29.0%) and the KT kit group (28.3%) (P < 0.001). No significant differences were observed in the clinical pregnancy and implantation rates among the MC, KT, and Modified kit groups (37.2% vs. 30.2% vs. 39.6%; 21.9% vs. 18.8% vs. 27.4%, respectively) (P > 0.05). The high-quality embryo rate per warmed oocyte was significantly higher (23.4%) in the Modified kit group than in the other groups (P < 0.001). The embryo utilization and live birth rates per warmed oocyte were the highest in the Modified kit group, but not significantly (P > 0.05). Conclusions:Modified vitrification media are efficient for oocyte vitrification and, with further verification, may be able to replace commercially available media in future clinical applications.
Branch and Tree Decomposition Techniques for Discrete Optimization

This chapter gives a general overview of two emerging techniques for discrete optimiza- tion that have footholds in mathematics, computer science, and operations research: branch decompositions and tree decompositions. Branch decompositions and tree decompositions, along with their respective connectivity invariants, branchwidth and treewidth, were first introduced to aid in proving the graph minors theorem, a well-known conjecture (Wagner's conjecture (103)) in graph theory. The algorithmic importance of branch decompositions and tree decompositions for solving NP -hard problems modeled on graphs was first realized by computer scientists in relation to for- mulating graph problems in monadic second-order logic. The dynamic programming techniques utilizing branch decompositions and tree decompositions, called branch decomposition- and tree decomposition-based algorithms, fall into a class of algorithms known as fixed-parameter tractable algorithms and have been shown to be effective in a practical setting for NP -hard problems such as minimum domination, the traveling salesman problem, general minor containment, and frequency assignment problems.
Integration of learning techniques into Incremental Satisfiability for efficient path-delay fault test generation

In recent years, several electronic design automation (EDA) problems in testing and verification have been formulated as Boolean satisfiability (SAT) instances due to the development of efficient general-purpose SAT solvers. Problem-specific learning techniques and heuristics can be integrated into the SAT solver to further speed-up the search for a satisfying assignment. In this paper, we target the problem of generating a complete test-suite for the path delay fault (PDF) model. We provide an incremental satisfiability framework that learns from (1) static logic implications, (2) segment-specific clauses, and (3) unsatisfiability cores of each untestable partial PDF. These learning techniques improvise the test generation for path delay faults that have common testable and/or untestable segments. The experimental results show that a significant portion of PDFs can be excluded dynamically in the proposed incremental SAT formulation for large benchmark circuits, thus potentially achieving speed-ups for PDF test generation.
Genetic diversity in Oryza glumaepatula wild rice populations in Costa Rica and possible gene flow from O. sativa

Wild crop relatives are an important source of genetic diversity for crop improvement. Diversity estimates are generally lacking for many wild crop relatives. The objective of the present study was to analyze how genetic diversity is distributed within and among populations of the wild rice species Oryza glumaepatula in Costa Rica. We also evaluated the likelihood of gene flow between wild and commercial rice species because the latter is commonly sympatric with wild rice populations. Introgression may change wild species by incorporating alleles from domesticated species, increasing the risk of losing original variation. Specimens from all known O. glumaepatula populations in Costa Rica were analyzed with 444 AFLP markers to characterize genetic diversity and structure. We also compared genetic diversity estimates between O. glumaepatula specimens and O. sativa commercial rice. Our results showed that O. glumaepatula populations in Costa Rica have moderately high levels of genetic diversity, comparable to those found in South American populations. Despite the restricted distribution of this species in Costa Rica, populations are fairly large, reducing the effects of drift on genetic diversity. We found a dismissible but significant structure (θ = 0.02 ± 0.001) among populations. A Bayesian structure analysis suggested that some individuals share a significant proportion of their genomes with O. sativa. These results suggest that gene flow from cultivated O. sativa populations may have occurred in the recent past. These results expose an important biohazard: recurrent hybridization may reduce the genetic diversity of this wild rice species. Introgression may transfer commercial traits into O. glumaepatula, which in turn could alter genetic diversity and increase the likelihood of local extinction. These results have important implications for in situ conservation strategies of the only wild populations of O. glumaepatula in Costa Rica.
From Policies to Realities

■ In 1999 a critical thinking syllabus was issued by the education authority to all junior secondary school English language teachers in Hong Kong. Different from the earlier curriculum guidelines, the syllabus highlights the importance of thinking in English language teaching and learning, and developing students’ critical thinking through the subject. This study aims to investigate through classroom observation whether the critical thinking syllabus is translated into the classroom practices of two teachers. In the case studies covering more than 600 minutes of classroom teaching, four writing lessons were observed, analyzed and reported. The data reveal that the two teachers constantly deprived their students of the time and space for critical thinking. What is striking about the classroom data is that these teachers were indeed not creating the space of learning for students’ writing development. The study, though exploratory, has important implications regarding students’ critical thinking development. The paper concludes that it is important for teacher trainers to help teachers become reflective writing instructors.
Proposal of a Method Detecting Malicious Processes

Malwares' communication detection methods based on communication characteristics have been proposed. However as malwares are getting more sophisticated and legitimate softwares' communication is getting diverse, it becomes harder to correctly tell malwares' communication and legitimate softwares' communication apart. Therefore we propose a method to check whether a process generating suspicious communication is malicious or not. This method focuses on malwares which impersonate a legitimate process by injecting malicious codes into the process. This method extracts two process images. One is obtained from a process to be checked (target process) generating suspicious communication. The other is obtained by executing the same executable as the target process in a clean Virtual Machine. Then the two process images are compared to extract injected codes. Finally the codes are verified whether the codes are malicious or not.
Distractibility and Concentration of Attention in Children's Development.

HIGGINS, ANNE T. , and TURNURE, JAMES E. Distractibility and Concentration of Attention in Children's Development. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1984, 55, 1799-1810. Preschool, second-, and sixth-grade children performed developmentally gradated, easy and difficult visual discrimination tasks in a quiet room or with 1 of 2 levels of extraneous auditory stimulation present. Subjects' errors, response latencies, and glances away from the task were recorded. Extraneous stimulation was found to impair performance significantly for younger children but to facilitate the performance of older children. Younger children made more errors and glanced away from the task more when performing with extraneous stimulation present, but these findings were generally reversed for older subjects. At all ages children glanced away from the task more and responded faster after learning the task. Learning and glancing correlated significantly in all experimental conditions. The findings provided support for the contention that there is developmental change in the ability to direct attention to an arbitrarily assigned task in the presence of extraneous stimulation. Findings are related to prior research and to practical concerns regarding attending to arbitrary tasks as well as research on theories of cognitive capacity and effects of arousal.
A Feedback Model for the Financialization of Commodity Markets

Recent empirical studies find evidence that commodity prices have become more correlated with financial markets since the early 2000s. This increased correlation is called the financialization of commodity markets and is conjectured to be due to the influx of external (portfolio optimizing) traders through commodity index funds, for instance. We build a feedback model to try and capture some of these effects, in which traditional economic demand for a commodity, oil say, is perturbed by the influence of portfolio optimizers. We approach the full problem of utility maximizing with a risky asset whose dynamics are impacted by trading through a sequence of problems that can be reduced to linear PDEs, and we find correlation effects proportional to the long or short positions of the investors, along with a lowering of volatility.
Phase transitions of opportunistic communication

In this paper, we study the utility of opportunistic communication systems with the co-existence of network infrastructure. We study how some important performance metrics change with varying degrees of infrastructure and mobile nodes willing to participate in the opportunistic forwarding. In doing so, we observe phase transitions in the utility of infrastructure and opportunistic forwarding respectively at different points in the design space. We discuss the implications that this has for the design of future network deployments and how this observation can be used to improve network performance, while keeping cost at a minimum.
Adaptive ${L}_{\bf 1/2}$ Sparsity-Constrained NMF With Half-Thresholding Algorithm for Hyperspectral Unmixing

Hyperspectral unmixing is an important step for material classification and recognition. Recently, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been utilized to unmix the hyperspectal imagery due to the advantage that it needs no assumption for the presence of pure pixels and can determine the endmembers and abundances simultaneously. In order to improve its unmixing performance, sparsity-constrained NMF has been demonstrated to be an efficient approach. The very recent study on L1/2 regularization theory in compressive sensing (CS) and sparsity-constrained NMF show that the L1/2 regularizer can yield stronger sparsity-promoting solutions than L1 or L2 regularizer. However, the L1/2 regularization can result in a complex nonconvex optimization problem that is hard to solve efficiently. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient adaptive half-thresholding algorithm for hyperspectral unmixing based on L1/2 sparsity-constrained NMF. In the proposed algorithm, iterative half-thresholding procedure that has been proved to be an efficient method for solving L1/2 regularization problem in CS is hybridized with the multiplicative update rule of standard NMF to deal with the L1/2 sparsity-constrained NMF, which can give sparser and better unmixing results than the alternative algorithms. Furthermore, the data sparsity information can be incorporated into the algorithm to adaptively adjust the regularization parameter of the model to improve algorithm performance and usability. The effectiveness of proposed algorithm was demonstrated by comparing with the representative algorithms on synthetic and real hyperspectral data.
The impact of otitis media on cognitive and educational outcomes

Otitis media is a common disease in childhood that can adversely affect cognitive and educational outcomes. The literature in this area is equivocal, and findings may be influenced by research design. The impact of otitis media on individual children's development appears to depend on the inter‐relationship between several factors. Children who have early‐onset otitis media (under 12 months) are at high risk of developing long‐term speech and language problems. Otitis media has been found to interact negatively with pre‐existing cognitive or language problems. For biological or environmental reasons, some populations have a pattern of early onset, higher prevalence and episodes of longer duration; this pattern leads to a higher risk of long‐term speech and language problems. These factors suggest that Indigenous children may be at higher risk of cognitive and educational sequelae than non‐Indigenous children.
Leveraging Light-weight Formal Methods with Functional Programming Approach on Cloud

We discuss the features of functional programming related to formal methods and an emerging paradigm, Cloud Computing. Formal methods are useful in developing highly reliable mission-critical software. However, in light-weight formal methods, we do not rely on very rigorous means, such as theorem proofs. Instead, we use adequately less rigorous means, such as evaluation of pre/post conditions and testing specifications, to increase confidence in our specifications. Millions of tests may be conducted in developing highly reliable mission-critical software in a light-weight formal approach. We consider an approach to leveraging lightweight formal methods by using ”Cloud. ” Given a formal specification language which has the features of functional programming, such as referential transparency, we can expect advantages of parallel processing. One of the basic foundations of VDM specification languages is Set Theory. The pre/post conditions and proof-obligations may be expressed in terms of set expressions. We can evaluate this kind of expression in a data-parallel style by using MapReduce framework for a huge set of test cases over cloud computing environments. Thus, we expect we can greatly reduce the cost of testing specifications in light-weight formal methods.
On Hybrid SAT Solving Using Tree Decompositions and BDDs

The goal of this paper is to study the benefits of hybridizing the CNF SAT Solvers with BDDs. Towards this we define a metric for the level of hybridization based on a tree decomposition of an input CNF. We also present a new linear time algorithm on BDDs, which is useful for efficient conflict analysis in any BDD-based hybrid SAT solver. Experiments on an implementation of our hybrid solver shows when to use such a hybridization.
The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis: The Brain and the Digestive System in Human and Primate Evolution

Les tissus du cerveau sont une extension metabollique, mais il n'existe pas de correlation significative entre le taux metabolique relatif de base et la taille relative du taille chez les humains et autres mammiferes a encephale. L'apport en graisses animales dans la nourriture est essentiel dans l'evolution du cerveau humain
First Report of Root Rot Caused by Plectosphaerella cucumerina on Cabbage in China

Abstract Severe root rot was observed in fields of cabbages (Brassica oleracea L.) in 2015 in China. Cardinal symptoms of this disease included root rot and wilting leaves. A fungus was isolated from diseased tissues consistently. Based on the morphological features and molecular analysis of the ITS-5.8S rDNA and D1/D2 domain of the 28S rRNA gene, it was identified as Plectosphaerella cucumerina. This is the first report of P. cucumerina causing cabbage root rot in China and the world.
Art Auctions: A Survey of Empirical Studies

This paper contains a review of the burgeoning research that has been designed to shed light on how the art auction system actually works and what it indicates about price formation. First, we find that in recent years returns on art assets appear to be little different from returns on other assets. In addition, some researchers have found that because of the weak correlation between art asset returns with other returns, there may be a case for the inclusion of art assets in a diversified portfolio. Second, we find evidence of several anomalies in art market pricing. The evidence clearly suggests that, contrary to the view of the art trade, 'masterpieces' underperform the market. In addition, there is considerable evidence that there are fairly long periods in which art prices may diverge across geographic areas and even auction houses. Third, we review the public record of the criminal trial of Sotheby's former Chairman, who was accused of price fixing, to show how the collusion with Christie's, the other great public auction house, was actually engineered. Contrary to the way the proceeds from the settlement of the civil suit in this case were distributed, we show that buyers were almost certainly not injured by the collusion, but that sellers were. In addition, based on the public record of settlement, it appears that the plaintiffs in the civil suit were very handsomely repaid for their injury. Finally, we review the extensive research on the effects of the auction institution on price formation. There is now considerable theoretical research on strategic behavior in auctions, much of it in response to empirical findings, and we review three key findings. First, the evidence suggests that art experts provide extremely accurate predictions of market prices, but that these predictions do not optimally process the publicly available information. Second, high reserve prices, and the resulting high unsold ('buy-in') rates are best explained as optimal search in the face of stochastic demand. Third, extensive research has documented that the prices of identical objects are more likely to decline than to increase when multiple units are sold, and this has led to considerable theoretical research. Subsequent empirical research has tended to document declining demand prices even when the objects are imperfect substitutes.
Pulsed dye laser therapy for viral warts.

Twenty-eight patients with 103 recalcitrant and 20 simple viral warts were treated with the Cynosure PhotoGenica V pulsed dye laser at 585 nm, and fluencies of 6.0-9.0 J/cm(2). An eradication rate of 92% for recalcitrant warts after an average of 2.1 (range 1-7) treatments and 75% for simple warts after an average of 1.6 (range 1-2) treatments was achieved with a mean follow-up period of 7.2 (range 3-15) months. Mild hypopigmentation was noted in one patient and superficial infection in another. Unlike ablative treatment modalities, with pulsed dye laser therapy, no wound was created thus avoiding prolonged postoperative pain, disability and scarring. Treatment was well tolerated by patients, most of whom returned to work or normal activities immediately postoperatively. Pulsed dye laser is an effective treatment for both recalcitrant and simple warts. It is the treatment of choice for these lesions in cosmetically sensitive areas.
Structural Modeling from Depth Images

In this work, we present a new automatic system for scene reconstruction of high-level structural models. We start with identifying planar regions in depth images obtained with a SLAM system. Our main contribution is an approach which identifies constraints such as incidence and orthogonality of planar surfaces and uses them in an incremental optimization framework to extract high-level structural models. The result is a manifold mesh with a low number of polygons, immediately useful in many Augmented Reality applications such as inspection, interior design or spatial interaction.
LncRNAs in Stem Cells

Noncoding RNAs are critical regulatory factors in essentially all forms of life. Stem cells occupy a special position in cell biology and Biomedicine, and emerging results show that multiple ncRNAs play essential roles in stem cells. We discuss some of the known ncRNAs in stem cells such as embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, adult stem cells, and cancer stem cells with a focus on long ncRNAs. Roles and functional mechanisms of these lncRNAs are summarized, and insights into current and future studies are presented.