Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Examining the Association between Children’s Hand Skill Performance and Participation in Everyday Life

This study examined whether children’s real-life hand skill performance associates with their participation. A group of 30 preschool-aged children without disabilities and their parents were recruited. Each child was observed performing activities in real-life contexts, and their hand skill performance was scored using the Assessment of Children’s Hand Skills. The parents completed the Children Participation Questionnaire. Real-life hand skill performance was found to significantly associate with children’s participation diversity, intensity, and independence. Neither children’s enjoyment nor parents’ satisfaction with children’s participation was predicted. This study provides preliminary evidence supporting the relationship between children’s real-life hand skill performance and participation.
Making public media personal: nostalgia and reminiscence in the office

In this paper we explore the notion of creating personally evocative collections of content from publicly available material. Compared to the personal media that we look at, reminisce over, or personalise our offices with, public media offers the potential for a different type of nostalgia, signifiers of an era such as entertainment, products, or fashions. Reminiscence from public media may be particularly valuable in the workplace, where existing practices of office personalisation bring benefits, but also concerns in terms of privacy and disclosing too much of one's identity. The use of filtered public media may mitigate concerns over privacy, while providing similar benefits in terms of reminiscence, improving mood, and developing identity. After preliminary explorations of content and form, we developed a two-screen ambient display that cycled through 500 images automatically retrieved based on four simple user questions. We ran a two-week trial of the display with six users. We present qualitative results of the trial from which we see that it is possible to bring the delight associated with personal content into the workplace, while being mindful of issues of appropriateness and privacy. Images of locations from childhood were particularly evocative for all participants, while simple objects such as stickers, music, or boardgames were more varied across participants. We discuss a number of avenues for future work in the workplace and beyond: improving the chance of an evocative moment, capturing the mundane, and the crowdsourcing of nostalgia.
MAPK and SHH pathways modulate type 3 deiodinase expression in papillary thyroid carcinoma.

Type 3 deiodinase (DIO3, D3) is reactivated in human neoplasias. Increased D3 levels in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) have been associated with tumor size and metastatic disease. The objective of this study is to investigate the signaling pathways involved in DIO3 upregulation in PTC. Experiments were performed in human PTC cell lines (K1 and TPC-1 cells) or tumor samples. DIO3 mRNA and activity were evaluated by real-time PCR and ion-exchange column chromatography respectively. Western blot analysis was used to determine the levels of D3 protein. DIO3 gene silencing was performed via siRNA transfection. DIO3 mRNA levels and activity were readily detected in K1 (BRAF(V6) (0) (0E)) and, at lower levels, in TPC-1 (RET/PTC1) cells (P<0.007 and P=0.02 respectively). Similarly, DIO3 mRNA levels were higher in PTC samples harboring the BRAF(V600E) mutation as compared with those with RET/PTC1 rearrangement or negative for these mutations (P<0.001). Specific inhibition of BRAF oncogene (PLX4032, 3 μM), MEK (U0126, 10-20 μM) or p38 (SB203580, 10-20 μM) signaling was associated with decreases in DIO3 expression in K1 and TPC-1 cells. Additionally, the blockage of the sonic hedgehog (SHH) pathway by cyclopamine (10 μM) resulted in markedly decreases in DIO3 mRNA levels. Interestingly, siRNA-mediated DIO3 silencing induced decreases on cyclin D1 expression and partial G1 phase cell cycle arrest, thereby downregulating cell proliferation. In conclusion, sustained activation of the MAPK and SHH pathways modulate the levels of DIO3 expression in PTC. Importantly, DIO3 silencing was associated with decreases in cell proliferation, thus suggesting a D3 role in tumor growth and aggressiveness.
Painting with Flow

We present an interactive algorithmic painting approach producing organic flow-like representations. Our approach is inspired by nature, in particular, the smooth patterns of flowing particles in liquid and air but also the smooth organic shapes occurring in flora. The algorithm for creating organic shapes follows mechanisms of flow visualization. It is based on the random spread of guiding points from a user-defined seeding position that grow to curves enclosing ribbons. This spreading process is initialized and can be—to some extent—influenced by the user. Rendering only requires the drawing of partly transparent polygons. Different color maps and rendering schemes are available to produce unique, non-deterministic paintings.
Quantitative techniques for analyzing high-resolution cardiac-mapping data.

In high-resolution cardiac mapping, signals are simultaneously recorded from hundreds of electrodes in contact with the myocardium and then analyzed to reveal the underlying activation pattern. Activation mapping has a long history in both experimental and clinical cardiac electrophysiology and has also been used to study other organ systems. Much of the current emphasis in mapping technology is on data analysis-ways to extract useful information from the voluminous data stream-rather than on the acquisition of the data. Hence, in this article, the authors review the traditional method for analyzing and interpreting mapping data, isochronal mapping, and then report on additional techniques that have recently emerged. The authors focus on techniques applicable to quantifying the dynamics of complex tachyarrhythmias such as ventricular fibrillation (VF) and atrial fibrillation (AF).
Criteria Used in Clinical Practice to Guide Immunosuppressive Treatment in Patients with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis

Background & Aims Current guidelines recommend immunosuppressive treatment (IT) in patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) and elevated aminotransferase levels more than five times the upper limit of normal and elevated serum IgG-levels above twice the upper limit of normal. Since there is no evidence to support this recommendation, we aimed to assess the criteria that guided clinicians in clinical practice to initiate IT in patients with previously diagnosed PSC. Methods This is a retrospective analysis of 196 PSC patients from seven German hepatology centers, of whom 36 patients had received IT solely for their liver disease during the course of PSC. Analyses were carried out using methods for competing risks. Results A simplified autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) score >5 (HR of 36, p<0.0001) and a modified histological activity index (mHAI) greater than 3/18 points (HR 3.6, p = 0.0274) were associated with the initiation of IT during the course of PSC. Of note, PSC patients who subsequently received IT differed already at the time of PSC diagnosis from those patients, who did not receive IT during follow-up: they presented with increased levels of IgG (p = 0.004) and more frequently had clinical signs of cirrhosis (p = 0.0002). Conclusions This is the first study which investigates the parameters associated with IT in patients with PSC in clinical practice. A simplified AIH score >5 and a mHAI score >3, suggesting concomitant features of AIH, influenced the decision to introduce IT during the course of PSC. In German clinical practice, the cutoffs used to guide IT may be lower than recommended by current guidelines.
Rationalisation of regimens of treatment of kala-azar with sodium stibogluconate in India: a randomised study

The efficacy and safety of six regimens of treatment for kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis) with sodium stibogluconate were evaluated in a prospective randomised study to ascertain the optimal treatment for Indian patients. Altogether 371 patients with kala-azar were randomised to receive sodium stibogluconate intramuscularly at a dose of 10 mg/kg body weight/day for 20 or 40 days (groups A and A1, respectively), 15 mg/kg body weight/day for 20 or 40 days (groups B and B1, respectively), or 20 mg/kg body weight/day for 20 or 40 days (groups C and C1, respectively). Patients were examined blind before and at the end of treatment and every month for six months. The number of patients who were apparently cured—that is, those whose temperature had returned to normal at the end of their regimen of treatment—was 45 (78%) in group A, 53 (87%) in group A1, 50 (81%) in group B, 60 (95%) in group B1, 58 (92%) in group C, and 62 (97%) in group C1. At six months 62 patients (97%) in group C1, 51 (81%) in group C, 54 (86%) in group B1, 42 (68%) in group B, 45 (74%) in group A1, and 33 (57%) in group A had not relapsed and were cured as confirmed by a bone marrow aspirate free of parasites. The differences between groups C1 and C, B1 and B, and A1 and A were significant. Logistic regression of the proportion cured with the dose and length of treatment showed that both factors were significant in improving the rate of cure; the highest dose for the longer time (group C1) had the best rate of cure. One patient in group C1, 12 in group C, nine in group B1, 18 in group B, 15 in group A1, and 23 in group A were cured with extended courses of 20 mg sodium stibogluconate. One patient in each of groups C1, B, A1, and A became unresponsive to antimony and were cured with pentamidine. One patient in each of groups C1, B, and A became unresponsive to both antimony and pentamidine. The patients tolerated the longer duration of treatment safely, and side effects were minor. Sodium stibogluconate should be given intramuscularly in the dosage of 20 mg/kg for at least 40 days, when patients should be assessed for further treatment if necessary. Such a regimen should achieve the highest rate of cure with low toxicity and low rates of relapse and unresponsiveness.
O benefício da dança sênior em relação ao equilíbrio e às atividades de vida diárias no idoso

Introduction: With elderly onset, some changes happen and determine a progressive loss of the individual’s adaptability, resulting in difficulties to maintain balance when performing activities of daily living, and making coexistence in society difficult. Dance provides improved functional capacity and psychological benefits. Objective: To evaluate the benefit of senior dance regarding balance and activities of daily living in the elderly. Methods: The senior dance group included 19 aged individuals between 60 to 85 years old, who answered the Berg and Lawton activities of daily living scales. Senior dance was applied twice a week for three months and, at the end of this period, the two scales were reapplied. Results: From the results of this study, it was possible to notice that the senior dance practice provided improvements to balance and activities of daily living. Since balance and fall risks assessed by Berg’s scale resulted in advances, showing a highly significant statistical value of p=0.001 regarding independence in activities of daily living assessed by Lawton’s scale, it was observed an improvement result with p=0.001. Conclusion: Senior dancing proved being beneficial as to balance and activities of daily living in the elderly.
Identifying and Scheduling Loop Chains Using Directives

Exposing opportunities for parallelization while explicitly managing data locality is the primary challenge to porting and optimizing existing computational science simulation codes to improve performance and accuracy. OpenMP provides many mechanisms for expressing parallelism, but it primarily remains the programmer's responsibility to group computations to improve data locality. The loopchain abstraction, where data access patterns are included with the specification of parallel loops, provides compilers with sufficient information to automate the parallelism versus data locality tradeoff. In this paper, we present a loop chain pragma and an extension to the omp for to enable the specification of loop chains and high-level specifications of schedules on loop chains. We show example usage of the extensions, describe their implementation, and show preliminary performance results for some simple examples.
Performance evaluation of backoff algorithms in multi-hop wireless mesh networks

Multi-hop wireless mesh networks (M-WMNs) have recently emerged as an alternative network infrastructure. For M-WMNs to serve as a network infrastructure, the protocol designs for M-WMNs should target a high network capacity. An efficient backoff algorithm is required to achieve a high network capacity. Most of existing works focused on backoff algorithms for infrastructure environment based on IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) or did not consider the features of M-WMN. In this paper, we propose an adaptive backoff algorithm based on the number of contention nodes for an IEEE 802.11 DCF-based M-WMN. The proposed backoff algorithm is founded on cross-layer cooperation between the routing and the medium access control (MAC) layers. The number of contention nodes of a node is obtained from the routing layer, and then this information is used to adaptively adjust the value of the minimum contention window (CWmin) in the backoff mechanism of the MAC protocol. To evaluate the performance of the proposed backoff algorithm and existing ones, computer simulations were performed. The simulation results show that the existing algorithms do not work well in M-WMN and the proposed backoff algorithm outperforms existing ones.
Time Varying Market Efficiency

Market efficiency requires that arbitrageurs are able to raise the capital needed to arbitrage away mispricing in the cross-section of stock returns. We identify a set of capital constraints that impede the flow of funds to arbitrage strategies. When this flow is particularly curtailed, investors are unable to fully implement arbitrage strategies, allowing some level of inefficiency to persist. In turn, this leads to higher cross-sectional return predictability and stronger performance of arbitrage strategies in the future, as mispricing is eventually corrected. Thus, the degree of market efficiency is not a static concept but varies across time as arbitrage agents face time-varying constraints to arbitrage capital.
The relaTionship beTween prospecTive Teachers' sTraTegies for coping wiTh sTress and Their percepTions of sTudenT conTrol

The relationship between prospective teachers’ preferred strategies for coping with stress and their perceptions of student control were examined by use of a relational survey model to determine the relations between these concepts. The study group consisted of 267 prospective teachers at the Faculty of Education in Kirsehir, Turkey. Data were collected from senior class faculty students using 2 scales: The Ways of Coping Scale (WCS) originally developed by Lazarus and Folkman (1984) and adapted into Turkish by Şahin and Durak (1994) and the Scale of Locus of Student Control developed by Miller et al. (1988) and adapted into Turkish by Abaci (1996). Pearson moment correlation was used to analyze the data. Findings showed that there was a noticeable meaningful statistical relation between variables. Findings are discussed based on the literature.
Performance of Clinical Algorithms for HIV-1 Diagnosis and Antiretroviral Initiation Among HIV-1-Exposed Children Aged Less Than 18 Months in Kenya

Background:Ninety percent of HIV-1-infected children live in sub-Saharan Africa. In the absence of diagnosis and antiretroviral therapy, approximately 50% die before 2 years. Methods:We evaluated sensitivity and specificity of clinical algorithms for diagnosis of HIV-1 infection and antiretroviral therapy initiation among HIV-1-exposed children aged less than 18 months. Children were identified with routine HIV-1 testing and assessed using 3 sets of criteria: (1) Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI), (2) World Health Organization Presumptive Diagnosis (WHO-PD) for HIV-1 infection, and (3) CD4 T-lymphocyte cell subsets. HIV-1 infection status was determined using DNA polymerase chain reaction testing. Findings:A total of 1418 children (median age 5.4 months) were screened for HIV-1 antibodies, of whom 144 (10.2%) were seropositive. Of these, 134 (93%) underwent HIV-1 DNA testing and 80 (60%) were found to be HIV-1 infected. Compared with HIV-1 DNA testing, sensitivity and specificity of the IMCI criteria were 19% and 96% and for WHO-PD criteria 43% and 88%, respectively. Inclusion of severe immune deficiency determined by CD4% improved sensitivity of IMCI and WHO-PD criteria to 74% and 84%, respectively; however, specificity declined to 43% and 41%, respectively. Interpretation:Diagnosis of HIV-1 infection among exposed children less than 18 months in a high-prevalence resource-limited setting remains a challenge, and current recommended algorithms have low sensitivity. This underscores the need for rapid scale-up of viral assays for early infant diagnosis.
Processing Skyline Groups on Data Streams

Skyline is defined as a set of objects in a multidimensional dataset. It returns objects which are not dominated by any other objects in the set. An object p dominates object p' if and only if it is not worse than p' on all of the attributes (dimensions) and is better than p' on at least one attribute. Given the same kind of dataset, the skyline group query returns groups which are not dominated by any other groups in the set and each group has the same number of objects. Although the skyline group query has been investigated in recent years, most techniques are designed for static datasets. However, data are changing with time in many practical applications nowadays and query processing techniques for dynamic datasets are not available. Therefore, finding skyline groups on data streams are highly required. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to find the skyline groups on data streams. We use two data structures CL and GSM to store the immediate results. CL stores the candidate objects that may become members of the skyline groups. GSM stores the immediate results of the dynamic programming. We do experiments on synthetic datasets. The experimental results show that the algorithms proposed can find skyline groups efficiently.
Nasolabial Fold Discontinuity during Speech as a Possible Extended Cleft Phenotype

Objective This exploratory research sought to extend the cleft phenotype by identifying movement-related soft tissue appearance changes in the midfacial region in individuals with cleft lip/palate or those with genetic susceptibility to cleft lip/palate (unaffected relatives). The cleft phenotype (clinically identified orofacial cleft or subclinical orbicularis oris defect) was hypothesized to be associated with movement related appearance changes in the midfacial region, e.g., with furrowing and dimpling during speech. Design Changes in the appearance of skin in the midfacial region, including a newly identified phenotypic feature, nasolabial fold (NLF) discontinuity, were described and compared across groups. Participants Individuals with cleft lip (n = 42), unaffected relatives of persons with a cleft (n = 57) and healthy controls (n = 41) were compared. Results Frequencies of NLF discontinuity differed across cleft, relative, and control groups. NLF discontinuities were observed more frequently in individuals with a cleft phenotype (overt cleft or previously identified orbicularis oris muscle defect) than in those with no underlying muscular defect (Fisher exact test, P = .014). Conclusion Results suggest that the appearance of facial soft tissue during movement of the midface is moderated at least in part by underlying cleft risk factors, indicating certain facial movements as candidate physical markers for extension of the cleft phenotype.
Density-functional-theory-based local quasicontinuum method: Prediction of dislocation nucleation

We introduce the density functional theory (DFT) local quasicontinuum method: a first principles multiscale material model that embeds DFT unit cells at the subgrid level of a finite element computation. The method can predict the onset of dislocation nucleation in both single crystals and those with inclusions, although extension to lattice defects awaits new methods. We show that the use of DFT versus embedded-atom method empirical potentials results in different predictions of dislocation nucleation in nanoindented face-centered-cubic aluminum.
Part-Based Annotation of Virtual 3D Shapes

In the latest years, distributed virtual worlds populated by static and dynamic 3D shapes have grown significantly, and the need to model and process them effectively has become a critical issue. The introduction of semantic annotations for capturing characteristics and behaviours is foreseen as a fundamental contribution to move from traditional geometric shapes towards self-describing semantic shapes. To this aim, we describe the foundations of a novel system that allows us to perform non-trivial segmentations of 3D surface meshes and to annotate the detected parts through concepts expressed by an ontology. Each part is connected to an instance in a knowledge base, allowing easier retrieval in a semantics-based context. We show how the part-based annotation framework might be used in two scenarios, namely for the creation of avatars in emerging Internet-based virtual worlds and for product design in emanufacturing.
Presidential Rhetoric and the Purpose of American Education

Abstract This study examines how U.S. presidents have defined the purpose of education. Presidential rhetoric about education in inaugural and State of the Union speeches was collected and examined. Throughout history, two purposes of education have gained the most attention—civic responsibility and economic efficiency—with emphasis shifting from civic responsibility to economic efficiency over time.
Dual Processes in the Psychology of Mathematics Education and Cognitive Psychology

Research in the psychology of mathematics education has been confronted with the fact that people blatantly fail to solve tasks they are supposed to be able to solve correctly given their available domain-specific knowledge and skills. Also researchers in cognitive psychology have encountered such phenomena. In this paper, theories that have been developed in both fields to account for these findings are discussed. After giving a summary of the state of the art in both fields, we argue that bringing together these largely separately developed (sets of) theories creates opportunities for both domains and we suggest a way in which this can be done.
An Enhanced k-means algorithm to improve the Efficiency Using Normal Distribution Data Points

— Clustering is one of the unsupervised learning method in which a set of essentials is separated into uniform groups. The k-means method is one of the most widely used clustering techniques for various applications. This paper proposes a method for making the K-means algorithm more effective and efficient; so as to get better clustering with reduced complexity. In this research, the most representative algorithms K-Means and the Enhanced K-means were examined and analyzed based on their basic approach. The best algorithm was found out based on their performance using Normal Distribution data points. The accuracy of the algorithm was investigated during different execution of the program on the input data points. The elapsed time taken by proposed enhanced k-means is less than k-means algorithm.