Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Naming compounds in Alzheimer's disease

The peculiar pattern of linguistic and cognitive deficits in early Alzheimer’s disease (DAT), whereby memory limitations and failure in semantics prevail over deficits in syntax, makes an interesting contrast with linguistic deficits in classic aphasia categories. The present study compared errors in picture naming of different types of Italian compounds, both in aphasia and in DAT. As in previous studies, in aphasia the knowledge of the compound status seems to be retained vis-a-vis the inability to retrieve the phonological form. This effect is much less evident in DAT. The target compound structure in errors is also preserved in aphasia, while DAT participants seem to compensate for their retrieval failure by overwhelmingly using the most productive structures. Unlike in aphasia, in DAT the retrieval of the second component is more difficult than the retrieval of the first component, probably as an effect of processing overload.
AN EVOLVING HISTORY OF ARCTIC AEROSOLS

T he Arctic represents the forefront of contemporary climate change, profoundly altered by distant emissions of greenhouse gases. Summer sea-ice cover is shrinking rapidly, while average Arctic temperatures are rising at a rate twice as fast as the global mean. A long legacy of international cooperation in the geophysical sciences has been dedicated to improving understanding of climate in the Arctic. Led by geographer Karl Weyprecht, scientists from 11 nations established a network of Arctic meteorological stations for the first International Polar Year (IPY), held 1881–84. Fifty years later, a second IPY saw 40 nations expanding and solidifying this network. The Third IPY, in 1957–58 (also known as the International Geophysical Year), involved 67 countries and was organized around a solar maximum to focus on the nascent field of space physics. Currently underway is the Fourth International Polar Year. Between March 2007 and March 2009, scientists will be engaged in over 200 projects, involving 60 nations. The Fourth IPY differs from its predecessors in focusing on how and why Arctic climate is changing, and also by coordinating ground, air, and space-based platforms for the investigation of the transport from midlatitudes of trace aerosol and gas plumes into the Arctic. While anthropogenic climate change did not command greater emphasis in earlier IPYs because it had not yet been confidently predicted or detected, the study of pollution intrusions languished mostly out of misinterpretation and neglect. Arctic atmospheric pollution, once thought to be a late twentieth-century discovery, turns out to have been noticed by our pioneering predecessors of the late 1800s. Our study of the research record shows that the remarkable phenomenon of “Arctic Haze” has been a story of repeated discovery and rediscovery. Most studies now recognize the first time Arctic aerosol pollution was noticed to be between the late 1940s and 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force f lew at least 3,000 “Ptarmigan” weather reconnaissance missions along a route from Alaska over the Arctic Ocean. As described in 1957 by air force meteorologist J. Murray Mitchell, “Perhaps the most surprising outcome of the ‘Ptarmigan’ observations has been the high incidence of haze at flight altitudes which restricts horizontal and slant visibility to an estimated range of 3–8 km without impairing vertical visibility to an obvious extent. The color effects in the haze suggest that, like the low-tropospheric haze of middle latitudes, the constituent particles are no larger than about 2 μ. This size is so small that, should the haze be made up of ice, the crystals would be very rudimentary. ” At first, these notes went largely unnoticed, at least until decades later when Glenn Shaw of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, drew greater attention to the phenomenon. As a recent Ph.D. from the University of Arizona, Shaw went to Barrow, Alaska, to measure atmospheric turbidity as part of the 1972 Arctic Ice Dynamics Joint Experiment. Shaw was
Quality of dyadic relationship in Swedish men and women living in long-term relationships and in couples in family counselling – Introduction of a new self-report measure, QDR36

There has long been a need for a well-balanced, comprehensive and up-dated self-report measure of dyadic relationship quality. The aim was to test the new Quality of Dyadic Relationship, QDR, on 90 men and women living in long-term relationships and on 94 men and women constituting 47 couples visiting family counselling. In the first group A, the experienced entire quality of the relationship, QDR index, was found to be 22, with a possible range between 5 and 30, which means rather a good quality in the relationship. The dimension Dyadic Consensus showed the highest marks together with Dyadic Satisfaction, indicating that these men and women did not just stay together by force of habit. In group B, the QDR-index was 20 before and 22 after counselling. Dyadic Sexuality was found to be lowest in both group A and B. QDR seems to be an instrument with good validity and reliability also in these study groups, according to the factor structure and Cronbach’s alpha. The entire QDR36 is hereby introduced and presented ready for use in different kinds of relationships.
A Modified MELD Model for Chinese Pre-ACLF and ACLF Patients and It Reveals Poor Prognosis in Pre-ACLF Patients

Background & Aims Acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) is one of the most deadly, prevalent, and costly diseases in Asia. However, no prognostic model has been developed that is based specifically on data gathered from Asian patients with ACLF. The aim of the present study was to quantify the survival time of ACLF among Asians and to develop a prognostic model to estimate the probability of death related to ACLF. Methods We conducted a retrospective observational cohort study to analyze clinical data from 857 patients with ACLF/pre-ACLF who did not undergo liver transplantation. Kaplan–Meier and Cox proportional hazards regression model were used to estimate survival rates and survival affected factors. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (auROC) was used to evaluate the performance of the models for predicting early mortality. Results The mortality rates among patients with pre-ACLF at 12 weeks and 24 weeks after diagnosis were 30.5% and 33.2%, respectively. The mortality rates among patients with early-stage ACLF at 12 weeks and 24 weeks after diagnosis were 33.9% and 37.1%, respectively. The difference in survival between pre-ACLF patients and patients in the early stage of ACLF was not statistically significant. The prognostic model identified 5 independent factors significantly associated with survival among patients with ACLF and pre-ACLF: the model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score; age, hepatic encephalopathy; triglyceride level and platelet count. Conclusion The findings of the present study suggest that the Chinese diagnostic criteria of ACLF might be broadened, thus enabling implementation of a novel model to predict ACLF-related death after comprehensive medical treatment.
Secure Multi-Agent Planning

Multi-agent planning using MA-STRIPS-related models is often motivated by the preservation of private information. Such motivation is not only natural for multi-agent systems, but is one of the main reasons, why multi-agent planning problems cannot be solved centrally. Although the motivation is common in the literature, formal treatment of privacy is mostly missing. An exception is a definition of two extreme concepts, weak and strong privacy. In this paper, we first analyze privacy leakage in the terms of secure Multi-Party Computation and Quantitative Information Flow. Then, we follow by analyzing privacy leakage of the most common MAP paradigms. Finally, we propose a new theoretical class of secure MAP algorithms and show how the existing techniques can be modified in order to fall in the proposed class.
Which Is Easier, Adjusting to a Similar or to a Dissimilar Culture?

The intuitively paradoxical research proposition that it could be as difficult for business expatriates to adjust to a similar as to a dissimilar host culture is tested in this exploratory study. Based on data from a mail survey, a comparison of American business expatriates in Canada and Germany respectively did not reveal any difference in their extent of adjustment. Besides a significant between-group difference in cultural distance, confirming that the American expatriates perceived Canada as more culturally similar to America than Germany, no significant intergroup differences were detected for general adjustment, interaction adjustment, work adjustment and psychological adjustment. Neither was there a difference in the time-related variable; time to proficiency. Although highly tentative, the suggestion that the degree of cultural similarity/dissimilarity may be irrelevant as to how easily expatriates adjust is fundamental. Implications for theory, practice and future research of these findings are discussed in detail.
Trends in Teacher Preparation

What are the current trends in teacher education? Cruickshank and Cruz use Teacher Education Reports to identify the issues, problems, and proposals that have had or will have significant impact on teacher preparation practices. The in stitutional winners and losers and the political anomalies of the recent reform rhetoric are identified and discussed by the authors.
Facework on Facebook: The presentation of self in virtual life and its role in the US elections

This article analyses the phenomenon known as social networking services (e.g. websites such as Facebook and MySpace) with anthropological theory deriving mainly from Melanesia. It is argued that these websites engender what in Western countries is a new form of presentation of self- and personhood that focuses on the social relations of the person rather than the person as an individual. In this way, the article discusses consumption in cyberspace and the production of differentiation, rank and hierarchy on the Internet in relation to social identity.
OptimAX: efficient support for data-intensive mash-ups

Mash-ups are being used in various Web-based applications of Web 2.0 which combine instantly information from different sources. Active XML (AXML, in short) language is a tool for decentralized, data-centric Web service integration. AXML document includes calls to services that may be either simple request-responses either long running subscriptions. Being fully composable and allowing resource sharing makes AXML ideal for mash-up style integration. In this demo we present how AXML can be used as a specification, optimization and distributed execution language for dynamic distributed mash-ups in varied P2P settings. We also demonstrate our AXML optimizer's (OptimAX) optimization rules and rewriting engine with a help of GUI.
Nested Monte-Carlo Expression Discovery

Nested Monte-Carlo search is a general algorithm that gives good results in single player games. Genetic Programming evaluates and combines trees to discover expressions that maximize a given evaluation function. In this paper Nested Monte-Carlo Search is used to generate expressions that are evaluated in the same way as in Genetic Programming. Single player Nested Monte-Carlo Search is transformed in order to search expression trees rather than lists of moves. The resulting program achieves state of the art results on multiple benchmark problems. The proposed approach is simple to program, does not suffer from expression growth, has a natural restart strategy to avoid local optima and is extremely easy to parallelize.
Sensitivity to grain discretization of the simulated crystal stress distributions in FCC polycrystals

An elastoviscoplastic finite element model of aluminum alloys is used to compare mechanical response among meshes formed with several different grain shapes. Tetrahedral elements are used to form grains of cubic, rhombic dodecahedral and truncated octahedral shape. The influence of the grain shape on the aggregate response is examined in terms of the stress variation and the aggregate elastic moduli. While elastic anisotropy in the bulk material is not found to be dependent on grain shape, consistent trends are observed in intragranular and intergranular stress distributions across these mesh definitions.
Hypothesize and Bound: A Computational Focus of Attention Mechanism for Simultaneous N-D Segmentation, Pose Estimation and Classification Using Shape Priors

Given the ever increasing bandwidth of the visual information available to many intelligent systems, it is becoming essential to endow them with a sense of what is worthwhile their attention and what can be safely disregarded. This article presents a general mathematical framework to efficiently allocate the available computational resources to process the parts of the input that are relevant to solve a given perceptual problem. By this we mean to find the hypothesis H (i.e., the state of the world) that maximizes a function L(H), representing how well each hypothesis "explains" the input. Given the large bandwidth of the sensory input, fully evaluating L(H) for each hypothesis H is computationally infeasible (e.g., because it would imply checking a large number of pixels). To address this problem we propose a mathematical framework with two key ingredients. The first one is a Bounding Mechanism (BM) to compute lower and upper bounds of L(H), for a given computational budget. These bounds are much cheaper to compute than L(H) itself, can be refined at any time by increasing the budget allocated to a hypothesis, and are frequently enough to discard a hypothesis. To compute these bounds, we develop a novel theory of shapes and shape priors. The second ingredient is a Focus of Attention Mechanism (FoAM) to select which hypothesis' bounds should be refined next, with the goal of discarding non-optimal hypotheses with the least amount of computation. The proposed framework: 1) is very efficient since most hypotheses are discarded with minimal computation; 2) is parallelizable; 3) is guaranteed to find the globally optimal hypothesis; and 4) its running time depends on the problem at hand, not on the bandwidth of the input. We instantiate the proposed framework for the problem of simultaneously estimating the class, pose, and a noiseless version of a 2D shape in a 2D image.
Threads vs. caches: Modeling the behavior of parallel workloads

A new generation of high-performance engines now combine graphics-oriented parallel processors with a cache architecture. In order to meet this new trend, new highly-parallel workloads are being developed. However, it is often difficult to predict how a given application would perform on a given architecture. This paper provides a new model capturing the behavior of such parallel workloads on different multi-core architectures. Specifically, we provide a simple analytical model, which, for a given application, describes its performance and power as a function of the number of threads it runs in parallel, on a range of architectures. We use our model (backed by simulations) to study both synthetic workloads and real ones from the PARSEC suite. Our findings recognize distinctly different behavior patterns for different application families and architectures.
EMR Adoption: A User Perception Study

Despite promise of significant benefits, inadequate user acceptance has frequently limited the impact of EMR implementations. Using an action research approach, our team is participating in an EMR implementation at Aravind Eye Care System (AECS), one of the largest eye hospitals in the world, to observe its current practices, measure user perceptions of EMR, plan interventions, and assess their impact. Our proximate research objective is to develop interventions based on sound conceptual foundations and empirical validation rather than in an ad hoc manner, to facilitate EMR acceptance and adoption by AECS hospital staff. The ensuing goal is to learn from the post intervention findings to develop guidelines for EMR implementations, particularly in a developing country context. In this paper we report on the first phase of this study, and these initial results show how even simple analysis of perception patterns can help to customize and shape intervention plans.
Antigenic Complementarity in the Origins of Autoimmunity: A General Theory Illustrated With a Case Study of Idiopathic Thrombocytopenia Purpura

We describe a novel, testable theory of autoimmunity, outline novel predictions made by the theory, and illustrate its application to unravelling the possible causes of idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura (ITP). Pairs of stereochemically complementary antigens induce complementary immune responses (antibody or T-cell) that create loss of regulation and civil war within the immune system itself. Antibodies attack antibodies creating circulating immune complexes; T-cells attack T-cells creating perivascular cuffing. This immunological civil war abrogates the self-nonself distinction. If at least one of the complementary antigens mimics a self antigen, then this unregulated immune response will target host tissues as well. Data demonstrating that complementary antigens are found in some animal models of autoimmunity and may be present in various human diseases, especially ITP, are reviewed. Specific mechanisms for preventing autoimmunity or suppressing existing autoimmunity are derived from the theory, and critical tests proposed. Finally, we argue that Koch's postulates are inadequate for establishing disease causation for multiple-antigen diseases and discuss the possibility that current research has failed to elucidate the causes of human autoimmune diseases because we are using the wrong criteria.
A Study of Layout Strategies for Lowering RF CMOS Device Tolerances

Although tolerance levels for CMOS devices at gigahertz frequencies constitute a major challenge to RF-IC designers, little has been published about this subject. This paper presents a large number of measurements on various devices; including capacitors, inductors, and MOSFETs. The devices have been fabricated in four different standard submicron CMOS technologies. The reliability issues of on-wafer measurements are covered and a link to robust test fixture design is made. To establish a methodology for reducing tolerances of RF CMOS devices, various component layout techniques are studied. Advanced configurations such as fractal capacitors, shielded multi-level inductors, and multi-fingered transistors have been attempted. Besides from enhancing the component performance, many of these techniques are useful for lowering device spread as well.
The cell graphs of cancer

We report a novel, proof-of-concept, computational method that models a type of brain cancer (glioma) only by using the topological properties of its cells in the tissue image. From low-magnification (80x) tissue images of 384 x 384 pixels, we construct the graphs of the cells based on the locations of the cells within the images. We generate such cell graphs of 1000-3000 cells (nodes) with 2000-10,000 links, each of which is calculated as a decaying exponential function of the Euclidean distance between every pair of cells in accordance with the Waxman model. At the cellular level, we compute the graph metrics of the cell graphs, including the degree, clustering coefficient, eccentricity and closeness for each cell. Working with a total of 285 tissue samples surgically removed from 12 different patients, we demonstrate that the self-organizing clusters of cancerous cells exhibit distinctive graph metrics that distinguish them from the healthy cells and the unhealthy inflamed cells at the cellular level with an accuracy of at least 85%. At the tissue level, we accomplish correct tissue classifications of cancerous, healthy and non-neoplastic inflamed tissue samples with an accuracy of 100% by requiring correct classification for the majority of the cells within the tissue sample.
Burnout, stress and health of employees on non-standard work schedules: a study of Canadian workers

This study examined the relationship between non-standard work schedules (shift work and weekend work) and job burnout, stress and psychosomatic health problems among full-time employed Canadians in a large metropolitan city on the east coast. Data were collected by means of a structured mail back questionnaire (N = 376). Employees involved with weekend work reported significantly higher emotional exhaustion, job stress and psychosomatic health problems than employees not involved with weekend work. Similarly, employees on non-standard work shifts (other than fixed day shift, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.) reported significantly higher overall burnout, emotional exhaustion, job stress and health problems than employees on a fixed day shift. Results from two-way ANOVA indicated that employees involved with weekend work and non-fixed day shifts reported significantly higher emotional exhaustion and health problems than other employees. Implications of the findings are discussed for future researchers in light of employee well-being and non-standard work schedules. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A projector-camera system with real-time photometric adaptation for dynamic environments

Projection systems can be used to implement augmented reality, as well as to create both displays and interfaces on ordinary surfaces. Ordinary surfaces have varying reflectance, color, and geometry. These variations can be accounted for by integrating a camera into the projection system and applying methods from computer vision. The methods currently applied are fundamentally limited since they assume the camera, projector, and scene are static. In this paper, we describe a technique for photometrically adaptive projection that makes it possible to handle a dynamic environment. We begin by presenting a co-axial projector-camera system whose geometric correspondence is independent of changes in the environment. To handle photometric changes, our method uses the errors between the desired and measured appearance of the projected image. A key novel aspect of our algorithm is that we combine a physics-based model with dynamic feedback to achieve real time adaptation to the changing environment. We verify our algorithm through a wide variety of experiments. We show that it is accurate and runs in real-time. Our algorithm can be applied broadly to assist HCI, visualization, shape recovery, and entertainment applications.
Ipsilateral and contralateral cortical apoptosis in rats after unilateral middle cerebral artery occlusion

Cerebral ischemia and subsequent reperfusion is known to induce irreversible tissue damage with the consequence of more or less pronounced impairments. The underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms however are far from being understood today. In the present study, we employed the well established rat model MCAO (middle cerebral artery occlusion), which uses a unilateral ligature of the middle cerebral artery for a defined period of time, prior to reperfusion. Animals develop symptoms, comparable to stroke in humans. Brains of such animals were used for histochemical and biochemical evaluation of markers, indicating programmed cell death (apoptosis) as evidenced by presence of tissue transglutaminase stained cells, DNA fragmentation and presence of cytochrome c in both cerebral hemispheres ipsilateral and contralateral to occlusion.