Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Efficacy of a Novel Video Game Intervention (MindLight) in Reducing Children's Anxiety

ii Acknowledgements . iii List of Figures . v List of Tables . vi List of Abbreviations . vii Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 MindLight: A Novel Video Game Intervention for Anxious Children . 3 The Present Study . 9 Chapter 2: Method . 11 Participants . 11 Procedure . 12 Measures . 14 Chapter 3: Results . 17 Data Analytic Strategy . 17 Preliminary Analyses . 19 Anxiety Symptoms (Hypothesis 1) . 22 State Anxiety in Response to Stress (Hypothesis 2) . 24 Psychophysiological Arousal in Response to Stress (Hypothesis 3) . 27 Summary of Results . 32 Chapter 4: Discussion . 34 Changes in Anxiety Symptoms . 35 Changes in State Anxiety in Response to Stress . 36 Changes in Psychophysiological Arousal in Response to Stress . 38 Limitations . 39 Future Directions . 40 Clinical Implications . 42 Conclusion . 43 References . 45 Appendix A: Demographic Questionnaire . 51 Appendix B: Spence Children's Anxiety Scale . 53 Appendix C: How Are You Feeling Questionnaires. 56
An Inspiration on Contemporary Green Building: Suitability-oriented Design in Treatise on Superfluous Things

Treatise on Superfluous Things by Wen Zhenheng has been viewed as the masterpiece concerning the 12 necessary aspects of literati life in late Ming dynasty. Based on Treatise on Superfluous Things, this research aims to explore the conception of suitability-oriented design. According to the methodology of design and art, the paper profoundly analyzes the location, function and environment of building aesthetics, and focuses on the suitable, appropriate and applicable design standards. By inheriting the design conception of gardening in Late Ming, some innovative skills are proposed to stimulate the sustainable development of contemporary green building.
Recognition of the N‐terminal lectin domain of FimH adhesin by the usher FimD is required for type 1 pilus biogenesis

In this work we discover that a specific recognition of the N‐terminal lectin domain of FimH adhesin by the usher FimD is essential for the biogenesis of type 1 pili in Escherichia coli. These filamentous organelles are assembled by the chaperone–usher pathway, in which binary complexes between fimbrial subunits and the periplasmic chaperone FimC are recognized by the outer membrane protein FimD (the usher). FimH adhesin initiates fimbriae polymerization and is the first subunit incorporated in the filament. Accordingly, FimD shows higher affinity for the FimC/FimH complex although the structural basis of this specificity is unknown. We have analysed the assembly into fimbria, and the interaction with FimD in vivo, of FimH variants in which the N‐terminal lectin domain of FimH was deleted or substituted by different immunoglobulin (Ig) domains, or in which these Ig domains were fused to the N‐terminus of full‐length FimH. From these data, along with the analysis of a FimH mutant with a single amino acid change (G16D) in the N‐terminal lectin domain, we conclude that the lectin domain of FimH is recognized by FimD usher as an essential step for type 1 pilus biogenesis.
Assisting Learner's in Monitoring their Conceptual Development - On the Design of a Computer-based Service to Support Conceptual Development

Berlanga, A. J., Spoelstra, H. , Rajagopal, K. , Smithies, A. , Braidman, I. , & Wild, F. (2010). Assisting Learner’s in Monitoring their Conceptual Development. In J. Cordeiro, B. Shishkov, A. Verbraeck, & M. Helfert (Eds.), Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2010) (pp. 294-299). April, 7-10, 2010, Valencia, Spain.
Comparison of nearest neighbor and probabilistic data association methods for non-linear target tracking data association

Target tracking problems are theoretically interesting, because the origins of the measurements are not identified. Data association is one of the key techniques on tracking with radar. The problem of data association for target tracking in a cluttered environment with linear target model and non-linear measurement model will be discussed. Firstly, evidences are constructed based on spherical coordinates. Then, the association decisions are constructed according to nearest neighbor and probabilistic data association methods. The simulation results show that the latter method has better performance than the former. Moreover, the results will be compared to linear target tracking, which is really common in data association techniques and it will be shown that there will be a slight decrease in performance of target tracking with nonlinear measurement model.
Conformance checking of electronic business processes to secure distributed transactions

Advances in computer technologies facilitate the implementation of inter-organizational business processes. At the same time, managing the security of these processes is increasingly difficult. Compliance with high level specifcations, like normatives and pre-agreed protocols, rules and requirements, is difficult to validate. Here we discuss how Conformance Checking, a specific area of Process Mining, can be adapted for this purpose. Its role is to verify if an execution of a business process satisfies specifications represented by formal models (e.g. Petri Nets, Transition Systems, structures based on partial orders, etc). In the process mining literature, few efforts have been dedicated to online checking of business processes and choreographies for security purposes. The main requirement is high precision and reliability of event logs. They should record, precisely and unambiguously, all security-relevant activities of the analyzed process. Mantaining high-level logs becomes difficult with choreographies: log data are distributed, and must be related to events. Important metadata of event logs, like timestamps, can be ambiguous. Moreover, some data cannot be distributed due to security or privacy issues. These problems result in security-relevant ambiguities in event logs. Here we define a framework to create high-level event logs for online inter-organizational compliance checking using a Validation Authority. The system described here has been implemented in the issuing infrastructure for the Italian Electronic Identity card.
Concurrent Multipath Transmission with Adaptive Forward Error Correction Mechanism for Delay-Sensitive Videostreaming in Wireless Home Networks

This paper proposes the Delay-sensitive Multipath FEC (DM-FEC) mechanism involving an estimation of available bandwidth and a mathematical analytical model with which the appropriate transmission rate, FEC block length and FEC redundancy on each path in a multipath environment can be determined to solve previous problems. The DM-FEC mechanism not only can select the appropriate transmission rate and FEC redundancy on each path but also adaptively adjusts the FEC block length and concurrently sends data over multiple paths to overcome burst packet losses which otherwise can cause the video frame to be unplayable and impede the timely recovery of video information. The experimental results obtained show that the DM-FEC mechanism has better performance than conventional CMT-FEC mechanisms in wireless home networks.
Ablation of Nonmuscle Myosin II-B and II-C Reveals a Role for Nonmuscle Myosin II in Cardiac Myocyte Karyokinesis

Ablation of nonmuscle myosin (NM) II-B and II-C in mice results in a defect in cardiac myocyte karyokinesis. More than 90% of the double knockout cardiac myocytes demonstrate defects in chromatid segregation and mitotic spindle formation. The requirement for NM II in karyokinesis is demonstrated in both the intact heart and in HL-1 atrial myocytes in culture.
The evolving legacy of disturbance in stream ecology: concepts, contributions, and coming challenges

Abstract We reviewed the development of ideas and empirical understanding about disturbance in lotic ecosystems by providing a pre-1986 historic context and highlighting major themes that have emerged in the 25 y since the inception of J-NABS. Disturbance was not well incorporated into stream ecological thinking before 1986, but awareness of its significance began to emerge in the early 1980s, as demonstrated by the publication of several classic papers illustrating the ecological consequences of floods. Broad recognition of disturbance as a fundamental driver in streams was crystallized by Resh et al. (19884) in a paper that marked the beginning of a period of intense research on disturbance. We recognized 4 subsequent research themes: 1) definition of terms and concepts and development of tools for quantifying disturbances and ecological responses, 2) the disturbance renaissance, a period during which empirical research increased dramatically, 3) formalization of the significance of disturbance in streams by its incorporation into conceptual models of stream ecosystems, and 4) operationalization of disturbance for management and restoration of streams and rivers. Despite remarkable progress toward understanding disturbance in lotic ecosystems in the past 25 y, opportunities for future research are numerous. Increasing scope and intensity of human activities underscore the need to examine interactions among disturbances and to incorporate ecological principles into management and restoration activities. New insights are likely to arise from recognition of links between geomorphic forms and processes and the ecology of disturbance. Viewing streams in the context of regime shifts should also lead to new advances, particularly for restoration, because disturbances can elicit nonlinear responses. Successes in these efforts should contribute to improved scientific understanding and stewardship of streams and rivers.
Eeciently Searching the 15-puzzle Eeciently Searching the 15-puzzle

The A* algorithm for single-agent search has attracted considerable attention in recent years due to Korf's iterative deepening improvement (IDA*). The algorithm's eeciency depends on the quality of the lower bound estimates of the solution cost. For sliding tile puzzles , reduction databases are introduced as a means of improving the lower bound. The database contains all solutions to the subproblem of correctly placing N tiles. For the 15-Puzzle, IDA* with reduction databases (N=8) are shown to reduce the total number of nodes searched on a standard problem set of 100 positions by over 1000-fold. With the addition of transposition tables and endgame databases, an improvement of over 1700-fold is seen.
Certain hormonal profiles of postpartum anestrus jersey crossbred cows treated with controlled internal drug release and ovsynch protocol

Aim: The study was conducted to determine the serum levels of certain hormones in post-partum anestrus cows following treatment with controlled internal drug release (CIDR) and Ovsynch protocol. Materials and Methods: A total of 30 postpartum anestrus cows were divided into three equal groups after thorough gynecoclinical examination. The Group 1 animals received an intravaginal progesterone device on day 0 and 2 ml of prostaglandin F2α (PGF2α) on day of CIDR removal (7th day), Group 2 cows were treated with ovsynch protocol (gonadotropin-releasing hormone [GnRH]-PGF2α-GnRH) on day 0, 7 and 9, respectively, and Group 3 cows were supplemented with mineral mixture and treated as control. The serum estrogen, progesterone, triiodothyronine, and thyroxine concentration were estimated using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay kit and absorbance was read at 450 nm with Perkin Elmer Wallac 1420 Microplate Reader. Results: There was a significant increase in progesterone level in Group 1 after withdrawal of CIDR as compared to other two groups. However, the estrogen assay revealed a greater concentration in Group 2 against Group 1 on day 7 of sampling. However, there was no significant difference for serum triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4) irrespective of treatment protocols and days of sampling. Conclusion: Treatment with CIDR based progesterone therapy and drug combinations may affect the reproductive hormonal balance like estrogen and progesterone, which is inevitable for successful return to cyclicity and subsequent fertilization and conception. However, as far as serum T3 and T4 concentration concerned it may not give an astounding result.
RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORK-ENHANCE SYSTEMS

In this paper, we show how speech recognition systems can be improved, using an adaptive model transition penalty term in the Viterbi decoding process. This term is calculated using the phone-mic segmentation of the speech signal, where a bi-directional recurrent neural network is used to segment the speech into phonemes. No higher level lexical knowledge (phoneme sequence) is used in the segmentation process. The method is compared to an existing technique, on the state-of-the-art speech recognition system, HTK. It is shown that our technique results in significantly better phoneme recognition accuracy.
Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization for intensification and diversification

The study of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has become an active research field in recent years. ACO which is based on feeding behavior of ants utilizes pheromone information to optimize. In optimization process of ACO, a balance between the intensification and diversification of a search is important. This paper discusses a new pheromone update rule which enables to control the balance. In the proposed technique, the intensification and diversification are periodically changed, which allows performance of both a global and a local search. In addition, a hybrid technique is introduced to improve searching performance. The validity of the proposed technique is verified by comparative experiments using benchmark data.
A Schema Finding Approach for the Regularity of Secondary Protein Structure

Instead of putting too much focus on current approaches to protein secondary structure prediction, the authors will look at the natural instincts of protein secondary structures, and propose a schema representation which are offered for identifying regular patterns among various types of secondary protein structures. The schemas employ genetic algorithms base on a steady-state strategy and two disjunctive data sets will be used to verify fitness function for our approach. In this study, 904 schemas were found, and nearly half of the said schemas reached confidence of 70% and higher. Finally, the paper concludes with some illustrations of significant schemas produced as part of this study, with brief explanations of their significance.
Faculty Work as Philanthropy or Philanthropy as Faculty Work

Employing Robert Payton’s (1988) definition of philanthropy, “Voluntary action for the public good” (p. 4), Faculty Work and the Public Good: Philanthropy, Engagement, and Academic Professionalism offers a fresh look at faculty work as philanthropy. The purpose of this review essay is to provide a brief review of some of the key propositions in this book and to explore how faculty work as philanthropy may be understood in non-U.S. cultural contexts. We start our exploration of faculty work as philanthropy in non-U.S. contexts by examining this construct in the U.S. as presented by Faculty Work and the Public Good and by laying out key forces that it sets forth as shaping faculty work as philanthropic practice: institutional structure and employment frameworks, resource constraints, and discretionary constraints.
Influence of Web-based Distance Education on the Academic Department Chair Role

The purpose of this study was to examine academic department chair perceptions about the future influence of web-based distance education on departmental operations and their changing role as academic leader. Using a rating, modified-policy Delphi method, the researcher worked with 22 department chairs employed at public, urban universities in the United States to develop 76 factor statements about the opportunities, pressures, changing relationships, and role of the chair. In a three-step process, the chairs reduced the 76 factors into 29 predictive statements. Furthermore, the researcher merged the predictions into six themes covering topics such as the importance of external agencies to the successful implementation of web-based education and concerns about future funding. Based on the findings, the researcher argued that the most efficient strategies to promote web-based distance education are through the efforts of the department chair due to the closer proximity of the department to external markets.
Violence Begets Violence: Armed conflict and domestic sexual violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

While the study of the causes of civil conflict is a well-established sub-discipline in the conflict literature, less is known about how political violence affects society. Although the majority of the direct victims of war are men, women face more insidious challenges, such as difficulty in providing for families and coping with sexual violence. The consequences of a conflict in terms of sexual violence are not limited to the abuses performed by conflict actors, nor are they limited to the period when the conflict was active. Drawing on psychological theories, this paper argues that armed conflict can have negative consequences for sexual violence in the private sphere. Combining subnational data on armed conflict events with individual-level data on partner abuse from DHS surveys in 17 Sub-Saharan African countries for a total of 95,913 women aged 15-49, I analyse the impact of conflict intensity on intimate partner sexual violence (IPSV). Individual-level analyses show that there is an independent, significant effect of armed conflict intensity in the home region of the respondent as regards her risk of experiencing IPSV. This result is robust even when controlling for factors such as childhood exposure to parent violence and the husband’s alcohol consumption.
An overview of the Sloth2005 curry system: system description

We present the current state and immediate future developments of Sloth [7], a Curry [2] to Prolog translator. Currently it implements almost all the features required the Curry Report [5] -- no encapsulated search at the moment -- and there is support for some extensions like, for instance, type classes and constraint programming over rationals.
‘I’m not a barcode or case file number’: understandings of perceived social support and belonging within disadvantaged adolescents and young adults

ABSTRACT Perceived social support and a sense of belonging are thought to be protective factors against negative outcomes in adulthood that are commonly associated with childhood adversity. However, while this relationship is well established, very little is understood about how adolescents and young adults define these constructs themselves. This research aimed to examine adolescents’ and young adults’ understandings of perceived social support and sense of belonging, as well as their own understandings of their childhood experiences and current outcomes. Participants in the study were 275 adolescents and emerging adults aged between 17 and 24 (mean = 18.82, SD = 1.50), and included 177 females, 99 males, and 2 transgender participants, with 2 participants not disclosing their gender. Convenience sampling from a national group of young people accessing welfare service organisations within Australia was used. Qualitative data were obtained from 13 open-ended questions to an online survey. The study found that this group of adolescents and emerging adults with a history of childhood adversity understood social support and belonging as having someone who listened, as coming from people who surrounded them, and as impacted by their childhood experiences. We argue that support for this group of youth needs to revolve around building positive relationships in order to maximise resilience and well-being outcomes.
The HIV-1 vpr Protein Acts as a Negative Regulator of Apoptosis in a Human Lymphoblastoid T Cell Line: Possible Implications for the Pathogenesis of AIDS

Although apoptosis is considered one of the major mechanisms of CD4+ T cell depletion in HIV-infected patients, the virus-infected cells somehow appear to be protected from apoptosis, which generally occurs in bystander cells. Vpr is an auxiliary HIV-1 protein, which, unlike the other regulatory gene products, is present at high copy number in virus particles. We established stable transfectants of CD4+ T Jurkat cells constitutively expressing low levels of vpr. These clones exhibited cell cycle characteristics similar to those of control-transfected cells. Treatment of control clones with apoptotic stimuli (i.e., cycloheximide/tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α), anti-Fas antibody, or serum starvation) resulted in a massive cell death by apoptosis. In contrast, all the vpr-expressing clones showed an impressive protection from apoptosis independently of the inducer. Notably, vpr antisense phosphorothioate oligodeoxynucleotides render vpr-expressing cells as susceptible to apoptosis induced by cycloheximide and TNF-α as the control clones. Moreover, the constitutive expression of HIV-1 vpr resulted in the upregulation of bcl-2, an oncogene endowed with antiapoptotic activities, and in the downmodulation of bax, a proapoptotic factor of the bcl-2 family. Altogether, these results suggest that low levels of the endogenous vpr protein can interfere with the physiological turnover of T lymphocytes at early stages of virus infection, thus facilitating HIV persistence and, subsequently, viral spread. This might explain why apoptosis mostly occurs in bystander uninfected cells in AIDS patients.
Numerical analysis of the sliding effects of a 5-DOF biped robot

When dealing with biped robots it is common to consider a set of specific assumptions in order to analyze the complete walking cycle. Among other assumptions, the non-slipping condition is a very common working hypothesis. This fact implies that the contact point between the supporting leg and the walking surface does not have a relative displacement along the walking axis. Although, in some practical situations, this movement could be neglected, this fact mainly depends on the friction characteristics between the contact points. This work is focused on the slip dynamic analysis of the supporting contact point of the stance leg of a biped robot and its walking surface. It is considered a finite-time controller in order to solve the path-tracking problem based on a Cartesian reference trajectory. It is shown how the primary effect of a sliding situation in a low friction surface is reflected directly on an actualization of the desired reference considered on the path-tracking problem.
Motion artifacts removal for fNIRS data based on independent component analysis

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a powerful tool in the functional brain imaging field. However, in practical applications, motion artifacts are often found in fNIRS data. In this study, we propose a new method based on independent component analysis to remove motion artifacts. The method uses the positive correlation between oxy-Hb and deoxy-Hb induced by motion artifacts. To demonstrate the feasibility of the method, we tested it on fNIRS data that contained motion artifacts collected from four participants. The results showed that: (a) the mean SNR of deoxy-Hb and oxy-Hb were improved 2.336 and 2.139 by our method, respectively; (b) the mean SNR of deoxy-Hb and oxy-Hb were improved 1.191 and 1.118 by the wavelet-based method, respectively. These results suggested that our method is better than the wavelet-based method.