Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Moderators of Psychological and Physical Health in a Military Assessment Center

Abstract : Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadets supply the US Army with 70% of its Officers. Thus, cadet selections for duty status and branch assignment are critically important to the Army and to cadets. The ROTC evaluates and assigns its cadets by looking at three performance criteria: academic, university unit, and Advanced Camp. The latter is a 6-week, intensive, evaluative assessment center that assesses cadets' field and garrison leadership skills in units ranging of varying size (e.g., squad, platoon). This setting offers a controlled environment in which one can ascertain stress and its effects. Indeed, a multitude of different stressors may manifest during the course of the assessment center (e.g., role stressors). Stressors, of course, are not without their consequences in terms of adverse health effects, psychological and physical (e.g., Beehr, 1995; Jex, 1998). As such, applied researchers are always searching for the often-elusive buffer effect (Cohen & Wills, 1985). In the present study, the Advanced Camp assessment center provided a unique "real-world" opportunity to study: 1) the relationship between role stressors and health, both psychological and physical, and 2) individual difference moderators of this link. Given the social context and evaluative setting of Advanced Camp, we posited that self-efficacy and extraversion would buffer adverse health effects associated with role stress. Generally, our hypotheses were supported with 7 of the 12 moderated regressions being significant and revealing buffering effects. However, extraversion was found to exhibit an anti-buffering effect by compounding the relationship between reports of role overload and physical health symptoms.
A novel grid middleware architecture

The important field associated to high throughput computing (HTC) [1] emerged as grid computing. With the development of cluster computing the overheads of the hardware required to execute rigorous computations has been reduced. The major drawback of such technology is that the cluster consists of dedicated systems. If a machine is idle, it remains idle as its processing cycles are not accessible to other users. At universities and corporations, computing recourses are available as most of the CPU remains idle for most of the time and its consumption is less then 10%. This paper provides a Generic Architecture for the Distribution, Allocation and Execution of threads across a network "To Share Execution Power amongst systems in order to Utilize Maximum System Resources" and to provide an Administrative Layer over Operating System to Distribute Threads in a Grid which is not provided in the existing architectures. A middleware responsible for thread parallelism at different levels but the parallelism will be controlled at application layer by allocating the threads dynamically, its distribution and execution through a grid.
Pure Strategy Markov Equilibrium in Stochastic Games with Concave Transition Probabilities

We show that if the transition probabilities are concave in actions and satisfy the continuity conditions assumed in the literature on stochastic games then there exists a Markov Perfect equilibrium in pure or nonrandomized strategies. We also show that if the transition probabilities are absolutely continuous with respect to a nonatomic measure then there is a stationary equilibrium in pure strategies that is semi-Markovian. The state space in every period is a separable metric space and the actions sets are compact subsets of an euclidean space.
Substance use by adolescents of the USA National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study

Although studies show that adolescents with same-sex parents experience homophobic discrimination, little is known about associations between stigmatization and substance use in this population. The 17-year-old offspring of lesbian parents from the largest, longest-running, longitudinal study of same-sex parented families were surveyed about substance use, experiences of homophobic stigmatization, and overall life satisfaction. Compared to matched adolescents from a national probability sample, adolescents with same-sex parents were more likely to report occasional substance use but not more likely to report heavy use. No associations were found between substance use and homophobic stigmatization or life satisfaction.
Analysis of Thermal Performance in a Micro Flat Heat Pipe with Axially Trapezoidal Groove

Numerical analysis is made on the thermal performance of micro heat pipe in a axial flat grooved channel. The flow of liquid and vapor is investigated in trapezoidal grooves and the effect of variable shear stress along the interface of the liquid and vapor considered. The results from this study are obtained in the axial variation of pressure difference between vapor and liquid, contact angle, velocity of liquid and vapor and so forth. In addition, maximum heat transport capacity of micro-heat pipe is provided by varying the operation temperature, and compared with that from Schneider and Devos's model in which the interfacial shear stress is neglected.
Lexicon Building using Word Embedding

Central to many text analysis methods is the notion of a concept : a set of semantically related keywords characterizing a specific object, phenomenon, or theme. Advances in word embedding allow building such concepts from a small set of seed terms. However, naive application of such techniques may result in false positive errors because of the polysemy of human language. To mitigate this problem, we present a visual analytics system called ConceptVector that guides the user in building such concepts and then using them to analyze documents. Document-analysis case studies with real-world datasets demonstrate the fine-grained analysis provided by ConceptVector. To support the elaborate modeling of concepts using user seed terms, we introduce a bipolar concept model and support for irrelevant words. We validate the interactive lexicon building interface via a user study and expert reviews. The quantitative evaluation shows that the bipolar lexicon generated with our methods is comparable to human-generated ones.
Phytoremediation of Metal Contaminated Soil Using Willow: Exploiting Plant-Associated Bacteria to Improve Biomass Production and Metal Uptake

Short rotation coppice (SRC) of willow and poplar is proposed for economic valorization and concurrently as remediation strategy for metal contaminated land in northeast-Belgium. However, metal phytoextraction appears insufficient to effectuate rapid reduction of soil metal contents. To increase both biomass production and metal accumulation of SRC, two strategies are proposed: (i) in situ selection of the best performing clones and (ii) bioaugmentation of these clones with beneficial plant-associated bacteria. Based on field data, two experimental willow clones, a Salix viminalis and a Salix alba x alba clone, were selected. Compared to the best performing commercial clones, considerable increases in stem metal extraction were achieved (up to 74% for Cd and 91% for Zn). From the selected clones, plant-associated bacteria were isolated and identified. All strains were subsequently screened for their plant growth-promoting and metal uptake enhancing traits. Five strains were selected for a greenhouse inoculation experiment with the selected clones planted in Cd-Zn-Pb contaminated soil. Extraction potential tended to increase after inoculation of S. viminalis plants with a Rahnella sp. strain due to a significantly increased twig biomass. However, although bacterial strains showing beneficial traits in vitro were used for inoculation, increments in extraction potential were not always observed.
Analyse fréquencielle du transport de la lumière : de la théorie aux applications. (Frequency Analysis of Light Transport : from Theory to Implementation)

Cette these presente une extension de l'analyse frequentielle des light-fields locaux de Durand et al. [2005]. Nous proposons l'etude de phenomenes de transport radiatif tels que la refraction par des surfaces non-speculaires, les effets de flou de bouge et la diffusion de la lumiere dans les volumes tels que les nuages. Nous proposons de plus une extension de l'etat de l'art en analyse frequentielle avec l'ajout de l'etude de l'occlusion non-planaire, des SVBRDFs anisotropes ainsi que les systemes de lentilles. Dans ce cadre, nous presentons l'analyse de la matrice covariance de l'amplitude du spectre, un outil compact d'analyse et compatible avec les methodes statistiques d'integrations. Nous montrons l'utilite de cet outil avec differentes applications: le sampling adaptatif avec reconstruction des effets de flou de profondeur et de bouge, l'estimation de noyaux de reconstructions pour l'algorithme de photon mapping et le sampling adaptatif des effets volumiques.
Repair of funnel chest using sub-sternal osteoperiosteal rib graft strut; report of a case with four year follow-up.

An excellent and thorough review of the literature dealing with funnel chest deformity was made in 1938 by Alton Ochsner and Michael DeBakey.1They described 32 operative techniques used since 1911 to correct this deformity, commonly known as pectus excavatum. These operations were divided into three types. The first type consisted of procedures involving varying degrees of chondrosternal resection, by which the structural defect was removed but the physiology of respiration was also disturbed. In the second type T-sternotomy procedures were explored, with or without costal cartilage division plus external traction. This method was extensive and complicated, and the condition was likely to recur. The third type involved sternal mobilization and costochondral division or resection, also with external sternal traction. This method was mentioned as the best. The only other treatment used in the past was conservative or nonsurgical, and consisted of breathing and postural exercises, application of various
Fluorescent resolution target for super‐resolution microscopy

Historically, resolution in fluorescence optical microscopy has been limited by the Rayleigh criterion. Recently, however, several techniques have achieved resolution below that specified by the Rayleigh criterion. Among these are 4‐Pi confocal microscopy, harmonic excitation light‐microscopy, stimulated emission depletion microscopy, near‐field scanning optical microscopy and I5M. The most widely accepted current method of resolution testing is to image an array of closely packed fluorescent beads or beads dispersed in a matrix. This shows that the system is capable of resolving a feature with a given diameter; however, it does not demonstrate the classical resolution of the system. We have fabricated a fluorescent resolution target for better characterization of a system's resolution.
Simultaneous immunoblotting analysis with activity gel electrophoresis in a single polyacrylamide gel

We describe here that a simple diffusion blotting method can couple immunoblotting analysis with another biochemical technique in a single polyacrylamide gel. The efficiency of protein transfer was evaluated by serial dilutions of nephrosin, a metalloproteinase of the astacin family, and by immunodetection. It is estimated that diffusion blotting produces 25–50% of the signal intensity compared to the classical electrophoretic transfer method. However, with diffusion blotting it is possible to generate several replicas from a single gel. In addition, a protein blot can be obtained from a sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)‐polyacrylamide gel for zymography assay or from a native polyacrylamide gel for electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA). In this regard, a particular signal in zymography or EMSA can be confirmed by simultaneous immunoblotting analysis with a corresponding antiserum. Therefore, diffusion blotting allows a direct comparison of signals between gels and replicas in zymography assay and EMSA. These advantages make diffusion blotting desirable when partial loss of transfer efficiency can be tolerated or be compensated by a more sensitive immunodetection reaction using enhanced chemiluminescence substrates.
The complexity of computing partial sums off-line

Given an array A with n entries in an additive semigroup, and m intervals of the form Ii=[i,j], where 0<i<j≤n, we show that the computation of A[i]+⋯+A[j] for all Ii, requires Ω(n+mα(m,n)) semigroup additions. Here, α is the functional inverse of Ackermann's function. A matching upper bound has already been demonstrated.
Fatigue in multiple sclerosis: a comparison of different rating scales and correlation to clinical parameters

Objectives: Fatigue is one of the most common, yet poorly defined, disabling symptoms in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). To delineate more clearly the frequency and type of fatigue, we first compared four widely used fatigue scales in consecutive MS patients. Secondly, to further clarify the nature of fatigue, we investigated its relation to physical disability, course of the disease, immunotherapy, and depression. Patients and Methods: Between February and September 2000, 151 consecutive MS patients entering our outpatient clinic (94 relapsing-remitting, 50 secondary progressive, and 7 primary progressive patients; mean age 29.0-7.3 years, mean disease duration 9.9-6.7 years, median EDSS 3.5) filled in a standardized questionnaire including four fatigue scales - Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS), MS-specific FSS (MFSS), Modified Fatigue Impact Scale (MFIS), and Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). Patients were included in the ‘MS-related fatigue group’ (MS-F) when they stated in the questionnaire that fatigue: 1) is one of their three most disabling symptoms; 2) occurs daily or on most of the days; and 3) limits their activities at home or at work. Patients fulfilling none of these criteria were classified as ‘MS-related nonfatigue group’ (MS-NF). Depression was measured by Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI). Results: Although all scales showed significant differences between MS-F and MS-NF, correlation between these scales was, at best, moderate (correlation coefficients ranging from 0.06 to 0.56). The most discriminative scales were FSS and MFIS, showing no overlap of the 10th and 90th percentiles for the MS-F and MS-NF groups, with cut-off values of 4.6 and 38, respectively. Depression (BDI≥18) was present in 24 of 148 patients who filled in the BDI (16%). FSS was significantly correlated with physical disability (r =0.33, p <0.0001) and BDI (r =0.41, p<0.0001), but not with age, disease duration, clinical activity, and treatment with interferon-b. In multivariate analysis, however, only BDI independently predicted fatigue. Conclusions: The association of fatigue and depression suggests that there might be either common underlying mechanisms or interdependence by a cause-and-effect relationship that requires further investigation. The weak correlation within various fatigue scales is best explained by the fact that fatigue is a multidimensional symptom and, therefore, the available tests measure and weight different aspects of fatigue. Our findings underline the necessity for a more exact definition of fatigue and the development of more valid tools if these are to be used to evaluate treatments.
African immigrant views of HIV service needs: Gendered perspectives

Abstract This qualitative, community-based research study explored the influence of gender on community perceptions of HIV/AIDS service needs among African immigrant men and women in Calgary, Canada. A total of 41 key informant participants (24 male, 17 female) from 14 sub-Saharan countries completed individual, semi-structured interviews. Thematic interview analysis results produced four themes directly related to HIV and gender, including different sexual standards for men and women, condom use, infidelity, and the need for dialogue between partners on sex and HIV. Each of these themes was related to a contextual theme of “family breakdown”, which resulted from cultural adjustment challenges faced by African immigrants. For men, finding suitable employment was a key issue; for women, isolation was identified as an adjustment factor. The findings suggest that a more holistic conception of HIV prevention may be necessary for programmes to be successful and that HIV/AIDS services should be better integrated with newcomer services.
Learning Language Models of Movie Characters

We investigate learning language models of individual movie characters. We train a recurrent neural net based model on a large dataset of movie scripts with no character specificity to learn a general dialogue model first. Then, we transfer the parameters from this pretrained model to initialize another model and learn a character specific model from a single show. We measure the performance by using perplexity on the general model and relative change in perplexity by switching out character models for the character specific model. Our results suggest that it is possible to learn and evaluate character specific language models.
Redundancies in Data and their Effect on the Evaluation of Recommendation Systems: A Case Study on the Amazon Reviews Datasets

A collection of datasets crawled from Amazon, “Amazon reviews”, is popular in the evaluation of recommendation systems. These datasets, however, contain redundancies (duplicated recommendations for variants of certain items). These redundancies went unnoticed in earlier use of these datasets and thus incurred to a certain extent wrong conclusions in the evaluation of algorithms tested on these datasets. We analyze the nature and amount of these redundancies and their impact on the evaluation of recommendation methods. While the general and obvious conclusion is that redundancies should be avoided and datasets should be carefully preprocessed, we observe more specifically that their impact depends on the complexity of the methods. With this work, we also want to raise the awareness of the importance of data quality, model understanding, and appropriate evaluation.
New strategy for image and video quality assessment

Image and video quality assessment (QA) is a critical issue in image and video processing applications. General full-reference (FR) QA criteria such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and mean squared error (MSE) do not accord well with human subjective assessment. Some QA indices that consider human visual sensitivity, such as mean structural similarity (MSSIM) with structural sensitivity, visual information fidelity (VIF) with statistical sensitivity, etc., were proposed in view of the differences between reference and distortion frames on a pixel or local level. However, they ignore the role of human visual attention (HVA). Recently, some new strategies with HVA have been proposed, but the methods extracting the visual attention are too complex for real-time realization. We take advantage of the phase spectrum of quaternion Fourier transform (PQFT), a very fast algorithm we previously proposed, to extract saliency maps of color images or videos. Then we propose saliency-based methods for both image QA (IQA) and video QA (VQA) by adding weights related to saliency features to these original IQA or VQA criteria. Experimental results show that our saliency-based strategy can approach more closely to human subjective assessment compared with these original IQA or VQA methods and does not take more time because of the fast PQFT algorithm.
Explorations in using grammatical dependencies for contextual phrase translation disambiguation

Recent research has shown the importance of using source context information to disambiguate source phrases in phrase-based Sta- tistical Machine Translation. Although encouraging results have been obtained, those studies mostly focus on translating into a less inflected target language. In this article, we present an attempt at using source context information to translate from English into French. In addition to information extracted from the immediate context of a source phrase, we also exploit grammatical dependencies information. While automatic evaluation does not exhibit a significant dierence, a manual evaluation we conducted provides evidence that our context-aware translation en- gine outperforms its context-insensitive counterpart.
2-Step IMAT and 2-Step IMRT: a geometrical approach.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a method that reduces the number of segments for intensity modulated arc therapy (IMAT) and intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) for concave target volumes (TV). The aim was to utilize no more than two intensity levels per organ at risk (OAR) and to derive both optimal segment widths and weights from geometric considerations. Brahme's model of an annular target surrounding a circular OAR was used as test model. Brahme's solution was substituted by a single segment added to a simple field blocking the OAR. Width and weight of the segment were the free parameters to optimize. The objective function to minimize was the root mean square (rms) error of the dose in the target volume. One boundary condition was--neglecting scatter--"zero-dose" to the OAR. The resulting rules for width and weight of the additive segment are referred to as "optimized 2-Step IMAT" and "2-Step IMRT. " The recommendations were applied to some simplified plans representing clinical cases using a commercial planning system. Optimized 2-Step IMAT improved the rms by a factor of 4 with respect to techniques simply blocking the OAR. The additional segment reduced the rms below 3% for cases with gaps between OAR and TV larger than 8% of the TV diameter. The results for 2-Step IMAT are applicable to IMRT and aperture modulated arc therapy (AMAT). 2-Step IMAT can be utilized for noncylindrical cases and for more than one OAR. A geometrical and topological approach to IMAT and IMRT can be useful to understand fluence profiles. The results could be applied to ameliorate other topology-based procedures used in some planning systems. Basic mechanisms of 2-Step IMAT can assist with the creation of rules for adaptive IMRT to compensate for patient motion.
Efficiency analysis and optimal design of a circular loop resonant coil for wireless power transfer

In this paper, wireless power transfer efficiency between two magnetic resonant coils is analyzed for optimal design of a magnetic resonant coil. A simple power efficiency formula is obtained, by assuming that source and device resonant coils are a single circular loop with parallel plate capacitor and identical. It is found that the efficiency η is determined by a coupling coefficient к of an intrinsic decay rate Γ and к/Γ is determined by a wire radius (a), a coil loop radius (r) and a distance (D) between two resonant coils. From the relations, the maximum power transfer efficiency can be calculated by fixing dimensions (a, r, D) of the resonant coil. And then, the optimal resonant coil can be designed. By simulation, the efficiency of designed coil is verified. The optimal design procedure can be also applied to other resonant coils.
A parallel current deposition method for PIC simulation on GPU

This paper offers a GPU-based implementation of the Particle-In-Cell (PIC) algorithm for dense plasma simulations. In particular we focus on fast algorithms for current depositing and proposed a parallel segmented reduction method on GPU. The presented method makes full use of the advantages of zigzag scheme and can greatly avoid writing-conflict caused by depositing currents. We obtained performance increases of about 4x over thread racing implementations in our experiments. Our method is expected to get higher speedups in denser plasma simulations due to its high degree of parallelism.
Optimised helper virus‐free production of high‐quality adeno‐associated virus vectors

Clinical development of adeno‐associated virus (AAV) requires standardised, safe, efficient and scalable procedures for the manufacture of the rAAV vector, including production, purification and testing. Several strategies have been reported for the approach to the manufacturing problem. We report a helper virus‐free process that produces high quality rAAV stocks.