Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A preliminary analysis for porting XML-based chat to MYSEA

Abstract : The Monterey Security Architecture (MYSEA) is a distributed multilevel secure (MLS) computing environment. MYSEA does not presently support chat, an Internet application that provides near-real-time collaboration capability. Chat capability that implements the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) standards has been recognized by the Department of Defense (DoD) as a mandatory standard. The primary goal of this thesis is to determine if a chat server that implements the XMPP and the XMPP Instant Messaging (XMPP-IM) standards could be ported to MYSEA. To accomplish this goal, a set of selection criteria was developed and the open-source jabberd14 server was selected for this study. Its functionality was tested on different operating system environments (Fedora 7, RedHat 8, STOP OS 7 beta). This study also includes a functional analysis of the XMPP and XMPP-IM specifications, the related XMPP extensions supported by the jabberd14 server, a preliminary security analysis and a survey of the jabberd14 server code. The results of this project show that implementation of the XMPP jabberd14-1.6. 0 server on the MYSEA platform under STOP 7 OS is feasible. The results also provide stepping stones toward a full-scale development effort to provide MLS-aware chat services in the MYSEA network.
Myofascial chains of the upper limb: A systematic review of anatomical studies

The presence of structural in‐series continuity between skeletal muscles has been confirmed in the trunk and lower extremity. However, it is not yet clear whether the same architecture can be found in the upper limb. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to review the available literature considering the existence of myofascial chains in the shoulder‐arm region. Two independent investigators performed a systematic literature search using MEDLINE (PubMed) and Google Scholar (each 1900–2019). Peer‐reviewed anatomical dissection studies reporting myofascial in‐series continuity in the upper extremity were included. The methodological quality of the included studies was assessed by the QUACS scale. Thirteen studies were included in the review. Analysis of these papers led to the identification of three myofascial chains: the ventral arm chain (pectoralis major, brachial fascia/biceps brachii, flexor carpi ulnaris/brachioradialis/supinator, based on five studies); the lateral arm chain (trapezius, deltoideus, lateral intermuscular septum/brachialis, brachioradialis, four studies); and the dorsal arm chain (latissiumus dorsi/teres minor/infraspinatus, triceps brachii, anconeus, extensor carpi ulnaris, six studies). There is good evidence for direct serial tissue continuity extending from the neck and shoulder region to the forearm. Despite this intriguing finding, which could have implications for health professionals and the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders, further research is needed to establish the mechanical relevance of the identified myofascial chains. Clin. Anat. 32:934–940, 2019. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Interpersonal Conflict, School Connectedness and Depressive Symptoms in Chinese Adolescents: Moderation Effect of Gender and Grade Level

This study examined the associations of interpersonal conflict and school connectedness with depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 6576 adolescents in Shenzhen, China. Participants completed a battery of questionnaires that assessed adolescents’ depressive symptoms, conflict with parents, teachers, and peers, school connectedness, and demographics. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to explore the association of interpersonal conflict and school connectedness with depressive symptoms in adolescents. Results showed that conflicts with their mother, father, teachers, and peers were associated with higher levels of depressive symptoms in adolescents, while greater school connectedness was related to lower levels of depressive symptoms in adolescents. Gender proved to be a moderator of these relationships in that the associations of quarreling with mothers, mothers’ use of emotional punishments, teachers’ use of emotional punishments, and school connectedness with depressive symptoms were stronger in females than males. Moreover, grade level proved to be another moderator, with the associations of teachers’ use of physical punishment and fighting with peers with depressive symptoms being stronger in primary school students than in secondary school students. Our findings suggest that gender and grade level moderated the association of interpersonal conflict and school connectedness with depressive symptoms in Chinese adolescents.
Post‐mortem multiple sclerosis lesion pathology is influenced by single nucleotide polymorphisms

Over the last few decades, several common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been identified that correlate with clinical outcome in multiple sclerosis (MS), but the pathogenic mechanisms underlying the clinical effects of these SNPs are unknown. This is in part because of the difficulty in the functional translation of genotype into disease‐relevant mechanisms. Building on our recent work showing the association of clinical disease course with post‐mortem MS lesion characteristics, we hypothesized that SNPs that correlate with clinical disease course would also correlate with specific MS lesion characteristics in autopsy tissue. To test this hypothesis, 179 MS brain donors from the Netherlands Brain Bank MS autopsy cohort were genotyped for 102 SNPs, selected based on their reported associations with clinical outcome or their associations with genes that show differential gene expression in MS lesions. Three SNPs linked to MS clinical severity showed a significant association between the genotype and either the proportion of active lesions (rs2234978/FAS and rs11957313/KCNIP1) or the proportion of mixed active/inactive lesions (rs8056098/CLEC16A). Three SNPs linked to MS pathology‐associated genes showed a significant association with either proportion of active lesions (rs3130253/MOG), incidence of cortical gray matter lesions (rs1064395/NCAN) or the proportion of remyelinated lesions (rs5742909/CTLA4). In addition, rs2234978/FAS T‐allele carriers showed increased FAS gene expression levels in perivascular T cells and perilesional oligodendrocytes, cell types that have been implicated in MS lesion formation. Thus, by combining pathological characterization of MS brain autopsy tissue with genetics, we now start to translate genotypes linked to clinical outcomes in MS into mechanisms involved in MS lesion pathogenesis.
Hybrid E-Learning Acceptance Model: Learner Perceptions.

E-learning tools and technologies have been used to supplement conventional courses in higher education institutions creating a “hybrid” e-learning module that aims to enhance the learning experiences of students. Few studies have addressed the acceptance of hybrid e-learning by learners and the factors affecting the learners’ satisfaction with these tools. This study assesses hybrid e-learning acceptance by learners using three critical success factors: instructor characteristics, information technology infrastructure, and organizational and technical support. Structural equation modeling was applied to examine and validate the hypothesized relationships among the three factors and their effects on learners’ acceptance of hybrid e-learning. A total of 538 usable responses from university students were used to validate the proposed research model. The influence of the three factors on learners’ decision to accept hybrid e-learning was empirically examined. The results show that all three factors significantly and directly impacted the learners’ acceptance of hybrid e-learning courses. Information technology infrastructure and organizational support were proven to be key determinants of the instructor characteristics as a critical success factor of hybrid e-learning acceptance by learners. Implications of this work for higher education institutions, researchers, and instructors are described.
Using Control Theory and Self-Esteem to Explain Older Consumers’ Low Use of the Internet

Many studies show that the usage rate of the Internet by older adults is the lowest of any demographic group. This paper explores the reasons for older adults’ lower inclination to use the Internet by employing control theory. The theory suggests that as people increasingly experience “losses” with age they also experience loss of control of their environments, including technology. Compensatory secondary control strategies, which allow the individual to protect him or herself from the perceived negative consequences associated with the older persons’ inability to control their technological environment, may help explain their low propensity to adopt and make use of the Internet.Findings based on a large-scale study in Thailand suggest that compensatory secondary control may provide an explanation for the low rates of Internet adoption and usage among older consumers. Moreover, Self-esteem moderates the negative relationship between compensatory secondary control and preference for Internet use. Older adults with high self-esteem who scored high on compensatory secondary control tended to have the lowest frequency of Internet use. Implications for theory and practice are offered and directions for future research are suggested.
Critical Thinking Handbook, 4Th-6Th Grades: A Guide for Remodelling Lesson Plans in Language Arts, Social Studies and Science

These handbooks have a double goal in that they aim at making the concept of critical thinking and the underlying principles clear to the reader and also they demonstrate in a very practical way how critical thinking can be taught in the classroom. The writers highlight both general strategies and demonstrate how these can be incorporated into individual lesson plans. The writers make a very important point when they suggest that the teaching of critical thinking should permeate the whole curriculum and reach out into the environment of the child's home and everyday life. The writers stress the importance of the development of critical thinking in the early years of the child's life so that the skills can be systematically developed to form a repertoire of working tools that the child carries through into his/her adult life. The writers urge the teachers to build critical thinking not as a series of isolated strategies but as skills that mutually support each other and work towards a unified end. They also emphasize the affective element as well as the cognitive aspect of thinking. These texts would form a very valuable structure for inservice education courses and for staff development within individual schools. Through discussion, teachers could take the various model lessons and apply the principles to their own classroom situation. If all the teachers in a school worked co-operatively and systematically then the pupils would receive training in the skills and the consolidation of those skills in every area of the curricum.
Robust Multiview Subspace Learning With Nonindependently and Nonidentically Distributed Complex Noise

Multiview Subspace Learning (MSL), which aims at obtaining a low-dimensional latent subspace from multiview data, has been widely used in practical applications. Most recent MSL approaches, however, only assume a simple independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian or Laplacian noise for all views of data, which largely underestimates the noise complexity in practical multiview data. Actually, in real cases, noises among different views generally have three specific characteristics. First, in each view, the data noise always has a complex configuration beyond a simple Gaussian or Laplacian distribution. Second, the noise distributions of different views of data are generally nonidentical and with evident distinctiveness. Third, noises among all views are nonindependent but obviously correlated. Based on such understandings, we elaborately construct a new MSL model by more faithfully and comprehensively considering all these noise characteristics. First, the noise in each view is modeled as a Dirichlet process (DP) Gaussian mixture model (DPGMM), which can fit a wider range of complex noise types than conventional Gaussian or Laplacian. Second, the DPGMM parameters in each view are different from one another, which encodes the “nonidentical” noise property. Third, the DPGMMs on all views share the same high-level priors by using the technique of hierarchical DP, which encodes the “nonindependent” noise property. All the aforementioned ideas are incorporated into an integrated graphics model which can be appropriately solved by the variational Bayes algorithm. The superiority of the proposed method is verified by experiments on 3-D reconstruction simulations, multiview face modeling, and background subtraction, as compared with the current state-of-the-art MSL methods.
Reducing communication in distributed model checking

Model checkers are programs that automatically verify, without human assistance, that certain user-specified properties hold in concurrent software systems. Since these programs often have expensive time and memory requirements, an active area of research is the development of distributed model checkers that run on clusters. Of particular interest is how the communication between the machines can be reduced to speed up their running time. In this thesis the design decisions involved in an on-the-fly distributed model checker are identified and discussed. Furthermore, the implementation of such a program is described. The central idea behind the algorithm is the generation and distribution of data throughout the nodes of the cluster. We introduce several techniques to reduce the communication among the nodes, and study their effectiveness by means of a set of models.
A New Early Stopping Method for P300 Spellers

In event-related potentials based brain–computer interfaces, the responses evoked by a well defined stimuli sequence are usually averaged to overcome the limitations caused by the intrinsic poor EEG signal-to-noise ratio. This, however, implies that the time necessary to detect the brain signals increases and then that the communication rate can be dramatically reduced. A common approach is then at first to estimate an optimal fixed number of responses to be averaged on a calibration data set and then to use this number on the online/testing dataset. In contrast to this strategy, several early stopping methods have been successfully proposed, aiming at dynamically stopping the stimulation sequence when a certain condition is met. We propose an efficient and easy to implement early stopping method that outperforms the ones proposed in the literature, showing its effectiveness on several publicly available datasets recorded from either healthy subjects or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients.
Preventive Effect of Quercetin in a Triple Transgenic Alzheimer’s Disease Mice Model

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common type of dementia and is the leading cause of disability in elderly people worldwide. Current pharmacological therapies do not cure the disease, and for this reason, some pharmacotherapy studies have investigated preventive treatments focused on modifiable nutritional factors such as diet. Quercetin (Qc) is a flavonoid found in fruits and vegetables that has several biological properties. In this study, we evaluated the effect of chronic oral quercetin administration (100 mg/kg) on neurodegeneration markers and cognitive and emotional deficits in a triple transgenic Alzheimer’s disease (3xTg-AD) mouse model using histological and behavioral analyses. Our results suggest that long-term (12 months) oral preventive treatment with quercetin has significant effects on β-amyloidosis reduction and tends to decrease tauopathy in the hippocampus and amygdala. These decreases positively affected the cognitive functional recovery (without modifying the emotional skills) of 3xTg-AD mice. These findings suggest that preventive and chronic administration of Qc might help to delay the development of histopathological hallmarks and cognitive function deficits in AD.
MusicNet: Aligning Musicology’s Metadata

As more resources are published as Linked Data, data from multiple heterogeneous sources should be more rapidly discoverable and automatically integrable, enabling it to be reused in contexts beyond those originally envisaged. But Linked Data is not of itself a complete solution. One of the key challenges of Linked Data is that its strength is also a weakness: anyone can publish anything. So in music, for instance, 17 sources may independently publish data about ‘Schubert’, but there is no de facto way to know that any of these Schuberts are the same, because the sources are not aligned. Alignment is a prerequisite for usable Linked Data, without which resources are effectively be stranded rather than integrated. To begin to address this, the MusicNet project has minted URIs for composers and exposed as RDF basic biographical data to aid disambiguation, and, crucially, alignment information for several leading providers of musicological data.
Detection of influenza D virus in bovine respiratory disease samples, UK

Abstract Influenza D is a newly described virus of cattle, pigs and small ruminants first detected in North America during 2011. Cattle have been shown to be the main viral reservoir and mounting evidence indicates that infection with influenza D may contribute to the development of bovine respiratory disease. The virus has been detected across the United States, Europe and Asia. To date, influenza D has not been reported in the UK. During the winter and spring of 2017/2018, we performed molecular testing of cattle submitted for post‐mortem examination where respiratory disease signs were present. We detected influenza D virus in 8.7% of cases, often as the sole viral agent and always in conjunction with bacterial co‐infection with one or more agents. Viral RNA was present in both the upper and lower respiratory tract and pathological changes in lung tissues were observed alongside signs of concurrent bacterial infections. Sequencing of one UK isolate revealed that it is similar to viruses from the Republic of Ireland and Italy.
Bilingualism on the Internet: The Teaching/Learning of Greek as a Second Language in Higher Education.

In the last few years we have observed a rapid increase in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Th ese applications include soft ware that aims at the teaching of fi rst, second and foreign languages, applications on the Internet or both. Th e historical retrospection of CALL shows its development, beginning from its fi rst applications in the 1960s up to this date (Warschauer and Healy, 1998). Today more possibilities exist in respect to new technologies but also theories of language learning and pedagogies that go beyond traditional orientations. Th is paper proposes ways in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can be used to enhance the teaching/learning of the Greek language in departments of Greek studies in higher education outside Greece. It describes an Internet based application for the teaching/learning of Greek as a second language, “Λόγου χάρη” (Logou hari) (Kourtis-Kazoullis, 2005), which is based on the creative analysis and production of literary texts, as well as collaboration between university classes.
Genetic variation at the coronary artery disease risk locus GUCY1A3 modifies cardiovascular disease prevention effects of aspirin.

AIMS Efficacy of aspirin in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD) may be influenced by a common allele in guanylate cyclase GUCY1A3, which has been shown to modify platelet function and increase CVD risk. METHODS AND RESULTS We investigated whether homozygotes of the GUCY1A3 rs7692387 risk (G) allele benefited from aspirin in two long-term, randomized placebo-controlled trials of aspirin in primary CVD prevention: the Women's Genome Health Study (WGHS, N = 23 294) and a myocardial infarction (MI, N = 550) and stroke (N = 382) case-control set from the Physician's Health Study (PHS, N = 22 071). Bleeding risk was evaluated in the WGHS. In the placebo group of the WGHS, the GUCY1A3 risk (G) allele was confirmed to increase CVD risk [hazard ratio 1.38; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.08-1.78; P = 0.01]. Random-effects meta-analysis of the WGHS and PHS revealed that aspirin reduced CVD events among risk allele homozygotes [G/G: odds ratio (OR) 0.79; 95% CI 0.65-0.97; P = 0.03] but increased CVD events among non-risk allele carriers (e.g. G/A: OR 1.39; 95% CI 1.03-1.87; P = 0.03) thus implying an interaction between genotype stratum and aspirin intake (Pinteraction = 0.01). Bleeding associated with aspirin increased in all genotype groups, with higher risks in heterozygotes. CONCLUSION In two randomized placebo-controlled trials in the setting of primary prevention, aspirin reduced the incidence of CVD events in individuals homozygous for the GUCY1A3 risk (G) allele, whereas heterozygote individuals had more events when taking aspirin.
Novel Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulator Ameliorates Murine Colitis

Estrogen-receptor-mediated signaling has been suggested to decrease the inflammatory response in monocyte macrophages. Previously, we showed that a novel selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM2) promotes anti-inflammatory phenotype of monocytes in vitro. In this study, we demonstrate the potential of SERM2 in amelioration of colitis. We utilized a dextran sodium sulfate (DSS)-induced colitis model in FVB/n mice to demonstrate the effects of orally administered SERM2 on the clinical status of the mice and the histopathological changes in the colon, as well as proportion of Mrc-1 positive macrophages. SERM2 nuclear receptor affinities were measured by radioligand binding assays. Orally administered, this compound significantly alleviated DSS-induced colitis in male mice and induced local estrogen receptor activation in the inflamed colon, as well as promoting anti-inflammatory cytokine expression and infiltration of anti-inflammatory monocytes. We show that this novel drug candidate has an affinity to estrogen receptors α and β and progesterone receptors, but not to glucocorticoid receptor, thus expressing unique binding properties compared to other sex steroid receptor ligands. These results indicate that novel drug candidates to alleviate inflammatory conditions of the colon could be found among sex steroid receptor activating compounds.
The domain name system

Abstract : The domain name system is a protocol and a set of servers which provides a uniform method for associating the names of resources (e.g., mailboxes, host names) to information about the resources (e.g. mail server addresses). The name database is distributed among multiple name servers scattered through one or more internets. The protocol provides tools for controlling both the distribution of the database and the responsibility for maintenance of the distributed pieces of the database. (Author)