Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reported Experience of Maltreatment in Adolescents Whose Mothers Have Borderline Personality Disorder

In this study we obtained data from adolescents (n = 22) age 14-18 whose mothers have borderline personality disorder (BPD) and normative comparisons (n = 22). We were interested in the group differences related to the experience of childhood maltreatment. Experiences of childhood maltreatment (including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional maltreatment and neglect) were coded from the adolescents Adult Attachment Interviews (AAI). We found that overall occurrences of maltreatment were higher in offspring whose mothers have BPD than in the comparison group. Moreover, we found significantly more neglect and emotional maltreatment in the adolescents of BPD mothers than the comparison group, marginally more physical abuse, but no difference for sexual abuse. We discuss the implications for the development of later psychopathology in these adolescents as well as the possible intergenerational transmission of maltreatment from mother to offspring. Maltreatment in Adolescents 3
Development and Political Institutions in the Middle East and North Africa

The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa have questioned the political institutions throughout this region. This thesis examines the effect of political institutions on economic development in that region using a panel dataset consisting of 63 countries over the period 1975 to 2008. No evidence is found to prove an effect of democracy on economic development. Also, the effect of the duration a high-quality government is in power does not differ significantly from the duration a low-quality government is in power. Furthermore, oil rents do not help governments in that region to stay in power. Evidence is found that a presidential system and the quality of the regime in a country have an effect on economic development in the Middle East and North Africa.
Website Quality and Performance Indicators Including Ratio Numbers – A Study of German and Danish SME Companies

We expect economic benefits from companies with good company websites. However, only little is known about the real effects of good websites on company success. Based on data about 1,000 small and medium-sized European production companies in Germany and Denmark a study is conducted in order to uncover correlations between economic indicators and the quality of company websites. The set of performance indicators for the companies are extracted from the ORBIS company database. The website quality data are obtained through a criteria-based evaluation method. A set of multivariate analyses of the data are performed using the Pearson method and the Spearman method. These analyses also include investigations for the constituent parts of indicators that are ratio numbers. At the country level, it turns out that in some areas the Danish companies outperform the German companies. Also the obtained results show that there exists a correlation between the website quality and the number of employees. A yet insignificant correlation between website quality and the ratio number ‘financial gearing’ is revealed, too. However, when decomposing ‘financial gearing’ into its constituent parts, bivariate correlation analyses with the constituent parts lead to highly significant correlations.
Soil physical properties and grape yield influenced by cover crops and management systems

The use of cover crops in vineyards is a conservation practice with the purpose of reducing soil erosion and improving the soil physical quality. The objective of this study was to evaluate cover crop species and management systems on soil physical properties and grape yield. The experiment was carried out in Bento Goncalves, RS, Southern Brazil, on a Haplic Cambisol, in a vineyard established in 1989, using White and Rose Niagara grape (Vitis labrusca L.) in a horizontal, overhead trellis system. The treatments were established in 2002, consisting of three cover crops: spontaneous species (SS), black oat (Avena strigosa Schreb) (BO), and a mixture of white clover (Trifolium repens L.), red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) and annual rye-grass (Lolium multiflorum L.) (MC). Two management systems were applied: desiccation with herbicide (D) and mechanical mowing (M). Soil under a native forest (NF) area was collected as a reference. The experimental design consisted of completely randomized blocks, with three replications. The soil physical properties in the vine rows were not influenced by cover crops and were similar to the native forest, with good quality of the soil structure. In the inter-rows, however, there was a reduction in biopores, macroporosity, total porosity and an increase in soil density, related to the compaction of the surface soil layer. The M system increased soil aggregate stability compared to the D system. The treatments affected grapevine yield only in years with excess or irregular rainfall.
A Croatian Study of Practitioners’ and Kindergarten Teacher Students’ Opinions of their Role in Children’s Lives

In the project Methods and Models in the Education of Preschool Children in Kindergartens conducted at the Faculty of Teacher Education in Zagreb, we were interested in practitioners’ and kindergarten teacher students’ opinions, motivation, satisfaction, expectations and attitudes with regard to their work. Two open-ended questions regarding the role of the kindergarten teacher in children’s lives, were set as a separate mini-questionnaire. For the purposes of this particular study, practitioners (N=69) and first-year university kindergarten teacher students (N=65) had to complete two sentences: “Children are like…because …” and “Kindergarten teachers are like… because…”. Their responses were content analysed and then compared. Analysis shows that both students and kindergarten teachers perceive children in a very positive way and evaluate their job as highly valuable. They also highly value their role in children’s lives (as another parent, teacher, helper, model, safe haven, etc.). The most significant difference between practising teachers and students is their perception of working conditions, where students show a more idealistic approach.
Computational Generation of Referring Expressions Containing Relational Descriptions

Referring expressions like the tall red cup are used to identify entities in many different language tasks, so referring expression generation (REG) is a crucial part of computational natural language generation. One of the challenges of REG is relational descriptions that refer to an object by relating it to some other object, as in the cup on the table. This paper presents a new computational algorithm, DR-REG, for referring expression generation using relational descriptions. DRREG generates relational referring expressions for complex objects by searching through syntactic and semantic information for a suitable expression. DR-REG is evaluated in a controlled experiment that shows its referring expressions lead readers to correctly identify a target object.
Design and Coordination of Macroprudential Policy in the Eurozone with International Banks

This paper seeks to find the optimal design of macroprudential policies in the Eurozone by testing different levels of implementation: federal or national, in a coordinated way or not. Using Bayesian techniques, we estimate an asymmetric two-country DSGE model that allows for cross-border loan facilities where monetary and macroprudential policies can play a role in mitigating the risk of the financial system. We divide the dataset of the Euro Area between core and peripheral countries to take into account the recent structural divergences of business and credit cycles. First, introducing macroprudential policy clearly increases welfare from 0.004% and 0.376% of unconditional consumption. Greater welfare gains are observed for the coordination scheme with national implementation. Second, cross-border loans are not a critical feature to assess the systemic risk at the national level. Finally concerning the interactions between monetary and macroprudential policy, we find that the implementation of monetary policy should only aim to maintain price stability in the Eurosystem: the financial and price stability mandates should remain separated.
MediCloud: Cloud Computing Services to Health Sector

Fast access to health data enables better healthcare service provisioning, improves quality of life, and helps saving life by assisting timely treatment in medical emergencies. Anywhere-anytime-accessible electronic healthcare systems play a vital role in our daily life. Services supported by mobile devices, such as home care and remote monitoring, enable patients to retain their living style and cause minimal interruption to their daily activities. In addition, it significantly reduces the hospital occupancy, allowing patients with higher need of in-hospital treatment to be admitted. E-healthcare systems are increasingly popular, a large amount of personal data for medical purpose are involved, and people start to realize that they would completely lose control over their personal information once it enters the cyberspace. According to the government website, around 8 million patients’ health information was leaked
Comparison Of Cd And Zn Accumulation In Tissues Of Different Vascular Plants: A Radiometric Study

Abstract The aim of the present work was to compare the accumulation and translocation of Cd and Zn in plants of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.), celery (Apium graveolens L.), maize (Zea mays L.), giant reed (Arundo donax L.), and alpine pennycress (Noccaea caerulescens L.) under conditions of short-term hydroponic experiments using nutrient solutions spiked with radionuclides 109Cd or 65Zn, and direct gamma-spectrometry. It was found that the time-course of metals accumulation in studied plants was not different in terms of target metal, but it was significantly different on the level of plant species. The highest values of Cd accumulation showed plants of giant reed, whereby the accumulation decreased in the order: giant reed > tobacco > alpine pennycress >> maize and celery. On the basis of concentration ratios (CR) [Me]shoot / [Me]root calculation for both metals, it was found that Cd and Zn were in prevailing part accumulated in the root tissues and only partially accumulated in the shoots, where the amount of accumulated Cd and Zn increased from the oldest developed leaves to the youngest developed leaves. The CR values corresponding to these facts were calculated in the range 0.06 – 0.27 for Cd and for Zn 0.06 – 0.48. In terms of plant species, the CR values obtained for Cd decreased in the order: maize > celery > tobacco and giant reed > alpine pennycress. The similarity between studied objects – individual plant species on the basis of the obtained variables defining Cd or Zn accumulation at different conditions of the experiments as well as the relationships between obtained variables and conditions of the experiments were subjected to multivariate analysis method – cluster analysis (CA). According to the findings and this analysis, it can be expected that plants of tobacco and giant reed will dispose with similar characteristics as plants of alpine pennycress, which are classified as Zn/Cd hyperaccumulators, in terms of Cd or Zn accumulation and other positive parameters for their utilization in phytoremediation processes and techniques.
A pr 2 00 0 How to Evaluate Your Question Answer ing System Every Day ... and Still Get Real Work Done

In this paper, we report on Qaviar, an experimental automated evaluation system for question answering applications. The goal of our research was to find an automatically calculated measure that correlates well with human judges' assessment of answer correctness in the context of question answering tasks. Qaviar judges the response by computing recall against the stemmed content words in the human-generated answer key. It counts the answer correct if it exceeds a given recall threshold. We determined that the answer correctness predicted by Qaviar agreed with the human 93% to 95% of the time. 41 question-answering systems were ranked by both Qaviar and human assessors, and these rankings correlated with a Kendall ’ s Tau measure of 0.920, compared to a correlation of 0.956 between human assessors on the same data.
Application of Open Web API: The Impact of Crude Oil Stocks Change Announcements on Crude Oil Price Volatility

- This interdisciplinary study focuses on the impact of financial news announcements on crude oil price volatility. The information released by free Open web API Services is increasing rapidly. So far the correlation between oil price and news announcements was described based on daily crude oil closing prices. Localizing the exact starting point of increasing volatility requires intraday price changes. We propose an interdisciplinary IT-method to extract intraday crude oil price data from Open web API Services to capture the exact effect of the US inventory announcements at the time of news arrival. Intraday data in 30minutes intervals were applied. We found that volatility decreases before the arrival of the announcement and increases afterwards. For capturing the effect of unexpected amount of change in inventory, the difference between real and expected amount of change was introduced in the model and is statistically significant
Information about metabolites : Biological cheminformatics 2

As metabolomics becomes an increasingly major component of modern biological research, steps must be taken to preserve and make maximal use of the ever increasing torrents of new data entering the public domain. While this task is by no means unique to the field of metabolomics, the complexity, heterogeneity and large sizes of metabolomics datasets make the development of effective metabolomics bioinformatics tools particularly challenging. Despite these challenges, metabolomics specialists have recently been making rapid progress in this area. A wide range of powerful web-based tools designed to facilitate the systematic online storage, processing, dissemination and biological interpretation of technically and biologically diverse metabolomics datasets have now emerged and are rapidly becoming cornerstones of advancement in biological science.
Autoregressive modeling approach of vibration data for bearing fault diagnosis in electric motors

This study investigates the performance of autoregressive (AR) modeling method to detect bearing fault in induction motor. For this purpose, AR models of vibration signals which are acquired during the load performance tests of healthy and seven gradually aged cases of induction motor are constructed. The variation of AR coefficients with model order is compared for all cases of the motor from healthy to faulty. It is seen that sixtieth order model is adequate to reflect the progress of fault characteristics and the first AR coefficient gets bigger with aging. AR modeling error or residuals computed as the difference between original signals and their AR representation gets large in time domain which corresponds to decrease in modeling performance with aging. In addition the error computed as the absolute difference between spectra of the original signals and their AR models gets large in frequency domain and preserves bearing fault features as the energy increase in high frequencies above 1.5 kHz.
Cyclic classes and attraction cones in max algebra

In max algebra it is well-known that the sequence A^k, with A an irreducible square matrix, becomes periodic at sufficiently large k. This raises a number of questions on the periodic regime of A^k and A^k x, for a given vector x. Also, this leads to the concept of attraction cones in max algebra, by which we mean sets of vectors whose ultimate orbit period does not exceed a given number. This paper shows that some of these questions can be solved by matrix squaring (A,A^2,A^4, .), analogously to recent findings concerning the orbit period in max-min algebra. Hence the computational complexity of such problems is of the order O(n^3 log n). The main idea is to apply an appropriate diagonal similarity scaling A -> X^{-1}AX, called visualization scaling, and to study the role of cyclic classes of the critical graph. For powers of a visualized matrix in the periodic regime, we observe remarkable symmetry described by circulants and their rectangular generalizations. We exploit this symmetry to derive a concise system of equations for attraction cpne, and we present an algorithm which computes the coefficients of the system.
Correction to the paper on global convergence of a class of trust region algorithms for optimization with simple bounds

A correction is made to the paper entitled “Global convergence of a class of trust region algorithms for optimization with simple bounds” [Corm, Gould, and Toint, SIAM J. Numer. Anal. , 25 (1988), pp. 433–460]. First, an error is pointed out in the proof of the fact that the correct set of active bounds is determined after a finite number of iterations. A new proof of the relevant theorem is given.
Single molecule fluorescence spectroscopy of ClpXP-mediated substrate degradation

Energy-dependent proteases, such as ClpXP, are responsible for the regulated destruction of proteins in prokaryotes and organelles of eukaryotes. AAA+ ATPases in these proteases recognize protein substrates and power their mechanical denaturation and subsequent translocation into a sequestered degradation chamber where polypeptide cleavage occurs. Here, we present the single molecule fluorescence assay for probing the interaction between the ClpXP enzyme and its substrates. A covalently crosslinked ClpX hexamer maintain functionally stable form at the low concentration of single molecule level. Surface passivation through polyethylene glycol (PEG) remove unwanted nonspecific binding of substrates, providng specific immobilization of ClpXP protease on the glass surface illuminated by total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF). Cy3-labeled engineered substrates containing nondegradable GFP in the prescence of ATPTS form stable pre-engaged substrate-ClpXP complexes where the whole substrate degradation pathway, from unfolding to egress of degraded products, can be monitored without competing with dissociation or additional background characteristic of free labeled substrate in solution. We directly observe some terminal processes that are encountered by ClpXP at the end of substrate degradation process. It is also shown that GFP tail domain stably bind to the ClpX in the presence of ATPyS and even in the absence of ATP hydrolysis. With the developement of single molecule assay for AAA+ protease, we can expand our knowledge on the mechanism of this crucial motor protein family. Thesis Supervisor: Matthew J. Lang Title: Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Biological Engineering
Parallel Ranking Assist against Distributed Reflection Denial of Service Attack

Distributed Reflection Denial of Service is the recent iteration in the series of Denial of Service attacks. It works similar to Distributed Denial of Service, in that it uses many sources to attack one victim and the attacker hides behind the zombies. In this paper, we concentrate on assisting the nodes of network during the DRDoS attack, by using detection algorithm to detect the attack whenever a suspicious flow is noticed and then by proper analysis of the network we can find the attack free path which can be used by the nodes in the network. We use Rank Correlation based Detection algorithm which helps to find whether the network is experiencing a channel failure or is under attack. Once the attack is detected, the attack path and source are multicast to all nodes, so that the nodes in the network can avoid any traffic from them, thus reducing the effect of DRDoS attack for a specified period of time.
Comparative study of performance evaluation for mobile ad hoc networks using a proxy node

In this paper, we present a model that incorporates nodes with role of proxy in a MANET environment. MANET is specifically characterized by high mobility of network nodes and frequent changes of direct visibility. In partially connected ad hoc networks, the destination is not always reachable. In our model we need a proxy node to relay messages to the destination. Proxies are nodes that have high probability of reaching the destination. In our scheme, when a source sends a request for a destination and the destination is not reachable, then some of the nodes in the network will choose to become the proxy for the destination. The model has been evaluated via simulation in order to confirm the feasibility of his application in real conditions. In our measurements we use one proxy node in order to broadcast the messages in the destination.
Simplified the Screening and In Vitro Appraisal of Antioxidant, Cytotoxic, Thrombolytic, Antimicrobial and Membrane Stabilizing Activities of Lablab Purpures at a Time

To simplify the different biological investigation of the methanolic extract and solvent-solvent partitioning of Lablab purpures (L. purpures) bark. In-vitro anti-oxidant study was determined using total DPPH radical scavenging assay. In vitro antimicrobial study was measured by observing zone of inhibition. The cytotoxic activity was studied using brine shrimp lethality bioassay and thrombolytic activity by clot disruption method. The antioxidant potential was evaluated by 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) and Folin-Ciocalteau reagents using butylated hydroxytolune (BHT) and ascorbic acid as standards. The Aqueous soluble fraction revealed the highest free radical scavenging activity (IC50 = 48.76 µg/mL). The antimicrobial screening of the bark of L. purpures exhibited mild to moderate activity in test microorganisms. The CSF showed the maximum relative percentage inhibition against Salmonella parathyphi (34.2%) for bacteria and C. albicans (28.8%) for fungi whereas, lowest relative percentage inhibition against Sarcina lutea (22.0%) for bacteria and Aspergillus niger (24.4%) for fungi. In the brine shrimp lethality bioassay, The LC50 values of Carbon tetrachloride and N-Hexane soluble fraction were found 92.18 µg/mL, and 68.95 µg/mL respectively while the LC50 values of standard Vincristine sulphate was 1.37 µg/mL. The methanolic extract and its organic soluble fractions of Lablab purpureus at concentration 2.0 mg/mL, significantly protected the lysis of erythrocyte membrane induced by hypotonic solution and heat as compared to the standard, acetyl salicylic acid (0.10 mg/mL). The MSF and AQSF produced 61.48 % and 53.75% inhibition of hemolysis of RBC caused by hypotonic solution respectively, whereas acetyl salicylic acid (0.10 mg/mL) showed 76.42%. Ethanol extract of L. purpures and all of its different partitions exhibited moderate thrombolytic activity of 37.25%-2.40%. Very good preliminary screening and simplified experiments were able to show the different biological activity of methanolic extract and its soluble fractions of L. purpures at a time.
Wavelet Instruments for Efficiency Gains in Generalized Method of Moment Models

We propose a simple computational method in the context of generalized method of moments for improving the efficiency of regression coefficient estimates. The gains in efficiency arise by incorporating additional moment conditions in the estimation framework based on maximal overlap wavelet packet transforms of the continuous explanatory variables. A major advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require additional exogenous auxiliary information but relies on wavelet packet transforms of the existing continuous explanatory variables. Based on existing theory, we provide theoretical arguments for the proposed methodology, for both linear and non-linear models, and demonstrate its advantages with both an empirical application concerning two brand demand models and a Monte Carlo simulation study.