Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perceptually Realistic Behavior through Alibi Generation

Real-time pedestrian simulation for open-world games involves aggressive behavior simplification and culling to keep computational cost under control, but it is diffficult to predict whether these techniques will become unrealistic in certain situations. We propose a method of perceptually simulating highly realistic pedestrian behavior in virtual cities in realtime. Designers build a highly realistic simulation, from which a perceptually identical "perceptual simulation" is generated. Although the perceptual simulation simulates only a small portion of the world at a time, and does so with inexpensive approximations, it can be statistically guaranteed that the results are perceptually indistinguishable from those of the original simulation.
Teaching an Interdisciplinary Course in Social Psychology.

The disciplinary moorings of social psychology are considered as an orienting framework; then goals for teaching a social psychology course are outlined. Emphasis is on an interdisciplinary introductory course that presents social psychology itself as social process. The importance of teaching theoretical perspectives and methods as well as concepts and findings is stressed, with specific suggestionsfor classroom application. Various instructional materials are reviewed, and the importance of the teaching role is noted.
Phonological analysis of four Down's syndrome children

ABSTRACT Several studies have reported that the articulatory abilities of Down's syndrome children are poor, but have provided little detail on the nature of the articulation problem. This paper presents a phonological analysis of the spontaneous speech of four Down's syndrome children, ages 3;10–6;3 including a) the phonetic inventory of each subject, b) a comparison of target consonant phonemes and the subjects' renditions of these phonemes, and c) a characterization of the subjects' errors in terms of phonological processes. The findings indicate that 1) although the subjects are capable of producing nearly all the consonant phonemes, correct production is often limited to a particular position within the word, 2) the phonological processes which account for the errors of the Down's syndrome subjects are similar to those reported for young normal children, and 3) the phonological abilities of the four subjects are comparable to, or better than, their general language ability as measured by MLU.
Social identity, autism and visual impairment (VI) in the early years

This article explores how visual impairment might impact on early social and emotional development including self-awareness and communication with others. Some children show a 'developmental setback' and other worrying developmental trajectories in the early years, including autistic related behaviours and autistic spectrum disorders. Research is beginning to reveal the risk factors and most vulnerable processes in the early years, including in social communication, joint attention and joint referencing. The new Developmental Journal for Visually Impaired Babies and Children draws on the research to date and provides a new framework for early intervention and habilitation.
Performance monitoring: How it affects work productivity.

Performance monitoring refers to gathering information about the work effectiveness of others. Traditionally, monitoring has been assumed to influence people's work behavior only to the extent that it is accompanied by additional managerial action (e.g, delivering positive or negative performance consequences). It seems likely, however, that performance monitoring may also have an independent effect on work behavior by influencing the perceived importance of the monitored task. This hypothesis was tested in a laboratory experiment in which subjects worked at 2 tasks for 2 hr. Subjects' work output was significantly affected both by monitoring alone and by monitoring coupled with contingent performance consequences, and the effect of monitoring alone was mediated by perceptions of task importance. The latter result is discussed in terms of social-information-processing theory, especially as it relates to role-making processes in organizations.
H19 Imprinting Control Region Methylation Requires an Imprinted Environment Only in the Male Germ Line

ABSTRACT The 2.4-kb H19 imprinting control region (H19ICR) is required to establish parent-of-origin-specific epigenetic marks and expression patterns at the Igf2/H19 locus. H19ICR activity is regulated by DNA methylation. The ICR is methylated in sperm but not in oocytes, and this paternal chromosome-specific methylation is maintained throughout development. We recently showed that the H19ICR can work as an ICR even when inserted into the normally nonimprinted alpha fetoprotein locus. Paternal but not maternal copies of the ICR become methylated in somatic tissue. However, the ectopic ICR remains unmethylated in sperm. To extend these findings and investigate the mechanisms that lead to methylation of the H19ICR in the male germ line, we characterized novel mouse knock-in lines. Our data confirm that the 2.4-kb element is an autonomously acting ICR whose function is not dependent on germ line methylation. Ectopic ICRs become methylated in the male germ line, but the timing of methylation is influenced by the insertion site and by additional genetic information. Our results support the idea that DNA methylation is not the primary genomic imprint and that the H19ICR insertion is sufficient to transmit parent-of-origin-dependent DNA methylation patterns independent of its methylation status in sperm.
Increased penetration of paclitaxel into the brain by inhibition of P-Glycoprotein.

P-Glycoprotein (Pgp) in the blood-brain barrier limits the uptake of substrate drugs into the brain. We have determined the efficacy of several (putative) inhibitors of Pgp (cyclosporin A, PSC833, GF120918, and Cremophor EL) on the penetration of paclitaxel into the mouse brain. Pgp inhibitors were administered p.o. before i.v. paclitaxel. Plasma and tissues were collected at 1, 4, 8, and 24 h and analyzed for paclitaxel by high-performance liquid chromatography. Pgp knockout mice were used as reference for complete blockade of Pgp and to determine the selectivity of Pgp inhibitors on the pharmacokinetics of paclitaxel. Cremophor EL had no effect at all. Increased brain uptake was observed with cyclosporin A (3-fold), PSC833 (6.5-fold), and GF120918 (5-fold), although the levels were lower than that observed in Pgp knockout mice (11-fold increase). Both cyclosporin A and PSC833 also markedly increased the plasma levels of paclitaxel in contrast to GF120918. Obviously, cyclosporin A and PSC833 markedly inhibited several elimination pathways of paclitaxel, whereas the reduced clearance of paclitaxel by GF120918 was most probably related to the inhibition of Pgp alone. After further optimization of the dose and schedule of GF120918, we could achieve paclitaxel brain levels of about 80-90% of those reached in Pgp knockout mice. It is warranted to test paclitaxel in combination with GF120918 in experimental brain tumor models and in clinical trials.
Information Retrieval for Temporal Bounding

The temporal bounding problem is that of finding the beginning and ending times of a temporal interval during which an assertion holds. Existing approaches to temporal bounding have assumed the provision of a reference document from which to extract temporal bounds. We argue that a real-world setting does not include a reference document and that an information retrieval step is often required in order to locate documents containing candidate beginning and end times. We call this task "Information Retrieval for Temporal Bounding". This paper defines the task and discusses suitable evaluation metrics, as well as demonstrating the task's difficulty using a reference dataset.
Impact of Extracellularity on the Evolutionary Rate of Mammalian Proteins

It is of fundamental importance to understand the determinants of the rate of protein evolution. Eukaryotic extracellular proteins are known to evolve faster than intracellular proteins. Although this rate difference appears to be due to the lower essentiality of extracellular proteins than intracellular proteins in yeast, we here show that, in mammals, the impact of extracellularity is independent from the impact of gene essentiality. Our partial correlation analysis indicated that the impact of extracellularity on mammalian protein evolutionary rate is also independent from those of tissue-specificity, expression level, gene compactness, and the number of protein–protein interactions and, surprisingly, is the strongest among all the factors we examined. Similar results were also found from principal component regression analysis. Our findings suggest that different rules govern the pace of protein sequence evolution in mammals and yeasts.
Organizational Culture Associated With Provider Satisfaction

Background: Organizational culture is key to the successful implementation of major improvement strategies. Transformation to a patient-centered medical home (PCHM) is such an improvement strategy, requiring a shift from provider-centric care to team-based care. Because this shift may impact provider satisfaction, it is important to understand the relationship between provider satisfaction and organizational culture, specifically in the context of practices that have transformed to a PCMH model. Methods: This was a cross-sectional study of surveys conducted in 2011 among providers and staff in 10 primary care clinics implementing their version of a PCMH: Care by Design. Measures included the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument and the American Medical Group Association provider satisfaction survey. Results: Providers were most satisfied with quality of care (mean, 4.14; scale of 1–5) and interactions with patients (mean, 4.12) and were least satisfied with time spent working (mean, 3.47), paperwork (mean, 3.45), and compensation (mean, 3.35). Culture profiles differed across clinics, with family/clan and hierarchical cultures the most common. Significant correlations (P ≤ .05) between provider satisfaction and clinic culture archetypes included family/clan culture negatively correlated with administrative work; entrepreneurial culture positively correlated with the Time Spent Working dimension; market/rational culture positively correlated with how practices were facing economic and strategic challenges; and hierarchical culture negatively correlated with the Relationships with Staff and Resource dimensions. Conclusions: Provider satisfaction is an important metric for assessing experiences with features of a PCMH model. Identification of clinic-specific culture archetypes and archetype associations with provider satisfaction can help inform practice redesign. Attention to effective methods for changing organizational culture is recommended.
L’évaluation de l’éthique médicale des résidents

Contexte : L'evaluation est reputee representer la prochaine etape pedagogique a franchir pour l'education en ethique medicale. But : Elaborer une strategie d'evaluation de l'ethique medicale des residents coherente avec leur apprentissage. Modele : L'approche dialogique de l'ethique comme competence clinique fournit un modele integrateur pour evaluer l'ethique professionnelle des residents durant leur formation : la sensibilite ethique identifie les enjeux en presence ; la deliberation precise le noeud du dilemme entre deux valeurs en conflit ; l'action temoigne de la decision dans le contexte ; le dialogue revele les raisons d'agir dans une argumentation convaincante dans les circonstances ; l'environnement donne le contexte et les circonstances qui colorent le cas precis du dilemme et influencent le comportement professionnel adopte. Application et exemple : Competence complexe, transversale, dialogique se construisant tout au long de la formation clinique, l'ethique s'integre a la formation clinique dans l'exemple fourni. Son evaluation doit etre interactive, de mediation humaine, et doit suivre toute la formation. L'evaluation de l'ethique doit etre variee : le carnet de stage, les seances d'apprentissage au raisonnement ethique (ARE) et l'observation directe couvrent l'eventail de la realite clinique dont l'ethique est indissociab le. Conclusion : Le modele de l'approche dialogique de l'ethique comme competence clinique peut guider l'evaluation de l'ethique professionnelle des residents.
Persistence of dyslexics' phonological awareness deficits.

This study examined the phonological awareness skills of dyslexic children, adults with childhood diagnoses of dyslexia, and good readers at various age levels. Comparisons of the dyslexics to good readers of the same age or the same reading level indicated that dyslexics do not acquire appropriate levels of phoneme awareness, regardless of their age or reading levels, although they eventually acquire appropriate levels of onset-rime awareness. Even adults with fairly high levels of word recognition skill show phoneme awareness deficits. For normal readers reliable increases in phoneme awareness were associated with age and reading level, whereas for dyslexic subjects these associations were not reliable
Regionalism in the European Union: Key Concepts and Project Overview

One of the apparent contradictions of the twenty-first century is that, in a world of globalisation and interdependence, there is an increase in the number of constitutional regions and stateless nations aggressively seeking autonomy and influence. Despite powerful arguments that inherent in globalisation is a process of deterritorialisation, the politics of place enjoys a reinvigorated salience. Uncertainty generated by the countervailing forces of integration and disintegration prompts contentious questions about shared sovereignty, viability of small entities, possibilities for transborder co-operation, competing loyalties, and democratisation via devolution. Perhaps nowhere are the dilemmas associated with these questions better illustrated than in the European Union. This issue of the Journal of European Integration introduces a collaborative research project that addresses the reciprocal relationship between regionalism and European unification. In this introductory essay, the project's core concerns are briefly outlined. Summaries are provided of how these concerns are empirically applied in the studies of seven scholars whose work is presented in this volume.
Zen, motorcycle maintenance and quality in higher education

Purpose – The paper seeks to deepen the understanding of university lecturers' perceptions of quality.Design/methodology/approach – The paper employs a literature review to establish a robust analytical framework and the use of in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with a random sample of 20 lecturers in a range of UK universities. The interview data was categorised using the constant comparative method.Findings – The majority of the respondents perceived quality to be largely related to fitness for purpose and accountability rather than transformation. Many respondents made reference to quality assurance or terms associated with it. On the other hand, very few respondents referred to quality enhancement or associated terms.Research limitations/implications – The research would suggest that enhancement activities in universities need to be developed further and then highlighted as the respondents in this small sample perceived quality to be more about assurance than enhancement. The research would need to .
Pedestrian Travel Time Estimation in Crowded Scenes

In this paper, we target on the problem of estimating the statistic of pedestrian travel time within a period from an entrance to a destination in a crowded scene. Such estimation is based on the global distributions of crowd densities and velocities instead of complete trajectories of pedestrians, which cannot be obtained in crowded scenes. The proposed method is motivated by our statistical investigation into the correlations between travel time and global properties of crowded scenes. Active regions are created for each source-destination pair to model the probable walking regions over the corresponding source-destination traffic flow. Two sets of scene features are specially designed for modeling moving and stationary persons inside the active regions and their influences on pedestrian travel time. The estimation of pedestrian travel time provides valuable information for both crowd scene understanding and pedestrian behavior analysis, but was not sufficiently studied in literature. The effectiveness of the proposed pedestrian travel time estimation model is demonstrated through several surveillance applications, including dynamic scene monitoring, localization of regions blocking traffics, and detection of abnormal pedestrian behaviors. Many more valuable applications based on our method are to be explored in the future.
Different Forms of Helper Tolerance to Carcinoembryonic Antigen: Ignorance and Regulation

Purpose: Understanding the mechanisms of immune tolerance to tumor-associated antigens (TAA) is an important step in the design of cancer immunotherapy. The aim was to determine how T helper (Th) cell tolerance is mediated for a prototypic TAA, carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA). Experimental Design: Peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 50 healthy volunteers were stimulated with CEA, and the type and fine specificity of any Th cell responses were identified. The inhibitory effects of T regulatory (Tr) populations were determined by depleting “natural” CD25+ Tr cells or neutralizing cytokine produced by the “induced” Tr form. Results: Proliferative Th cell responses were consistently induced by CEA in 22 of 50 individuals. Responding cells were drawn from the CD45RA+ “naive” or quiescent population. Depleting the CD25+ fraction did not enhance CEA responsiveness. However, CEA elicited secretion of the Tr cytokine interleukin-10 (IL-10) in 23 of 50 donors, including 20 of 22 where no proliferation was induced. Neutralizing IL-10 revealed previously unseen proliferation to CEA by CD45RO+ “memory” Th cells. Epitope maps revealed differences in the fine specificities of Th cells capable of proliferating or secreting IL-10. Conclusions: There are at least two major forms of CEA tolerance in different individuals. One is “ignorance,” a failure of specific Th cells to respond to antigen presented in vivo. The other, seen when ignorance is lost, is mediated by IL-10–secreting Tr cells that recognize CEA. TAA tolerance, for example to colorectal carcinoma cells expressing CEA, may be overcome by peptide vaccines that exploit the differences in epitopes recognized by effector and Tr responses.
LIGAND: chemical database of enzyme reactions

LIGAND is a composite database comprising three sections: ENZYME for the information of enzyme molecules and enzymatic reactions, COMPOUND for the information of metabolites and other chemical compounds, and REACTION for the collection of substrate-product relations. The current release includes 3390 enzymes, 5645 compounds and 5207 reactions. The database is indispensable for the reconstruction of metabolic pathways in the completely sequenced organisms. The LIGAND database can be accessed through the WWW (http://www.genome.ad.jp/dbget/ligand.html ) or may be downloaded by anonymous FTP (ftp://kegg.genome.ad.jp/molecules/ligand/ ).
Low-Rank Approximations for Spatial Channel Models

We analyze the problem of approximating vectors that are superpositions of many closely spaced steering vectors. Such vectors appear in realistic models for wireless communication channels and describe single clusters of scatterers. We question the practice of using a dictionary of steering vectors in order to find a sparse approximation. Alternative dictionaries can be obtained from the Karhunen-Loève expansion of the channel vectors or they can be learned from observed channel realizations. Furthermore, it is possible to restrict the allowed combinations of dictionary elements, thereby reducing the complexity of algorithms that find an approximation. We provide simulation results and discuss the performance of the various approaches.
Evaluation of the sensitivity to chemotherapeutics or thiazolidinediones of primary anaplastic thyroid cancer cells obtained by fine-needle aspiration.

OBJECTIVE Anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) is often unoperable and chemotherapy and radiotherapy are the main treatments. Until now 'primary ATC cell cultures' (ANA) have been developed from surgical biopsies. The possibility to obtain ANA from fine-needle aspiration (FNA-ANA) and to test their sensitivity to different drugs could increase the effectiveness of treatments and avoid unnecessary surgical procedures. DESIGN To obtain FNA-ANA from six ATC patients before undergoing surgery and to evaluate the chemosensitivity of FNA-ANA to chemotherapeutic agents and thiazolidinediones (TZD). METHODS AND RESULTS FNA-ANA from the six ATC patients were cultured in RPMI 1640 and propagated in DMEM. Chemosensitivity was evaluated by inhibiting the proliferation with increasing concentrations of five different chemotherapeutic agents (bleomycin, cisplatin, gemcitabine, etoposide, and carboplatin) or TZD (rosiglitazone). Chemotherapeutic agents significantly inhibited (P<0.0001) FNA-ANA proliferation, such as TZD (P<0.001); etoposide was the most effective in reducing cell growth. Another ANA culture for each patient was obtained from a biopsy specimen; the results for the chemosensitivity tests were similar to those obtained with FNA-ANA. The (V600E)BRAF mutation was observed in two ATC patients; the inhibition of proliferation by drugs was similar in tumors with or without (V600E)BRAF mutation. CONCLUSIONS Our study demonstrates 1) the possibility to obtain FNA-ANA, and opens the way to the use of FNA-ANA to test the chemosensitivity to different drugs (chemotherapeutic agents or TZD; and possibly the radiosensitivity) in each patient, avoiding unnecessary surgical procedures and the administration of inactive chemotherapeutics; and 2) that etoposide is highly effective in reducing ATC cell growth in vitro.
An RSU coordination scheme for WAVE safety services support

The use of wireless communication technologies to increase road safety is rising within the automobile world. Vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications is a very promising field but the slow vehicle renewal rate combined with the current world economic crisis turns V2V into a distant scenario. A more viable solution relies on Infrastructure to vehicle communications (I2V) and the use of the wireless access for vehicular environment (WAVE) standard, specifically tailored for delivering safety and multimedia messages in a highly dynamic communication environment. This work-in-progress paper addresses an open issue in a previous presented infrastructure based solution: the beacon coordination between adjacent road side units (RSUs) and also a safety message retransmission mechanism performed by such RSUs.
The Argumentational Texture of Transaction Cost Economics

The deconstruction method was used to analyze a seminal text in transaction cost economics, viz., Oliver Williamson's Economic Institutions of Capitalism. This deconstructive reading revealed that the assumption of opportunism that gives rise to the problem of economic organization as formulated by William son also tends to undermine the proposed solution to this problem. The plausi bility of unified governance as a solution to the problem of opportunism in transaction relations with asset specificity is shown to hinge on the temporary deferment of the assumption of opportunism. Thus, transaction cost economics finds itself in an impasse of thought: actors have to be assumed to be both opportunistic and not-opportunistic if the logic of the theory is to be main tained.