Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Games for Persuasion

The greatest threat to the success of serious games is inattention to the quality of the player experience. The gamification fad endorses a canard that games can be strip-mined for “useful” bits that, when tacked onto conventional applications, should be expected to have the same effects as true games. This lie exposes a disdain for play and an incapacity to perceive games themselves as useful and worthwhile endeavors. Creating games that achieve great things in the real world while remaining enjoyable experiences instead requires working with the prodigious strengths inherent to the medium. This presentation explores how the native procedurality of video games makes them a potentially ideal way to persuade people to adopt a particular point of view. It will cover the history and modern theory of persuasive games, offer guidelines for crafting arguments based in gameplay, and present a case study of the design of a persuasive game.
Curbing Inflammation in the Ischemic Heart Disease

A modern concept considers acute coronary syndrome as an autoinflammatory disorder. From the onset to the healing stage, an endless inflammation has been presented with complex, multiple cross-talk mechanisms at the molecular, cellular, and organ levels. Inflammatory response following acute myocardial infarction has been well documented since the 1940s and 1950s, including increased erythrocyte sedimentation rate, the C-reactive protein analysis, and the determination of serum complement. It is surprising to note, based on a wide literature overview including the following 30 years (decades of 1960, 1970, and 1980), that the inflammatory acute myocardium infarction lost its focus, virtually disappearing from the literature reports. The reversal of this historical process occurs in the 1990s with the explosion of studies involving cytokines. Considering the importance of inflammation in the pathophysiology of ischemic heart disease, the aim of this paper is to present a conceptual overview in order to explore the possibility of curbing this inflammatory process.
Marginal Space Learning for Fast Detection in Large Dimensional Spaces

In this paper we present a new computational method for object detection in high dimensional spaces that achieves speedups on the order of millions of times with minimal performance loss. The problem addressed is the large computational burden incurred when detecting objects with many parameters (e.g. 9 parameters for 3D rigid objects). Another problem addressed is that memory limitations prohibit the use of a single set of negative samples and many levels of bootstrapping are required for comprehensive training. The new method that we propose, named marginal space learning, takes advantage of the fact that most data has some mildly invariant properties (e.g. the hearts in CT have approximatively the same size and orientation), and large parts of the parameter space can be elliminated in a marginal space where only some of the object parameters are considered and the rest are integrated out (ignored). As a result, the detection takes about 0.0001 feature computations for each location. We present applications to Left Ventricle detection in 3D CT and Catheter Tip detection in 2D Fluoroscopy. We observe speedups as large as 10 times, obtaining detection times on the order of 1 second for LV detection and 6 frames per second for Ablation Tip detection.
Early Degenerative Effects of Diabetes Mellitus on Pancreas, Liver, and Kidney in Rats: An Immunohistochemical Study

Liver and kidney commonly affected by diabetes in chronic cases but pathogenetic mechanisms are not fully understood in early stages of the disease. The aim of this study was to investigate the immunohistochemical expression of caspase-3, cyclooxygenase (COX)-1 and-2, calcium sensing receptor (CSR), and hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α) in pancreas, liver, and kidney in streptozotocin (STZ) induced DM. Study group (n = 6) were received streptozotocin (50 mg/kg) and control group (n = 6) physiologic saline. The blood glucose and ketonuria were measured, and necropsy was performed on them on third, fourth, and fifth days. Immunohistochemistry revealed that marked increase in caspase-3 reaction pancreas, liver, and kidney in the study group than control group. COX-1 slightly increased in these organs in study group compared to controls. Immunohistochemically COX-2 reaction was markedly positive in liver and kidney, but slightly increased in pancreas. The most increased reaction was observed in CRS and all organs were markedly positive. HIF-1α expression was also increased but the reaction was more severe in pancreas than liver and kidney. This study indicated that degeneration starts in organs in early stages of the disease and the most effective route for degeneration related to increase of calcium influx and hypoxia upon cells in DM.
Evolution of PolyBot: A Modular Reconfigurable Robot

Modular, self-reconfigurable robots show the promise of great versatility, robustness and low cost. This paper presents examples and issues in realizing those promises. PolyBot is a modular, self-reconfigurable system that is being used to explore the hardware reality of a robot with a large number of interchangeable modules. Three generations of PolyBot have been built over the last three years which include ever increasing levels of functionality and integration. PolyBot has shown versatility, by demonstrating locomotion over a variety of terrain and manipulating a variety of objects. PolyBot is the first robot to demonstrate sequentially two topologically distinct locomotion modes by self-reconfiguration. PolyBot has raised issues regarding software scalability and hardware dependency and as the design evolves the issues of low cost and robustness are being addressed while exploring the potential of modular, selfreconfigurable robots.
The Safety of Nuclear Power

HE USE of energy pervades almost all aspects of our lives. Not only do we make direct use of energy sources as in heating our homes and offices and in operating industrial processes, but we also depend on the availability of materials and services to maintain the quality of our lifestyle which depend in turn on the use of energy. Both the quantity and type of energy we use is largely decided by the energy consequences of the multitude of individual decisions we all make in the course of our
Alpha-adrenoceptor blockade by phentolamine inhibits adrenaline-induced platelet activation in vivo without affecting resting measurements.

1. The effects of phentolamine (500 micrograms/min) on platelet aggregability in vivo at rest and during adrenaline infusion were assessed by ex vivo filtragometry and measurements of plasma beta-thromboglobulin levels in 10 healthy male subjects. Plasma levels of von Willebrand factor antigen and free fatty acids were also measured. 2. Adrenaline induced marked and expected increases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure and decreased diastolic blood pressure when venous plasma adrenaline levels were elevated from 0.12 +/- 0.02 to 2.9 +/- 0.3 nmol/l (P less than 0.01). 3. Adrenaline caused platelet activation in vivo. Ex vivo filtragometry readings were shortened by 58 +/- 9% (P less than 0.01), plasma beta-thromboglobulin levels increased by 99 +/- 44% (P less than 0.01) and platelet counts increased by 26 +/- 6% (P less than 0.01). Plasma levels of von Willebrand factor antigen and free fatty acids increased by 53 +/- 5% and 475 +/- 113% (both P less than 0.01), respectively. 4. Phentolamine enhanced the beta-adrenergic vasodilator responses to adrenaline, as both the decrease in diastolic blood pressure and the reflexogenic increase in heart rate were enhanced (both P less than 0.01). Marked elevations in plasma noradrenaline levels were found during infusions of phentolamine and adrenaline (P less than 0.001). 5. Phentolamine did not alter platelet indices at rest, but abolished adrenaline-induced platelet activation, as filtragometry readings, plasma beta-thromboglobulin levels and platelet counts remained at, or below, resting levels. Responses of plasma levels of von Willebrand factor antigen and free fatty acids to adrenaline were not influenced by phentolamine and did not seem to influence platelet responses. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The Reactome pathway knowledgebase

Reactome (http://www.reactome.org) is a manually curated open-source open-data resource of human pathways and reactions. The current version 46 describes 7088 human proteins (34% of the predicted human proteome), participating in 6744 reactions based on data extracted from 15 107 research publications with PubMed links. The Reactome Web site and analysis tool set have been completely redesigned to increase speed, flexibility and user friendliness. The data model has been extended to support annotation of disease processes due to infectious agents and to mutation.
Predictive Modeling to Forecast Student Outcomes and Drive Effective Interventions in Online Community College Courses

Community colleges continue to experience tremendous growth in online courses. This growth reflects the need to increase the numbers of students who complete certificates or degrees. Retaining online students, not to mention assuring their success, is a challenge that must be addressed through practical institutional responses. By leveraging the huge volumes of existing student information, higher education institutions can build statistical models, or learning analytics, to forecast student outcomes. This is a case study from a community college utilizing learning analytics and the development of predictive models to identify at-risk students based on dozens of key variables.
Performing and interpreting identity through Facebook imagery

This one-year cyber-ethnography examines identity presentations and interpretations of 346 Facebook users. The social–psychological theoretical framework used drew specifically from symbolic interaction, Goffman’s performance of self, and schema theory. Generally, Facebookers sought social acceptance with their presentations. Primary findings indicate that the Facebookers present over-simplified imagery to reduce ambiguity and align with specific social groups. This study asked Facebookers to respond to strangers’ Facebook profiles, and the responses showed that due to the glut of identity-related information on the site, interpretations are heavily reliant on schemas. Online interview participants indicated several basic categories of identity performance that were used to assess others. Furthermore, online interview participants felt confident giving detailed descriptions of strangers’ personalities based on only a few minutes of viewing their profiles.
Morphological and genetic effects of benomyl on polyploid brewing yeasts: isolation of auxotrophic mutants

An enrichment procedure after ethyl methanesulfonate mutagenesis and exposure to the fungicide benomyl yielded mutants auxotrophic for several amino acids from two polyploid Saccharomyces spp. Benomyl treatment was found to have a marked morphological effect on polyploid Saccharomyces cerevisiae, causing cells to adopt a characteristic doublet cell morphology in which buds are nearly as large as the parent cells. Experiments in which nuclear division was monitored in benomyl-induced doublet cells by Giemsa nuclear staining demonstrated an unusual sequence of cytological events which culminated in the formation of binucleate parental and mononucleate bud components. The frequency of formation of doublet and binucleate parent cells was found to depend on the strain employed and the benomyl concentration administered.
Effect of luminance noise on the object frequencies mediating letter identification

Purpose: To determine if the same object frequency information mediates letter contrast threshold in the presence and absence of additive luminance noise (i.e., “noise-invariant processing”) for letters of different size. Methods: Contrast thresholds for Sloan letters ranging in size from 0.9 to 1.8 log MAR were obtained from three visually normal observers under three paradigms: (1) high- and low-pass Gaussian filtered letters were presented against a uniform adapting field; (2) high- and low-pass Gaussian filtered letters were presented in additive white luminance noise; and (3) unfiltered letters were presented in high- and low-pass Gaussian filtered luminance noise. A range of high- and low-pass filter cutoffs were used to limit selectively the object frequency content of the letters (paradigms 1 and 2) or noise (paradigm 3). The object frequencies mediating letter identification under each paradigm were derived from plots of log contrast threshold vs. log filter cutoff frequency. Results: The object frequency band mediating letter identification systematically shifted to higher frequencies with increasing log MAR letter size under all three paradigms. However, the relationship between object frequency and letter size depended on the paradigm under which the measurements were obtained. The largest difference in object frequency among the paradigms was observed at 1.8 log MAR, where the addition of white noise nearly doubled the center frequency of the band of object frequencies mediating letter identification, compared to measurements made in the absence of noise. Conclusion: Noise can affect the object frequency band mediating letter contrast threshold, particularly for large letters, an effect that is likely due to strong masking of the low frequency letter components by low frequency noise checks. This finding indicates that noise-invariant processing cannot necessarily be assumed for large letters presented in white noise.
An interaction educational computer game framework using hand gesture recognition

This paper proposes an interaction educational computer game framework that currently use hand gesture recognition to accomplish the interaction. The objective of the framework is to ease the game development so that developers can easily use it to produce educational computer games for end-users. By using the hand gesture, the game players (targeting preschool children) can have both body action and mind activity in synergy during playing games. Thus, they can have the better learning fruit and body-mind coordination development. In building the interaction educational computer game framework, this paper does the following three jobs. First, we primarily design and implement the interaction educational computer game framework. Second, we implement hand gesture recognition component using Microsoft Kinect#8482;. Last, we study the principles of designing hand gesture for the preschool children and we establish a primary version of hand gesture vocabulary according to the principles. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our method can successfully recognize the hand gestures in the vocabulary.
An Asymmetric Increase in Inhibitory Synapse Number Underlies the Development of a Direction Selective Circuit in the Retina

Neural circuits rely upon a precise wiring of their component neurons to perform meaningful computations. To compute the direction of motion in the visual scene, the direction selective circuit in the mouse retina depends on an asymmetry in the inhibitory neurotransmission from starburst amacrine cells (SACs) to direction selective ganglion cells (DSGCs). Specifically, depolarization of a SAC on the null side of a DSGC causes a threefold greater unitary inhibitory conductance than depolarization of a SAC on the preferred side. This asymmetry emerges during the second postnatal week of development, but its basis remains unknown. To determine the source of this asymmetry in inhibitory conductance, we conducted paired recordings between SACs and DSGCs at the beginning and end of the second postnatal week. We replaced calcium with strontium to promote asynchronous neurotransmitter release and produce quantal events. During the second postnatal week the quantal frequency but not the quantal amplitude of synaptic events increased more than threefold for null-side SAC-DSGC pairs but remained constant for preferred-side pairs. In addition, paired-pulse depression did not differ between SACs located on the null and preferred sides of DSGCs, indicating that all inhibitory SAC synapses onto a DSGC exhibit the same probability of release. Thus, the higher quantal frequency seen in null-side pairs results from a greater number of inhibitory synapses, revealing that an asymmetry in synapse number between SACs and DSGCs underlies the development of an essential component in the retina's direction selective circuit.
Heart Rate Acquisition and Threshold-Based Training Increases Oxygen Uptake at Metabolic Threshold in Triathletes: A Pilot Study

Exercise intensity is a critical component of the exercise prescription model. However, current research employing various non-specific exercise intensity protocols have reported wide variability in maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) improvement after training, suggesting a present lack of consensus regarding optimal heart rate (fC) training zones for maximal athletic performance. This study examined the relationship between percentage of time (%time) spent training between the metabolic (VO2θ) and ventilatory thresholds (VEθ), and the resultant change in markers of aerobic performance. Thirteen (6 males) collegiate club-level triathletes were recruited for eight weeks of remote fC monitoring during all running and cycling sessions. Participants donned a forearm-worn optical fC sensor paired to a smartphone that collected and stored fCs. Subjects were categorized into Low and High groups based on %time spent training between the VO2θ and VEθ. Significant increases were observed in relative VO2max (P = 0.007, g = 0.48), VO2θ (P = 0.018, g = 0.35), and VEθ (P = 0.030, g = 0.29) from baseline after eight weeks for both groups. A 95% bootstrapped confidence interval that did not include zero (−0.38, −0.03; g = 1.26) revealed a large and significantly greater change in VO2θ in the High group (0.37 ± 0.15 L/min) versus the Low group (0.17 ± 0.14 L/min). No significant differences were observed in other variables between groups. Increasing triathletes’ %time spent exercising between VO2θ and VEθ may optimize increases in VO2θ after eight weeks of training.
Degradation of [8,9,-14C]endosulfan by soil microorganisms

Twenty-eight soil fungi, 49 soil bacteria, and 10 actinomycetes were tested as to their ability to degrade the insecticide endosulfan. Using 14C-labeled material, the qualitative as well as the quantitative formation of metabolities, as well as of 14CO2, could be followed. Sixteen fungi, 15 bacteria, and 3 actinomycetes were found capable of metabolizing more than 30% of the applied endosulfan. The major metabolities detected were endosulfate, formed by oxidation of the sulfite group, and endodiol, formed by hydrolysis of the ester bond. The majority of highly active fungi formed endosulfate as the major metabolite, whereas the majority of active bacteria formed endodiol. In addition to endosulfate and endodiol, individual cultures contained small quantities of endohydroxyether and two unidentified products. The very small quantities of 14CO2 evolved from cultures indicated that an extensive mineralization of the carbon skeleton of endosulfan did not occur.
The Webkit tangible user interface: a case study of iterative prototyping

Here we describe our 18-month iterative-design program to create Webkit, a tangible user interface (TUI) to help school children learn argumentation skills - an English National Curriculum requirement. The goal was to have Webkit disappear into the environment such that the teachers and students remained focused on the learning activity. However, the school children wouldn't be allowed to evaluate our prototypes unless we showed that the classroom time allocated to our research simultaneously helped teach the curriculum. To achieve this, we developed a form of user-centered design called curriculum-focused design. When we used CFD, the curriculum and student needs motivated not just the final technology but also our design process.
Brain asymmetry in cortical thickness is correlated with cognitive function

Man is, of all the animals, the onewhose brain in the normal state is themost asymmetrical. He is also the onewho possesses most acquired faculties.Among these faculties.the faculty ofarticulate language holds pride of place.It is this that distinguishes us the mostclearly from the animal. —Broca (1877)
Scientific impact evaluation and the effect of self-citations: Mitigating the bias by discounting the h-index

In this article, we propose a measure to assess scientific impact that discounts self‐citations and does not require any prior knowledge of their distribution among publications. This index can be applied to both researchers and journals. In particular, we show that it fills the gap of the h‐index and similar measures that do not take into account the effect of self‐citations for authors or journals impact evaluation. We provide 2 real‐world examples: First, we evaluate the research impact of the most productive scholars in computer science (according to DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, Universitat Trier, Trier, Germany); then we revisit the impact of the journals ranked in the Computer Science Applications section of the SCImago Journal & Country Rank ranking service (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, University of Granada, Extremadura, Madrid, Spain). We observe how self‐citations, in many cases, affect the rankings obtained according to different measures (including h‐index and ch‐index), and show how the proposed measure mitigates this effect.
Elimination Ordering in Lifted First-Order Probabilistic Inference

Various representations and inference methods have been proposed for lifted probabilistic inference in relational models. Many of these methods choose an order to eliminate (or branch on) the parameterized random variables. Similar to such methods for non-relational probabilistic inference, the order of elimination has a significant role in the performance of the algorithms. Since finding the best order is NP-complete even for non-relational models, heuristics have been proposed to find good orderings in the non-relational models. In this paper, we show that these heuristics are inefficient for relational models, because they fail to consider the population sizes associated with logical variables. We extend existing heuristics for non-relational models and propose new heuristics for relational models. We evaluate the existing and new heuristics on a range of generated relational graphs.
USER-CENTRIC DESIGN FOR SEMANTIC DISCOVERY OF MATHEMATICAL WEB SERVICES

Adopting an efficient and effective method to locate and select desired services among thousands of available web services is an important task in the service-oriented computing environment. If the services are registered properly, then it will be easy for the service requesters to discover the Web services. Here, we provide Web Service Registration Interface for the service providers along with an ontology tree to register the functional and non-functional properties of the mathematical Web services under a particular domain. The registration details are stored in an XML file and a sorted file. A user-centric client interface is also provided for the service requesters to search the Web services based on user’s preference. Finally, a Quality of Service based ranking algorithm is provided to rank the Web services and top-k Web services are returned. With the experimental evaluation, our approach not only alleviates the requesters from time consuming discovery tasks but also reduce the search space for discovery processes in the user-centric Web environment.