Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Livelli di Burn-out e percezioni del contesto lavorativo: un’indagine sugli insegnanti della scuola secondaria di primo grado di Roma e Salerno

This research focuses on well-being at school and is based on the relationship between Burn-out conditions and perceptions of the work context of lower secondary school teachers. Well-being is a construct studied experimentally since the 60s and it assumes different shapes in diverse contexts; in literature there are many theoretical references depending on the disciplinary perspective or the approach considered. The study addresses the relationship between the school work context and forms of chronic stress through a survey on a sample of over 200 teachers from Rome and Salerno. The contribution shows the main theories and studies on which this research is based, the hypotheses, the tools selected and the discussion on findings. Then, the general research design on which this study is included, the other measures used and the main results of the broad research are provided.
Random-valued impulse noise removal in color images by using switching Non-local vector median filter

This paper describes a novel image filtering method for removal of random-valued impulse noise superimposed on color images. In color image filtering, generally, it is preferable to deal with the R, G, and B components of each pixel of a color image as elements of a vectorized signal as in the vector median filter rather than component-wise signals in order to prevent color shift after filtering. Furthermore, in impulse noise removal, it is essential to use switching type filtering manner as in the switching median filter to preserve the detailed part of an original image with good quality. By taking those fundamentals in consideration, in this study, we propose a switching-type vector median filter with non-local processing mainly consists of a noise detection part and a noise removal one. Concretely, we propose a noise detector which proactively finds out noise-corrupted pixels by focusing attention on isolation tendencies of pixels of interest in difference images between RGB components. Furthermore, as a noise removal filter, we propose an extended version of Non-local median filter (NL-MF), which we proposed previously for grayscale images, named Non-local vector median filter (NL-VMF) which deals with color images. The proposed method realizes superior balance between the detail-preservation based on the proactive noise detection and the noise removal by the non-local switching vector median filtering. The effectiveness and the validity of the proposed method are verified by some experiments using natural color images.
The role of work preferences in the disparity between females in public relations and females leading public relations

This study examines the choices of Public Relations practitioners in an agency setting to analyze their preferences for work-life balance and the domestic division of labor. The in-depth interviews of 10 practitioners were used to add to the literature available on the use of Preference Theory to describe why women make up a majority of the Public Relations career field, but do not make up a majority of the leaders within Public Relations. Results indicate that PR practitioners are making work-life balance choices that have affected their career progression, there is an acceptance of long work hours that restricts advancement of people with family commitments, and work-life balance issues were not factors for employees’ eligibility for advancement; however, management did feel that their billable hours and ability to balance the two would affect their selection.
Synthesis of Biocompatible Hydroxyapatite Using Chitosan Oligosaccharide as a Template

In this study, a novel biocompatible hydroxyapatite (HA) was synthesized by using chitosan oligosaccharide (COS) as a template. These HA samples were studied by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The biocompatibility of HA samples was evaluated via cell viability, cell morphology and alkaline phosphatase staining of MG-63 cell lines. The results show that HA synthesized in the presence of COS was favorable to proliferation and osteogenic differentiation of MG-63 cells. These hydroxyapatites are potentially attractive biomaterials for bone tissue engineering applications.
Challenges against creative skills in foods and nutrition by senior secondary school students in Lagos State

The present knowledge based economy needs graduate with varying multi-faceted skills of creativity. This study investigated the challenges militating against the acquisition of creative skills needed in foods and nutrition by senior secondary school students in Lagos State and the ways of overcoming them. Two hundred senior secondary school Home Economics students/teachers were purposively studied from selected senior secondary schools in Lagos State. Questionnaire was used to collect data. Mean and standard deviation were used to describe the data. The result revealed the challenges militating against acquisition of creative skills in foods and nutrition as: few experts of foods and nutrition or home economics, inadequate tools and equipment to meet the number of students during practical classes, inadequate founding of schools and time-table constrains. The results also indicated the ways of improving acquisition of creative skills among senior secondary schools students as: individualization of instruction, adequate supervision of students work and schools, provision of items needed for students practical classes, frequent curriculum review and exhibition of students creative work. It is recommended among others that conducive environment, adequate tools and equipment and experts in Home economics/Foods and Nutrition field should help in developing appropriate creative skills in foods and nutrition
Past and present of hepatitis E in the Netherlands

Recent studies show that endemic hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection occurs frequently in some developed countries. In the Netherlands in 2013, the routine screening of 35,220 plasma donations for HEV RNA showed 20 donors to be viremic (1:1761), which seems to contradict reports of declining HEV seroprevalence in the recent past.
A Multimodal Audio Visible and Infrared Surveillance System (MAVISS)

This paper presents a low cost surveillance system employing multimodal information (visible, infrared and audio signals) for monitoring small area and detecting alarming events. To ensure efficient and robust operation, the system captures different aspects of the environment using audio and video information. Infrared imagery is usedfor night and other low level lighting situations. The visual processing module of the system uses a motion based approach for detecting objects, and employs Kalman filter model for tracking its motion. Environmental sound is recognized by processing audio signals to extract features in the form of Mel-Frequency Cepstral coefficients (MFCC), which are then used for classification by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) technique. Semantic rules are proposed to identify alarming events by using information from audio and video module. Experimental results are shown on some typical sequences and publicly available dataset.
Overview of the nutrition situation in four countries in South and Central Asia.

This report first presents causes of malnutrition of concern in Asia potential solutions and current global and USG efforts to reduce it (Section 2). Next regional analysis is provided in Section 3 that compares data on nutrition status and trends across and within Bangladesh India Nepal and Tajikistan. From this analysis potential causes of malnutrition are identified in Section 4 followed by priorities to address these causes (Sections 5 and 6) and recommendations for USAID (Section 7). This report also includes separate individual nutrition profiles for each country consisting of an overview of programs and policies that address nutrition for young children and women of reproductive age data on nutrition status and trends priority nutrition problems and their probable causes and recommendations for dealing with them effectively. (Excerpts)
PLL structures for utility connected systems

This paper presents a detailed analysis of PLL structures for utility connected systems. The three-phase PLL (phase-locked loop) structure capable of fast tracking the utility voltage vector is studied. A single-phase PLL structure, derived from the three-phase PLL topology, is discussed and its behavior under distorted utility conditions is analyzed. Additionally, the conventional zero-crossing PLL is studied and an alternative implementation for this PLL is proposed in order to improve its dynamic behavior. Simulation and experimental results from a DSP-based system are included to support the theoretical analysis.
BitTorrent network topology active measurement method

Peer-to-peer (P2P) network topology measurement is the foundation for research of p2p network sharing behavior pattern and network resources dynamic distribution. To BitTorrent (BT) network, we present an active measurement method of network topology. Firstly, using seed crawler get entire BT network's seeds, then through analyzing every seed to get tracker servers' information, after that, BT crawler inquire every track server to get peers' information, and now, we achieve BT network topology measurement. At the end, an example is given and proving the validity of this method.
Online Consumer Behavior - An Analysis with the Theory of Planned Behavior

Digital marketing is growing at a rapid pace in most of the countries in the world. While all other Industries are struggling with a low growth rate, Digital marketing industry is booming high and already achieved a growth rate of 30% last recent past years. Some of the applications of E-Marketing, such as order tracking, online banking, and payment systems are the main reason for growth. Digital Marketing has reached almost all the business sectors in India. E-Commerce has transformed the way business is done in India. The Indian e-commerce market is expected to grow to US$ 200 billion by 2026 from US$ 38.5 billion as of 2017.
Who are the wine and food
festival visitors?

Hosting wine festivals provides the opportunity to organizers and wine destinations to offer a wide range of experiences that differ from the day-today way of life and, in a sense, are the best way to provide a wine tourism lifestyle experience. The aim of the research was to measure the wine and food personality traits of festival visitors, specifically involvement and neophobia, and explore their relationship with the experience quality dimensions of the festival (environment, education, service providers, functional benefits, entertainment) and experience outcomes (satisfaction, loyalty). Additionally, research aimed to compare wine and food involvement and neophobia with regard to specific demographic characteristics of the visitors (gender, income level, visitor status, employment, residency). Data collection was done during the VinoCOM festival on 24th and 25th November 2017 in Zagreb using an on-site questionnaire. Descriptive and bivariate statistical analyses were used to analyze collected data. The results obtained show a significant and positive relationship between wine and food involvement and experience quality as well as experience outcomes. At the same time it is confirmed a negative relationship between wine and food neophobia, experience quality and experience outcomes.
Automatic Classification of Leading Interactions in a String Quartet

The aim of the present work is to analyze automatically the leading interactions between the musicians of a string quartet, using machine-learning techniques applied to nonverbal features of the musicians’ behavior, which are detected through the help of a motion-capture system. We represent these interactions by a graph of “influence” of the musicians, which displays the relations “is following” and “is not following” with weighted directed arcs. The goal of the machine-learning problem investigated is to assign weights to these arcs in an optimal way. Since only a subset of the available training examples are labeled, a semisupervised support vector machine is used, which is based on a linear kernel to limit its model complexity. Specific potential applications within the field of human-computer interaction are also discussed, such as e-learning, networked music performance, and social active listening.
Markov Logic Networks for Scene Interpretation and Complex Event Recognition in Videos

Automatic extraction and representation of visual concepts and semantic information in scenes is a desired capability in surveillance operations. We target the problem of complex event recognition in network information environment, where lack of effective visual processing tools and incomplete domain knowledge frequently cause uncertainty in the datasets and consequently, in the visual primitives extracted from it. We employ Markov Logic Network (MLN) to address the task of reasoning under uncertainty. In this work we demonstrate use of MLN as a domain knowledge representation language that can be used for inferring complex events in real world. MLN is a knowledge representation language that combines domain knowledge, visual concepts and experience to infer simple and complex real-world events. MLN generalizes over the existing probabilistic models, including hidden Markov models, Bayesian networks, and stochastic grammars. The framework can be made scalable to support variety of entities, their activities and interactions that are typically observed in the real world. Experiments with real-world data in a variety of urban settings illustrate the mathematical soundness and wide-ranging applicability of our approach.
The relationship of leaf photosynthetic traits – Vcmax and Jmax – to leaf nitrogen, leaf phosphorus, and specific leaf area: a meta-analysis and modeling study

Great uncertainty exists in the global exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and the terrestrial biosphere. An important source of this uncertainty lies in the dependency of photosynthesis on the maximum rate of carboxylation (Vcmax) and the maximum rate of electron transport (Jmax). Understanding and making accurate prediction of C fluxes thus requires accurate characterization of these rates and their relationship with plant nutrient status over large geographic scales. Plant nutrient status is indicated by the traits: leaf nitrogen (N), leaf phosphorus (P), and specific leaf area (SLA). Correlations between Vcmax and Jmax and leaf nitrogen (N) are typically derived from local to global scales, while correlations with leaf phosphorus (P) and specific leaf area (SLA) have typically been derived at a local scale. Thus, there is no global-scale relationship between Vcmax and Jmax and P or SLA limiting the ability of global-scale carbon flux models do not account for P or SLA. We gathered published data from 24 studies to reveal global relationships of Vcmax and Jmax with leaf N, P, and SLA. Vcmax was strongly related to leaf N, and increasing leaf P substantially increased the sensitivity of Vcmax to leaf N. Jmax was strongly related to Vcmax, and neither leaf N, P, or SLA had a substantial impact on the relationship. Although more data are needed to expand the applicability of the relationship, we show leaf P is a globally important determinant of photosynthetic rates. In a model of photosynthesis, we showed that at high leaf N (3 gm−2), increasing leaf P from 0.05 to 0.22 gm−2 nearly doubled assimilation rates. Finally, we show that plants may employ a conservative strategy of Jmax to Vcmax coordination that restricts photoinhibition when carboxylation is limiting at the expense of maximizing photosynthetic rates when light is limiting.
On a generalized Cahn-Hilliard equation with biological applications

In this paper, we are interested in the study of the asymptotic behavior of a generalization of the Cahn-Hilliard equation with a proliferation term and endowed with Neumann boundary conditions. Such a model has, in particular, applications in biology. We show that either the average of the local density of cells is bounded, in which case we have a global in time solution, or the solution blows up in finite time. We further prove that the relevant, from a biological point of view, solutions converge to $1$ as time goes to infinity. We finally give some numerical simulations which confirm the theoretical results.
Distribution and morphology of nitrergic neurons across functional domains of the rat primary somatosensory cortex

The rat primary somatosensory cortex (S1) is remarkable for its conspicuous vertical compartmentalization in barrels and septal columns, which are additionally stratified in horizontal layers. Whereas excitatory neurons from each of these compartments perform different types of processing, the role of interneurons is much less clear. Among the numerous types of GABAergic interneurons, those producing nitric oxide (NO) are especially puzzling, since this gaseous messenger can modulate neural activity, synaptic plasticity, and neurovascular coupling. We used a quantitative morphological approach to investigate whether nitrergic interneurons, which might therefore be considered both as NO volume diffusers and as elements of local circuitry, display features that could relate to barrel cortex architecture. In fixed brain sections, nitrergic interneurons can be revealed by histochemical processing for NADPH-diaphorase (NADPHd). Here, the dendritic arbors of nitrergic neurons from different compartments of area S1 were 3D reconstructed from serial 200 μm thick sections, using 100x objective and the Neurolucida system. Standard morphological parameters were extracted for all individual arbors and compared across columns and layers. Wedge analysis was used to compute dendritic orientation indices. Supragranular (SG) layers displayed the highest density of nitrergic neurons, whereas layer IV contained nitrergic neurons with largest soma area. The highest nitrergic neuronal density was found in septa, where dendrites were previously characterized as more extense and ramified than in barrels. Dendritic arbors were not confined to the boundaries of the column nor layer of their respective soma, being mostly double-tufted and vertically oriented, except in SG layers. These data strongly suggest that nitrergic interneurons adapt their morphology to the dynamics of processing performed by cortical compartments.
A NEW PROCEDURE FOR 2D TO 3D CONVERSION USING DEPTH ARRAY CONVERSION

Entertainment in the real world becomes a popular era and it is long lasting for several decades. The major advancement in television as well as in projection leads to highest quality in terms of realistic pictures, images and movies. Various researchers and research forums are under the development of stereoscopic conversion of 2D program material into 3D realistic. Due to less availability of 3D videoscopic displays, we proposed a new methodology to convert 2D array of video sequence into stereoscopic 3D.The proposed methodology focuses on depth array conversion of back grounds from the 2D video and subtracting the active objects in each scenes at every frames, this yields to obtain the depth information from the video which requires heavy computation in real time, which was achieved by Cryengine with AMD QUADCORE A6 CPU, as well with Radeon graphics. Experimental results shows that 3D recognition rate of a single image in the 2D video sequence is up to 78% and display rate of the particular sequence are at 29 frames per second. Experimental results has been included and 3D display rate for the converted sequence is up to 92% accuracy and frame rates be 32 frames per second for FULL HD (1080 p).
Stemming versus multi-words indexing for Arabic documents classification

Documents indexing is the main step in a conventional document classification or information retrieval framework. This study aims to highlight the influence of features' type on the efficiency of a classification system. Empirical results on Arabic dataset reveal that the choice of extracted feature's type has a significant impact on conserving semantic information and improving classification accuracy, especially with the morphological complexity of the Arabic language. Precision, recall, F-measure and accuracy are the metrics adopted to compare the efficiency of the proposed indexing system.
Wormholes and Cosmic Strings

A gravitational scenario is proposed where the euclidean action is invariant under the isotropic and homogeneous version of the euclidean {\it U(1)} group of local transformations of the scale factor and scalar matter field, interpreting the the trace of the second fundamental form as the gauge field. The model allows spontaneous breakdown of some involved symmetries, including possibly diffeomorphism invariance, and leads to the formation of topologiocal deffects. In particular, we consider here the case of the wormhole-induced formation of cosmic strings. (To appear in the Proceedings of the International Workshop on "Quantum Systems: New Trends and Methods", World Scientific)
Representing Policies for Quantified Boolean Formulae

The practical use of Quantified Boolean Formulae (QBFs) often calls for more than solving the validity problem QBF. For this reason we investigate the corresponding function problems whose expected outputs are policies. QBFs which do not evaluate to true do not have any solution policy, but can be of interest nevertheless; for handling them, we introduce a notion of partial policy. We focus on the representation of policies, considering QBFs of the form ∀X ∃Y Փ. Because the explicit representation of policies for such QBFs can be of exponential size, descriptions as compact as possible must be looked for. To address this issue, two approaches based on the decomposition and the compilation of Փ are presented.
Suppression of human metapneumovirus (HMPV) infection by the innate sensing gene CEACAM1

The innate sensing system is equipped with PRRs specialized in recognizing molecular structures (PAMPs) of various pathogens. This leads to the induction of anti-viral genes and inhibition of virus growth. Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV) is a major respiratory virus that causes an upper and lower respiratory tract infection in children. In this study we show that upon HMPV infection, the innate sensing system detects the viral RNA through the RIG-I sensor leading to induction of CEACAM1 expression. We further show that CEACAM1 is induced via binding of IRF3 to the CEACAM1 promoter. We demonstrate that induction of CEACAM1 suppresses the viral loads via inhibition of the translation machinery in the infected cells in an SHP2-dependent manner. In summary, we show here that HMPV-infected cells upregulates CEACAM1 to restrict HMPV infection.
Research proposal for distributed deep web search

This proposal identifies two main problems related to deep web search, and proposes a step by step solution for each of them. The first problem is about searching deep web content by means of a simple free-text interface (with just one input field, instead of a complex interface with many input fields). To this end, we propose a real-time query conversion layer to translate a free-text query into a structured query. The second problem concerns the scalability of the system, and we propose a distributed approach.