Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Big Data for Urban Studies: Opportunities and Challenges: A Comparative Perspective

A city is a complex system with complicated interactions between transport, land use, environment, population at a variety of scales. Understanding these interactions is the prerequisite for predicting urban changes, supporting sustainable urban development planning. In this paper, we divide the evolution of urban data into four stages. Then the opportunities of big data (new stage) for urban studies application are explored, followed by case studies from both the UK, China. The main challenges are evaluated, the solutions to which are further discussed, compared between both countries.
Eyewitness identification under stress in the London Dungeon

Eyewitness experiments do not induce the stress experienced by victims of crime. It is important to understand the effect of stress if results of laboratory studies are to be generalised to victims and witnesses of real crimes, but previous research has shown a mixed picture. The ability of visitors to the London Dungeon to describe and identify somebody encountered in the Horror Labyrinth was investigated, as a function of their state anxiety. To validate the measure of state anxiety, participants wore a wireless heart rate monitor whilst in the labyrinth. High state anxiety was associated with a higher heart rate. Subsequently, visitors completed measures of their state anxiety experienced whilst in the labyrinth and a measure of trait anxiety. High state anxiety was associated with reporting fewer correct descriptors of the target person, more incorrect details and making fewer correct identifications from a lineup. There was no effect of trait anxiety on eyewitness memory.
Synthesis of correct-by-construction behavior trees

In this paper we study the problem of synthesizing correct-by-construction Behavior Trees (BTs) controlling agents in adversarial environments. The proposed approach combines the modularity and reactivity of BTs with the formal guarantees of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) methods. Given a set of admissible environment specifications, an agent model in form of a Finite Transition System and the desired task in form of an LTL formula, we synthesize a BT in polynomial time, that is guaranteed to correctly execute the desired task. To illustrate the approach, we present three examples of increasing complexity.
Vitamin E supplementation and macular degeneration: randomised controlled trial

Objective: To determine whether vitamin E supplementation influences the incidence or rate of progression of age related maculopathy (AMD). Design: Prospective randomised placebo controlled clinical trial. Setting: An urban study centre in a residential area supervised by university research staff. Participants: 1193 healthy volunteers aged between 55 and 80 years; 73% completed the trial on full protocol. Interventions: Vitamin E 500 IU or placebo daily for four years. Main outcome measures: Primary outcome: development of early age related macular degeneration in retinal photographs. Other measures included alternative definitions of age related macular degeneration, progression, changes in component features, visual acuity, and visual function Results: The incidence of early age related macular degeneration (early AMD 3) was 8.6% in those receiving vitamin E versus 8.1% in those on placebo (relative risk 1.05, 95% confidence interval 0.69 to 1.61). For late disease the incidence was 0.8% versus 0.6% (1.36, 0.67 to 2.77). Further analysis showed no consistent differences in secondary outcomes. Conclusion: Daily supplement with vitamin E supplement does not prevent the development or progression of early or later stages of age related macular degeneration.
Simian immunodeficiency virus SIVmac chimeric virus whose env gene was derived from SIV-encephalitic brain is macrophage-tropic but not neurovirulent

We inoculated four rhesus macaques with molecularly cloned simian immunodeficiency virus SIVmac239/17E env, a chimeric virus whose env gene was derived from the brain of an SIV-encephalitic macaque. Blood and lymphoid tissues had high frequencies of infected cells. The virus was neuroinvasive, but productive virus replication did not occur in the brain, and animals did not develop encephalitis.
World Englishes: approaches, issues and resources

The conceptualisation of World Englishes with a theoretical framework actually goes back to the early 1960s (Kachru, 1965). However, organised efforts in discussing the concept and its formal and functional implications were not initiated until 1978. I will, therefore, provide a brief historical context and a survey of resources, primarily since 1978. It was during that year, just three months apart, that the international and intranational functions of English became the focus of two independently organised international conferences. The first conference was organised by Larry E. Smith in April (1-15) at the East-West Culture Learning Institute (now the Institute for Culture and Communication) of the East-West Center, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. The second was organised by me (30 June-2 July), in conjunction with the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana—Champaign, USA. These conferences had considerable conceptual similarities and shared several participants. The conferences resulted in two publications, Smith (ed., 1981) and Kachru (ed., 1982; 2nd edition, 1992). At the end of the Honolulu conference all the participants signed a statement and an agenda for the future which articulated their views. In that conference, as Kachru and Quirk (1981: xiii) observe:
Conspicuous compassion and wicked problems: the Howard government's national emergency in Indigenous affairs

A ‘wicked problem’ is a term used in the planning literature to characterise a complex multi-dimensional problem. The article argues that Indigenous child abuse is one such problem. Whatever the merits of the recent federal intervention into Northern Territory Indigenous communities, it is unlikely to succeed without both long-term bipartisan commitment of substantial resources and a meaningful process of consultation with Indigenous peoples. If we are to learn from what policies worked (and what did not work), then it is particularly important that a transparent evaluation framework be established before undertaking policy initiatives.
Stressinduzierte Herabsetzung der Aufmerksamkeit bei jungen Erwachsenen mit ADHS-ähnlicher Symptomatik

Zusammenfassung. Theoretischer Hintergrund: Modelle zur Aufrechterhaltung des ADHS-Syndroms postulieren, dass die allgemeine Aufmerksamkeitsleistung und damit auch die Selbstaufmerksamkeit durch Stress vermindert werden kann. Fragestellung: In der Studie wurde gepruft, ob sich dieser Effekt bereits bei Personen aus der gesunden Bevolkerung zeigt, die einen hohen Auspragungsgrad an ADHS-ahnlicher Symptomatik aufweisen. Methode: 84 Manner mit einem mittleren Alter von 23 Jahren wurden getestet. Die Stressinduktion erfolgte durch mentale Arithmetik aus dem Trier Sozial Stress-Test. Die Aufmerksamkeitsleistung wurde mit dem Frankfurter Aufmerksamkeitsinventar gemessen. Die Gruppierung der Probanden erfolgte durch Median-Split aufgrund der Selbstbeurteilungsskala aus den Homburger ADHS-Skalen fur Erwachsene in solche mit hoher bzw. niedriger ADHS-Tendenz. Ergebnisse: Bezuglich der Aufmerksamkeitsleistung zeigte sich der erwartete Interaktionseffekt (Gruppierung × Bedingung) mit schlechterer Leistung nach Stres.
The Effect of Classmate Characteristics on Post- Secondary Outcomes: Evidence from the Add Health^

This paper uses a within-school/across-cohort design to present new evidence of the effects of high school classmate characteristics on a wide range of post-secondary outcomes. We find that increases in the percent of classmates with college-educated mothers decreases the likelihood of dropping out and increases the likelihood of attending college, despite showing no impact on a range of in-school achievement, attitudes, and behaviors. The percent of students from disadvantaged minority groups does not show any effects on post-secondary outcomes, but is associated with students reporting less caring student-teacher relationships and increased prevalence of some undesirable student behaviors during high school. (JEL I21, J13, J15)
Consensus control for dynamic systems on lie groups

This paper addresses the consensus problem of multi-agent systems with a complete communication topology consisting of second order dynamics defined on Lie groups. The specific results are illustrated on SE(3) and SE(2) (the special Euclidean groups of rigid body motions and each of which shares the geometric structure of a Lie group). The control algorithm proposed in the paper drive the multi-agent systems toward consensus of position as well as attitude simultaneously with specific motion patterns. Several numerical simulations are included to verify the theoretical results.
Autophosphorylation of DNA-PKCS regulates its dynamics at DNA double-strand breaks

The DNA-dependent protein kinase catalytic subunit (DNA-PKCS) plays an important role during the repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). It is recruited to DNA ends in the early stages of the nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) process, which mediates DSB repair. To study DNA-PKCS recruitment in vivo, we used a laser system to introduce DSBs in a specified region of the cell nucleus. We show that DNA-PKCS accumulates at DSB sites in a Ku80-dependent manner, and that neither the kinase activity nor the phosphorylation status of DNA-PKCS influences its initial accumulation. However, impairment of both of these functions results in deficient DSB repair and the maintained presence of DNA-PKCS at unrepaired DSBs. The use of photobleaching techniques allowed us to determine that the kinase activity and phosphorylation status of DNA-PKCS influence the stability of its binding to DNA ends. We suggest a model in which DNA-PKCS phosphorylation/autophosphorylation facilitates NHEJ by destabilizing the interaction of DNA-PKCS with the DNA ends.
Perspective taking 1 Perspective Taking and Grammar

This paper examines the effects of perspective taking on grammar and the processing of sentences. The perspective hypothesis claims that language allows us to shift perspective on four cognitive levels. The specific claims are that: 1. Perspective taking operates online using images created in four systems: direct experience, space/time deixis, plans, and social role taking. 2. Language uses perspective taking to bind together these four imagery subsystems. 3. Grammar arose as a social convenience to support accurate tracking and switching of perspective. 4. Language comprehension and production use both depictive and enactive imagery. Depictive imagery relies on the ventral image processing system, whereas enactive imagery relies on the dorsal system for perception-action linkages. Perspective taking depends primarily on processing in the dorsal stream. 5. On the level of direct experience, perspective shifting depends on imagery grounded directly on body maps. 6. On the level of deixis in space and time, perspective shifting depends on the projection of the body image across egocentric, allocentric, and geocentric frames. 7. On the level of plans, perspective shifting in the transitivity system assigns roles to referents through the transitivity system. Premotor working memory areas and inferior frontal action planning areas provide the processing capacity to control perspective shifts in action chains. 8. On the level of social roles, perspective switching through speech acts allows us to construct images of social reality. Switching of social perspectives is facilitated by a functional circuit including prefrontal cortex and medial structures. 9. By tracing perspective shifts in language, children are able to learn the cognitive pathways and mental models sanctioned by their culture. 10. The emergence of language as a species-specific human skill depends on a series of gradual evolutionary adaptations that supported perspective taking in the four subsystems, as well as additional adaptations for vocal control. Perspective taking 3 Successful communication rests not just on shared knowledge and reference (H. Clark & Marshall, 1981), but also on a process of mutual perspective taking. By giving clear cues to our listeners about which perspectives they should assume and how they should move from one perspective to the next, we maximize the extent to which they can share our perceptions and ideas. When language is rich in cues for perspective taking and perspective shifting, it awakens the imagination of the listener and leads to successful sharing of ideas, impressions, attitudes, and narratives. When the process of perspective sharing is …
Spotting Social Signals in Conversational Speech over IP: A Deep Learning Perspective

The automatic detection and classification of social signals is an important task, given the fundamental role nonverbal behavioral cues play in human communication. We present the first cross-lingual study on the detection of laughter and fillers in conversational and spontaneous speech collected 'in the wild' over IP (internet protocol). Further, this is the first comparison of LSTM and GRU networks to shed light on their performance differences. We report frame-based results in terms of the unweighted-average area-under-the-curve (UAAUC) measure and will shortly discuss its suitability for this task. In the mono-lingual setup our best deep BLSTM system achieves 87.0% and 86.3% UAAUC for English and German, respectively. Interestingly, the cross-lingual results are only slightly lower, yielding 83.7% for a system trained on English, but tested on German, and 85.0% in the opposite case. We show that LSTM and GRU architectures are valid alternatives for e. g. , on-line and compute-sensitive applications, since their application incurs a relative UAAUC decrease of only approximately 5% with respect to our best systems. Finally, we apply additional smoothing to correct for erroneous spikes and drops in the posterior trajectories to obtain an additional gain in all setups.
A Capacitor-less Low Drop out Voltage Regulator

Low dropout voltage regulators (LDO) use a large external capacitor, in the range of few micro-farads. These external capacitors occupy valuable board space, increase the IC pin count and prohibit System-On-Chip (SoC) solutions. The large external capacitor is replaced with a reasonable 1nF internal capacitor. The capacitor-less LDO is designed for an output voltage of 1.4V for a given supply voltage 2.2V using Cadence tool, UMC180 PDK in 0. 18µm CMOS technology. The capacitor-less LDO responds within 80ns for a load current change of 0 – 5mA consuming 300uA of ground current The Line and Load regulations achieved are 0.3mV and 0.22 mV respectively. The observed overshoot and undershoot voltages are less than 50mV in all process corners. The fast transient loop used has improved line regulation, load regulation and transient response.
Secure Range Query Processing over Untrustworthy Cloud Services

Database-as-a-service is a relatively new cloud computing service offered on a pay-per-use basis and providing on-demand access to a database. The way data has dramatically increased in volume explains its success, while security and privacy issues arise, leaving enterprises, in particular, exposed to the risk of leakage of the data which they entrust to specialized cloud service providers or to other parties in order to reduce storage and query processing costs. Since traditional encryption does not support the execution of queries on encrypted data, this paper focuses on the problem of secure computation on encrypted data and puts forward a cloud database model that supports secure range query processing and retrieval of multi-dimensional (i.e. multi-attribute) data. It proposes two schemes to resist practical attacks operating on the basis of powerful background knowledge. A performance and efficiency evaluation of these schemes is also carried out to confirm their efficiency and practicability.
Simulating hospital patient flows

This case study development has benefited by the use of clear on-screen logic which has facilitated useful discussions between the analyst and end-users. The screen displays enable a realistic depiction of a system to be developed. A simple first model was gradually made more realistic in a step-by-step process involving both analyst and end-users. The investigation is continuing and the model is being further refined. Data collection is underway, and system data will be used to provide the model's input parameters of arrival and service rates. Times and lengths of queues of patients and total time in the system will be compared with their model equivalents. The resulting model is likely to be acceptable to the end-users because of their involvement in its development. This involvement has been facilitated by a simulation environment which enables on-screen iconic representations of system components to be created by analyst and end-user together.
Women's Economic Participation in the Middle East: What Difference Has The Neoliberal Policy Turn Made?

In this article I examine changes in patterns of women's employment and social policies pertaining to women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and make comparisons between two periods: the oil boom era of the 1960s-1980s, and the period of liberalization since the latter part of the 1980s and into the present decade. Like other areas in the world-economy, the region has undergone a shift from state-directed economic development with protected industries to a more open and liberalized economic policy environment. Economies within the region are more or less liberalized in terms of trade and financial markets, and the region as a whole has seen less foreign direct investment than have other regions. Some economists have explained this in terms of the less competitive nature of MENA industries, labor skills, and wages compared with other regions, largely the result of the region's earlier "competitive advantage" in oil (Karshenas 2001; Hakimian 2001). My focus is on female labor, social policy, and the changing political economy, with an emphasis on Iran (an example of an oil economy), Jordan (a non-oil economy), and Tunisia (a mixed oil economy). Conceptually, I take a feminist political economy approach, wherein attention is drawn to the gendered outcomes of the use of natural resources and systems of distribution, the way that female labor is deployed in economic processes, and state policies pertaining to women's participation. Most MENA states have been rentier, authoritarian, and culturally conservative, with distinct implications
Ketamine infusions: pharmacokinetics and clinical effects.

The clinical effects and pharmacokinetics of ketamine, administered as an i.v. infusion, were studied in 31 patients. Anaesthesia was induced with ketamine 2 mg kg-1 i.v. and maintained using an i.v. infusion of ketamine, supplemented by nitrous oxide. The plasma concentrations of ketamine, nor-ketamine and dehydro-nor-ketamine were analysed using gas-liquid chromatography. The average maintenance dose of ketamine was 41 +/- 21 microgram kg-1 min-1, but there was an obvious decrease in the dose required as anaesthesia progressed. This dose gave a stable plasma concentration of ketamine of 9.3 +/- 0.8 mumol litre-1. Patients recovered at 2.7 +/- 0.9 mumol litre-1. Plasma half-life of ketamine was 79 +/- 8 min. Maximum concentration of nor-ketamine was 4.7 +/- 2.4 mumol litre-1 and of dehydro-nor-ketamine 3.2 +/- 1.9 mumol litre-1. There were transient increases (15-30% of pre anaesthetic values) in arterial pressure, heart rate and cardiac output during operation. No post-operative respiratory depression was seen.
Practical functional assessment of elderly persons: a primary-care approach.

OBJECTIVE To describe simple, practical measures of physical and psychosocial function to detect problems and enhance the care of elderly patients. DESIGN We reviewed pertinent articles and current standard textbooks of geriatrics; the most useful findings are summarized, and tools that can be used for functional assessment of the geriatric population are presented. RESULTS Care of elderly patients necessitates a comprehensive review of key areas of function. Using only clinical judgment, physicians may overlook important clinical deficits common in older patients. Because of their length and complexity, many of the standard geriatric assessment tools are impractical for use by primary-care physicians. Certain simplified or condensed versions--such as the Functional Reach Test and the "Get Up and Go" Test--are efficient substitutes. In this article, we describe methods for practical identification of functional impairments, assessment of cognition and mood, evaluation of hearing and vision, and detection of problems with continence, nutrition, and social needs. Instruments for assessment of caregiver burden are also outlined. CONCLUSION Use of the assessment tools presented herein can assist primary-care physicians in comprehensive evaluation of function in older patients.
DEPRESSION IN HYPERTENSIVE SUBJECTS

SUMMARY 168 patients attending hypertension clinic were randomly selected for the study. They were thoroughly investigated using E.C. G. , X-ray chest, Urine analysis, Blood sugar, Blood urea, Serum cholesterol, Serum K, Serum Na, Scrum creatinine and Uric acid level. Detailed psychiatric case history and mental examination was carried out. Beck Rating Scale was used to measure the depression. 25% of hypertensive subjects exhibited depressive features and their mean score in Beck Rating scale is 21.76. The mean score of non-depressives is 4.46. All patients were receiving methyl dopa.25 mg. twice or thrice daily with thiazide diuretic. No significant difference in the incidence of depression with the duration of medication was observed. The hypertension was classified into mild, moderate and severe depending on the diastolic pressure. Depression was more frequent in severe hypertensives but not to the statistically significant level. Further hypertensives were classified into: 1. Hypertension without organ involvement 2. Hypertension with LVH only 3. Hypertension with additional organ involvement 4. Malignant hypertension Depression was significantly more frequent in hypertensives with complications and also hypertensives in whom the B.P. remained uncontrolled. As all the patients were on the same drug, the drug effect is common to all; hence, the higher incidence of depression in hypertensives with complications is due to the limitation and distress caused by the illness.
AN ENDOCRINE CELL CARCINOMA WITH GASTRIC‐AND‐INTESTINAL MIXED PHENOTYPE ADENOCARCINOMA COMPONENT IN THE STOMACH

A 77‐year‐old man complained of bodyweight loss, and a Borrmann 3 type lesion was observed endoscopically in the anterior wall of angular region of the stomach. The endocrine cell carcinoma (ECC) having the cytoplasmic staining of chromogranin A (CgA) was detected pathologically in the biopsy samples. The patient underwent distal gastrectomy plus systemic lymph node (LN) dissection (D2 LN dissection), and pathological examination revealed ECC invading the subserosa, and no LN metastasis (pT2N0M0). None of the gastric and intestinal endocrine cell marker expression was apparent in the ECC cells. The lesion also contained a moderately differentiated type tubular adenocarcinoma component, which was judged to be gastric‐and‐intestinal mixed (GI type) phenotype, using gastric and intestinal exocrine cell markers. After the surgery, he left the hospital and started oral doxifluridine (600 mg/day). The patient now (March 2008, about 19 months since the surgery) continues this chemotherapy with no recurrence. In conclusion, we experienced ECC with a GI type adenocarcinoma component. The ECC cases with the GI type adenocarcinoma component may have a relatively good prognosis, being similar to the results of advanced gastric cancers from the viewpoint of gastric and intestinal phenotypic expression.