Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing a Conceptual Framework for Comparing Social Value Creation

The soaring popularity of business practices in the social sector has elicited numerous calls from academics and practitioners to adopt appropriate methodologies to quantify and compare social value creation. Contributing scholars consider it a great if not impossible challenge to compare social value creation of different, unrelated heterogonous interventions. We help bridge this research gap by developing a conceptual framework that allows us to compare the effectiveness of social interventions serving the different needs of different treatment groups in different socioeconomic and institutional contexts. We do so by bringing insights from both the literature on subjective well-being and the literature on organizational effectiveness theory into not-for-profit and social entrepreneurship research, as well as into the literature on program evaluation.
Regulation of translation dynamic and neoplastic conversion by tRNA and their pieces

Research on transfer RNA (tRNA) has gone a long way since the existence of this essential adapter of the genetic code was first hypothesized five decades ago. With the new and fascinating discovering of connections between tRNAs and cellular pathways beyond genetic translation, the field of tRNA research has reached a new era. Here, we review some aspects of the emerging variety of tasks performed by full length tRNAs as well as their fragments generated by specific nuclease cleavage. Topics of special focus include the effect of differential expression of tRNAs in healthy tissues as well as their frequent deregulation observed in cancer cells. We also discuss the central role played by tRNAMet in cell metabolism, proliferation, and response to oxidative stress. Finally we review evidences suggesting that tRNAs are critical sources of short RNAs regulating an ever growing variety of cellular processes including translation initiation, control of genomic retroviral sequences, or RNA interference.
Classroom Analysis of an Oral Communication Class at a Japanese High School

In Japanese English education, Oral Communication classes were introduced to improve students’ communicative competency. This research compares the outcomes of an Oral Communication class taught by a native English speaking teacher, with those of a reading class taught by a Japanese teacher of English from two previous studies (Nunn, 2004; Otlowski, 2003). Though one would expect significant differences, the outcomes of both of these classes were highly convergent and predictable. Likewise, provision of a native English speaking teacher did not induce a higher quality of English output from students. This probably results from Japanese classroom culture and the negative washback effect of examinations. The assumptions that provision of Native English speaking teachers, and that Oral Communication classes will improve communicative competence is clearly challenged, as there remain serious constraints which impede objectives.
ESTADOS, SOCIEDADE E CIDADANIA: OUTCOMES DA MENSAGEM HERMÉTICA NO CONTRATO PSICOLÓGICO STATE, SOCIETY AND CITIZENSHIP: OUTCOMES OF HERMETIC MESSAGE ON PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACT

Societies are intrinsically linked to the existence of States. If their development depends on the individual conduct of each citizen, it is with the States’ coherence, in the application of the political matrix, that better societies are built. The relationship is circular. Citizenship is constituted by the bond between an individual and a territorial and political entity. The new concept of citizenship that the European Union has been spreading, not only seeks to enhance and improve the assurance of economic and social rights but it also ensures that the citizen feels like a part of the European integration process. Among the written legal norms and the European Union’s guidelines, and their implementation by the Institution of Sovereignty, there is a subjective space in the relationship, whose interpretation differs from what is formally written in legal diplomas. In this kinetic gap, the relationship is driven by the psychosocial contract, being that the individual’s attitudes and behaviours result from perceptions based on an interpretative framework that each one creates about a certain reality. The current study mainly aims to discuss the austerity measures implemented in societies governed by the fundamental principles of a State of democratic right and by the principle of subsidiarity. We strictly follow the principles of objective hermeneutic interpretation applied to the documents produced by the European Union on citizenship. Citizenship cannot be a characteristic of only some nations. Nor can it be political rhetoric, with illusion intentions from Institutions which, in the empty exercise of duties assigned by Society, renounce the general will by stripping them from their fundamental rights, freedom and assurances.
Estudo exploratório sobre filiação e identificação partidária no Brasil

O artigo recupera a discussao dos conceitos de filiacao partidaria e identificacao partidaria na Ciencia Politica contemporânea e analisa os respectivos dados a partir dos resultados do Estudo Eleitoral Brasileiro (ESEB) de 2014. Analisamos os dados sobre a filiacao partidaria e a identificacao partidaria, primeiro atraves de inferencias descritivas a respeito da distribuicao das variaveis na amostra do ESEB, depois avaliando o poder explicativo das variaveis para entender diferentes dimensoes do comportamento e das atitudes politicas dos entrevistados. Identificamos tres tipos de filiados: (i) os filiados sem empatia por um partido; (ii) os que tem empatia pelo partido ao qual estao filiados (50%) e (iii) os que apresentam empatia por um outro partido. Esses resultados indicam a necessidade de explorar diferentes dimensoes da filiacao partidaria em futuras pesquisas. Em relacao a identificacao partidaria, verificamos que ela contribui para explicar a probabilidade de filiacao e de se engajar em diferentes formas de ativismo politico. A variavel identificacao partidaria tambem ajuda prever o comparecimento eleitoral. Os fenomenos da filiacao partidaria e da identificacao partidaria, pouco valorizados na Ciencia Politica brasileira, apresentam padroes consistentes e sao ferramentas importantes para entender o comportamento politico dos cidadaos. Futuras pesquisas devem dedicar mais atencao a esses fenomenos.
Lifetime principal occupation and risk of Alzheimer's disease in the Kungsholmen project.

BACKGROUND Some studies suggest that manual work is associated with dementia. This study is aimed at identifying the specific occupational categories that may be related to dementia. METHODS A cohort of 913 non-demented subjects aged 75 + years was longitudinally examined twice over 6 years to detect incident dementia using the DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria. The lifetime longest occupations of all subjects were divided into different categories according to the occupation-based classification system. Data were analyzed with Cox models. RESULTS During the follow-up period, 260 subjects were diagnosed with dementia (197 with Alzheimer's disease). Manual work was associated with an increased risk of dementia, and the association was dependent on educational level. Compared with non-manual work, manual work involving goods production had a multi-adjusted relative risk (95% CI) of 1.6 (1.0-2.5, P = 0.046) for Alzheimer's disease and 1.4 (0.9-2.1) for dementia. CONCLUSIONS An association between goods production, manual work and Alzheimer's disease found in this study suggests that factors in the mid-twentieth century goods production environment may be involved in the development of Alzheimer's disease.
What Is the Role and Importance of the Revised AERA, APA, NCME Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing ?

With the 2014 publication of the 5th revision of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, the cochairs of the Joint Committee for the revision process were asked to consider the role and importance of the Standards for the educational testing community, and in particular for members of the National Council on Measurement in Education. This article begins with an overview of the process used to create the 2014 revision of the Standards and a discussion of challenges faced by the Joint Committee in the revision process. The next section summarizes the major changes in the revised Standards. The final section considers uses of the revised Standards and is intended to stimulate discussion and debate on the role and importance of these revised Standards for the educational measurement community.
A software-only compression system for trading-offs between performance and code size

The design of an embedded system is often heavily constrained by its performance objective and budget envelope. Software code compression may reduce the instruction memory space and then the overall cost of the system. However, it may also induce performance degradation. Previous studies proposed selective code compression using profile information in order to reduce the performance penalty. In this paper, we go one step further. We propose a software-only compression system, called SCS, that automatically finds trade-offs between code size and performance. Through an iterative approach, SCS automatically determines which functions to be compressed given a performance constraint and/or a code size constraint in order to guarantee a minimal performance and a maximal code size for an application. Experimentations illustrate that even with a non-optimal software decompression approach, SCS achieves a high compression rate with a minimal performance degradation.
Exploring the role of the buddy scheme for researchers.

There are many career options available to nurses, midwives and allied health professional (AHPs) and one of these options is in the world of research. Making the move into research as a career option is gaining popularity and by the end of 2013 it is anticipated that the UK-wide clinical research nurse workforce will be about 10 000. The previous paper in this series looked at the role of the research nurse and how to take the first tentative steps into the role. This paper will discuss supporting the development of researchers and is applicable to both novice and more experienced researchers.
Controlling a service robot in a smart home with behavior planning and learning

The role of a service robot in a smart home can be considered as one of service providers. One difference is that this service provider can provide different services by its own and can also collaborate with others to provide different versions of services. Previous research in service provision concentrates what service devices can be integrated to introduce a new service. However, a service robot's presence can bring a new challenge to service provision. A smart home system is proposed in this paper by integrating techniques in ontology, reasoning, and planning. A user request is processed by the system to produce tasks that needs to be satisfied. A service robot performs a sequence of operations planned by hierarchical task network (HTN) planning. The use of ontology provides the definition of the context and situation in a smart home with machine-interpretable formats that will be recorded and reused. In addition, the preferences of individual users can also be recorded as personal ontology. Reasoning through case-based reasoning (CBR) determines the behaviors that a user engages in while interacting with smart homes and it also provides a learning mechanism for the interaction between the users and the smart home system.
Estradiol Modulates Local Gut Injury Induced by Intestinal Ischemia-Reperfusion in Male Rats.

Intestinal ischemia and reperfusion (I/R) triggers a systemic inflammatory response characterized by leukocyte mobilization from the bone marrow, release of cytokines to the circulation, and increased microvascular permeability, leading to high mortality. Females have shown attenuated inflammatory response to trauma when compared to males, indicating a role for female sex hormones in this process. Here we have evaluated the effect of estradiol on the local gut injury induced by I/R in male rats. I/R was induced by the clamping of the superior mesenteric artery for 45 min, followed by 2 h of reperfusion. A group received 17β-estradiol (280 μg/kg, i.v., single dose) at 30 min of ischemia. Morphometric analysis of the gut showed I/R induced a reduction of villous height that was prevented by estradiol. White blood cells, notably granulocytes, were mobilized from the circulation to the intestine by I/R, which was also prevented by estradiol treatment. Groups had the intestine wrapped in a plastic bag to collect intestinal fluid, where leukocytes count, TNF-α and IL-10 levels were increased by I/R. Serum chemokines (CINC-1, MIP-1α, MIP-2), ICAM-1 expression in the mesenteric tissue and neutrophils spontaneous migration measured in vitro were also increased after I/R. Estradiol treatment reduced leukocytes numbers and TNF-α on intestinal fluid, serum chemokine release and also downregulated MIP-1α, MIP-2 gene expression and spontaneous in vitro neutrophil migration. In conclusion, estradiol blunts intestinal injury induced by I/R by modulating chemokines release and leukocyte trafficking.
An Investigation of Verbal Short-term Memory and Phonological Processing in Four Children With Williams Syndrome

Although phonological processing is generally considered to be a proficiency in Williams syndrome (WS), there are very few studies which have extensively explored phonological processing abilities in WS. In this study, we re-assessed phonological processing in WS by exploring verbal STM and phonological awareness abilities in 4 children with WS (CA: 10–12 years) and two control groups, one matched for chronological age (CA) and the other matched for verbal mental age (VA). Our results confirm and extend previous claims of preserved phonological STM in WS by showing specifically preserved STM performance for non-words, compared to both VA and CA control groups. However, we observed that this was the case only for non-words where support of phonological and lexico-semantic knowledge was minimized, with reduced phonological and lexico-semantic effects on STM performance. Furthermore, a more direct assessment of phonological processing abilities through phonological awareness tasks showed impaired performance for the 4 WS children. Our data confirm that STM for non-words represents a real strength in WS but they do not support previous assumptions of a more general preservation of phonological processing abilities in WS. Implications for impaired and preserved cognitive processes underlying verbal STM and phonological awareness abilities in WS are discussed.
Organotypic slice co‐cultures reveal that early postnatal hippocampal axons lose the ability to grow along the fimbria, while retaining the ability to invade and arborise in septal neuropil

The failure of cut axons to grow along fibre tracts in the adult CNS contrasts with their ability to do so in development. Organotypic slices culture of a number of areas enables the time of failure to be pinpointed to around the second week of postnatal life in the rat. ‘Heterochronic’ co‐culture of slices above and below this age shows that the failure is due to the inability of the older axons to grow into either the same age or younger targets. Using hippocampo‐septal slices the present experiments show that this failure is due to an inability to recognise the glial pathway of the fimbria, even when this is of a younger age. However, the older hippocampal neurons retain the ability to grow axons into septal target tissue when they are placed in direct contact with it. This exactly mirrors the inability of cut central axons to regenerate along their previous fibre pathways while they retain their ability to reinnervate neuropil.
Analysis of worst-case hot-carrier conditions for n-type MOSFET

We analyze the worst-case conditions of hot-carrier induced degradation with our model which is based on the evaluation of the carrier distribution function along the Si/SiO2 interface, i.e. thorough consideration of carrier transport. The distribution function obtained by means of a full-band Monte-Carlo device simulator is used to calculate the acceleration integral, which controls how effectively the carriers are breaking Si-H bonds. Therefore, we analyze these worst-case conditions using this integral as a criterion. We compare the numerical picture with the experimental one and conclude that the model fits the experimental data rather accurately and confirm that these conditions correspond to the relation Vgs = 0.4Vds between gate and drain voltages. The simplified treatment of carrier transport using the non-Maxwellian but still analytical distribution function is also discussed. A discrepancy between experimental results and simulations, which occurred while employing this simplified approach, is shown and explained.
Application of puncturing of a CRC code for WLANs

In some cases, like the proposed IEEE 802.11ah draft specification [3], there arises a need to have a short Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) code to detect errors on the information bits in the various signal fields. While an optimum CRC of the required length can be chosen for this, in order to minimize complexity it may be desirable to “puncture” an existing CRC generator to reduce the number of parity bits transmitted. In this letter we evaluate puncturing of a CRC-8 generator to generate a 4-bit CRC such that the minimum Hamming distance of the resultant code is 2.
Interspecies Electron Transfer via Hydrogen and Formate Rather than Direct Electrical Connections in Cocultures of Pelobacter carbinolicus and Geobacter sulfurreducens

ABSTRACT Direct interspecies electron transfer (DIET) is an alternative to interspecies H2/formate transfer as a mechanism for microbial species to cooperatively exchange electrons during syntrophic metabolism. To understand what specific properties contribute to DIET, studies were conducted with Pelobacter carbinolicus, a close relative of Geobacter metallireducens, which is capable of DIET. P. carbinolicus grew in coculture with Geobacter sulfurreducens with ethanol as the electron donor and fumarate as the electron acceptor, conditions under which G. sulfurreducens formed direct electrical connections with G. metallireducens. In contrast to the cell aggregation associated with DIET, P. carbinolicus and G. sulfurreducens did not aggregate. Attempts to initiate cocultures with a genetically modified strain of G. sulfurreducens incapable of both H2 and formate utilization were unsuccessful, whereas cocultures readily grew with mutant strains capable of formate but not H2 uptake or vice versa. The hydrogenase mutant of G. sulfurreducens compensated, in cocultures, with significantly increased formate dehydrogenase gene expression. In contrast, the transcript abundance of a hydrogenase gene was comparable in cocultures with that for the formate dehydrogenase mutant of G. sulfurreducens or the wild type, suggesting that H2 was the primary electron carrier in the wild-type cocultures. Cocultures were also initiated with strains of G. sulfurreducens that could not produce pili or OmcS, two essential components for DIET. The finding that P. carbinolicus exchanged electrons with G. sulfurreducens via interspecies transfer of H2/formate rather than DIET demonstrates that not all microorganisms that can grow syntrophically are capable of DIET and that closely related microorganisms may use significantly different strategies for interspecies electron exchange.
Notes on DSRC & WAVE Standards Suite: Its Architecture, Design, and Characteristics

The Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC) standards suite is based on multiple cooperating standards mainly developed by the IEEE. In particular, we focus this paper on the core design aspects of DSRC which is called Wireless Access in Vehicular Networks (WAVE). WAVE is highlighted in IEEE 1609.1/. 2/. 3/. 4. The DSRC and WAVE standards have been the center of major attention in both research and industrial communities. In 2008, WAVE standard was the third best seller standards in the history of the IEEE. This attention reflects the potential of WAVE to facilitate much of the vehicular safety applications. In this paper we present a fairly detailed tutorial of the WAVE standards. We extend the paper by describing some of the lessons learned from particular design approaches. We direct the reader to the landmark research papers in relevant topics. We alert the reader about major open research issues that might lead to future contribution to the WAVE design.
COMPARING SOUNDS AND THE ORGANISATION OF THEIR ONSETS IN TIME

This abstract describes the algorithm we submitted to the MIREX 2009 Audio Similarity (AMS) Task. The algorithm has two main components. One component aims to describe the similarity of the “timbre” or “sound” that appears in the two tracks to compare, and the second component focuses on comparing the periodicities and frequencies of the onsets appearing in the two tracks. Both components are weighted equally (i.e., 1 : 1). The algorithm is a variant of the algorithm described in [1], and ranked first in the MIREX 2009 AMS task. 1 ALGORITHM DESCRIPTION This abstract contains a superficial description of the algorithm components. For more information, the reader is referred to [1]. The algorithm has two major components which are weighted equally (i.e., 1 : 1), a rhythm component and a “timbral” component. 1.1 Rhythm Component The rhythm component is based on a modification of the Fluctuation Patterns [2]. Calculation of the rhythm component includes the following steps: • The audio excerpt is transformed into a cent/sone like representation. Sone values s are estimated from the amplitudes a by s = 210 (cf. [3]). • An onset estimation is performed, and the number of frequency bands is reduced. • For each frequency band, periodicity estimation is done on segments of 2.63 sec length. Periodicities are scaled to assign each metrical level the same number of bins (assuming only meters of two). The matrix resulting for each segment is transformed by applying a 2D cosine transform. Coefficients 0 and 1 are kept in the frequency dimension, and coefficients 0.17 are kept in the periodicity dimension. These values are stacked to form a 36 dimensional vector for each segment. The rhythm feature data for a track is the mean and full covariance matrix of these vectors over all segments. The rhythm component distance of two songs is estimated by calculating (cf. [4, 5]) D(N1,N2) = H(N3)− H(N1) + H(N2) 2 (1) where H denotes the entropy, and N3 results from merging N1 and N2. We use the square root of D. A way to merge two Gaussians into one is given in [6], setting the weights of N1 and N2 to 0.5 each it follows: μ3 = 0.5μ1 + 0.5μ2 Σ3 = 0.5Σ1 + 0.5Σ2 + 0.5μ1μ1 + 0.5μ2μ ′ 2 − μ3μ3 The entropy H of a single Gaussian can be computed by (e.g., [5])