Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using the Constructivist Tridimensional Design Model for Online Continuing Education for Health Care Clinical Faculty

This article presents a new paradigm for continuing education of Clinical Instructors (CIs): the Constructivist Tridimensional (CTD) model for the design of an online curriculum. Based on problem-based learning, self-regulated learning, and adult learning theory, the CTD model was designed to facilitate interactive, collaborative, and authentic learning. The authors conducted experimental research with twenty-one physical therapy (PT) CIs to explore how the participants perceived the usefulness of the online curriculum structured around the CTD model in improving their knowledge in student mentoring. The CTD-inspired module was effective in that the participants perceived an improvement in the quality of their mentoring skills and they were able to maintain best practices.
Texture Mapping with Hard Constraints

We show how to continuously map a texture onto a 3D triangle mesh when some of the mesh vertices are constrained to have given (u, v) coordinates. This problem arises frequently in interactive texture mapping applications and, to the best of our knowledge, a complete and efficient solution is not available. Our techniques always guarantee a solution by introducing extra (Steiner) vertices in the triangulation if needed. We show how to apply our methods to texture mapping in multi‐resolution scenarios and image warping and morphing.
Analysis of tests used to differentiate Trichophyton rubrum from Trichophyton mentagrophytes

Differential identification of Trichophyton rubrum and Trichophyton mentagrophytes was evaluated by using the standard in vitro hair perforation test as a criterion for identification and comparing its effectiveness with that of nine other tests used to differentiate these two taxa. Correlation and multiple regression analysis showed that no single test or combination of these tests was able to make the differentiation as effectively as the standard in vitro hair perforation test. Using relative error analysis, we suggest an identification scheme based upon selective utilization of potato-carrot agar for sporulation and the standard in vitro hair perforation test. Using potato-carrot agar for development of typical microconidia on each of the nonsporulating primary isolates and subsequently performing the standard in vitro hair perforation test only on those isolates that failed to produce spores on potato-carrot medium, we showed that this combination scheme provides more expedient results, without any sacrifice in reliability, than the standard in vitro hair perforation test alone.
JBR: A reassessment of concept familiarity and a category-specific disorder for living things

Abstract JBR, a classic case of a category-specific disorder for living things reported by Warrington and Shallice (Brain 1984; 107: 829-54), was reassessed to establish whether differences in concept familiarity could account for his disorder. JBR's ability to name and define living and non-living things deteriorated with decreasing levels of familiarity, but was significantly more impaired for living things in the low familiarity range; no category-specific effect was apparent for highly familiar items. Possible confounding effects arising from the greater visual complexlty and visual similarity of living things could not account for the findings. Further investigations showed that JBR's disorder for living things could not be explained in terms of a specific loss of visual feature knowledge. Normal controls also showed a disparity between their naming of living and non-living things rated equivalently for familiarity, indicating that JBR's category disorder was not necessarily pathological in nature. I.
Teachers' death anxiety, ability to cope with death, and perceived ability to aid bereaved students

Abstract The focus of this study is the relationship between educators' personal death attitudes and the emotional support they are able to give students experiencing serious loss. After a discussion of evidence illustrating how teachers' death attitudes influence their ability to aid grieving students; the need for teachers to be aware of both those attitudes, and the needs of students suffering from the effects of loss are identified. Results are then presented of a study that assessed the correlation between teachers' death attitudes and experience and their perceived ability to aid grieving students. Teachers' ability to handle death of self, their level of death anxiety, their perception of their role with students who have experienced loss, and their ability to feel comfortable in counseling grieving students were among the factors found to predict their perceived ability to help grieving students. The implications of the research findings are reviewed, and the need for further research explored.
Twinship and risk of postmenopausal breast cancer.

BACKGROUND Intrauterine exposure to high levels of endogenous estrogens has been hypothesized to increase the risk of breast cancer. Because estrogens and other pregnancy hormones are substantially elevated in twin pregnancies, and possibly more so in dizygotic twin pregnancies, we evaluated the association between aspects of twin membership (i.e., belonging to a twin pair) and the risk of breast cancer. METHODS In a cohort of 29 197 postmenopausal Iowa women with no prior diagnosis of cancer (except for nonmelanoma skin cancer), breast cancer risk factors were determined by use of a mailed questionnaire in 1986 (baseline); twin membership, sex of the twin, and zygosity were determined by use of a follow-up questionnaire in 1992. RESULTS Within the cohort, 1.8% (n = 538) of the women reported being a twin; of these, 24% (n = 130) were monozygotic twins, 63% (n = 337) were dizygotic twins, and 13% (n = 71) did not know their zygosity. From 1986 through 1996, 1230 breast cancers in the cohort were ascertained by linkage to the Iowa Cancer Registry. Compared with singletons, women who belonged to a twin pair were at elevated risk of breast cancer (multivariate-adjusted risk ratio [RR] = 1.72; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.22-2.42), with adjustment for educational level, family history of breast cancer, height, body mass index, body fat distribution, age at menarche, age at first live birth, use of hormone replacement therapy, and alcohol use. Multivariate-adjusted risk was elevated (in comparison with singletons) if the sex of the other twin was female (RR = 1.82; 95% CI = 1.20-2.75); however, this risk was limited to female dizygotic twins (RR = 2.14; 95% CI = 1. 21-3.79), since no excess risk was evident for monozygotic twins (RR = 1.04; 95% CI = 0.43-2.50). The risk to women with a male twin was also elevated (RR = 1.49; 95% CI = 0.80-2.78) in comparison with singletons, but this estimate was not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS This cohort study lends further support to the theory that there are important intrauterine influences on carcinogenesis of the breast.
Telebeads: social network mnemonics for teenagers

This article presents the design of Telebeads, a conceptual exploration of mobile mnemonic artefacts. Developed together with five 10-14 year olds across two participatory design sessions, we address the problem of social network massification by allowing teenagers to link individuals or groups with wearable objects such as handmade jewelery. We propose different concepts and scenarios using mixed-reality mobile interactions to augment crafted artefacts and describe a working prototype of a bluetooth luminous ring. We also discuss what such communication appliances may offer in the future with respect to interperception, experience networks and creativity analysis.
DEAS 2005

Understanding software engineering issues for autonomic computing systems is critical for the software and information technology sectors, which are continually challenged to reduce the complexity of their systems. To be autonomic, a system must know itself as well as its boundaries and its environment, configure and reconfigure itself, continually optimize itself, recover or heal from malfunction, protect itself, and function in a heterogeneous world---while keeping its complexity hidden from the user. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners, who investigate concepts, methodologies, techniques, technologies, and tools to design and evolve autonomic software.
Effect of the Affordable Care Act on Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Insurance Coverage.

OBJECTIVES To document how health insurance coverage changed for White, Black, and Hispanic adults after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) went into effect. METHODS We used data from the American Community Survey from 2008 to 2014 to examine changes in the percentage of nonelderly adults who were uninsured, covered by Medicaid, or covered by private health insurance. In addition to presenting overall trends by race/ethnicity, we stratified the analysis by income group and state Medicaid expansion status. RESULTS In 2013, 40.5% of Hispanics and 25.8% of Blacks were uninsured, compared with 14.8% of Whites. We found a larger gap in private insurance, which was partially offset by higher rates of public coverage among Blacks and Hispanics. After the main ACA provisions went into effect in 2014, coverage disparities declined slightly as the percentage of adults who were uninsured decreased by 7.1 percentage points for Hispanics, 5.1 percentage points for Blacks, and 3 percentage points for Whites. Coverage gains were greater in states that expanded Medicaid programs. CONCLUSIONS The ACA has reduced racial/ethnic disparities in coverage, although substantial disparities remain. Further increases in coverage will require Medicaid expansion by more states and improved program take-up in states that have already done so.
Three Social Dilemmas of Workforce Diversity in Organizations: A Social Identity Perspective

This paper explores the relationship among threesocial dilemmas faced by organizations wishing to attainand maintain workforce diversity: the dilemmas oforganizational participation, managerial participation, and individual participation. Functional andsocial category diversity offer benefits fororganizations (creativity, adaptation and innovation,and access to external networks), but there are costswhich deter organizations from pursuing thesebenefits. The costs associated with organizationalparticipation in diversity initiatives arise becausemanagers and their employees perceive organizationalconflicts and organize their interactions along socialidentity lines, so that temporal traps and collectivefences surround diversity. Resolving the subordinatedilemmas of managerial and individual participation provides the key to resolving the dilemma oforganizational participation. Social identity theory isused to understand the dilemmas and to develop possibleresolutions, which should make the benefits of diversity more immediately accessible toorganizations and society.
Analysis and optimization of a SAR ADC with attenuation capacitor

The conventional binary weighted array SAR ADC is the common topology adopted to achieve high efficiency conversion, i.e. with less than 10 fJ/conversion-step, even requiring extra effort to design and simulate full custom sub-fF capacitors. This paper presents the design and the optimization of an asynchronous SAR ADC with attenuation capacitor achieving an efficiency similar to conventional binary weighted array converters but adopting standard MiM capacitors. A monotonic switching algorithm further reduces the capacitive array consumption while an asynchronous and fully-differential dynamic logic minimizes the digital power consumption. A 10-bit prototype has been fabricated in a 0.13-μm CMOS technology. At 0.5-V supply and 200-kSps sampling frequency, the ADC achieves a SNDR of 52.6 dB, an ENOB of 8.45, and a power consumption of 420 nW, corresponding to a figure-of-merit (FOM) of 6 fJ/conversion-step. This efficiency is comparable to the best results published so far and it's the lowest among ADCs in 130-nm or less scaled technology. The ADC core occupies an area of only 0.045 mm2.
Embodied Conversational Agents: Representation and Intelligence in User Interfaces

How do we decide how to represent an intelligent system in its interface, and how do we decide how the interface represents information about the world and about its own workings to a user? This article addresses these questions by examining the interaction between representation and intelligence in user interfaces. The rubric representation covers at least three topics in this context: (1) how a computational system is represented in its user interface, (2) how the interface conveys its representations of information and the world to human users, and (3) how the system's internal representation affects the human user's interaction with the system. I argue that each of these kinds of representation (of the system, information and the world, the interaction) is key to how users make the kind of attributions of intelligence that facilitate their interactions with intelligent systems. In this vein, it makes sense to represent a systmem as a human in those cases where social collaborative behavior is key and for the system to represent its knowledge to humans in multiple ways on multiple modalities. I demonstrate these claims by discussing issues of representation and intelligence in an embodied conversational agent -- an interface in which the system is represented as a person, information is conveyed to human users by multiple modalities such as voice and hand gestures, and the internal representation is modality independent and both propositional and nonpropositional.
What Makes People Dissatisfied with their Neighbourhoods?

A logistic regression model of individual neighbourhood dissatisfaction was developed using data from the 1997/98 Survey of English Housing. Housing satisfaction and the general appearance of the neighbourhood were closely associated with neighbourhood dissatisfaction, although perceptions of noise, friendliness, community spirit, schools and crime were also important. Although sociodemographic factors were much less important than residential perceptions in helping to predict dissatisfaction, the type of neighbourhood remained a significant independent predictor of dissatisfaction even when residents' views were taken into account. Some factors were more important in different areas: in particular, residents in less affluent areas were more sensitive to unfriendliness and crime. There were also indications that owner-occupiers were less satisfied in areas where they had a lower tenure share. The paper concludes that neighbourhood policies with a broad spectrum of goals are required, that pay careful attention to residents' own assessments of local conditions.
Was that a man? Sex identification as a function of menstrual cycle and masculinity

The accuracy of female perceivers on a face sex-categorization task was investigated as a function of perceivers' menstrual cycle and target facial qualities. Regularly ovulating female participants completed a sex-categorization task twice, once during ovulation (high fertility) and once during menstruation (low fertility). Perceivers made more errors in identifying male than female faces at both testing sessions. Fewer errors were made in identifying male targets rated high on masculinity, but only during periods of high fertility. For female targets accuracy was negatively associated with masculinity and positively associated with attractiveness ratings, at both high and low fertility testing sessions. Results are discussed in terms of adaptive person construal. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Image Retrieval for Medical Imaging Using Combined Feature Fuzzy Approach

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) system allows users to retrieve similar images from a large image database based upon a query image. Furthermore, the challenges faced by content-based image retrieval system are the semantic gap and perception subjectivity. In this paper, a combined feature fuzzy approach based CBIR system for the retrieval of bio-medical images is proposed in order to provide better image classification and fast image retrieval. In the proposed method the texture features like contrast, mean, standard deviation, energy and entropy are extracted from the image and converted into fuzzy aggregation membership functions. The result shows that the proposed approach retrieves images efficiently and accurately than the other existing techniques.
Generic Multi Document Summarization Based On STARLET Approach

Document summarization is an emerging technique for understanding the main purpose of any kind of documents. To visualize a large text document within a short duration and small visible area like PDA screen, summarization provides a greater flexibility and convenience. Summarization may be single or multi document summarization. If summery is to be generated for single document then it is called as single document summarization. If summery is to be created for multiple documents then it is called as multi document summarization. STARLET is a novel approach to multidocument summarization for evaluative text that considers the rating distribution as summarization feature to consistently preserve overall opinion distribution expressed in the original review. In STARLET approach A* Search Algorithm is used. STARLET is a multi document summarization of Service and Product Reviews with balanced rating distribution. A Generic Multi Document Summarization is a graph based multi document summarization technique. In this technique, directed acyclic directed graph will be constructed and A * search algorithm is used for selecting high scoring sentences and summary is generated. Finally, we shows that how Generic Multi Document summarization is efficient than other available multi document summarization techniques such as RANDOM and MEAD.
Age as an Ambiguous Variable in Developmental Research: Some Epidemiological Considerations from Developmental Psychopathology

Intra-individual change in behaviour with age constitutes the essential element in developmental research but, unless age is broken down into its component parts, age is devoid of meaning. The issues involved are discussed from the perspective of epidemiology as applied to developmental psychopathology. Methodological concerns are discussed with respect to continuities and discontinuities in development (with special reference to the cumulative emergence of skills and variable consistency over the life span), secular trends, and the distinction between individual and groupaggregated age trends. The different components of chronological age are considered in terms of cognitive level, different types of biological maturity, and the duration of type of life experiences. The same components are discussed with respect to the issues involved in the study of differential effects of experiences according to their timing in the developmental sequence, and maturational delay.
IDCT Implementation on an FPGA-Augmented TriMedia

This paper presents an experiment which aims to assess the potential impact on performance yielded by augmenting a TriMedia/CPU64 processor with a reconfigurable core. We first propose the skeleton of an extension of the TriMedia/CPU64 architecture, which consists of a Reconfigurable Functional Unit (RFU) and the associated instructions. Then, we address the computation of the 8 8 IDCT on such extended TriMedia and propose a scheme to implement the 1-D IDCT operation on the RFU. When implemented on an ACEX EP1K100 FPGA from Altera, the proposed 1-D IDCT exhibits a latency of 16 and a recovery of 2 TriMedia (200 MHz) cycles, and occupies 42% of the device. By configuring the 1-D IDCT computing facility on the RFU at application load-time, a 2-D IDCT including all overheads can be computed with the throughput of 1/32 IDCT/cycle. This is an improvement of more than 40% over the standard TriMedia/CPU64.
MnM: a Max/MSP mapping toolbox

In this report, we describe our development on the Max/MSP toolbox MnM dedicated to mapping between gesture and sound, and more generally to statistical and machine learning methods. This library is built on top of the FTM library, which enables the efficient use of matrices and other data structures in Max/MSP. Mapping examples are described based on various matrix manipulations such as Single Value Decomposition. The FTM and MnM libraries are freely available.
Transplantable Subcutaneous Hepatoma 22a Affects Functional Activity of Resident Tissue Macrophages in Periphery

Tumors spontaneously develop central necroses due to inadequate blood supply. Recent data indicate that dead cells and their products are immunogenic to the host. We hypothesized that macrophage tumor-dependent reactions can be mediated differentially by factors released from live or dead tumor cells. In this study, functional activity of resident peritoneal macrophages was investigated in parallel with tumor morphology during the growth of syngeneic nonimmunogenic hepatoma 22a. Morphometrical analysis of tumor necroses, mitoses and leukocyte infiltration was performed in histological sections. We found that inflammatory potential of peritoneal macrophages in tumor-bearing mice significantly varied depending on the stage of tumor growth and exhibited two peaks of activation as assessed by nitroxide and superoxide anion production, 5′-nucleotidase activity and pinocytosis. Increased inflammatory reactions were not followed by the enhancement of angiogenic potential as assessed by Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor mRNA expression. Phases of macrophage activity corresponded to the stages of tumor growth characterized by high proliferative potential. The appearance and further development of necrotic tissue inside the tumor did not coincide with changes in macrophage behavior and therefore indirectly indicated that activation of macrophages was a reaction mostly to the signals produced by live tumor cells.
Mycophenolic Acid Inhibits Migration and Invasion of Gastric Cancer Cells via Multiple Molecular Pathways

Mycophenolic acid (MPA) is the metabolized product and active element of mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) that has been widely used for the prevention of acute graft rejection. MPA potently inhibits inosine monophosphate dehydrogenase (IMPDH) that is up-regulated in many tumors and MPA is known to inhibit cancer cell proliferation as well as fibroblast and endothelial cell migration. In this study, we demonstrated for the first time MPA’s antimigratory and anti-invasion abilities of MPA-sensitive AGS (gastric cancer) cells. Genome-wide expression analyses using Illumina whole genome microarrays identified 50 genes with ≥2 fold changes and 15 genes with > 4 fold alterations and multiple molecular pathways implicated in cell migration. Real-time RT-PCR analyses of selected genes also confirmed the expression differences. Furthermore, targeted proteomic analyses identified several proteins altered by MPA treatment. Our results indicate that MPA modulates gastric cancer cell migration through down-regulation of a large number of genes (PRKCA, DOCK1, INF2, HSPA5, LRP8 and PDGFRA) and proteins (PRKCA, AKT, SRC, CD147 and MMP1) with promigratory functions as well as up-regulation of a number of genes with antimigratory functions (ATF3, SMAD3, CITED2 and CEAMCAM1). However, a few genes that may promote migration (CYR61 and NOS3) were up-regulated. Therefore, MPA’s overall antimigratory role on cancer cells reflects a balance between promigratory and antimigratory signals influenced by MPA treatment.