Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Personality in Computer Characters

Personality characterizes an individual through a set of traits that influence his or her behavior. We propose a model of personality that can be used by intelligent, automated actors able to improvise their behavior and to interact with users in a multimedia environment. Users themselves become actors by exercising high-level control over their own intelligent agents. We propose different dimensions of personality that are based on the processes that intelligent agents usually perform. These dimensions are rich enough to allow the specification of an interesting number of characters able to improvise and react differently although they are put in the same context. We show the influence that the personality traits have on an actor’s behavior, moods and relationships. An application of the Computer Virtual Theater, the Cyberoaft, is used to test our model.
Transformer tank vibration modeling as a method of detecting winding deformations-part I: theoretical foundation

In this paper, a model developed for a transformer monitoring system to estimate transformer tank vibration is presented. The model calculates vibration on the transformer tank starting from some input variables that can be easily measured on the transformer. Tank vibration is also measured, showing a good concordance between estimated and measured values if the transformer is healthy. In case of a winding deformation winding vibration and, consequently, that of the tank, changes and a big difference between estimated and measured vibration appear. To estimate tank vibration, the model takes into account the main physical phenomena generating vibrations in the different transformer elements and how these vibrations are superposed and transmitted to the tank. The model has been tested experimentally on a test transformer fitted with internal and external accelerometers. A deformation has been provoked in the test transformer winding with the aim of testing the model's ability to detect it. The model has been also tested on several in-service grid transformers. The results of the experimental validation are shown in Part II of the paper.
Differential Context Modeling in Collaborative Filtering

Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) try to adapt their recommendations to users’ specific contextual situations. In many recommender systems, particularly those based on collaborative filtering (CF), the additional contextual constraints may lead to increased sparsity in the user preference data, thus fewer matches between the current user context and previous situations. Our earlier work proposed two approaches to deal with this problem – differential context relaxation (DCR) and differential context weighting (DCW) and we have successfully examined them using user-based collaborative filtering (UBCF). In this paper, we put DCR and DCW into one framework called differential context modeling (DCM). As a general framework, DCM is able to be applied to other recommendation algorithms other than UBCF. We expand the application of DCM to the other two CF approaches: item-based CF and slope one recommender. Predictive performances are evaluated based on two real-world data sets and experimental results demonstrate that applying DCM to those two algorithms is able to improve predictive accuracy compared with our baselines: context-free CF algorithms and contextual pre-filtering algorithms.
A nontumorigenic variant of FGF19 treats cholestatic liver diseases

Nontumorigenic FGF19 variants represent an effective approach for the prevention and treatment of cholestatic liver diseases. FGF Variant Ducts Cancer A fibroblast growth factor (FGF) variant can prevent bile acid overproduction without carcinogenesis. Luo et al. report that an FGF19 variant protects mice, and potentially humans, from liver injury. Cholestatic liver disease is characterized by bile acid retention in the liver. FGF19 is known to regulate bile acids, but its role as a therapeutic is limited because of potential hepatocellular tumorigenesis. The authors found that M70—a nontumorigenic FGF19 variant—can repress hepatic expression of the bile acid synthesis enzyme Cyp7a1 (cholesterol 7α-hydroxylase), which reduces hepatic bile acid accumulation and protects mice from liver injury. This FGF19-mediated regulation of bile acid metabolism is conserved in healthy human subjects, and M70 regulates bile acid synthesis in humans, paving the way for new therapies. Hepatic accumulation of bile acids is central to the pathogenesis of cholestatic liver diseases. Endocrine hormone fibroblast growth factor 19 (FGF19) may reduce hepatic bile acid levels through modulation of bile acid synthesis and prevent subsequent liver damage. However, FGF19 has also been implicated in hepatocellular carcinogenesis, and consequently, the potential risk from prolonged exposure to supraphysiological levels of the hormone represents a major hurdle for developing an FGF19-based therapy. We describe a nontumorigenic FGF19 variant, M70, which regulates bile acid metabolism and, through inhibition of bile acid synthesis and reduction of excess hepatic bile acid accumulation, protects mice from liver injury induced by either extrahepatic or intrahepatic cholestasis. Administration of M70 in healthy human volunteers potently reduces serum levels of 7α-hydroxy-4-cholesten-3-one, a surrogate marker for the hepatic activity of cholesterol 7α-hydroxylase (CYP7A1), the enzyme responsible for catalyzing the first and rate-limiting step in the classical bile acid synthetic pathway. This study provides direct evidence for the regulation of bile acid metabolism by FGF19 pathway in humans. On the basis of these results, the development of nontumorigenic FGF19 variants capable of modulating CYP7A1 expression represents an effective approach for the prevention and treatment of cholestatic liver diseases as well as potentially for other disorders associated with bile acid dysregulation.
Dietary patterns and colorectal cancer recurrence and survival: a cohort study

Objective To examine the association between dietary patterns and colorectal cancer (CRC) survival. Design Cohort study. Setting A familial CRC registry in Newfoundland. Participants 529 newly diagnosed CRC patients from Newfoundland. They were recruited from 1999 to 2003 and followed up until April 2010. Outcome measure Participants reported their dietary intake using a food frequency questionnaire. Dietary patterns were identified with factor analysis. Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models were employed to estimate HR and 95% CI for association of dietary patterns with CRC recurrence and death from all causes, after controlling for covariates. Results Disease-free survival (DFS) among CRC patients was significantly worsened among patients with a high processed meat dietary pattern (the highest vs the lowest quartile HR 1.82, 95% CI 1.07 to 3.09). No associations were observed with the prudent vegetable or the high-sugar patterns and DFS. The association between the processed meat pattern and DFS was restricted to patients diagnosed with colon cancer (the highest vs the lowest quartile: HR 2.29, 95% CI 1.19 to 4.40) whereas the relationship between overall survival (OS) and this pattern was observed among patients with colon cancer only (the highest vs the lowest quartile: HR 2.13, 95% CI 1.03 to 4.43). Potential effect modification was noted for sex (p value for interaction 0.04, HR 3.85 for women and 1.22 for men). Conclusions The processed meat dietary pattern prior to diagnosis is associated with higher risk of tumour recurrence, metastasis and death among patients with CRC.
The extraembryonic serosa protects the insect egg against desiccation

Insects have been extraordinarily successful in occupying terrestrial habitats, in contrast to their mostly aquatic sister group, the crustaceans. This success is typically attributed to adult traits such as flight, whereas little attention has been paid to adaptation of the egg. An evolutionary novelty of insect eggs is the serosa, an extraembryonic membrane that enfolds the embryo and secretes a cuticle. To experimentally test the protective function of the serosa, we exploit an exceptional possibility to eliminate this membrane by zerknüllt1 RNAi in the beetle Tribolium castaneum. We analyse hatching rates of eggs under a range of humidities and find dramatically decreasing hatching rates with decreasing humidities for serosa-less eggs, but not for control eggs. Furthermore, we show serosal expression of Tc-chitin-synthase1 and demonstrate that its knock-down leads to absence of the serosal cuticle and a reduction in hatching rates at low humidities. These developmental genetic techniques in combination with ecological testing provide experimental evidence for a crucial role of the serosa in desiccation resistance. We propose that the origin of this extraembryonic membrane facilitated the spectacular radiation of insects on land, as did the origin of the amniote egg in the terrestrial invasion of vertebrates.
Temporal higher-order contracts

Behavioral contracts are embraced by software engineers because they document module interfaces, detect interface violations, and help identify faulty modules (packages, classes, functions, etc). This paper extends prior higher-order contract systems to also express and enforce temporal properties, which are common in software systems with imperative state, but which are mostly left implicit or are at best informally specified. The paper presents both a programmatic contract API as well as a temporal contract language, and reports on experience and performance results from implementing these contracts in Racket. Our development formalizes module behavior as a trace of events such as function calls and returns. Our contract system provides both non-interference (where contracts cannot influence correct executions) and also a notion of completeness (where contracts can enforce any decidable, prefix-closed predicate on event traces).
The First Identification and Retrospective Study of Severe Fever With Thrombocytopenia Syndrome in Japan

Abstract Background. Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is caused by SFTS virus (SFTSV), a novel bunyavirus reported to be endemic in central and northeastern China. This article describes the first identified patient with SFTS and a retrospective study on SFTS in Japan. Methods. Virologic and pathologic examinations were performed on the patient's samples. Laboratory diagnosis of SFTS was made by isolation/genome amplification and/or the detection of anti-SFTSV immunoglobulin G antibody in sera. Physicians were alerted to the initial diagnosis and asked whether they had previously treated patients with symptoms similar to those of SFTS. Results. A female patient who died in 2012 received a diagnosis of SFTS. Ten additional patients with SFTS were then retrospectively identified. All patients were aged ≥50 years and lived in western Japan. Six cases were fatal. The ratio of males to females was 8:3. SFTSV was isolated from 8 patients. Phylogenetic analyses indicated that all of the Japanese SFTSV isolates formed a genotype independent to those from China. Most patients showed symptoms due to hemorrhage, possibly because of disseminated intravascular coagulation and/or hemophagocytosis. Conclusions. SFTS has been endemic to Japan, and SFTSV has been circulating naturally within the country.
A functional approach to the attainability of typological targets in L2 acquisition

This paper proposes a functional, parsing-based approach to the attainability of typological targets in L1 and L2 acquisition. Ideally, there should be a functional synchronization between the order in which principles constituting typological values emerge in learner grammars and the computational demands imposed by the simplest data instantiating a typological value. In L2 acquisition this functional synchronization is jeopardized by the possibility of L1-inspired misparses which may impute more structure to an input string than is consistent with a minimal parse. As a result, the more marked typological setting or the implicans of two grammatical principles in a relationship of logical entailment can appear first in interlanguage grammars. In L1 acquisition, on the other hand, misparses appear to be the result of assuming too little structure. Because of these differences, recovery from an inappropriate value follows different courses in L1 and L2 acquisition. It is proposed that this difference has important implications for the learn-ability of first and second languages.
Association of Asymmetric Dimethylarginine and Endothelial Dysfunction

Abstract There is abundant evidence that the endothelium plays a crucial role in the maintenance of vascular tone and structure. One of the major endothelium-derived vasoactive mediators is nitric oxide (NO), which has been characterized as an “endogenous anti-atherosclerotic molecule”. Synthesis of NO can be selectively inhibited by guanidino-substituted analogs of L-arginine, which act as competitive inhibitors at the active site of the enzyme. One such analog is asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA), a compound that has been found in human plasma and urine and exerts the activity of an endogenous inhibitor of NO synthase. In contrast to ADMA, its regioisomer symmetric dimethylarginine (SDMA) does not inhibit NO synthase. The methyl groups contained within the dimethylarginine molecules are derived from S-adenosylmethionine, an intermediate in the homocysteine/methionine pathway. There is experimental evidence that homocysteine may affect endothelium-dependent vascular function by increasing the formation of ADMA. Both ADMA and SDMA are eliminated from the body by renal excretion. In addition, the metabolism of ADMA, but not SDMA, occurs via hydrolytic degradation to citrulline and dimethylamine by the enzyme dimethylarginine dimethylaminohydrolase (DDAH). Data from experimental studies suggest that ADMA inhibits vascular NO elaboration at concentrations found in pathophysiological conditions (i.e., 3–15 μM). ADMA likely acts as an autocrine regulator of endothelial NO synthase activity. When rabbits are placed on a diet enriched with 1% cholesterol, ADMA levels are increased within 4 weeks of dietary intervention as compared to control animals. Elevated plasma concentrations of ADMA are also present in hypercholesterolemic and hypertensive patients, in patients with chronic heart failure, and in other patient groups at high risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Elevation of ADMA induces dysfunction of the endothelium, which becomes clinically evident by impaired endothelium-dependent vasodilation, hyperaggregability of platelets, and enhanced monocyte adhesion. Recent prospective studies suggest that endothelial dysfunction indicates an increased risk of future cardiovascular events. In line with these observations, we and others found evidence that ADMA is a novel cardiovascular risk factor.
How infants make sense of intentional action

The ability to make sense of the actions of other people is critical to human functioning, and the origins of this ability have inspired much speculation and debate. Until recently, there has been little empirical evidence available to inform our understandings this ability in infants. My collaborators and I have begun to address this gap by asking whether infants make sense of human behavior in ways that are continuous with later concepts of intentional action. Adults have a strong propensity to construe behavior as goal-directed. Mature reasoners represent action sequences in terms of the actor's probable goals, weighting goal-related information more heavily in memory than aspects of the events that were not relevant to the actor's goals. With this in mind, we began by assessing infants' encoding of a simple goal-directed action. Babies saw a person reach through a distinctive path in order to grasp one of two toys. This event was repeated until infants had habituated to it. Then, the positions of the toys were reversed, and infant saw test events in which either the path of motion or the goal object of the actor's reach had changed. Sixand 9-month-old infants showed a greater novelty response to the latter events than to the former. Infants at both ages who saw an inanimate object reach toward and grasp or touch the toy did not show this pattern. That is, infants selectively encoded the relation between a human actor and the object she grasped, and do not do this for inanimate graspers. Thus, there is one way in which infant reasoning is continuous with mature reasoning.
Why we need statistical static timing analysis

As technology continues to advance deeper into the nanometer regime, a tight control on the process parameters is increasingly difficult. As a consequence, variability has turned out to be a dominant factor in the design of complex ICs. Traditional static timing analysis (STA) is becoming insufficient to accurately evaluate the process variation impact on the design performance considering the increasing number of process, power supply voltage, and temperature (PVT) corners. In contrast, statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) is a promising innovative technique to handle increasingly larger environmental and process fluctuations, especially on-chip parameter variations. However, the statistical approach needs a set of costly additional data such as an accurate process variation description, and a statistical standard cell library characterization. In this paper, STA and SSTA are applied on a real industrial design to compare the two techniques, in terms of both accuracy and cost. From our analysis, we have concluded that the potential advantages offered by SSTA exceed the additional library characterization cost and process data assembly effort.
Exercise and mood: A selective review and synthesis of research employing the profile of mood states

Abstract This paper highlights the use of the Profile of Mood States (POMS) in physical activity research by reviewing and synthesizing literature generated in exercise settings. The results of many studies using the POMS have supported the relationships between exercise and acute mood changes in normal populations and between exercise and chronic mood changes in clinical populations. Based on the multitude of studies utilizing the POMS, Berger and colleagues developed a preliminary taxonomy containing enjoyment, mode, and practice guidelines to help maximize the mood benefits associated with exercise. The POMS also has been employed to identify underlying mechanisms that may promote mood alteration. Unfortunately, there is no conclusive evidence that identifies a single mechanism or group of mechanisms as consistently influencing the exercise-mood relationship. Although knowledge of the relationship between exercise and mood alteration is substantial, much remains to be studied. Promising avenues for future investigation of exercise include mood changes in specific populations, environmental influences on mood alteration, and personal characteristics impacting mood alteration.
Cost Models for Distributed Pattern Mining in the Cloud

Recently, distributed pattern mining approaches have become very popular, especially in certain domains such as bioinformatics, chemoinformatics and social networks. In most cases, the distribution of the pattern mining process generates a loss of information in the output results. Reducing this loss may affect the performance of the distributed approach and thus, the monetary cost when using cloud environments. In this context, cost models are needed to help selecting the best parameters of the used approach in order to achieve a better performance especially in the cloud. In this paper, we address the multi-criteria optimization problem of tuning thresholds related to distributed frequent pattern mining in cloud computing environment while optimizing the global monetary cost of storing and querying data in the cloud. To achieve this goal, we design cost models for managing and mining graph data with large scale pattern mining framework over a cloud architecture. Furthermore, we define four objective functions, with respect to the needs of customers. We present an experimental validation of the proposed cost models in the case of distributed subgraph mining in the cloud.
Reducing time and space costs of memory tracing

Event tracing of applications under dynamic execution is crucial for performance modeling, optimization and trace-driven simulations. However, collecting and processing events, especially memory addresses, is extremely expensive in terms of time and space requirements. It is also challenging to find the right platform and the right tools to perform tracing. Such challenges greatly hinder the feasibility of tracing memory of large, long running, parallel applications. In this thesis, the challenges in tracing memory are explored and several solutions are exhibited to face each challenge. The philosophy of these solutions, schemes and workarounds is to find balance in the time and space on available platforms with available tools. Specifically, the time required to acquire memory traces can be greatly reduced by carefully identifying all causes of slowdown and addressing them in the design of built-for-the-purpose tracers. Techniques, including buffering, chaining and delayed instrumentation, are introduced and have been shown to reduce the time cost of memory tracing by more than 80% when used with traditional instrumentation tools. In addition, a lightweight instrumentation tool ALITER, which only causes two-fold slowdown in collecting full memory traces, is introduced to demonstrate the benefits of asynchronous tracing schemes. Path grammar guided trace compression and trace approximation are explored in this thesis to reduce space costs of memory tracing. The efficacy of low-level general purpose compression schemes is greatly enhanced when they are organized around information about program structure and phases; combined with trace recording designed to capture the locality properties of random events, not the exact random events themselves, space required to store traces can be reduced by many orders of magnitude. These techniques enable one to generate reusable intermediate representations of memory traces, which are small enough to be stored on the disk, accurate enough for trace-driven simulations and fast enough to collect and process. Together with working through practical issues of availability, these advances make trace-driven simulation of full scale HPC applications feasible.
Relationship between family psychosocial variables and reading/writing performance in children

In this article we analyze the relationship between family psychosocial factors and the reading and writing performance in children. We conducted a comparative study through a semi-structured interview with 29 families of two groups of second grade students from elementary education. After the neuropsychological assessment, the students were characterized like either having trouble reading and writing or being efficient readers and writers. The statistic analysis highlighted the significant association between the group with troubles in reading and writing and the variables, like the presence of their own family transportation, the family's perception on the child's trouble learning to read, as well as his/her difficulty in reading performance, the children's higher index of repeating the school year and the family's history of difficulties in reading. The results obtained showed the importance of analyzing family psychosocial factors in order to understand the complex process of developing children's reading and writing skills.