Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Turnover Intentions of Employees With Informal Eldercare Responsibilities

As longevity increases, so does the need for care of older relatives by working family members. This research examined the interactive effect of core self-evaluations and supervisor support on turnover intentions in two samples of employees with informal caregiving responsibilities. Data were obtained from 57 employees from Australia (Study 1) and 66 employees from the United States and India (Study 2). Results of Study 1 revealed a resource compensation effect, that is, an inverse relationship between core self-evaluations and turnover intentions when supervisor care support was low. Results of Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating resource boosting effects. Specifically, there was an inverse relationship between core self-evaluations and subsequent turnover intentions for those with high supervisor work and care support. In addition, employees' satisfaction and emotional exhaustion from their work mediated the inverse relationship between core self-evaluations and subsequent turnover intentions when supervisor work support and care support were high. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of employee- and supervisor-focused intervention strategies in organizations to support informal caregivers.
Speech Recognition with Segmental Conditional Random Fields: Final Report from the 2010 JHU Summer Workshop

Novel techniques in speech recognition are often hampered by the long road that must be followed to turn them into fully functional systems capable of competing with the state-of-the-art. In the 2010 JHU summer workshop, we explored the use of Segmental Conditional Random Fields as an integrating technology to augment the best conventional systems with information from novel scientific approaches.
Characterization of fading on fixed wireless channels between 200 MHz and 2 GHz in suburban macrocell environments

Growing use of point-to-multipoint fixed wireless networks to support network access and SCADA applications in suburban macrocell environments has prompted regulators to re-allocate various bands between 200 MHz and 2 GHz to such applications. Links in such networks are usually obstructed by buildings and foliage and are classified as non-line-of-sight. Although it is well-known that such links are susceptible to fading caused by windblown trees and foliage, most past efforts to characterize fading on such links have focused on frequency bands at 1.9 GHz and above. Here, we show how signal fading in the 220, 850 and 1900 MHz bands vary with both distance and time-averaged wind speed in a representative macrocell environment. Based upon time-series of received signal strength collected in a typical macrocell environment with moderate foliage at locations between 1 and 4 km from a transmitting site located 80 m above ground level, we show that fading on such links is relatively severe at 1.9 GHz but decreases rapidly as the carrier frequency decreases. We have expressed our results in the form of a first-order simulation model. Additional data will be required to estimate standardized model parameters that can be applied to a broad range of environments.
Influence of Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors and DNA-Methyltransferase Inhibitors on the NK Cell-Mediated Lysis of Pediatric B-Lineage Leukemia

Epigenetic drugs like histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) and DNA-methyltransferase inhibitors (DNMTi) have been shown to be effective against a variety of tumor entities. Among different molecular anticancer activities of epigenetic active substances, up-regulation of natural killer (NK) cell ligands was described to contribute to an enhanced NK cell-mediated killing of tumor cell lines. So far, no data is available on this effect in childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. We investigated the effect of two HDACi [vorinostat, valproic acid (VPA)] and two DNMTi (azacytidine, decitabine) on the viability, expression of NK ligands, and NK susceptibility of the pre-B-cell-ALL cell line MHH-CALL-4. Whereas vorinostat, azacytidine, and decitabine directly reduced viability of the cell line, VPA had no direct cytotoxic effect. NKG2D-ligands were expressed only at very low levels and not affected by epigenetic treatment. Higher expression was found for the DNAM-1 ligands with significant up regulation of CD112 after treatment with VPA (p = 0.02). No significant increase in lysis mediated by resting NK cells could be observed, whereas incubation of target cells with decitabine resulted in a significant increase in lysis mediated by IL-2 activated NK cells (p = 0.0051, p = 0.06 for azacytidine). Vorinostat and VPA could increase the lysis by expanded NK cells which was statistically not significant due to high inter-individual variability. Furthermore, HDACi but not DNMTi reduced the NK-mediated lysis of MHH-CALL-4 after incubation of effector cells. In conclusion, there is a synergistic effect between epigenetic drugs and NK cells against MHH-CALL-4 which is not as strong as in other tumor entities. In situations where NK-mediated control of leukemia is assumed or wanted, a sophisticated combination of single epigenetic drugs and ex vivo expanded NK cells is needed to maximize the synergistic effect of both treatment strategies and DNMTIs may be preferred based on the direct inhibitory effect of HDACi on NK cell cytotoxicity.
Fleeing the House of Horrors: Women Who Have Left Abusive Partners

Thirty-nine women and their strategies of survival are the central focus of Aysan Sev'er's newest study on women who have left abusive situations. Through a mainly feminist orientation, Sev'er analyzes abuse, its many definitions, and existing theories surrounding violence against women, and incorporates an extensive literature review of Canadian and American sources that investigates feminist, non-feminist, and social-psychological theories of abuse. She then proceeds to relate the intimate stories of women who survived. These interviews, from women outside institutional settings, candidly reveal the women's strengths and weaknesses. Some successful, some eventually destructive, the detailed stories allow Sev'er to analyse positive and negative social support systems, women's own aggression, and finally to develop a new model for post-violence adjustment. Erudite, revealing and ultimately affirming, Sev'er's study provides a new look and new hope to the issue of violence against women, and will be indispensable to anyone who is involved in women's issues.
Étude expérimentale de la perception de la modalité à travers l’intonation en anglais

En anglais comme en francais, on peut formuler une question sans changer la syntaxe d’un enonce, simplement en lui associant une intonation interrogative. Cette etude porte sur la perception de deux modalites d’intonation – interrogative et declarative – dans des enonces comportant trois niveaux de difficulte syntaxique ou lexicale. Les participants avaient pour tâche de discerner quelle etait la modalite de chaque enonce, interrogative ou declarative, et de reagir a l’aide d’un dispositif enregistrant leur temps de reponse. Il y avait trois groupes de participants : des anglophones, des etudiants francais anglicistes ayant sejourne une annee en pays de langue anglaise et des etudiants francais non anglicistes. Les resultats permettent de degager des tendances par groupe : les anglophones repondent plus rapidement que les anglicistes qui sont eux-memes plus rapides que les non anglicistes. Il y a egalement une interaction entre groupes et modalite, car les etudiants francophones identifient les enonces declaratifs plus rapidement que les interrogatifs, alors que pour les anglophones c’est l’inverse. En ce qui concerne les types d’enonces, les temps de reponse sont significativement plus lents pour les phrases syntaxiquement incompletes.
Immediate Care of the Wounded Introductory Thoughts

Breathing Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Courage is a matter of the red corpuscle. It is oxygen that makes every attack; without oxygen in his blood to back him, a man attacks nothing-not even a pie… Elbert Hubbard " Wounds of the chest, when taken as a class, are perhaps the most fatal of gunshot wounds " 1 (p.276)
Quaternionic Signal Processing Techniques for Automatic Evaluation of Dance Performances From MoCap Data

In this paper, the problem of automatic dance performance evaluation from human Motion Capture (MoCap) data is addressed. A novel framework is presented, using data captured by Kinect-based human skeleton tracking, where the evaluation of user's performance is achieved against a gold-standard performance of a teacher. The framework addresses several technical challenges, including global and local temporal synchronization, spatial alignment and comparison of two “dance motion signals. ” Towards the solution of these technical challenges, a set of appropriate quaternionic vector-signal processing methodologies is proposed, where the 4D (spatiotemporal) human motion data are represented as sequences of pure quaternions. Such a quaternionic representation offers several advantages, including the facts that joint angles and rotations are inherently encoded in the phase of quaternions and the three coordinates variables ( X,Y,Z) are treated jointly, with their intra-correlations being taken into account. Based on the theory of quaternions, a number of advantageous algorithms are formulated. Initially, global temporal synchronization of dance MoCap data is achieved by the use of quaternionic cross-correlations, which are invariant to rigid spatial transformations between the users. Secondly, a quaternions-based algorithm is proposed for the fast spatial alignment of dance MoCap data. Thirdly, the MoCap data can be temporally synchronized in a local fashion, using Dynamic Time Warping techniques adapted to the specific problem. Finally, a set of quaternionic correlation-based measures (scores) are proposed for evaluating and ranking the performance of a dancer. These quaternions-based scores are invariant to rigid transformations, as proved and demonstrated. A total score metric, through a weighted combination of three different metrics is proposed, where the weights are optimized using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The presented experimental results using the Huawei/3DLife/EMC2 dataset are promising and verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Risk Assessment for Drug-Drug Interaction Caused by Metabolism-Based Inhibition of CYP3A Using Automated in Vitro Assay Systems and Its Application in the Early Drug Discovery Process

The CYP3A family is a major drug metabolism enzyme in humans. Metabolism-based inhibition of CYP3A might cause clinically significant drug-drug interactions (DDIs). To assess the risk of DDIs caused by metabolism-based inhibition (MBI) of CYP3A, we established an automated single time- and concentration-dependent inhibition assay. To create a diagram to assess DDI risk of compounds in the early discovery stage, we classified 171 marketed drugs by the possibility of the occurrence of in vivo DDI caused by MBI from the relationship between the inactivation activity determined in the MBI screening, the therapeutic blood or plasma concentration, and the in vivo DDI information. This analysis revealed that the DDI risk depends on both the MBI potential and the blood concentration of a compound, and provided the criteria of the DDI risk. In the assay, three compounds (midazolam, nifedipine, and testosterone) were compared as CYP3A probe substrates. The results show that the evaluation for MBI does not depend on the probe substrates used in the assay. In addition, we established an automated assay to distinguish quasi-irreversible and irreversible binding to CYP3A in which the quasi-irreversible inhibitors such as diltiazem, verapamil, and nicardipine were dissociated from CYP3A by the addition of potassium ferricyanide, whereas the irreversible inhibitors such as clozapine, delavirdine, and mibefradil were not. It provides useful information related to chemical structures likely to cause MBI. By using these MBI assays supported by an extensive database of marketed compounds, a systematic MBI evaluation paradigm was established and has been incorporated into our drug discovery process.
Active Labeling of Facial Feature Points

Although considerable progress has been made in the field of facial feature point detection and tracking, accurate feature point tracking is still very challenging. Manually feature point labeling and correction are time consuming and labor intensive. To alleviate this problem, an active feature point labeling method is proposed in this paper. First, the spatial relations among feature points are modeled by a Bayesian Network. Second, the mutual information between a feature point and the remaining feature points is calculated in two steps: in the first step, to identify the most informative facial region, the mutual information between one facial sub-region and the other sub-regions is calculated, in the second step, the mutual information between one feature point and the other feature points in the most informative facial sub-region is established to rank the facial feature points. Users provide labels of the feature points according to their mutual information in descending order. After that, the human corrections and the image measurements are integrated by the Bayesian Network to produce the refined annotations. Simulative experiments on the extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) database demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
A Survey into Mainstream Teachers' Attitudes Towards the Inclusion of Children with Special Educational Needs in the Ordinary School in one Local Education Authority

Attitudes of mainstream teachers towards the inclusion of children with special needs in the ordinary school were surveyed soon after the release of the Green Paper. The survey was carried out in one Local Education Authority in the south-west of England and the sample comprised of 81 primary and secondary teachers. The analysis revealed that teachers who have been implementing inclusive programmes, and therefore have active experience of inclusion, possess more positive attitudes. Moreover, the data showed the importance of professional development in the formation of positive attitudes towards inclusion. In particular, teachers with university-based professional development appeared both to hold more positive attitudes and to be more confident in meeting the IEP requirements of students with SEN. The role that training at both pre-service and post-service levels has in the development of teachers' support for inclusion is discussed.
Aberrant semantic activation in schizophrenia: a neurophysiological study.

OBJECTIVE Schizophrenia has long been thought to be characterized by a fundamental disturbance in semantic associations, which has often been presumed to be of neurobiological origin. The authors examined the neurophysiological characteristics of semantic processing in schizophrenic patients. METHOD During EEG recording, 15 schizophrenic patients and 15 age-matched comparison subjects read sentences that had either sensible or nonsensical endings. The authors recorded the N400 component, a specific negative event-related brain potential occurring approximately 400 msec after the final word in the sentence. N400 is highly, if not uniquely, sensitive to semantic expectancy and context, and larger, more negative N400 amplitude is associated with increased semantic unexpectancy. RESULTS In relation to the normal comparison subjects, the schizophrenic patients demonstrated prolonged N400 latency after nonsensical sentence endings and also showed enhanced N400 negativity, regardless of the sense of the sentence ending. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest slower and more diffuse semantic activation in patients with schizophrenia, perhaps reflective of a disease-related failure to maintain and to use semantic context.
Performance Analysis of Channel Inversion over MIMO Channels

The distribution of the received signal power Λ of a multiple-input multiple-output system, with the associated 2 × 2 complex Wishart matrix having n degrees of freedom, is investigated under the channel inversion power allocation scheme. Exact closed-form expressions are derived for the probability density function and the cumulative distribution function of Λ. The analysis covers systems with transmit-receive antennas {Nt, Nr| min(Nt, Nr) = 2, max(Nt, Nr) ≥ 2}, and independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading links between each antenna pair. We derive (i) the distribution of Shannon capacity of the multiple-input multiple-output channel (ii) average symbol error rate for a class of modulation schemes that includes Binary Phase Shift Keying.
No reference quality assessment for screen content images

In this paper, we propose a novel no reference visual quality assessment (VQA) metric for screen content images (SCIs) by luminance features and texture features based on the properties of human vision system (HVS). First, we calculate the luminance map through the local normalization and the statistical luminance features is extracted from the luminance map. Furthermore, we extract the texture features from high order derivatives which can capture the details of image texture, in which we use the sobel filters to compute the gradient map based on the luminance map which is considered the first order derivatives, the texture features are extracted from the second order derivatives calculated based on the gradient map by the local binary patterns (LBPs). Both luminance and texture features are represented in the form of histogram. The support vector regression (SVR) is adopted as the mapping function from the quality-aware features to subjective ratings. Experimental results on the large-scale SCI database show that the proposed method can obtain better performance of visual quality prediction of SCIs than other existing methods and even including some full reference visual quality assessment methods.
Inhibition of mRNA deadenylation and degradation by different types of cell stress

Abstract We have previously observed rapid and strong inhibition of mRNA deadenylation and degradation in response to UV-B light [Gowrishankar et al., Biol. Chem. 386 (2005), pp. 1287–1293]. Expression analysis using a microarray for inflammatory genes showed that UV-B light induces stabilization of all short-lived mRNAs assayed. Stabilization was observed in HeLa cells, as well as in the keratinocyte line HaCaT. It affected constitutively expressed mRNA species, as well as species induced by the inflammatory cytokine IL-1. Many of the latter encode proteins involved in inflammation, suggesting that stress-induced inhibition of mRNA deadenylation contributes to changes in inflammatory gene expression. Deadenylation and degradation of tet-off-expressed mRNAs were also inhibited upon exposure to H2O2. However, scavengers of reactive oxygen species did not interfere with UV-B-induced inhibition of degradation, arguing against the involvement of UV-induced H2O2 in these effects of UV-B light. Heat shock and hyperosmolarity also inhibited mRNA deadenylation and degradation, whereas γ-radiation did not. Thus, inhibition of mRNA deadenylation and degradation is a cellular response elicited by several but not all inducers of cell stress.
A software authentication system for the prevention of computer viruses

In the absence of systematic techniques to detect the existence of computer viruses, preventing suspicious software from entering the system at the initial point of entry appears to be the best method to protect computing resources against attacks of computer viruses. Currently, software is distributed primarily by diskettes instead of online transmission. Diskettes are more susceptible to modification and masquerading while on-line transmission usually follows proper user/message authentication. A software authentication system is proposed which does not require a mutually trusted center of both software vendors and users, or users' interaction with any key center. Vendors assume responsibility by signing released software and users verify the authenticity of received software before using it. Through such an authentication process, users eliminate the risk of running “unlicensed” or modified programs, thus eliminating the possibility of virus infections.
The duplication mutation of Quebec platelet disorder dysregulates PLAU, but not C10orf55, selectively increasing production of normal PLAU transcripts by megakaryocytes but not granulocytes

Quebec Platelet disorder (QPD) is a unique bleeding disorder that markedly increases urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) in megakaryocytes and platelets but not in plasma or urine. The cause is tandem duplication of a 78 kb region of chromosome 10 containing PLAU (the uPA gene) and C10orf55, a gene of unknown function. QPD increases uPA in platelets and megakaryocytes >100 fold, far more than expected for a gene duplication. To investigate the tissue-specific effect that PLAU duplication has on gene expression and transcript structure in QPD, we tested if QPD leads to: 1) overexpression of normal or unique PLAU transcripts; 2) increased uPA in leukocytes; 3) altered levels of C10orf55 mRNA and/or protein in megakaryocytes and leukocytes; and 4) global changes in megakaryocyte gene expression. Primary cells and cultured megakaryocytes from donors were prepared for quantitative reverse polymerase chain reaction analyses, RNA-seq and protein expression analyses. Rapidly isolated blood leukocytes from QPD subjects showed only a 3.9 fold increase in PLAU transcript levels, in keeping with the normal to minimally increased uPA in affinity purified, QPD leukocytes. All subjects had more uPA in granulocytes than monocytes and minimal uPA in lymphocytes. QPD leukocytes expressed PLAU alleles in proportions consistent with an extra copy of PLAU on the disease chromosome, unlike QPD megakaryocytes. QPD PLAU transcripts were consistent with reference gene models, with a much higher proportion of reads originating from the disease chromosome in megakaryocytes than granulocytes. QPD and control megakaryocytes contained minimal reads for C10orf55, and C10orf55 protein was not increased in QPD megakaryocytes or platelets. Finally, our QPD megakaryocyte transcriptome analysis revealed a global down regulation of the interferon type 1 pathway. We suggest that the low endogenous levels of uPA in blood are actively regulated, and that the regulatory mechanisms are disrupted in QPD in a megakaryocyte-specific manner.
Integrative Complexity and British Decisions during the Munich and Polish Crises

This study addresses the impact of crisis management strategies, stress, and groupthink conditions on the integrative complexity of British decision makers in 10 decision-making episodes during two Anglo-German crises in 1938 and 1939. A systematic random sample of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's statements during British cabinet deliberations in the intragovernmental arena and British messages to Germany in the intergovernmental arena during the acute phase of each crisis was scored for integrative complexity. An ANOVA of integrative complexity for crisis, arena, and episode demonstrated a significant independent relationship between strategy and integrative complexity plus a significant interaction effect between strategy and arena on integrative complexity. There were also significant differences in Chamberlain's integrative complexity between early and later episodes of the Polish conflict in the intragovernmental arena; no significant differences occurred between episodes in either arena during the Munich conflict. These results support the hypotheses that associate low integrative complexity with the implementation of a competitive strategy in the intergovernmental arena and with high stress in the intragovernmental arena.