Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ANALYSIS OF PROPAGATION AND POLARIZATION CHARACTERISTICS OF ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVES THROUGH NONUNIFORM MAGNETIZED PLASMA SLAB USING PROPAGATOR MATRIX METHOD

An analytical technique referred to as the propagator ma- trix method (PMM) is presented to study the problem of electromag- netic (EM) waves interacting with the nonuniform magnetized plasma. In this method, the state vector is proposed to describe the characteris- tics of eigen waves in anisotropic medium, and state vectors at two dif- ferent locations are related with each other by the propagator matrix. This method can be used to deal with the phenomenon of the trans- formation of EM wave polarization induced by anisotropic magnetized plasma, besides the conventional propagation characteristics through plasma slab, which overcomes the drawback of other analytical meth- ods introduced in former studies. The EM problem model considered in this work is a steady-state, two-dimensional, nonuniform magne- tized plasma slab with arbitrary magnetic declination angle, which is composed of a number of subslabs. Each subslab has a flxed electron density, and the overall density proflle across the whole slab follows any practical distribution function. Based on PMM, a signiflcant feature of strong transformation of EM wave polarization is addressed when an incident wave normally projects on the slab, which leads to the re- ∞ected or transmitted waves containing two kinds of waves, i.e., the co-polarized wave and the cross-polarized wave. The efiects of vary- ing the plasma parameters on the re∞ected and transmitted powers of co-polarization and cross-polarization, as well as the absorptive power
Temperature effect on isometric tension is mediated by regulatory proteins tropomyosin and troponin in bovine myocardium

The effect of temperature on isometric tension with and without the regulatory proteins tropomyosin and troponin was studied in bovine myocardium using a thin filament removal and reconstitution protocol. In control bovine myocardium, isometric tension increased linearly with temperature in the range 5–40 °C: isometric tension at 10 and 30 °C was 0.65 and 1.28 times that at 20 °C, respectively, with a Q10 of about 1.4. In actin filament‐reconstituted myocardium without regulatory proteins, the temperature effect on isometric tension was less: isometric tension at 10 and 30 °C was 0.96 and 1.17 times that at 20 °C, respectively, with a Q10 of about 1.1. The temperature dependence of the apparent rate constants was studied using sinusoidal analysis. The temperature dependence of 2πb (rate constant of delayed tension phase) did not vary significantly with the regulatory proteins under the standard activating condition (5 mm MgATP, 8 mm Pi, 200 mm ionic strength, pCa 4.66, pH 7.00). Q10 for 2πb in control and actin filament‐reconstituted myocardium was 3.8 and 4.0, respectively. There were two phases to the temperature dependence of 2πc (rate constant of quick recovery). In control and thin filament‐reconstituted myocardium, Q10 for 2πc was approximately 5.5 in the low temperature range (≤ 25 °C) and 2.7 in the high temperature range (≥ 30 °C). In actin filament‐reconstituted myocardium, Q10 for 2πc was 8.5 in the low temperature range and 3.6 in the high temperature range. The above results demonstrate that regulatory proteins augment the temperature dependence of isometric tension, indicating that the regulatory proteins may modify the actomyosin interaction.
Physico-chemical and microbial quality of indigenous Indonesian spicy dried meat

Traditional spicy dried meat of Indonesia, known as dendeng, is an eastern indigenous meat-processing product using meat as a raw material and incorporating coconut sugar, cooking salt and spices. The aspects of stability of this product (physico-chemical and microbial quality) have been discussed and dendeng, as other similar dried meat products in different countries, had the potency to be developed using new technology in order to improve its' quality, stability and organoleptic acceptability and to produce a more stable product.
New Insights into the Spring-Loaded Conformational Change of Influenza Virus Hemagglutinin

ABSTRACT Influenza virus hemagglutinin undergoes a conformational change in which a loop-to-helix “spring-loaded” conformational change forms a coiled coil that positions the fusion peptide for interaction with the target bilayer. Previous work has shown that two proline mutations designed to disrupt this change disrupt fusion but did not determine the basis for the fusion defect. In this work, we made six additional mutants with single proline substitutions in the region that undergoes the spring-loaded conformational change and two additional mutants with double proline substitutions in this region. All double mutants were fusion inactive. We analyzed one double mutant, F63P/F70P, as an example. We observed that F63P/F70P undergoes key low-pH-induced conformational changes and binds tightly to target membranes. However, limited proteolysis and electron microscopy observations showed that the mutant forms a coiled coil that is only ∼50% the length of the wild type, suggesting that it is splayed in its N-terminal half. This work further supports the hypothesis that the spring-loaded conformational change is necessary for fusion. Our data also indicate that the spring-loaded conformational change has another role beyond presenting the fusion peptide to the target membrane.
How teachers construe curriculum integration: the Science, Technology, Society (sts) movement as Bildung

STS (Science, Technology, Society) approaches to science education challenge teachers’ conceptions of the discipline and of pedagogy. This paper deals with the change in teacher thinking necessary to cope with integrated science and STS education. It involves reflection on the moral basis of the subject matter and its teaching. Based on interviews with Canadian and German teachers the authors note that while teacher thinking is rooted in the discipline, and the discipline is the context for teacher reflection about STS approaches, it is also a source of constraint. This constraint raises concerns about the possibility of STS science. The authors consider how integration might enable teachers to overcome the elementarization of school knowledge and work towards helping students cope with the problems of real life.
Does the Arrangement of Audit Evidence According to Causal Connections Make Auditors More Susceptible to Memory Conjunction Errors

ABSTRACT: Although prior research has shown that arranging working paper evidence according to causality can improve auditor judgment, the present study proposes that causal arrangements may elicit certain ill-effects on auditor memory and thus undermine auditor judgment. Specifically, causal arrangements of evidence may heighten auditors' vulnerability to memory conjunction errors (MCEs), wherein auditors misattribute one client's evidence to another client. In an experiment, auditors provided going concern judgments for two companies, whose evidence was causally, traditionally, or randomly arranged. Their recognition accuracy of whether previously evaluated or new (conjunction) evidence items were included in original company evidence sets provided an indication of proneness to MCEs. The results indicate that auditors are more prone to MCEs when evidence is presented in a causal as opposed to either a traditional or random arrangement. Data Availability: Confidentiality agreements with participants, wr.
Challenges of assessing the clinical efficacy of asexual blood-stage Plasmodium falciparum malaria vaccines

In the absence of any highly effective vaccine candidate against Plasmodium falciparum malaria, it remains imperative for the field to pursue all avenues that may lead to the successful development of such a formulation. The development of a subunit vaccine targeting the asexual blood-stage of Plasmodium falciparum malaria infection has proven particularly challenging with only limited success to date in clinical trials. However, only a fraction of potential blood-stage vaccine antigens have been evaluated as targets, and a number of new promising candidate antigen formulations and delivery platforms are approaching clinical development. It is therefore essential that reliable and sensitive methods of detecting, or ruling out, even modest efficacy of blood-stage vaccines in small clinical trials be established. In this article we evaluate the challenges facing blood-stage vaccine developers, assess the appropriateness and limitations of various in vivo approaches for efficacy assessment and suggest future directions for the field.
Scarcity Polarizes Preferences: The Impact on Choice among Multiple Items in a Product Class

This research examines how the salience of scarcity influences choices of individual items from a product class. The authors propose that overall perception of scarcity versus overall perception of abundance increases choice share of the most-preferred item from a product class. They argue that this phenomenon occurs because scarcity induces arousal and the heightened arousal polarizes the evaluations of individual items contained in the choice set. The results from five experiments show that scarcity versus abundance broadens the discrepancy between the liking of the favorite and nonfavorite items and leads to a greater choice share of the favorite item. The findings provide support for the arousal-based explanation, showing that the effect of scarcity salience on choices is mediated by consumers’ reported arousal level and moderated by an experimentally induced arousal state.
Plane-wave decomposition analysis for spherical microphone arrays

Spherical microphone arrays have attracted attention for analyzing the sound field in a region and beamforming. The analysis of the recorded sound has been performed in terms of spherical wave-functions, and recently the use of plane-wave expansions has been suggested. We show that the plane-wave basis is intimately related to the spherical wave-functions. Reproduction in terms of both representations satisfies certain band-limit criteria. We provide an error bound that shows that to reproduce the spatial characteristics of a sound of a certain frequency we need to be able to accurately represent sounds of up to a particular order, which establishes a Nyquist-like criterion. The order of the sound field in turn is related to the number of microphones in the array necessary to achieve accurate quadrature on the sphere. These results are illustrated with simulations.
A Markov Chain Model of Elite Table Tennis Competition

The evaluation of the structure of sports performance is one of the important functions of diagnostics in competitive sport. Especially in game sports, it is important to obtain diagnostic information on competition because of the interactive process between the two teams or players. This interaction cannot be simulated or replicated in training or test situations. When it comes to table tennis, performance diagnostics offers many different techniques and methods to analyze a game. In this context, problems mostly occur in adequately modelling the game. Moreover, the approaches lack a scope of uniform performance criteria. According to a stochastic performance diagnostic concept (Markov Chain) for game sports, we developed four different state-transition-models to describe tactical behaviour in table tennis: (1) game action, (2) stroke position, (3) stroke direction and (4) stroke technique. Afterwards we formalized these models by means of finite Markov Chain (stochastic modelling) to determine the relevance of tactical behaviour to performance by simulation. In this study, 152 games of the top 50 ranked male players in the world were analyzed. The results suggest that in international-level table tennis, the diagonal game from backhand to backhand (“stroke position”), strokes into the long backhand zone (“stroke direction”), and especially the topspin stroke for shake-hand players in general (“stroke technique”), are the most important winning tactical strategies. In comparison with traditional methods used in elite table tennis the approach described here is valuable in quantifying and comparing the relevance of various tactical behaviours to performance.
Computer-aided classification of patents oriented to TRIZ

TRIZ has been widely acknowledged as an effective tool to solve technical problems. In TRIZ theory, a significant operation of product innovation is to solve design contradictions. When an engineer formulates his problem as a contradiction, the Contradiction Matrix helps him to identify a representative Contradiction and Inventive Principles. But Inventive Principles are abstract, it will be more helpful to generate innovative problem-solving ideas for innovators if they obtain related examples from published patents which have used the same Inventive Principles in different fields. Most of the current available automatic patent classification systems are based on technology field such as IPC and they are not suitable for TRIZ. Recent advance of computational linguistics allowed us to integrate text mining and TRIZ for patent classification. In this paper, a computer-aided approach to classify patents according to Inventive Principles is proposed.
Novel method of evaluating liver stiffness using transient elastography to evaluate perioperative status in severe heart failure.

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study was to assess the efficacy of a non-invasive method, transient elastography (FibroScan), in measuring liver stiffness (LS), and whether LS can be used as a marker of cardiac - and hence perioperative - status. METHODS AND RESULTS Perioperative LS was prospectively measured using a FibroScan in 30 patients (21 male; 42.2 ± 13.3 years old) who underwent left ventricular assist device (LVAD) implantation. LS was checked pre- and postoperatively, then analyzed in regard to perioperative status. Preoperative LS was 13.3 ± 13.0 kPa (normal, <5.5 kPa), and was abnormal in 77% of patients. Four required bilateral VAD. LS in patients with bilateral VAD tended to be higher than in LVAD patients (25.1 ± 22.7 vs. 11.5 ± 10.5 kPa, P=0.051). No patient with LS ≤ 7.0 kPa required a right VAD. The incidence of major adverse events was lower in patients with LS ≤ 12.5 kPa (25% vs. 80%, P<0.05). There were also no mortalities among patients with LS ≤ 12.5 kPa. CONCLUSIONS LS was correlated with preoperative severity in patients with severe heart failure and reflected liver congestion, and may be useful to predict the requirement of right VAD, as well as postoperative complications in patients with LVAD implantation. This novel modality may be a useful non-invasive assessment method for management of severe heart failure.
Automatic Conceptual Analysis of User Requirements with the Requirements Engineering Assistance Diagnostic (READ) Tool

This paper describes an elaborate methodology that constitutes a proof of concept for the idea that a conceptual knowledge on the software to be developed can be acquired through an automated process, with a corpus of textual requirement documents as input and diagrams representing its static (domain model) and dynamic (context use-case model) aspects, as output. An improved domain model is generated by injecting domain-related missing information provided by Expert Comparable Contextual (ECC) models, which are extracted from reusable domain-specific data models. The dynamic view abstracts the main functionalities of the software as a context use-case model. The paper describes the architecture of the Requirements Engineering Assistance Diagnostic (READ) tool implementing our methodology which will guide the developers in their in-depth study of the requirements text and in the timely identification of risks that poorly specified requirements might introduce into the project.
Knowledge management and measurement in Public Sector Organizations

Knowledge Management (KM) is a strategic component that enables development, growth and continuous improvement of Public Sector Organizations (PSO). This thesis is bounded to this specific context. Indeed, we critically and comprehensively study the factors that characterize KM strategies and those that foster its development and success in PSO, then finally we propose metrics to measure and evaluate, in order to continuous and systematically improve KM practices in PSO. Main problems are related to the lack of academic literature that explains the elements that KM address in the given context. In addition, it is identified as a problem the lack of criteria for measuring and evaluating KM in PSO, from a different viewpoint than business perspective. The contribution of this thesis is that it provides valuable elements for an academic debate on the previous factors, strategies and metrics to promote KM initiatives in PSO. To achieve the research objective of this thesis we performed a comprehensive systematic literature review in order to discover what the KM critical success factors are, and also we integrated and proposed some metrics to evaluate and assess the performance of KM in PSO. We conducted an in-depth study among different Public Sector Organizations in order to learn what are the critical success factors that must be first considered before implement KM initiatives. based on this. Finally, based on this methodological proposal and as a result of this research, we were able to analyze and explain the critical success factors, we identified some strategies to encourage the success of KM and integrated a proposal of metrics, from different approaches, for KM in PSO.
Architectures for ASIC implementations of low-density parity-check convolutional encoders and decoders

Low-density parity-check convolutional codes (LDPC-CCs) are an attractive alternative to their block-oriented counterparts, LDPC-BCs. In this paper, we introduce these codes and propose an encoder and decoder architecture that is implementable as an ASIC. We report upon a realization of this new architecture capable of an information throughput of 430 Mbps and 164 Mbps for the encoder and decoder, respectively. We discuss a top-level chip specification and then extend ideas to parallelize the design.
Use of Motivational Teaching Techniques and Psychology Student Satisfaction

This study explored the relationship between the frequency of use of specific motivational teaching techniques and satisfaction of students with their psychology courses. One hundred and thirty-five university students rated the level of use of specific teaching techniques used in psychology courses they had completed and indicated their overall satisfaction with their psychology courses. Higher student ratings of frequency of use of motivational teaching strategies were related to more student satisfaction. The specific motivational teaching techniques that were significantly related to satisfaction spanned nine categories ranging from providing a model of interest in learning to relating course content to student interests. Among the specific motivational teaching techniques significantly related to student satisfaction were expressing interest in facilitating student learning, showing warmth and empathy, giving interesting assignments, praising students for good effort, and providing prompt, constructive feedback. The findings suggest potential value in psychology instructors testing the effects of specific motivational teaching methods.
Modest face recognition

The facial imagery usually at the disposal for forensics investigations is commonly of a poor quality due to the unconstrained settings in which it was acquired. The captured faces are typically non-frontal, partially occluded and of a low resolution, which makes the recognition task extremely difficult. In this paper we try to address this problem by presenting a novel framework for face recognition that combines diverse features sets (Gabor features, local binary patterns, local phase quantization features and pixel intensities), probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) and data fusion based on linear logistic regression. With the proposed framework a matching score for the given pair of probe and target images is produced by applying PLDA on each of the four feature sets independently - producing a (partial) matching score for each of the PLDA-based feature vectors - and then combining the partial matching results at the score level to generate a single matching score for recognition. We make two main contributions in the paper: i) we introduce a novel framework for face recognition that relies on probabilistic MOdels of Diverse fEature SeTs (MODEST) to facilitate the recognition process and ii) benchmark it against the existing state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the feasibility of our MODEST framework on the FRGCv2 and PaSC databases and present comparative results with the state-of-the-art recognition techniques, which demonstrate the efficacy of our framework.
Metacognition and clinical psychology: a preliminary framework for research and practice

A theoretical framework for metacognition in clinical psychology is proposed that emphasizes the metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control of emotional states. The proposal is that the person monitors his/her emotional state, applies a label to it, compares it to a goal state, and takes action to make the current emotional state become closer to the goal state. Implications are drawn for clinical research and clinical practice, with examples given for schizophrenia and excessive anger. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Assessing the Cross-Cultural Applicability of Affective and Cognitive Components of Attitude

This research tests the cross-cultural applicability of the affective and cognitive component model of attitude using within-group and multigroup confirmatory factor analysis in the context of food attitudes. French from France and Chinese from the People’s Republic of China were selected for their differences in cultural orientation toward food; the French display strong affective-cognitive ambivalence, whereas the Chinese have a balanced attitude toward food. The third group, English-Canadian Chinese, allows investigation into the consequences of acculturation on the attitude structure. Results strongly support the cross-cultural applicability of the affective-cognitive model. The affective-cognitive model was validated within groups, and invariance in model measurement was established across groups. In addition, cross-cultural differences and similarities in the latent means and in the pattern of correlations between affective and cognitive components were consistent with theoretically derived expectations.
Can schooling contribute to a more just society?

This article combines discussions of the politics of education with personal story telling to remind us why the continuing struggle over schooling — over what is and is not taught, over how it is taught and evaluated, over how students with different characteristics are treated, over how teachers and other school employees are respectfully dealt with, over how the relationship between schools and their communities can be democratized, and so much more — is absolutely crucial to the pursuit of social justice. Using the example of the book Democratic Schools , it suggests tactics for making critically democratic practices more visible. It also describes seven specific tasks that critical scholar/activists in education should perform if we are committed to challenging dominant relations in education and the larger society.