Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Preparing Students With Disabilities for School-to-Work Transition and Postschool Life

life, consuming as much as half of our waking hours. People often identify themselves by the work that they do. A job can provide a sense of accomplishment and pride and have an enormous effect on our overall life satisfaction, or it can serve as a source of frustration and dissatisfaction. Finding the right job—simply knowing what it might be—is not easy, even for highly skilled individuals. Doing so is even more difficult for those who lack adequate training or face special challenges, such as a disability. According to nationwide studies, as many as 66% of working adults never had a career plan and are currently working at their jobs because of chance factors or the influence of others or because it was the only job available. Only about half of these workers are satisfied with their job situation (Brown & Minor, 1989; Hoyt & Lester, 1995). Preparing students for the workforce is an important role for schools—or at least it should be. However, most U.S. high schools emphasize college preparation, which often overshadows attention to actual workforce readiness. Although a college degree is an excellent advantage in finding a rewarding job for a great number of people, postsecondary education is not the optimal or even possible choice for many students. Unfortunately, about half of U.S. students leave high school without the knowledge or skills needed to find and maintain a job (U.S. Department of Labor, 1991), and onethird of students are not prepared for even entry-level work (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1993).
Groundhog day? Nietzsche, Deleuze and the eternal return of prosumption in lifelong learning

This conceptual article examines George Ritzer’s concept of prosumption in the context of lifelong learning in the United Kingdom. Ritzer’s references to prosumption as a form of eternal return of a ‘primal act’, which draw on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze, introduce some ambiguity into the concept. This ambiguity echoes a certain polarization in the debate about co-creation, especially regarding the nature of consumer participation in the creation of value, but it is central to defining the limits of consumer freedom and agency. Critical analysis of UK lifelong learning discourse shows how prosumption can work as a tool of control in this context, producing docile subjectivities, compliant forms of creative co-production and disposable ‘nothing’ products through repetition and a return of the same. Where prosumption is able to challenge this repetition, however, it involves creativity and the return of difference. These examples show how eternal return, ultimately, underpins prosumption’s claim to offer a valid description of emerging practices of prosuming lifelong learners.
Epithelial damage and angiogenesis in the airways of children with asthma.

RATIONALE Airway remodeling and inflammation are characteristic features of adult asthma that are still poorly investigated in childhood asthma. OBJECTIVES To examine epithelial and vascular changes as well as the inflammatory response in airways of children with asthma. METHODS We analyzed bronchial biopsies obtained from 44 children undergoing bronchoscopy for appropriate clinical indications other than asthma: 17 with mild/moderate asthma (aged 2-15 yr), 12 with atopy without asthma (1-11 yr), and 15 control children without atopy or asthma (1-14 yr). By histochemistry and immunohistochemistry, we quantified epithelial loss, basement membrane thickness, number of vessels, and inflammatory cells in subepithelium. RESULTS Epithelial loss and basement membrane thickness were increased in children with asthma compared with control subjects (p = 0.005 and p = 0.0002, respectively) and atopic children (p = 0.002 and p = 0.005, respectively). The number of vessels and eosinophils was increased not only in asthmatic children (p = 0.03 and p = 0.0002, respectively) but also in atopic children without asthma (p = 0.03 and p = 0.008, respectively) compared with control subjects. When we stratified the analysis according to age, we observed that children with asthma younger than 6 yr had increased epithelial loss, basement membrane thickening, and eosinophilia compared with control subjects of the same age. CONCLUSIONS Epithelial damage and basement membrane thickening, which are pathologic features characteristic of adult asthma, are present even in childhood asthma. Other changes, such as airway eosinophilia and angiogenesis, were also observed in atopic children without asthma. These observations suggest that pathologic changes occur early in the natural history of asthma and emphasize the concept that some of these lesions may characterize atopy even in the absence of asthmatic symptoms.
Clinical utility of HIV-1 genotyping and expert advice: the Havana trial

Objective To determine whether HIV-1 genotyping and expert advice add additional short-term virologic benefit in guiding antiretroviral changes in HIV+ drug-experienced patients. Design A two factorial (genotyping and expert advice), randomized, open label, multi-center trial. The patients were stratified according to the number of treatment failures. Patients and methods HIV-1 infected patients on stable antiretroviral therapy who presented virological failure were included into the study. Genotypic testing was performed by using TrueGene HIV Genotyping kit and the results were interpreted by a software package (RetroGram®, version 1.0). An expert advisory committee suggested the new therapeutic approach based on clinical information alone or on clinical information plus HIV-1 genotyping results. Plasma HIV-1 RNA load, CD4+ cell count and adverse events were recorded at baseline and every 12 weeks. Results A total of 326 patients were included. The baseline CD4+ cell count and plasma HIV-1 RNA were 387 (± 224) × 106 cells/l and 4 (± 1) log10 respectively. The proportion of patients with plasma HIV-1 RNA < 400 copies/ml at 24 weeks differed between genotyping and no genotyping arms (48.5 and 36.2%, P < 0.05). Factors associated with a higher probability of plasma HIV-1 RNA < 400 copies/ml were HIV-1 genotyping [odds ratio (OR), 1.7; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.1–2.8;P = 0.016] and the expert advice in patients failing to a second-line antiretroviral therapy (OR, 3.2; 95% CI, 1.2–8.3;P = 0.016). Conclusions HIV-1 genotyping interpreted by a software package improves the virological outcome when it is added to the clinical information as a basis for decisions on changing antiretroviral therapy. The expert advice also showed virologic benefit in the second failure group.
Golgi Alkalinization by the Papillomavirus E5 Oncoprotein

The E5 oncoprotein of bovine papillomavirus type I is a small, hydrophobic polypeptide localized predominantly in the Golgi complex. E5-mediated transformation is often associated with activation of the PDGF receptor (PDGF-R). However, some E5 mutants fail to induce PDGF-R phosphorylation yet retain transforming activity, suggesting an additional mechanism of action. Since E5 also interacts with the 16-kD pore-forming subunit of the vacuolar H+-ATPase (V-ATPase), the oncoprotein could conceivably interfere with the pH homeostasis of the Golgi complex. A pH-sensitive, fluorescent bacterial toxin was used to label this organelle and Golgi pH (pHG) was measured by ratio imaging. Whereas pHG of untreated cells was acidic (6.5), no acidification was detected in E5-transfected cells (pH ∼7.0). The Golgi buffering power and the rate of H+ leakage were found to be comparable in control and transfected cells. Instead, the E5-induced pH differential was attributed to impairment of V-ATPase activity, even though the amount of ATPase present in the Golgi complex was unaltered. Mutations that abolished binding of E5 to the 16-kD subunit or that targeted the oncoprotein to the endoplasmic reticulum abrogated Golgi alkalinization and cellular transformation. Moreover, transformation-competent E5 mutants that were defective for PDGF-R activation alkalinized the Golgi lumen. Neither transformation by sis nor src, two oncoproteins in the PDGF-R signaling pathway, affected pHG. We conclude that alkalinization of the Golgi complex represents a new biological activity of the E5 oncoprotein that correlates with cellular transformation.
The small-for-date infant. II. Neurological and intellectual sequelae.

A prospective study has been done on 96 full term small-for-date infants to determine the incidence and type of neurological and intellectual sequelae. Major neurological defects were uncommon with an incidence of 1% for cerebral palsy and 6% for convulsions. Minimal cerebral dysfunction characterized by hyperactivity, a short attention span, learning difficulties, poor fine coordination and hyper-reflexia was diagnosed in 25%. EEG abnormalities predominantly of a diffuse mild nature were seen in 59% of the boys and 69% of the girls (similar EEC tracings are reported in 27% of apparently normal children). Speech defects featuring immaturity of reception and expression were present in 33% of the boys and 26% of the girls. Hearing and vision were not appreciably affected. The average IQ was 95 (boys) and 101 (girls). However 50% of the boys and 36% of the girls had a poor school performance.
Biological aspects of the beetle Delphastus davidsoni fed with whitefly eggs laid on tomato genotypes

Many plant breeding programs have incorporated plant resistance characteristics without considering how this resistance may affect the natural enemies of plant pests. We evaluated the biological aspects of Delphastus davidsoni (Gordon) fed with Bemisia tabaci B biotype eggs laid on tomato genotypes with different trichome densities and types. On LA1335 and NAV1062, the development periods were 21 days, and the larval mortality rates were 46.7 % and 28.9 %, respectively; on IAC294, the development period was 26 days, and the mortality rate 88.9 %. None of the larvae completed development when fed with whitefly eggs laid on PI134418. Most of the deaths took place in the second instar stage because the larvae became trapped in the glandular trichomes; similar results were also observed on IAC294. The adult longevity and female fecundity on LA1335 and NAV1062 were 32 and 34 days, and 61 and 78 eggs, respectively. The type IV and VI glandular trichomes present on PI134418 and IAC294 adversely affected the larval development of D. davidsoni, resulting in high mortality rates. Nevertheless, type V non-glandular trichomes, in high (NAV1062) or low (LA1335) densities, did not affect the development of the insect.
TwinCG: Dual Thread Redundancy with Forward Recovery for Conjugate Gradient Methods

Even though iterative solvers like the Conjugate Gradients method (CG) have been studied for over fifty years, fault tolerance for such solvers has seen much attention in recent years. For iterative solvers, two major reliable strategies of recovery exist: checkpoint-restart for backward recovery, or some type of redundancy technique for forward recovery. Important redundancy techniques like ABFT techniques for sparse matrix-vector products (SpMxV) have recently been proposed, which increase the resilience of CG methods. These techniques offer limited recovery options, and introduce a tolerable overhead. In this work, we study a more powerful resilience concept, which is redundant multithreading. It offers more generic and stronger recovery guarantees, including any soft faults in CG iterations (among others covering ABFT SpMxV), but also requires more resources. We carefully study this redundancy/efficiency conflict. We propose a fault tolerant CG method, called TwinCG, which introduces minimal wallclock time overhead, and significant advantages in detection and correction strategies. Our method uses Dual Modular Redundancy instead of the more expensive Triple Modular Redundancy; still, it retains the TMR advantages of fault correction. We describe, implement, and benchmark our iterative solver, and compare it in terms of efficiency and fault tolerance capabilities to state-of-the-art techniques. We find that before parallelization, TwinCG introduces around 5-6% runtime overhead compared to standard CG, and after parallelization efficiently uses BLAS. In the presence of faults, it reliably performs forward recovery for a range of problems, outperforming SpMxV ABFT solutions.
Estrogen Receptor (ER)-β Reduces ERα-Regulated Gene Transcription, Supporting a “Ying Yang” Relationship between ERα and ERβ in Mice

Estrogen is of importance for the regulation of adult bone metabolism. The aim of the present study was to determine the role of estrogen receptor-beta (ERbeta) in vivo on global estrogen-regulated transcriptional activity in bone. The effect of estrogen in bone of ovariectomized mice was determined using microarray analysis including 9400 genes. Most of the genes (95% = 240 genes) that were increased by estrogen in wild-type (WT) mice were also increased by estrogen in ERbeta-inactivated mice. Interestingly, the average stimulatory effect of estrogen on the mRNA levels of these genes was 85% higher in ERbeta-inactivated than in WT mice, demonstrating that ERbeta reduces estrogen receptor-alpha (ERalpha)-regulated gene transcription in bone. The average stimulatory effect of estrogen on estrogen-regulated bone genes in ERalpha-inactivated mice was intermediate between that seen in WT and ERalphabeta double-inactivated mice. Thus, ERbeta inhibits ERalpha-mediated gene transcription in the presence of ERalpha, whereas, in the absence of ERalpha, it can partially replace ERalpha. In conclusion, our in vivo data indicate that an important physiological role of ERbeta is to modulate ERalpha-mediated gene transcription supporting a "Ying Yang" relationship between ERalpha and ERbeta in mice.
Microtrons for Electron and Photon Radiotherapy

For radiation therapy at medium and high energies the circular and the racetract microtron are ideally suited electron accelerators. The fine energy definition of the electron beam from a microtron allows the use of beam transport from one accelerator to several treatment units. This possibility makes an installation with two or more treatment rooms very interesting from an economical point of view particularly at high energies. The availability of high quality radiation modalities from the compact high energy racetrack microtron may open new possibilities in the treatment of large deep seated tumours.
ROS2D: Image feature detector using rank order statistics

We present a new image feature detection method. Our method selects features based on segmenting points with high local intensity variations across different scales using a robust rank order statistics approach. Our method produces a large number of repeatable features that are invariant to several image transformations such as rotation, scaling, viewpoint, and lighting variations. We show the advantages of our feature in comparison to other existing features using the Oxford dataset. We also show that, when used in monocular and stereo SLAM systems, our feature outperforms SIFT in terms of the pose estimation accuracy using several public datasets including the KITTI dataset.
Paternal age and congenital malformations.

BACKGROUND Spontaneous mutations in germ cells increase with male age, but an association between paternal age and congenital malformations is not well established. We conducted a population-based cohort study to estimate this association. METHODS A study population of couples and their firstborn children were identified in the Danish Fertility Database between 1980 and 1996 (n = 71937). Diagnoses of congenital malformations in children were obtained by linkage to the nationwide hospital register (1980-1999). RESULTS Overall, there were no differences in the prevalence of malformations as a function of paternal age. However, the prevalence of malformations of extremities and syndromes of multiple systems, as well as Down's syndrome, increased with increasing paternal age. For example, in comparison with fathers age 20-29 years, adjusted hazard ratio of syndromes of multiple systems was 1.15 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.81-1.65] for age 35-39 years, 1.33 (95% CI 0.79-2.25) for age 40-44 years, 1.73 (95% CI 0.82-3.65) for age 45-49 years, and 3.20 (95% CI 1.37-7.48) for age > or = 50 years (test for trend P = 0.01). CONCLUSIONS Our data suggest that advanced paternal age may be associated with an excess occurrence of some specific malformations. The association could be caused by mutations of the gametes in men induced by biological or environmental factors.
Organization of afferent input to subdivisions of area 8 in the rhesus monkey

The sources of ipsilateral afferents to subdivisions of one frontal eye field (Walker, '40a area 8 ) were studied with horseradish peroxidase (HRP) in macaque monkeys. There were major differences in the distribution of cells pro‐ jecting to the caudal and rostral parts of area 8. The majority (53%) of labeled cortical cells projecting to caudal regions were in visual association areas, and an additional 23% were in the ventral bank of the intraparietal sulcus, where neurons may have predominantly visual and visuomotor properties. In contrast, rostral area 8 had a much lower percentage of its cortical input originating in visual association areas (5%) or in the ventral bank ofthe intraparietal sulcus (8%). After HRP injection in this rostral part, 21% of labeled cells were in auditory association areas and 13% in paralimbic regions, whereas labeling in these two types of cortex was negligible after HRP administration to caudal parts of area 8. The percentage of cells in other association regions (portions of the banks of the superior temporal sulcus, dorsolateral parietal, medial parietal, and prefrontal cortices) was higher in the rostral (53%) than in the caudal case (21%). The results suggest that caudal area 8 may be involved in head and eye movements in response to visual stimuli, while its anterior subdivisions may be involved in directing the head and eyes in response to auditory stimuli. Furthermore, limbic input may also be relevant to the neural processing occurring in rostral frontal eye fields, perhaps by directing attention toward motivationally relevant stimuli.
Dual-Band Circularly Polarized Split Ring Resonators Loaded Square Slot Antenna

A dual-band circularly polarized (CP) microstrip line fed slot antenna using a set of split ring resonators (SRRs) is proposed in this communication. Outer ring connected SRRs are placed on the back side of the slot to create the CP upper band. Diagonally opposite corners of the slot are truncated, which together with the SRRs give CP response in the lower band. The proposed dual-band CP antenna provides design flexibility to control the resonance frequency and sense of polarization at the dual bands, independently. The proposed antenna is designed to operate at 3.1 and 4.7 GHz, which is fabricated and tested. The experimental results show the -10-dB impedance bandwidths of 400 MHz in both the bands and the 3-dB axial ratio bandwidth of 3.1% (from 3.05 to 3.15 GHz) and 4.2% (from 4.65 to 4.85 GHz) in lower and upper bands, respectively. Finally, a metallic cavity is used with the antenna to achieve a unidirectional radiation pattern with front-to-back ratio of more than 15 dB without affecting the impedance bandwidth and CP performance of the antenna.
Computational Techniques for Real Logarithms of Matrices

In this work, we consider computing the real logarithm of a real matrix. We pay attention to general conditioning issues, provide careful implementation for several techniques including scaling issues, and finally test and compare the techniques on a number of problems. All things considered, our recommendation for a general purpose method goes to the Schur decomposition approach with eigenvalue grouping, followed by square roots and diagonal Padé approximants of the diagonal blocks. Nonetheless, in some cases, a well-implemented series expansion technique outperformed the other methods. We have also analyzed and implemented a novel method to estimate the Frech&eacutet derivative of the $\log$, which proved very successful for condition estimation.
Phospholipase A2 inhibitors as potential therapeutic agents for the treatment of inflammatory diseases

Importance of the field: The various phospholipase A2 (PLA2) types have been implicated in diverse kinds of lipid signaling and inflammatory diseases. Rheumatoid arthritis, lung inflammation, neurological disorders, such as multiple sclerosis, cardiovascular diseases, including atherosclerosis, and cancer are included among the diseases where PLA2 enzymes are involved. Thus, there is a great interest in developing potent and selective PLA2 inhibitors and some of them have entered clinical trials. Areas covered in this review: This review article discusses the role of each PLA2 class in inflammatory diseases and the advances in the development of inhibitors presented in patent literature from January 2004 to May 2009. What the reader will gain: PLA2s cluster in four main types: secreted sPLA2, cytosolic cPLA2, Ca2+-independent iPLA2 and lipoprotein-associated LpPLA2. Each of those types has been implicated in diverse kinds of inflammatory diseases. Readers will rapidly gain an overview of the various PLA2 inhibitors reported in the patent literature in the past 5 years. Furthermore, the readers will learn the difficulties related to the development of PLA2 inhibitors as new drugs and also the different companies and research groups that are the main players in the field. Take home message: Although the role of each PLA2 is not yet distinct in different diseases, the development and future use of different PLA2 inhibitors to treat human disease seems very promising.
Changes in muscle contractile properties and neural control during human muscular fatigue

The factors limiting force production and exercise endurance time have been briefly described, together with some of the changes occurring at various sites within the muscle and central nervous system. Evidence is presented that, in fatigue of sustained maximal voluntary contractions (MVC) executed by well‐motivated subjects, the reduction in force generating capacity need not be due to a decline in central nervous system (CNS) motor drive or to failing neuromuscular transmission, but can be attributed solely to contractile failure of the muscles involved. However, despite this conclusion, both the integrated electromyogram (EMG) and the mean firing rate of individual motor units do decline progressively during sustained MVC. This, however, does not necessarily result in loss of force since the parallel slowing of muscle contractile speed reduces tetanic fusion frequency. It is suggested that the range of motoneuron firing rates elicited by voluntary effort is regulated and limited for each muscle to the minimum required for maximum force generation, thus preventing neuromuscular transmission failure and optimizing motor control. Such a CNS regulating mechanism would probably require some reflex feedback from the muscle.
Human Heuristics for a Team of Mobile Robots

This paper is at the crossroad of cognitive psychology and AI robotics. It reports a cross-disciplinary project concerned about implementing human heuristics within autonomous mobile robots. In the following, we address the problem of relying on human-based heuristics to endow a group of mobile robots with the ability to solve problems such as target finding in a labyrinth. Such heuristics may provide an efficient way to explore the environment and to decompose a complex problem into subtasks for which specific heuristics are efficient. We first present a set of experiments conducted with group of humans looking for a target with limited sensing capabilities solving. Then we describe the heuristics extracted from the observation and analysis of their behavior. Finally we implemented these heuristics within khepera-like autonomous mobile robots facing the same tasks. We show that the control architecture can be experimentally validated to some extent thanks to this approach.