Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The different impact of a structured peer-assessment task in relation to university undergraduates’ initial writing skills

Abstract This article presents an empirical evaluation of the validity and reliability of a peer-assessment activity to improve academic writing competences. Specifically, we explored a large group of psychology undergraduate students with different initial writing skills. Participants (n = 365) produced two different essays, which were evaluated by their course peers and professors using a specific grading instrument (rubric). The validity of the task was demonstrated by a high inter-grader agreement and a strong degree of consistency between the ratings of the peers and professors. Although all students did not improve their writing skills between their first and second essays, the peer-assessment activity enhanced the writing abilities of low but not high-achieving participants. The pedagogical implications of these results are discussed.
Characterization of the Promoter Region of Biosynthetic Enzyme Genes Involved in Berberine Biosynthesis in Coptis japonica

The presence of alkaloids is rather specific to certain plant species. However, berberine, an isoquinoline alkaloid, is relatively broadly distributed in the plant kingdom. Thus, berberine biosynthesis has been intensively investigated, especially using Coptis japonica cell cultures. Almost all biosynthetic enzyme genes have already been characterized at the molecular level. Particularly, two transcription factors (TFs), a plant-specific WRKY-type TF, CjWRKY1, and a basic helix-loop-helix TF, CjbHLH1, were shown to comprehensively regulate berberine biosynthesis in C. japonica cells. In this study, we characterized the promoter region of some biosynthetic enzyme genes and associated cis-acting elements involved in the transcriptional regulation via two TFs. The promoter regions of three berberine biosynthetic enzyme genes (CYP80B2, 4′OMT and CYP719A1) were isolated, and their promoter activities were dissected by a transient assay involving the sequentially truncated promoter::luciferase (LUC) reporter constructs. Furthermore, transactivation activities of CjWRKY1 were determined using the truncated promoter::LUC reporter constructs or constructs with mutated cis-elements. These results suggest the involvement of a putative W-box in the regulation of biosynthetic enzyme genes. Direct binding of CjWRKY1 to the W-box DNA sequence was also confirmed by an electrophoresis mobility shift assay and by a chromatin immunoprecipitation assay. In addition, CjbHLH1 also activated transcription from truncated 4′OMT and CYP719A1 promoters independently of CjWRKY1, suggesting the involvement of a putative E-box. Unexpected transcriptional activation of biosynthetic enzyme genes via a non-W-box sequence and by CjWRKY1 as well as the possible involvement of a GCC-box in berberine biosynthesis in C. japonica are discussed.
Sets, Properties, and Unrestricted Quantification

Call a quantifier unrestricted if it ranges over absolutely all things: not just over all physical things or all things relevant to some particular utterance or discourse but over absolutely everything there is. Prima facie, unrestricted quantification seems to be perfectly coherent. For such quantification appears to be involved in a variety of claims that all normal human beings are capable of understanding. For instance, some basic logical and mathematical truths appear to involve unrestricted quantification, such as the truth that absolutely everything is self-identical and the truth that the empty set has absolutely no members. Various metaphysical views too appear to involve unrestricted quantification, such as the physicalist view that absolutely everything is physical. However, the set-theoretic and semantic paradoxes have been used to challenge the coherence of unrestricted quantification. It has been argued that, whenever we form a conception of a certain range of quantification, this conception can be used to define further objects not in this range, thus establishing that the quantification wasn’t unrestricted after all.1 This paper has two main goals. My first goal is to point out some problems with the most promising defense of unrestricted quantification developed to date. My second goal is to develop a better defense. The most promising defense of unrestricted quantification developed to date makes use of a hierarchy of types (Section 3). I show that there are some important semantic insights that type-theorists cannot express in full generality (Section 4). I argue that this problem is analogous to those faced by philosophers who deny the coherence of unrestricted quantification. My alternative defense of unrestricted quantification is based on a sharp distinction between sets and properties (Section 5). Sets are combinatorial entities, individuated by reference to their elements. Properties are intensional entities, individuated
Prevalence and Trends in Obesity among China’s Children and Adolescents, 1985–2010

Objectives We examined the prevalence of and trends in obesity among children and adolescents in China (1985–2010). Methods We used data from the 1985, 1991, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 Chinese National Surveys on Students’ Constitution and Health (CNSSCH). The CNSSCH is a national survey of physical fitness and health status in Chinese students that uses multistage stratified sampling of 31 provinces and municipalities. A subject was considered obese or overweight if weight-for-height exceeded the 20% or 10% of standard weight-for-height. The standard weight-for-height was the 80th percentile for sex- and age-specific growth charts. Results The age-adjusted prevalence of obesity and of overweight and obesity combined was 8.1% (95% CI, 8.0–8.3%) and 19.2% (95% CI, 19.1–19.4%) among children and adolescents 7–18 years in age. Obesity was more likely to be present among children or adolescents who were male (RR, 1.93; 95% CI, 1.90–1.97), urban (RR, 1.99; 95% CI, 1.95–2.02), or 10–12 years (RR, 1.43; 95% CI, 1.40–1.46). Trend analyses of the 25-year period revealed a significant increasing trend in males (RR, 1.59; 95% CI, 1.58–1.60) and in females (RR, 1.49; 95% CI, 1.48–1.50). The rate of increase in obese or overweight prevalence was highest in boys from rural areas (9% annual increase). Conclusions During 1985–2010, there was a significant and continuous increase in the prevalence of obesity in children and adolescents. Obesity is epidemic in China, but may be reduced with evidence-based interventions (e.g., school intervention programs).
The use of “High Dose” Dexmedetomidine in a Patient with CriticalTracheal Stenosis and Anterior Mediastinal Mass

The anterior medial mass patient continues to offer great challenges for the anesthesiologist. As such, newer and safer methods of providing anesthetic care are continually being sought. To this end, there is a growing body of evidence that may suggest that higher than Food and Drug Administration approved dosages of dexmedetomidine may offer another option in the arsenal of the anesthesiologist in this patient population. We recently cared for a middle aged male who presented with a large mediastinal mass, extrinsic compression critical tracheal stenosis, superior vena cava syndrome, and massive supraclavicular lymphadenopathy, scheduled for tracheal stent placement, biopsy, and diagnostic evaluation of the esophagus. After reviewing anesthetic options, we deemed the safest technique available to us to be the use of a high dose dexmedetomidine based technique with continuous infusion rate of 2mcg/kg/hr. Spontaneous respirations were maintained throughout the case, with a stable heart rate and blood pressure, and our patient tolerated the procedure without complications.
Rotalumè: A Tool for Automatic Reverse Engineering of Malware Emulators

Malware authors have recently begun using emulation technology to obfuscate their code. They convert native malware binaries into bytecode programs written in a randomly generated instruction set and paired with a native binary emulator that interprets the bytecode. No existing malware analysis can reliably reverse this obfuscation technique. In this paper, we present the first work in automatic reverse engineering of malware emulators. Our algorithms are based on dynamic analysis. We execute the emulated malware in a protected environment and record the entire x86 instruction trace generated by the emulator. We then use dynamic data-flow and taint analysis over the trace to identify data buffers containing the bytecode program and extract the syntactic and semantic information about the bytecode instruction set. With these analysis outputs, we are able to generate data structures, such as control-flow graphs, that provide the foundation for subsequent malware analysis. We implemented a proofof-concept system called Rotalumè and evaluated it using both legitimate programs and malware emulated by VMProtect and Code Virtualizer. The results show that Rotalumè accurately reveals the syntax and semantics of emulated instruction sets and reconstructs execution paths of original programs from their bytecode representations.
A Superlinearly and Globally Convergent Algorithm for Power Control and Resource Allocation With General Interference Functions

In wireless networks, users are typically coupled by interference. Hence, resource allocation can strongly depend on receive strategies, such as beamforming, CDMA receivers, etc. We study the problem of minimizing the total transmission power while maintaining individual quality-of-service (QoS) values for all users. This problem can be solved by the fixed-point iteration proposed by Yates (1995) as well as by a recently proposed matrix-based iteration (Schubert and Boche, 2007). It was observed by numerical simulations that the matrix-based iteration has interesting numerical properties, and achieves the global optimum in only a few steps. However, an analytical investigation of the convergence behavior has been an open problem so far. In this paper, we show that the matrix-based iteration can be reformulated as a Newton-type iteration of a convex function, which is not guaranteed to be continuously differentiable. Such a behavior can be caused by ambiguous representations of the interference functions, depending on the choice of the receive strategy. Nevertheless, superlinear convergence can be shown by exploiting the special structure of the problem. Namely, the function is convex, locally Lipschitz continuous, and an invertible directional derivative exists for all points of interest.
Feature Selection for Speech Emotion Recognition in Spanish and Basque: On the Use of Machine Learning to Improve Human-Computer Interaction

Study of emotions in human–computer interaction is a growing research area. This paper shows an attempt to select the most significant features for emotion recognition in spoken Basque and Spanish Languages using different methods for feature selection. RekEmozio database was used as the experimental data set. Several Machine Learning paradigms were used for the emotion classification task. Experiments were executed in three phases, using different sets of features as classification variables in each phase. Moreover, feature subset selection was applied at each phase in order to seek for the most relevant feature subset. The three phases approach was selected to check the validity of the proposed approach. Achieved results show that an instance-based learning algorithm using feature subset selection techniques based on evolutionary algorithms is the best Machine Learning paradigm in automatic emotion recognition, with all different feature sets, obtaining a mean of 80,05% emotion recognition rate in Basque and a 74,82% in Spanish. In order to check the goodness of the proposed process, a greedy searching approach (FSS-Forward) has been applied and a comparison between them is provided. Based on achieved results, a set of most relevant non-speaker dependent features is proposed for both languages and new perspectives are suggested.
Automatic Extraction of Bibliographic Information from Biomedical Online Journal Articles Using a String Matching Algorithm

A system has been developed to extract bibliographic data (grant numbers and databank accession numbers) from online biomedical journal articles for the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINEreg database. Rule-based algorithms and a string matching algorithm are proposed to extract the bibliographic data from HTML-formatted articles. Experiments conducted with 411 medical articles from 73 journal issues show an accuracy exceeding 96%
Phenomenological description of space-time foam

The expectation that it should not be possible to gain experimental insight on the structure of space-time at Planckian distance scales has been recently challenged by several studies. With respect to space-time fluctuations, one of the conjectured features of quantum-gravity foam, the experiments that have the best sensitivity are the ones which were originally devised for searches of the classical-physics phenomenon of gravity waves. In experiments searching for classical gravity waves the presence of space-time fluctuations would introduce a source of noise just like the ordinary (non-gravitational) quantum properties of the photons composing the laser beam used in interferometry introduce a source of noise. Earlier studies of the noise induced by quantum properties of space-time have shown that certain simple pictures of fluctuations of space-time occuring genuinely at the Planck scale would lead to an observably large effect. Experimentalists would benefit from the guidance of detailed description of this noise, but quantum-gravity theories are not yet developed to the point of allowing such detailed analysis of physical processes. I propose a new phenomenological approach to the description of foam-induced noise.
A dynamic motion pattern analysis approach to fall detection

In this paper we present our work on human body movement analysis, especially on fall detection. We have developed a reliable dynamic motion pattern analysis algorithm to detect fall situation. The algorithm works on the digital signal output from waist-mounted accelerometry. It first filters noisy components with a Gaussian filter; secondly sets up a 3D body motion model which relates various body postures to the outputs of accelerometry; finally a dynamic detection process is applied to make decision. Experiments were done on 40 cases mimicking various body movements. Our approach gave right judgements in all cases. Our work is an important part of elder care and rehabilitation.
In-solution hybrid capture of bisulfite-converted DNA for targeted bisulfite sequencing of 174 ADME genes

DNA methylation is one of the most important epigenetic alterations involved in the control of gene expression. Bisulfite sequencing of genomic DNA is currently the only method to study DNA methylation patterns at single-nucleotide resolution. Hence, next-generation sequencing of bisulfite-converted DNA is the method of choice to investigate DNA methylation profiles at the genome-wide scale. Nevertheless, whole genome sequencing for analysis of human methylomes is expensive, and a method for targeted gene analysis would provide a good alternative in many cases where the primary interest is restricted to a set of genes. Here, we report the successful use of a custom Agilent SureSelect Target Enrichment system for the hybrid capture of bisulfite-converted DNA. We prepared bisulfite-converted next-generation sequencing libraries, which are enriched for the coding and regulatory regions of 174 ADME genes (i.e. genes involved in the metabolism and distribution of drugs). Sequencing of these libraries on Illumina’s HiSeq2000 revealed that the method allows a reliable quantification of methylation levels of CpG sites in the selected genes, and validation of the method using pyrosequencing and the Illumina 450K methylation BeadChips revealed good concordance.
Applying XML-based technologies to developing online courses: the case of a prototype learning environment

Purpose – This paper seeks to describe XML technologies and to show how they can be applied for developing web‐based courses and supporting authors who do not have much experience with the preparation of web‐based courses.Design/methodology/approach – When developing online courses the academic staff has to address the following problem – how to keep pace with the ever‐changing technology. Using XML technologies helps to develop a learning environment which can be useful for academics when designing web‐based courses, preparing the materials and then reusing them.Findings – The paper discusses the benefits of using XML for developing computer‐based courses. The task of introducing new versions of existing courses can be reduced to editing appropriate XML files without any need for program change and an author can perform this task easily from a computer connected to the internet. What is more – using XML makes it possible to reuse data in different teaching situations.Research limitations/implications – T.
Video-to-text information fusion evaluation for level 5 user refinement

Video-to-Text (V2T) fusion is an example of coordinating low-level information fusion (LLIF) with high-level information fusion (HLIF) through semantic descriptions of physical information. Using hard (e.g., video) and soft (i.e., text) data fusion affords Level 5 User Refinement of object characterization, target tracking, and situation assessment. Building on our previous video-to-text (V2T) Fusion2014 paper, we extend the method for evaluation of eight tracking methods compared for extraction of semantic information including target number, category, attribute, and direction. Using the CMUSphinx speech-to-text system for semantic parsing of user call-outs, preliminary results show the integration of video tracking and text analysis is better with the compressive tracker (CT) and the Tracking-Learning-Detection (TLD) method. The feature analysis of the CT and TLD demonstrate the ability to associate user call-out text-based semantic descriptors with video exploitation. The results are presented in a visualization tool for rapid production to aid user refinement (HLIF) and object assessment (LLIF) functions.
Optimizing Inventory in a Multi-Echelon Multi-Item Supply Chain with Time-Based Customer Service Level Agreements

We present a continuous-review inventory model for tactical planning in a multi-item, multi-echelon service parts distribution system with time-based service level requirements. Our goal is to determine base stock levels for all items at all locations so that the service level agreements are met at minimum investment. We present exact time-based fill rate expressions for each item and efficient methods for their computation. We develop a greedy algorithm to find near-optimal solutions to largescale problems quickly and a Lagrangian-based approach that provides near-optimal solutions and good lower bounds with increased computational effort.
A novel method for identifying polymorphic transposable elements via scanning of high-throughput short reads

Identification of polymorphic transposable elements (TEs) is important because TE polymorphism creates genetic diversity and influences the function of genes in the host genome. However, de novo scanning of polymorphic TEs remains a challenge. Here, we report a novel computational method, called PTEMD (polymorphic TEs and their movement detection), for de novo discovery of genome-wide polymorphic TEs. PTEMD searches highly identical sequences using reads supported breakpoint evidences. Using PTEMD, we identified 14 polymorphic TE families (905 sequences) in rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, and 68 (10,618 sequences) in maize. We validated one polymorphic TE family experimentally, MoTE-1; all MoTE-1 family members are located in different genomic loci in the three tested isolates. We found that 57.1% (8 of 14) of the PTEMD-detected polymorphic TE families in M. oryzae are active. Furthermore, our data indicate that there are more polymorphic DNA transposons in maize than their counterparts of retrotransposons despite the fact that retrotransposons occupy largest fraction of genomic mass. We demonstrated that PTEMD is an effective tool for identifying polymorphic TEs in M. oryzae and maize genomes. PTEMD and the genome-wide polymorphic TEs in M. oryzae and maize are publically available at http://www.kanglab. cn/blast/PTEMD_V1. 02.htm.
Design of State Diagram Facilities in Sced Design of State Diagram Facilities in Sced Design of State Diagram Facilities in Sced

Various possibilities to support the automated construction of state diagrams of the OMT method are considered. The proposed facilities are planned to be included in a prototype environment whose basic components are editors for scenarios and state diagrams. The considered support covers automatic means for synthesizing a state diagram on the basis of scenarios, for making the state diagramas compact as possible, for determininga satisfactory layout for the state diagram, and for maintainingconsistency between scenarios and state diagrams. The prototype environment| called SCED| currently supports editing of scenarios and automatic synthesis of state diagrams.
The Delft Reconfigurable VLIW Processor

In this paper, we present the rationale and design of the Delft reconfigurable and parameterized VLIW processor called ρ-VEX. Its architecture is based on the Lx/ST200 ISA developed by HP and STMicroelectronics. We implemented the processor on an FPGA as an open-source softcore and made it freely available. Using the ρ-VEX, we intend to bridge the gap between general-purpose and application-specific processing through parameterization of many architectural and organizational features of the processor. The parameters include: instruction set (number and type of supported instructions), the number and type of functional units (FUs), issue-width (number of slots), register file size, memory bandwidth. The parameters can be set in a static or dynamic manner in order to provide the best performance or the best utilization of available resources on the FPGA. A complete toolchain including a C compiler and a simulator is freely available. Any application written in C can be mapped to the ρ-VEX processor. This VLIW processor is able to exploit the instruction level parallelism (ILP) inherent in an application and make its execution faster compared to a RISC processor system. This project creates research opportunities in the domain of softcore embedded VLIW processor prototyping, as well as designs that can be used in high-performance applications.
Integrating Cadence SMV in the Verification of UML Software

The Unified Modeling Language has been widely used in software development. Verifying that a UML model meets the required properties has become a key issue. The verification gives us the opportunity to remove errors, inconsistencies, and misconceptions in the very early stages of software development. Model checking is an important technology of automatic formal verification to ensure the correctness of design specifications. The discussion mainly focuses on the use of Cadence SMV in the design of software systems in UML. In this paper, we present a translation template for UML state charts and for UML protocol conformance into CSMV.