Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The importance of early intervention

Upon entering kindergarten, most children have acquired an amazingly sophisticated level of language competence that allows them to comprehend and produce complex discourse that was impossible just a few years earlier. For example, a typical 6-year-old child can listen to a fairy tale and grasp the protagonist's dilemma, understand the plot of a Disney movie, and learn the rules of a board game as a parent reads the directions aloud. At this age, children can also engage in extended conversations with others, taking turns and expressing original thoughts in sentences that are largely free of phonological, syntactic, morphological, and lexical errors. They also show their awareness of other peoples' perspectives by performing such tasks as embellishing personal anecdotes to entertain their listeners, employing politeness markers to persuade their parents to purchase a new puppy, or explaining to a younger sibling how to operate an electronic toy. Their preliteracy skills are similarly impressive as they identify the rhyming words in a poem, find all the words on a page that start with a certain fricative, recite the alphabet, and pretend to read bedtime stories to their stuffed animals. With this level of linguistic sophistication, the typical &year-old child is
A Coordinate Descent Method for Robust Matrix Factorization and Applications

Matrix factorization methods are widely used for extracting latent factors for low rank matrix completion and rating prediction problems arising in recommender systems of on-line retailers. Most of the existing models are based on L2 fidelity (quadratic functions of factorization error). In this work, a coordinate descent (CD) method is developed for matrix factorization under L1 fidelity so that the related minimization is done one variable at a time and the factorization error is sparsely distributed. In low rank random matrix completion and rating prediction of MovieLens-100k datasets, the CDL1 method shows remarkable stability and accuracy under gross corruption of training (observation) data while the L2 fidelity based methods rapidly deteriorate. A closed form analytical solution is found for the one-dimensional L1-fidelity subproblem, and is used as a building block of CDL1 algorithm whose convergence is analyzed. The connection with the well-known convex method, the robust principal component analysis (RPCA), is made. A comparison with RPCA on recovering low rank Gaussian matrices under sparse and independent Gaussian noise shows that CDL1 maintains accuracy at much lower sampling ratios (from much fewer observed entries) than that for RPCA.
The Ghetto of Exclusion and the Fortified Enclave

Three key developments are described: (a) the transformation of the earlier racial ghettos into excluded ghettos, class/racial ghettos of the excluded and abandoned, resulting from a combination of hyperpauperization and racism; (b) a qualitatively new phase of the totalizing suburb, in which “edge cities” are created combining residential, business, social, and cultural areas that are removed from older central cities and overlaid on earlier patterns of suburbanization, representing a dramatic and expanded form of the exclusionary enclave; and (c) the parallel transformation of luxury and upper-class residences (and, increasingly, businesses and social and cultural facilities—thus similarly totalizing) into separate areas, appropriately called fortified citadels, each again separated from the other parts of the city by social, economic, and often physical barriers. The three developments are intimately connected with each other and mutually reinforcing.
What Facial Appearance Reveals Over Time: When Perceived Expressions in Neutral Faces Reveal Stable Emotion Dispositions

It might seem a reasonable assumption that when we are not actively using our faces to express ourselves (i.e., when we display nonexpressive, or neutral faces), those around us will not be able to read our emotions. Herein, using a variety of expression-related ratings, we examined whether age-related changes in the face can accurately reveal one’s innermost affective dispositions. In each study, we found that expressive ratings of neutral facial displays predicted self-reported positive/negative dispositional affect, but only for elderly women, and only for positive affect. These findings meaningfully replicate and extend earlier work examining age-related emotion cues in the face of elderly women (Malatesta et al., 1987a). We discuss these findings in light of evidence that women are expected to, and do, smile more than men, and that the quality of their smiles predicts their life satisfaction. Although ratings of old male faces did not significantly predict self-reported affective dispositions, the trend was similar to that found for old female faces. A plausible explanation for this gender difference is that in the process of attenuating emotional expressions over their lifetimes, old men reveal less evidence of their total emotional experiences in their faces than do old women.
Relationship of Human Toenail Nicotine, Cotinine, and 4-(Methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-Pyridyl)-1-Butanol to Levels of These Biomarkers in Plasma and Urine

Recently, we developed sensitive and quantitative methods for analysis of the biomarkers of tobacco smoke exposure nicotine, cotinine, and 4-(methylnitrosamino)-1-(3-pyridyl)-1-butanol (NNAL) in human toenails. In this study, we further evaluated the newly developed toenail biomarkers by investigating their relationship to demographic factors, reported exposure, plasma nicotine, cotinine, and trans-3′-hydroxycotinine, and urinary NNAL. Toenails of 105 smokers, mean age 38.9 years (range, 19-68), were analyzed. Fifty-five (53.4%) were male, with approximately equal numbers of Whites and African-Americans. The average number of cigarettes smoked per day was 18 (range, 5-50). There was no effect of age or gender on the toenail biomarkers. Toenail NNAL was higher in White than in African-American participants (P = 0.019). Toenail nicotine and toenail cotinine correlated significantly with cigarettes smoked per day (r = 0.24; P = 0.015 and r = 0.26; P = 0.009, respectively). Toenail nicotine correlated with plasma nicotine (r = 0.39; P < 0.001); toenail cotinine correlated with plasma cotinine (r = 0.45; P < 0.001) and plasma trans-3′-hydroxycotinine (r = 0.30; P = 0.008); and toenail NNAL correlated with urine NNAL (r = 0.53; P = 0.005). The results of this study provide essential validation data for the use of toenail biomarkers in investigations of the role of chronic tobacco smoke exposure in human cancer. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2007;16(7):1382–6)
Enhanced pulmonary and active skeletal muscle gas exchange during intense exercise after sprint training in men

1 This study investigated the effects of 7 weeks of sprint training on gas exchange across the lungs and active skeletal muscle during and following maximal cycling exercise in eight healthy males. 2 Pulmonary oxygen uptake (V̇O2) and carbon dioxide output (V̇CO2) were measured before and after training during incremental exercise (n= 8) and during and in recovery from a maximal 30 s sprint exercise bout by breath‐by‐breath analysis (n= 6). To determine gas exchange by the exercising leg muscles, brachial arterial and femoral venous blood O2 and CO2 contents and lactate concentration were measured at rest, during the final 10 s of exercise and during 10 min of recovery. 3 Training increased (P < 0.05) the maximal incremental exercise values of ventilation (V̇E, by 15.7 ± 7.1%), V̇CO2 (by 9.3 ± 2.1%) and V̇O2 (by 15.0 ± 4.2%). Sprint exercise peak power (3.9 ± 1.0% increase) and cumulative 30 s work (11.7 ± 2.8% increase) were increased and fatigue index was reduced (by −9.2 ± 1.5%) after training (P < 0.05). The highest V̇E, V̇CO2 and V̇O2 values attained during sprint exercise were not significantly changed after training, but a significant (P < 0.05) training effect indicated increased V̇E(by 19.2 ± 7.9%), V̇CO2(by 9.3 ± 2.1%) and V̇O2(by 12.7 ± 6.5%), primarily reflecting elevated post‐exercise values after training. 4 Arterial O2 and CO2 contents were lower after training, by respective mean differences of 3.4 and 21.9 ml l−1 (P < 0.05), whereas the arteriovenous O2 and CO2 content differences and the respiratory exchange ratio across the leg were unchanged by training. 5 Arterial whole blood lactate concentration and the net lactate release by exercising muscle were unchanged by training. 6 The greater peak pulmonary V̇O2 and V̇CO2 with sprint exercise, the increased maximal incremental values, unchanged arterial blood lactate concentration and greater sprint performance all point strongly towards enhanced gas exchange across the lungs and in active muscles after sprint training. Enhanced aerobic metabolism after sprint training may contribute to reduced fatigability during maximal exercise, whilst greater pulmonary CO2 output may improve acid‐base control after training.
Use of NK cell activity in cure by transplant

Analogous to T cells, Natural Killer (NK) cells may facilitate engraftment, combat infection, and control cancer in bone marrow or haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT); however, NK cells do not cause graft‐versus‐host disease. Killer immunoglobulin‐like receptors (KIRs) regulate NK cell function, and recent data suggest that KIR is as important as its ligand (human leucocyte antigen; HLA) in HSCT for both malignant and non‐malignant conditions. Because there is substantial variability in KIR gene content, allelic polymorphism, and cell‐surface expression among people, careful selection of donors based on HLA and KIR is essential to optimize HSCT outcomes. Furthermore, NK cells may be used for adoptive immunotherapy after HSCT in place of conventional donor lymphocyte infusion, as part of pre‐transplant cytoreductive therapy, or as an independent therapeutic agent in high‐risk leukaemia in place of sibling donor HSCT.
Disease monitoring and biosecurity

Understanding and detecting diseases of amphibians has become vitally import-ant in conservation and ecological studies in the twenty- ﬁ rst century. Disease is deﬁ ned as the deviance from normal conditions in an organism. The etiologies (causes) of disease include infectious, toxic, traumatic, metabolic, and neoplas-tic agents. Thus, monitoring disease in nature can be complex. For amphib-ians, infectious, parasitic, and toxic etiologies have gained the most notoriety. Amphibian diseases have been linked to declining amphibian populations, are a constant threat to endangered species, and are frequently a hazard in captive breeding programs, translocations, and repatriations. For example, a group of viruses belonging to the genus
Distribution-free Evolvability of Vector Spaces: All it takes is a Generating Set

In Valiant's model of evolution, a class of representations is evolvable iff a polynomial-time process of random mutations guided by selection converges with high probability to a representation as $\epsilon$-close as desired from the optimal one, for any required $\epsilon>0$. Several previous positive results exist that can be related to evolving a vector space, but each former result imposes restrictions either on (re)initialisations, distributions, performance functions and/or the mutator. In this paper, we show that all it takes to evolve a complete normed vector space is merely a set that generates the space. Furthermore, it takes only $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ steps and it is essentially strictly monotonic, agnostic and handles target drifts that rival some proven in fairly restricted settings. In the context of the model, we bring to the fore new results not documented previously. Evolution appears to occur in a mean-divergence model reminiscent of Markowitz mean-variance model for portfolio selection, and the risk-return efficient frontier of evolution shows an interesting pattern: when far from the optimum, the mutator always has access to mutations close to the efficient frontier. Toy experiments in supervised and unsupervised learning display promising directions for this scheme to be used as a (new) provable gradient-free stochastic optimisation algorithm.
Serotonin excitation of facial motoneurons: Receptor subtype characterization

The receptor subtype (s) mediating the enhancement of facial motoneuron exctitability by serotonin (5‐HT) was evaluated by means of single‐cell recording in vivo (in the anesthetized rat) and in vitro in brain slices. In vivo, microiontophoretic application of the broad‐spectrum 5‐HT1 agonist 5‐carboxamidotryptamine (5‐CT), the 5‐HT2/5‐HT1c agonist 1‐[2,5‐demethoxy‐4‐methylphenyl]‐2‐aminopropane (DOM), but not the selective 5‐HT1A agonist 8‐OH‐2[di‐n‐propylamino]tetralin (8‐OH‐DPAT), produced a 5‐HT‐like enhancement of facial motoneuron excitability. Intravenous administration of the 5‐HT2/ 5‐HT1c antagonists ritanserin and LY 53857 in vivo blocked the facilitatory effects of 5‐HT and DOM, but not norepinephrine (NE). Similarly, in brain slices, bath application of ritanserin blocked the effects of 5‐HT, DOM, and 5‐CT, but not NE on facial motoneurons. Intracellular recordings showed that DOM induced a slow depolarization and an increase in evoked spikes, but these effects were of lesser magnitude and longer duration than those produced by 5‐HT. Taken together these result indicate a a role for 5‐HT2 and/or 5‐HT1c but not 5‐HT1A receptors in serotonergic enhancement of facial motoneuron excitability since 5‐HTs effect was (1) at least partially mimicked by the selective 5‐HT2/5‐HTlc agonist DOM, (2) mimicked by the broad‐spectrum 5‐HT1 agonist 5‐CT but not the selective 5‐HTlA agonist 8‐OH‐DPAT, and (3) blocked by the 5‐HT2/5‐HT1c antagonists ritanserin and LY 53857.
Global motion estimation based on SIFT feature match for digital image stabilization

This paper proposes a global motion estimation method based on SIFT feature match according to the characteristics and requirements of digital image stabilization. This method proceeds by using multi-block when extracting key points, followed by in-block match selection using reverse match, and finally inter-block match selection using angle invariance of similarity transformation. The experimental results show that this method with low complexity and high accuracy can achieve good performance dealing with variety of videos, and is proved useful in digital image stabilization technology.
Soft Biometrics; Human Identification Using Comparative Descriptions

Soft biometrics are a new form of biometric identification which use physical or behavioral traits that can be naturally described by humans. Unlike other biometric approaches, this allows identification based solely on verbal descriptions, bridging the semantic gap between biometrics and human description. To permit soft biometric identification the description must be accurate, yet conventional human descriptions comprising of absolute labels and estimations are often unreliable. A novel method of obtaining human descriptions will be introduced which utilizes comparative categorical labels to describe differences between subjects. This innovative approach has been shown to address many problems associated with absolute categorical labels-most critically, the descriptions contain more objective information and have increased discriminatory capabilities. Relative measurements of the subjects' traits can be inferred from comparative human descriptions using the Elo rating system. The resulting soft biometric signatures have been demonstrated to be robust and allow accurate recognition of subjects. Relative measurements can also be obtained from other forms of human representation. This is demonstrated using a support vector machine to determine relative measurements from gait biometric signatures-allowing retrieval of subjects from video footage by using human comparisons, bridging the semantic gap.
Modulating Attentional Load Affects Numerosity Estimation: Evidence against a Pre-Attentive Subitizing Mechanism

Traditionally, the visual enumeration of a small number of items (1 to about 4), referred to as subitizing, has been thought of as a parallel and pre-attentive process and functionally different from the serial attentive enumeration of larger numerosities. We tested this hypothesis by employing a dual task paradigm that systematically manipulated the attentional resources available to an enumeration task. Enumeration accuracy for small numerosities was severely decreased as more attentional resources were taken away from the numerical task, challenging the traditionally held notion of subitizing as a pre-attentive, capacity-independent process. Judgement of larger numerosities was also affected by dual task conditions and attentional load. These results challenge the proposal that small numerosities are enumerated by a mechanism separate from large numerosities and support the idea of a single, attention-demanding enumeration mechanism.
An efficient public-key attribute-based broadcast encryption scheme allowing arbitrary access policies

We describe a new public-key and provably secure attribute-based broadcast encryption scheme which supports complex access policies with AND, OR and NOT gates. Our scheme, especially targetting the implemention of efficient Pay-TV systems, can handle conjunctions of disjunctions by construction and disjunctions of conjunctions by concatenation, which are the most general forms of Boolean expressions. It is based on a modification of the Boneh-Gentry-Waters broadcast encryption scheme in order to achieve attribute collusion resistance and to support complex Boolean access policies. The security of our scheme is proven in the generic model of groups with pairings. Finally, we compare our scheme to several other Attribute-based Broadcast Encryption designs, both in terms of bandwidth requirements and implementation costs.
Clobazam for the Treatment of Intractable Epilepsy in Children

We describe our experience using clobazam, examining efficacy for individual seizure types and analyzing for factors contributing to initial and sustained response. We retrospectively reviewed medical charts of children treated with clobazam. We collected patient and treatment characteristics and compared response to therapy at 6, 12, and >12 months’ duration. One hundred eight patients with a variety of seizure types and etiologies of epilepsy were treated. Response rates for >50% seizure reduction were 59%, 39%, and 30% of patients at 6, 12, and >12 months’ therapy, respectively. No seizure type responded more favorably and there were no patient predictors of favorable response. Patients tended to respond early and at low dosing, and half the patients maintained this response for 15 months or more. Clobazam has efficacy against a wide spectrum of seizure types and epilepsy etiologies. An early, low-dose response is a favorable indicator for sustained response.
Genetic studies of germinal mosaicism in Drosophila melanogaster using the mutable wc gene.

HE process of gonad differentiation and germ cell renewal in higher meta-zoans is a useful piece of information. Its usefulness extends from medical counselling where it can be used to determine the recurrence risks for gonadal mosaics (HARTL 1970) to evolutionary biology in which it enters into the equa-tions for describing the probability of survival of a newly mutant gene (FISHER 1930). Two general experimental approaches have been used to elucidate this process, a cytological approach and a purely genetic approach ( HANNAH-ALAVA 1965). In order to be effective the cytological approach requires that some morphological difference exist between the germ cells and the associated apical or synergistic cells. This is often the case, and as a consequence a substantial amount of cytological observation is available throughout the animal kingdom from arthropods to vertebrates. On the other hand, the cytological studies are of limited value because the identification of a germ cell depends on its morphology, not its function, and the possibility cannot be excluded that some of the “germ cells” may never undergo gametogenesis. The genetic approach to gonadogenesis and germ cell renewal has as its main method brood-pattern studies among the progeny of individuals who are gonadal mosaics for point mutations or chromosome aberrations. This procedure depends for the most part on the induction of new mutations and hence conclusions based on it must include reservations about the possibility of differential viability between mutant and nonmutant cells. brood-pattern sufficiently high individual studied will have had at least one sufficiently low that very few had more than mutation One genetic the recently discovered
Investigating the emergence themes of cyberbullying phenomenon: A grounded theory approach

This paper focuses on the emergence factors and themes that surfaced as result of cyberbullying activities among adolescents in Malaysia that have never been reported prior to this one. The actual research attempted to fill the knowledge gap in cyberbullying phenomenon by focusing on factors that contribute to its activities among adolescents in Malaysia. In addition, the research seeks to understand the antecedents and the contexts and prevailing conditions that influence it, as well as the phenomenon, the coping strategies and the consequences resulting from the coping strategies. Using a grounded theory methodology, in-depth interviews were conducted on adolescents aged between 12 to 18 years from different schools in the state of Perlis. The data were analyzed using NVivo 10 by methodically coding and categorizing the data in open, axial and selective coding to arrive at a model development. A paradigm model will be obtained based on informants' individual comments and experiences which uniquely contribute to the body of knowledge on cyberbullying phenomenon in Malaysia. The involved elements derived from the model are; the antecedents of cyberbullying; the phenomenon; the coping strategies by informants and the consequences resulting from these strategies. The significance of this study lies in its attempt to provide a working framework for reducing adolescents' technology abuse that will eventually lead to cyberbullying and to find solutions for adolescents to tackle cyberbullying problems if it ever happened. This study is hoped to benefit all the parties: adolescents, parents, teachers, and other stakeholders to minimize adolescents' cyberbullying phenomenon. At a time when most adolescents are exposed to cyber bullying around the world, this research is both timely and necessary.
Famous Faces as Icons. The Illusion of Being an Expert in the Recognition of Famous Faces

It is a common belief that we are experts in the processing of famous faces. Although our ability to quickly and accurately recognise pictures of famous faces is quite impressive, we might not really process famous faces as faces per se, but as ‘icons’ or famous still pictures of famous faces. This assumption was tested in two parallel experiments employing a recognition task on famous, but personally unfamiliar, and on personally familiar faces. Both tests included (a) original, ‘iconic’ pictures, (b) slightly modified versions of familiar pictures, and (c) rather unfamiliar pictures of familiar persons. Participants (n = 70 + 70) indeed recognised original pictures of famous and personally familiar people very accurately, while performing poorly in recognising slightly modified, as well as unfamiliar versions of famous, but not personally familiar persons. These results indicate that the successful processing of famous faces may depend on icons imbued in society but not on the face as such.