Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of work conditions in a pasta manufacturing plant with particular consideration of dustiness.

OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was evaluation of work conditions in a pasta manufacturing plant, including: physical and psychological load and factors of material work environment. The main aim was determination of the level of employees' exposure to our dust. METHODS Studies of work conditions were conducted in a our processing plant in the Lublin region at the workplace of an automatic production line - operator of the noodle production line, employees packaging pasta, and the manual line - employees responsible for the kneading of dough, cutter operators, and employees engaged in packaging. Energy expenditure, static load and monotony of the movements performed were assessed as a part of the physical load. Mental effort and monotony of work were assessed as a part of psychological load. Measurements of dustiness, noise, microclimate and lighting were performed according to the Polish standards and regulations in effect. Dust concentrations at work were carried out in the respiratory zone of workers while performing work activities at individual workplaces. Measurements of weight concentrations were carried out in series for individual workplaces, and covered the measurements of concentrations of individual fractions of dust deposited in the sections of the airways (inhaled, thoracic and alveolar). RESULTS The evaluation of work conditions, which covered physical and psychological load and factors of the material occupational environment, showed that their values did not exceed the allowable values contained in respective standards. While kneading dough on the manual line, the highest concentrations of dust were observed of inhaled, thoracic and respirable fractions (12.96 mg/m(3); 3.09 mg/m(3); and 0.18 mg/m(3), respectively), whereas the lowest - at the workplace of an operator of an automatic packer (0.39 mg/m(3); 0.14 mg/m(3); and 0.03 mg/m(3)). At the workplace of an automatic packer the MAC values for inhaled dust were exceeded. At the remaining workplaces on the manual line, and all workplaces on the automatic line, the MAC values for inhaled and respirable dust were not exceeded.
AHP Supported Evaluation of LMS Quality

Learning Management System (LMS) provides a platform for an on-line learning environment by enabling the management, delivery, and tracking of the learning process and learners. Selection of the most suitable method is usually prolonged by the time and effort consuming evaluations of numerous features of LMS. To reduce the number of features and at the same obtain a reliable result from an evaluation, we propose a decomposition of this complex problem to more easily comprehended subproblems that can be analyzed independently through a multi-criteria method called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). To verify the approach, an expert is asked to use AHP on an originally developed reduced hierarchy of the problem of selecting the most appropriate LMS for the student target group. Results of the application are compared with the results obtained by the DEXi multicriteria model.
Phonological working memory and sentence comprehension in preschool children

This study investigates -whether phonological working memory is associated with preschool children's sentence comprehension ability. Thirty-four subjects aged between four and four and a half years old participated in tw T o tasks. The subjects repeated nonwords of various length [an index of phonological working memory (Baddeley, 1986)] in the first task. In the second task, subjects comprehended four types of sentences: (i) redundant-reversible, (ii) redundant-nonreversible, (iii) nonredundant-reversible, and (iv) nonredundanf-nonreversible. A Pearson product-moment analysis was computed and results showed that subjects' performance in the nonword repetition task was positively correlated with their comprehension of sentence types (i), (ii) and (iii). No significant correlation was found between subjects 1 performance in nonword repetition and type (iv) sentence comprehension. The possible mechanisms by which phonological working memory skills are linked to the comprehension of the different types of sentence are discussed.
eview hat are the specific vs . generalized effects of drugs of abuse on europsychological performance ? aria

Most substance abusers simultaneously use and abuse more than one substance, even when there is a clear drug of choice. This pattern creates a great challenge in relating neuropsychological findings in drug users to a certain drug. This review aims to: (i) discuss results from neuropsychological studies using different research methodologies that may improve our understanding of specific vs. generalized effects of different drugs on neuropsychological performance; and (ii) determine which neuropsychological mechanisms are impaired in the same way by the use of different drugs, and which impairments are specific to certain substances, including cannabis, psychostimulants, opioids and alcohol. We review evidence from human studies in chronic substance abusers using three methodologies: (i) studies on ‘pure’ users of one particular substance, (ii) studies that methodologically control the effects of drugs co-abused, and (iii) studies contrasting subgroups of polysubstance users with different drugs of choice. Converging evidence from these approaches indicates that all the drugs studied are commonly associated with significant alterations in the neuropsychological domains of episodic memory, emotional processing, and the executive components of updating and decision-making. However, there is evidence of a greater reliability in the association of certain substances with specific neuropsychological domains. Specifically, there are relatively more robust effects of psychostimulants and alcohol use on impulsive action and cognitive flexibility, of alcohol and MDMA use on spatial processing, perceptual speed and selective attention, cannabis and methamphetamine on prospective memory deficits, and cannabis and MDMA on processing speed and complex planning. The magnitude of both generalized and specific neuropsychological effects is overall attenuated in samples achieving long-term abstinence, but there are persistent psychostimulant-related effects on updating, inhibition, flexibility and emotional processing, and opioid-related effects on updating and decision-making. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
TRPC3 contributes to regulation of cardiac contractility and arrhythmogenesis by dynamic interaction with NCX1

Aim TRPC3 is a non-selective cation channel, which forms a Ca2+ entry pathway involved in cardiac remodelling. Our aim was to analyse acute electrophysiological and contractile consequences of TRPC3 activation in the heart. Methods and results We used a murine model of cardiac TRPC3 overexpression and a novel TRPC3 agonist, GSK1702934A, to uncover (patho)physiological functions of TRPC3. GSK1702934A induced a transient, non-selective conductance and prolonged action potentials in TRPC3-overexpressing myocytes but lacked significant electrophysiological effects in wild-type myocytes. GSK1702934A transiently enhanced contractility and evoked arrhythmias in isolated Langendorff hearts from TRPC3-overexpressing but not wild-type mice. Interestingly, pro-arrhythmic effects outlasted TRPC3 current activation, were prevented by enhanced intracellular Ca2+ buffering, and suppressed by the NCX inhibitor 3′,4′-dichlorobenzamil hydrochloride. GSK1702934A substantially promoted NCX currents in TRPC3-overexpressing myocytes. The TRPC3-dependent electrophysiologic, pro-arrhythmic, and inotropic actions of GSK1702934A were mimicked by angiotensin II (AngII). Immunocytochemistry demonstrated colocalization of TRPC3 with NCX1 and disruption of local interaction upon channel activation by either GSK1702934A or AngII. Conclusion Cardiac TRPC3 mediates Ca2+ and Na+ entry in proximity of NCX1, thereby elevating cellular Ca2+ levels and contractility. Excessive activation of TRPC3 is associated with transient cellular Ca2+ overload, spatial uncoupling between TRPC3 and NCX1, and arrhythmogenesis. We propose TRPC3-NCX micro/nanodomain communication as determinant of cardiac contractility and susceptibility to arrhythmogenic stimuli.
Correctness proofs of distributed termination algorithms

The problem of correctness of the solutions to the distributed termination problem of Francez [7] is addressed. Correctness criteria are formalized in the customary framework for program correctness. A very simple proof method is proposed and applied to show correctness of a solution to the problem. It allows us to reason about liveness properties of temporal logic (see, e.g., Manna and Pnueli [12]) using a new notion of weak total correctness.
Building an Ethical Culture in the Post-Bureaucratic Era: Empowerment, Dialogue, and Virtue

The purpose of this chapter is to propose a framework for achieving an ethical culture in the post-bureaucratic era. The authors emphasize the necessity of informal dialogue and employee empowerment, and examine the role that personal values have in the post-bureaucratic work environment. Next, this chapter explores the appraisal of personal values and asserts that modern organizations will need similar strategies in order to identify and develop an effective ethical culture. The last portion of this chapter addresses three employee virtues that are helpful in the design and implementation of an ethical culture. Over and above appraising the values of an organization, this chapter provides a modern account for the definition of values and discusses methods for appraising each virtue while also proposing some alternatives for measuring employee loyalty, integrity and perseverance.
Toward efficient, privacy-aware media classification on public databases

The ability to search databases by providing multimedia examples of voices, faces, or locations instead of textual descriptions can be tremendously useful. At the same time, uploading media for queries---especially media that contains sensitive content---means sharing private information with a potentially untrusted service provider. The growing field of privacy-preserving database searches attempts to resolve this tension. Within this scope of private searches, private media classification and retrieval is particularly challenging due to the inherent inexactness of recognition; to be useful, image or other media classification systems must identify approximate matches rather than just exact ones. This is difficult to reconcile with distortion-intolerant and resource-heavy privacy primitives, especially in web-scale databases. In this paper, we present an architecture for media classification on public databases that preserves client privacy while achieving asymptotic communication and computation costs that are sublinear in the size of the database. We demonstrate the usefulness of this architecture in the context of a privacy-preserving face recognition system. We observe order-of-magnitude speedups over state-of-the-art private face recognition systems.
Time-leverage point detection for time sensitive software maintenance

Correct real-time behavior is an important aspect for time sensitive software, but it is difficult to get right. Time faults can be introduced not just during software development but also maintenance. So software maintainers without time information tend to have more chances to introduce unintended time behaviors. In this paper, we propose time change impact analysis to help maintainers estimate the potential influence of time changes on programs before the software evolves. Our main insight is that by being reminded and warned that a small-time change at some places in the source code will largely affect the whole task execution time, maintainers can be more cautious when updating such places. Because these places have a leverage effect that multiplies the task execution time in a subtle way, we call them time-leverage points. We give an approach to detect the time-leverage points based on a dynamic testing method, which instruments the program at a point for introducing a small delay and observes its impact on the task execution time. We implement a prototype tool and empirically evaluate the approach.
Breast, colon, and prostate screening in the adult population of Croatia: does rural origin matter?

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to investigate the utilization of breast, colon and prostate cancer screening in the adult Croatian population in a period without national cancer screening programs, with a special interest in respondents' rural versus urban origin. METHODS Self-reported screening utilization was investigated in the Croatian Adult Health Survey, which collected health-related information from a representative sample of the adult Croatian population. Breast cancer screening was investigated in women aged over 40 years, while colon and prostate screening was investigated in respondents aged over 50 years. The data were analysed using binary logistic regression. RESULTS One in five women reported breast cancer screening uptake in the year preceding the survey (22.5%), while only 4.5% reported a colon screening. A total of 6.1% men reported colon screening, while 13.7% of men reported having a prostate cancer screening. Respondents with rural origin reported all sites screening utilization less frequently than those of urban origin (breast: 14.5% vs 27.4%; prostate: 9.6% vs 16.3%; colon-men: 5.7% vs 6.3%; colon-women: 3.6% vs 5.1%; respectively). Multivariable models indicated that people with higher socio-economic status more commonly reported breast and prostate cancer screening uptake. Access to health care was the only independent variable associated with colon cancer screening in men, and the strongest variable associated with colon cancer screening in women. Rural origin was associated only with lower odds of breast screening (adjusted odds ratio 0.60 [95% confidence interval 0.48-0.74]), while in the remaining models, rural origin was not a significant predictor for cancer screening uptake. CONCLUSIONS Opportunistic cancer screening uptake is low in the Croatian adult population, with existing socio-economic differences in breast and prostate screening, and their absence in colon cancer screening. Rural origin was significantly associated with breast screening, even after adjustment to socioeconomic status and problems in access to health care. Lack of rural origin significance in the other screening sites could be related to small sample sizes of people who reported opportunistic utilization. Overall, access to health care is the strongest cancer screening predictor, and this should have a prominent role in the development of a systematic cancer screening program on a national level.
Critical social pedagogy : Colliding with neo-liberal education management

This paper reports research conducted by the Research Centre for Learning and Social Transformation. Our work on workbased learning (WBL) reframes the dualism of higher education and vocational education and training within a critical social pedagogy framework. In implementing WBL we are aware of the epistemological and historical backgrounds of workbased learning and the tensions between competing interests embedded in it. Some of these backgrounds will be explored briefly to position our view on WBL within broader educational debates. The paper argues that two main forces, economic responsiveness and critical social pedagogy form an integral, historic part of WBL. The specific expression of these debates in our application will be described as principles of ethical practice and quality education developed in the Graduate Diploma of Social Sciences (Community Services). Introduction From schools to universities, the inclusion of work in institutionalised learning processes is seen as a major advance towards a more economically viable output (ie. employable school leavers and graduates). Consequently, ‘workbased learning’ and its more limited sibling ‘workplace learning ’are emerging as the latest innovations throughout the education system. In higher education, WBL can be seen as a strategy to break down barriers between vocational and academic education and as an opportunity to improve access to higher education. Hand in hand with ‘seamless’ education and recognition of prior learning, WBL is making inroads in traditional education institutions. The debate about vocational outcomes of schools and universities is longer philosophical and technical. Apart from implementation issues, schools and universities are struggling to embrace WBL, which is often seen as purely instrumental and as selling the role of education short. Schoolteachers have resisted the production of ‘factory fodder’ since the beginning of mass education and universities pride themselves on the unfettered pursuit of knowledge. In our experience, these two positions form an integral part of a WBL dialectic, they need not be mutually exclusive and a quasistationary balance between economic responsiveness and critical social pedagogy can be attempted. Historical and epistemological backgrounds of WBLa brief overview Although spoken of as educational innovation, WBL has a long history of experimentation and the educational concepts and practices described as workplace learning and WBL have a rich epistemological tradition in debates about
MIQIS: Modular Integration of Queryable Information Systems

Information integration is not a new problem. By all accounts, language has always taken a multitude of forms, thus the need for translating between different representations of our world has been acute throughout history. With the advent of the World Wide Web, however, this need takes on hitherto unseen dimensions in terms of both difficulty and promise. Automated, webbased integration could offer unparalleled access to worldwide perspectives, but the range of difference among sources is formidable — even in the case of a single underlying representational model. The MIQIS project aims to provide a highlevel logic for reasoning about integration scenarios and their fundamental properties. A key contribution of this perspective is the unification of the semantic, syntactic ,a ndeffective aspects of information integration. Within MIQIS we research foundational properties of inter- and intrarepresentation integration frameworks, as well as produce practical, modular solutions as specific applications of the general theory.
Image renovation in Positron Emission Tomography using recursive algorithm

This paper explains the image reconstruction in Positron Emission Tomography using Maximum a Posterior (MAP). Till date, Diagnostic reconstruction methods offer a direct mathematical solution for the edifice of an image. This tactic requires a minimization of a convex cost function which in turn results in many problems related to the computational difficulty. Further, Iterative techniques are based on a more accurate description of the imaging process resulting in a more complicated mathematical solution requiring multiple steps to attain the image. The practical technique used here is MAP repetition method. This statistical technique offers better and lowest normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) in the PET Brain replica. Various image quality constraints make it painstaking and time consuming to analyze the PET brain image in this procedure. The PET brain image is fabricated and pretend in MATLAB/Simulink package.
Formation control of marine craft using constraint functions

This article presents a method for formation control of marine surface vessels inspired by Lagrangian mechanics. The desired formation configuration is given as a set of constraint functions. The functions are treated analytically and by using feedback from the imposed constraint functions, constraint forces arise. Since the constraint functions are designed for a desired effect, the forces can be seen as control laws. These forces act so that the constraint functions are satisfied in order to keep the formation assembled during operations. Examples of constraint functions that can be used to maintain a formation are presented. Simulations with surface vessel models have been performed to illustrate the proposed method
A Closer Look into MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC

MPEG Spectral Band Replication (SBR) is the newest compression technology available as part of the MPEG standards. It is combined with MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and improves coding efficiency by more than 30%. The resulting scheme is called High-Efficiency AAC (HE AAC). This presentation explains MPEG SBR and its integration into the existing MPEG-4 bitstream format. The SBR technology itself as well as the implications on systems based on MPEG-4 technology are described. Signaling through MPEG-4 Systems and other transport formats is introduced and typical applications and usage scenarios are listed.
Design and implementation of information retrieval system based ontology

Nowadays, the resources available on the web increases significantly. It then has a large volume of information, but without mastery of content. In this immense data warehouse research of current information retrieval systems do not allow users to obtain results to their requests that meet exactly their needs. This is due in large part to indexing techniques (key words, thesaurus). The result is that the user of the web wasting much of his time to examine a large number of Web page by searching for what he needs, because the Web does not provide service in this direction. The Semantic Web is the solution; this new vision of the web is to make web resources not only understandable by humans but also by machines. To improve the relevance of information retrieval, we propose in this paper an approach based on the use of domain ontology for indexing a collection of documents and the use of semantic links between documents in the collection to allow the inference of all relevant documents. The work involves the implementation of a system based on the use of OWL ontology for research pedagogical documents. In this case, the descriptors are not directly chosen in the documents but in the ontology and are indexed by concepts that reflect their meaning rather than words are often ambiguous. To perform a search based on meaning, documents and their descriptors are stored in OWL ontologies describing the documentary features of a document. The objective is to design two types of OWL ontologies: document ontology reserved for storage of all pedagogical documents and domain ontology reserved for well-structured of documents stored in the level of the document ontology and each document is indexed by its keywords and their synonyms.
The MHC Motif Viewer: A Visualization Tool for MHC Binding Motifs

In vertebrates, the onset of cellular immune reactions is controlled by presentation of peptides in complex with major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules to T cell receptors. In humans, MHCs are called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs). Different MHC molecules present different subsets of peptides, and knowledge of their binding specificities is important for understanding differences in the immune response between individuals. Algorithms predicting which peptides bind a given MHC molecule have recently been developed with high prediction accuracy. The utility of these algorithms is hampered by the lack of tools for browsing and comparing specificity of these molecules. We have developed a Web server, MHC Motif Viewer, which allows the display of the binding motif for MHC class I proteins for human, chimpanzee, rhesus monkey, mouse, and swine, as well as HLA‐DR protein sequences. The binding motif for each MHC molecule is predicted using state‐of‐the‐art, pan‐specific peptide‐MHC binding‐prediction methods, and is visualized as a sequence logo, in a format that allows for a comprehensive interpretation of binding motif anchor positions and amino acid preferences. Curr. Protoc. Immunol. 88:18.17. 1‐18.17. 13. © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.