Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ATP Augments Peptide Release from Rat Sensory Neurons in Culture through Activation of P2Y Receptors

ATP has recently emerged as an important proinflammatory mediator that has direct excitatory actions on sensory neurons through activation of ion channel-coupled P2X receptors. The purpose of the current work is to assess whether ATP alters the release of neuropeptides from sensory neurons and the receptors mediating this putative action. Exposing embryonic sensory neurons in culture to concentrations of ATP up to 300 μm did not increase the release of immunoreactive substance P or calcitonin gene-related peptide from sensory neurons. However, pre-exposing sensory neurons to 0.1 to100 μm ATP prior to and throughout administration of 30 nM capsaicin resulted in a significant augmentation of release evoked by the vanilloid. This sensitizing action of ATP is blocked by suramin but not pyridoxal phosphate-6-azobenzene-2,4-disulfonic acid and is mimicked by the P2Y receptor agonists, 2-2-chloroadenosine triphosphate and UTP, but not by 2-(methylthio)adenosine 5′-triphosphate or α,β-methyleneadenosine 5′-diphosphate. This profile of drug actions suggests that the sensitizing actions of ATP are mediated by P2Y receptors. Pretreating sensory neurons with bisindolylmaleimide I, a selective protein kinase C (PKC) inhibitor, attenuates the augmentation of capsaicin-induced peptide release by ATP, further implicating P2Y receptors in the actions of ATP. Immunoblotting also indicates the presence of P2Y2-like immunoreactive substance in embryonic dorsal root ganglia neurons. Together, these data support the notion that ATP acts at P2Y receptors in sensory neurons in a PKC-dependent manner to augment their sensitivity to other stimuli.
Engineering students’ experiences of interactive teaching in calculus

ABSTRACT This study reports on an educational development initiative where peer instruction was used instead of traditional lectures in a calculus course for first-year engineering students. The aim of the study was to explore students’ experiences of this method. Data were collected by means of an open-ended questionnaire on two occasions: early and late in the course. The data were analyzed with an inductive content analysis. The findings comprise three qualitatively different ways to experience the interactive teaching method in calculus: (1) enthusiasm, (2) nuanced skepticism and (3) aversion. The categories differed regarding emotional reactions to the teaching, experiences of learning, conceptions of teaching and learning, and experiences of meaningfulness. Many students expressed enthusiasm for learning with peer instruction and noted that the method gave both teachers and students feedback on what students have difficulties with. These students perceived that they were responsible for their own learning. Other students experienced that peer instruction had some advantages and disadvantages, and preferred a mix between traditional lectures and peer instruction sessions. They seemed to believe that teachers and students share responsibility for learning. Some students expressed an aversion for peer instruction and the method seemed to challenge their beliefs of how teaching and learning is best conducted. Our study illustrates that educational development initiatives, even though based on research on student learning, do not benefit all students. One of the major obstacles seems to be that students’ underlying beliefs regarding teaching and learning may be counterproductive to the ideas behind the educational initiative. We suggest that beliefs regarding teaching and learning need to be addressed when introducing new teaching and learning methods.
Beliefs about the teaching practicum of pre-service language teachers from the Bachelor of Education at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogotá

The Teaching Practicum of the Major in Modern Languages at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana is a space in which three factors: practice, reflection, and knowledge come together to train pre-service teachers in a professional environment. Said factors create accountability for the beliefs about language teaching held by the participants of the Teaching Practicum: pre-service teachers, cooperative teachers, and pedagogical guides. In order to understand what is believed about language teaching and about the Teaching Practicum this exploratory-descriptive ethnography sought to identify beliefs (understood as a theoretical construct) by means of three instruments: a focus group composed of eight pre-service teachers, interviews applied to three cooperative teachers and two pedagogical guides, and an online blog in which fourteen pre-service teachers participated. The questions laid out in these different data collecting mechanisms elicited beliefs that were classified in two different ways: firstly, beliefs were classified both based on the participants (pre-service teachers, cooperative teachers, and pedagogical guides) and on their nature (affective-laden beliefs, cognitive-laden beliefs, or experience-laden beliefs). Secondly, beliefs were grouped based on specific points of convergence about the teaching profession (expectations and responsibilities, teaching styles and strategies, role performance, challenges, and training y formation.) When contrasting the beliefs that the different actors of the Teaching Practicum create, similarities were found in terms of what is believed to be beneficial and rewarding of the 6 Beliefs about the teaching practicum of pre-service language teachers from the Bachelor of Education at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogota experience, on the challenges that the process poses, and on what is expected of each role that takes place in it. Complementing points of view were found in terms of what is believed to be a proper teaching style and strategy implementation, and what performing the role of a teacher entails. The implications of these findings can be understood greatly as positive feedback for the Major in Modern languages for shaping and training well-prepared pre-service teachers, and recommendations for improving the process made by all actors that take part in it.
Word Topical Mixture Models for Dynamic Language Model Adaptation

This paper considers dynamic language model adaptation for Mandarin broadcast news recognition. A word topical mixture model (TMM) is proposed to explore the co-occurrence relationship between words, as well as the long-span latent topical information, for language model adaptation. The search history is modeled as a composite word TMM model for predicting the decoded word. The underlying characteristics and different kinds of model structures were extensively investigated, while the performance of word TMM was analyzed and verified by comparison with the conventional probabilistic latent semantic analysis-based language model (PLSALM) and trigger-based language model (TBLM) adaptation approaches. The large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) experiments were conducted on the Mandarin broadcast news collected in Taiwan. Very promising results in perplexity as well as character error rate reductions were initially obtained.
Accelerating thermal simulations of 3D ICs with liquid cooling using neural networks

Vertical integration is a promising solution to further increase the performance of future ICs, but such 3D ICs present complex thermal issues that cannot be solved by conventional cooling techniques. Interlayer liquid cooling has been proposed to extract the heat accumulated within the chip. However, the development of liquid-cooled 3D ICs strongly relies on the availability of accurate and fast thermal models. In this work, we present a novel thermal model for 3D ICs with interlayer liquid cooling that exploits the neural network theory. Neural Networks can be trained to mimic with high accuracy the thermal behavior of 3D ICs and their implementation can efficiently exploit the massive computational power of modern parallel architectures such as graphic processing units. We have designed an ad-hoc Neural Network model based on pertinent physical considerations of how heat propagates in 3D IC architectures, as well as exploring the most optimal configuration of the model to improve the simulation speed without undermining accuracy. We have assessed the accuracy and run-time speed-ups of the proposed model against a 3D IC simulator based on compact model. We show that the proposed thermal simulator achieves speed-ups up to 106x for 3D ICs with liquid cooling while preserving the maximum absolute error lower than 1.0 degree C.
Learning from Experience

This report learned from the experience of both Ebola and data management efforts to help inform post-Covid-19 recovery including a data architecture for a resilient education data ecosystem in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. This was built on the construction of a combined database containing Annual School Census data at the school level from 2015–2019, and at the district level from 2011–2013. Analysis of enrolment and Ebola case data highlighted the ongoing importance of geographical and economic factors in determining education access, over and above the short-term health impacts of such crises. This has also enabled a detailed consideration of the data architecture within Sierra Leone to inform ongoing stakeholder discussions in this area, as well as demonstrating the potential benefits of improved data structures for data analysis, visualisation, and use through a dashboard. This has been warmly received, with the government looking to take over ownership of the database, display the dashboard publicly, and inform ongoing policy development and implementation. Finally, key principles and step-by-step guides for replicating this work have been provided to support similar efforts in other countries which face comparable challenges to Sierra Leone in terms of both data availability and consistency, and the potential use of this data to support Covid-19 school reopening. Learning from Experience 3
The Emotracker: Visualizing Contents, Gaze and Emotions at a Glance

In the last years, Affective Computing investigations have focused the efforts in the automatic extraction of human emotions and in increasing the success rates in the emotion recognition task. However, there is a lack of automatic tools that intuitively visualize the users' emotional information. In this work, we propose Emotracker, a novel tool based on the combination of eye tracking and facial emotional recognition technologies that allows the visualization of contents, user emotions and gaze at a glance, and offers a wide range of visualization options, including emotional saccade maps and emotional heat maps. The simultaneous consideration of gaze and emotion opens the door to the evaluation of user engagement, which is of great importance for content creators, but has also other promising fields of application in psychology research and, more specifically, in autism.
Rhetorical Impression Management in the Letter to Shareholders and Institutional Setting: A Metadiscourse Perspective.

Purpose - Using composite style measures of the letter to shareholders, the purpose of this paper is to elaborate dominant rhetorical profiles and qualify them from an impression management (IM) perspective. In addition, the paper examines how institutional differences affect rhetorical profiles by comparing intensity and contingencies of rhetorical profiles of UK and US companies. Design/methodology/approach - The authors use automated text analysis to capture linguistic style characteristics of a panel of UK and US companies and employ factor analysis to determine rhetorical profiles. Next, the authors investigate company-level and country-level determinants of a company’s rhetorical stance. Findings - The authors document three prominent rhetorical profiles: an emphatic acclaiming stance, a cautious plausibility-based framing position, and a logic-based rationalizing orientation. The profiles represent distinct self-presentational logics and have different readability effects. Rhetorical IM is stronger in US companies, but higher expected scrutiny in the US institutional environment affects sensitivity of rhetorical postures to message credibility and litigation risk, while marginally increasing the less litigation-sensitive defensive framing style in US letters. Originality/value - The authors develop replicable archival-based measures of prominent rhetorical IM traits of the shareholder letter, based on composite style features. The authors argue that they are qualitatively different from content-based IM proxies. The authors investigate their institutional and organizational relevance by examining how company features and country-level differences affect incentives and constraints for style-based rhetorical IM.
An Adaptive Domain Knowledge Manager for Dialogue Systems

This paper describes the recent effort to improve our Domain Knowledge Manager (DKM) that is part of a mixed-initiative task based Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) architecture, namely to interact within an ambient intelligence scenario. Machine-learning applied to SDS dialogue management strategy design is a growing research area. Training of such strategies can be done using human users or using corpora of human computer dialogue. However, the size of the state space grows exponentially according to the state variables taken into account, making the task of learning dialogue strategies for large-scale SDS very difficult. To address that problem, we propose a divide to conquer approach, assuming that practical dialogue and domain-independent hypothesis are true. In this context, we have considered a clear separation between linguistic dependent and domain dependent knowledge, which allows reducing the complexity of SDS typical components, specially the Dialoguer Manager (DM). Our contribution enables domain portability issues, proposing an adaptive DKM to simplify DM’s clarification dialogs. DKM learns, through trial-and-error, from the interaction with DM suggesting a set of best task-device pairs to accomplish a request and watching the user’s confirmation. This adaptive DKM has been tested in our domain simulator.
Colored Petri nets in the simulation of ETL standard tasks: the surrogate key pipelining case

ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) systems are formed by processes responsible for the extraction of data from several sources, cleaning and transforming it in accordance with some prerequisites of a data warehouse, and finally loading it in its multidimensional structures. ETL processes are the most complex tasks involved within the development of a Data Warehousing System, being crucial to model them previously so that, during the implementation stage, the correct set of requirements is considered. Coloured Petri Nets are a graphical modelling language used in the design, specification, simulation and validation of large systems, characterized as being strongly concurrent. The objective of this manuscript is to discuss the application of Coloured Petri Nets to the specification and validation of ETL systems. To demonstrate their viability for such tasks we have selected one of the most relevant and used case in ETL systems implementation: a surrogate key pipelining.
The General Factor of Personality Is Stronger and More Strongly Correlated With Cognitive Ability Under Instructed Faking

A General Factor of Personality (GFP) can be derived by extracting one factor from a broad range of personality dimensions. Researchers are divided on whether the GFP represents social desirability or an evolved trait with survival value. The current paper tests a social desirability interpretation of the GFP by comparing one-factor models of the HEXACO under standard versus fake-good instructions (N = 185 undergraduates). Analyses include both principal components analyses (PCA) and a comparison of factorial invariance of a hierarchical one-factor model. Compared to standard instructions, fake-good instructions showed: (a) significantly higher correlations between domain scale scores for 10 of 15 cases; (b) significantly higher component loadings in the PCA; (c) significantly more variance explained by the GFP (in both principal components and invariance analyses); and (d) significantly higher correlations with a cognitive g factor derived from six indicators. Results support a social desirability interpretation of the GFP.
Local observer for axial flow aeroengine compressors

Instability phenomena occurred in aeroengines are certainly very undesirable. The unstable flow not only causes a drastic reduction in the performance of the compressor but also can damage to engine's components during operations. Thus it is necessary and critical to employ various feedback control mechanism to stabilize the system. Current all proposed feedback controllers in literature require the full information of the disturbance at the duct entrance, which is an infinite-dimensional quantity and thus is impossible for a direct on-line measurement in reality. In this paper, we construct a local state observer which can deliver the full information of the disturbance by only sensing on an arbitrarily small area at the duct entrance. The approach relies on the semigroup theory as well as operator spectrum analysis. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed observer by demonstrating different types of flow situations for the aeroengine compressors.
The Equivalence of Strong RSA and Factoring in the Generic Ring Model of Computation

Let N be the result of an RSA modulus generation, i.e., a random variable distributed according to some appropriate distribution over the set of products of two primes, such that factoring N is believed to be hard. The Strong RSA assumption states that, given an x chosen uniformly at random from ZN , it is computationally infeasible to com- pute a y 2 ZN and an e2 Nnf1g such that y e x (mod N). This assumption is important in cryptography and has been used to construct several cryptosystems. Due to the lack of complexity-theoretic lower bound proofs for crypto- graphic problems in a general model of computation, it is a common practice in cryptography to give proofs of computational security in meaningful restricted models of computation. Some examples of restricted models that are interesting in cryptography are the generic group model for proving lower bounds for the discrete logarithm problem and related problems, and the random oracle model for proving the soundness of protocols or hash function constructions. A generic model captures that an algorithm does not exploit the bit rep- resentation of the elements other than for testing equality. The security of the RSA public-key cryptosystem can be analyzed in the generic ring model. In this paper, we prove that for almost all possible distributions of N , the problem of factoring N can be eciently reduced to solving the Strong RSA problem on ZN in the generic ring model of computation, where an algorithm can perform ring operations, inverse ring operations, and test equality.
Toward an efficient, highly scalable maximum clique solver for massive graphs

As the size of available data sets grows, so too does the demand for efficient parallel algorithms that will yield the solution to complex combinatorial problems on graphs that may be too large to fit entirely in memory. In previous work, we have provided a set of out-of-core algorithms to solve one of the central examples of such a problem, maximum clique. In this paper, we review the algorithms and report on our ongoing work to use them as a starting point for an optimized, highly scalable implementation of a maximum clique solver.
Differential Localization of Rho Gtpases in Live Cells

Determinants of membrane targeting of Rho proteins were investigated in live cells with green fluorescent fusion proteins expressed with or without Rho-guanine nucleotide dissociation inhibitor (GDI)α. The hypervariable region determined to which membrane compartment each protein was targeted. Targeting was regulated by binding to RhoGDIα in the case of RhoA, Rac1, Rac2, and Cdc42hs but not RhoB or TC10. Although RhoB localized to the plasma membrane (PM), Golgi, and motile peri-Golgi vesicles, TC10 localized to PMs and endosomes. Inhibition of palmitoylation mislocalized H-Ras, RhoB, and TC10 to the endoplasmic reticulum. Although overexpressed Cdc42hs and Rac2 were observed predominantly on endomembrane, Rac1 was predominantly at the PM. RhoA was cytosolic even when expressed at levels in vast excess of RhoGDIα. Oncogenic Dbl stimulated translocation of green fluorescent protein (GFP)-Rac1, GFP-Cdc42hs, and GFP-RhoA to lamellipodia. RhoGDI binding to GFP-Cdc42hs was not affected by substituting farnesylation for geranylgeranylation. A palmitoylation site inserted into RhoA blocked RhoGDIα binding. Mutations that render RhoA, Cdc42hs, or Rac1, either constitutively active or dominant negative abrogated binding to RhoGDIα and redirected expression to both PMs and internal membranes. Thus, despite the common essential feature of the CAAX (prenylation, AAX tripeptide proteolysis, and carboxyl methylation) motif, the subcellular localizations of Rho GTPases, like their functions, are diverse and dynamic.
Definitive radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy for clinical stage T4N0-1 non-small cell lung cancer

Purpose To determine failure patterns and survival outcomes of T4N0-1 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with definitive radiotherapy. Materials and Methods Ninety-five patients with T4N0-1 NSCLC who received definitive radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy from May 2003 to October 2014 were retrospectively reviewed. The standard radiotherapy scheme was 66 Gy in 30 fractions. The main concurrent chemotherapy regimen was 50 mg/m2 weekly paclitaxel combined with 20 mg/m2 cisplatin or AUC 2 carboplatin. The primary outcome was overall survival (OS). Secondary outcomes were failure patterns and toxicities. Results The median age was 64 years (range, 34 to 90 years). Eighty-eight percent of patients (n = 84) had an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0-1, and 42% (n = 40) experienced pretreatment weight loss. Sixty percent of patients (n = 57) had no metastatic regional lymph nodes. The median radiation dose was EQD2 67.1 Gy (range, 56.9 to 83.3 Gy). Seventy-one patients (75%) were treated with concurrent chemotherapy; of these, 13 were also administered neoadjuvant chemotherapy. At a median follow-up of 21 months (range, 1 to 102 months), 3-year OS was 44%. The 3-year cumulative incidences of local recurrence and distant recurrence were 48.8% and 36.3%, respectively. Pretreatment weight loss and combined chemotherapy were significant factors for OS. Acute esophagitis over grade 3 occurred in three patients and grade 3 chronic esophagitis occurred in one patient. There was no grade 3-4 radiation pneumonitis. Conclusion Definitive radiotherapy for T4N0-1 NSCLC results in favorable survival with acceptable toxicity rates. Local recurrence is the major recurrence pattern. Intensity modulated radiotherapy and radio-sensitizing agents would be needed to improve local tumor control.