Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ethnicity, Families and Social Capital: Caring Relationships across Italian and Caribbean Transnational Families

Social capital theorists acknowledge that caring networks operating within and above all across households lie at the heart of families and communities. They also see these networks and family bonds as generally declining in contemporary society due to individualisation. However, there seems to be little empirical evidence documenting these processes in detail, particularly with regards to minority ethnic and transnational families. This article explicitly addresses reciprocal relationships in ethnic minority families, focusing on different forms of care circulating within transcultural and intergenerational family and kin networks. By doing so, this discussion reveals many nuances of family life and the processes by which cultural norms, values, attitudes and behaviour are transmitted, transformed and maintained across generations and geographical distance.
Weekend-based short workweeks: peripheral work or facilitating ‘work–life balance’?

This research focuses on those working weekends and also having a workweek of 20 hours or less, which we define as having a weekend-based short workweek (WBSW). The purpose of this paper is to examine the characteristics of workers with a WBSW, with emphasis on gender, family status, and work–life balance. To our knowledge, this is the first study examining work schedules having overlapping characteristics of both weekend work and part-time hours. The country of research for this study is Canada. We found that workers with a WBSW are more likely to be female, but less likely to be married or have dependent children. They are also more likely to be younger, less educated, less experienced, and low-waged. Nonetheless, job satisfaction among those with a WBSW is only slightly lower than those without one. Moreover, we found a group of older, married females with high job satisfaction notwithstanding having a WBSW. We presume that some have managed to balance the substantial work, economic, and family obligations that they face, but also wonder whether some have become resigned to their available employment options rather than having found decent work per se.
Distance computation between non-convex polyhedra at short range based on discrete Voronoi regions

An algorithm for calculating the minimum distance between non-convex polyhedra is described. A polyhedron is represented by a set of triangles. In calculating the distance between two polyhedra, it is important to search efficiently the pair of the triangles which gives the pair of closest points. In our algorithm discrete Voronoi regions are prepared as voxels around a non-convex polyhedron. Each voxel is given the list of triangles which have the possibility of being the closest to the points in the voxel. When a triangle on the other object is intersecting a voxel, the closest triangles can be efficiently searched from this list on the voxel. The algorithm has been implemented, and the results of distance computations show that it can calculate the minimum distance between non-convex polyhedra composed of a thousand triangles at interactive rates.
Automated analog IC design constraints generation for a layout-aware sizing approach

This paper presents an approach to automatically generate circuit-level design constraints to a layout-aware sizing approach. The proposed approach is an enhanced version and implementation of an established method, based on pattern recognition and symmetry detection, and is integrated in the AIDAsoft electronic design automation (EDA) environment. The generation of constraints increases the automation of the design process and reduces the risk of errors, assisting the project designer during the design specification setup. The validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated for the synthesis of classical circuit structures in the AIDAsoft environment.
Eye Movement Strategies Involved in Face Perception

Recordings were made of the eye fixations of three subjects in two tasks involving black-and-white photographs of faces. In the first task, subjects matched a test face with a previously viewed target face; in the second task, subjects compared two simultaneously presented faces. The eye movements were recorded with a corneal reflection technique. Each subject showed an individual fixation strategy for the tasks; in particular each subject had one or more preferred facial features which were viewed foveally in both tasks. The subjects also showed some tendency to use a regular sequential pattern of eye movements. However, the sequences used differed from one task to the other. Although some aspects of the results support the scanpath hypothesis of Noton, it is suggested that an alternative interpretation is possible.
New methods for receiver internal jitter measurement

We have developed three receiver internal deterministic jitter (DJ) and random jitter (RJ) measurement methods through external DJ stressing, RJ stressing, or sampling time shifting. High throughput jitter tolerance tests utilizing the receiver internal DJ and RJ are presented. Analytical formulas for receiver DJ and RJ estimation have been developed. Relevant simulations and laboratory experiments have been conducted and the validity for the methods has been verified. We have also shown that a 6 orders of magnitude reduction in test time can be achieved with a good statistical confidence with the proposed methods.
Making Bilingualism Work: Developments in Bilingual Education in ASEAN.

Abstract Systems of bilingual education in three neighbouring countries, Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei Darussalam are examined in an attempt to understand basic issues. These are ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries that fall into the category of Small Young Countries (SYCs) previously discussed in Pakir (1992a). A unifying feature is the fact that they are multilingual communities, with a vast range of complex linguistic and cultural traditions. A second feature is that they represent parallel cases of countries in which English has played an internal role historically. Third, these countries have Malay as the national language (albeit in Singapore, with a large Chinese majority and using English as a working language, Malay is not as widely used). Fourth, bilingual‐ism is a language policy, whether publicly advocated or implicitly sanctioned.
Colonic Biopsies to Assess the Neuropathology of Parkinson's Disease and Its Relationship with Symptoms

Background The presence of Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites (LN) has been demonstrated in the enteric nervous system (ENS) of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. The aims of the present research were to use routine colonoscopy biopsies (1) to analyze, in depth, enteric pathology throughout the colonic submucosal plexus (SMP), and (2) to correlate the pathological burden with neurological and gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms. Methodology/Principal Findings A total of 10 control and 29 PD patients divided into 3 groups according to disease duration were included. PD and GI symptoms were assessed using the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale part III and the Rome III questionnaire, respectively. Four biopsies were taken from the ascending and descending colon during the course of a total colonoscopy. Immunohistochemical analysis was performed using antibodies against phosphorylated alpha-synuclein, neurofilaments NF 220 kDa (NF) and tyrosine hydroxylase (TH). The density of LN, labeled by anti-phosphorylated alpha-synuclein antibodies, was evaluated using a quantitative rating score. Lewy pathology was apparent in the colonic biopsies from 21 patients and in none of the controls. A decreased number of NF-immunoreactive neurons per ganglion was observed in the SMP of PD patients compared to controls. The amount of LN in the ENS was inversely correlated with neuronal count and positively correlated with levodopa-unresponsive features and constipation. Conclusion/Significance Analysis of the ENS by routine colonoscopy biopsies is a useful tool for pre-mortem neuropathological diagnosis of PD, and also provides insight into the progression of motor and non-motor symptoms.
Translating, Reliability Testing, and Validating a Norwegian Questionnaire to Assess Adolescents’ Intentions to be Physically Active After High School Graduation

This study aimed to test the reliability and validity of a Norwegian measure of adolescents’ intentions to be physically active after graduation (the Intention to be Physically Active After Graduation [IPAG] Questionnaire). The development of IPAG involved a translation and back-translation procedure and a test–retest study, performed on 105 adolescents (M age = 17.1, SD = 0.6) from three different high schools in Kristiansand, Norway. The four IPAG items loaded on one single factor, demonstrating acceptable factor loadings (.68-.90) and acceptable Cronbach’s alpha values (.84 and .84) in both the test and retest assessment. IPAG correlated positively with a measure of attitudes toward physical activity (.61-.71) and a measure of participants’ intentions to be physically active next month (.77-.82), supporting both construct validity and criterion-related validity of the IPAG-Questionnaire. Acceptable reliability and validity of IPAG was found, which supports the use of this instrument in future research.
Evaluation of harvest control rules: simple one- parameter vs. complex multi-parameter strategies

Harvest control rules (HCR) are sets of well-defined rules that can be used for determining annual fish catch quotas. If a management policy can be expressed as a HCR, then the HCR provides means to determine the total allowable catch unambiguously. In order to improve certain aspects of the performance for these rules, rules of increasing complexity have been suggested for fish stocks both in Europe and in North America. But is this complexity necessarily better? Are simple strategies outdated? Traditional harvesting strategies (i.e. constant harvest rate, fixed quota and constant escapement strategies) are simple HCRs with only one control parameter (i.e. target harvest rate, catch and escapement, respectively). Complex harvest control strategies are here defined as a multi-parameter HCR. In this study, three criteria (average catch and its coefficient of variability and risk of population abundance below a minimum acceptable level) are used to judge the performance of traditional and complex HCRs, utilizing a set of stochastic age-structured population models that mimic dynamics of fish populations. The traditional and complex HCRs are then evaluated against each other, paying particular attention to the trade-offs among the performance criteria.
Iranian Journal of Neurology © 2013 Original Paper the Relation between Peptide Hormones and Sex Hormone in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

Background: Hormones can play a significant role in the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis (MS). The aim of this study was to compare levels of ghrelin, leptin, and testosterone hormones of MS patients with healthy subjects, and assess the relationship between levels of peptide hormone and sex hormones in MS patients. Methods: 35 MS patients with definite relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) (male = 9, female = 26) and 13 healthy subjects (male = 4, female = 9) were enrolled in the study. Levels of serum ghrelin, leptin, and testosterone hormones were measured in this study. ANOVA and Pearson correlation were used for data analysis (P < 0.05). Results: The female and male participants of the patient group were compared with the healthy group. No significant differences were found in serum of leptin, ghrelin, testosterone, ghrelin/leptin, and testosterone/leptin (P < 0.05). Spearman correlation coefficient showed that leptin had a significant negative correlation with the variability of testosterone (r =-1.00) in the healthy male group. Moreover, leptin had a significant positive correlation with the variability of BMI (r = 0.68) and weight (r = 0.59), at the 0.01 level (2-tailed), in the female patient group. In addition, in the healthy male group, ghrelin had a significant negative correlation with the variability of weight (r =-1.00). Conclusion: According to the results, there was no significant difference between peptide and sex hormones of MS patients and healthy persons. Furthermore, there was no significant relationship between peptide and sex hormones of MS patients and healthy persons.
LUMINAL THERAPY IN THE CONTROL OF EPILEPTIC SEIZURES

Notwithstanding the many ingenious hypotheses advanced to explain epilepsy, it still must be assumed that it is a disease of unexplained etiology. In the present state of information, it might be best regarded as the result of an increased irritability of the cerebral cortex, occurring as an expression of organ inferiority, with the seizures as responses of this cortex to stimuli of exogenous or endogenous origin. The fact that most patients at first have nocturnal fits, then nocturnal and diurnal ones, and that there is a tendency toward an increase in the number of seizures, might best be explained on the principle that every nervous activity is enhanced by each preceding one; in other words, each epileptic seizure predisposes to the following one. While it takes considerable time for the highly irritable cortex to respond to the stimuli, when once it has responded, it is much easier for the following
Lisbon Landmark Lenslet Light Field Dataset: Description and Retrieval Performance

Popular local feature extraction schemes, such as SIFT, are robust when changes in illumination, translation and scale occur, and play an important role in visual content retrieval. However, these solutions are not very robust to 3D object rotations and camera viewpoint changes. In such scenarios, the emerging and richer lenslet light field image representation can provide additional information such as multiple perspectives and depth data. This paper introduces a new lenslet light field imaging dataset and studies the retrieval performance when popular 2D visual descriptors are applied. The new dataset consists of 25 Lisbon landmarks captured with a lenslet camera from different perspectives. Moreover, this paper proposes and assesses straightforward extensions of visual 2D descriptor matching for lenslet light field retrieval. The experimental results show that gains up to 14% can be obtained with a light field representation when compared to a 2D imaging conventional representation.
FPGA implementation of low latency routing algorithm for 3D Network on Chip

Network on chip (NoC) is the most promising on-chip communication architecture. The three dimensional integration of NoC is achieved by stacking 2D layers. The communication between the layers is achieved by the presence of vertical links between the 3D nodes. We propose a deterministic routing scheme for choosing the 3D node and it uses the xy routing within the 2D layers. Our algorithm finds path from any source to specified destination. The unique feature of this model is the search for the proximal vertical 3D node towards the destination router. It is inferred from the result that the routing scheme can achieve better performance in terms of reduced latency compared with the 3D routing method. The algorithm is implemented in FPGA.
ADJUSTMENT FROM PRIMARY TO SECONDARY SCHOOL: A ONE YEAR FOLLOW-UP

Summary. Four hundred and eighty-two children aged 10 and 11 years who were in their final year in primary school were followed up a year later to determine the extent to which personality, behavioural and educational variables as measured by tests, questionnaires and ratings, related to their social, emotional and educational adjustment in the secondary school. In general, correlations between the primary school variables and criterion variables were low. Behaviour in the primary school showed the highest correlation with adjustment after transfer whilst personality measures were unrelated to the criteria. Multiple regression analyses showed that the predictive efficiency of the primary variables in combination was also poor.
To Know or not to Know: A Moral Reflection on Information Poverty

This article reflects, from an ethical perspective, on the problem of information poverty. Information poverty is defined as that situation in which individuals and communities, within a given context, do not have the requisite skills, abilities or material means to obtain efficient access to information, interpret it and apply it appropriately. It is further characterized by a lack of essential information and a poorly developed information infrastructure. It is argued in this article that information poverty is a serious moral concern and a matter of social justice and as such should be on the world’s moral agenda of social responsibility. Based on social justice a set of broad ethical principles are formulated that can be used to guide the social, economic and political initiatives to solve information poverty and to create a fair information society.
Resilience of Deployed TCP to Blind Attacks

As part of TCP's steady evolution, recent standards have recommended mechanisms to protect against weaknesses in TCP. But adoption, configuration, and deployment of TCP improvements can be slow. In this work, we consider the resilience of deployed TCP implementations to blind in-window attacks, where an off-path adversary disrupts an established connection by sending a packet that the victim believes came from its peer, causing data corruption or connection reset. We tested operating systems (and middleboxes deployed in front) of webservers in the wild in September 2015 and found 22% of connections vulnerable to in-window SYN and reset packets, 30% vulnerable to in-window data packets, and 38.4% vulnerable to at least one of three in-window attacks we tested. We also tested out-of-window packets and found that while few deployed systems were vulnerable to reset and SYN packets, 5.4% of connections accepted in-window data with an invalid acknowledgment number. In addition to evaluating commodity TCP stacks, we found vulnerabilities in 12 of 14 of the routers and switches we characterized -- critical network infrastructure where the potential impact of any TCP vulnerabilities is particularly acute. This surprisingly high level of extant vulnerabilities in the most mature Internet transport protocol in use today is a perfect illustration of the Internet's fragility. Embedded in historical context, it also provides a strong case for more systematic, scientific, and longitudinal measurement and quantitative analysis of fundamental properties of critical Internet infrastructure, as well as for the importance of better mechanisms to get best security practices deployed.
Streptococcal Cellulitis Following Preparation of Fresh Raw Seafood

We describe three zoonotic streptococcal soft tissue infections resulting from fresh seafood contact. One was a localized thumb infection with Streptococcus iniae in an immunocompetent healthy young male resulting from a puncture wound from a crab pincer. The other two were cases of ascending upper limb cellulitis associated with bacteraemia in mastectomy patients. One of these infections was caused by S. iniae while the other was caused by Streptococcus dysgalactiae subsp. dysgalactiae, a species that has not been previously described as a cause of zoonotic infection. Hence when cleaning raw seafood, protective equipment should be used to minimize the risk of percutaneous injuries.
SPICE modelling of a coupled piezoelectric-bimetal heat engine for autonomous Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSN) power supply

This paper deals with an electrical modelling and optimization of a thermal energy harvester dedicated to power autonomous systems. Such devices based on bimetal strips and piezoceramics turn thermal gradients into electricity by a two-step conversion mechanism. This work focuses first on a demonstration of a ST-WSN (GreenNet demonstration platform) supplied by the harvester to validate, for the first time, the harvesters viability. That demonstration focuses attention on the need for an optimized power management circuit for piezoelectric generators able to reach output voltages up to 20 V. The work deals then with the proposal of an equivalent lumped element model of the piezoelectric transducer with its SPICE implementation to enable the optimization of a dedicated power management circuit based on the Pulsed Synchronous Charge Extractor (PSCE). Simulations using the SPICE model and the power management circuit lead to an increased extracted power by 144%.
The extent of protist diversity: insights from molecular ecology of freshwater eukaryotes

Classical studies on protist diversity of freshwater environments worldwide have led to the idea that most species of microbial eukaryotes are known. One exemplary case would be constituted by the ciliates, which have been claimed to encompass a few thousands of ubiquitous species, most of them already described. Recently, molecular methods have revealed an unsuspected protist diversity, especially in oceanic as well as some extreme environments, suggesting the occurrence of a hidden diversity of eukaryotic lineages. In order to test if this holds also for freshwater environments, we have carried out a molecular survey of small subunit ribosomal RNA genes in water and sediment samples of two ponds, one oxic and another suboxic, from the same geographic area. Our results show that protist diversity is very high. The majority of phylotypes affiliated within a few well established eukaryotic kingdoms or phyla, including alveolates, cryptophytes, heterokonts, Cercozoa, Centroheliozoa and haptophytes, although a few sequences did not display a clear taxonomic affiliation. The diversity of sequences within groups was very large, particularly that of ciliates, and a number of them were very divergent from known species, which could define new intra-phylum groups. This suggests that, contrary to current ideas, the diversity of freshwater protists is far from being completely described.
Effects of a Self-Regulated Learning Course on the Academic Performance and Graduation Rate of College Students in an Academic Support Program

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of completion of a self-regulated learning course on long-term academic outcomes of undergraduate students from a university program to support underprepared undergraduate students. These students were compared to a group of students from the same program who were carefully selected to be similar in terms of number of prior academic credits, prior cumulative GPA, gender, and number of transfer credits. Students who took the course had significantly higher cumulative GPAs four semesters afterwards, significantly higher odds of graduation, and significantly lower odds of receiving one or more F grades in subsequent semesters. Course structure and other factors deemed central to the success of this course were identified.
A ug 2 00 2 Finite Temperature Gases of Fermionic Strings

We show that in the absence of a Ramond-Ramond sector both the type IIA and type IIB free string gases have a thermal instability due to low temperature tachyon modes. The gas of free IIA strings undergoes a thermal duality transition into a gas of free IIB strings at the self-dual temperature TC . The free heterotic string gas is a tachyon-free ensemble with gauge symmetry SO(16)×SO(16) in the presence of a timelike Wilson line background. It exhibits a holographic duality relation undergoing a self-dual phase transition at TC with positive free energy and positive specific heat. The ensemble is thermodynamically stable with no analog of the unphysical fixed point entropy and tachyonic modes of the pedagogically similar bosonic string gas. The type I open and closed string gas explicitly violates thermal duality. The oneloop free energy vanishes identically as a consequence of tadpole cancellation. We identify the order parameter for the Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition from a low temperature gas of short open strings to a high temperature long string phase at or below TC . shyamoli@thphysed.org