Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Penile size and the ‘small penis syndrome’

The male is often troubled by concerns that his penis is not large enough to satisfy his partner or himself. He is ashamed to have others view his penis, especially in the flaccid state. Such concerns might be unfounded in reality and might be a presentation of social anxiety or some other clinical problem, such as erectile dysfunction. Concern over the size of the penis, when such concern becomes excessive, might present as the ‘small penis syndrome’, an obsessive rumination with compulsive checking rituals, body dysmorphic disorder, or as part of a psychosis. However, it is often a worry that can be described as within the normal experience of many men. Various potential causal factors are considered. A thorough assessment, normalizing the worry and then exploring the treatment options in detail with the man, is essential to allow the matter to be consolidated satisfactorily within the male ego.
Generative and Evolutionary Techniques for Building Envelope Design

The authors have been involved in the use of generative techniques for building envelope design since 1968 and the use of genetic algorithms since 1990. Recent work has focused on incorporating optimisation functions into form generating processes in order for new forms responding to varied design environments to be created and determined. This paper will summarise the authors' previous work in this field and explain the theory behind this approach, and illustrate recent developments. While the initial implementation of a new building envelope design system is reported in more details in a related paper at this conference, this paper outlines its main features and points out the direction at which it is to be fully developed and further improved.
Targeted Help for Spoken Dialogue Systems

We present experimental evidence that providing naive users of a spoken dialogue system with immediate help messages related to their out-of-coverage utterances improves their success in using the system. A grammar-based recognizer and a Statistical Language Model (SLM) recognizer are run simultaneously. If the grammar-based recognizer suceeds, the less accurate SLM recognizer hypothesis is not used. When the grammar-based recognizer fails and the SLM recognizer produces a recognition hypothesis, this result is used by the Targeted Help agent to give the user feedback on what was recognized, a diagnosis of what was problematic about the utterance, and a related in-coverage example. The in-coverage example is intended to encourage alignment between user inputs and the language model of the system. We report on controlled experiments on a spoken dialogue system for command and control of a simulated robotic helicopter.
Recognition and Tracking of 3 D Objects by 1 D

We show that the bounded error recognition problem for images of non-planar 3D objects using point features can be decomposed into 1D search tasks, along lines joining the origin of the object coordinate system to the feature points chosen to model the object. Points are constructed along these lines at locations given by the coordinates of the detected image points; concurrent bracketing of these points by segment tree search along each of these lines provides maximal matchings between feature points and image points. Depth of search is limited by pixel resolution. This method is well adapted to the task of tracking objects in the presence of variable occlusions and clutter.
Methods of mindfulness: how mindfulness is studied in the workplace

Introduction Interest in mindfulness in the workplace has been on the rise. A recent surge of research has built a compelling case for mindfulness and its potential benefits continue to attract the attention of organizational scholars. To name but a few, in the past years we have seen research linking mindfulness to work-family balance (Allen and Kiburz 2012), work engagement (Leroy, Anseel, Dimitrova, and Sels 2013), negotiation outcomes (Reb and Narayanan 2014), job burnout (Roche and Haar 2013), resilience to bias (Hafenbrack, Kinias, and Barsade 2013), working memory (Mrazek et al . 2013) and performance (Dane and Brummel 2014; Reb, Narayanan, and Chaturvedi 2014). While mindfulness was initially studied as a method of treating ailing clinical populations (Kabat-Zinn 1990), today its application has expanded to executive boardrooms, elementary school classrooms, professional sports, and military Special Forces. The rapid expansion of mindfulness studies in non-clinical populations, particularly work environments, is exciting for practitioners but also raises a series of methodological concerns. It is to this end that we focus this chapter: a review and analysis of the study of mindfulness in the workplace. We hope this chapter will offer a roadmap to scholars new to mindfulness by summarizing prevailing methods and their areas for improvement. We also aim to offer innovative insights for more established researchers by reflecting on directions for further research. This chapter discusses the study of workplace mindfulness in three sections. First, we review how researchers have studied the various conceptualizations of mindfulness and the major issues concerning the construct of mindfulness altogether. Clearly operationalizing mindfulness is an important precursor to any other step in the research process for it stands to help define the scope and boundaries of the topic under investigation. In the second section, we review the most commonly used methods in mindfulness research such as experiments, surveys, and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs).
The emotional labour of boundary spanning

Purpose Within public services there is a widely recognised role for workers who operate across organisational and professional boundaries. Much of this literature focusses on the organisational implications rather than on how boundary spanners engage with citizens. An increased number of public service roles require boundary spanning to support citizens with cross-cutting issues. The purpose of this paper is to explicate the emotional labour within the interactions that boundary spanners have with citizens, requiring adherence to display rules and building trust. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual paper which draws on illustrative examples to draw out the emotional labour within two types of boundary spanning: explicit and emergent. Findings Emotional labour theory offers a way to classify these interactions as requiring high, medium or low degrees of emotional labour. Boundary spanning theory contributes an understanding of how emotional labour is likely to be differently experienced depending on whether the boundary spanning is an explicit part of the job, or an emergent property. Originality/value Drawing on examples from public service work in a range of advanced democracies, the authors make a theoretical argument, suggesting that a more complete view of boundary spanning must account for individual-level affect and demands upon workers. Such a focus captures the “how” of the boundary spanning public encounter, and not just the institutional, political and organisational dimensions examined in most boundary spanning literatures.
Short running title : Economic evaluations of neuraminidase inhibitors in adults

Up to 10% of individuals present influenza-like illness each year. Neuraminidase inhibitors reduce significantly the median duration of flu symptoms by 1.38 days and median time to return to normal activities by 0.9 days in adults. This review presents the economic evaluations of neuraminidase inhibitors in adults. Choice of key parameter estimates in costeffectiveness or cost-benefit models were sensitive to the perspective of analysis: health-care payer or societal, including productivity gains. This review discusses among other key parameters the proportion of influenza-like illness due to the influenza virus (targeted by neuraminidase inhibitors and flu vaccine) and the measure of health benefits by either QALYs gained or willingness-to-pay for a day of symptoms averted. Overall, neuraminidase inhibitors are worth their costs and do not challenge annual flu vaccination, but should be seen as a complementary option to reduce the burden of influenza.
G9a selectively represses a class of late-replicating genes at the nuclear periphery

We have investigated the role of the histone methyltransferase G9a in the establishment of silent nuclear compartments. Following conditional knockout of the G9a methyltransferase in mouse ESCs, 167 genes were significantly up-regulated, and no genes were strongly down-regulated. A partially overlapping set of 119 genes were up-regulated after differentiation of G9a-depleted cells to neural precursors. Promoters of these G9a-repressed genes were AT rich and H3K9me2 enriched but H3K4me3 depleted and were not highly DNA methylated. Representative genes were found to be close to the nuclear periphery, which was significantly enriched for G9a-dependent H3K9me2. Strikingly, although 73% of total genes were early replicating, more than 71% of G9a-repressed genes were late replicating, and a strong correlation was found between H3K9me2 and late replication. However, G9a loss did not significantly affect subnuclear position or replication timing of any non-pericentric regions of the genome, nor did it affect programmed changes in replication timing that accompany differentiation. We conclude that G9a is a gatekeeper for a specific set of genes localized within the late replicating nuclear periphery.
A Modified PEG Algorithm for Construction of LDPC Codes with Strictly Concentrated Check-Node Degree Distributions

Progressive edge-growth (PEG) algorithm is a good approach to construct low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes with large girth at finite block lengths. However, the check-node degrees of PEG codes are usually loosely concentrated for both regular (more than one degree) and irregular codes (more than two degrees). In this paper, the authors propose a modified PEG algorithm for construction of LDPC codes with strictly concentrated check-node degrees, which yields both completely regular codes and strictly right-concentrated irregular codes with two consecutive check-node degrees. Moreover, our algorithm further improves the girth histogram of the codes for better performance. Simulation results show that even under strictly concentrated check-node degrees, our proposed algorithm slightly improves the performance of both regular and irregular PEG codes, especially for irregular codes at high SNR values.
La valutazione della qualità dell'istruzione superiore in Europa : istituzionalizzazione, pratiche e conflitti

The aim of the article is to account the process of institutionalization of quality assessment in the european higher education, the way it is implemented and the different forms of conflicts and resistance strategies it generate between the academic field and societal actors, and within the academic field itself. The analytical framework is drawn from sociological new institutionalism and from Bourdieu's concepts of field as a social space. By the first source, quality assessment is conceived as an organizational field in which structuration and institutionalization processes are at work carried by different organizational and institutional actors acting at supra-national level as carriers exerting normative, cognitive and coercive pressures on higher education systems and institutions to incorporate in their structural arrangements quality assessment schemes. By the second theoretical source, the organizational field is viewed as a field of struggles, that is a social space where different actors with different positions, dispositions and interests related to quality assessment struggle to institutionalize a certain definition of quality assessment linked to certain tools and goals. This struggles generate lines of tension and conflict in the higher education field between academic and non academic actors and within academy itself. The last part of the article is dedicated to a critical appraisal of quality assessment practice and goals, as they currently appear, and to some proposal to reduce their most critical flaws and risks.
Enforceable Data Sharing Agreements Using Smart Contracts

As more and more data is collected for various reasons, the sharing of such data becomes paramount to increasing its value. Many applications ranging from smart cities to personalized health care require individuals and organizations to share data at an unprecedented scale. Data sharing is crucial in today's world, but due to privacy reasons, security concerns and regulation issues, the conditions under which the sharing occurs needs to be carefully specified. Currently, this process is done by lawyers and requires the costly signing of legal agreements. In many cases, these data sharing agreements are hard to track, manage or enforce. In this work, we propose a novel alternative for tracking, managing and especially enforcing such data sharing agreements using smart contracts and blockchain technology. We design a framework that generates smart contracts from parameters based on legal data sharing agreements. The terms in these agreements are automatically enforced by the system. Monetary punishment can be employed using secure voting by external auditors to hold the violators accountable. Our experimental evaluation shows that our proposed framework is efficient and low-cost.
ON THE IDENTIFICATION OF CERTAIN NOISY FIR CONVOLUTIVE MIXTURES

In this paper, we address the identification problem of –inputs –outputs MA models corrupted by a white noise with unknown covariance matrix in the case where . Under certain additional conditions, we show that the generating function of the MA model is identifiable up to a constant orthogonal matrix by using the autocovariance function of the observation.
Survey of User-Based Experimentation in Augmented Reality

Although augmented reality (AR) was first conceptualized over 35 years ago (Sutherland, 1968), until recently the field was primarily concerned with the engineering challenges associated with developing AR hardware and software. Because AR is such a compelling medium with many potential uses, there is a need to further develop AR systems from a technology-centric medium to a user-centric medium. This transformation will not be realized without systematic user-based experimentation. This paper surveys and categorizes the user-based studies that have been conducted using AR to date. Our survey finds that the work is progressing along three complementary lines of effort: (1) those that study low-level tasks, with the goal of understanding how human perception and cognition operate in AR contexts, (2) those that examine user task performance within specific AR applications or application domains, in order to gain an understanding of how AR technology could impact underlying tasks, and (3) those that examine user interaction and communication between collaborating users.
Prediction of protein relative solvent accessibility with a two‐stage SVM approach

Information on relative solvent accessibility (RSA) of amino acid residues in proteins provides valuable clues to the prediction of protein structure and function. A two‐stage approach with support vector machines (SVMs) is proposed, where an SVM predictor is introduced to the output of the single‐stage SVM approach to take into account the contextual relationships among solvent accessibilities for the prediction. By using the position‐specific scoring matrices (PSSMs) generated by PSI‐BLAST, the two‐stage SVM approach achieves accuracies up to 90.4% and 90.2% on the Manesh data set of 215 protein structures and the RS126 data set of 126 nonhomologous globular proteins, respectively, which are better than the highest published scores on both data sets to date. A Web server for protein RSA prediction using a two‐stage SVM method has been developed and is available (http://birc.ntu.edu.sg/∼pas0186457/rsa.html). Proteins 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A Stochastic Approach for Virtual Machine Placement in Volunteer Cloud Federations

Volunteer cloud federations (VCFs) are cloud federations where clouds may join and leave a federation without restrictions and may contribute resources to the federation without long term commitment. This makes it difficult to predict the long term availability of resources. Also, in IaaS VCFs, volunteers may collectively contribute a large number of heterogeneous virtual machine instances. In this paper, we focus on the problem of efficiently allocating this dynamic, heterogeneous capacity to a flow of incoming VM instantiation requests. We propose an approach, called stochastic least differential capacity (SLDC),that allows over-provisioning only when necessary. The approach uses historical information about recent instantiation requests to derive stochastic predictions regarding future demand. We implemented VCFSim, a VCF simulator that uses the proposed resource allocation solution. The results of the experimental evaluation show that the proposed approach is able to improve the success rate of VM instantiation requests by up to 38%compared to an approach that uses exact matching with no demand forecasting.
Impact of absolute junction temperature on power cycling lifetime

The influence of the absolute junction temperature Tj* on IGBT power module lifetime was systematically investigated by means of active power cycling tests. Both the impact on the wire bond lift-off and the chip solder degradation mechanism could be determined separately by applying the concept of separating failure modes. The test results not only prove that classical lifetime models overestimate the influence of Tj*, but also show that the two dominant failure mechanisms have to be treated differently. The wire bond lift-off failure mode is weakly affected by the absolute temperature level and possesses a very small activation energy of 0.069 eV. The solder degradation mode exhibits a significantly larger activation energy of 0.159 eV, which results in a massive decrease (factor 3) in power cycling capability when increasing Tj* by 85 K. For junction temperatures above 175°C SnAg-based solder joints are no longer suitable for reliable power module designs and advanced die attach technologies such as silver sintering have to be deployed. For the description of such advanced power modules specific lifetime curves are under development which exclusively represent the pure wire bond lifetime, as for common power cycling conditions the silver sintered die attach is not subjected to ageing.
Micropatterning of costimulatory ligands enhances CD4+ T cell function

Spatial organization of signaling complexes is a defining characteristic of the immunological synapse (IS), but its impact on cell communication is unclear. In T cell–APC pairs, more IL-2 is produced when CD28 clusters are segregated from central supramolecular activation cluster (cSMAC)-localized CD3 and into the IS periphery. However, it is not clear in these cellular experiments whether the increased IL-2 is driven by the pattern itself or by upstream events that precipitate the patterns. In this article, we recapitulate key features of physiological synapses using planar costimulation arrays containing antibodies against CD3 and CD28, surrounded by ICAM-1, created by combining multiple rounds of microcontact printing on a single surface. Naïve T cells traverse these arrays, stopping at features of anti-CD3 antibodies and forming a stable synapse. We directly demonstrate that presenting anti-CD28 in the cell periphery, surrounding an anti-CD3 feature, enhances IL-2 secretion by naïve CD4+ T cells compared with having these signals combined in the center of the IS. This increased cytokine production correlates with NF-κB translocation and requires PKB/Akt signaling. The ability to arbitrarily and independently control the locations of anti-CD3 and anti-CD28 offered the opportunity to examine patterns not precisely attainable in cell–cell interfaces. With these patterns, we show that the peripheral presentation of CD28 has a larger impact on IL-2 secretion than CD3 colocalization/segregation.
Protein-Protein Interaction Prediction Based on Sequence Data by Support Vector Machine with Probability Assignment

In this paper, we investigate the sequence-based protein-protein interaction prediction by machine learning methods. Specifically, we propose to build classifiers in the space of domain pairs, which are purely based on sequence data. We designed a novel way to select negative samples using a classification-based iterative voting procedure, and systematically compared the effects of negative sample selection on the performance of classification. We also propose an approach to estimate the probabilities for the predictions by SVM. Based on the selected negative samples, we compared nonlinear SVM based on gaussian kernel, linear SVM and linear logistic regression for both classification performance and probability assignments. Our results show that the probability assigned by SVM is more natural than logistic regression, and SVM also outperforms logistic regression for prediction.
Customer Mistreatment: Conceptualization, Measurement and Nomological Network

Customer mistreatment refers to the low-quality interpersonal treatment that employees receive from customers, such as Customer Verbal Aggression, sexual harassment. Previous studies have investigated the definition, construct and outcome of customer mistreatment in depth. Customer mistreatment is founded to be influenced by subject and object factors, and affect individuals and organizations through theories of resource conservation, social exchange, affective events and organizational justice. We concluded with an agenda for future research on the conceptualization, construct, measurement, nomological network, and cross-cultural investigation of customer mistreatment.
Mutual Information of Buffer-Aided Full-Duplex Relay Channels

We derive the mutual information (MI) of the wireless links in a buffer-aided full-duplex (FD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relaying network. The FD relay still suffers from residual self-interference (RSI), after the application of self-interference mitigation techniques. We investigate both cases of the slow-RSI channel, where the RSI is fixed over the entire codeword, and the fast-RSI channel, where the RSI changes from one symbol duration to another within the codeword. We show that the RSI can be completely eliminated when the FD relay is equipped with a buffer in the case of slow RSI. In the case of fast RSI, the RSI cannot be eliminated. Closed-form expressions for the links' MI are derived under both RSI scenarios. For the fixed-rate data transmission scenario, we derive the optimal transmission strategy that should be adopted by the source and relay nodes to maximize the system throughput. We verify our analytical findings through simulations.