Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measuring ENS Success : User Satisfaction , Technology Acceptance and Strategic Analysis

Over the years there has been much debate over the assessment of information systems (IS) success. The two leading paradigms are user satisfaction and technology acceptance. However, for the field of e-commerce a strategic perspective must also be incorporated into the theories to explain behavior. This paper integrates two approaches by examining the relationships among the usefulness of system features, user satisfaction, intention to use and strategic analysis on performance. The proposed model is tested with an electronic negotiation system (Inspire) in an internet field experiment with over 5,000 participants in 53 different countries. The system features consist of analytical, communication and graphical tools.
Response Inhibition in Children With DSM-IV Subtypes of AD/HD and Related Disruptive Disorders: The Role of Reward

The current study had four aims: (a) to replicate previous findings of slow response inhibition in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), (b) to explore whether poor response inhibition in children with AD/HD is a core problem or rather a result of an underlying problem related to reward, (c) to investigate the specificity of poor response inhibition and the role of reward in relation to AD/HD, and (d) to study whether findings would be different for three subtypes of AD/HD. In order to address these issues, a stop paradigm was administered under a reward condition and under a nonreward condition to an AD/HD group (n = 24), an Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD)/Conduct Disorder (CD) group (n = 21), a comorbid AD/HD+ODD/ CD group (n = 27), and a normal control (NC) group (n = 41). Firstly, contrary to prediction, none of the Disruptive Behavior Disorder (DBD) groups differed from the NC group with respect to the speed of the inhibition process. Secondly, it was shown that children with AD/HD and children with comorbid AD/HD+ODD/CD, but not children with ODD/CD alone, slowed down more dramatically in the reward condition than normal controls. This finding was interpreted as a strategy to increase the chance of being rewarded in children with AD/HD and children with comorbid AD/HD+ODD/CD, but not in children with pure ODD/CD. Finally, analysis of AD/HD subtypes did not change the main findings of this study.
Transmission Mode Selection in Cooperative Multi-Cell Systems Considering Training Overhead

Cooperative base station transmission, also known as coordinated multi-point (CoMP)transmission, is a promising technique to improve spectrum efficiency of cellular networks. however, coherent CoMP joint transmission needs huge training overhead which will reduce the effective data transmission rate. In this paper, a downlink transmission mode selection method is proposed, aiming at improving cell-edge throughput without reducing cell-center user rate. To reduce the adverse impact of the overhead, we select the following users for CoMP transmission: those can obtain significant performance gain from CoMP and those can increase the multiplexing gain. A threshold for large scale SINR is defined to find cell-edge users. An adaptive orthogonal threshold is designed for selecting partner users for the cell-edge users. Impact of the two thresholds are analyzed and performance of the proposed method are evaluated through simulations, which shows evident performance gain over both Non-CoMP and Full-CoMP systems.
Systemic Sclerosis: Environmental Factors

Epidemiological evidence for the association between environmental and occupational risk factors and systemic sclerosis (SSc) has been extensively analyzed. Such exposures are frequently of long duration, and the inadequate classification of the type of exposure and other confounding variables may bias their estimated association with SSc. Environmental factors could be classified as occupational (silica, organic solvents), infectious (bacterial, viral), and non-occupational/non-infectious (drugs, pesticides, silicones). Understanding the link between environmental risk factors and the development of SSc is limited, due to the phenotypic and pathogenic heterogeneity of patients and disease, respectively, and also due to poor ability to assess environmental exposures quantitatively and the role of the gene-environment interactions in this disease. Global collaboration could increase the chance for a better use of the data obtained from a limited number of cases and also limited resources. Normalization and validation of biomarkers and questionnaires could also be very useful to reliably quantify environmental exposures.
Opacity , Phonetics , and Frequency in Taiwanese Tone Sandhi

A wug test study of tone sandhi patterns in Taiwanese indicates that sandhi productivity is affected by phonological opacity as well as the durational property and lexical frequency of the sandhi. Opacity outweighs phonetics and frequency as a global effect; frequency effects are evident for everyday users of the language; phonetic effects only surface for occasional users for whom the frequency effects have been weakened due to the lack of use of the language. The simultaneous underlearning of exceptionless opaque patterns, overlearning of phonetic effects, and proper learning of lexical statistics by Taiwanese speakers can be modeled by a Maximum Entropy grammar that encodes learning biases against lexical listing constraints and phonetically unmotivated patterns.
System prototypes: Virtual, hardware or hybrid?

Almost all SoC designs today use hardware prototyping at some point of the development cycle to perform hardware/software validation or test interfaces to real-world stimulus. Recently, virtual prototypes have emerged as a way to run system level tests and perform hardware/software co-simulation before silicon or hardware prototypes are available. Does the emergence of virtual prototyping mean the end for FPGA-based prototypes? Will the hardware prototype continue to live on as an integral part of the SoC design cycle? Will hybrids of virtual and hardware prototypes be the answer? Join our expert panelists in a spirited discussion on the best approach for speeding the verification and validation of complex SoC using system prototypes. Virtual, hardware or hybrid - which will reign supreme?
Radiofrequency Neurolysis for Lumbar Pain Using a Variation of the Original Technique.

BACKGROUND Zygapophysial joint arthrosis is a pathology related with axial lumbar pain. The most accepted treatment, after failure of medical management, is the thermal denervation of the medial branch. Nonetheless, the placement of the heat probe remains a challenge to surgeons, even when using the fluoroscope. Using a variation of Shealy's and Bogduk's original techniques, which includes ablation of the medial branch and the nerves present in the joint capsule, we hypothesize that we can obtain similar outcomes to those found in the literature. OBJECTIVE To present the results attained over the last 8 years in the treatment of axial lumbar pain from zygapophysial joints degeneration, by employing a variation of the lumbar medial branch neurotomy technique, called 360-degree facet rhizotomy with radiofrequency. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective evaluation. SETTING Spine Center - Minimally Invasive Surgery in Bogotá, Colombia. METHODS A medical chart review was conducted for patients diagnosed with axial lumbar pain from zygapophysial joint arthrosis and treated with 360-degree facet rhizolysis with a high frequency radiofrequency energy source between 2008 and 2014. Data were evaluated under modified MacNab and pre- and postoperative visual analog scale (VAS) criteria. RESULTS We obtained a total of 73 patients. The average population age was 58.6 years. The preoperative VAS obtained was 7.3, which changed to 1.7 one year after the procedure. The MacNab criteria 12 months after the surgery gave satisfactory outcomes (excellent and good) from 91.7% of the patients. LIMITATIONS This retrospective study includes inherent limitations and only offers one year follow-up data. CONCLUSIONS Thermal therapy for zygapophysial joint arthrosis constitutes a safe and effective technique. The one year follow-up data presented here show that the ablation of the medial branch and nerves present in the joint capsule leads to satisfactory results in a high percentage of patients.
The Principal's Paradox: Remaining Secure in A Precarious Position

Many educators maintain that the principalship is the most demanding of all public school administrative roles. At best, principals strive to provide vision and unity of purpose within challenging, dynamic, and highly political settings. At worst, principals are faced with the unre lenting task of maintaining structure and order within increasingly hostile, unpredictable, and conflict-laden environments.
Path planning using a Jacobian-based freespace generation algorithm

A simple and efficient algorithm is developed to generate a 2"-tree (generalized quad-tree) representation of the free configuration space for a manipulator moving in a workspace with obstacles. The algorithm is based on the existence of uniform bounds on the Jacobians relating the differential motions of points on the manipulator to differential joint motions. This representation can be searched to generate a collision-free path and optimized with dynamic constraints to produce an executable trajectory.
RANKING THE INFLUENCE USERS IN A SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE USING AN IMPROVED TOPSIS METHOD

With the wide spread popularity of social networking sites (SNS), enterprise organizations have started to explore the business opportunities in SNS such as Facebook to conduct targeted marketing and reputation management. Customers or users tend to trust the opinion of other customers or users, especially those with prior experience of a product or service, rather than company marketing. One of the important challenges to these enterprises is to conduct cost-effective marketing and reputation management on SNS through influencing users. When it comes to marketing, the users’ influence is associated with a certain topic or field on which people have different levels of preference and expertise is called homophily. In order to identify and predict influential users in a specific topic/subject more effectively, this paper introduces a new method to effectively identify the most influence users, who can generate the maximum of total benefit with respect to specific topics or business situations. This method uses homophily characteristics along with the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). Using this improved TOPSIS method, influencing users are identified and ranked on a Facebook dataset and compared against with TOPSIS method with no homophily. The experimental results show that how well the proposed technique precociously identify and rank influential users based on a certain topic or
Design space exploration of coarse-grain reconfigurable DSPs

This work introduces a new digital signal processor (DSP) architecture concept, which provides increased instruction-level parallelism (ILP), flexibility and scalability compared to state-of-the-art DSPs. The concept can be characterized by an enhanced RISC microprocessor with a tightly coupled reconfigurable ALU array, a vector load/store unit and a control flow manipulation unit. These units implement coarse-grain reconfigurable structures by means of switchable contexts. In contrast to previous work, context activation is performed event-driven according to the instruction pointer of the RISC microprocessor. The synchronous operation of the context-controlled functional units enables an ILP comparable to complex VLIW/SIMD processors, without introducing additional instruction overhead. The reconfigurable units can be adapted to the application demands exploiting parallelism more coarse-grain than common instruction-level functional units. To evaluate the concept, we present a parametrizable template model of the DSP architecture based on a standard ARM7 RISC microprocessor. The DSP model includes an architecture description based on our own ADL/simulation environment and a VHDL RTL model for the purpose of FPGA prototype evaluation. Further, we show detailed quantitative performance and utilization evaluation results related to the ALU array geometry, memory transfer bandwidth and the number of configuration contexts. First experiments executing DSP algorithms have indicated that the proposed architecture can exploit more of the potential application parallelism at a reasonable amount of hardware costs compared to conventional digital signal processors
THE WELL-TRAVELLED YOGURT POT: LESSONS FOR NEW FREIGHT TRANSPORT POLICIES AND REGIONAL PRODUCTION

Freight transport on roads has increased greatly, especially in the food sector. The growing distances in goods transportation are decisive determinants of environmental and social impacts. There are capacity limits which become evident in the environmental field and in the social field in decreasing quality of life. The concept of a product related transportation analysis which analyses the product- related transportation procedures has been accomplished for a strawberry yogurt. Eight thousand kilometres of roads are used for producing and distributing the examined yogurt. If one 150g strawberry yogurt is purchased in a supermarket in southern Germany, it will have been responsible for moving one lorry over 9.2 metres. So-called "environmental" products are not environmental if the distances are included. A regional product label can identify the origin of the ingredients and the total distance travelled. Suggests product-related transportation analysis can give the basis for such a scheme. (A)
Imbalance Between Xanthine Oxidase and Nitric Oxide Synthase Signaling Pathways Underlies Mechanoenergetic Uncoupling in the Failing Heart

Inhibition of xanthine oxidase (XO) in failing hearts improves cardiac efficiency by an unknown mechanism. We hypothesized that this energetic effect is due to reduced oxidative stress and critically depends on nitric oxide synthase (NOS) activity, reflecting a balance between generation of nitric oxide (NO) and reactive oxygen species. In dogs with pacing-induced heart failure (HF), ascorbate (1000 mg) mimicked the beneficial energetic effects of allopurinol, increasing both contractility and efficiency, suggesting an antioxidant mechanism. Allopurinol had no additive effect beyond that of ascorbate. Crosstalk between XO and NOS signaling was assessed. NOS inhibition with NG-monomethyl-l-arginine (L-NMMA; 20 mg/kg) had no effect on basal contractility or efficiency in HF, but prevented the +26.2±3.5% and +66.5±17% enhancements of contractility and efficiency, respectively, observed with allopurinol alone. Similarly, improvements in contractility and energetics due to ascorbate were also inhibited by L-NMMA. Because of the observed NOS-XO crosstalk, we predicted that in normal hearts NOS inhibition would uncover a depression of energetics caused by XO activity. In normal conscious dogs, L-NMMA increased myocardial oxygen consumption (M&OV0312;O2) while lowering left ventricular external work, reducing efficiency by 31.1±3.8% (P <0.005). Lowered efficiency was reversed by XO inhibition (allopurinol, 200 mg) or by ascorbate without affecting cardiac load or systemic hemodynamics. Single-cell immunofluorescence detected XO protein in cardiac myocytes that was enhanced in HF, consistent with autocrine signaling. These data show that both NOS and XO signaling systems participate in the regulation of myocardial mechanical efficiency and that upregulation of XO relative to NOS contributes to mechanoenergetic uncoupling in heart failure.
Mechanism of Dun1 Activation by Rad53 Phosphorylation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae*

Despite extensive studies, the molecular mechanism of DNA damage checkpoint activation remains incompletely understood. To better dissect this mechanism, we developed an activity-based assay for Dun1, a downstream DNA damage check-point kinase in yeast, using its physiological substrate Sml1. Using this assay, we confirmed the genetic basis of Dun1 activation. Rad53 was found to be directly responsible for Dun1 activation. We reconstituted the activation of Dun1 by Rad53 and found that phosphorylation of Thr-380 in the activation loop of Dun1 by Rad53 is responsible for Dun1 activation. Interestingly, phosphorylation of the evolutionarily conserved Thr-354 in the activation loop of Rad53 is also important for the regulation of Rad53 activity. Thus, this conserved mode of activation loop phosphorylation appears to be a general mechanism for the activation of Chk2 family kinases.
Housing First: Implementation, Dissemination, and Program Fidelity

The theme of this special issue is implementation, dissemination, and program fidelity of the Pathways’ Housing First (PHF) program. I cannot imagine a more fitting platform than The American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation for the first collection of articles on Housing First (HF). It is a sometimes overlooked but important fact that the (PHF) program was founded on the principles of psychiatric rehabilitation, which were infused into the program’s clinical practice from its inception. PHF began as an NIMH research-demonstration project called Taking Psych Rehab to the Streets, which sought to engage people who were homeless and who had co-occurring severe mental health and addiction problems (Tsemberis, Moran, Shinn, Shern, & Asmussen, 2003). Respecting consumers’ preferences was one of the core practices of that early outreach intervention, and it continues to be the foundation of the PHF program. In that initial study, we found that consumers who had remained homeless and previously shunned help for years were quick to engage if the offer of assistance was consistent with their priorities. What these consumers wanted above all was fundamental to their
A unified framework for the scale covariant affine, hyperbolic, and power class quadratic time-frequency representations using generalized time shifts

We propose a framework that unifies and extends the affine, hyperbolic, and power classes of quadratic time-frequency representations (QTFRs). These QTFR classes satisfy the scale covariance property, important in multiresolution analysis, and a generalized time-shift covariance property, important in the analysis of signals propagating through dispersive systems. We provide a general class formulation in terms of 2-D kernels, a generalized signal expansion, a list of desirable QTFR properties with kernel constraints, and a "central QTFR" generalizing the Wigner distribution and the Altes-Marinovich Q-distribution. We also propose two generalized time-shift covariant (not, in general, scale covariant) QTFR classes by applying a generalized warping to Cohen's (1966) class and to the affine class.
Language planning considerations in indigenous communities

Abstract Federally-funded bilingual programs for American Indian/Alaska Native students are addressesed from a language planning perspective. The discussion identifies three language policy types—endoglossic (community-oriented), exoglossic (externally-oriented), and mixed policies—and their relationship to American Indian/Alaska Native bilingual education. Federally-funded bilingual education represents an exoglossic policy for indigenous communities and as such, can lead to language loss. The recommendation here is that indigenous communities begin now to develop endoglossic policies that will reinforce past efforts in bilingual education while simultaneously stabilizing community heritage languages.
Excessive sleepiness is predictive of cognitive decline in the elderly.

STUDY OBJECTIVES To examine the association of sleep complaints reported at baseline (insomnia complaints and excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS)) and medication, with cognitive decline in community-dwelling elderly. DESIGN An 8-yr longitudinal study. SETTING The French Three-City Study. PARTICIPANTS There were 4,894 patients without dementia recruited from 3 French cities and having a Mini-Mental Status Examination (MMSE) score ≥ 24 points at baseline. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Questionnaires were used to evaluate insomnia complaints (poor sleep quality (SQ), difficulty in initiating sleep (DIS), difficulty in maintaining sleep (DMS), early morning awakening (EMA)), EDS, and sleep medication at baseline. Cognitive decline was defined as a 4-point reduction in MMSE score during follow-up at 2, 4, and 8 yr. Logistic regression models were adjusted for sociodemographic, behavioral, physical, and mental health variables, and apolipoprotein E genotype. EDS independently increased the risk of cognitive decline (odds ratio (OR) = 1.26, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.02-1.56), especially for those patients who also developed dementia during the follow-up period (OR = 1.39, 95% CI = 1.00-1.97). The number of insomnia complaints and DMS were negatively associated with MMSE cognitive decline (OR = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.60-0.98 for 3-4 complaints, OR = 0.81, 95% CI = 0.68-0.96, respectively). The 3 other components of insomnia (SQ, DIS, EMA) were not significantly associated with MMSE cognitive decline. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that EDS may be associated independently with the risk of cognitive decline in the elderly population. Such results could have important public health implications because EDS may be an early marker and potentially reversible risk factor of cognitive decline and onset of dementia.
Critical Literacy Development In Action

In this article, we explore the determinants of critical literacy development and of social and academic transformation. Knowledge of such determinants is prerequisite to the act of creating effective classroom policy that builds on the academic, social and language experience of the students rather than on the background experience of teachers, administrators and policy makers who create and enforce educational policy. Pedagogical implications are drawn from a close examination of various novels and texts which are suitable for k to college-level classrooms and can encourage a broader look at society. These implications focus on how literacy, and in particular critical literacy, can be used to question the texts and raise social awareness of societal values, thereby promoting social justice. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2009 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved. ]