Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of introducing single-gender classrooms in higher education on student achievement levels: A case study in software engineering courses in the GCC region

Changing from a co-education to a single-gender learning environment could be an opportunity and a challenge to any institute. Software engineering is one of the fields that could be affected by gender-segregation policies. Teaching the subject involves group and individual activities which could be dramatically affected in single-gender settings. In this paper, we present our experience in teaching software engineering in gender segregated classes. We will compare the performance of students before and after gender segregation. We will show samples of the activities and the findings. We will have a discussion about the impact of gender segregation on the overall course performance. Our findings could be useful in providing strategies to enhance the higher education learning experience and to eliminate future gender divide issues in the workplace.
Efficient proposal distributions for MCMC image segmentation

We present methods to obtain computationally efficient proposal distributions for Bayesian reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) based image segmentation. The slow convergence of MCMC methods often makes them poorly suited for practical image processing applications. We show how carefully crafted proposal distributions along with certain approximations can decrease the computational cost of MCMC image segmentation to a level that is comparable with some traditional algorithms. We also discuss the interpretation of the resulting distribution of different segmentations and present experimental results.
Enhanced Aldosterone Response to Angiotensin II in Human Hypertension

Adrenal and vascular responsiveness to graded doses of angiotensin II (A II) were recorded for seven normal subjects and 12 patients with essential hypertension while in balance on an intake of 200 mEq sodium/100 mEq potassium. Patients with essential hypertension had been previously studied and known to have normal responses of plasma renin activity to sodium restriction and upright posture. All was administered for 30 minutes at rates of 0.1, 0.3, 1, and 3 ng/kg per minute and plasma aldosterone responses were assessed 20 and 30 minutes later; blood pressure was monitored at intervals of 1 minute during infusion of A 11 at each rate. A significant increment in plasma aldosterone occurred at an infusion rate of 0.3 ng/kg per minute in patients with hypertension. This change was not seen until the infusion rate reached 1.0 ng/kg per minute in the normotensive control subjects. Even at an A II infusion rate of 1 ng/kg per minute, the increment in plasma aldosterone levels in normotensive subjects (4.2 ± 0.6 ng/dl) was significantly less (P < 0.001) than that in patients with essential hypertension (19 ± 3 ng/dl). In both groups, a significant rise in mean arterial blood pressure occurred at an A II dose of 0.3 ng/kg per minute, but the pressor response of the hypertensive group was significantly greater at the highest infusion rate (3 ng/kg per minute) (P < 0.05). Thus, enhanced adrenal and pressor responsiveness to infused A II was observed in the hypertensive subjects, suggesting a change in A II receptor affinity.
The Corticotropin-releasing Factor Receptor Type 2a Contains an N-terminal Pseudo Signal Peptide*

The corticotropin-releasing factor receptor type 2a (CRF2(a) receptor) belongs to the family of G protein-coupled receptors. The receptor possesses a putative N-terminal signal peptide that is believed to be cleaved-off after mediating the endoplasmic reticulum targeting/insertion process, like the corresponding sequence of the homologous CRF1 receptor. Here, we have assessed the functional significance of the putative signal peptide of the CRF2(a) receptor and show that it is surprisingly completely incapable of mediating endoplasmic reticulum targeting, despite meeting all sequence criteria for a functional signal by prediction algorithms. Moreover, it is uncleaved and forms part of the mature receptor protein. Replacement of residue Asn13 by hydrophobic or positively charged residues converts the sequence into a fully functional and cleaved signal peptide demonstrating that conventional signal peptide functions are inhibited by a single amino acid residue. Deletion of the domain leads to an increase in the amount of immature, intracellularly retained receptors demonstrating that the sequence has adopted a new function in receptor trafficking through the early secretory pathway. Taken together, our results identify a novel hydrophobic receptor domain in the family of the heptahelical G protein-coupled receptors and the first pseudo signal peptide of a eukaryotic membrane protein. Our data also show that the extreme N termini of the individual CRF receptor subtypes differ substantially.
Is There a Future for Histone Deacetylase Inhibitors in the Pharmacotherapy of Psychiatric Disorders?

In recent years, it has become widely recognized that a comprehensive understanding of chromatin biology is necessary to better appreciate its role in a wide range of diseases. The histone code has developed as a new layer of our appreciation of transcription factor-based mechanisms of gene expression. Although epigenetic regulation refers to a host of chromatin modifications that occur at the level of DNA, histones, and histone-associated proteins, how this regulation is orchestrated is still incompletely understood. Of those processes that comprise the epigenetic regulatory machinery, DNA methylation and histone acetylation/deacetylation have been the most thoroughly studied. Compounds that act as inhibitors of DNA methyltransferases or histone deacetylases (HDACs) activate a variety of intracellular signaling pathways that ultimately affect the coordinated expression of multiple genes. The altered patterns of mRNA and protein expression collectively converge on pathways linked to apoptosis and cell cycle arrest, among others. This has prompted a widespread search for epigenetic inhibitors that could be used as chemotherapeutic agents, and several are undergoing clinical evaluation. More recently, there has been interest in the use of HDAC inhibitors to activate the expression of mRNAs that are down-regulated in various neurological and psychiatric conditions. Considerably less is known regarding the effect these drugs have on postmitotic cells such as neurons. Before we consider the clinical use of additional HDAC inhibitors to treat schizophrenia or unipolar depression, there are a number of key issues that need to be resolved.
A flexible hybrid framework for modeling complex manipulation tasks

Future service robots will need to perform a wide range of tasks using various objects. In order to perform complex tasks, robots require a suitable internal representation of the task. We propose a hybrid framework for representing manipulation tasks, which combines continuous motion planning and discrete task-level planning. In addition, we use a mid-level planner to optimize individual actions according to the plan. The proposed framework incorporates biologically-inspired concepts, such as affordances and motor primitives, in order to efficiently plan for manipulation tasks. The final framework is modular, can generalize well to different situations, and is straightforward to expand. Our demonstrations also show how the use of affordances and mid-level planning can lead to improved performance.
Three-Dimensional Maturation Reaction Norms for North Sea Plaice

Probabilistic maturation reaction norms (PMRNs) with up to three explanatory dimensions were estimated for female North Sea plaice. The three-dimensional PMRNs reported here (1) are the first ones to be obtained for any organism, (2) reveal the differential capacity of alternative life-history state variables to predict the onset of reproduction, (3) document consistent temporal trends in maturation, and (4) help disentangle the contributions of genetic and plastic effects to these trends. We first show that PMRNs based on age and weight provide slightly more accurate approximations of maturation probabilities than PMRNs based on age and length. At the same time, weight-based PMRNs imply a much wider spread of maturation probabilities than length-based PMRNs. We then demonstrate that including condition as a third explanatory variable improves predictions of maturation probability. The resultant three-dimensional PMRNs for age-length-condition or age-weight-condition not only show how, at given size and age, maturation probability increases with condition, but also expose how this impact of condition decreases with age and has changed over time. Our analysis reveals several interesting temporal trends. First, it is demonstrated that, even after removing plastic effects on maturation captured by age, length, weight, and condition, residual trends towards maturation at younger ages and smaller lengths remain. Second, we find that the width of both length- and weight-based PMRNs decreased significantly over time. Third, age and condition are nowadays affecting maturation probabilities less than they did decades ago. We think that plaice is currently maturing at a very low age, size and body condition, and think that the narrow and steep reaction norms do not allow a strong continuation of the observed trends. All obtained findings are in good agreement with predictions from life-history theory based on the hypothesis of evolutionary change caused by heavy exploitation. We estimate maturation probabilities
Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus A/H5N1 Infection in Vaccinated Meat Duck Flocks in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam

Summary We investigated episodes of suspected highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI)‐like illness among 12 meat duck flocks in two districts in Tien Giang province (Mekong Delta, Vietnam) in November 2013. In total, duck samples from 8 of 12 farms tested positive for HPAI virus subtype A/haemagglutinin 5 and neuraminidase 1 (H5N1) by real‐time RT‐PCR. Sequencing results confirmed clade of 2.3. 2.1. c as the cause of the outbreaks. Most (7/8) laboratory‐confirmed positive flocks had been vaccinated with inactivated HPAI H5N1 clade 2.3. 4 vaccines <6 days prior to onset of clinical signs. A review of vaccination data in relation to estimated production in the area suggested that vaccination efforts were biased towards larger flocks and that vaccination coverage was low [21.2% ducks vaccinated with two shots (range by district 7.4–34.9%)]. The low‐coverage data, the experimental evidence of lack of cross‐protection conferred by the currently used vaccines based on clade 2.3. 4 together with the short lifespan of meat duck flocks (60–70 days), suggest that vaccination is not likely to be effective as a tool for control of H5N1 infection in meat duck flocks in the area.
Real-Time In-Memory Checkpointing for Future Hybrid Memory Systems

In this paper, we study real-time in-memory checkpointing as an effective means to improve the reliability of future large-scale parallel processing systems. Under this context, the checkpoint overhead can become a significant performance bottleneck. Novel memory system designs with upcoming non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) technologies are emerging to address this performance issue. However, we find that those designs can still have prohibitively high checkpoint overhead and system downtime, especially when checkpoints are taken frequently to implement a reliable system. In this paper, we propose a novel in-memory checkpointing system, named Mona, for reducing the checkpoint overhead of hybrid memory systems with NVRAM and DRAM. To minimize the in-memory checkpoint overhead, Mona dynamically writes partial checkpoints from DRAM to NVRAM during application execution. To reduce the interference of partial checkpointing, Mona utilizes runtime idle periods and leverages a cost model to guide partial checkpointing decisions for individual DRAM ranks. We further develop load-balancing mechanisms to balance checkpoint overheads across different DRAM ranks. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of Mona in reducing the checkpoint overhead, downtime and restarting time.
Data Mining Challenges for Electronic Safety: The Case of Fraudulent Intent Detection in E-Mails

Online criminals have adapted traditional snail mail and door-to-door fraudulent schemes into electronic form. Increasingly, such schemes target an individual’s personal email, where they mingle among, and are masked by, honest communications. The targeting and conniving nature of these schemes are an infringement upon an individual’s personal privacy, as well as a threat to personal safety. In this paper, we introduce an array of challenges which are ripe for the attention of the data mining research community and are vastly different from those of combating the general problem of spam. We illustrate how state-of-theart spam filtering systems fail to capture fraudulent intent hidden in the text of e-mails, but demonstrate how more robust systems can be engineered using existing data mining tools. We conclude by examining a specific scheme, the Nigerian 4-1-9 advance fee fraud scam, for which we design a learning system capable of accurately identifying the fraudulent indent within an e-mail. Our system is applicable to fraud detection and can serve as a guide for law enforcement agencies in cyber-investigations.
Real Time Eye Gaze Logging in a 3D Game/Simulation World

Evaluating the effectiveness of virtual environments as training and analysis systems one must take into account both strongly and weakly defined measures of visual behaviour and associated experience. The investigation of cross correlations between strongly defined measures of logged gaze behaviours, and weakly defined measures of subjective perceptions of visual behaviour, reveals significant discrepancies. The existence of these discrepancies casts doubt upon the effectiveness of using self-reporting questionnaires to assess training effectiveness. However, making participants aware of these discrepancies can be a potentially powerful method for increasing the effectiveness of training using virtual worlds.
Ultrastructure of iodine treated wood

Abstract Iodine staining has been used to study the orientation of cellulose microfibrils in wood using light microscopy. The aim of this work was to understand the exact nature of the staining reaction with iodine and to provide insight into the properties and organisation of the wood cell wall. Based on transmission electron microscopy it is apparent that precipitation of the iodine following treatment with nitric acid results in the formation of crystal cavities within the cell wall, which follow the orientation of the cellulose microfibrils. There is no evidence that iodine precipitates within “drying checks” as previously speculated. High resolution confocal reflectance microscopy of crystal cavity orientation indicates that the microfibril arrangement within pit borders can be both spiral and circular. Crystal cavities are much more abundant within the S1 layer than elsewhere. All of the cells examined had crystal cavities in the S1 region, which may be related to the reduced lignification at the S1/S2 boundary resulting in greater porosity of the cell wall at this location. Within the S2 region, clusters of crystal cavities are randomly distributed and occur in widely varying numbers among adjacent cell walls, suggesting variations in the porosity of the S2 wall within and among adjacent tracheids. Cavities form preferentially within more electron lucent regions of the cell wall. The random nature of crystal cavity formation within S2 clusters probably reflects the underlying random nature of the cell wall nanostructure. We conclude that iodine staining can provide important clues to the nanostructural properties of tracheid cell walls.
Personalized Human Computation

Significant effort in machine learning and information retrieval has been devoted to identifying personalized content such as recommendations and search results. Personalized human computation has the potential to go beyond existing techniques like collaborative filtering to provide personal­ized results on demand, over personal data, and for complex tasks. This work-in-progress compares two approaches to personal­ized human computation. In both, users annotate a small set of training examples which are then used by the crowd to annotate unseen items. In the first approach, which we call taste-matching, crowd members are asked to annotate the same set of training examples, and the ratings of similar users on other items are then used to infer personal­ized ratings. In the second approach, taste-grokking, the crowd is presented with the training examples and asked to use them predict the ratings of the target user on other items.
Lighthouse: coordination through emerging design

Despite the fact that software development is an inherently collaborative activity, a great deal of software development is spent with developers in isolation, working on their own parts of the system. In these situations developers are unaware of parallel changes being made by others, often resulting in conflicts. One common approach to deal with this issue is called conflict resolution, which means that changes have already been checked-in and developers must use merge tools to resolve conflicts and then retest the code to ensure its correctness. Unfortunately, this process becomes more difficult the longer the conflicts go undetected. In order to address these issues, have been proposed conflict avoidance approaches that detect conflicts as soon as they occur. In this paper, we present Lighthouse, an Eclipse plug-in that takes the conflict avoidance approach to coordinate developers. Lighthouse distinguishes itself by utilizing a concept called emerging design, an up to date design representation of the code, to alert developers of potentially conflicting implementation changes as they occur, indicating where the changes have been made and by whom.
Computational Modeling of Concrete Degradation Due to Alkali Silica Reaction

This paper presents a computational multi-level model for the description of alkali and moisture transport in concrete structures coupled to a macroscopic alkali silicate reaction (ASR) induced phase-field damage model. Concrete is modeled as a heterogeneous material consisting of a partially saturated pore space with diffusively distributed microcracks and the solid skeleton (cement paste and potentially reactive and inert aggregates). The influence of the topology of the pore space and the presence of oriented microcracks on ion diffusion and moisture transport is taken into account through a novel continuum micromechanics homogenization model. The transport model is connected to a phenomenological reaction kinetics model to account for the ASR induced volume expansion of the affected aggregates. At the macroscopic scale, crack propagation and effects of induced topological changes on the fluid and ion transport are taken into account using a phase-field model.
NOMAD: Linguistic Resources and Tools Aimed at Policy Formulation and Validation

The NOMAD project (Policy Formulation and Validation through non Moderated Crowd-sourcing) is a project that supports policy making, by providing rich, actionable information related to how citizens perceive different policies. NOMAD automatically analyzes citizen contributions to the informal web (e.g. forums, social networks, blogs, newsgroups and wikis) using a variety of tools. These tools comprise text retrieval, topic classification, argument detection and sentiment analysis, as well as argument summarization. NOMAD provides decision-makers with a full arsenal of solutions starting from describing a domain and a policy to applying content search and acquisition, categorization and visualization. These solutions work in a collaborative manner in the policy-making arena. NOMAD, thus, embeds editing, analysis and visualization technologies into a concrete framework, applicable in a variety of policy-making and decision support settings In this paper we provide an overview of the linguistic tools and resources of NOMAD.
Unintentional injuries in a twin study of preschool children: environmental, not genetic, risk factors.

OBJECTIVE To analyze the relative contribution of latent genetic and environmental factors to differences in the injury liability of children, and to examine the association between measured socio-economic, family, and child-behavior variables and unintentional injury risk. METHODS Unintentional injuries from birth to age 5, together with information regarding measured risk variables, were reported by mothers in a sample of 1027 same-sex twin pairs from a nationally representative 1994-1995 birth cohort. RESULTS Child-specific environmental factors accounted for most of the variance (86.4%) in the likelihood of ever having an injury. When considering the risk of two or more injuries child-specific environmental factors explained 60.2% of the variance and family-wide environmental influence 39.8%. Measured socio-economic, family, and child-behavior factors predicted frequent injury. CONCLUSIONS Results give little support to the concept of a heritable injury-prone trait in preschool children; environmental influences accounted for most of the injury variance in this sample. However, behavioral variables, especially the child's externalizing problem behaviors, are also important in explaining unintentional injuries.
Efficient buffer sharing in shared memory ATM systems with space priority traffic

In this letter we study the problem of the optimal design of buffer management policies within the class of pushout and expelling policies for a shared memory asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch or demultiplexer fed by traffic containing two different space priorities. A numerical study of the optimal policies for small buffer sizes is used to help design heuristics applicable to large buffer sizes. Simulation studies for large buffer systems are then presented.
Zinc Intake and Risk of Prostate Cancer: Case-Control Study and Meta-Analysis

Zinc is an essential dietary element that has been implicated in the pathogenesis of prostate cancer, a cancer that disproportionately affects men of African descent. Studies assessing the association of zinc intake and prostate cancer have yielded inconsistent results. Furthermore, very little is known about the relationship between zinc intake and prostate cancer among African Americans. We examined the association between self-reported zinc intake and prostate cancer in a hospital-based case-control study of African Americans. We then compared our results with previous studies by performing a meta-analysis to summarize the evidence regarding the association between zinc and prostate cancer. Newly diagnosed African American men with histologically confirmed prostate cancer (n = 127) and controls (n = 81) were recruited from an urban academic urology clinic in Washington, DC. Controls had higher zinc intake, with a mean of 14 mg/day versus 11 mg/day for cases. We observed a non-significant, non-linear increase in prostate cancer when comparing tertiles of zinc intake (OR <6.5 vs 6.5–12.5mg/day 1.8, 95% CI: 0.6,5.6; OR <6.5 vs >12.5mg/day 1.3, 95% CI: 0.2,6.5). The pooled estimate from 17 studies (including 3 cohorts, 2 nested case-control, 11 case-control studies, and 1 randomized clinical trial, with a total of 111,199 participants and 11,689 cases of prostate cancer) was 1.07hi vs lo 95% CI: 0.98–1.16. Using a dose-response meta-analysis, we observed a non-linear trend in the relationship between zinc intake and prostate cancer (p for nonlinearity = 0.0022). This is the first study to examine the relationship between zinc intake in black men and risk of prostate cancer and systematically evaluate available epidemiologic evidence about the magnitude of the relationship between zinc intake and prostate cancer. Despite of the lower intake of zinc by prostate cancer patients, our meta-analysis indicated that there is no evidence for an association between zinc intake and prostate cancer.