Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reconceptualizing the Member Check Interview

The member check has been heralded as an important component of validation in qualitative research. Traditionally, the member check has been used in order to assess the accuracy with which a researcher has represented a participant's subjectivity. Some theorists, however, have argued that change, rather than representation, should be sought as a primary goal for qualitative research. The difference between using representation or change as a marker of validity has been described as a transactional/transformational divide. I argue that the member check can be utilized to span this divide in order to support a holistic view of validity. In particular, I assert that researchers should not expect participant subjectivities to remain static throughout the research process. Examples of the member check used in this manner are provided.
Attachment Styles, Relationship Satisfaction, and Well-Being in Working Women

ABSTRACT We propose and test a model connecting women's attachment styles, intimate relationship quality, workplace supervisor relationships, and well-being. The factors that lead to women's successful interaction patterns at home with a partner are suggested to be similar to successful interactions at work and are suggested to be related to well-being. A model was tested with data from 209 working women across various U.S. organizations. Women with an avoidance attachment style tended to have intimate relationships that were low in satisfaction and cohesion as well as low-quality relationships with their supervisors. Women in cohesive intimate relationships were likely to be satisfied with their job, experience low conflict at work, and report few physical symptoms. Women who had quality relationships with their superiors also had low conflict at work and were satisfied with their jobs. Results show important associations among social relationships at home and work related to quality of life.
SkewMask : Frustrating Clock Skew Fingerprinting Attempts

Previous work has shown that clock skew can be considered an identifying feature of a physical system, independent of time of measurement, network location of subject and observer, and other factors. Under certain reasonable assumptions, it is possible to fingerprint, or uniquely identify within some anonymity set, a remote machine by observing some of its network traffic and observing changes in the timestamps it sends in outgoing TCP headers. In this work we present and implement a simple scheme by which a machine can mask, or intentionally misrepresent, its clock skew, as a defense against fingerprinting by remote machines. We demonstrate the manner in which this masking scheme can be used to disguise a single machine or a group of machines, and we explore the limitations of our masking defense.
Forgiveness: Theory, research, and practice.

McCullough, Pargament, Thoresen, The Psychology of Forgiveness: History, Conceptual Issues, and Overview. Part I: Conceptual and Measurement Issues. Rye, Pargament, Ali, Beck, Dorff, Hallisey, Narayanan, Williams, Religious Perspectives on Forgiveness. Temoshok, Chandra, The Meaning of Forgiveness in a Specific Situational and Cultural Context: Persons Living with HIV/AIDS in India. McCullough, Hoyt, Rachal, What We Know (and Need to Know) about Assessing Forgiveness Constructs. Part II: Basic Psychological Research. A. B. Newberg, d'Aquili, S. K. Newberg, deMarici, The Neuropsychological Correlates of Forgiveness. Mullet, Girard, Developmental and Cognitive Points of View on Forgiveness. Exline , Baumeister, Expressing Forgiveness and Repentance: Benefits and Barriers. Emmons, Personality and Forgiveness. Part III: Applications in Counseling, Psychotherapy, and Health. Malcolm, Greenberg, Forgiveness as a Process of Change in Individual Psychotherapy. Gordon, Baucom, Snyder, The Use of Forgiveness in Marital Therapy. Worthington, Sandage, Berry, Group Interventions to Promote Forgiveness: What Researchers and Clinicians Ought to Know. Thoresen, Harris, Luskin, Forgiveness and Health: An Unanswered Question. Patton, Forgiveness in Pastoral Care and Counseling. Part IV: Conclusion. Pargament, McCullough, Thoresen, The Frontier of Forgiveness: Seven Directions for Psychological Study and Practice.
The mechanism of relaxation in response to magnesium by the aorta of pregnant rats with salt‐induced hypertension

The study examined the effect of salt‐induced hypertension on vascular relaxation in response to magnesium sulphate during pregnancy. Pregnant Wistar rats were fed for 6 weeks on a diet containing 0.3% (control) and 8.0% (test) sodium chloride. Aortic rings were then removed and contracted with 10(‐7) M phenylephrine or 30 mM potassium chloride. High salt intake increased the systolic blood pressure of the rats and increased the relaxation of phenylephrine‐contracted intact rings in response to magnesium sulphate. Neither endothelium removal nor treatment with 10(‐6) M indomethacin altered the relaxation of rings from the two groups of rats, when contracted with potassium chloride. Both processes significantly (P < 0.05) and similarly decreased the sensitivity and the maximal relaxation of rings from test rats contracted with phenylephrine; the relaxation of rings from the control rats was not altered. The results suggest that the relaxation of isolated rat aortic rings contracted with phenylephrine is enhanced in pregnant rats with salt‐induced hypertension. The mechanism involved in this enhancement is dependent on the vascular endothelium and receptor activation, and is indomethacin sensitive.
Usability testing: what have we overlooked?

For more than a decade, the number of usability test participants has been a major theme of debate among usability practitioners and researchers keen to improve usability test performance. This paper provides evidence suggesting that the focus be shifted to task coverage instead. Our data analysis of nine commercial usability test teams participating in the CUE-4 study revealed no significant correlation between the percentage of problems found or of new problems and number of test users, but correlations of both variables and number of user tasks used by each usability team were significant. The role of participant recruitment on usability test performance and future research directions are discussed.
Recognizing emotions of characters in movies

This work presents an investigation into recognizing emotions of people in near real life scenarios. Most existing studies on recognizing emotions of people have been conducted under controlled environments where the emotions are not spontaneous, rather highly exaggerated, and the number of modalities considered and their interactions is limited. The proposed bimodal approach fuses facial expression recognition (FER) with the “semantic orientation” of dialogs of actors to identify emotions under difficult illumination conditions, pose variations and occlusions in scenes. Experiments conducted on a dataset of 700 video clips from 17 movies demonstrate that the proposed fusion approach improves emotion recognition performance over unimodal approaches.
Faster Batched Range Minimum Queries

Range Minimum Query (RMQ) is an important building brick of many compressed data structures and string matching algorithms. Although this problem is essentially solved in theory, with sophisticated data structures allowing for constant time queries, there are scenarios in which the number of queries, $q$, is rather small and given beforehand, which encourages to use a simpler approach. A recent work by Alzamel et al. starts with contracting the input array to a much shorter one, with its size proportional to $q$. In this work, we build upon their solution, speeding up handling small batches of queries by a factor of 3.8--7.8 (the gap grows with $q$). The key idea that helped us achieve this advantage is adapting the well-known Sparse Table technique to work on blocks, with speculative block minima comparisons. We also propose an even much faster (but possibly using more space) variant without the array contraction.
Solution of the heawood map-coloring problem.

One of the most fascinating problems in mathematics is the four-color conjecture , and in spite of the fact that we have nothing new to add, a short discussion of the matter is important for our purposes. The fascination of the problem is almost certainly due to the fact that the relevant question may be stated so as to be intelligible to the general public. Are four colors always enough to obtain a coloring of the countries of any map on a sphere? It is only necessary to clarify the italicized words above for the general reader to understand and, if inquisitive, to become interested in the problem. A country must be connected; hence Pakistan, which consists of two disjoined parts, does not qualify. The reader begins to realize that we are considering an abstraction which has little resemblance to political reality. In reference to the term map on a sphere, there are no oceans; every point on the sphere is either inside exactly one country or is on the frontiers of two or more countries. Two countries are adjacent if they have a common line of frontier points. Thus France and Spain are adjacent, but the states of Colorado and Arizona are not, in spite of the fact that they have one frontier point in common. The negating factor is that there is no common line of frontier points. A coloring of a map on a sphere is an assignment of one color to each country so that no pair of adjacent countries is assigned the same color. Thus two countries having the property observed above (Colorado and Arizona) may be assigned the same color, but countries like France and Spain must be assigned different colors. The minimum number of colors which suffices to color a given map is called the chromatic number of the map. The maximum, m, of the chromatic numbers for all maps on the sphere is called the chromatic number of the sphere. Thus we can be assured that any map on the sphere can be colored by using no more than m colors. The question is: "What is m? " It is easy to see that there is a map on a sphere that consists of four countries each adjacent to the other three. Hence this map has four as its chromatic number. Consequently, m> 4. This leads to the classical question: "Does m = …
Polylogarithmic inapproximability

We provide the first hardness result of a polylogarithmic approximation ratio for a natural NP-hard optimization problem. We show that for every fixed ε>0, the GROUP-STEINER-TREE problem admits no efficient log2-ε k approximation, where k denotes the number of groups (or, alternatively, the input size), unless NP has quasi polynomial Las-Vegas algorithms. This hardness result holds even for input graphs which are Hierarchically Well-Separated Trees, introduced by Bartal [FOCS, 1996]. For these trees (and also for general trees), our bound is nearly tight with the log-squared approximation currently known. Our results imply that for every fixed ε>0, the DIRECTED-STEINER TREE problem admits no log2-ε n--approximation, where n is the number of vertices in the graph, under the same complexity assumption.
MicroRNA-326 suppresses the proliferation, migration and invasion of cervical cancer cells by targeting ELK1

Although microRNAs (miRNAs or miRs) are able to function as oncogenes or tumor suppressors, the role of miR-326 in regulating human cervical cancer cells remains unclear. In the present study, the expression of miR-326 was identified to be downregulated in cervical cancer cell lines and primary tumor samples, and the overexpression of miR-326 decreased cell proliferation, migration and invasion in cervical cell lines. Bioinformatics prediction and experimental validation results revealed that the function of miR-326 was achieved by targeting and repressing ETS domain-containing protein Elk-1 (ELK1) expression. ELK1 was targeted directly by miR-326, which was downregulated in human cervical cancer tissues compared with that in adjacent normal tissues. The results of the present study suggest that miR-326, a potential tumor suppressor, may be used in the treatment of cervical cancer.
Optimal HDR reconstruction with linear digital cameras

Given a multi-exposure sequence of a scene, our aim is to recover the absolute irradiance falling onto a linear camera sensor. The established approach is to perform a weighted average of the scaled input exposures. However, there is no clear consensus on the appropriate weighting to use. We propose a weighting function that produces statistically optimal estimates under the assumption of compound-Gaussian noise. Our weighting is based on a calibrated camera model that accounts for all noise sources. This model also allows us to simultaneously estimate the irradiance and its uncertainty. We evaluate our method on simulated and real world photographs, and show that we consistently improve the signal-to-noise ratio over previous approaches. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our model for optimal exposure sequence selection and HDR image denoising.
Primary cerebral lymphoma: a study of 47 cases probed for Epstein-Barr virus genome.

AIMS: To determine the prevalence of Epstein-Barr virus genome in primary cerebral lymphomas occurring in the absence of immune suppression. METHODS: Forty eight consecutive patients with lymphomas restricted to the central nervous system were identified, all of whom had had neurosurgical biopsies performed at the National Hospitals for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London. Only five patients had some form of underlying immune deficiency; 43 were apparently normal. The tumours were studied with immunohistochemical markers and by in situ hybridisation, using a biotinylated probe to the internal repeat region of Epstein-Barr virus. RESULTS: All the lymphomas were B cell in origin. Tumours from the five immunosuppressed patients all showed hybridisation, as did two of the "spontaneous" tumours. CONCLUSIONS: This is the largest series of cerebral lymphomas so far probed for Epstein-Barr virus genome: as more are examined, it is suggested that a small proportion of the tumours from immunocompetent patients will also contain the virus.
Centennial Changes of the Global Water Cycle in CMIP5 Models

AbstractThe global water cycle is predicted to intensify under various greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. Here the nature and strength of the expected changes for the ocean in the coming century are assessed by examining the output of several CMIP5 model runs for the periods 1990–2000 and 2090–2100 and comparing them to a dataset built from modern observations. Key elements of the water cycle, such as the atmospheric vapor transport, the evaporation minus precipitation over the ocean, and the surface salinity, show significant changes over the coming century. The intensification of the water cycle leads to increased salinity contrasts in the ocean, both within and between basins. Regional projections for several areas important to large-scale ocean circulation are presented, including the export of atmospheric moisture across the tropical Americas from Atlantic to Pacific Ocean, the freshwater gain of high-latitude deep water formation sites, and the basin averaged evaporation minus precipitation with im.
Agile Development Methods for Mobile Applications

This thesis is aimed at evaluating the suitability of agile methods for mobile application development projects, bringing a set of improvements to an established agile method called Mobile-D, and providing tool support to enable these improvements, facilitating performance testing and usage logging in the lifecycle. The motivation for this work is to better understand mobile development, and to improve related activities through research in the field and development of a support tool. After establishing agile methods as a good approach towards mobile application development, a number of improvements to the Mobile-D method are presented, including a study in mobile application categories, related paradigms, end-user inclusion in the lifecycle, as well as performance testing of components and adoption of software product line principles. The support tool enabling some of these improvements is then presented, with functionalities including performance testing for Android components, usage logging and automatic test case generation. These contributions intend to bring Mobile-D closer to an ideal mobile application development methodology, while providing useful features that can be outside the process, either in the form of practices or tools. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Mr. Stuart Anderson, for all the insightful ideas, suggestions and feedback I've received throughout my work. I would also like to thank the " Dinu Patriciu " Foundation for funding my studies; I am grateful for the opportunity they have given me. Special thanks to Panos Tsogas and to Marinos Argyrou who kindly provided his Android application for me to experiment with. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their full support during my studies. iii Declaration I declare that this thesis was composed by myself, that the work contained herein is my own except where explicitly stated otherwise in the text, and that this work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification except as specified.
Leaf cold acclimation and freezing injury in C3 and C4 grasses of the Mongolian Plateau

The scarcity of C4 plants in cool climates is usually attributed to their lower photosynthetic efficiency than C3 species at low temperatures. However, a lower freezing resistance may also decrease the competitive advantage of C4 plants by reducing canopy duration, especially in continental steppe grasslands, where a short, hot growing season is bracketed by frost events. This paper reports an experimental test of the hypothesis that cold acclimation is negligible in C4 grasses, leading to greater frost damage than in C3 species. The experiments exposed six C3 and three C4 Mongolian steppe grasses to 20 d chilling or control pre-treatments, followed by a high-light freezing event. Leaf resistance to freezing injury was independent of photosynthetic type. Three C3 species showed constitutive freezing resistance characterized by <20% leaf mortality, associated with high photosynthetic carbon fixation and electron transport rates and low leaf osmotic potential. One freezing-sensitive C4 species showed the expected pattern of chilling-induced damage to photosynthesis and >95% leaf mortality after the freezing event. However, three C3 and two C4 species displayed a cold acclimation response, showing significant decreases in osmotic potential and photosynthesis after exposure to chilling, and a 30–72% reduction of leaf freezing injury. This result suggested that down-regulation of osmotic potential may be involved in the cold acclimation process, and demonstrated that there is no inherent barrier to the development of cold acclimation in C4 species from this ecosystem. Cold acclimation via osmoregulation represents a previously undescribed mechanism to explain the persistence of C4 plants in cool climates.
Software transactional networking: concurrent and consistent policy composition

It seems natural to imagine that SDN policy specification and control is distributed, and this paper focuses on the resulting concurrency issues. Indeed, conflicts among concurrent policy updates may result in serious inconsistencies on the data plane, even when each update is installed with per-packet consistent update semantics. This paper introduces the problem of consistent composition of concurrent policy updates. Intuitively, consistent concurrent policy composition must appear as though there is no concurrency neither between any policy updates, nor between a policy update and in-flight packets on the data plane. We propose an elegant policy composition abstraction based on a transactional interface with all-or-nothing semantics: a policy update is either committed, in which case the policy is guaranteed to compose consistently over the entire network and the update is installed in its entirety, or aborted, in which case, no packet is affected by it. Consequently, the control application logic is relieved from the cumbersome and potentially error-prone synchronization and locking tasks, and control applications are kept light-weight. In this paper, we also sketch a simple implementation of the transactional synchronization: our approach is based on fine-grained locking on network components and avoids complex state machine replication.
Prevalence,awareness and factors associated with hypertension in North West Tanzania

ABSTRACT Background: Hypertension is a public health problem, and yet few people are aware of it and even fewer access effective treatment. With the ongoing demographic transition in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, people are changing from rural, manual work to urban lifestyles, hence the risk of hypertension increases. Objective: This study aimed at determining the prevalence, awareness and risk factors associated with hypertension in North West Tanzania. Design: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted among adults in Magu District in 2013. Information on socio-demographic, economic and lifestyle characteristics, medical conditions, and risk factors for hypertension were collected according to the WHO Steps survey tool. Measurements of blood pressure, blood sugar, pulse rate, and anthropometry were taken. Multivariate logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) for factors associated with hypertension (Blood pressure ≥140/90mm/Hg). Frequencies and percentages were used to determine the awareness, and treatment among hypertensive participants. Results: Among 9678 participants, the prevalence of hypertension was 8.0% and pre-hypertension 36.2%. There was a higher prevalence of hypertension at older ages, among females (8.2%) compared to males (7.7%), and among urban dwellers (10.1%) compared to rural residents (6.8%). Overweight, obese, and diabetic individuals had a higher risk of hypertension while HIV positive participants had a lower risk of hypertension (OR = 0.56; 95% CI 0.39 – 0.79). Among participants with hypertension, awareness was less than 10%. Conclusion: By integrating blood pressure screening into our long-standing community HIV screening program, we were able to identify many previously undiagnosed cases of hypertension and pre-hypertension. Age, residence, overweight and obesity were the major associated factors for hypertension. Awareness and treatment rates are very low indicating the need for programs to improve awareness, and treatment of hypertension.