Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intrinsic mobility in graphene

Recent studies have shown that a high K dielectric solvent screens the impurities for room temperature transport in graphene and the mobility has been found to increase by orders of magnitude. This gives what is probably the intrinsic, phonon limited mobility at room temperature, and we have confirmed this with simulation. Mobility as high as 44 000 cm2 V−1 s−1 was achieved. At very low density, impurity scattering still is the determining factor for mobility, but this is significantly reduced in the recent experiments due to the dielectric screening. At high density, impurity scattering becomes negligible.
Expression of the lipogenic enzyme fatty acid synthase (FAS) in retinoblastoma and its correlation with tumor aggressiveness.

PURPOSE Fatty acid synthase (FAS) performs the anabolic conversion of dietary carbohydrate or protein to fatty acids. Many common human cancers express high levels of FAS, and its differential expression between normal and neoplastic tissues has led to the consideration of FAS as a target for anticancer therapy. To investigate the potential of targeting FAS in the treatment of retinoblastoma, we first determined whether FAS was activated in this human tumor. Moreover, correlation of FAS expression with tumor aggressiveness was determined. METHODS FAS reactivity was evaluated by immunohistochemistry in 66 retinoblastoma specimens from 65 patients. Degree of tumor differentiation, choroid invasion, optic nerve infiltration, mitotic rate, and necrosis extension were estimated. FAS expression was correlated with all these tumor characteristics by means of parametric and nonparametric statistical analyses. RESULTS Eighty-two percent of tumors were FAS positive. Stronger FAS expression correlated with more advanced choroid (P < 0.001) and optic nerve (P = 0.016) invasion, high mitotic index (P < 0.001), and less differentiated histology (P = 0.047). Correlation with extension of necrosis was not statistically significant. Unaffected retina was negative. CONCLUSIONS The data suggest that expression of FAS and fatty acid synthesis support an essential functional aspect of retinoblastoma cells, perhaps cell growth or survival. FAS activation may serve as a novel target for systemic and local antineoplastic therapy and, because it increases with tumor aggressiveness, its inhibition could represent an alternative treatment strategy in advanced and resistant retinoblastomas.
Mobility strategies, ‘mobility differentials’ and ‘transnational exit’: the experiences of precarious migrants in London’s hospitality jobs

This article explores the patterns of occupational and geographical mobility of migrant hospitality workers, drawing on participatory research in London. It focuses on the ways in which migrants strategize around temporary employment and move across different jobs and locations trying to improve their precarious lives. Combining labour process theory and the perspective of the autonomy of migration the author reviews the concept of ‘mobility power’ as a form of resistance to degrading work. The findings illustrate that, while certain categories of migrants remain trapped in temporary employment, others manage to move on occupationally, develop aspects of their lives beyond work and engage in new migration. The main argument is that, in contrast to mainstream accounts of migrants’ labour market incorporation, migrant temp workers use their transnational exit power to quit bad jobs and defy employers’ assumptions about their availability to work under poor conditions.
A Caveolar Complex between the Cationic Amino Acid Transporter 1 and Endothelial Nitric-oxide Synthase May Explain the “Arginine Paradox”*

Immunohistochemistry of porcine pulmonary artery endothelial cells (PAEC) with antibodies specific for caveolin, endothelial nitric-oxide synthase (eNOS), and the arginine transporter (CAT1) demonstrates that all of these proteins co-localize in plasma membrane caveolae. When incubated with solubilized PAEC plasma membrane proteins, eNOS-specific antibody immunoprecipitates CAT1-mediated arginine transport. These results document the existence of a caveolar complex between CAT1 and eNOS in PAEC that provides a mechanism for the directed delivery of substrate arginine to eNOS. Direct transfer of extracellular arginine to membrane-bound eNOS accounts for the “arginine paradox” and explains why caveolar localization of eNOS is required for optimal nitric oxide production by endothelial cells.
Rough set based pose invariant face recognition with mug shot images

This paper presents a pose invariant face recognition system to annihilate pose problem by using a modified log Gabor algorithm and the concepts of rough sets together. The proposed system consists of four separate modules; face detection, pose classification, feature extraction and recognition. Rough membership function rmf classifier has been used to classify the poses of an image. Log Gabor has been used as feature extraction to represent the face and SVDs to reduce the redundant features. And at last, the reduced log Gabor feature is applied to the nearest neighbour classifier for recognition. The aim of this paper is to address the issues such as recognizing the individual from mug shot images, under limited number of training samples available for large degree of variations in poses. The proposed system has been evaluated for different pose variations under arbitrary tilt orientations for four different face databases.
Perceived affordances of Malaysian university students in Web 2.0-based English as second language informal learning: A mixed methods study

Recent advances in Web 2.0 technology offer global authentic materials and a natural context to promote learner independence in informal ESL acquisition. This paper presents a report on research on the effect of Web 2.0 technologies on Malaysian university students’ informal learning practices. The researcher applies a mixed-methods approach combining multiple data sources (i.e. on-line self-reported surveys and focus group interviews) and analytical methods. Questionnaires are used to generate quantitative data from the university student population (N=400) through the on-line self-reported survey. Five in-depth focus group interviews comprising 20 students are conducted. This stage aims to contribute further insights into these issues. Finally, the analysis integrates the results of the two methods during the interpretation stage. A majority of the Malaysian university students (ESL learners) surveyed found informal learning mediated by web 2.0 tools to be a useful and motivating practice. The research finds that context-sensitive, web 2.0 tools are valuable for motivating informal learning.
Effects of sibling training on in-home applied behavior analysis programs and attitudes toward children with autism

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . vi TABLE OF CONTENTS . x LIST OF FIGURES . xii LIST OF TABLES . xiii LIST OF APPENDICIES . xiv INTRODUCTION . 1 Statement of Purpose . 1 Autism . 3 Treatment Based on Applied Behavior Analysis . 5 Parent, Caregiver, and Sibling Training . 8 Current Study and Research Questions. 14 METHOD . 17 Participants . 17 Measures . 18 Materials . 19 Procedure . 20 Intervention . 23 Potential Benefits, Risks, and Management of Risks . 28 Analysis of Data . 31
Effects of Dopamine-Receptor Blockade on Self-Stimulation in the Monkey I

MORA, F. , E. T. ROLLS, M. J. BURTON AND S. G. SHAW. Effects ofdopamine-receptor blockade on self-stimulation in the monkey. PHARMAC. BIOCHEM. BEHAV. 4(2) 211-216 , 1976. In a do~-response experiment it was shown that intraperitoneal injections of 0.062 mg/kg, and 0.1 mg/kg of the dopamine-receptor blocking agent and neuroleptic spiroperidol severely attenuate self-stimulation in the orbitofrontal cortex, hypothalamus, and in the region of the locus coeruleus, in the rhesus monkey and in the squirrel monkey. In the rhesus monkey intracranial injections of 6 ug of spiroperidol bilaterally into the nucleus accumbens or the hypothalamus attenuated self-stimulation of the amygdala, and injections into the orbitofrontal cortex attenuated self-stimulation of the amygdala and lateral hypothalamus. Self-stimulation at other sites tested (including the region of the locus coeruleus) was much less affected by the injections, and injections into the region of the locus coeruleus were ineffective. These results together with other control experiments suggest that spiroperidol can attenuate self-stimulation in the monkey independently of any motor impairment or sedation produced, and that dopamine receptors in particular brain regions are involved in self-stimulation of particular brain sites.
Applying Dimensional Values in Understanding Intercultural Communication

There exist multiple approaches in the theorizing of the relationship between culture and communication. This article will focus on the benefits of utilizing the dimensional value framework in explaining cross-cultural or intercultural communication processes. The essay is organized in three sections. First, core ideas of the interpretive, critical, and social science approaches to the study of intercultural communication will be outlined and the merits of a social science perspective will be advanced. Second, the two social science positions, the discrete versus the dimensional value position will be discussed via a set of controversial issues to be addressed. Third, future challenges concerning the relationship between dimensional values analysis and intercultural communication issues will be raised.
Syntrophic exchange in synthetic microbial communities

Significance Metabolic exchange between microbes is a crucial process driving the development of microbial ecosystems. The exchange of essential amino acids presents an opportunity to investigate the guiding principles underlying microbial trade in nature. In this study, we devised synthetic communities of Escherichia coli bacteria of increasing complexity to measure general properties enabling metabolic exchange of amino acids. We identified numerous syntrophic interactions that enable cooperative growth, which exhibited both positive and negative epistasis with increasing community complexity. Our results suggest that amino acid auxotrophy may be an evolutionarily optimizing strategy to reduce biosynthetic burden while promoting cooperative interactions between different bacteria in the microbiome. Metabolic crossfeeding is an important process that can broadly shape microbial communities. However, little is known about specific crossfeeding principles that drive the formation and maintenance of individuals within a mixed population. Here, we devised a series of synthetic syntrophic communities to probe the complex interactions underlying metabolic exchange of amino acids. We experimentally analyzed multimember, multidimensional communities of Escherichia coli of increasing sophistication to assess the outcomes of synergistic crossfeeding. We find that biosynthetically costly amino acids including methionine, lysine, isoleucine, arginine, and aromatics, tend to promote stronger cooperative interactions than amino acids that are cheaper to produce. Furthermore, cells that share common intermediates along branching pathways yielded more synergistic growth, but exhibited many instances of both positive and negative epistasis when these interactions scaled to higher dimensions. In more complex communities, we find certain members exhibiting keystone species-like behavior that drastically impact the community dynamics. Based on comparative genomic analysis of >6,000 sequenced bacteria from diverse environments, we present evidence suggesting that amino acid biosynthesis has been broadly optimized to reduce individual metabolic burden in favor of enhanced crossfeeding to support synergistic growth across the biosphere. These results improve our basic understanding of microbial syntrophy while also highlighting the utility and limitations of current modeling approaches to describe the dynamic complexities underlying microbial ecosystems. This work sets the foundation for future endeavors to resolve key questions in microbial ecology and evolution, and presents a platform to develop better and more robust engineered synthetic communities for industrial biotechnology.
Game-based Co-design of Games for Learning with Children and Teachers: Research Goals and a Study

This paper reports on the research topics and goals for my Ph.D. In the opening, game-based learning and co-design are overviewed. Issues emerging from the surveyed literature are used to frame the research goals of my Ph.D., broken down into propaedeutic objectives. The paper continues presenting the co-design studies for tackling the stated objectives, and focuses on the study conducted with tablets. The design of this study is discussed rather in details so as to foster the discussion and gather expert feedback from CHItaly community. The paper ends recapping the main lessons learnt across the co-design studies.
In Search of Identity: Nationalism and Religion in Eastern Europe

At the beginning of the 1990s an anecdote was very popular in Bulgaria: 'Someone asks radio Yerevan how many European states there will be in the year 2000. The answer is: eight, namely, the United States of Europe, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro. ' We might also add the former Soviet republics. The anonymous author of this anecdote has aptly expressed the two simultaneous trends in the social-economic, political and cultural processes in Europe after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: on the one hand, the striving for, and concrete steps towards, the further development of supranational spaces and entities at different levels, such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe; and on the other hand, renationalisation and regionalisation, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Unfortunately, this disintegration reflects the separatist nationalistic attitudes suppressed for some decades under the cover of internationalist ideology and practice, and its extreme expressions were the bloody events in former Yugoslavia and Nagorny Karabakh, which once again reminded us of the importance of interethnic tolerance. One of the best television reports that I have seen on the war in former Yugoslavia ended with the revelation of a Russian volunteer: 'There aren't any atheists in the trenches here! ' I had the opportunity to see personally the gaping wounds of the war during my trip from Rijeka to Dubrovnik in April 1994, and through conversations and discussions with people of different nationalities and denominations to feel the subtle insidious bonds between their sense of ethnic belonging and their intimate religiosity, which were so skilfully exploited by unscrupulous politicians and military men. The Orthodox and the Catholic faiths were unalterable characteristics of the Serbian and the Croatian popUlation. This gave a new sacred! dimension to the resentment and the hatred. Thus I came to the idea, more emotionally than rationally, of investigating the relations and alliances between two essential phenomena of the history of humankind religion and nationalism in their specific forms and relations in postcommunist European societies. Because of my position as a witness and participant in the hectic and often surprising events in this region, this paper is far from claiming to give cool diagnoses or to commit itself to lofty prognoses. This is not only because the specific character of these very historical processes makes the ground for such claims fairly questionable. My primary aim is to understand and explain better the world I am living in: typically behind the academic concepts and constructions concerning
Sep , 2005 TR CS-05-09 Search on the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web provides a way to encode information and knowledge on web pages in a form that is easier for computers to understand and process. This article discusses the issues underlying the discovery, indexing and search over web documents that contain semantic web markup. Unlike conventional Web search engines, which use information retrieval techniques designed for documents of unstructured text, Semantic Web search engines must handle documents comprised of semi-structured data. Moreover, the meaning of data is defined by associated ontologies that are also encoded as semantic web documents whose processing may require significant amount of reasoning. We describe Swoogle, an implemented semantic web search engine that discovers, analyzes, and indexes knowledge encoded in semantic web documents throughout the Web, and illustrate its use to help human users and software agents find relevant knowledge.
Effects of Polite Behaviors Expressed by Robots: A Psychological Experiment in Japan

A psychological experiment was conducted to straightforwardly investigate the effects of polite behaviors expressed by robots in Japan, using a small-sized humanoid robot that performed four types of behaviors with voice task instructions. Results of the experiment suggested that the subjects who experienced "deep bowing" motion of the robot felt it more extrovert than those who experienced "just standing" motion. Subjects who experienced "lying" motion of the robot felt the robot less polite than those who experienced the other motions. Female subjects more strongly feeling the robot extrovert replied for the task instruction from the robot faster, although no such trend was found in the male subjects. However, the male subjects who did not perform the task felt the robot less polite than the male subjects who performed the task and the female subjects who did not perform the task.
Overview of the TREC 2015 Tasks Track

Research in Information Retrieval has traditionally focused on serving the best results for a single query, ignoring the reasons (or the task) that might have motivated the user to submit that query. Often times search engines are used to complete complex tasks (information needs); achieving these tasks with current search engines requires users to issue multiple queries. For example, booking travel to a location such as London could require the user to submit various queries such as flights to London, hotels in London, points of interest around London, etc. Standard evaluation mechanisms focus on evaluating the quality of a retrieval system in terms of the relevance of the results retrieved, completely ignoring the fact that user satisfaction mainly depends on the usefullness of the system in helping the user complete the actual task that led the user issue the query. The TREC 2015 Tasks Track is an attempt in devising mechanisms for evaluating quality of retrieval systems in terms of (1) how well they can understand the underlying task that led the user submit a query, and (2) how useful they are for helping users complete their tasks. In this overview, we first summarise the three categories of evaluation mechanisms used in the track and briefly describe the corpus, topics, and tasks that comprise the test collections. We then give an overview of the runs submitted to the Tasks Track and present evaluation results and analysis.
Acts of Benevolence: A Limited-Resource Account of Compliance with Charitable Requests

The invention relates to a clock signal frequency multiplier circuit. The circuit multiplies the speed of a clock signal of an integrated circuit (IC) by a factor N to generate a times-N clock signal. The circuit first receives a clock signal. Next, the circuit replicates the clock signal into a plurality of N component signals. Each Jth component signal is delayed from the (J-1)th component signal by 1/N cycles, where J equals 1 to N. The (J=1)th component signal is the clock signal. The N component signals are referred to as phase-shifted components. Finally, the circuit logically combines the phase-shifted components into a times-N clock signal.
Childhood Soy Intake and Breast Cancer Risk in Asian American Women

Introduction: Historically, breast cancer incidence has been substantially higher in the United States than in Asia. When Asian women migrate to the United States, their breast cancer risk increases over several generations and approaches that for U.S. Whites. Thus, modifiable factors, such as diet, may be responsible. Methods: In this population-based case-control study of breast cancer among women of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino descent, ages 20 to 55 years, and living in San Francisco-Oakland (California), Los Angeles (California) and Oahu (Hawaii), we interviewed 597 cases (70% of those eligible) and 966 controls (75%) about adolescent and adult diet and cultural practices. For subjects with mothers living in the United States (39% of participants), we interviewed mothers of 99 cases (43% of eligible) and 156 controls (40%) about the daughter's childhood exposures. Seventy-three percent of study participants were premenopausal at diagnosis. Results: Comparing highest with lowest tertiles, the multivariate relative risks (95% confidence interval) for childhood, adolescent, and adult soy intake were 0.40 (0.18-0.83; Ptrend = 0.03), 0.80 (0.59-1.08; Ptrend = 0.12), and 0.76 (0.56-1.02; Ptrend = 0.04), respectively. Inverse associations with childhood intake were noted in all three races, all three study sites, and women born in Asia and the United States. Adjustment for measures of westernization attenuated the associations with adolescent and adult soy intake but did not affect the inverse relationship with childhood soy intake. Discussion: Soy intake during childhood, adolescence, and adult life was associated with decreased breast cancer risk, with the strongest, most consistent effect for childhood intake. Soy may be a hormonally related, early-life exposure that influences breast cancer incidence. (Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2009;18(4):1050–9)
Motivation and Adventure Learning

This paper analyzes the adventure learning (AL) project, PolarHusky, which used motivational factors such as the polarhuskies (the sled dogs), the real-time delivery of far-away places, and the collaboration with educators, experts, and other students. The instructional designers of PolarHusky designed their AL project with Keller's motivational principles in mind. This study reports 1) how student motivation is related to the student and teacher characteristics of those who used this online adventure learning environment and 2) how motivation is related to the ways in which the adventure learning environment was used within the classroom. Surveys of 228 respondents who used the online curriculum in 300 separate courses, 21 interviews, and three classroom observations were analyzed.