Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Community Colleges in the Highway: Major Issues for Technology Planning

This study identieed and ranked community college planning issues related to the information superhighway (ISH), as perceived by technology planning personnel. A Delphi study was conducted to identify the applicable issues and the level of agreement on these issues. Prior to Round 1 of the Delphi study, the panelists identieed the educational planning issues to be rated. Rounds 1 and 2 included a consolidated list of 124 issues with an accompanying Likert-type scale to allow the participant to rate the importance of each of the issues. Median ratings of assent were compared between Round 1 and Round 2. The Delphi procedure was terminated after Round 2, based on the ending that no signiecant diA erence was found between the responses for Rounds 1 and 2. The Delphi study produced 123 validated issues, each of which maintained a high level of consensus and rating of importance. Additionally, the level of assent and consensus of opinion was extremely high considering the relative newness of the ISH phenomenon. The results suggested that two categories, planning and faculty/staA , essentially need to be addressed before all other identieed categories. The level of knowledge and the depth of understanding of technology planners is, no doubt, sufficient to the task of planning for the ISH. Finally, based on comments by the panelists, cost was considered aA ordable, planning was clearly needed, faculty and staA should be encouraged to use the ISH, and minimumgovernment interference was preferred. Planning for the implementation and support of technology in educational institutions is as necessary as planning for any other form of infrastructure. Although some states, school agencies, and universities have been very proactive in planning for technology in
A nonparametric approach to forecasting realized volatility

A well developed literature exists in relation to modeling and forecasting asset return volatility. Much of this relate to the development of time series models of volatility. This paper proposes an alternative method for forecasting volatility that does not involve such a model. Under this approach a forecast is a weighted average of historical volatility. The greatest weight is given to periods that exhibit the most similar market conditions to the time at which the forecast is being formed. Weighting occurs by comparing short-term trends in volatility across time (as a measure of market conditions) by the application of a multivariate kernel scheme. It is found that at a 1 day forecast horizon, the proposed method produces forecasts that are significantly more accurate than competing approaches.
The novel regulatory ncRNA, NfiS, optimizes nitrogen fixation via base pairing with the nitrogenase gene nifK mRNA in Pseudomonas stutzeri A1501

Significance The biological nitrogen fixation process responsible for the reduction of atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia represents the primary source of nitrogen supporting extant life. We have identified a novel noncoding RNA (ncRNA) in the Pseudomonas stutzeri core genome, called NfiS, that is involved in the stress response and controls the expression of genes located in a genomic nitrogen-fixing (nif) island. NfiS was found to optimize nitrogen fixation by the direct posttranscriptional regulation of nitrogenase gene nifK mRNA. The acquisition of the nif island and the recruitment of NfiS by nifK mRNA are evolutionary events that seem to contribute to fine-tuned regulation of nitrogenase activity in P. stutzeri. This study provides a new regulatory pathway, mediated by an ncRNA for optimal nitrogen fixation, that may operate in other diazotrophs. Unlike most Pseudomonas, the root-associated bacterium Pseudomonas stutzeri A1501 fixes nitrogen after the horizontal acquisition of a nitrogen-fixing (nif) island. A genome-wide search for small noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) in P. stutzeri A1501 identified the novel P. stutzeri-specific ncRNA NfiS in the core genome, whose synthesis was significantly induced under nitrogen fixation or sorbitol stress conditions. The expression of NfiS was RNA chaperone Hfq-dependent and activated by the sigma factor RpoN/global nitrogen activator NtrC/nif-specific activator NifA regulatory cascade. The nfiS-deficient mutant displayed reduced nitrogenase activity, as well as increased sensitivity to multiple stresses, such as osmotic and oxidative stresses. Secondary structure prediction and complementation studies confirmed that a stem-loop structure was essential for NfiS to regulate the nitrogenase gene nifK mRNA synthesis and thus nitrogenase activity. Microscale thermophoresis and physiological analysis showed that NfiS directly pairs with nifK mRNA and ultimately enhances nitrogenase activity by increasing the translation efficiency and the half-life of nifK mRNA. Our data also suggest structural and functional divergence of NfiS evolution in diazotrophic and nondiazotrophic backgrounds. It is proposed that NfiS was recruited by nifK mRNA as a novel regulator to integrate the horizontally acquired nif island into host global networks.
Life‐history variation of a neotropical thrush challenges food limitation theory

Since David Lack first proposed that birds rear as many young as they can nourish, food limitation has been accepted as the primary explanation for variation in clutch size and other life‐history traits in birds. The importance of food limitation in life-history variation, however, was recently questioned on theoretical grounds. Here, we show that clutch size differences between two populations of a neotropical thrush were contrary to expectations under Lack's food limitation hypothesis. Larger clutch sizes were found in a population with higher nestling starvation rate (i.e. greater food limitation). We experimentally equalized clutches between populations to verify this difference in food limitation. Our experiment confirmed greater food limitation in the population with larger mean clutch size. In addition, incubation bout length and nestling growth rate were also contrary to predictions of food limitation theory. Our results demonstrate the inability of food limitation to explain differences in several life-history traits: clutch size, incubation behaviour, parental feeding rate and nestling growth rate. These life-history traits were better explained by inter‐population differences in nest predation rates. Food limitation may be less important to life history evolution in birds than suggested by traditional theory.
PKU-MMD: A Large Scale Benchmark for Skeleton-Based Human Action Understanding

Despite the fact that many 3D human activity benchmarks being proposed, most existing action datasets focus on the action recognition tasks for the segmented videos. There is a lack of standard large-scale benchmarks, especially for current popular data-hungry deep learning based methods. In this paper, we introduce a new large scale benchmark (PKU-MMD) for continuous skeleton-based human action understanding and cover a wide range of complex human activities with well annotated information. PKU-MMD contains 1076 long video sequences in 51 action categories, performed by 66 subjects in three camera views. It contains almost 20,000 action instances and 5.4 million frames in total. Our dataset also provides multi-modality data sources, including RGB, depth, Infrared Radiation and Skeleton. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest skeleton-based detection database so far. We conduct extensive experiments and evaluate different methods on this dataset. We believe this large-scale dataset will benefit future researches on action detection for the community.
Psychological Factors Associated with Support for Suicide Bombing in the Muslim Diaspora

A robust literature on ingroup versus outgroup conflict suggests that perceived discrimination may be an important factor in intergroup aggression. Yet, to date, no studies have tested the hypothesis that the perception of being the victim of anti-Muslim discrimination might be associated with support for anti-Western political violence. We undertook an analysis of two Pew Global Attitudes Surveys: (1) a 2006 data set surveying 1,627 adult Muslim residents of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain and (2) a 2007 data surveying 1,050 adult Muslim residents of the United States. Our analyses support the conclusions that younger age and perceived discrimination are both associated with support of suicide bombing in these Muslim diaspora populations. Study 1 found that a bad experience of discrimination increased the odds of justifying suicide bombing among European Muslims by a factor of 3.4. Study 2 found that experienced discrimination was associated with justification of suicide bombing among American Muslims. If further investigations confirm that perceived discrimination is a risk factor for support for political violence, initiatives to reduce discrimination would theoretically reduce the risk of terrorism. We discuss the challenge of breaking the vicious cycle of intergroup prejudice and radicalization.
Frequency-dependent reciprocal modulation of verbal fluency and motor functions in subthalamic deep brain stimulation.

BACKGROUND High-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) improves motor functions in those with Parkinson disease but may worsen frontal functions such as verbal fluency (VF). In contrast, low-frequency DBS leads to deterioration of motor functions. It is not known whether low-frequency STN DBS also has an effect on frontal functions. OBJECTIVE To examine whether low-frequency STN DBS in contrast to high-frequency STN DBS has a positive effect on frontal functions on the basis of VF test results. DESIGN A double-blind randomized crossover experiment to compare performance in 4 VF subtests and motor performance at 10 Hz, 130 Hz, and no stimulation. SETTING University hospitals in Düsseldorf and Cologne, Germany. PATIENTS Twelve patients with Parkinson disease 3 months or more after bilateral electrode implantation into the STN. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Mean number of words in VF at different stimulation frequencies. RESULTS The VF was significantly better at 10 Hz (48.3 words) compared with 130 Hz and showed a nonsignificant trend toward worsening at 130 Hz (42.3 words) compared with no stimulation (43.8 words). These results were consistent across all subtests. CONCLUSIONS The study provides evidence of a beneficial effect of low-frequency (10 Hz) STN DBS on VF, which may be caused by activating neural pathways projecting to the frontal cortex. In addition, the study reproduces the negative effect of therapeutic high-frequency STN DBS on VF. The study results provide evidence for a frequency-dependent modulation of cognitive circuits involving the STN.
Detection of Multi-walled Carbon Nanotubes and Carbon Nanodiscs on Workplace Surfaces at a Small-Scale Producer.

BACKGROUND The industrial use of novel-manufactured nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes and carbon nanodiscs is increasing globally. Occupational exposure can occur during production, downstream use, and disposal. The health effects of many nanomaterials are not yet fully characterized and to handle nano-objects, their aggregates and agglomerates >100nm (NOAA), a high degree of control measures and personal protective equipment are required. The emission of airborne NOAA during production and handling can contaminate workplace surfaces with dust, which can be resuspended resulting in secondary inhalation exposures and dermal exposures. This study surveys the presence of carbon-based nanomaterials, such as multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and carbon nanodiscs, as surface contamination at a small-scale producer using a novel tape sampling method. METHODS Eighteen different surfaces at a small-scale producer were sampled with an adhesive tape sampling method. The surfaces selected were associated with the production and handling of MWCNT powder in the near-field zone. Surfaces in the far-field zone were also sampled. In addition, tape stripping of the skin was performed on one worker. The tape samples were analysed with scanning electron microscopy to detect the carbon-based NOAA. Air sampling with a personal impactor was also performed on a worker who was producing MWCNTs the same day as the tape samples were collected. RESULTS MWCNTs were detected in 50% of the collected tape samples and carbon nanodiscs in 17%. MWCNTs and carbon nanodiscs were identified in all parts of the workplace, thus, increasing the risk for secondary inhalation and dermal exposure of the workers. Both airborne MWCNTs and carbon nanodiscs were detected in the personal impactor samples. The tape-strip samples from the worker showed no presence of carbon-containing nanoparticles. CONCLUSIONS Tape sampling is a functional method for detecting surface contamination of carbon-based NOAA and for exposure control during production at potentially any workplace that produces or handles such manufactured nanomaterials. With the tape method, it is possible to monitor if a potential for secondary inhalation exposure or dermal exposure exists through resuspension of dust deposited on workplace surfaces. By means of air sampling, we could confirm that carbon nanodiscs were resuspended into the air at the workplace even though they were not handled during that particular work shift. MWCNTs were detected in the air samples, but can have been derived from either resuspension or from the work tasks with MWCNTs that were performed during the air sampling. Tape sampling is a complementary method to air sampling and together these two methods provide a better view of the hygienic situation in workplaces where NOAA can be emitted into work environments.
Information filtering via biased heat conduction

The process of heat conduction has recently found application in personalized recommendation [Zhou et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 107, 4511 (2010)], which is of high diversity but low accuracy. By decreasing the temperatures of small-degree objects, we present an improved algorithm, called biased heat conduction, which could simultaneously enhance the accuracy and diversity. Extensive experimental analyses demonstrate that the accuracy on MovieLens, Netflix, and Delicious datasets could be improved by 43.5%, 55.4% and 19.2%, respectively, compared with the standard heat conduction algorithm and also the diversity is increased or approximately unchanged. Further statistical analyses suggest that the present algorithm could simultaneously identify users' mainstream and special tastes, resulting in better performance than the standard heat conduction algorithm. This work provides a creditable way for highly efficient information filtering.
Vision-Based Hand Gesture Recognition Using Combinational Features

This paper presents a feature extraction method for hand gesture based on multi-layer perceptron. The feature of hand skin color in the YCbCr color space is used to detect hand gesture. The hand silhouette and features can be accurately extracted in means of binarizing the hand image and enhancing the contrast. Median and smoothing filters are integrated to remove the noise. Combinational parameters of Hu invariant moment, hand gesture region, and Fourier descriptor are created to form a new feature vector which can recognize hand gesture. To confirm the robustness of this proposed method, a dataset including 3500 images is built. Experimental results demonstrate that our system can successfully recognize hand gesture with 97.4% recognition rate.
Scene Signatures: Localised and Point-less Features for Localisation

This paper is about localising across extreme lighting and weather conditions. We depart from the traditional point-feature-based approach as matching under dramatic appearance changes is a brittle and hard thing. Point feature detectors are fixed and rigid procedures which pass over an image examining small, low-level structure such as corners or blobs. They apply the same criteria applied all images of all places. This paper takes a contrary view and asks what is possible if instead we learn a bespoke detector for every place. Our localisation task then turns into curating a large bank of spatially indexed detectors and we show that this yields vastly superior performance in terms of robustness in exchange for a reduced but tolerable metric precision. We present an unsupervised system that produces broad-region detectors for distinctive visual elements, called scene signatures, which can be associated across almost all appearance changes. We show, using 21km of data collected over a period of 3 months, that our system is capable of producing metric localisation estimates from night-to-day or summer-to-winter conditions.
Volumetric Curved Planar Reformation for Virtual Endoscopy

Curved Planar Reformation (CPR) has proved to be a practical and widely used tool for the visualization of curved tubular structures within the human body. It has been useful in medical procedures involving the examination of blood vessels and the spine. However, it is more difficult to use it for large, tubular, structures such as the trachea and the colon because abnormalities may be smaller relative to the size of the structure and may not have such distinct density and shape characteristics.Our new approach improves on this situation by using volume rendering for hollow regions and standard CPR for the surrounding tissue. This effectively combines gray scale contextual information with detailed color information from the area of interest. The approach is successfully used with each of the standard CPR types and the resulting images are promising as an alternative to virtual endoscopy.Because the CPR and the volume rendering are tightly coupled, the projection method used has a significant effect on properties of the volume renderer such as distortion and isometry. We describe and compare the different CPR projection methods and how they affect the volume rendering process.A version of the algorithm is also presented which makes use of importance driven techniques; this ensures the users attention is always focused on the area of interest and also improves the speed of the algorithm.
Participation Structures in a Reading Lesson with Hawaiian Children: Analysis of a Culturally Appropriate Instructional Event

It was hypothesized that the reading achievement of a group of young Hawaiian children was increased because the participation structures in their reading lessons had become more similar to those of talk story, a major speech event in Hawaiian culture. A sample reading lesson was analyzed to test this notion. The lesson was found to contain nine types of participation structures, some found in conventional classroom settings but others much like those in talk story. More than half the sequences in the lesson were conducted in this second type of structure and involved a high degree of joint performance among the children.
Pleiotropic Role of the RNA Chaperone Protein Hfq in the Human Pathogen Clostridium difficile

ABSTRACT Clostridium difficile is an emergent human pathogen and the most common cause of nosocomial diarrhea. Our recent data strongly suggest the importance of RNA-based mechanisms for the control of gene expression in C. difficile. In an effort to understand the function of the RNA chaperone protein Hfq, we constructed and characterized an Hfq-depleted strain in C. difficile. Hfq depletion led to a growth defect, morphological changes, an increased sensitivity to stresses, and a better ability to sporulate and to form biofilms. The transcriptome analysis revealed pleiotropic effects of Hfq depletion on gene expression in C. difficile, including genes encoding proteins involved in sporulation, stress response, metabolic pathways, cell wall-associated proteins, transporters, and transcriptional regulators and genes of unknown function. Remarkably, a great number of genes of the regulon dependent on sporulation-specific sigma factor, SigK, were upregulated in the Hfq-depleted strain. The altered accumulation of several sRNAs and interaction of Hfq with selected sRNAs suggest potential involvement of Hfq in these regulatory RNA functions. Altogether, these results suggest the pleiotropic role of Hfq protein in C. difficile physiology, including processes important for the C. difficile infection cycle, and expand our knowledge of Hfq-dependent regulation in Gram-positive bacteria.
Constrained handling in multi-objective optimization based on Quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization

Particle swarm optimization with penalty mechanism is used in coping with constrained problems. Quantum behaved PSO has been proved efficient compared with PSO. In this paper, three mutation operators including Gaussian, Chaotic, Cauchy and Levy combined with PSO are studied. And three mechanisms are adopted as approach for constraints which are H, J and P strategy. Turbulence operations are come up in PSO which improves the exploratory capabilities. Self-adaptive parameters are adopted in improved H strategy and constraints violates sum is used instead of minimum and maximum fitness values is brought up in improved P strategy, both of the two improved strategies achieved better performances compared with GA in optimizing benchmark functions. Finally convergence and algorithm complexity of adopted algorithms are analyzed.
Switchable Adhesion Surfaces with Enhanced Performance Against Rough Counterfaces

In a recent study, we demonstrated that the pressurization of micro-fluidic features introduced in the subsurface of a soft polymer can be used to actively modify the magnitude of the adhesion to a harder counterface by changing its waviness or long wavelength undulations. In that case, both contacting surfaces had very smooth finishes with root-mean-square roughnesses of less than 20 nm. These values are far from those of many engineering surfaces, which usually have a naturally occurring roughness of between ten and a hundred times this value. In this work, we demonstrate that appropriate surface features, specifically relatively slender “fibrils”, can enhance the ability of a such a soft surface to adhere to a hard, but macroscopically rough, counterface, while still maintaining the possibility of switching the adhesion force from one level to another. Conversely, stiffer more conical surface features can suppress adhesion even against a smooth counterface. Examples of each form of topography can be found in the natural world.
Endoplasmic reticulum‐specific BH3‐only protein BNIP1 induces mitochondrial fragmentation in a Bcl‐2‐ and Drp1‐dependent manner

Bcl‐2/adenovirus E1B 19‐kDa interacting protein 1 (BNIP1), which is predominantly localized to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), is a pro‐apoptotic Bcl‐2 homology domain 3 (BH3)‐only protein. Here, we show that the expression of BNIP1 induced not only a highly interconnected ER network but also mitochondrial fragmentation in a BH3 domain‐dependent manner. Functional analysis demonstrated that BNIP1 expression increased dynamin‐related protein 1 (Drp1) expression followed by the mitochondrial translocation of Drp1 and subsequent mitochondrial fission. Both BNIP1‐induced mitochondrial fission and the translocation of Drp1 were abrogated by Bcl‐2 overexpression. These results collectively indicate that ER‐specific BNIP1 plays an important role in mitochondrial dynamics by modulating the mitochondrial fission protein Drp1 in a BH3 domain‐dependent fashion. J. Cell. Physiol. 227: 3027–3035, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
On-chip antenna: Practical design and characterization considerations

This paper highlights the challenges of an emergent field, namely, on-chip antenna design. Consistent with the RF System-on-Chip (SoC) concept, co-design strategy for circuits and on-chip antennas is described. A number of design and layout issues, arising from the highly integrated nature of this kind of systems, are discussed. The characterization difficulties related to on-chip antennas radiation properties are also highlighted. Finally, a novel on-wafer test fixture is proposed to measure the gain and radiation pattern of the on-chip antennas in the anechoic chamber.