Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A survey on testing technique empirical studies: how limited is our knowledge

Engineering disciplines are characterised by the use of mature knowledge by means of which they can achieve predictable results. Unfortunately, the type of knowledge used in software engineering can be considered to be of a relatively low maturity, and developers are guided by reasoning based on intuition, fashion or market-speak rather than by facts or undisputed statements proper to an engineering discipline. This paper analyses the maturity level of the knowledge about testing techniques by examining existing empirical studies about these techniques. For this purpose, three categories of knowledge of increasing maturity have been presented and the results of these empirical studies have been placed in these three categories.
A Survey on TDMA-based MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network

Recent advancement in micro-electro- mechanical systems (mems) have enabled the development of Wireless sensor Network (WSN) which is gaining popularity day by day and is used in wide range of applications. The sensor nodes that constitute WSN have several constraints like limited battery power, memory constraint, limited bandwidth etc. Therefore designing an efficient MAC layer protocol is a challenging task. TDMA-based MAC protocols can avoid collisions, overhearing and idle listening and therefore energy efficient. In this paper, we firstly describe a brief account of the factors influencing WSN MAC design. Then, we describe several TDMA-based MAC protocols both centralized and distributed which are proposed so far for wireless sensor network.
Der Einfluss von Biographie, Lebensereignissen und chronischen Schwierigkeiten auf den Verlauf stationärer Therapie Depressiver

Zusammenfassung Ziel der vorliegenden Studie ist die Ergänzung der Lifeevent-Forschung durch den Einfluss von Lebensstress und biographischen Faktoren auf den klinisch-stationären Behandlungsverlauf von Depressionen. Methoden: Die Daten wurden an 152 Patienten erhoben, die sich mit der Diagnose einer affektiven Erkrankung (DSM–III–R) in stationärer Behandlung befanden. Der psychopathologische Status wurde an vier Messzeitpunkten mit der Depressivitätsskala von v. Zerssen dokumentiert und diente als Variable des Behandlungsverlaufes. Zu Beginn wurden die Patienten zu biographischen Aspekten (BIFA–AL), belastenden Lebensereignissen (ILE), chronischen Schwierigkeiten (Liste CS), Krankheitsverarbeitung (FKV) sowie soziodemographischen Merkmalen befragt. Ergebnisse: Kritische Lebensereignisse und chronische Schwierigkeiten beeinflussen die psychopathologische Symptomatik und die klinische Aufenthaltsdauer signifikant, ebenso wie die Faktoren »Neurotizismus« und »Zielgerichtetheit«. Diese beiden Faktoren sowie der Mittelwert der summierten Gesamtbelastung BELWERT eignen sich als gute Prognosefaktoren für den klinischen Verlauf. Ein deutlicher Zusammenhang besteht zwischen den biographischen Dimensionen und der Belastung durch chronisch schwierige Situationen sowie zwischen den Faktoren »Primärsozialisation« und mit negativem Vorzeichen »Zielgerichtetheit« mit der Anzahl belastender Lebensereignisse (ALE). Schlussfolgerung: Die prämorbide Biographie eines Individuums beeinflusst die Empfindlichkeit für Stress und damit das Risiko, an einer affektiven Störung zu erkranken. Die Belastung durch kritische Lebensereignisse und chronische Schwierigkeiten sowie biographische Variablen eignen sich als Prädiktoren für den stationär–klinischen Verlauf depressiver Erkrankungen. Klinische Relevanz: Um die Auslösung einer depressiven Erkrankung durch ein kritisches Lebensereignis bei bekanntem biographischem Risikoprofil zu verhindern, können rechtzeitig präventive therapeutische Maßnahmen ergriffen werden.
Ranking invariance between fuzzy similarity measures applied to image retrieval

We first introduce the fuzzy similarity measures in the context of a CBIR system. This leads to the observation of an invariance in the ranking for different similarity measures. We then propose an explanation to this phenomenon, and a larger theory about order invariance for fuzzy similarity measures. We introduce a definition for equivalence classes based on order conservation between these measures. We then study the consequences of this theory on the evaluation of document retrieval by fuzzy similarity.
Testing for the Structure of the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form Among Chinese College Students

This study examines the factor structure of the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form (CDSES-SF) among Chinese college students. Two samples of college students from China were used. The original 25-item CDSES-SF was not supported by the data derived from a sample of 256 Chinese college students (Sample 1). However, a modified 13-item, three-factor model of the CDSES-SF fit the data well: The standardized factor loadings and goodness-of-fit indexes were adequate and the reliability coefficient was . 85. This 13-item model was subsequently cross-validated with a second sample of Chinese college students (N= 157). The cross-validation test revealed that the model was invariant across the two samples. It is suggested that this revised CDSES-SF may be applied to understanding Chinese college students’ career decision-making behavior.
Cleavage and Structural Transitions during Maturation of Staphylococcus aureus Bacteriophage 80α and SaPI1 Capsids

In the tailed bacteriophages, DNA is packaged into spherical procapsids, leading to expansion into angular, thin-walled mature capsids. In many cases, this maturation is accompanied by cleavage of the major capsid protein (CP) and other capsid-associated proteins, including the scaffolding protein (SP) that serves as a chaperone for the assembly process. Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage 80α is capable of high frequency mobilization of mobile genetic elements called S. aureus pathogenicity islands (SaPIs), such as SaPI1. SaPI1 redirects the assembly pathway of 80α to form capsids that are smaller than those normally made by the phage alone. Both CP and SP of 80α are N-terminally processed by a host-encoded protease, Prp. We have analyzed phage mutants that express pre-cleaved or uncleavable versions of CP or SP, and show that the N-terminal sequence in SP is absolutely required for assembly, but does not need to be cleaved in order to produce viable capsids. Mutants with pre-cleaved or uncleavable CP display normal viability. We have used cryo-EM to solve the structures of mature capsids from an 80α mutant expressing uncleavable CP, and from wildtype SaPI1. Comparisons with structures of 80α and SaPI1 procapsids show that capsid maturation involves major conformational changes in CP, consistent with a release of the CP N-arm by SP. The hexamers reorganize during maturation to accommodate the different environments in the 80α and SaPI1 capsids.
Short-term Exposure to One Dialect Affects Processing of Another

It is well established that speakers accommodate in speech production. Recent work has shown a similar effect in perception—speech perception is affected by a listener’s beliefs about the speaker. In this paper, we explore the consequences of such perceptual accommodation for experiments in speech perception and lexical access. Our interest is whether perceptual accommodation to one speaker—the experimenter who meets participants, for example— might have carry-over effects on participants’ behavior in subsequent tasks that do not directly involve the experimenter’s voice. We explore this possibility by exposing groups of participants to different varieties of English before they participate in experiments involving speech perception and/or lexical access. Our results reveal that the nature of this prior exposure considerably influences participants’ behavior in the tasks. This suggests that the phonetic detail of encountered speech is stored in the lexicon, together with information about the speaker’s regional origin. Subparts of phonetically detailed lexical distributions can then be effectively ‘primed’ by exposure to speakers or lexical items associated with particular dialects. We argue for an exemplar model of lexical representation with both word-level and phoneme-level representations. The consequences of cross-dialectal priming vary, depending on whether tasks involve primarily word-level or phoneme-level access.
Tang-Luo-Ning, a Traditional Chinese Medicine, Inhibits Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress-Induced Apoptosis of Schwann Cells under High Glucose Environment

Tang-Luo-Ning (TLN) has a definite effect in the clinical treatment of diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN). Schwann cells (SCs) apoptosis induced by endoplasmic reticulum stress (ER stress) is one of the main pathogeneses of DPN. This study investigates whether TLN can inhibit SCs apoptosis by inhibiting ER stress-induced apoptosis. Our previous researches have demonstrated that TLN could increase the expression of ER stress marker protein GRP78 and inhibited the expression of apoptosis marker protein CHOP in ER stress. In this study, the results showed that TLN attenuated apoptosis by decreasing Ca2+ level in SCs and maintaining ER morphology. TLN could decrease downstream proteins of CHOP including GADD34 and Ero1α, while it increased P-eIF2α and decreased the upstream proteins of CHOP including P-IRE1α/IRE1α and XBP-1, thereby reducing ER stress-induced apoptosis.
Translational pain assessment: could natural animal models be the missing link?

Abstract Failure of analgesic drugs in clinical development is common. Along with the current “reproducibility crisis” in pain research, this has led some to question the use of animal models. Experimental models tend to comprise genetically homogeneous groups of young, male rodents in restricted and unvarying environments, and pain-producing assays that may not closely mimic the natural condition of interest. In addition, typical experimental outcome measures using thresholds or latencies for withdrawal may not adequately reflect clinical pain phenomena pertinent to human patients. It has been suggested that naturally occurring disease in veterinary patients may provide more valid models for the study of painful disease. Many painful conditions in animals resemble those in people. Like humans, veterinary patients are genetically diverse, often live to old age, and enjoy a complex environment, often the same as their owners. There is increasing interest in the development and validation of outcome measures for detecting pain in veterinary patients; these include objective (eg, locomotor activity monitoring, kinetic evaluation, quantitative sensory testing, and bioimaging) and subjective (eg, pain scales and quality of life scales) measures. Veterinary subject diversity, pathophysiological similarities to humans, and diverse outcome measures could yield better generalizability of findings and improved translation potential, potentially benefiting both humans and animals. The Comparative Oncology Trial Consortium in dogs has pawed the way for translational research, surmounting the challenges inherent in veterinary clinical trials. This review describes numerous conditions similarly applicable to pain research, with potential mutual benefits for human and veterinary clinicians, and their respective patients.
Beyond malaria--causes of fever in outpatient Tanzanian children.

BACKGROUND As the incidence of malaria diminishes, a better understanding of nonmalarial fever is important for effective management of illness in children. In this study, we explored the spectrum of causes of fever in African children. METHODS We recruited children younger than 10 years of age with a temperature of 38°C or higher at two outpatient clinics--one rural and one urban--in Tanzania. Medical histories were obtained and clinical examinations conducted by means of systematic procedures. Blood and nasopharyngeal specimens were collected to perform rapid diagnostic tests, serologic tests, culture, and molecular tests for potential pathogens causing acute fever. Final diagnoses were determined with the use of algorithms and a set of prespecified criteria. RESULTS Analyses of data derived from clinical presentation and from 25,743 laboratory investigations yielded 1232 diagnoses. Of 1005 children (22.6% of whom had multiple diagnoses), 62.2% had an acute respiratory infection; 5.0% of these infections were radiologically confirmed pneumonia. A systemic bacterial, viral, or parasitic infection other than malaria or typhoid fever was found in 13.3% of children, nasopharyngeal viral infection (without respiratory symptoms or signs) in 11.9%, malaria in 10.5%, gastroenteritis in 10.3%, urinary tract infection in 5.9%, typhoid fever in 3.7%, skin or mucosal infection in 1.5%, and meningitis in 0.2%. The cause of fever was undetermined in 3.2% of the children. A total of 70.5% of the children had viral disease, 22.0% had bacterial disease, and 10.9% had parasitic disease. CONCLUSIONS These results provide a description of the numerous causes of fever in African children in two representative settings. Evidence of a viral process was found more commonly than evidence of a bacterial or parasitic process. (Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and others.).
Examining the technological pedagogical content knowledge of Singapore pre-service teachers with a large-scale survey

This paper examined the profile of Singaporean pre-service teachers in terms of their technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). A total of 1185 pre-service teachers were studied with a TPACK survey. An exploratory factor analysis found five distinctive constructs: technological knowledge, content knowledge, knowledge of pedagogy, knowledge of teaching with technology and knowledge from critical reflection. The participants of this study did not make conceptual distinctions between TPACK constructs such as technological content knowledge and technological pedagogical knowledge. There were some differences in their TPACK perceptions by gender. However, the influence of age and teaching level were not strong. The methodological and theoretical implications for the development of TPACK surveys were discussed.
A Model Predictive Control Approach for Optimal Drug Administration

The barriers between systems engineering and medicine are slowly eroding as recently it has become evident that medicine has a lot to gain by systems technology. In particular, the drug administration problem be cast as a control engineering problem, where the objective is to keep the drug concentration at certain organs in the body close to desired set-points. A number of constraints render the problem rather challenging. For example, hard constraints may be posed on the drug concentration in blood, because a higher than a certain limit concentration may render the drug effects adverse and toxic. In this paper we show that a popular method for tackling chemical engineering control problems can be used for determining the optimal drug administration. Specifically, the Model Predictive Control (MPC) technology is used for taking optimal decisions regarding of drug concentration in the human body, while incorporating constraints on both drug concentration and drug infusion rate.
A Hybrid Method for the Recognition of Acceptor Splice Sites

Accurate prediction of exons in eukaryotic genes requires methods for exact acceptor and donor splice site prediction. In this paper, we report on a combination of a digital signal processing (DSP) technique and a data-driven statistical technique for the recognition of acceptor splice sites. The proposed hybrid method and the existing statistical techniques were compared on standard human datasets. Comparisons, (i) number of false positive (and specificity) at different sensitivity levels, and (ii) area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, show that a DSP-statistical hybrid method outperforms the major existing techniques. By comparison with the acceptor splice site detection method used in GENSCAN, the proposed method reveals a consistent reduction in false positives, averaging 52.6%, and 56.1% reductions using the GENSCAN test and HS3D datasets respectively.
Head Extension Effect in Static Posturography

The effect of head extension on the standing position has been studied by analysis of recordings made by static posturography type III (SPGIII), a set of six tests of posturography for sensory interaction. The head extension effect in posturography was evaluated by comparing the results of testing with head extension on a stable platform and on foam rubber to testing with a normal head position. In normal subjects head extension increased the postural sway, but there was no more effect on foam rubber than on the stable platform. For patients with peripheral vestibular disorders the head extension effect on the measured postural sway was evaluated by the difference from the normal condition. This difference could be positive, zero, or negative on the stable platform as well as on foam rubber. In both patients and normal subjects, foam rubber had no more effect than the stable platform. The several types of results could be seen in each category of peripheral vestibular disorders. Only minor nuances could be observed: positive differences were more pronounced in benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, whereas negative ones were more obvious in unilateral vestibular deficits. These findings, moreover, deny that head extension in SPGIII should be considered a condition revealing vestibular dysfunction, as has been supposed. As head extension has an influence on the neck proprioceptor as well as on the position of the otoliths, its effect is ambiguous, which makes the interpretation rather difficult. A neck proprioceptive as well as an otolithic explanation appears to have some clinical support.
Hard Choices

How do women choose between work and family commitments? And what are the causes, limits, and consequences of the "subtle revolution" in women's choices over the 1960s and 1970s? To answer these questions, Kathleen Gerson analyzes the experiences of a carefully selected group of middle-class and working-class women who were young adults in the 1970s. Their informative life histories reveal the emerging social forces in American society that have led today's women to face several difficult choices.
An Empirical Evaluation of Seven Mice for Scrolling Tasks

Users can easily and conveniently operate scrolling task components with pointing devices such as mouse wheels, by a simple motion of one finger. In this paper, two experiments which comprehensively evaluated the scroll performance of scrolling devices are reported. Seven devices, Scroll Wheel, Side Wheel, Smooth Wheel, Scroll Ball, Scroll Point, Scroll Stick and Scroll Panel, which are embedded in seven kinds of pointing device were tested in a dragging task and in a webpage browsing task respectively. Experimental results showed that Smooth Wheel and Scroll Point could be used as the optimal scrolling devices in a dragging task and a webpage browsing task respectively.
Improved traffic signs detection based on significant color extraction and geometric features

Traffic signs detection is a key part of traffic signs recognition system. We propose an improved approach for traffic signs detection based on significant color extraction and geometric features. Firstly, we use a median filter to remove the noise. Secondly, we calculate the quadratic weighting difference of R, G and B in RGB color space to extract the significant color of the traffic sign. Thirdly, the morphological processing is applied to get connected regions. Finally, we filtrate the connected regions based on geometric features to locate the traffic sign accurately. The experiment on 200 traffic sign images shows the detection rate of 95.4%. Our algorithm can adapt to various environment, has a high accuracy and a good robustness.
Observational analysis of student activity modes, lesson contexts and teacher interactions during games classes in high school (11—16 years) physical education

This purpose of this study was to examine student activity, lesson contexts and teacher interactions during secondary school physical education, using a recently validated systematic observation instrument termed the System for Observing the Teaching of Games in Physical Education (SOTG-PE). Thirty, single-gender high school (11—16 years) physical education games lessons were systematically observed and recorded using SOTG-PE. Results showed the pupils were engaged in high levels of inactivity. The highest level of inactivity was recorded (52.8 percent) in the striking/fielding category. In the lesson context category general management was recorded highest (47.4 percent). The highest recorded teacher interactions across the three games categories were verbally promoting technical behaviour (40.9 percent).
Pesticides, People and Power in Ecuador's Banana Industry: Participatory Epidemiology and Political Ecology Approaches to Occupational Health and Safety

Occupational and environmental health risks in Ecuador’s export-based banana industry – the world’s largest – demonstrate many of the contradictions inherent in the global food system, and the model of development within which it fits. Banana workers in Ecuador tend to be young, proletarianized, and vulnerable to exploitation by wealthy elites; farm-owning elites are in turn contractually engaged by multinational banana exporters to sell bananas, with financial risk being shifted downward by all parties in the supply chain (Striffler, 2002). The extremely precarious nature of banana industry employment is reinforced by disregard for Ecuador’s labour laws, meaning that workers who attempt to join unions or ask for better pay or working conditions are often summarily dismissed (Pier, 2002). Bananas are a pesticide-intensive monoculture due to their low genetic diversity and vulnerability to fungal diseases (Henriques et al., 1997); among other occupational hazards, this combination of ecological and social risk leads to exposure to several classes of hazardous pesticides, with neurotoxic, carcinogenic, reproductive and dermatological effects. Agro-industrial exports such as bananas, produced using “Green Revolution” technologies, have been key components of compulsory economic restructuring plans imposed on countries such as Ecuador by international financial institutions and development agencies. Overall,
Indistinguishability operators in measurement theory, Part II: Construction of indistinguishability operators based on probability distributions

As a continuation of the work initiated by Demirci, the main subject of this paper is the problem of constructing indistinguishability operators in terms of probability distribution functions and the probability density functions, addressed in Demirci [“Indistinguishability operators in measurement theory, Part I: Conversions of indistinguishability operators with respect to scales”, Int. J. General Systems (2003f) To appear]. In detail, two different approaches have been developed for the solution of this construction problem.