Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LONG-TERM DIETARY EFFECTS ON FRUIT FLY “ LOVE STORY ” : SIZE AND SYMMETRY OF SEX COMBS AND MALE MATING SUCCESS

The influence of three types of diets on the number and symmetry of sex comb teeth (male secondary sexual character) as well as on behavioral trait (mating success) was tested in fruit fly in laboratory conditions. Mating experiments were conducted with three Drosophila melanogaster strains reared more than one year on different food. The quality of the diet itself had no influence on the number of sex comb teeth, neither on their symmetry. The size of sex comb and levels of fluctuating asymmetry were similar in mated and unmated males. However, males developed on different substrates showed differences in mating success: males of the “banana strain” and of the “cornmeal strain” were more successful in achieving copulations than males of the “tomato strain”. It seems that some other traits (morphological, physiological, and behavioral) were more important for male mating success than tactile stimuli provided by sex combs during the courtship.
The Influence of Backrest Inclination and Lumbar Support on Lumbar Lordosis

The influence of backrest inclination and lumbar support on the shape of the lumbar spine in sitting positions has been studied radiographically on 38 healthy subjects. Four angles of backrest inclination and four different sizes of lumbar support were studied. In addition, the lumbar support was placed at three different lumbar levels. When sitting down from a standing position, the pelvis rotates and the lumbar lordosis decreases. Increases in the backrest-seat angle had only minor effect on the lumbar lordosis. A lumbar support, on the other hand, had a significant influence: the lordosis increased with increasing support. The location of the lumbar support with respect to the level of the spine did not significantly influence the measured angles.
Predictors of intention to reduce stroke risk among people at risk of stroke: An application of an extended health belief model.

Purpose: To examine predictors of intention to reduce stroke risk in a sample of at risk individuals through the application of an expanded Health Belief Model (HBM). Research Method: Predictors included stroke knowledge, demographic variables, beliefs about stroke derived from the HBM, and measures of subjective norm and self-efficacy. The dependent variable was intention to reduce stroke risk. Two hundred and seventy six surveys were distributed to participants at three site types: bowling clubs, senior citizens clubs and retirement villages. One hundred and one surveys were returned yielding a response rate of 37%, and data from 76 of these respondents was used for further analysis. Results: With regard to exercise intention, a pattern of significant correlations between HBM variables, subjective norm and self-efficacy was observed. Results of multiple hierarchical regression analyses showed that perceived benefits of undertaking exercise, and self-efficacy in relation exercise were the two most important determinants of exercise intentions. Conclusions: Findings suggest that health beliefs may play an important role in stroke prevention. Practice Implications: Stroke education and prevention programs that selectively target beliefs about the perceived benefits of, and self-efficacy related to, exercise to reduce stroke risk may prove most efficacious.
Outcomes of hearing aid fitting for older people with hearing impairment and their significant others

As hearing impairment affects communication, it seems intuitive that both the person with hearing impairment and the significant other (SO) will experience effects as a result of the impairment and subsequent rehabilitation. The present study examined the effect that hearing impairment and aural rehabilitation has on the person with hearing impairment and the SO's quality of life (QOL). Ninety-three people with hearing impairment completed a measure of hearing-specific QOL (Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly) and health-related QOL (Short Form-36), while 78 SOs completed a modi- fied version of the Quantified Denver Scale and the Short Form-36, prior to and 3 months following hearing aid fitting. The results emphasize the significant impact of hearing impairment on both the person with hearing impairment and the SO. The results also demonstrate the effective role that hearing aids play in reducing such negative effects for both parties. Sumario Conforme un trastorno auditivo afecta la comunicación, podemos intuir que tanto la persona con hipoacusia como sus seres significativos (SO) experimentarán efectos relacionados con el trastorno y la rehabilitación subsecuente. El presente estudio examina el efecto que el trastorno auditivo y la rehabilitación aural ejercen sobre la calidad de vida (QOL) de la persona con una hipoacusia y su SO. Noventa y tres personas con hipoacusia completaron una medida de la QOL específica para la audición (Inventario del Impedimento Auditivo para el Anciano) y de la QOL relacionado con la salud (Fórmula corta 36), mientras que 78 SOs completaron una versión modifi- cada de la Escala Cuantificada de Denver y la Fórmula corta 36, antes y 3 meses después de la adaptación del auxiliar auditivo. Los resultados enfatizan el impacto significativo del trastorno auditivo tanto en la persona con hipoacusia como para su SO. Los resultados también demostraron el papel efectivo que el auxiliar auditivo juega en reducir tales efectos negativos en ambas partes.
The long and winding road: professional development in further and higher education

This article provides a narrative and commentary on the developments, over the last 20 years, of professional standards for lecturers in the lifelong learning and higher education sectors in the UK. The article examines these developments and seeks to demonstrate that a number of tensions and issues arise from the current structures and frameworks. Research data and evaluations associated with the effectiveness of professional development across the sectors will be presented and discussed.
Evaluation of four postprocessing methods for determination of cerebral blood volume and mean transit time by dynamic susceptibility contrast imaging

Four different postprocessing methods to determine cerebral blood volume (CBV) and contrast agent mean transit time (MTT) by dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) MRI were compared. CBV was determined by two different methods that integrate tracer concentration–time curves numerically and by two other methods that take recirculation into account. For the two methods that use numerical integration, one method cuts the integration after the first pass while the other method integrates over the whole time series. For the two methods that account for recirculation, one method uses a gamma‐variate fit, whereas the other method utilizes tissue impulse response. All four methods determine MTT as the ratio of CBV and cerebral blood flow (CBF). In each case, CBF was obtained as the height of the impulse response obtained by deconvolving the tissue concentration–time curves with a noninvasively determined arterial input function. Monte Carlo simulations were performed to determine the reliability of the methods and the validity of the simulations was supported by observation of similar trends in 13 acute stroke patients. The method of determining CBV and subsequently MTT was found to affect the measured value especially in areas where MTT is prolonged, but had no apparent effect on the visually determined hypoperfusion volumes. Magn Reson Med 47:973–981, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Proceedings of Fast '03: 2nd Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies 2nd Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies Semantically-smart Disk Systems

We propose and evaluate the concept of a semantically-smart disk system (SDS). As opposed to a traditional " smart " disk, an SDS has detailed knowledge of how the file system above is using the disk system, including information about the on-disk data structures of the file system. An SDS exploits this knowledge to transparently improve performance or enhance functionality beneath a standard block read/write interface. To automatically acquire this knowledge, we introduce a tool (EOF) that can discover file-system structure for certain types of file systems, and then show how an SDS can exploit this knowledge on-line to understand file-system behavior. We quantify the space and time overheads that are common in an SDS, showing that they are not excessive. We then study the issues surrounding SDS construction by designing and implementing a number of prototypes as case studies; each case study exploits knowledge of some aspect of the file system to implement powerful functionality beneath the standard SCSI interface. Overall, we find that a surprising amount of functionality can be embedded within an SDS, hinting at a future where disk manufacturers can compete on enhanced functionality and not simply cost-per-byte and performance.
Heads and Modifiers bei der Korpusanalyse

Fruhere Veroffentlichungen in der Computerlinguistik legen ihr Schwergewicht entweder auf linguistische Theorie, oder aber auf die empirisch Arbeit anhand von Korpora. Der folgende Artikel verbindet beides: Er befast sich mit dem Zusammenhang von bekannten linguistischen Theorien und der Extraktion von Heads und Modifiers aus Korpora. Drei theoretische Aspekte werden diskutiert: der Bezug zu Erkenntnissen aus der kognitiven Psychologie, der Bezug zur Merkmalssemantik und der Bezug ZU" modelltheoretischen Semantik. Zusammengenommen zeigt sich die Relevanz der Dependenzgrammatik in der Korpusanalyse. Diese ist allerdings nicht nur von theoretischem Interesse, sondern kann in der Praxis auch direkt bei verschiedenen Anwendungen eingesetzt werden.
Joint subspace learning for reconstruction of 3D facial dynamic expression from single image

Recently, the synthesis of 3D dynamic expressions has become an important concern in computer graphics, facial recognition, etc. In this study, we propose a regression based joint subspace learning method for the automatic synthesis of 3D dynamic expression images. This method synthesizes 3D dynamic expression images from a single 2D facial image. We use two subspaces (the view subspace and the frame subspace) to synthesize a 3D image. First, we use the view subspace to estimate multi-view facial images from a front image. Next, we construct a 3D image using the estimated multi-view facial images. Finally, we estimate the 3D images in different frames by using the frame subspace to synthesis 3D dynamic expression images. This approach is unlike the conventional joint subspace learning in which, the coefficients estimated by the input image are directly used for synthesis. Furthermore, we propose using textural information to improve the accuracy of synthesized images.
The utilization of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues in the assignment of subject role in Arabic

Abstract The role of four cues in the assignment of actor role in Arabic was studied. These cues included animacy, case marking, gender agreement, and word order. The cues were set-in-a competing/converging fashion following the framework of the Competition Model of Bates and MacWhinney (1981, 1982, 1987). Fifty-four sentences representing all possible permutations of the cues were presented to 100 native speakers of Arabic, who were asked to identify the actor in each sentence. Subjects relied mainly on gender agreement and case marking in the assignment of the actor role. The results suggested that cue validity is very highly correlated with cue strength. It was also found that cues do not exhibit an additive nature, and that cross-linguistic formal similarities do not warrant similar processing strategies. Order of nouns tended to represent a “latent strategy” to be utilized only when other relevant cues were not available.
Perceived Burdensomeness and Lethality of Suicide Method among Suicide Completers in the People's Republic of China

A subjective sense of burdensomeness toward loved ones has been posited as a marker for high risk of suicide. The present study applied the burdensomeness model of suicide to a sample of suicide notes from the People's Republic of China. High levels of burdensomeness toward loved ones was significantly and negatively correlated with lethality of suicide method among suicide notes. In addition, males were more likely than females to employ more lethal means of suicide. Theoretical explanations for these findings are discussed, highlighting potential cultural influences.
Growth in the Maturity of Writing Vocabularies of Primary- and Middle-Grade Children

ONE of the important problems1 confronting a primary-grade teacher who is concerned about the language development of children is how to contribute to the maturity of the children's writing vocabularies. To give themselves some sense of what constitutes maturity, teachers often use published word lists, varying widely as to source and scaling practice but indicating the range of words used by children or adults and arranged in order of difficulty or maturity. The assumption underlying such lists is that, as the child gets older and progresses through school, the words he uses will reflect both greater quantity and quality of vocabulary development. The adult word list is a simple extension of this kind of thinking.
Book Review

contains many opportunities for discrimination, and informal recruiting and screening procedures such as relying on employee referrals tend to reinforce the firm's current racial composition. The chapter would have benefited, however, from more extensive links to the large body of literature that has documented many of these processes in detail (see Arvey and Faley, 1992, for a review). The book's concluding chapter outlines an ambitious policy agenda to address the barriers faced by workers of color in seeking employment. The authors suggest that schools, nonprofit organizations, and employer consortia should train employees in soft skills and provide ongoing social support once employees enter the workplace. They also argue for revitalizing and expanding affirmative action to include both funding for audits that demonstrate the prevalence of racial discrimination in employment and incentives for firms that provide opportunities for workers of color. It is unclear, however, to what extent the relatively blunt tools outlined in this chapter can alter the subtle but powerful processes that shape the stories employers tell about race, skill, and employment.
Harmonization of German Lexical Resources for Opinion Mining

We present on-going work on the harmonization of existing German lexical resources in the field of opinion and sentiment mining. The input of our harmonization effort consisted in four distinct lexicons of German word forms, encoded either as lemmas or as full forms, marked up with polarity features, at distinct granularity levels. We describe how the lexical resources have been mapped onto each other, generating a unique list of entries, with unified Part-of-Speech information and basic polarity features. Future work will be dedicated to the comparison of the harmonized lexicon with German corpora annotated with polarity information. We are further aiming at both linking the harmonized German lexical resources with similar resources in other languages and publishing the resulting set of lexical data in the context of the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud.
Platform for the design of energy autonomous systems

Investigation of components and their interaction in operation is especially important for the design of systems using ambient energy. The limited energy harvester's efficiency, the strong fluctuating behaviour of the ambient energy sources as well as the limited storage unit's capacities command the actual performance of such systems. In order to design energy autonomous systems an automated test platform has been developed, to characterise energy harvesting systems at component and system level. Different energy harvester and system components have been investigated and their interaction with each other has been evaluated. Using the developed test platform, the efficiency of energy conversion and energy management can be investigated thoroughly.
Human dendritic cell subsets

Dendritic cells are highly adapted to their role of presenting antigen and directing immune responses. Developmental studies indicate that DCs originate independently from monocytes and tissue macrophages. Emerging evidence also suggests that distinct subsets of DCs have intrinsic differences that lead to functional specialisation in the generation of immunity. Comparative studies are now allowing many of these properties to be more fully understood in the context of human immunology.
Development and Validation of EST-SSR Markers from the Transcriptome of Adzuki Bean (Vigna angularis)

The adzuki bean (Vigna angularis (Ohwi) Ohwi and Ohashi) is an important grain legume of Asia. It is cultivated mainly in China, Japan and Korea. Despite its importance, few genomic resources are available for molecular genetic research of adzuki bean. In this study, we developed EST-SSR markers for the adzuki bean through next-generation sequencing. More than 112 million high-quality cDNA sequence reads were obtained from adzuki bean using Illumina paired-end sequencing technology, and the sequences were de novo assembled into 65,950 unigenes. The average length of the unigenes was 1,213 bp. Among the unigenes, 14,547 sequences contained a unique simple sequence repeat (SSR) and 3,350 sequences contained more than one SSR. A total of 7,947 EST-SSRs were identified as potential molecular markers, with mono-nucleotide A/T repeats (99.0%) as the most abundant motif class, followed by AG/CT (68.4%), AAG/CTT (30.0%), AAAG/CTTT (26.2%), AAAAG/CTTTT (16.1%), and AACGGG/CCCGTT (6.0%). A total of 500 SSR markers were randomly selected for validation, of which 296 markers produced reproducible amplicons with 38 polymorphic markers among the 32 adzuki bean genotypes selected from diverse geographical locations across China. The large number of SSR-containing sequences and EST-SSR markers will be valuable for genetic analysis of the adzuki bean and related Vigna species.
Combination of decomposability and propagation for solving first-order constraints in decomposable theories

Over the last decade, first-order constraints have been efficiently used in the constraint programming world to model many kinds of complex problems such as: scheduling, resource allocation, computer graphics and bio-informatics. Recently, a new property called "decomposability" has been introduce and many first-order theories have been proved to be decomposable: finite or infinite trees, rational and real numbers, linear dense order, . etc. A decision procedure in the form of 5 rewriting rules has also been developed but this later can only decide if a formula without free variables is true or not in any decomposable theory T. Unfortunately, this decision procedure is not enough when we want to find the values of the free variables of any first-order constraint ϕ so that ϕ is true in any decomposable theory T. These kind of problems are generally known as first-order constraint satisfaction problems. We present in this paper not only a decision procedure but a full first-order constraint solver for any decomposable theory T. Our solver is given in the form of six rewriting rules which transform any first-order constraint (which can possibly contain free variables) into an equivalent solved formula which is either the formula true, or the formula false or a formula having at least one free variable and written in a very simple and explicit solved form. We also show the efficiency of our solver by solving complex first-order constraints containing a huge number of imbricated quantifiers and negations. This is the first full first-order constraint solver over any decomposable theory.
Association of MRI Markers of Vascular Brain Injury With Incident Stroke, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Dementia, and Mortality: The Framingham Offspring Study

Background and Purpose— White matter hyperintensities and MRI-defined brain infarcts (BIs) have individually been related to stroke, dementia, and mortality in population-based studies, mainly in older people. Their significance in middle-aged community-dwelling persons and the relative importance of these associations remain unclear. We simultaneously assessed the relation of white matter hyperintensities and BI with incident stroke, mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and mortality in a middle-aged community-based cohort. Methods— A total of 2229 Framingham Offspring Study participants aged 62±9 years underwent volumetric brain MRI and neuropsychological testing (1999 to 2005). Incident stroke, dementia, and mortality were prospectively ascertained and for 1694 participants in whom a second neuropsychological assessment was performed (2005 to 2007), incident mild cognitive impairment was evaluated. All outcomes were related to white matter hyperintensities volume (WMHV), age-specific extensive WMHV and BI adjusting for age and gender. Results— Extensive WMHV and BI were associated with an increased risk of stroke (hazard ratio [HR]=2.28, 95% CI: 1.02 to 5.13; HR=2.84, 95% CI: 1.32 to 6.10). WMHV, extensive WMHV, and BI were associated with an increased risk of dementia (HR=2.22, 95% CI: 1.32 to 3.72; HR=3.97, 95% CI: 1.10 to 14.30; HR=6.12, 95% CI: 1.82 to 20.54) independently of vascular risk factors and interim stroke. WMHV and extensive WMHV were associated with incident amnestic mild cognitive impairment in participants aged ≥60 years only (OR=2.47, 95% CI: 1.31 to 4.66 and OR=1.49, 95% CI: 1.14 to 1.97). WMHV and extensive WMHV were associated with an increased risk of death (HR=1.38, 95% CI: 1.13 to 1.69; HR=2.27, 95% CI: 1.41 to 3.65) independent of vascular risk factors and of interim stroke and dementia. Conclusions— In a large community-based sample of middle-aged adults, BI predicted an increased risk of stroke and dementia independent of vascular risk factors. White matter hyperintensities portended an increased risk of stroke, amnestic mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and death independent of vascular risk factors and interim vascular events.
The Benefits of Experimental Methods for the Study of Campaign Effects

Researchers rely heavily on observational designs to study the effects of political campaigns. In doing so, scholars often overlook serious threats to causal inference that bedevil their research designs. The strategic nature of campaigns leads to serious selection biases in voter exposure to campaign stimuli and, ultimately, generates biased estimates of campaign effects. Standard approaches to establishing causal effects in observational research, such as the collection of panel data and the inclusion of covariates, are often inadequate. In contrast, experimental approaches offer researchers a more promising way to estimate accurately the causal effects of campaigns. In this essay, I discuss the recent renaissance of experimental research in the study of campaigns and illustrate how scholars can use lab, field, and survey experiments to good effect. When experimental methods are not feasible, studies of campaign effects would benefit from paying better attention to the causal identification strategy. In closing, I discuss how the logic of experimentation can be applied to some observational settings.