Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Internet Use and Civic Engagement: A Longitudinal Analysis

Conclusions about the impact of the Internet on civic engagement have been hampered by the unavailability of before and after measures, a shortage of varied and multiple indicators of attitudes and behaviors regarding engagement, and insufficient attention to generational differences. This article seeks to address these weaknesses by employing a quasi-experimental design that draws on the 1982 and 1997 waves of a panel study that began with a national sample of the high school class of 1965 and that also includes that generation's lineage successor. Comparisons between those using and not using the Internet demonstrated that the digital divide, the original pre-Internet gap in civic engagement, remained in place or increased slightly over time. Taking into account pre-Internet levels of civic engagement and key socio-economic characteristics indicates that Internet access has positive effects on several indicators of civic engagement. Comparisons of civic engagement among Internet users according to how much they employ the Internet for political purposes revealed modest bivariate associations and very little independent effect at the multivariate level. The connection between the Internet and civic engagement differed across the two generations in some respects, explained in part by intergenerational divergence in the intersection between the stage of individual political development and incorporation of the Internet into a person's media repertory
Our perception of the mast cell from Paul Ehrlich to now

Just over a century ago Paul Ehrlich received the Nobel Prize for his studies of immunity. This review describes one of his legacies, the histochemical description of the mast cell, and the research that has ensued since then. After a long period of largely descriptive studies, which revealed little about the biological role of the mast cell, the field was galvanized in the 1950s by the recognition that the mast cell was the main repository of histamine and a key participant in anaphylactic reactions. Although the mast cell was long‐viewed in these terms, recent research has now shown that the mast cell also plays a key role in innate and adaptive immune responses, autoimmune disease, and possibly tissue homeostasis by virtue of its expression of a diverse array of receptors and biologically active products. In addition, the responsiveness of mast cells to immunological and pathological stimulants is highly modulated by the tissue cytokine environment and by synergistic, or inhibitory, interactions among the various mast cell receptor systems. This once enigmatic cell of Paul Ehrlich has proved to be both adaptable and multifunctional.
A study on large capacity file transfer with gigabit to the home (GTTH) system

We have been developing a GTTH (gigabit to the home) system, in which a 2.5-Gb/s downstream signal can provide various services including communication and broadcasting. In this paper, a large-capacity file transfer system making full use of the large bandwidth of GTTH is proposed. The system configuration and performance evaluation using a GTTH demonstration system are described.
How to inform a morbidly obese patient on the specific risk to develop postoperative pulmonary complications using evidence‐based methodology

Background and objective: Patients have the right to be informed about the expected benefits and risks of medical and surgical procedures. Ideally this information should be scientifically based and presented to the patient in time. In morbidly obese patient undergoing general anaesthesia, postoperative pulmonary complications are an important cause of postoperative morbidity and mortality. A 46‐yr‐old female with a body mass index of 89.8 kg m−2 was scheduled to undergo radical abdominal surgery for cervix carcinoma. In order to inform her accurately on the risk of developing postoperative pulmonary complications, we undertook to answer the following question: What is the risk to develop postoperative pulmonary complications in a morbidly obese patient about to undergo abdominal surgery under general anaesthesia? Methods: A Medline search was conducted from 1966 to 2004 with respect to postoperative pulmonary complications in abdominal surgery of morbidly obese patients. Altogether, 213 articles were found, of which seven were selected. Additionally, seven cross‐references and or related articles were used. Results: For obese patients who undergo abdominal surgery under general anaesthesia, the likelihood to develop atelectasis is 10.4 ± 4.8% (P < 0.001) with a correlation coefficient of 0.28‐0.34 (P < 0.05). The likelihood to develop atelectasis and pneumonia taken together is 29.3% with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.82 (95% confidence interval 1.66‐4.78; P = 0.0001). Conclusion: Considering the positive correlation coefficient and the high body mass index of this patient she has a risk of at least 29.3% to develop pneumonia and/or atelectasis, which should affect the anaesthetic strategy in this patient.
The Concept of Elective Affinity According to Max Weber

The notion of elective affinity (Wahlverwandtschaft) has a long history which is much older that Weber’s writings. It went through a complex path that leads from alchemy to romantic literature (Goethe), and from there to the social sciences. Weber uses it only three times in The Protestant Ethic, but it appears also in several of his other writings, mainly concerning sociology of religion. Weber does not define it, but one could propose the following definition, based on the weberian use of the notion: elective affinity is a process through which two cultural forms – religious, intellectual, political or economical – who have certain analogies, intimate kinships or meaning affinities, enter in a relationship of reciprocal attraction and influence, mutual selection, active convergence and mutual reinforcement. Without substituting other analytical, explanatory or comprehensive paradigms, elective affinity may offer a new approach, until now hardly explored, in the field of sociology of culture.
Concepts and Mechanisms of Generalized Central Nervous System Arousal

A concept of generalized arousal of the CNS is presented and given an operational definition that leads to quantitative physical measures. Because this primitive arousal function underlies all motivated behavioral responses, cognitive functions, and emotional expression, disorders of generalized arousal can be associated with a large number of problems in medicine and public health, including vegetative states, attentional disorders, depression, occupational hazards, and problems with sleep and anesthesia. Some of its known mechanisms are briefly reviewed, at the levels of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and functional genomics. Generalized arousal contributes to the excitement and the activation of behaviors during specific arousal states. Data are summarized for four genomic/neurochemical systems through which changes in generalized arousal could affect sexual arousal, two of which heighten, and the other two of which reduce arousal.
Core variability in mutation rates shape the basal sequence characteristics of the human genome

Accurate knowledge on the core components of mutation rates is of vital importance to understand genome dynamics. By performing a single-genome and model-free analysis of 39894 retrotransposon remnants, we reveal core, sequence-dependent, nucleotide substitution rates (germline) at each of the 3.2 billion positions of the human genome. Benefiting from the data made available in such detail, we show that a simulated genome generated by equilibrating a random DNA sequence solely using our rate constants, exhibits nucleotide organisation observed in the actual human genome, with or without repeat elements. This directly demonstrates the key role of the core nucleotide substitution rates in shaping the oligomeric composition of the human genome. We next generate the basal mutability profile of the human genome and show the depletion of the moieties with low basal mutability in the database of cancer mutations.
Myeloperoxidase: friend and foe

Neutrophilic polymorphonuclear leukocytes (neutrophils) are highly specialized for their primary function, the phagocytosis and destruction of microorganisms. When coated with opsonins (generally complement and/or antibody), microorganisms bind to specific receptors on the surface of the phagocyte and invagination of the cell membrane occurs with the incorporation of the microorganism into an intracellular phagosome. There follows a burst of oxygen consumption, and much, if not all, of the extra oxygen consumed is converted to highly reactive oxygen species. In addition, the cytoplasmic granules discharge their contents into the phagosome, and death of the ingested microorganism soon follows. Among the antimicrobial systems formed in the phagosome is one consisting of myeloperoxidase (MPO), released into the phagosome during the degranulation process, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), formed by the respiratory burst and a halide, particularly chloride. The initial product of the MPO‐H2O2‐chloride system is hypochlorous acid, and subsequent formation of chlorine, chloramines, hydroxyl radicals, singlet oxygen, and ozone has been proposed. These same toxic agents can be released to the outside of the cell, where they may attack normal tissue and thus contribute to the pathogenesis of disease. This review will consier the potential sources of H2O2 for the MPO‐H2O2‐halide system; the toxic products of the MPO system; the evidence for MPO involvement in the microbicidal activity of neutrophils; the involvement of MPO‐independent antimicrobial systems; and the role of the MPO system in tissue injury. It is concluded that the MPO system plays an important role in the microbicidal activity of phagocytes.
Fat Thoughts and Fat Content Do Not Affect Eating Behavior in Women

The present study examined if the perception of fat and the content of fat in a food affect the cumulative curve of food intake and chewing among healthy women. One group of 11 women was served the same food twice, the food contained 2.5g fat/100g. They were informed verbally and by labeling that the food had a high fat content on one occasion and that it had a low fat content on the other. Another group of 13 women was also served the same food twice. In one condition the food contained 9g fat/100g and in the other it contained 3.1g fat/100g. The women were not informed about the fat content of the food. Cumulative food intake was measured using Mandometer ® in both experiments and combined with video recording of the maxillary-mandibular region in the second, to measure the size of the bites, the sequences of chewing, and the pauses between bites. Labeling food “high fat” or serving food with a high fat content increased the perception of the fatness of the food but had no effect on food intake. Chewing was also unaffected by the fat content of the food. As a consequence, energy intake was markedly increased when the fat content of the food was increased. The results suggest that neither the thought of fatness nor the fat content of a food affect the cumulative intake of food and that energy intake can increase in the absence of a change in eating behavior.
Ethics Education in the Australian Accounting Curriculum: A Longitudinal Study Examining Barriers and Enablers

Abstract The increasing significance of ethics in the accounting profession is evidenced by the seminal events that witnessed the collapse of major corporations (e.g. Enron and WorldCom); regulatory interventions (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the USA and the CLERP 9 Act in Australia); and calls for increased ethics interventions in the accounting curriculum. This project has two objectives: to investigate the nature of ethics education in the Australian accounting curriculum and how it has changed from 2000 to 2012; and to analyse the barriers to enhancing ethics education by soliciting the opinions of Heads of Departments/Schools of Australian universities. Compared with early empirical evidence, universities responded to the call for ethics education with increased levels of ethics intervention, but had failed to enhance the extent of ethics education coverage in the intervening period in which the data were collected. The lack of qualified staff and research opportunities represent major obstacles to the enhancement of ethics education.
Complex Wavelet Modulation Subbands for Speech Compression

Low-frequency modulation of sound carry essential information for speech and music. They must be preserved for compression. The complex modulation spectrum is commonly obtained by spectral analysis of the sole temporal envelopes of the subbands out of a time/frequency analysis. Amplitudes and tones of speech or music tend to vary slowly over time thus the temporal envelopes are mostly of polynomial type. Processing in this domain usually creates undesirable distortions because only the magnitudes are taken into account and the phase data is often neglected. We remedy this problem with the use of a complex wavelet transform as a more appropriate envelope and phase processing tool. Complex wavelets carry both magnitude and phase explicitly with great sparsity and preserve well polynomials. Moreover an analytic Hilbert-like transform is possible with complex wavelets implemented as an orthogonal filter bank. By working in this alternative transform domain coined as ``Modulation Subbands", this transform shows very promising compression capabilities thanks to interesting sparsity properties and suggests new approaches for joint spectro-temporal analytic processing of slow frequency and phase varying audio signals.
An integrated pedestrian behavior model based on Extended Decision Field Theory and Social Force model

A novel pedestrian behavior model is proposed, which integrates 1) Extended Decision Field Theory (EDFT) for tactical level human decision-making, 2) Social Force model (SFM) to represent physical interactions and congestions among the people and the environment, and 3) dynamic planning algorithm involving AND/OR graphs. Furthermore, the Social Force model is enhanced with the vision of each individual, and both individual behaviors as well as group behaviors are considered. The proposed model is illustrated and demonstrated with a shopping mall scenario. Literature survey and observations have been conducted at the mall for data collection and partial validation of the proposed model. The constructed simulation using AnyLogic® software was utilized to conduct several experiments on performance of the mall and scalability of the proposed model.
Higher-order Occurrence Pooling on Mid- and Low-level Features: Visual Concept Detection

In object recognition, the Bag-of-Words model assumes: i) extraction of local descriptors from images, ii) embedding these descriptors by a coder to a given visual vocabulary space which results in so-called mid-level features, iii) extracting statistics from mid-level features with a pooling operator that aggregates occurrences of visual words in images into so-called signatures. As the last step aggregates only occurrences of visual words, it is called as First-order Occurrence Pooling. This paper investigates higher-order approaches. We propose to aggregate over co-occurrences of visual words, derive Bag-of-Words with Second- and Higher-order Occurrence Pooling based on linearisation of so-called Minor Polynomial Kernel, and extend this model to work with adequate pooling operators. For bi- and multi-modal coding, a novel higher-order fusion is derived. We show that the well-known Spatial Pyramid Matching and related methods constitute its special cases. Moreover, we propose Third-order Occurrence Pooling directly on local image descriptors and a novel pooling operator that removes undesired correlation from the image signatures. Finally, Uni- and Bi-modal First-, Second-, and Third-order Occurrence Pooling are evaluated given various coders and pooling operators. The proposed methods are compared to other approaches (e.g. Fisher Vector Encoding) in the same testbed and attain state-of-the-art results.
Unsupervised sentiment analysis with a simple and fast Bayesian model using Part-of-Speech feature selection

Unsupervised Bayesian sentiment analysis often uses models that are not well motivated. Mostly, extensions of Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA) are applied ‐ effectively modeling latent class distributions over words instead of documents. We introduce a Bayesian, unsupervised version of Naive Bayes for sentiment analysis and show that it offers superior accuracy and inference speed.
Distributed access control for social networks

Access control is the process by which access to information is granted to users for certain actions based on their identity. Traditional access control models that map every system resource directly to every system user work for organizations with thousands of users but struggle for social network sites like Facebook with millions of users. The problems faced are firstly the technical complexity of mapping millions of users to billions of resources and secondly the social need of users to own the items they post and to control their access, so access policies beyond just public/private are needed. And finally, that if ordinary users are to manage their own access control, they need software support. This paper argues that only distributed access control can meet these challenges and proposes a model based on the socio-technical design paradigm: first define the social requirements then design a technical solution to fulfill them.
Serum Mesothelin, Osteopontin and Vimentin: Useful Markers for Clinical Monitoring of Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma

Introduction Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a relatively rare tumor, with the epithelioid type occurring more frequently. Several biomarkers have been suggested for screening and early diagnosis of MPM. Currently, high levels of soluble mesothelin-related peptides (SMRP), plasma osteopontin (pOPN) and vimentin have been reported in patients with MPM as promising markers for diagnosis, but their clinical use in monitoring is still discussed. The aim of our study was to evaluate the usefulness of these substances as markers of the clinical response to treatment in patients suffering from epithelioid mesothelioma. Methods 219 serum samples from 56 patients were collected during follow-up and the clinical response to therapy was recorded. Percentage differences between 2 consecutive measurements of SMRP, osteopontin and vimentin (Δ markers) by means of commercially available kits were correlated with changes in the clinical course. Results Δ SMRP, Δ pOPN and Δ vimentin showed statistically significant differences between the disease categories stable disease, partial response and disease progression (p = 0.0001, p = 0.035 and p = 0.0025 for SMRP, pOPN and vimentin, respectively). Moreover, contingency table analysis showed statistically significant differences between clinical response and Δ of each marker clustered into 3 groups (<-20%, between -20% and +20%, >+20%). Conclusions The time course of Δ SMRP and Δ vimentin was strongly associated with disease status, and so was the time course of pOPN, albeit to a lesser extent. These markers appear to be particularly effective in cases of partial response and disease progression, while their possible use in stable disease should be better investigated.
Preliminary Results in Sliding Autonomy for Coordinated Teams

We are developing a coordinated team of robots to assemble structures. The assembly tasks are sufficiently complex that no single robot, or type of robot, can complete the assembly alone. Even with a group of multiple heterogeneous robots, each adding its unique set of capabilities to the system, the number of contingencies that must be addressed for a completely autonomous system is prohibitively large. Teleoperating a multiple robot system, at the other extreme, is difficult and performance may be highly dependent on the skill of the operator. We propose and evaluate an implementation of a framework that, ideally, provides the operator with a means to interact seamlessly with the autonomous control system. Using an architecture that incorporates sliding autonomy, the operator can augment autonomous control by providing input to help the system recover from unexpected errors and increase system efficiency. Our implementation is motivated by results from an extended series of experiments we are conducting with three robots that work together to dock both ends of a
Respiration of a monotreme, the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus.

BENTLEY, P.J., CLYDE F. HERREID II, AND KNUT SCHMIDTNIELSEN. Respiration of a monotreme, the echidna, Tachyglossus aculeatus. Am. J. Physiol. 212(5): 957-961. rg67. ----The minute volume, tidal volume, and respiratory frequency were measured in three echidnas breathing air and various air-CO* mixtures. Increased concentration of CO2 in the inspired air caused large increases in minute and tidal volume but little change in respiratory rate. However, normal variation in minute volume of echidnas breathing air was principally the result of change in respiratory rate. The end-tidal (alveolar) COP concentration was 5-6 y0 whereas the 02 was 14-r 5 %, both values being similar to those of typical placental mammals. Burrowing echidnas voluntarily tolerate CO* concentrations of about 5 70. The sensitivity of these animals to CO* was compared to other homeotherms and found to be low, but definite conclusions cannot be drawn until results on more species are available.
Active Monitoring Toolkit for Longterm QoS Analysis in Large Scale Internet

This paper presents the CM toolset active monitoring toolkit based on the controlled interaction between different components and integrated data base to support longterm QoS analysis in large scale Internet. Initially developed in the AQUILA EU project for QoS /SLA monitoring, the CM Toolset was enhanced in INTERMON EU project with new facilities for active topology discovery (traceroute) and time series data analysis of QoS parameter data to get valid and useful status information over long time for performance and fault management, network resource planning and active QoS/SLA monitoring. The paper shows the collaborative usage of the tools and the role of the integrated data base to support QoS analysis for longterm performance management scenarios. The paper discusses based on scenarios methods for QoS time series pattern analysis, especially the usage of linear approximation for supporting for efficient representation and understanding of long term QoS parameter data describing the quality of inter-domain Internet connections. Based on real QoS and topology monitoring data collected in the CMToolset data base, involving European Internet Providers, „what-if“ analysis based on gradient descriptions of increase / decrease patterns is discussed.
Modeling emotional action for social characters

Abstract Emotion is an important aspect of human intelligence and has been shown to play a significant role in the human decision-making process. This paper proposes a comprehensive computational model of emotions that can be incorporated into the physiological and social components of the emotions. Since interaction between characters can have a major impact on emotional dynamics, the model presents a social learning component for learning associations among characters, which in turn affects the character’s decision-making and social interactions. The model also designs a set of personality progression functions to enhance individual differences. In addition, we demonstrate this empirically through a computer simulation of a dynamic environment inhabited by a few characters to test our emotional model. The experiments show the effectiveness of our emotional model to build believable characters during interaction with the virtual environment.