Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The use of two language tests to identify pragmatic language problems in children with autism spectrum disorders.

PURPOSE Pragmatic language disorders (PLDs) are difficult to diagnose in a cost-effective manner, and there are few assessment tools that yield quantitative data. This investigation was designed to determine whether two formal assessment tools would differentiate PLDs in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) from controls matched on verbal IQ and language fundamentals. METHOD Thirty-four matched participants were given the Test of Pragmatic Language (TOPL; D. Phelps-Terasaki & T. Phelps-Gunn, 1992) and the Strong Narrative Assessment Procedure (SNAP; C. J. Strong, 1998). RESULTS Participants with ASDs had significantly poorer scores than controls on the TOPL. On the SNAP, the children with ASDs performed similarly to controls on syntax, cohesion, story grammar, and completeness of episodes. The controls performed significantly better only on the ability to answer inferential questions. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS The TOPL was effective in differentiating PLDs in children with ASDs when performance was compared tomatched controls. The SNAP did not clearly differentiatelanguage problems in these two groups. Research is needed to develop formal assessment tools that target the unique language disabilities of high-functioning individuals with ASDs.
Complement fixation: the effects of IgG and IgM antibody concentration on C1-binding affinity.

When red cells were reacted with increasing amounts of IgG antibody, the number of sites capable of binding C1 increased in a non-linear manner with constantly decreasing rate. At low antibody multiplicities, all of these sites bound C1 with approximately the same affinity, as shown by nearly complete C1 transfer at an ionic strength (μ) close to 0.06. As the amount of antibody increased, a heterogeneity in C1-binding affinities appeared, such that increasing amounts of C1 failed to transfer at μ = 0.059 but did transfer at μ = 0.140. It is suggested that this heterogeneity in C1 binding to IgG may reflect different C1-binding affinities of antibody doublets, triplets, etc. When red cells were reacted with increasing amounts of IgM antibody, the number of C1-binding sites increased linearly. The slope of the plotted curves of these data was close to 1. These sites bound C1 with a range of affinities that was constant, providing all sites were saturated with C1, over a wide range of IgM concentrations. If the antibody:C1 ratio exceeded approximately 1.5:1, a selection in favor of more firmly bound C1 appeared, so that the proportion of cell-bound C1 which transferred at any ionic strength below 0.14 became inversely proportional to the antibody concentration. It is suggested that this heterogeneity in C1 binding to IgM may reflect differences in the number of antibody combining sites which are occupied by antigen.
COMPUTER-BASED TESTING IN NIGERIA’S UNIVERSITY ENTRANTS’ MATRICULATION EXAMINATION: READINESS AND ACCEPTABILITY OF CRITICAL STAKE-HOLDERS BY Prof. Monday T. Joshua Faculty of Education, University of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria

Entrants into universities in Nigeria are selected through a nation-wide paper-and-pencil Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination administered by government-established body called Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB). In 2013, JAMB introduced computer-based testing (CBT) version of this selection examination, with the plan of making the CBT version the only one in the next few years. There were mixed reactions to this critical innovation in large-scale assessment in Nigeria. The purpose of this study was to determine the acceptability and readiness levels of critical stake-holders (students) to this innovation. The research design was survey. The sample for the study comprised 600 final year students in 10 secondary schools in Cross River State, Nigeria, using stratified random sampling to take care of gender, school location and school proprietorship variables. A structured questionnaire (with reliability of .81) was used to collect data, which were analyzed with percentage, mean, t-test and ANOVA. The results indicate that the level of readiness for CBT is high, but that of acceptability is moderate, with a relatively higher preference by students federal government owned and privately owned schools. It is concluded that Nigerian students are supportive of innovations that would ensure international best practices in the nation’s school system. (
Auditory guidance in a smoke-filled tunnel

As a test on auditory guidance, participants tried to find refuge and safety in a road tunnel in dense smoke with sound beacons over the escape exits. The beacons emitted a ‘shhussing’ noise with a 5-Hz pulse frequency. Three groups participated, 32 or 33 participants per group, the first with minimal instruction (sound not mentioned), the second with beacons instruction ‘sound beacons help you to orient’, and the third with full instruction ‘sound beacons over the escape exits’. The percentage of participants finding an escape exit was 16, 21, and 70%, respectively. While the potential of auditory guidance is amply demonstrated, there is the possibility that improvement in the recognition of the sound could improve escape exit usage further. It is recommended to include in the sound of the beacon the speech fragment ‘exit here’. This will probably eliminate the need for instruction. If, in the future, the beacons are used broadly (in buildings, on ships and planes), the recognition issue should diminish.
The Strategic Use of Private Quality Standards in Food Supply Chains

We explore the strategic role of private quality standards in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the suppliers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric equilibria in the retailers' quality requirements. Our results reveal that the retailers use private quality standards to improve their bargaining position in the intermediate goods market. This is associated with inefficiencies in the upstream production, which can be mitigated by enforcing a minimum quality standard.
Facilitating enhanced user access through Palm-leaf manuscript digitization — Challenges and solutions

Palm-leaf manuscripts are a unique medium that serve as a repository of knowledge from across a few centuries. Digitization is an essential process to preserve this knowledge and provide access to users. Due to their unique nature, palm-leaf manuscripts pose some specific challenges. This paper highlights such challenges identified during the course of implementation at SCSVMV University Palm Leaf Library and provides suggestions for possible solutions to these challenges.
A re-appraisal of the concept of ideal mixtures through a computer simulation study of the methanol-ethanol mixtures

Methanol-ethanol mixtures under ambient conditions of temperature and pressure are studied by computer simulations, with the aim to sort out how the ideality of this type of mixtures differs from that of a textbook example of an ideal mixture. This study reveals two types of ideality, one which is related to simple disorder, such as in benzene-cyclohexane mixtures, and another found in complex disorder mixtures of associated liquids. It underlines the importance of distinguishing between concentration fluctuations, which are shared by both types of systems, and the structural heterogeneity, which characterises the second class of disorder. Methanol-1propanol mixtures are equally studied and show a quasi-ideality with many respect comparable to that of the methanol-ethanol mixtures, hinting at the existence of a super-ideality in neat mono-ol binary mixtures, driven essentially by the strong hydrogen bonding and underlying hydroxyl group clustering.
Premenopausal women and low bone density.

OBJECTIVE To review the evidence and provide an approach to management of low bone density among premenopausal women. QUALITY OF EVIDENCE MEDLINE: was searched from January 1990 to November 2004 and articles graded by level of evidence (I to III). Diagnosis and management recommendations were based on evidence from randomized controlled trials and expert consensus. MAIN MESSAGE Bone mineral density (BMD) testing among premenopausal women should be completed only in the presence of approved indications. Current evidence does not support screening for osteoporosis among premenopausal women. Low BMD in premenopausal women is associated with a lower fracture risk than seen in postmenopausal women. In the absence of fragility fractures, low BMD might reflect low peak bone mass based on genetic predisposition, environment, and lifestyle factors. Clinical evaluation enables distinction between low peak bone mass and a systemic disorder resulting in low BMD and skeletal fragility. Common causes of low bone density among premenopausal women include ovulatory disturbances and low body weight. CONCLUSION Bone mineral density alone is insufficient for diagnosis of osteoporosis among premenopausal women in the absence of fragility fractures. Antiresorptive therapy has been evaluated and shown to benefit premenopausal women using glucocorticoid therapy or those with primary hyperparathyroidism.
Cost and time savings from a rapid access model of care using transient elastography to screen and triage patients with chronic Hepatitis C infection

Abstract Background: Treatment uptake amongst patients with chronic Hepatitis C virus (HCV) in Australia is relatively low. New approaches to assessment have the potential to reduce public waiting lists, improve access to treatment, and to reduce healthcare costs. Aim: To describe the costs to the public hospital system and waiting time associated with a novel integrated rapid access to assessment and treatment (RAAT) model of care that utilizes Transient Elastography (TE) as a specialist outpatient-based approach for a streamlined assessment of patients with chronic HCV, compared to conventional outpatient management with liver biopsy (LB). Methods: Time from first medical review to treatment plan and costs associated with detection of fibrosis were recorded for patients receiving RAAT during a 3-month period, and for a similar historical cohort managed conventionally with LB. Costs related to medical and multidisciplinary team reviews and the TE/LB test itself were included. Results: Patients receiving RAAT had lower costs (n = 27, median AU$2716) and shorter time to treatment (median = 194 days) than for conventional management (n = 13, median $5005, 420 days; p < 0.01). Differences related to the lower TE test costs and the lower cost of consults between first medical review and establishment of a treatment plan. Conclusions: Based on real world audit data, this evaluation suggests TE, used as part of a new RAAT model of care, is cost saving to the health system in the short-term and reduces waiting times. The analysis reported here was intended to assess the costs related to detection of fibrosis, and is limited by the small sample size and potential selection bias. Future research should undertake a full economic evaluation at a whole of service level, to consider a more comprehensive and longer-term assessment of the costs and benefits associated with HCV management.
A Space-Frequency Technique for Chipless RFID Tag Localization

In this paper, a new technique is proposed for the accurate localization of chipless RFID tags presented in the reader area. The reader area is subdivided into some triangular unit cells. Each unit cell is covered by three antennas located at the vertices of the triangle in order to extract the positions of the tags. Assuming the reader area as the scatterer medium, the tags act as the scattering centers of the medium. Employing some mathematical description, it is shown that by applying the narrow-frequency matrix pencil method (NFMPM) to the frequency response of the tag, the distance of the tag from the antennas can be found from a space-frequency diagram. Having three distances and coordinates of the antennas, the position of the tag can be obtained easily by triangulation technique. Different scenarios are simulated and validated with the measured results. The measured range and angle errors achieved based on the proposed approach are less than 1.5 cm and 2.6 ° for a tag with area of 15 × 25 mm2.
Search for an optimal multistage charging pattern for lithium-ion batteries using the Taguchi approach

Commercial lithium-ion batteries are playing important roles as energy storage solutions for portable devices, automotive electronics and renewable energy systems. In order to maximize the performance of lithium-ion batteries, an advanced charging pattern is required. In this paper, a Taguchi-based algorithm is presented. Orthogonal arrays are implemented to determine the optimal charging pattern for multistage constant current charging method. Experimental results show that the obtained charging pattern is capable of charging the lithium-ion batteries to 75 % capacity in 40 minutes. The obtained pattern also provides 60 % more cycle life than the conventional constant current-constant voltage method.
A Colorless Wavelength Add or Drop Module With Ultralow Power Consumption

We report on a novel design for a colorless wavelength adding-and-dropping module. The module comprises a cyclic demultiplexer and an optical cross connect and greatly reduces the insertion loss of this functionality, in comparison to other approaches. Implementation of ultralow-power-consumption thermo-optic switches simplifies the module thermal control.
Feature Extraction and Classification of Surface EMG Signals for Robotic Hand Simulation

Feature Extraction and Classification of Surface Electromyography (EMG) signals provide an access for the development of Robotic Hand. EMG signals stands for electromyography signals. These are called the bio signals. Bio signal means a collective electrical signal acquired from any organ that represents a physical variable of interest. The EMG signal being a biomedical signal that measures electrical currents generated in muscles during its contraction representing neuromuscular activities. [1]. The nervous system always controls the muscle activity (contraction/relaxation). Hence, the EMG signal is a complicated signal, which is controlled by the nervous system and is dependent on the anatomical and physiological properties of muscles. In this paper, we have discussed different steps in analyzing the EMG signals. The first step is to analyze the surface EMG signal from the subject’s forearm using Discrete Wavelet Transform and extract features using the singular value decomposition. The second step is to call the different feature values into linguistic terms by using Fuzzy Logic Classifiers in order to recognize different degrees of freedom like open to close, close to open etc. This paper will give in depth insight in the field of EMG signal and has provided more efficient work when compared to conventional works and efficiency is 99%.
Equipoise, a term whose time (if it ever came) has surely gone.

I thank Drs. Shapiro and Glass for the spirit, as well as the letter, of their commentary. In the same collegial spirit I reply. If a term is to do more good than harm in human affairs, it must pass at least the following 3 tests: · Consistency: it must mean roughly the same thing to everybody
Rank-1 kernels for regularized system identification

A kernel-based regularization method to linear system identification was introduced and studied recently. Its novelty is that it finds a reliable way to tackle the bias-variance tradeoff via well-tuned regularization. Kernel design is a key issue for this method and several single kernels have been proposed. Very recently, we introduced and studied the multiple kernel, a conic combination of some suitably chosen fixed kernels. In particular, we investigated the possibility of constructing multiple kernels based on a special class of rank-1 kernels, called output error (OE) kernels. In this contribution, we study OE kernels in more details. The peculiarity of OE kernels lies in that their structure depends on the data. Special cares are thus needed for the use of OE kernels. Two topics are considered: how to select the best OE kernel among a number of candidate OE kernels and how to construct multiple OE kernels in a good way. Numerical experiments show that the proposed OE kernel based regularization method behaves well.
North-South asymmetry in the ionosphere and seismic activity

[1] A retrospective study of the North-South asymmetry (NSA) during the solstices is made using the different geospace parameters in the North and South magnetic hemispheres. The NSA features are investigated using Total Electron Content, TEC, and Global Electron Content, GEC, produced from global ionospheric maps, GIM-TEC for 1999-2013, the Ionospheric Electron Content, IEC, measured by Topex-Jason-1,2 (T/J) satellites for 2001-2012, the F2 layer critical frequency and peak height measured onboard of ISIS1,2 and IK19 satellites during 1969-1982, and the earthquakes M5+ occurrence for 1999-2013. NSA is observed with GEC and IEC for the years of observation with asymmetry index, AI, showing January>July excess from 0.02 to 0.25. The coincident pattern of January-to-July asymmetry ratio of TEC and IEC co-located along the magnetic longitude sector of 270±5E in the Pacific ocean is obtained varying with local time and magnetic latitude. The sea/land differences in the F2 layer peak electron density, NmF2, and the peak height, hmF2, gathered with topside sounding data exhibit tilted ionosphere along the seashores with denser electron population at greater peak heights over the sea. The topside peak electron density NmF2, TEC, IEC and the hemisphere part of GEC are dominant in the South hemisphere which resembles the pattern for seismic activity with dominant earthquake occurrence in the South magnetic hemisphere. Though the study is made for the NSA during solstices in the ionosphere the conclusions seem valid for other aspects of seismic-ionospheric associations with tectonic plate boundaries representing zones of enhanced risk for space weather.
Un processus multi-approches pour l'indexation de documents

This article presents an automatic method of indexing documents based on a semantic, linguistic and finally statistics approach. The semantic analysis is based on the annotation of the document to index by using the ontology of water domain’s. The linguistic process and statistics which succeed him are a sequential combination of the linguistic analysis of the document to be indexed by the extraction of the significant terms of the document and the statistical analysis is the decomposition in singular values of words composing the document. Here, weighting terms are set to take advantages of both their position compared to other terms (co-occurrence) and their local and global context. An application was developed in order to suggest assignments topics of documents to a referential. Finally, we will present experiments comparatives results (with or without semantic treatment) and evaluation carried out on documents of Suez-Environnement. MOTS-CLES : ontologie, indexation, linguistique, statistique
Blockage of Volume-Activated Chloride Channels Inhibits Migration of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Cells

Cell migration is crucial for tumor metastasis. Membrane ion channels may play a major role in tumor cell migration because the cells must undergo changes in shape and volume during migration. In the present study, we used the transwell migration assay, an in vitro model for cell migration, and the patch-clamp technique to investigate the role of the volume-activated Cl- current (Icl,vol) in the regulation of the migration of nasopharyngeal carcinoma CNE-2Z cells. 5-Nitro-2- (3-phenylpropylamino) benzoic acid (NPPB) inhibited the Icl,vol and the migration of CNE-2Z cells with almost identical dose-dependent pattern (IC50 of 98.1 µM and 97.7 µM for Icl,vol and cell migration, respectively). Extracellular adenosine triphosphate (ATP) also showed similar dose-dependent inhibitory effects on the currents and migration (IC50 of 1.07mM, and 1.11mM for Icl,vol and cell migration, respectively). Hypotonic treatments, which activated Icl,vol, increased cell migration. Exposure to hypertonic solutions, which was shown to suppress Icl,vol, inhibited cell migration. Replacement of Cl- with gluconate, which is relatively chloride channel-impermeable, impaired cell migration, whereas substitution of Cl- by I- and Br-, the chloride channel-permeable ions, did not significantly affect cell migration. Analysis of the effects of all the above treatments on Icl,vol and cell migration indicated that the inhibition of migration was positively correlated with the blockage of Icl,vol, with a correlation coefficient (r) of 0.97, suggesting a functional relationship between Icl,vol and cell migration. These data suggest that the volume-activated Cl- channels are involved in cell migration.
Multifaceted role of TREX2 in the skin defense against UV-induced skin carcinogenesis

TREX2 is a 3′-DNA exonuclease specifically expressed in keratinocytes. Here, we investigated the relevance and mechanisms of TREX2 in ultraviolet (UV)-induced skin carcinogenesis. TREX2 expression was up-regulated by chronic UV exposure whereas it was de-regulated or lost in human squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs). Moreover, we identified SNPs in the TREX2 gene that were more frequent in patients with head and neck SCCs than in healthy individuals. In mice, TREX2 deficiency led to enhanced susceptibility to UVB-induced skin carcinogenesis which was preceded by aberrant DNA damage removal and degradation as well as reduced inflammation. Specifically, TREX2 loss diminished the up-regulation of IL12 and IFNγ, key cytokines related to DNA repair and antitumor immunity. In UV-treated keratinocytes, TREX2 promoted DNA repair and passage to late apoptotic stages. Notably, TREX2 was recruited to low-density nuclear chromatin and micronuclei, where it interacted with phosphorylated H2AX histone, which is a critical player in both DNA repair and cell death. Altogether, our data provide new insights in the molecular mechanisms of TREX2 activity and establish cell autonomous and non-cell autonomous functions of TREX2 in the UVB-induced skin response.
Temperature-dependant thermal stress analysis of through-silicon-vias during manufacturing process

Thermal stress is induced by high temperature manufacturing processes, due to the mismatch of Coefficient of Thermal Expansion s (CTE) between silicon, dielectric material and copper. In this paper, thermal stress around Through-Silicon-Vias (TSVs) was discussed using 3D FEA transient method. Stress distributions near a TSV and TSVs array were investigated after dielectric liner deposition, barrier layer deposition and annealing process, respectively. Moreover, stress distribution around a via was impacted by the thickness of the dielectric liner, the via diameter, the via pitch and the cooling speed during annealing process. In order to verify the simulation results, TSV samples were fabricated through a series of processes. Si Raman shift profiles near a TSV was also measured and calculated. The simulation results coincided with the real measurement value in tolerable error range.