Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
4-H State Leaders’ Readiness to Support Lesbian and Gay Youth-Assessing Leaders’ Lesbian and Gay Knowledge, Homophobic Attitudes, and Best Practice Implementation

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . vi VITA . vii LIST OF TABLES . xvi LIST OF FIGURES . xvii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 Diversity and Cooperative Extension . 1 Background . 1 Responding to Diversity . 2 A New Audience . 2 Pathway to Diversity . 3 Pathways to Diversity Reaffirmed . 4 Change Agent States for Diversity . 5 4-H and Sexual Orientation . 6 LGBT Youth Harassed in School . 7 Keeping LGBT Youth Safe . 8 Problem Statement . 8 Significance of the Study . 9 Research Questions . 11 Definition of Terms. 12 Assumptions . 14 Limitations . 15 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW . 16 Introduction . 16 x Extension and Pluralism . 18 Kellogg Commission Reports . 18 Extension Committee on Organization and Policy . 19 Pathway to Diversity . 19 Pathways to Diversity Reaffirmed . 19 Change Agent States . 21 Protection for Sexual Orientation . 22 Director‘s Memorandum . 23 Conducted Versus Assisted Programs . 24 4-H Cannot Discriminate . 25 National 4-H Foundation and National 4-H Center Provide Protection . 26 Policy and Leadership Support Diversity Competency . 26 LGBT Youth . 27 Harassment Studies . 27 Safe Schools Coalition Study. 27 California Study . 28 National Education Association Study . 28 California Healthy Kids Study . 29 Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) . 30 Summary of Harassment Studies . 32 Improving School Climate for LGBT Youth . 32 Best Practices . 32 California Safe Schools Coalition . 32 Gay and Lesbian Straight Education Network . 33 The National Education Association . 34 UC-Davis 4-H Center . 34 California Safe School Coalition . 35 xi Advocates for Youth . 35 Best Practice Research . 37 Szalacha Research . 37 Markow & Fein Research . 38 Goodenow, Szalacha, and Westheimer Research . 38 Best Practices Summary . 38 Extension‘s Popular 4-H program . 39 4-H and Sexual Orientation . 40 4-H and Sexual Orientation Research . 41 4-H Database . 41 WorldCat Database . 41 LGBT Resources Within Extension. 42 Family Issues newsletter. 43 California 4-H Center for Youth Development. 43 Essential competencies for 4-H youth professionals. 44 CYFERnet. 44 Summary . 45 Assessing 4-H Leaders‘ Sexual Diversity Competence . 46 Leadership Influences Diversity Competence . 46 Measuring Knowledge . 46 Measuring Attitudes . 47 Traditional Scales. 48 Modern Scales . 48 Measuring Male and Female Prejudice. 49 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY . 52 Subject Selection/Study Participants . 52
Protein and Amino Acid Metabolism in Man

THIS BRIEF review will summarize some of the knowledge gained over the past decade about substrate and hormonal controls of nitrogen metabolism, mainly from studies in man. Although most of the information relates to skeletal muscle, presently available information suggests that it also applies to heart. Animals lack a form of protein purely for storage sake, unlike triglyceride and glycogen for fat and carbohydrate, respectively. In other words, every protein molecule is serving a physiological role, be it structural, oncotic, or catalytic, suggesting that nitrogen economy must have been of major evolutionary importance at one time. Since muscle is the major protein depot, it serves in man as the principal organ for nitrogen expansion and contraction. Its upper limit is set by muscle cellularity, a result of both heredity and growth, by nitrogen availability, and, most important, by its physical use. Once muscle depots are fully expanded, any excess nitrogen intake is excreted as urea and the calories are converted into and stored as fat. On the deficit side, muscle nitrogen is a function of activity as well as the severity of the nitrogen deficiency, since a minimal nitrogen intake is needed to replace essential amino acids metabolized during turnover. There is another major metabolic role played by muscle independent of the aforementioned, namely, as the donor for amino acids needed for glucose synthesis when carbohydrate becomes unavailable to the organism. Thus it serves as a very special fuel depot in addition to its mechanical role. A normal fasting man of approximately 70 kg consumes 2,000 calories daily with minimal activity. One-quarter of this is for brain, = 125 g of glucose being necessary. Liver glycogen can provide a 12to 18-hour supply of glucose for brain, but once depleted hepatic gluconeogenesis from muscle-derived amino acids takes over. The remainder of the body is using as fuel primarily free fatty acids released from adipose tissue'(Fig. 1). The control of net muscle proteolysis appears to be insulin (with again activity of any specific muscle playing a more dominant role for that muscle alone). With fasting, as insulin levels decrease skeletal muscle releases amino acids, mainly alanine and glutamine,' and these are transported to the splanchnic bed and kidney for gluconeogenesis. Local infusion of insulin to a given muscle suppresses this process,
Maximizing survival, growth and goal reaching under borrowing constraints

In this paper, we consider the survival, growth and goal reaching maximization problems treated in Browne [Math. Oper. Res., 1997, 22, 468–493] and solve them in a market constrained due to borrowing prohibition. To solve the problems, we first construct an auxiliary market introduced by Cvitanic and Karatzas [Ann. Appl. Probab. , 1992, 2, 767–818] and then apply the dynamic programming approach. Via our solutions, an alternative approach is introduced in order to solve the problems defined under an auxiliary market.
Character-Oriented Narrative Goal Reasoning in Autonomous Actors

The cognitive autonomy capability understood in a certain sense is vital for actors working as teams in unpredictable environments with limited communications. Such actors need to be able to reason about their goals and decide which to pursue. Therefore, methods of autonomous goal reasoning (GR) would be useful in such cases. However, most previously studied models of GR are limited in their abilities to reason in situations involving multiple characters, viewing the latter from a third-person perspective. In this context, the connection between GR and narrative reasoning is beginning to be explored. Recently, a theoretical framework for narrative team planning (NTP) has been developed and used to generate character goals (not team goals). This approach, however, relies on a global team planning, which may not be suitable for a team operating with limited communications and without a central command. Accepting NTP as a baseline, here we argue that an appropriate introduction of characters and narratives into a GR framework can (in some environments) be beneficial, both conceptually and in terms of performance measures. We study this claim analytically using a Character Reasoner model that we formulate, and apply it to several example scenarios. This model separates characters from actors and employs a hierarchical network for narrative and goal selection. Expected benefits for teams of autonomous actors include more efficient and more robust goal reasoning abilities.
Detecting Android Smells Using Multi-Objective Genetic Programming

The evolution rate of mobile applications is much higher than regular software applications having shorter release deadlines and smaller code base. Mobile applications tend to be evolved quickly by developers to meet several new customer requirements and fix discovered bugs. However, evolving the existing features and design may introduce bad design practices, also called code smells, which can highly decrease the maintainability and performance of these mobile applications. However, unlike the area of object-oriented software systems, the detection of code smells in mobile applications received a very little of attention. Recent, few studies defined a set of quality metrics for Android applications and proposed a support to manually write a set of rules to detect code smells by combining these quality metrics. However, finding the best combination of metrics and their thresholds to identify code smells is left to the developer as a manual process. In this paper, we propose to automatically generate rules for the detection of code smells in Android applications using a multi-objective genetic programming algorithm (MOGP). The MOGP algorithm aims at finding the best set of rules that cover a set of code smell examples of Android applications based on two conflicting objective functions of precision and recall. We evaluate our approach on 184 Android projects with source code hosted in GitHub. The statistical test of our results show that the generated detection rules identified 10 Android smell types on these mobile applications with an average correctness higher than 82% and an average relevance of 77% based on the feedback of active developers of mobile apps.
Chemolithotrophic bacteria in copper ores leached at high sulfuric Acid concentration

Extensive bacterial growth was observed when copper sulfide ores were leached with 0.6 N sulfuric acid. The bacterial population developed in this condition was examined by characterization of the spacer regions between the 16S and 23S rRNA genetic loci obtained after PCR amplification of the DNA extracted from the leached ore. The spacers observed had the sizes found in strains of "Leptospirillum ferrooxidans" and Thiobacillus thiooxidans, except for a larger one, approximately 560 bp long, that was not observed in any of the strains examined, including those of Thiobacillus ferrooxidans. The bacteria with this last spacer were selected after culturing in mineral and elemental sulfur media containing 0.7 N sulfuric acid. The spacer and the 16S ribosomal DNA of this isolate were sequenced and compared with those in species commonly found in bioleaching processes. Though the nucleotide sequence of the spacer showed an extensive heterologous region with T. thiooxidans, the sequence of its 16S rDNA gene indicated a close relationship (99.85%) with this species. These results indicate that a population comprised of bacterial strains closely related to T. thiooxidans and of another strain, possibly related to "L. ferrooxidans," can develop during leaching at high sulfuric acid concentration. Iron oxidation in this condition is attributable to "L. ferrooxidans" and not T. ferrooxidans, based on the presence of spacers with the "L. ferrooxidans" size range and the absence of spacers characteristic of T. ferrooxidans.
Building speech synthesis systems for Indian languages

In this paper, new efforts to build text-to-speech synthesis systems (TTS) for Indian languages is presented. The synthesisers are built around both concatenative speech synthesis and statistical parametric speech synthesis frameworks. Text to speech synthesis systems require accurate segmentation. Obtaining accurate segmentation at the phone-level is a difficult task. Manual segmentation leads to human errors, while automatic segmentation using statistical approaches (hidden Markov model based approaches) leads to poor boundary information, when the amount of data used for training is small. A group delay based syllable segmentation semi-automatic tool is discussed. The tool is semi-automatic as some of the boundaries obtained are inaccurate and have to be manually corrected. Next, a segmentation algorithm that uses both HMM based segmentation and group delay based segmentation, is used to obtain accurate boundaries automatically. The boundaries obtained are used in the syllable-based synthesiser for unit selection. In the statistical phone-based synthesiser, embedded reestimation is performed at the phone level. Syllable-based and penta-phone based HMMs are used for building the synthesiser. TTS systems for 12 different Indian languages namely Tamil, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Telugu, Rajasthani, Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Manipuri, Kannada and Gujarati are built using semi-automatic segmentation and synthesisers have been built for 7 Indian languages using automatic segmentation. Evaluation of the semi-automatic segmentation systems indicate that the MOS (mean opinion score) is above 3.0 for most of the languages. Pair comparison tests on semi-automatic vs. automatic segmentation show that automatic segmentation is preferred.
Body mass scaling of passive oxygen diffusion in endotherms and ectotherms

Significance Biologists have long sought to understand how differences in the structure of vertebrate respiratory systems are related to differences in oxygen consumption rates associated with metabolism. In particular, they have sought to understand how structural constraints on passive oxygen diffusion through gills or lungs are related to the nonlinear body mass scaling of oxygen consumption rates. Here we show that the body mass dependence of oxygen diffusion capacity, which is governed by the area and thickness of respiratory surfaces, matches the body mass dependence of respiration in diverse endothermic (birds and mammals) and ectothermic (reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) vertebrates. These results provide a step toward a more complete understanding of the structural differences that underlie changes in oxygen consumption rates with body size. The area and thickness of respiratory surfaces, and the constraints they impose on passive oxygen diffusion, have been linked to differences in oxygen consumption rates and/or aerobic activity levels in vertebrates. However, it remains unclear how respiratory surfaces and associated diffusion rates vary with body mass across vertebrates, particularly in relation to the body mass scaling of oxygen consumption rates. Here we address these issues by first quantifying the body mass dependence of respiratory surface area and respiratory barrier thickness for a diversity of endotherms (birds and mammals) and ectotherms (fishes, amphibians, and reptiles). Based on these findings, we then use Fick’s law to predict the body mass scaling of oxygen diffusion for each group. Finally, we compare the predicted body mass dependence of oxygen diffusion to that of oxygen consumption in endotherms and ectotherms. We find that the slopes and intercepts of the relationships describing the body mass dependence of passive oxygen diffusion in these two groups are statistically indistinguishable from those describing the body mass dependence of oxygen consumption. Thus, the area and thickness of respiratory surfaces combine to match oxygen diffusion capacity to oxygen consumption rates in both air- and water-breathing vertebrates. In particular, the substantially lower oxygen consumption rates of ectotherms of a given body mass relative to those of endotherms correspond to differences in oxygen diffusion capacity. These results provide insights into the long-standing effort to understand the structural attributes of organisms that underlie the body mass scaling of oxygen consumption.
Torus Homotopy Groups.

A promising line of attack on the unsolved problem of calculating the homotopy groups r,, r = 1, 2, . , of a.topological space Y was initiated by J. H. C. Whitehead.1 The results which he has obtained involve a certain "multiplication": for any pair of elements a e Tm, e sr, the Whitehead product aBf is defined and is an element of the group Tm + n 1. This multiplication can be compared with the group operation only when m = n = 1 and in this case a* =aa In order to study this product I define here, for every dimeiision r ) 1, a group -r, which I call the r-dimensional torus homotopy group and which has the following properties: 1. Every homotopy group of dimension less than r + 1 can be mapped isomorphically into r,. (In fact most homotopy groups have many such isomorphisms.) 2. If y = a where a e-mv,(7ne r,y Tm+ nr-1 andm+n-1< r + 1, then isomorphisms Tm -,tTn i T--m + n-1,r can be so chosen that a -a, ,,, --* -j and f = ag,15-1. The groups Tl, T2, T3, . form a direct homomorphism system and the limit group T has properties (1) and (2) with r = co. Thus all the homotopy groups and all the Whitehead products can be studied within one single group r. Let Y be a topological space and y* one of its points. Denote by Tr 1 the (r -l)-dimensional torus whose coordinates are the r 1 real numbers xI, x2, . , Xr 1 (mod 1). The r-dimensional torus homotopy group ,r( Y) = r( Y, y*) is defined to be the fundamental group of the function space YTr 1, using the mapping y* = y*Tr as base point. Thus an element of Tr( Y) is represented by a continuous Y-valued functionf of r real variables xo, xi, . ,r 1 (mod 1) which satisfies the condition
Remedies against the Vocabulary Gap in Information Retrieval

Search engines rely heavily on term-based approaches that represent queries and documents as bags of words. Text—a document or a query—is represented by a bag of its words that ignores grammar and word order, but retains word frequency counts. When presented with a search query, the engine then ranks documents according to their relevance scores by computing, among other things, the matching degrees between query and document terms. While term-based approaches are intuitive and effective in practice, they are based on the hypothesis that documents that exactly contain the query terms are highly relevant regardless of query semantics. Inversely, term-based approaches assume documents that do not contain query terms as irrelevant. However, it is known that a high matching degree at the term level does not necessarily mean high relevance and, vice versa, documents that match null query terms may still be relevant. Consequently, there exists a vocabulary gap between queries and documents that occurs when both use different words to describe the same concepts. It is the alleviation of the effect brought forward by this vocabulary gap that is the topic of this dissertation. More specifically, we propose (1) methods to formulate an effective query from complex textual structures and (2) latent vector space models that circumvent the vocabulary gap in information retrieval.
NOD2 (Nucleotide-Binding Oligomerization Domain 2) Is a Major Pathogenic Mediator of Coxsackievirus B3-Induced Myocarditis

Background: The cytoplasmatic pattern recognition receptor, NOD2 (nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain 2), belongs to the innate immune system and is among others responsible for the recognition of single-stranded RNA. With Coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3) being a single-stranded RNA virus, and the recent evidence that the NOD2 target, NLRP3 (NOD-like receptor family, pyrin domain containing 3) is of importance in the pathogenesis of CVB3-induced myocarditis, we aimed to unravel the role of NOD2 in CVB3-induced myocarditis. Methods and Results: Endomyocardial biopsy NOD2 mRNA expression was higher in CVB3-positive patients compared with patients with myocarditis but without evidence of persistent CVB3 infection. Left ventricular NOD2 mRNA expression was also induced in CVB3-induced myocarditis versus healthy control mice. NOD2 knockdown(−/−) mice were rescued from the detrimental CVB3-mediated effects as shown by a reduced cardiac inflammation (less cardiac infiltrates and suppression of proinflammatory cytokines), cardiac fibrosis, apoptosis, lower CAR (Coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor) expression and CVB3 copy number, and an improved left ventricular function in NOD2−/− CVB3 mice compared with wild-type CVB3 mice. In agreement, NOD2−/− decreased the CVB3-induced inflammatory response, CVB3 copy number, and apoptosis in vitro. NOD2−/− was further associated with a reduction in CVB3-induced NLRP3 expression and activity as evidenced by lower ASC (apoptosis-associated speck-like protein containing a CARD) expression, caspase 1 activity, or IL-1&bgr; (interleukin-1&bgr;) protein expression under in vivo and in vitro CVB3 conditions. Conclusions: NOD2 is an important mediator in the viral uptake and inflammatory response during the pathogenesis of CVB3 myocarditis.
Optimized Operation-Planning of a Microgrid with Renewable Sources and Vehicle to Grid

The microgrid with renewable sources possess stability issues. During the grid-connected mode, these issues are taken care by the external grid. However in case of islanding, the distributed generators within the microgrid, have to take care of these issues independently. It needs additional backup like diesel generation or battery storage, which increases the overall capital and operation costs. With the intervention of the V2G storage, these costs can be saved to some extent. However similar to the renewable sources like wind and solar, the power from V2G is also fluctuating which may lead the microgrid towards an uneconomical operation. Therefore an extensive operation-planning is needed to deal with these uncertainties, for the microgrid to be economically viable. In this context, the stochastic programming has been applied to achieve the optimum results. The stochastic scenarios for wind speed, solar radiation, V2G power and load fluctuation have been generated using the Markov chain Monte Carlo method. The optimized operation-planning aims to minimize the total net present cost, size of the fixed storage and fossil fuel emissions subject to constraints. The simulations have been performed using Matlab/Simulink, HOMER and Excel. The simulation results show that the V2G technology substantially decrease the total net present cost. Moreover for such a microgrid the total net present cost and fossil fuel emissions conflict with each other. Full Text: PDF DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.11591/telkomnika.v16i3. 9067
Geosmithia argillacea: an Emerging Pathogen in Patients with Cystic Fibrosis

ABSTRACT We report eight cases of airway colonization by Geosmithia argillacea in patients with cystic fibrosis. This filamentous fungus, resembling members of the genera Penicillium and Paecilomyces, was identified by molecular analysis. All patients carried a mutation on each CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) allele, with at least one copy of the F508del mutation. The first isolation of this fungus occurred from F508del-homozygous patients at a younger age than in F508del-heterozygous patients. Before recovery of G. argillacea, all patients were treated with itraconazole; two of them had also received voriconazole for an Aspergillus fumigatus infection. However, antifungal susceptibility patterns showed high MICs of voriconazole for all isolates, and high MICs of amphotericin B and itraconazole for the majority of them, but mostly low minimum effective concentrations (MECs) of caspofungin. The appearance and persistence of G. argillacea in the airways were not associated with exacerbation of the disease. However, the clinical implications of G. argillacea, particularly in immunocompromised patients, remain a concern, particularly given recent observations suggesting that this fungus may also cause disseminated infections.
Characterization of Human Motor Units From Surface EMG Decomposition

Motor units are the smallest functional units of our movements. The study of their activation provides a window into the mechanisms of neural control of movement in humans. The classic methods for motor unit investigations date to several decades ago. They are based on invasive recordings with selective needle or wire electrodes. Conversely, the noninvasive (surface) EMG has been commonly processed as an interference signal, with the extraction of its global characteristics, e.g., amplitude. These characteristics, however, are only crudely associated to the underlying motor unit activities. In the last decade, methods have been proposed for reliably extracting individual motor unit activities from the interference surface EMG signal. We describe these methods in this review, with a focus on blind source separation (BSS) and techniques used on decomposed EMG signals. For example, from the motor unit discharge timings, information can be extracted regarding the synaptic input received by the corresponding motor neurons. In reviewing these methods, we also provide examples of applications in representative conditions, such as pathological tremor. In conclusion, we provide an overview of processing methods of the surface EMG signal that allow a reliable characterization of individual motor units in vivo in humans.