LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Sperm transfer in the Japanese queenless ant Diacamma sp. (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)

Sperm transfer in the Japanese ponerine ant Diacamma sp. was studied by making histologicalsections through copulatingpairs. Males of this species remain attached to the female by their genitalia for several hours, during which they are killed by the gamergate and her nestmates. Our sections revealed that males clasp the female’s last sternite with two chelate appendices of the male copulatory organ, called volsellae. We also found that the male inserts his sharp sclerotised penis valves in the female bursa copulatrix, a dorsal evagination of the genital chamber. The penis is in ated inside the female genital chamber, possibly strengthening the connection between the partners. We noticed that the male transfers his sperm to the female in a sheath of gelatinous material, called a spermatophore. Eventually the male’s abdomen is removed by the gamergate. Prolonged copulations are viewed as an effective male strategy to ensure unique fatherhood.
Linking Organizational Structure, Job Characteristics, and Job Performance Constructs: A Proposed Framework

A growing emphasis has been given on employees’ job performance as a source of competitive advantage to promote responsiveness in enhancing overall organizational effectiveness. Although performance depends very much on personality traits, other external factors, also known as system factors or opportunities to perform, have a significant amount of influence on employees’ task and contextual performance. Constraints to perform, such as bureaucratic structure and ineffective job design, will influence individual task and contextual performance negatively. Such circumstance inadvertently hinders high organizational performance. This paper proposes that organizational structure, namely formalization and centralization, have direct effects on employee task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Also, this paper posits that job characteristics, namely skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback, exert influence on employee task performance and OCB. To examine the applicability of the proposed framework, seven main propositions are identified and analyzed.
Insulin pump therapy for 1-6 year old children with type 1 diabetes.

BACKGROUND
The management of diabetes in preschool children poses unique difficulties for both the families and the medical team.


OBJECTIVE
To test the feasibility and safety of insulin pump therapy in the 1-6 year age group in order to improve quality of life and metabolic control.


METHODS
The study group comprised 15 type 1 diabetic children aged 1-6 years old (mean +/- SD, 3.8 +/- 1.2 years) from three diabetes centers. Insulin pump therapy was applied for 12 months. Data, including insulin dose, hemoglobin A1c, hypoglycemic events, as well as scores on the Diabetes Quality of Life Measure Questionnaire and the Diabetes Treatment Satisfaction Questionnaire, were collected and compared with the multiple daily injection treatment prior to entry into the study,


RESULTS
HbA1c was measured at the beginning of the study and at 2, 4, 8 and 12 months later; the respective levels (mean +/- SD) were 8.82 +/- 0.98, 8.45 +/- 1.05, 8.37 +/- 0.85, 8.32 +/- 0.71, 8.18 +/- 0.90%. HbA1c measurements after 12 months were significantly lower than at the beginning of the study (P < 0.05). There were no significant differences in insulin dose and the total number of hypoglycemic events. In both the DQOL and DTSQ scales there were significant differences in scores in favor of the insulin pump period (43.7 +/- 8.0 versus 33.7 +/- 7.9, P < 0.001; and 10.9 +/- 2.3 versus 14.5 +/- 2.3, P < 0.001), respectively.


CONCLUSIONS
For very young diabetic children, insulin pump therapy improves quality of life and is feasible and safe. It should be considered as an optional mode of therapy for this age group.
Moderators and non-specific predictors of treatment outcome for anxiety disorders: a comparison of cognitive behavioral therapy to acceptance and commitment therapy.

OBJECTIVE
Understanding for whom, and under what conditions, treatments exert their greatest effects is essential for developing personalized medicine. Research investigating moderators of outcome among evidence-based treatments for anxiety disorders is lacking. The current study examined several theory-driven and atheoretical putative moderators of outcome in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).


METHOD
Eighty-seven patients with a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed., text rev.; DSM-IV-TR; American Psychiatric Association, 2000) anxiety disorder completed 12 sessions of ACT or CBT and were assessed with a self-report measure of anxiety at baseline, post-treatment, and 6- and 12-month follow-up assessments.


RESULTS
CBT outperformed ACT among those at moderate levels of baseline anxiety sensitivity, and among those with no comorbid mood disorder. ACT outperformed CBT among those with comorbid mood disorders. Higher baseline neuroticism was associated with poorer outcome across treatment conditions. Neither moderation nor general prediction was observed for baseline anxiety disorder comorbidity, race/ethnicity, gender, age, or baseline severity of the principal anxiety disorder. When including all randomized participants who completed the pre-treatment assessment (N = 121), a similar pattern was observed.


CONCLUSIONS
Prescriptive recommendations for clinical practice and directions for future research are discussed.
Robobarista: Object Part based Transfer of Manipulation Trajectories from Crowd-sourcing in 3D Pointclouds

There is a large variety of objects and appliances in human environments, such as stoves, coffee dispensers, juice extractors, and so on. It is challenging for a roboticist to program a robot for each of these object types and for each of their instantiations. In this work, we present a novel approach to manipulation planning based on the idea that many household objects share similarly-operated object parts. We formulate the manipulation planning as a structured prediction problem and design a deep learning model that can handle large noise in the manipulation demonstrations and learns features from three different modalities: point-clouds, language and trajectory. In order to collect a large number of manipulation demonstrations for different objects, we developed a new crowd-sourcing platform called Robobarista. We test our model on our dataset consisting of 116 objects with 249 parts along with 250 language instructions, for which there are 1225 crowd-sourced manipulation demonstrations. We further show that our robot can even manipulate objects it has never seen before. Keywords— Robotics and Learning, Crowd-sourcing, Manipulation
Measuring leadership practices of nurses using the Leadership Practices Inventory.

BACKGROUND
Originally developed for educational use, the Leadership Practice Inventory (LPI) is used to measure leadership practices in nursing research. There is limited reporting of LPI psychometric properties when used to measure leadership practices of nurses.


OBJECTIVE
This study aimed to investigate psychometric properties of the LPI when used to measure the leadership practices of nurses.


METHOD
Data from 67 LPI-self and 347 LPI-observer respondents were used to establish LPI psychometric properties. Dimensionality of the LPI was investigated using exploratory principal components analysis, and LPI construct validity was established by exploring correlations with theoretically related concepts and a known-groups approach. The predictive validity of the LPI was investigated using regression analysis to determine whether observer-reported leadership practices of established and aspiring nurse leaders predict observer ratings of the effectiveness of the organization environment. Reliabilities of the new factor solution were explored.


RESULTS
Factor analysis found that the identified three-factor solution has psychometric properties at least as strong as those found with the original five-factor LPI solution.


DISCUSSION
The three-factor solution is advocated for use in nursing research because of the strong psychometric properties, lighter respondent burden, and decrease in research costs, as compared with the traditional five-factor solution. When used as an educational tool, the five-factor LPI may be preferred because it may be more useful for examining a greater number of leadership behaviors.
Appearance-based data augmentation for image datasets using contrast preserving sampling

Data augmentation techniques have been employed to overcome the problem of model over-fitting in deep convolutional neural networks and have consistently shown improvement in classification. Most data augmentation techniques perform affine transformations on the image domain. However these techniques cannot be used when object position is significant in the image. In this work we propose a data augmentation technique based on sampling an representation built by inequality constraints propagated from local binary patterns. We sample nine distinct variations for an image in a manner meant to preserve local structure and differ only in the amount of contrast between pixels. These contrast invariants are then used to augmented the original images. We present evaluations on CIFAR-10 and validate our gains in performance across four criteria, accuracy, precision, recall and Fl-Score; using a 2-layer convolutional neural network with different configuration of filters, and report improvement by about 13%, 9%, 12%, and 22% respectively over the baseline.
Src family kinase inhibitor PP2 efficiently inhibits cervical cancer cell proliferation through down-regulating phospho-Src-Y416 and phospho-EGFR-Y1173

Tyrosine (Y) kinases inhibitors have been approved for targeted treatment of cancer. However, their clinical use is limited to some cancers and the mechanism of their action remains unclear. Previous study has indicated that PP2, a selective inhibitor of the Src family of non-receptor tyrosine kinases (nRTK), efficiently repressed cervical cancer growth in vitro and in vivo. In this regard, our aims are to explore the mechanism of PP2 on cervical cancer cell growth inhibition by investigating the suppressive divergence among PP1, PP2, and a negative control compound PP3. MTT results showed that three compounds had different inhibitory effects on proliferation of two cervical cancer cells, HeLa and SiHa, and PP2 was most efficient in a time- and dose-dependent manner. Moreover, we found 10 μM PP2 down-regulated pSrc-Y416 (P < 0.05), pEGFR-Y845 (P < 0.05), and -Y1173 (P < 0.05) expression levels, while 10 μM PP1 down-regulated pSrc-Y416 (P < 0.05) and pEGFR-Y845 (P < 0.05), but not pEGFR-Y1173; 10 μM PP3 down-regulated only pEGFR-Y1173 (P < 0.05). PP2 could modulate cell cycle arrest by up-regulating p21Cip1 and p27Kip1 in both HeLa and SiHa cells and down-regulating expression of cyclin A, and cyclin dependent kinase-2, -4 (Cdk-2, -4) in HeLa and of cyclin B and Cdk-2 in SiHa. Our results indicate that Src pathway and EGFR pathway play different roles in the proliferation of cervical cancer cells and PP2 efficiently reduces cervical cancer cell proliferation by reduction of both Src and EGFR activity.
Human Resource Management of US Multinationals in Germany and the UK

This research examines human resource management (HRM) in subsidiaries of US multinational firms (MNCs) operating in the UK and Germany. Together with parallel studies in Ireland and Spain it explores the potential tensions resulting from a transfer of US-type human resource (HR) policies to Europe. Whilst we expected that the liberal market British economy would not provide a major challenge for the transfer of US practices, we foresaw that the more densely institutionalized German business system would constitute a more serious barrier to transfer.
A novel immersed boundary velocity correction-lattice Boltzmann method and its application to simulate flow past a circular cylinder

A novel immersed boundary velocity correction–lattice Boltzmann method is presented and validated in this work by its application to simulate the two-dimensional flow over a circular cylinder. The present approach is inspired from the conventional immersed boundary method (IBM). In the conventional IBM, the effect of rigid body on the surrounding flow is modeled through a forcing term, which is in turn used to correct the surrounding velocity field. It was found that this process is actually an iterative procedure, trying to satisfy the non-slip boundary condition at the solid wall. In this work, a new concept of immersed boundary velocity correction approach is proposed, which directly corrects the velocity to enforce the physical boundary condition. The main advantage of the new method is that it is simple in concept and easy for implementation, and the convergence of numerical computation is faster and more stable than the conventional IBM. One challenging issue of conventional IBM is that some streamlines may pass through the solid body since there is no mechanism to enforce the non-slip condition at the boundary. As shown in the present numerical results, this unphysical phenomenon is avoided in our new method since the non-slip condition is enforced. The present results for the steady and unsteady flows compare very well with available data in the literature. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Fairness in markets: A laboratory investigation

Abstract It is generally assumed in applications of economic theory that people are concerned only with their monetary wealth. However, bargaining and public choice research indicates that people respond not only to monetary incentives, but also to considerations of fairness. The purpose of this study is to consider the effect of fairness on market behavior. This issue was addressed in a series of eight laboratory markets. The results suggest that fairness can affect market prices, but that the effect may decline over time.
Watch Out for the Bully! Job Interference Study on Dragonfly Network

High-radix, low-diameter dragonfly networks will be a common choice in next-generation supercomputers. Preliminary studies show that random job placement with adaptive routing should be the rule of thumb to utilize such networks, since it uniformly distributes traffic and alleviates congestion. Nevertheless, in this work we find that while random job placement coupled with adaptive routing is good at load balancing network traffic, it cannot guarantee the best performance for every job. The performance improvement of communication-intensive applications comes at the expense of performance degradation of less intensive ones. We identify this bully behavior and validate its underlying causes with the help of detailed network simulation and real application traces. We further investigate a hybrid contiguous-noncontiguous job placement policy as an alternative. Initial experimentation shows that hybrid job placement aids in reducing the worst-case performance degradation for less communication-intensive applications while retaining the performance of communication-intensive ones.
Nearest Neighbor and Reverse Nearest Neighbor Queries for Moving Objects

With the proliferation of wireless communications and the rapid advances in technologies for tracking the positions of continuously moving objects, algorithms for efficiently answering queries about large numbers of moving objects increasingly are needed. One such query is the reverse nearest neighbor (RNN) query that returns the objects that have a query object as their closest object. While algorithms have been proposed that compute RNN queries for non-moving objects, there have been no proposals for answering RNN queries for continuously moving objects. Another such query is the nearest neighbor (NN) query, which has been studied extensively and in many contexts. Like the RNN query, the NN query has not been explored for moving query and data points. This paper proposes an algorithm for answering RNN queries for continuously moving points in the plane. As a part of the solution to this problem and as a separate contribution, an algorithm for answering NN queries for continuously moving points is also proposed. The results of performance experiments are reported.
TraX: a device-centric middleware framework for location-based services

Location-based services turned out not to be the "next big thing" following the success stories of GSM and SMS. The reasons for this are manifold and range from inaccurate cellular positioning technologies to a lack of competition in this field, both being closely related to the fact that positioning is controlled by a network-centric approach where the mobile network operator has the unique selling point for making position data available to third parties. However, things change: small, low-cost GPS receivers, either attachable to mobile devices or even integrated, are enjoying great popularity since their recent inception and are expected to become a standard feature of cell phones in the near future. In conjunction with mobile packet data services, they provide a basis for device-centric LBS platforms, where position data can be obtained directly from the mobile device. In this article the device-centric LBS middleware TraX, which focuses particularly on position management, advanced functions for interrelating the position data of several targets, and privacy protection, is presented. Due to its generic and open design, TraX can be reused for a broad range of different LBSs and thus fosters service diversity and multiprovider environments, both of which are essential for making the next generation of LBSs a success
Effects of Financial Innovations on the Financial Performance of Commercial Banks in Kenya

The commercial banking industry in Kenya has in the last ten years involved itself in financial innovations, moving from the traditional banking to better meet the growing complex needs of their customer and globalization challenges. Despite the recognized importance of financial innovation and an extensive descriptive literature, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies. This situation has denied the banks the much needed information regarding this important area of financial innovations sometimes leading to reverse causality in the innovation-financial performance relationship. The study was guided by the following specific objectives; establish whether credit cards affect the financial performance of commercial banks in Kenya; examine the effects of mobile banking on the financial performance of commercial banks in Kenya; determine the influence of internet banking in financial performance of banks in Kenya; determine the influence of agency banking on profitability in financial performance of banks. The population of the study consisted of forty four commercial banks that are currently operating in Kenya, The target population was Sixteen banks and at least four members of the management team with representations in the following dimensions; locally incorporated banks, banks incorporated elsewhere but operating in Kenya, banks in which the government has some shareholding and also based on size. Thus sixty questionnaires were dispatched. Secondary data was collected from the bank’s for the periods 2008-2012. Analyzed data was summarized and presented in the form of simple frequency tables of the ratio counts and graphs. The study found that some banks in Kenya had adopted some financial innovations such as credit cards, mobile, internet and agency banking. The financial innovations had great impact on the financial performance of the banks.
One-year outcomes of a randomized controlled trial of an educational-behavioural joint protection programme for people with rheumatoid arthritis.

OBJECTIVE
Joint protection aims to reduce pain and local inflammation, preserve the integrity of joint structures and improve function. There is evidence that it can improve pain and function in the short term, but the long-term effects are uncertain. This study evaluated the effects of joint protection in early rheumatoid arthritis (RA).


METHODS
A randomized, controlled, assessor-blinded trial of duration 1 yr was conducted. Two interventions (both 8 h) were compared: standard arthritis education, including 2.5 h of joint protection education based on typical UK practice; and a joint protection arthritis education programme, using educational-behavioural teaching methods. Assessments were made at entry and 6 and 12 months.


RESULTS
Sixty-five people with RA attended the joint protection programme and 62 the standard programme. The groups were matched for age (51 and 49 yr), disease duration (21 and 17.5 months) and use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs. In comparison with the standard group, the joint protection group significantly improved with respect to adherence to the joint protection programme (P=0.001), hand pain (P=0.02), general pain (P=0.05), early morning stiffness (P=0.01), self-reported number of disease flare-ups (P=0.004), visits to the doctor for arthritis (P<0.01), and the AIMS2 (Arthritis Impact Measurement Scales) activities of daily living scale (P=0.04). A trend to improved swollen joint counts was identified (P=0.07). Within-group analyses also showed improvements in arthritis self-efficacy and perceived control. Hand deformity scores continued to increase in both groups.


CONCLUSION
We found significant improvements in adherence, pain, disease status and functional ability amongst those attending the joint protection programme. Benefits became more apparent with time, suggesting that joint protection can help slow the progression of the effects of RA over and above the effects of drug therapy.
Randomised controlled trials in overweight children: practicalities and realities.

AIM
To highlight and discuss the practical aspects of conducting high quality, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) with overweight and obese children and their families.


CONTENT
Realistic considerations and suggestions for researchers arising from the experiences of three Australian interventions in overweight/obese children are highlighted. The practical implications of key issues arising during this type of RCT include study design, obtaining ethical approval, choice of outcome measures, recruitment, working with families, impact and process evaluation, retention strategies, managing multi-site trials and data management.


CONCLUSION
Interventions for overweight children and their families are challenging. Although there were some differences in the design and outcome measures among the three studies, there were many similarities. Multi-site trials, although more expensive than single-site trials, are advantageous in increasing sample size and external validity. Collectively we have developed strategies to address key problems in conducting RCTs, including the common challenges of recruitment, retention and working with families.