Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mindfulness-Based Mobile Applications: Literature Review and Analysis of Current Features

Background Interest in mindfulness has increased exponentially, particularly in the fields of psychology and medicine. The trait or state of mindfulness is significantly related to several indicators of psychological health, and mindfulness-based therapies are effective at preventing and treating many chronic diseases. Interest in mobile applications for health promotion and disease self-management is also growing. Despite the explosion of interest, research on both the design and potential uses of mindfulness-based mobile applications (MBMAs) is scarce. Objective Our main objective was to study the features and functionalities of current MBMAs and compare them to current evidence-based literature in the health and clinical setting. Methods We searched online vendor markets, scientific journal databases, and grey literature related to MBMAs. We included mobile applications that featured a mindfulness-based component related to training or daily practice of mindfulness techniques. We excluded opinion-based articles from the literature. Results The literature search resulted in 11 eligible matches, two of which completely met our selection criteria–a pilot study designed to evaluate the feasibility of a MBMA to train the practice of “walking meditation,” and an exploratory study of an application consisting of mood reporting scales and mindfulness-based mobile therapies. The online market search eventually analyzed 50 available MBMAs. Of these, 8% (4/50) did not work, thus we only gathered information about language, downloads, or prices. The most common operating system was Android. Of the analyzed apps, 30% (15/50) have both a free and paid version. MBMAs were devoted to daily meditation practice (27/46, 59%), mindfulness training (6/46, 13%), assessments or tests (5/46, 11%), attention focus (4/46, 9%), and mixed objectives (4/46, 9%). We found 108 different resources, of which the most used were reminders, alarms, or bells (21/108, 19.4%), statistics tools (17/108, 15.7%), audio tracks (15/108, 13.9%), and educational texts (11/108, 10.2%). Daily, weekly, monthly statistics, or reports were provided by 37% (17/46) of the apps. 28% (13/46) of them permitted access to a social network. No information about sensors was available. The analyzed applications seemed not to use any external sensor. English was the only language of 78% (39/50) of the apps, and only 8% (4/50) provided information in Spanish. 20% (9/46) of the apps have interfaces that are difficult to use. No specific apps exist for professionals or, at least, for both profiles (users and professionals). We did not find any evaluations of health outcomes resulting from the use of MBMAs. Conclusions While a wide selection of MBMAs seem to be available to interested people, this study still shows an almost complete lack of evidence supporting the usefulness of those applications. We found no randomized clinical trials evaluating the impact of these applications on mindfulness training or health indicators, and the potential for mobile mindfulness applications remains largely unexplored.
Commodities and Commodity Derivatives: Modelling and Pricing for Agriculturals, Metals and Energy

The last few years have been a watershed for the commodities, cash and derivatives industry. New regulations and products have led to an explosion in the commodities markets, creating a new asset class for investors that includes hedge funds as well as University endowments, and has resulted in a spectacular growth in spot and derivative trading. This book covers hard and soft commodities (energy, agriculture and metals) and analyses: *Economic and geopolitical issues in commodities markets *Commodity price and volume risk *Stochastic modelling of commodity spot prices and forward curves *Real options valuation and hedging of physical assets in the energy industry It is required reading for energy companies and utilities practitioners, commodity cash and derivatives traders in investment banks, the Agrifood business, Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs) and Hedge Funds.
New kid on the block: exploring the google+ social graph

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Google+ social network. We identify the key differences and similarities with other popular networks like Facebook and Twitter, in order to determine whether Google+ is a new paradigm or yet another social network. This work is based on large-scale crawls of over 27 million user profiles that represented nearly 50% of the entire network in 2011. We observe that the average path length between users is slightly higher than other networks, possibly because Google+ is a new system where relationships are still rapidly growing. Google+ shows a higher level of reciprocity than Twitter, which also has directed social links. The newly available "places lived" field could be used to study how users are distributed around the world and how aggressively the service has been adopted in different countries. We find that Google+ is popular in countries with relatively low Internet penetration rate. Based on the amount and types of information publicly shared in user profiles, we also find that the notion of privacy varies significantly across different cultures.
Cloud Computing Adoption and its Implications for CIO Strategic Focus - An Empirical Analysis

The evolving role of Chief Information Officers (CIO) has been widely recognized in IS literature. Yet the enablers of CIOs to focus on strategic activities towards CIO effectiveness have been understudied from constructs, structures, processes and mechanisms perspective and the evidence is largely anecdotal. Cloud computing technologies are gaining adoption and anecdotal evidence suggests that these technologies may allow CIOs to focus more on strategic activities. Drawing on IS literature and on the Attention Based View of the firm from Organizations literature, we posit that cloud computing can enable CIOs to focus on strategic activities and organizational complementarities augment the impact. Our large dataset of US firms provides conclusions beyond single instances and largely supports our propositions. We find that cloud computing can in fact enable CIO strategic focus and complementarities in process and systems capabilities and organizational learning maximize the value.
Establishment Efficiency Among Clones of the Malaria Parasite, Plasmodium mexicanum, for Mixed-Clone Infections in Its Natural Lizard Host

Abstract: Within genetically diverse infections of malaria parasites (Plasmodium spp.), the relative proportions of genetic clones in the vertebrate host's blood can influence clonal competition, transmission success, gametocyte sex ratio, and virulence. Clonal proportions depend on establishment success of each clone when they enter a new host and on subsequent differences in rates of asexual replication and clearance. Both of these life history traits could be influenced by clone genotype. To assess genetic (clonal) influences on both establishment success and later changes in relative proportion for the lizard malaria parasite Plasmodium mexicanum, 7 naturally infected fence lizards harboring a single clone of P. mexicanum served as donors to initiate replicate experimental infections containing each of the clones and combinations of 2 clones. Measured were relative establishment success of each clone, change in relative proportions over time, and rate of increase of parasite density and total parasitemia. Relative clonal proportions were determined using microsatellite markers. Rates of increase in the parasitemia and degree of change in relative proportions were not correlated, so both rapidly and slowly growing infections could show either little or substantial change in clonal proportions over time. There was a significant clone effect on establishment efficiency but not on later changes in relative proportions. These results argue for a combination of genetic and environmental (host) effects on the success of P. mexicanum clones in genetically complex infections. The maintenance of genetic variation for establishment success, but not subsequent replication rate or shifts in relative proportion, suggests trade-offs between these traits during life history evolution of malaria parasites.
Barriers to Exercise in Younger and Older Non-Exercising Adult Women: A Cross Sectional Study in London, United Kingdom

A survey of 100 women in the south of London, United Kingdom (UK) compared exercise barrier intensities between non-exercising younger (20–27 years) and older (28–35 years) adult women; and examined childcare duties as perceived barriers to exercise. Perceived barriers to exercise were examined using an Exercise Benefits/Barriers Scale (EBBS) comprising four subscales (exercise milieu; time expenditure; physical exertion; family discouragement). Participants’ number of children was also noted. Non-exercising older women reported significantly higher total exercise barriers, as well as across three barrier subscales: exercise milieu, time expenditure, and family discouragement. For both age groups, significant correlation existed between number of children and women’s total exercise barrier scores. Number of children explained ≈25% and ≈30% of the variance of younger and older women’s total barrier scores respectively. For both women groups, the strongest correlation between exercise barrier and number of children was for the time expenditure subscale. Broad grouping of 20–35 year old non-exercising women does not reflect a homogenous sample. Age categories employing narrower age brackets are recommended. Issues surrounding family responsibilities e.g. childcare duties may be shared between these groups and require further research and policy attention.
Linguistic Template Extraction for Recognizing Reader-Emotion

Previous studies on emotion classification mainly focus on the emotional state of the writer. By contrast, our research emphasizes emotion detection from the readers' perspective. The classification of documents into reader-emotion categories can be applied in several ways, and one of the applications is to retain only the documents that trigger desired emotions to enable users to retrieve documents that contain relevant contents and at the same time instill proper emotions. However, current information retrieval (IR) systems lack the ability to discern emotions within texts, and the detection of reader's emotion has yet to achieve a comparable performance. Moreover, previous machine learning-based approaches generally use statistical models that are not in a human-readable form. Thereby, it is difficult to pinpoint the reason for recognition failures and understand the types of emotions that the articles inspired on their readers. In this paper, we propose a flexible emotion template-based approach (TBA) for reader-emotion detection that simulates such process in a human perceptive manner. TBA is a highly automated process that incorporates various knowledge sources to learn an emotion template from raw text that characterize an emotion and are comprehensible for humans. Generated templates are adopted to predict reader's emotion through an alignment-based matching algorithm that allows an emotion template to be partially matched through a statistical scoring scheme. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can effectively detect reader's emotions by exploiting the syntactic structures and semantic associations in the context, while outperforming currently well-known statistical text classification methods and the stat-of-the-art reader-emotion detection method.
Clinical Medicine Insights: Oncology O R I G I N a L R E S E a R C H Influence of Immunotherapy with Autologous Dendritic Cells on Innate and Adaptive Immune Response in Cancer Discipline of Gynaecology and Obstetrics

Open Access Full open access to this and thousands of other papers at Abstract: The objective of this study was to evaluate some of the mechanisms involved in the activation of the immune system in patients with advanced-stage cancer (n = 7) who received an autologous dendritic cell vaccine. We examined the immune response mediated by macrophages (CD14+), natural killer cells (CD56+), and B lymphocytes (CD19+) by flow cytometry and assessed the expression of Th1 (IFN-γ, TNF-α, IL-2, and IL-12), Th2 (IL-4), and Treg (TGF-β) cytokines by flow cytometry and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The CD14+ TNF-α+ population was significantly increased (P , 0.04) when patients received the vaccine; IL-2 expression in both NK cells and in B lymphocytes was increased after a transient initial increase showed a nearly significant decrease (P , 0.07 and P , 0.06 respectively), whereas the CD19+ and CD56+ populations did not show significant changes. Dendritic cell-based immunotherapy led to increased secretion of IFN-γ and IL-12 and reduced secretion of TGF-β. In conclusion, it is likely that the autologous dendritic cell vaccine stimulated the immune cells from the peripheral blood of patients with cancer and generally increased the production of Th1 cytokines, which are related to immunomodulatory responses against cancer.
Biological membranes as bilayer couples. III. Compensatory shape changes induced in membranes

We have previously proposed the hypothesis that asymmetric membranes behave like bilayer couples: the two layers of the bilayer membrane can respond differently to a particular perturbation. Such a perturbation, for example, can result in the expansion of one layer relative to the other, thereby producing a curvature of that membrane. In experiments with erythrocytes and lymphocytes, we now demonstrate that different membrane perturbations which have opposite effects on membrane curvature can compensate and neutralize one another, as expected from the bilayer couple hypothesis. This provides a rational basis, for example, for understanding the effects of amphipathic drugs on a variety of cellular phenomena which involve shape changes of membranes.
Recurrent neural networks for solving linear inequalities and equations

This paper presents two types of recurrent neural networks, continuous-time and discrete-time ones, for solving linear inequality and equality systems. In addition to the basic continuous-time and discrete-time neural-network models, two improved discrete-time neural networks with faster convergence rate are proposed by use of scaling techniques. The proposed neural networks can solve a linear inequality and equality system, can solve a linear program and its dual simultaneously, and thus extend and modify existing neural networks for solving linear equations or inequalities. Rigorous proofs on the global convergence of the proposed neural networks are given. Digital realization of the proposed recurrent neural networks are also discussed.
Old high-redshift galaxies and primordial density fluctuation spectra

We have discovered a population of extremely red galaxies at z ≃ 1.5 which have apparent stellar ages of ≳ 3 Gyr, based on detailed spectroscopy in the rest-frame ultraviolet. In order for galaxies to have existed at the high collapse redshifts indicated by these ages, there must be a minimum level of power in the density fluctuation spectrum on galaxy scales. This paper compares the required power with that inferred from other high-redshift populations: damped Lyα absorbers and Lyman-limit galaxies at z ≃ 3.2. If the collapse redshifts for the old red galaxies are in the range zc ≃ 6–8, there is general agreement between the various tracers on the required inhomogeneity on 1-Mpc scales. This level of small-scale power requires the Lyman-limit galaxies to be approximately ν ≃ 3.0 fluctuations, implying a very large bias parameter b ≃ 6. If the collapse redshifts of the red galaxies are indeed in the range zc = 6–8 required for power spectrum consistency, their implied ages at z ≃ 1.5 are between 3 and 3.8 Gyr for essentially any model universe of current age 14 Gyr. The age of these objects as deduced from gravitational collapse thus provides independent support for the ages estimated from their stellar populations. Such early-forming galaxies are rare, and their contribution to the cosmological stellar density is consistent with an extrapolation to higher redshifts of the star formation rate measured at z < 5; there is no evidence for a general era of spheroid formation at extreme redshifts.
Electrical Stimulation Promotes Cardiac Differentiation of Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells

Background. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are an attractive source of cardiomyocytes for cardiac repair and regeneration. In this study, we aim to determine whether acute electrical stimulation of human iPSCs can promote their differentiation to cardiomyocytes. Methods. Human iPSCs were differentiated to cardiac cells by forming embryoid bodies (EBs) for 5 days. EBs were then subjected to brief electrical stimulation and plated down for 14 days. Results. In iPS(Foreskin)-2 cell line, brief electrical stimulation at 65 mV/mm or 200 mV/mm for 5 min significantly increased the percentage of beating EBs present by day 14 after plating. Acute electrical stimulation also significantly increased the cardiac gene expression of ACTC1, TNNT2, MYH7, and MYL7. However, the cardiogenic effect of electrical stimulation was not reproducible in another iPS cell line, CERA007c6. Beating EBs from control and electrically stimulated groups expressed various cardiac-specific transcription factors and contractile muscle markers. Beating EBs were also shown to cycle calcium and were responsive to the chronotropic agents, isoproterenol and carbamylcholine, in a concentration-dependent manner. Conclusions. Our results demonstrate that brief electrical stimulation can promote cardiac differentiation of human iPS cells. The cardiogenic effect of brief electrical stimulation is dependent on the cell line used.
Dispositions and Processes in the Emotion Ontology

Affective science conducts interdisciplinary research into the emotions and other affective phenomena. Currently, such research is hampered by the lack of common definitions of terms used to describe, categorise and report both individual emotional experiences and the results of scientific investigations of such experiences. High quality ontologies provide formal definitions for types of entities in reality and for the relationships between such entities, definitions which can be used to disambiguate and unify data across different disciplines. Heretofore, there has been little effort directed towards such formal representation for affective phenomena, in part because of widespread debates within the affective science community on matters of definition and categorization. We describe our efforts towards developing an Emotion Ontology (EMO) to serve the affective science community. We here focus on conformity to the BFO upper ontology and disambiguation of polysemous terminology. The full ontology is available for download from: https://emotionontology.googlecode. com/svn/trunk/ontology/EMO.owl under the Creative Commons CC BY 3.0 Attribution license.
Asymmetric Auctions

The revenue-equivalence theorem' for auctions predicts that expected seller revenue is independent of the bidding rules, as long as equilibrium has the properties that the buyer with the highest reservation price wins and any buyer with the lowest possible reservation price has zero expected surplus. Thus, in particular, the two most common auction institutions-the open "English" auction and the sealed high-bid auction are equivalent despite their rather different strategic properties. This strong prediction of equivalence seems at odds, however, with the empirical observation that rarely is any given kind of commodity sold through more than one sort of auction. Thus, for example, art is nearly always auctioned off according to the English rules, whereas job contracts are normally awarded through sealed bids. Admittedly, in the public sector, there have been a few attempts to use both methods (lumber contracts in the Pacific Northwest) or to switch from one to the other (Treasury Bills). But changes have typically met great resistance. This is also in conflict with theory, since a corollary of the revenue equivalence theorem is that the expected surplus for any buyer is the same in the two auctions. These discrepancies suggest that the hypotheses of the revenue-equivalence theorem may be too strong. The principal assumptions are (i) risk neutrality, (ii) independence of different buyers' private signals about the item's value, (iii) lack of collusion among buyers, and (iv) symmetry of buyers' beliefs. Over the last fifteen years, a number of papers have explored the implications of relaxing these assumptions. Typically a clear-cut prediction has emerged in each of these papers in favour of either the high-bid or open auction. Thus under increasingly general assumptions, Holt (1980), Riley and Samuelson (1981), and Maskin and Riley (1984) show that, when buyers are risk averse, the high-bid auction should be favoured by a seller even if he also exhibits risk aversion.2 In turn, the assumption of independence of private signals of the item's value is relaxed by Milgrom and Weber (1982). If reservation prices are "affiliated" (technically, pair-wise positively correlated), they show that the English auction generates higher expected revenue than
Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering a Systematic Review of Cross-vs. Within- Company Cost Estimation Studies

OBJECTIVE – The objective of this paper is to determine under what circumstances individual organisations would be able to rely on cross-company based estimation models. METHOD – We performed a systematic review of studies that compared predictions from cross-company models with predictions from within-company models based on analysis of project data. RESULTS – Ten papers compared cross-company and within-company estimation models, however, only seven of the papers presented independent results. Of those seven, three found that cross-company models were as good as within-company models, four found cross-company models were significantly worse than within-company models. Experimental procedures used by the studies differed making it impossible to undertake formal meta-analysis of the results. The main trend distinguishing study results was that studies with small single company data sets (i.e. <20 projects) that used leave-one-out cross-validation all found that the within-company model was significantly more accurate than the cross-company model. CONCLUSIONS – The results of this review are inconclusive. It is clear that some organisations would be ill-served by cross-company models whereas others would benefit. Further studies are needed, but they must be independent (i.e. based on different data bases or at least different single company data sets). In addition, experimenters need to standardise their experimental procedures to enable formal meta-analysis.
The Long-Run Performance Puzzle of Initial Public Offerings in Taiwan: Empirical Findings from Various Models

This paper focuses on the measure of the long-run performance of initial public offerings (lPOs). Ritter (1991) and Loughran and Ritter (1995) argue that the long-run performance of IPOs is worse than that of the overall market or that of the firms with the same size and age. Besides the traditional market-adjusted returns and adjusted market model returns, this paper employs multi-factor models as well as Jensen's alpha to measure the long-run performance of IPOs. Our results show that the long-run performance of IPOs measured by raw return, market-adjusted return or Fama-French three-factor model follows a specific pattern which contradicts to random walk hypothesis. However, the IPO long-run performance measured by a four-factor model (Fama-French three factors plus momentum factor) 的similar to that of a seasoned security. The empirical findings suggest that various measurement models lead to various long-run performance of IPOs. Therefore, researchers must be cautious with the empirical findings of IPO long-run performance since it is very sensitive to the measurement models.