Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conflict, criticism, or confidence: an empirical examination of the gender gap in wikipedia contributions

A recent survey of contributors to Wikipedia found that less than 15% of contributors are women. This gender contribution gap has received significant attention from both researchers and the media. A panel of researchers and practitioners has offered several insights and opinions as to why a gender gap exists in contributions despite gender anonymity online. The gender research literature suggests that the difference in contribution rates could be due to three factors: (1) the high levels of conflict in discussions, (2) dislike of critical environments, and (3) lack of confidence in editing other contributors' work. This paper examines these hypotheses regarding the existence of the gender gap in contribution by using data from an international survey of 176,192 readers, contributors, and former contributors to Wikipedia, including measures of demographics, education, motivation, and participation. Implications for improving the design and culture of online communities to be more gender inclusive are discussed.
Are Managers Motivated to Explore in the Face of a New Technological Change? The Role of Regulatory Focus, Fit, and Complexity of Decision‐Making

We develop a psychological perspective on managers’ exploration orientation. Our study suggests that the regulatory focus of managers may in different ways, impact their orientation toward search, risk-taking, and experimentation. Moreover, we argue that these relationships are contingent not only on the extent to which the organizational context fits with the motivational disposition of managers, but also on the complexity of decision-making. Using an experimental setting, we find that managers’ regulatory focus affects their willingness to experiment with a wide range of alternatives and to deviate from existing best practices. Moreover, the promotion focus of managers heightens their exploration orientation in an organizational context with promotion-focused cues in highly complex decision-making. This study has important implications for our understanding of managers’ exploration orientation under conditions of complexity.
The Slugs of Britain and Ireland: Undetected and Undescribed Species Increase a Well-Studied, Economically Important Fauna by More Than 20%

The slugs of Britain and Ireland form a well-studied fauna of economic importance. They include many widespread European species that are introduced elsewhere (at least half of the 36 currently recorded British species are established in North America, for example). To test the contention that the British and Irish fauna consists of 36 species, and to verify the identity of each, a species delimitation study was conducted based on a geographically wide survey. Comparisons between mitochondrial DNA (COI, 16S), nuclear DNA (ITS-1) and morphology were investigated with reference to interspecific hybridisation. Species delimitation of the fauna produced a primary species hypothesis of 47 putative species. This was refined to a secondary species hypothesis of 44 species by integration with morphological and other data. Thirty six of these correspond to the known fauna (two species in Arion subgenus Carinarion were scarcely distinct and Arion (Mesarion) subfuscus consisted of two near-cryptic species). However, by the same criteria a further eight previously undetected species (22% of the fauna) are established in Britain and/or Ireland. Although overlooked, none are strictly morphologically cryptic, and some appear previously undescribed. Most of the additional species are probably accidentally introduced, and several are already widespread in Britain and Ireland (and thus perhaps elsewhere). At least three may be plant pests. Some evidence was found for interspecific hybridisation among the large Arion species (although not involving A. flagellus) and more unexpectedly in species pairs in Deroceras (Agriolimacidae) and Limacus (Limacidae). In the latter groups, introgression appears to have occurred in one direction only, with recently-invading lineages becoming common at the expense of long-established or native ones. The results show how even a well-studied, macroscopic fauna can be vulnerable to cryptic and undetected invasions and changes.
Policy network structures, institutional context, a nd policy change

This paper studies whether characteristics of polic y networks can help us understand policy change. The relation between policy networks and policy outputs is complex. I argue that taking into account the institutio nal context in which decision-making takes place allows underst anding which policy network structures favor major policy change and which ones breed outputs close to the st atus quo. The study analyzes how conflict, collabor ation, and power relations among coalitions of actors matter f or the understanding of policy change in an institu tional context of a consensus democracy. Empirically, I re ly on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to conduct a cross-sector comparison between the 11 most important political decision-making processes in Switzerla nd between 2001 and 2006. Coalition structures with lo w conflict and strong collaboration among coalition s as well as structures with dominant coalitions and weak col laboration both facilitate major policy change. Com peting coalitions that are separated by strong conflict bu t still collaborate strongly produce policy outputs that are close to the status quo.
Assessing the importance of cultural capital on post-secondary education attendance in Canada

Abstract This paper extends the current literature on access to post-secondary education by investigating the role played by various family background characteristics related to the home environment and family habits and behaviours. Exploiting the extraordinary richness of the Youth in Transition Survey in this regard, we include whether the family ate dinner together, whether they discussed current affairs, and how often their children went to concerts – and if so, what kind of concerts. Many of these factors are found to have a significant relationship with attending post-secondary education, university in particular. Furthermore, these factors are in addition to – and at least to some degree independent of – more conventional influences such as parental education and family income. With appeal to the paradigm of ‘cultural capital’ – which refers to the knowledge, experiences, and connections which help individuals succeed in life – these results indicate how advantages in accessing higher levels of education accrue to those from families that are rich in this kind of asset, while others are left behind.
Real-life emotions detection with lexical and paralinguistic cues on human-human call center dialogs

The emotion detection work reported here is part of a larger study aiming to model user behavior in real interactions. We already studied emotions in a real-life corpus with human-human dialogs on a financial task. We now make use of another corpus of real agent-caller spoken dialogs from a medical emergency call center in which emotion manifestations are much more complex, and extreme emotions are common. Our global aims are to define appropriate verbal labels for annotating real-life emotions, to annotate the dialogs, to validate the presence of emotions via perceptual tests and to find robust cues for emotion detection. Annotations have been done by two experts with twenty verbal classes organized in eight macro-classes. We retained for experiments in this paper four macro classes: Relief, Anger, Fear and Sadness. The relevant cues for detecting natural emotions are paralinguistic and linguistic. Two studies are reported in this paper: the first investigates automatic emotion detection using linguistic information, whereas the second investigates emotion detection with paralinguistic cues. On the medical corpus, preliminary experiments using lexical cues detect about 78% of the four labels showing very good detection for Relief (about 90%) and Fear (about 86%) emotions. Experiments using paralinguistic cues show about 60% of good detection, Fear being best detected. Index Terms: emotion detection, real-life emotion, lexical and paralinguistic cues
Application of pixel selection in pixel-based classification for automatic white blood cell segmentation

The pixel-based classification is a robust segmentation approach of color images by determining a label region for each pixel of the image. The main drawback of this approach is the computed charge that is very high, since training data is possibly composed of many training pixels and also the predicted models is applied to the full image matrix. We propose in this work a method for segmentation and automatic recognition of white blood cells WBC (nucleus and cytoplasm) by selecting the relevant pixels for the pixels-based classification task. Different pixel selection algorithms are applied as a prior step to the pixel-based classification task where a comparative study of five pixel selection methods from three type group: condensation, edition and hybrid algorithms are performed. The proposed method comprises four phases: First, the expert will intervene on ten cytological images by labeling the regions of interest (ROI). The second is an image preprocessing with a characterization of each pixel of the image. The third step consists of applying pixel selection technique in the aim to reduce computational time and save the predictive power of the approach by pixel-wise segmentation. Finally, a pixel-based classification is performed by Random Forest based on a Region-growing approach from pixels of interest by the classifiers to extract the nucleus and cytoplasm. Our approach is evaluated on sixty cytological images; the obtained results are very promising and demonstrate the efficiency and power of segmentation by the Random Forest classifier in automatic segmentation.
International New Venture Legitimation: An Exploratory Study

There is limited theoretical understanding and empirical evidence for how international new ventures legitimate. Drawing from legitimation theory, this study fills in this gap by exploring how international new ventures legitimate and strive for survival in the face of critical events during the process of their emergence. It is a longitudinal, multiple-case study research that employs critical incident technique for data collection, analysis, and interpretation. Following theory driven sampling, five international new ventures were selected that were operating in the software sector in the UK, and had internationalized and struggled for survival during the dotcom era. Grounded in data, this study corroborates a number of legitimation strategies yielded by prior research and refutes others. It further contributes to our understanding of international new venture legitimation by suggesting new types of legitimation strategies: technology, operating, and anchoring. Studying international new ventures through theoretical lenses of legitimation is a promising area of research that would contribute to the advancement of international entrepreneurship theory.
Inter-Protein Sequence Co-Evolution Predicts Known Physical Interactions in Bacterial Ribosomes and the Trp Operon

Interaction between proteins is a fundamental mechanism that underlies virtually all biological processes. Many important interactions are conserved across a large variety of species. The need to maintain interaction leads to a high degree of co-evolution between residues in the interface between partner proteins. The inference of protein-protein interaction networks from the rapidly growing sequence databases is one of the most formidable tasks in systems biology today. We propose here a novel approach based on the Direct-Coupling Analysis of the co-evolution between inter-protein residue pairs. We use ribosomal and trp operon proteins as test cases: For the small resp. large ribosomal subunit our approach predicts protein-interaction partners at a true-positive rate of 70% resp. 90% within the first 10 predictions, with areas of 0.69 resp. 0.81 under the ROC curves for all predictions. In the trp operon, it assigns the two largest interaction scores to the only two interactions experimentally known. On the level of residue interactions we show that for both the small and the large ribosomal subunit our approach predicts interacting residues in the system with a true positive rate of 60% and 85% in the first 20 predictions. We use artificial data to show that the performance of our approach depends crucially on the size of the joint multiple sequence alignments and analyze how many sequences would be necessary for a perfect prediction if the sequences were sampled from the same model that we use for prediction. Given the performance of our approach on the test data we speculate that it can be used to detect new interactions, especially in the light of the rapid growth of available sequence data.
GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION : DO THEY CONVERGE OR FOLLOW WAGNER ’ S LAW ?

This paper examines government expenditure convergence within the expanded European Union. Except for a few cases convergence was generally not validated for government consumption, transfers, subsidies nor for their aggregate, all expressed in constant real per capita terms. Neither was any long run equilibrium relationship found between these categories of expenditures and GDP. Causality tests from GDP to these expenditure categories, in the spirit of Wagner’s law, proved as unsatisfactory as tests of reverse causality. All results indicate that there is room for government expenditure harmonization within the EU provided members are really determined to work toward such objective. [H50]
Enfrentamento da violência sexual de crianças e adolescentes pelo Legislativo no Amazonas/ Confronting sexual violence against children and adolescents by the Amazonas Legislative Assembly

Este artigo faz uma reflexao sobre acoes do poder Legislativo Estadual do Amazonas no enfrentamento a violencia sexual de criancas e adolescentes. Trata-se de uma pesquisa documental - feita em jornais e no sitio da Assembleia Legislativa do Estado - e empirica, contemplando a fala de deputados estaduais. O Amazonas aponta avancos quanto a criacao da Comissao Parlamentar de Inquerito da Pedofilia e Exploracao Sexual em 2014, projetos de lei sobre a tematica, realizacao de audiencias publicas e seminarios com a participacao da comunidade. Por outro lado, o compromisso politico e ainda restrito para se falar de garantia e defesa dos direitos da infância, o que se constata pela omissao, da maioria dos parlamentares, no enfrentamento da questao. Portanto, e necessario consolidar as acoes ja desenvolvidas e realiza-las de forma integrada e articulada com o executivo e judiciario, alem da parceira com a sociedade civil.
Functional Interchangeability of Late Domains, Late Domain Cofactors and Ubiquitin in Viral Budding

The membrane scission event that separates nascent enveloped virions from host cell membranes often requires the ESCRT pathway, which can be engaged through the action of peptide motifs, termed late (L-) domains, in viral proteins. Viral PTAP and YPDL-like L-domains bind directly to the ESCRT-I and ALIX components of the ESCRT pathway, while PPxY motifs bind Nedd4-like, HECT-domain containing, ubiquitin ligases (e.g. WWP1). It has been unclear precisely how ubiquitin ligase recruitment ultimately leads to particle release. Here, using a lysine-free viral Gag protein derived from the prototypic foamy virus (PFV), where attachment of ubiquitin to Gag can be controlled, we show that several different HECT domains can replace the WWP1 HECT domain in chimeric ubiquitin ligases and drive budding. Moreover, artificial recruitment of isolated HECT domains to Gag is sufficient to stimulate budding. Conversely, the HECT domain becomes dispensable if the other domains of WWP1 are directly fused to an ESCRT-1 protein. In each case where budding is driven by a HECT domain, its catalytic activity is essential, but Gag ubiquitination is dispensable, suggesting that ubiquitin ligation to trans-acting proteins drives budding. Paradoxically, however, we also demonstrate that direct fusion of a ubiquitin moiety to the C-terminus of PFV Gag can also promote budding, suggesting that ubiquitination of Gag can substitute for ubiquitination of trans-acting proteins. Depletion of Tsg101 and ALIX inhibits budding that is dependent on ubiquitin that is fused to Gag, or ligated to trans-acting proteins through the action of a PPxY motif. These studies underscore the flexibility in the ways that the ESCRT pathway can be engaged, and suggest a model in which the identity of the protein to which ubiquitin is attached is not critical for subsequent recruitment of ubiquitin-binding components of the ESCRT pathway and viral budding to proceed.
Applying the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills Model of HIV- Risk to Youth in Psychiatric Care

(2005). Applying the information-motivation-behavioral skills model of HIV-risk to youth in psychiatric care. This study examined the utility of cognitive and behavioral constructs (AIDS information , motivation, and behavioral skills) in explaining sexual risk taking among 172 12–20–year-old ethnically diverse urban youths in outpatient psychiatric care. Structural equation modeling revealed only moderate support for the model, explaining low to moderate levels of variance in global sexual risk taking. The amount of explained variance improved when age was included as a predictor in the model. Findings shed light on the contribution of AIDS information , motivation, and behavioral skills to risky sexual behavior among teens receiving outpatient psychiatric care. Results suggest that cognitive and behavioral factors alone may not explain sexual risk taking among teens whose cognitive and emotional deficits (e.g., impaired judgment, poor reality testing, affect dysregulation) interfere with HIV preventive behavior. The most powerful explanatory model will likely include a combination of cognitive, behavioral, developmental, social (e.g., family), and personal (e.g., psychopathology) risk mechanisms. HIV continues to spread among young people despite a decreased incidence of AIDS cases nationwide. HIV infection doubles every 14 months in adolescents, and teenagers account for 25% of new sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) reported annually (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2000). Teens are most likely to acquire HIV through risky sexual behavior (e.g., sex without a condom), but risk is not uni-and numerous others who assisted in data collection for this study. They also appreciate the valuable technical advice of Gerhard Mels and the insightful feedback of the editor and anonymous reviewers. Finally, they thank the administrators and clinical staff at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Children's Memorial Hospital, and the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the participating parents and adolescents, without whose help this study would not have been possible. form across youths. Adolescents receiving mental health services are especially vulnerable to HIV because they engage in the same risk behaviors as their school–aged peers In a recent study, teens in psychiatric care reported high rates of unprotected sexual intercourse (55%), sex while using drugs/alcohol (49%), sex with a high–risk partner (43%), and being currently sexually active (45%) (Donenberg et al., 2001). Cognitive deficits associated with mental health problems, such as impaired decision making, poor judgment, impulsivity, and inaccurate assessment of risk exacerbate the health risks for these youths, but their unique risk mechanisms are not well …
An Enhanced Fish School Search Algorithm

Fish School Search (FSS) is swarm-based optimizer that excels on multimodal search problems, but presents some drawbacks, such as the necessity to proper define the step used in some operators and the need to evaluate the fitness function twice per fish per iteration. This paper presents a simpler and enhanced version of the FSS, that features three advantages over the original FSS: high exploitation capability, just one fitness evaluation per fish per iteration and easy implementation. We name this novel version as FSS-II. Our proposal was compared to the FSS and the two most used PSO variations in terms velocity of convergence and robustness in six benchmark functions. FSS-II outperformed the other approaches in most of cases.
Significantly reducing MPI intercommunication latency and power overhead in both embedded and HPC systems

Highly parallel systems are becoming mainstream in a wide range of sectors ranging from their traditional stronghold high-performance computing, to data centers and even embedded systems. However, despite the quantum leaps of improvements in cost and performance of individual components over the last decade (e.g., processor speeds, memory/interconnection bandwidth, etc.), system manufacturers are still struggling to deliver low-latency, highly scalable solutions. One of the main reasons is that the intercommunication latency grows significantly with the number of processor nodes. This article presents a novel way to reduce this intercommunication delay by implementing, in custom hardware, certain communication tasks. In particular, the proposed novel device implements the two most widely used procedures of the most popular communication protocol in parallel systems the Message Passing Interface (MPI). Our novel approach has initially been simulated within a pioneering parallel systems simulation framework and then synthesized directly from a high-level description language (i.e., SystemC) using a state-of-the-art synthesis tool. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article presenting the complete hardware implementation of such a system. The proposed novel approach triggers a speedup from one to four orders of magnitude when compared with conventional software-based solutions and from one to three orders of magnitude when compared with a sophisticated software-based approach. Moreover, the performance of our system is from one to two orders of magnitude higher than the simulated performance of a similar but, relatively simpler hardware architecture; at the same time the power consumption of our device is about two orders of magnitude lower than that of a low-power CPU when executing the exact same intercommunication tasks.