Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Awarding Scarce Ideas in Innovation Contests

This paper studies the relationship between optimal award and scarcity of ideas in innovation contests. We consider contests with different distributions of idea qualities and conduct comparative static analysis of optimal – revenue maximizing – awards with respect to the distributions. We find that a distribution with scarcer ideas leads to higher optimal awards if the marginal value of innovation quality is low, and it leads to lower optimal awards if the marginal value is high. JEL classification: D44, D82, O31
Prenatal Exposure to Tetrachloroethylene-Contaminated Drinking Water and the Risk of Adverse Birth Outcomes

Background Prior studies of prenatal exposure to tetrachloroethylene (PCE) have shown mixed results regarding its effect on birth weight and gestational age. Objectives In this retrospective cohort study we examined whether PCE contamination of public drinking-water supplies in Massachusetts influenced the birth weight and gestational duration of children whose mothers were exposed before the child’s delivery. Methods The study included 1,353 children whose mothers were exposed to PCE-contaminated drinking water and a comparable group of 772 children of unexposed mothers. Birth records were used to identify subjects and provide information on the outcomes. Mothers completed a questionnaire to gather information on residential histories and confounding variables. PCE exposure was estimated using EPANET water distribution system modeling software that incorporated a fate and transport model. Results We found no meaningful associations between PCE exposure and birth weight or gestational duration. Compared with children whose mothers were unexposed during the year of the last menstrual period (LMP), adjusted mean differences in birth weight were 20.9, 6.2, 30.1, and 15.2 g for children whose mothers’ average monthly exposure during the LMP year ranged from the lowest to highest quartile. Similarly, compared with unexposed children, adjusted mean differences in gestational age were −0.2, 0.1, −0.1, and −0.2 weeks for children whose mothers’ average monthly exposure ranged from the lowest to highest quartile. Similar results were observed for two other measures of prenatal exposure. Conclusions These results suggest that prenatal PCE exposure does not have an adverse effect on these birth outcomes at the exposure levels experienced by this population.
Hobbes, civil law, liberty and the Elements of Law

When he gave his first political work the title The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, Hobbes signalled an agenda to revise and incorporate continental Roman and Natural Law traditions for use in Great Britain, and from first to last he remained faithful to this agenda, which it took his entire corpus to complete. The success of his project is registered in the impact Hobbes had upon the continental legal system in turn, specific aspects of his theory, as for instance the right to punish, entering the European civil code through Pufendorf, and remaining to this day. This is a topic of considerable importance at a time at which the UK is considering scrapping the European Union, with all the attendant legal ramifications that entails. But strangely, despite some acknowledgement of Hobbes’s contribution to European civil law, and specifically the German civil code, the larger legal context for his thought has not thus far been systematically addressed.
Editing Episodic Memory following the Identification of Error

The editing of an episodic memory record in order to remove incorrect information embedded within naturalistic communications is an important though underinvestigated phenomenon. Experiment 1 deals with the recall and comprehension of a sequence of messages following the delayed identification of one of the messages as being incorrect. Two styles of correction were employed, and it was found that in neither case was the memory record edited effectively. Inferences based upon the old information continued to be drawn although subjects had clearly recalled that it had been subsequently corrected. Experiment 2 showed that editing could be effective if the old information did not play a central role in the message sequence. It is concluded that the observed difficulties in editing arise when old information has to be excised from the episodic record; the uncontested insertion of new information retrospectively did not present the same difficulty. Reading span was used to monitor subjects’ editing strategies, and from its association with performance measures it is concluded that contradictions in the memory record are not dealt with immediately but are resolved locally when comprehension is questioned. At this time inferences are drawn based upon the most recent version of the contradictory messages. This recency strategy breaks down when the old information provides a better fit to the question posed. Some implications of these findings for models of memory storage are discussed.
Forensic Taxonomy of Popular Android mHealth Apps

Mobile health applications (or mHealth apps, as they are commonly known) are increasingly popular with both individual end users and user groups such as physicians. Due to their ability to access, store and transmit personally identifiable and sensitive information (e.g. geolocation information and personal details), they are potentially an important source of evidentiary materials in digital investigations. In this paper, we examine 40 popular Android mHealth apps. Based on our findings, we propose a taxonomy incorporating artefacts of forensic interest to facilitate the timely collection and analysis of evidentiary materials from mobile devices involving the use of such apps. Artefacts of forensic interest recovered include user details and email addresses, chronology of user locations and food habits. We are also able to recover user credentials (e.g. user password and four-digit app login PIN number), locate user profile pictures and identify timestamp associated with the location of a user.
An Exploratory Study of Member Attraction, Climate, and Behavioral Outcomes of Anger-Coping Group Therapy for Children with Emotional Disturbance

This exploratory study examined member attraction, group climate, and behavioral outcomes of anger-coping group therapy with children in an urban school. Two facilitators co-led a 6-week cognitive-behavioral group intervention with five children who were identified with either emotional disturbance (ED) or exhibited difficulty with anger management. Pretest and posttest ratings on the Behavioral Assessment System for Children (BASC) were gathered from children, parents, and teachers. Children also completed the Group Attitude Scale (GAS) after the first, middle, and last group session. All group sessions were videotaped, and three independent observers viewed the tapes and completed the Group Climate Questionnaire–Short Form (GCQ-S) following each session. Results indicated that the children formed a cohesive, healthy functioning group. Parents indicated significant improvement in children's behavior on the BASC, although teachers and children did not note these changes. Clinical implications for interventions for children with ED and directions for future research are discussed
Aldosterone Excess or Escape: Treating Resistant Hypertension

Aldosterone excess or “escape” can occur after treatment with medications that block the renin‐angiotensin‐aldosterone system or in undiagnosed primary aldosteronism. Spironolactone is thought to be an important addition to resistant hypertension (RH) treatment. In this study, resistant (RH) and controlled (CH) hypertensives and normotensive patients were submitted to echocardiography, flow‐mediated vasodilation, carotid intima‐media wall thickness studies, renin plasma activity, and aldosterone plasma levels and plasma and urinary sodium and potassium concentrations at baseline (pre‐spironolactone phase). Subsequently, for only RH and CH groups, 25 mg/d spironolactone was added to preexisting treatments over 6 months. Afterwards, these parameters were reassessed (post‐spironolactone phase). The RH and CH groups achieved reductions in blood pressure (P<.001), decreases in left ventricular hypertrophy (P<.001), improved diastolic function (Kappa index RH: 0.219 and Kappa index CH: 0.392) and increases in aldosterone concentrations (P<.05). The RH group attained improved endothelium‐dependent (P<.001) and independent (P=.007) function. Optimized RH treatment with spironolactone reduces blood pressure and improves endothelial and diastolic function and left ventricular hypertrophy despite the presence of aldosterone excess or escape.
Gram-CTC: Automatic Unit Selection and Target Decomposition for Sequence Labelling

Most existing sequence labelling models rely on a fixed decomposition of a target sequence into a sequence of basic units. These methods suffer from two major drawbacks: 1) the set of basic units is fixed, such as the set of words, characters or phonemes in speech recognition, and 2) the decomposition of target sequences is fixed. These drawbacks usually result in sub-optimal performance of modeling sequences. In this pa- per, we extend the popular CTC loss criterion to alleviate these limitations, and propose a new loss function called Gram-CTC. While preserving the advantages of CTC, Gram-CTC automatically learns the best set of basic units (grams), as well as the most suitable decomposition of tar- get sequences. Unlike CTC, Gram-CTC allows the model to output variable number of characters at each time step, which enables the model to capture longer term dependency and improves the computational efficiency. We demonstrate that the proposed Gram-CTC improves CTC in terms of both performance and efficiency on the large vocabulary speech recognition task at multiple scales of data, and that with Gram-CTC we can outperform the state-of-the-art on a standard speech benchmark.
Part-time workers’ responses to electronic performance monitoring

The present study examined whether the presence of electronic performance monitoring at work would yield lower perceptions of control, job satisfaction, and commitment among part-time employees. This group of employees has not been traditionally examined in electronic monitoring research. We also tested whether the presence of electronic performance monitoring indirectly decreases citizenship behaviours and increases turnover behaviours through perceived control, satisfaction, and commitment. The sample included 208 students who worked part-time (no more than 30 hours per week). The data were collected using a two-part survey which assessed job attitudes, perceived control, intentions and behaviours, as well as type of monitoring being used in the workplace. The presence of electronic performance monitoring had a significant negative relationship with perceived control and job attitudes. Electronic monitoring indirectly predicted more self-reported turnover behaviour through perceived control, job attitudes, and intentions. The results suggest that monitoring might be an important situational factor that negatively influences employee attitudes and behaviours. The findings suggest that lower working hours within the organisation do not necessarily inure these employees to the effects of monitoring compared to their full-time colleagues, particularly when the performance standards are similarly demanding.
Depression in mothers of young children.

During the last five years, depression in mothers, particularly those with children of pre-school age, has become a major topic of discussion among child psychiatrists. At first sight this apparently recent interest appears surprising. The importance of parental depression is mentioned frequently in clinical descriptions of families with disturbed children,1 and for some time it has been known from systematic studies that any chronic parental illness, physical or psychiatric, can have a deleterious effect on children.2 The current growth of interest (and concern) arises from the results of a number of research projects carried out during the 1970s. Epidemiological studies, looking at women in the community, show how very common is depression in mothers of children aged under 5, and how widespread its effect can be on family life and on children's development and health.
Recommendation with Social Dimensions

The pervasive presence of social media greatly enriches online users' social activities, resulting in abundant social relations. Social relations provide an independent source for recommendation, bringing about new opportunities for recommender systems. Exploiting social relations to improve recommendation performance attracts a great amount of attention in recent years. Most existing social recommender systems treat social relations homogeneously and make use of direct connections (or strong dependency connections). However, connections in online social networks are intrinsically heterogeneous and are a composite of various relations. While connected users in online social networks form groups, and users in a group share similar interests, weak dependency connections are established among these users when they are not directly connected. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit the heterogeneity of social relations and weak dependency connections for recommendation. In particular, we employ social dimensions to simultaneously capture heterogeneity of social relations and weak dependency connections, and provide principled ways to model social dimensions, and propose a recommendation framework SoDimRec which incorporates heterogeneity of social relations and weak dependency connections based on social dimensions. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. We conduct further experiments to understand the important role of social dimensions in the proposed framework.
What Works in Student Retention

In a process of manufacturing an alloy steel, particularly stainless steel, in an electric arc furnace, in a first stage the furnace charge is brought to a molten state, in a second stage ferro-alloy in divided form is continuously supplied to the molten charge and simultaneously a refining fluid is blown into the charge, and in a third stage the molten charge is decarburized, if necessary, to give the required carbon content, and chromium oxide in the slag is reduced.
Towards a Theory of Community Technology Centers: A Knowledge-Based Study

The study of knowledge flows in organizations has provided penetrating insights into innovation processes and other forms of knowledge creation. The study of knowledge flows within small rural communities is a less developed area of research that has the potential to better understand community-wide knowledge creation. This is of particular importance when community technology centers (CTCs) are used to address problems in disadvantaged communities. In developing this idea, the paper reports on research that focused on a program to establish community technology centers (CTCs) in 55 regional areas of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW). The research used Nonaka and T akeuchi' s Knowledge Creating Theory to provide an analytical framework to investigate knowledge creation within three selected cases. In analyzing the contrasts between cases the knowledge-based constructs provide penetrating insights into the problems solving endeavors of communities using information and communication technologies (ICTs).
Benford's law, values of L-functions and the 3x+1 problem

We show the leading digits of a variety of systems satisfying certain conditions follow Benford's Law. For each system proving this involves two main ingredients. One is a structure theorem of the limiting distribution, specific to the system. The other is a general technique of applying Poisson Summation to the limiting distribution. We show the distribution of values of L-functions near the central line and (in some sense) the iterates of the 3x+1 Problem are Benford.
Altered neuroendocrine activity in maltreated children related to symptoms of depression

Abstract This study examined the effects of stressful environments on physiological and affective functioning among 131 maltreated school-aged children attending a summer day camp. Sixty-six nonmaltreated children also attending the camp served as a comparison group. Salivary Cortisol measures were obtained daily at 10:00 a.m. and at 4:00 p.m. Depression was measured using the Child Depression Inventory. Children with scores of 19 or higher were classified as depressed. Internalizing and externalizing behavior problems were determined from the Teacher Report Form of the Child Behavior Checklist. Children with t scores of 70 or higher were classified as having clinical levels of these problems. Maltreated children had slightly elevated afternoon Cortisol concentrations, but their morning concentrations did not differ significantly from those of nonmaltreated children. Neither clinical levels of depression, internalizing, or externalizing problems were predictive of the elevated afternoon values. Depression among maltreated children was, however, associated with altered activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis. Depressed maltreated children had lower morning Cortisol concentrations compared to nondepressed maltreated children and were more likely to show a rise rather than the expected decrease in Cortisol from morning to afternoon. These data replicated earlier findings. There was no evidence that depressed, nonmaltreated children exhibited this change in diurnal Cortisol activity.
The Upside of Accents: Language, Inter-group Difference, and Attitudes toward Immigration

Many developed democracies are experiencing high immigration, and public attitudes likely shape their policy responses. Prior studies of ethnocentrism and stereotyping make divergent predictions about anti-immigration attitudes. Some contend that culturally distinctive immigrants consistently generate increased opposition; others predict that natives’ reactions depend on the particular cultural distinction and associated stereotypes. This article tests these hypotheses using realistic, video-based experiments with representative American samples. The results refute the expectation that more culturally distinctive immigrants necessarily induce anti-immigration views: exposure to Latino immigrants with darker skin tones or who speak Spanish does not increase restrictionist attitudes. Instead, the impact of out-group cues hinges on their content and related norms, as immigrants who speak accented English seem to counteract negative stereotypes related to immigrant assimilation.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis of Peroneal Tendon Pathology Associated With Low-Lying Peroneus Brevis Muscle Belly

Background. Low-lying peroneus brevis tendon muscle belly has been speculated to be an associated factor with symptomatic peroneal tendon pathology. Multiple studies have analyzed normal and anomalous anatomy associated with peroneal tendon pathology; however, no study has confirmed the clinical association between peroneal tendon pathology and low-lying peroneus brevis muscle belly. Purpose. To identify the correlation of low-lying peroneus brevis muscle belly with peroneal tendon pathology. Study Design. Case-control study; Level of evidence 3. Methods. The level of peroneus brevis muscle belly was compared between patients with symptomatic peroneal tendon pathology (experimental group) and asymptomatic individuals with otherwise normal lateral ankle using magnetic resonance images. Results. Of the 32 consecutive patients with symptomatic peroneal tendon pathology, 28 (87.5%) demonstrated peroneus brevis muscle distal to the fibular groove while 53.8% of control patients demonstrated such findings (P = .022). The most common diagnosis associated with peroneal tendon pathology was ankle instability and osteochondral defect of the talus or tibial plafond. Peroneal tendon pathology in isolation was less common. Conclusion. Peroneal tendon pathology is often associated with lateral ankle instability and osteochondral defects of the ankle joint. Low-lying peroneus brevis muscle belly may be a common anatomic variant, but in the setting of instability it can become a source of pain and pathology secondary to overcrowding. Levels of Evidence: Diagnostic, level III: Case-control study
Evolutionary Multi-Objective Day-Ahead Thermal Generation Scheduling in Uncertain Environment

This paper addresses day-ahead thermal generation scheduling as a realistic multi-objective optimization problem in an uncertain environment considering system operation cost, emission cost and reliability as the multiple objectives. The uncertainties occurring due to unit outage and load forecast error are incorporated using loss of load probability (LOLP) and expected unserved energy (EUE) reliability indices. For solving the above-mentioned scheduling problem, a multi-objective generation scheduling algorithm (MOGSA) is proposed in this paper. Three case studies are performed on large scale test systems considering two different bi-objective optimization models and a three-objective optimization model that may be chosen by the system operator according to his/her own preference. The simulation results demonstrate the advantages of solving the thermal generation scheduling problem as a realistic multi-objective optimization problem in an uncertain environment. Finally the authors suggest a systematic procedure for the system operators to choose a single solution for the thermal generation scheduling problem.
Serum Prolidase Activity and Oxidative Stress in Diabetic Nephropathy and End Stage Renal Disease: A Correlative Study with Glucose and Creatinine

Association of oxidative stress and serum prolidase activity (SPA) has been reported in many chronic diseases. The study was aimed at evaluating the correlation of glucose and creatinine to SPA and oxidative stress in patients with diabetic nephropathy (DN) and end stage renal disease (ESRD) concerned with T2DM. 50 healthy volunteers, 50 patients with T2DM, 86 patients with DN, and 43 patients with ESRD were considered as control-1, control-2, case-1, and case-2, respectively. Blood glucose, creatinine, SPA, total oxidant status (TOS), total antioxidant status (TAS), and oxidative stress index (OSI) were measured by colorimetric tests. SPA, TOS, and OSI were significantly increased in case-1 and case-2 than control-1 and control-2, while TAS was significantly decreased (P < 0.001). Blood glucose was linearly correlated to SPA, TOS, TAS, and OSI in control-2, case-1 and case-2 (P < 0.001). Serum creatinine was linearly correlated with SPA, TOS, TAS and OSI in control-2 and case-1 (P < 0.001). In case-2, serum creatinine was significantly correlated with SPA only (P < 0.001). Thus, the study concluded that SPA and oxidative stress significantly correlated with blood glucose and creatinine. SPA, TOS, TAS, and OSI can be used as biomarkers for diagnosis of kidney damage.