Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors Influencing Household Recycling Behavior

To investigate factors encouraging or deterring recycling, telephone interviews were used to study recycling behavior, attitudes, and knowledge of 221 randomly selected adults in a suburban city that had begun a citywide curbside recycling program within the past year. Approximately 40% reported participation in the curbside recycling program, and nearly 20% more claimed that their household had been recycling in other ways. Most demographic variables did not predict participation in the curbside recycling program, nor did general environmental attitudes and behaviors, though simple conservation knowledge did. The main significant predictors of curbside recycling were a few demographic variables, attitudes, and behavioral variables that pertained specifically to recycling. As predicted, factor analyses showed that there was no general factor underlying (a) various environmental attitudes and (b) various environmental behaviors, all of which might seem on an a priori basis to be related. Implications of the findings for understanding and promoting curbside recycling are discussed.
Strategies for Clarifying Ambiguous Functional Analysis Outcomes

The development and refinement of functional assessment technology in the last 20 to 25 years has greatly advanced the behavioral treatment of problem behaviors (e.g., E. G. Carr & Durand, 1985; E. G. Carr, Newsom, & Binkoff, 1980; Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, & Richman, 1982). Although a number of successful interventions had emerged in the behavior analysis literature prior to the development of functional assessment, treatments typically were not explicitly matched to the function of the problem behavior (Iwata, Vollmer, Zarcone, & Rodgers, 1993; Lennox, Miltenberger, Spengler, & Erfanian, 1988). As behavior analysis matured, researchers identified the importance of assessing the antecedents and consequences maintaining problem behavior so that treatments could be developed to address the controlling variables (Durand, 1987; Iwata, Vollmer, & Zarcone, 1990; Lennox & Miltenberger, 1989). Kennedy (this issue) aptly concludes that the development of functional assessment technology was one of the most important developments in understanding and successfully treating problem behaviors. In his thoughtful article, Kennedy (this issue) identifies the limitations of our current functional assessment
Ieee Transactions on Communications (accepted for Publication) Design of Multi-edge-type Bilayer-expurgated Ldpc Codes for Decode-and-forward in Relay Channels

—We consider the design of bilayer-expurgated low-density parity-check (BE-LDPC) codes as part of a decode-and-forward protocol for use over the full-duplex relay channel. A new ensemble of codes, termed multi-edge-type bilayer-expurgated LDPC (MET-BE-LDPC) codes, is introduced where the BE-LDPC code design problem is transformed into the problem of optimizing the multinomials of a multi-edge-type LDPC code. We propose two design strategies for optimizing MET-BE-LDPC codes; the bilayer approach is preferred when the difference in SNR between the source-to-relay and the source-to-destination channels is small, while the bilayer approach with intermediate rates is preferred when this difference is large. In both proposed design strategies multi-edge-type density evolution is used for code optimization. The resulting MET-BE-LDPC codes exhibit improved threshold and bit-error-rate performance as compared to previously reported bilayer LDPC codes.
[Transgender] young men: gendered subjectivities and the physically active body

In this paper, I discuss [transgender] young men's social, physical and embodied experiences of sport. These discussions draw from interview research with two young people who prefer to self-identify as ‘male’ and not as ‘trans men’, although they do make use of this term. Finn and Ed volunteered to take part in the research following my request for volunteers at a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth group. Their narratives provide valuable testimonies on transgender and transgender and sport: more specifically, their experiences of school sport, their embodied subjectivities, transitioning and sport participation. The focus on transgender and sport also highlights the taken-for-granted assumption that a coherent LGBT collective exists and that transgender is a fixed, definable and agreed-upon category. The paper, therefore, has two aims. First, it intends to privilege and document the views of two young people who identify with a group that is often marginalised. Their narratives raise significant questions in relation to transgender and sport participation in educational and recreational settings. Second, the paper seeks to expose the methodological and ontological complexities surrounding ‘LGBT’ and ‘transgender’ and place these debates within sport and educational studies.
Video-Assisted Anterior Thoracoscopic Spinal Fusion Versus Posterior Spinal Fusion: A Comparative Study Utilizing the SRS-22 Outcome Instrument

Study Design. Retrospective, matched cohort. Objective. The purpose of this study was to compare the Scoliosis Research Society's Outcomes measures (SRS-22) scores, as well as radiographic outcomes of patients with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis who had a single thoracic structural curvature treated by either posterior spinal fusion (PSF) or video-assisted thoracoscopic (VATS) fusion. Summary of Background Data. To our knowledge, there has been no prior matched-pair study comparing outcomes between 2 different surgical approaches for the same curve type using the SRS-22 outcomes instrument. Methods. Patients were evaluated before surgery and at 2-year follow-up. A total of 52 patients with Lenke type I curvature were paired by age, gender, and major Cobb angle into 2 groups: PSF (8 men, 18 women, mean age 14.7, mean Cobb angle 48.7) and VATS (mean age 14.8, mean Cobb angle 49.1). All questionnaire scores were classified based on domains of activity, pain, self-image, mental health, satisfaction, and total scores. Results. The patients in the VATS group scored higher than the PSF group in the domains of self-image (P < 0.02), mental health (P < 0.03), and total score (P < 0.05), but not activity, pain, or satisfaction at 2 years. There was no difference in percent curve correction between the match-paired groups. Within-group analyses revealed that VATS patients experienced insignificant improvements compared with PSF in most SRS-22 domains and a trend toward significant overall mean score improvement (P = 0.06). Conclusion. Based on the SRS-22 questionnaire data, the VATS patients scored higher in the self-image, mental health, and total domains despite similar curve corrections. We hypothesize that this may be related to the smaller surgical scar and less invasive nature of VATS.
Resource management and performance control for staged design-based services

The staged architecture has emerged as an approach to implement highly concurrent Internet services. Staging means that the functionality of the server code is broken down into computational stages with each stage performs some aspect of request processing. A client request would then be processed along a pipeline of these stages. This architecture allows services to behave well and gracefully handle overload, in addition to increase code modularity and simplify service design. However, Staged architecture has introduced other design challenges related to resource management and performance control. A bottleneck stage in the work-flow of requests processing will limit the overall system throughput even though other stages are isolated from this bottleneck stage and can support a higher performance. For this reason care must be taken to avoid bottlenecks. A solution to adjust the throughput is to allocate more resources to a stage if it is becoming a bottleneck, this in turn may force other stages into becoming a bottleneck. Since all stages are competing for the same resources additional effects may take place and give rise to instability or oscillations. Staged design was originally introduced as a programming abstraction to improve memory accesses behavior of highly concurrent Internet servers by implementing cohort scheduling policies which batch the execution of requests at each stage. As a result existing scheduling policies in staged design-based applications are mechanisms to increase the benefit from cache locality within the individual stages, rather than to balance resource allocation to avoid bottleneck stages and control the system performance. Consequently, dynamic changes in stages requirements lead to instability and oscillations in performance under different load conditions. In addition, achieving a target performance in such systems is a hard job and often depends on manual parameters tuning by expert administrators or benchmarks experiments. To address these challenges, this thesis suggests a three-layers control architecture for resource management and performance control of staged applications based on the Staged Event Driven Architecture (SEDA), which is the
Negative Affect and Emotion Dysregulation

Previous research has shown negative affect and emotion dysregulation to be significant predictors of adverse outcomes. Because justice-involved adolescents have demonstrated more negative emotionality and fewer adaptive emotion regulation strategies than their non-justice-involved peers, they may be particularly susceptible to maladaptive behavior. The current study investigated the extent to which negative affect and facets of emotion dysregulation were associated with violence and risky sexual behavior. Participants included 94 justice-involved adolescents who were recruited while waiting for their court date and asked to complete several questionnaires. Results suggest that global negative affect and emotion dysregulation are not associated with violence or risky sexual behavior. However, specific aspects of negative affect (anger) and emotion dysregulation (impulse control difficulties) did predict violence. Examination of conditional effects also suggested that negative affect is significantly associated with violence and risky sexual behavior in adolescents who have specific difficulties regulating their emotions (e.g., poor emotional clarity and limited access to emotion regulation strategies). This study demonstrates the utility of examining negative affect and emotion regulation as heterogeneous constructs that interact in specific ways to predict violence.
Attenuating the Negative Effects of Perceived Incongruence in Sponsorship: How Message Repetition Can Enhance Evaluations of an “Incongruent” Sponsor

As sponsorship spending continues to increase worldwide, research indicates that a brand or company perceived as “congruent” with the event or cause it sponsors will enjoy more favorable consumer reactions than will a sponsor deemed “incongruent. ” However, by conceptualizing perceived congruence as an inherent, static property and by exposing individuals to only one sponsorship message, much research in this domain remains limited. The current experiment demonstrated that perceived congruence is a malleable property that can be positively influenced by repeated exposure to sponsorship messages, a rather common marketing communications strategy. Further, for a sponsor initially deemed incongruent, perceived congruence mediated the positive effects of repeated exposure on other brand evaluations. Findings inform both scholars and practitioners that sponsorship affiliations—and the potential successes thereof—should not be viewed as dichotomous, all-or-none scenarios. By increasing perceived congruence, repeated exposure to sponsorship messages can alleviate some of the risks typically assumed to exist for brands initially deemed low in fit.
Cognitive dysfunction in urban elderly people : an exploratory study using neuropsychological and neuroimaging perspective

Background: Cognitive impairment is an integral part of old age as well as it is a part of many neurodegenerative disorders. Early identification of cognitive impairment is necessary in order to make treatment and rehabilitation possible. Materials and methods: Keeping in mind that early identification of cognitive impairment is necessary, a sample of 20 elderly patients with memory complaints who were referred for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with symptoms of peripheral nervous system disorder by neurologists have been assessed using neuropsychological tests and MRI, and results have been analysed using IBM SPSS 21 and DICOM software. Results: Neuropsychological test findings suggest that age, sex, and education are related to performance of the participants on different tests of cognitive functions in different ways. Scores on the tests of delayed memory and verbal fluency emerged as positive predictors of activity level. On the basis of MRI, the elderly people were identified with periventricular hyper-intensity of white matter and global cortical atrophy. A comparison of the two groups (on the basis of MRI findings) suggest that elderly people with global cortical atrophy were found to be significantly more impaired on visuospatial tasks in comparison to the group with periventricular hyperintensity of white matter, among other tests of cognitive functions. Conclusion: In spite of the absence of manifestation of dementing illness at clinical level, the participants actually exhibited underlying pathological process which can be detected with neuropsychological testing in conjunction with neuroimaging.
Mental health and law enforcement professionals: Trauma history, psychological symptoms, and impact of providing services to child sexual abuse survivors

A survey of 558 mental health and law enforcement professionals assessed current and past trauma experiences, exposure to traumatic client material, and the sequelae of both types of personal and professional trauma experiences. Results indicated that 29.8% of therapists and 19.6% of officers reported experiencing some form of childhood trauma.
Pathology and immunohistochemistry study of Newcastle disease field case in chicken in Indonesia

Aim: The aim of the study was to examine pathology and the distribution pattern of Newcastle disease virus (NDV) in internal organs of chickens from a field case using immunohistochemical staining. Materials and Methods: 10 groups of broiler, layer, and domestic chicken were collected from necropsy room Division of Pathology, Bogor Agricultural University. These chickens were originated from West Java and collected based on pathologist diagnosis as suspect of Newcastle disease (ND). They were subsequently confirmed positive of ND with real-time-reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction assay. The respiratory, circulatory, digestive, lymphoreticular and central nervous systems were collected for histopathology examination. Results: The gross pathology and histopathology changes were tracheitis, pneumonia, pericarditis, myocarditis, catarrhal proventriculitis, catarrhal enteritis, typhlitis, perihepatitis, pancreatitis, nephritis interstitial, splenitis, atrophy of Bursa Fabricius, and encephalitis. Conclusion: The distribution pattern of NDV in internal organs of chickens from a field case in this study is similar with a previous reported pattern in systemic cases of the internal chicken organs. High intensity of immunohistochemistry stain result was detected in trachea, lung, proventriculus, duodenum, cecal tonsil, kidney, and brain.
Childhood in a Digital Age: Creative Challenges for Educational Futures.

The early 21st century is characterised by rapid change. Commentators note how permeating digital technologies engage increasing numbers of children, young people and adults as consumers and also producers. In the shifting technological landscape, childhood and youth are changing. Connectivity around the clock, with a parallel existence in virtual space, is seamlessly integrated with actual lives. Young people are skilful collaborators, navigating digital gaming and social networking with ease, capably generating and manipulating content, experimenting virtually with versions of their ‘social face’. They are implicit, inherent and immersed consumers. They are digital possibility thinkers posing ‘what if? ’ questions and engaging in ‘as if’ activity. This paper seeks to theorise such possibility thinking in a digital, marketized age, using two competing discourses: young people as vulnerable and at risk; or alternatively as capable and potent. The former perspective imbues anxiety about the digital revolution; the latter embraces it as exciting and enabling. As education providers seek to re-imagine themselves, neither is sufficient. Local and global challenge and change urgently demand our creative potential and wisdom, recognising three further key characteristics of changing childhood and youth: pluralities, playfulness, and participation. Drawing from work with schools, the paper argues for co-creating with students, education futures through dialogue to nurture the 4 p’s: plurality, playfulness, participation and possibilities.
Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Tracking Control Against Actuator Faults With Application to Flight Control

This paper deals with the problem of flight tracking control against actuator faults using the linear matrix inequality (LMI) method and adaptive method. An adaptive fault-tolerant flight controller design method is developed based on the online estimation of an eventual fault and the addition of a new control law to the normal control law in order to reduce the fault effect on the system without the need for a fault detection and isolation (FDI) mechanism. In the framework of LMI approach, the normal tracking performance of the resultant closed-loop system is optimized without any conservativeness and the states of fault modes asymptotically track those of the normal mode. A numerical example of an F-16 aircraft model and its simulation results are given
Shifting boundaries and negotiations on knowledge: interprofessional conflicts between nurses and nursing assistants in Norway

This chapter deals with a long and intense conflict between nurses and nursing assistants within the context of the Norwegian health care system. Caring work is culturally coded as female. A major issue embedded in the conflict concerns the definition of knowledge. The issue, it is argued, is not so much what constitutes knowledge, but what counts as professional expertise and theoretical knowledge when it comes to women’s work, which is devalued. As a middle‐class women’s occupation, nurses have strong aspirations that their work be acknowledged as a full profession. Their knowledge base is a combination of practical and theoretical knowledge, profoundly different from medicine they themselves argue. Such a “professionalisation” of care work is, however, threatened by the mere presence of nursing assistants and the overlapping work they do. For various reasons – not least strategic – the concept of basic care was introduced more than ten years ago. The term was rather vaguely defined, but seems to comprise all personal care for the patient and the patient’s body, including intimate tasks such as washing, dealing with bodily waste products, feeding, etc. Making basic care the exclusive preserve of nurses and delegating the more “housewifely” tasks to nursing assistants effectively excludes the latter from caring work and, not surprisingly, they strongly oppose existing working boundaries and the redistribution of tasks. We investigate the power relationship between the two occupational groups and examine dual closure strategies. Interestingly, nurses have invested in a precarious strategy by reclaiming the hands‐on bodywork that is often labelled “dirty work”. In Western societies these tasks are commonly left to working‐class women. The conflict is thus about both gender and class in an androgynous professional world. The aim is to explore the occupational conflict and to trace some of its implications for theorising professions. Professional tasks, knowledge claims, and the concept of dirty work are addressed, and professional projects and strategies discussed from a gender perspective.
The SAS Education Value-Added Assessment System (SAS® EVAAS®) in the Houston Independent School District (HISD): Intended and Unintended Consequences

The SAS Educational Value-Added Assessment System (SAS ® EVAAS ® ) is the most widely used value-added system in the country. It is also self-proclaimed as “the most robust and reliable” system available, with its greatest benefit to help educators improve their teaching practices. This study critically examined the effects of SAS ® EVAAS ® as experienced by teachers, in one of the largest, high-needs urban school districts in the nation – the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Using a multiple methods approach, this study critically analyzed retrospective quantitative and qualitative data to better comprehend and understand the evidence collected from four teachers whose contracts were not renewed in the summer of 2011, in part given their low SAS ® EVAAS ® scores. This study also suggests some intended and unintended effects that seem to be occurring as a result of SAS ® EVAAS ® implementation in HISD. In addition to issues with reliability, bias, teacher attribution, and validity, high-stakes use of SAS ® EVAAS ® in this district seems to be exacerbating unintended effects.
Trait and Evaluative Consistency in Self-Description

THE social desirability scale values (SDSVs) of personality statements can be estimated by having a group of judges rate the statements on a 9-point scale in accordance with standard instructions described by Edwards (1957). On the 9-point rating scale, 1 represents extremely undesirable statements, 5 represents neutral statements, and 9 represents extremely desirable statements. The average rating assigned to a statement is the SDSV of the statement. If subjects are asked to describe themselves in terms of a set of personality statements, the percentage answering True, P (T), to each statement can be obtained. For random or representative sets of statements, P(T) is a linear increasing function of the SDSVs of the statements. The evidence regarding the linear relationship between P(T) and SDSV has been summarized by Edwards (1967), who reports that the typical product-moment correlation between these two variables is about . 87. When the SDSV of a personality statement is known, it is possible to define a socially desirable (SD) response to the statement. An SD response is defined as a True response to statements with SDSVs > 5.0 or as a False response to statements with SDSVs