Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The People-Game-Play model for understanding videogames' impact on wellbeing

Given the increasing popularity of videogames, understanding when, how and for whom they have a positive or negative impact on wellbeing is critical. We propose a model for exploring these questions based on existing literature and our own research. The People-Game-Play model identifies player characteristics, game features and the experience of play as key determinants of the impact of videogame play on wellbeing. We propose research exploring the relationships within and between each of these key factors is needed and identify some examples of future research in this space.
Rhetoric of Science

Before we begin, please take another look at the title; in particular, please notice that, open-ended and swollen though it is, it manages to avoid three words, one big, one mid-sized, and, in the most important side-step of all, a potent little article. The title avoids prolegomenon (the big word) and towards (the mid-sized word), because both terms are far more hesitant than we need be about rhetorical investigations of science. Although the field is rather new, it has proven remarkably successful, and there are abundant signs of a healthy future. As for the stout little article, the epigrams should indicate that it is missing because neither rhetoric nor science is stable enough to bear the immense burden of specificity that the definite article brings with it. Certainly there is no such thing as the rhetoric of science. But there is, carefully denuded of specificity, rhetoric of science. In fragmented form, it goes back as long as the two fields have existed, and it makes various appearances throughout the history of each. Aristotle, for instance, was a seminal contributor to both fields, and he occasionally speaks about them in the same breath-as when he says that dialectic and rhetoric are employed by the sciences, but are not sciences themselves (Rhetoric 1359b). Bacon's many writings on induction include a great deal of rhetorical and scientific commentary in concert, such as his discussion of invention in science and rhetoric (Advancement, XIII). And Priestley's Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism contains a wide range of rhetorical advice directed explicitly at his fellow scientists, like Lecture IX on the analytic method. Still, the development of a specific genre of rhetorical analysis directed at scientific discourse is a quite recent phenomenon, only now beginning to flower. The first few steps of the new genre were rather hesitant. Rhetoric is, after all, a shabby little weasel word in most circles, and science is a god-term; putting the two words together, only a slim little preposition between them, was not an act for the faint of pen or keyboard. Fortunately, scholars in other fields did most of the groundwork for us. Polanyi argued that sciences are knowledge-
The influence of employment status on job stress, affective commitment and job satisfaction: possible moderators

The numbers of temporary forms has increased largely over the past years when compared to permanent employees. Organizations are attracted to this type of employment because of its flexibility that allows them to rapidly adjust their workforce size, cut costs while also creating a source of knowledge within organizations. This flexibility brought a lot of unbeneficial aspects when it comes to temporary employment such as aggravating job characteristics, high demands and less control etc. Most of these aspects have been related to stress which in turn was related to a decrease organizational outcome variables job satisfaction and affective commitment. The results on the relationship between employment status and these outcome variables were very mixed. An important reason that was given for these mixed results were individual differences, thus that the workforce was not homogenous and rather heterogeneous. Some individual differences has already been identified namely choice of contract, expectation and motivation. However, less attention was paid to the influence of education which plays an important role in the structure of temporary employment. This study focuses on the moderation effect of education on the interaction between employment status and job stress. And it can be concluded that education does not moderate this interaction but that this effect emerges at conditional levels of education, namely low, average and high
Optimal control of a class of linear hybrid systems with saturation

We consider a class of queueing systems that can operate in several modes; in each mode the queue lengths exhibit a linear growth until a specified upper or lower level is reached, after which the queue length stays at that level until the end of the mode. We present some methods to determine the optimal switching time instants that minimize a criterion such as average queue length, worst case queue length, average waiting time, and so on. We show that if there is no upper saturation then for some objective functions the optimal switching scheme can be computed very efficiently.
Hard fallow deer antler: A living bone till antler casting?

Deer antlers are the only mammalian bone structures which regenerate completely every year. Once developed, antlers are cleaned of the velvet‐like skin. Presently it is believed that due to velvet shedding the blood supply is interrupted in the solidifying antler bone. Histological examinations were made on different parts of fallow deer antlers investigated from the time of velvet shedding till the antler casting. The present study on hard (polished) antlers revealed living bone with regions presenting living osteocytes, active osteoblasts, osteoid seams and even early stages of trabecular microcallus formation, thus indicating to a continuous bone remodeling. A well developed vascular system was found despite the presence of hard antler bone. The pedicle bone exhibits a rich supply of capillaries and vessels connected to the spongy core of the main branch and the compact bone as well. There is evidence that hard fallow deer antlers possess a functioning vascular system that “keeps the antler moist” resulting in a high impact resistance when fights are most frequent. As late as 3 weeks prior to antler casting a large number of living cells were discovered within the antler core. As we have no doubt that parts of the polished fallow deer antler represent a living bone, we have concluded that a sufficient blood supply of the antler core is maintained almost till the time of antler casting by vessels passing through the antler base. Anat Rec 255:69–77, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Planning Paths for Elastic Objects under Manipulation Constraints

This paper addresses the problem of planning paths for an elastic object from an initial to a final configuration in a static environment. It is assumed that the object is manipulated by two actuators and that it does not touch the obstacles in its environment at any time. The object may need to deform to achieve a collision-free path from the initial to the final configuration. Any required deformations are automatically computed by the planner according to the principles of elasticity theory from mechanics. The problem considered in this paper differs significantly from that of planning for a rigid or an articulated object. In the first part of the paper, the authors point out these differences and highlight the reasons that make planning for elastic objects an extremely difficult task. The authors then present a randomized algorithm for computing collision-free paths for elastic objects under the above-mentioned restrictions of manipulation. The paper includes a number of experimental results. The work is motivated by the need to consider the physical properties of objects while planning and has applications in industrial problems, in maintainability studies, in virtual reality environments, and in medical surgical settings.
Identifying Parallel Documents from a Large Bilingual Collection of Texts: Application to Parallel Article Extraction in Wikipedia.

While several recent works on dealing with large bilingual collections of texts, e.g. (Smith et al., 2010), seek for extracting parallel sentences from comparable corpora, we present Paradocs, a system designed to recognize pairs of parallel documents in a (large) bilingual collection of texts. We show that this system outperforms a fair baseline (Enright and Kondrak, 2007) in a number of controlled tasks. We applied it on the French-English cross-language linked article pairs of Wikipedia in order see whether parallel articles in this resource are available, and if our system is able to locate them. According to some manual evaluation we conducted, a fourth of the article pairs in Wikipedia are indeed in translation relation, and Paradocs identifies parallel or noisy parallel article pairs with a precision of 80%.
Effect of retinal ischemia on the non-image forming visual system

Retinal ischemic injury is an important cause of visual impairment. The loss of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) is a key sign of retinal ischemic damage. A subset of RGCs expressing the photopigment melanopsin (mRGCs) regulates non-image-forming visual functions such as the pupillary light reflex (PLR), and circadian rhythms. We studied the effect of retinal ischemia on mRGCs and the non-image-forming visual system function. For this purpose, transient ischemia was induced by raising intraocular pressure to 120 mm Hg for 40 min followed by retinal reperfusion by restoring normal pressure. At 4 weeks post-treatment, animals were subjected to electroretinography and histological analysis. Ischemia induced a significant retinal dysfunction and histological alterations. At this time point, a significant decrease in the number of Brn3a(+) RGCs and in the anterograde transport from the retina to the superior colliculus and lateral geniculate nucleus was observed, whereas no differences in the number of mRGCs, melanopsin levels, and retinal projections to the suprachiasmatic nuclei and the olivary pretectal nucleus were detected. At low light intensity, a decrease in pupil constriction was observed in intact eyes contralateral to ischemic eyes, whereas at high light intensity, retinal ischemia did not affect the consensual PLR. Animals with ischemia in both eyes showed a conserved locomotor activity rhythm and a photoentrainment rate which did not differ from control animals. These results suggest that the non-image forming visual system was protected against retinal ischemic damage.
Catalytic performance of Metal-Organic-Frameworks vs. extra-large pore zeolite UTL in condensation reactions

Catalytic behavior of isomorphously substituted B-, Al-, Ga-, and Fe-containing extra-large pore UTL zeolites was investigated in Knoevenagel condensation involving aldehydes, Pechmann condensation of 1-naphthol with ethylacetoacetate, and Prins reaction of β-pinene with formaldehyde and compared with large-pore aluminosilicate zeolite beta and representative Metal-Organic-Frameworks Cu3(BTC)2 and Fe(BTC). The yield of the target product over the investigated catalysts in Knoevenagel condensation increases in the following sequence: (Al)beta < (Al)UTL < (Ga)UTL < (Fe)UTL < Fe(BTC) < (B)UTL < Cu3(BTC)2 being mainly related to the improving selectivity with decreasing strength of active sites of the individual catalysts. The catalytic performance of Fe(BTC), containing the highest concentration of Lewis acid sites of the appropriate strength is superior over large-pore zeolite (Al)beta and B-, Al-, Ga-, Fe-substituted extra-large pore zeolites UTL in Prins reaction of β-pinene with formaldehyde and Pechmann condensation of 1-naphthol with ethylacetoacetate.
Underweight vs. overweight/obese: which weight category do we prefer? Dissociation of weight‐related preferences at the explicit and implicit level

Although stigma towards obesity and anorexia is a well‐recognized problem, no research has investigated and compared the explicit (i.e. conscious) and implicit (i.e. unconscious) preferences between these two conditions. The present study conducted this investigation in a sample of 4,806 volunteers recruited at the Project Implicit website (https://implicit.harvard.edu).
Modularity and the predictive mind

Modular approaches to the architecture of the mind claim that some mental mechanisms, such as sensory input processes, operate in special-purpose subsystems that are functionally independent from the rest of the mind. This assumption of modularity seems to be in tension with recent claims that the mind has a predictive architecture. Predictive approaches propose that both sensory processing and higher-level processing are part of the same Bayesian information-processing hierarchy, with no clear boundary between perception and cognition. Furthermore, it is not clear how any part of the predictive architecture could be functionally independent, given that each level of the hierarchy is influenced by the level above. Both the assumption of continuity across the predictive architecture and the seeming non-isolability of parts of the predictive architecture seem to be at odds with the modular approach. I explore and ultimately reject the predictive approach’s apparent commitments to continuity and non-isolation. I argue that predictive architectures can be modular architectures, and that we should in fact expect predictive architectures to exhibit some form of modularity.
How good is opportunistic routing?: a reality check under Rayleigh fading channels

Considerations of realistic channel dynamics motivate the design of a new breed of opportunistic schemes, such as opportunistic transmission, scheduling and routing. Compared to their deterministic counter part, opportunistic schemes have been shown to increase network throughput, and/or reduce delay in limited experimental/simulation scenarios. In this paper, we propose analytical models that characterize the performance of routing protocols in lossy wireless networks with Rayleigh fading channels. We investigate the efficiency of a few representative deterministic and opportunistic routing protocols under both light-loaded and saturated traffic conditions. This work deviates from existing work that assumes idealistic packet reception, and is thus of practical relevance. Our study shows that opportunistic routing significantly outperforms its deterministic counterpart in average effective progresses made in single-hop transmissions. In deterministic routing schemes, tuning of parameters based on node density is critical to achieve optimal performance.
The cardiac-specific N-terminal region of troponin I positions the regulatory domain of troponin C

Significance Protein–protein interactions typically involve some degree of induced fit, producing complementary surfaces that account for high affinity and specificity. However, there are increasingly more examples of intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) that exert important biologic effects despite never attaining a rigid structure. Here we show how a particularly disordered region of cardiac troponin I impacts the overall global conformation and function of its binding partner, cardiac troponin C. This newly described role for an IDR is accomplished through electrostatic interactions, which are particularly suited to IDRs. The regulation of electrostatic interactions in IDRs through phosphorylation is an emerging concept in cellular signaling, and troponin I is now another important example, one known by cardiac physiologists for 40 y. The cardiac isoform of troponin I (cTnI) has a unique 31-residue N-terminal region that binds cardiac troponin C (cTnC) to increase the calcium sensitivity of the sarcomere. The interaction can be abolished by cTnI phosphorylation at Ser22 and Ser23, an important mechanism for regulating cardiac contractility. cTnC contains two EF–hand domains (the N and C domain of cTnC, cNTnC and cCTnC) connected by a flexible linker. Calcium binding to either domain favors an “open” conformation, exposing a large hydrophobic surface that is stabilized by target binding, cTnI[148–158] for cNTnC and cTnI[39–60] for cCTnC. We used multinuclear multidimensional solution NMR spectroscopy to study cTnI[1–73] in complex with cTnC. cTnI[39–60] binds to the hydrophobic face of cCTnC, stabilizing an alpha helix in cTnI[41–67] and a type VIII turn in cTnI[38–41]. In contrast, cTnI[1–37] remains disordered, although cTnI[19–37] is electrostatically tethered to the negatively charged surface of cNTnC (opposite its hydrophobic surface). The interaction does not directly affect the calcium binding affinity of cNTnC. However, it does fix the positioning of cNTnC relative to the rest of the troponin complex, similar to what was previously observed in an X-ray structure [Takeda S, et al. (2003) Nature 424(6944):35–41]. Domain positioning impacts the effective concentration of cTnI[148–158] presented to cNTnC, and this is how cTnI[19–37] indirectly modulates the calcium affinity of cNTnC within the context of the cardiac thin filament. Phosphorylation of cTnI at Ser22/23 disrupts domain positioning, explaining how it impacts many other cardiac regulatory mechanisms, like the Frank–Starling law of the heart.
Everolimus use and associated factors among post-menopausal women with hormonal receptor positive/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 negative metastatic breast cancer

Abstract Background: Everolimus has been shown to be an effective HR+/HER2- mBC treatment in both clinical trials and real-world practice. The current study aims at understanding factors associated with everolimus use and how it is used in the real world. Methods: A retrospective chart review was conducted among postmenopausal HR+/HER2- mBC women who received everolimus, endocrine therapy (ET), or chemotherapy (CT) for mBC between 1 July 2012 and 15 April 2013 after an NSAI failure. Factors associated with everolimus use versus ET or CT were identified using multivariable logistic regressions. Reasons for prescribing everolimus and everolimus treatment patterns were described. Results: Liver metastasis and high tumor volume were associated with a higher likelihood of everolimus use versus ET (OR = 1.67, OR = 1.62) but a lower likelihood of everolimus use versus CT (OR = 0.43, OR = 0.30). Medicare-only insurance (OR = 0.30) as well as ECOG ≥2 (OR = 3.72) and prior CT in mBC (OR = 2.76) were associated with a lower and higher likelihood of everolimus use versus CT, respectively. The top reason for prescribing everolimus was efficacy (69–85%). About 15% and 29% of everolimus users in second line and third line or above received prior CT for mBC. Exemestane was the most common concomitant therapy with everolimus (56–87%). The majority of patients initiated everolimus at the labeled dose of 10 mg daily (>80%) and maintained this dose (>80%). Conclusions: In the real world, everolimus was used in more severe patients than ET but less severe patients than CT based on visceral metastasis, tumor volume, and performance status. The top reason for prescribing everolimus was efficacy. A large proportion of patients received first or second line CT before everolimus initiation. The majority of patients used everolimus according to the labeled combination and dose. Future studies are needed to determine optimal sequencing of everolimus, ET, and CT for HR+/HER2- mBC.
Emergence of the Erythropoietin/Erythropoietin Receptor System as a Novel Cardiovascular Therapeutic Target

Abstract Although hypoxia and ischemia are known to be involved in the pathogenesis of cardiovascular disease, specific therapeutic targets still remain elusive. To address this important issue, we have performed 2 series of experimental studies, aiming at erythropoietin (Epo)/Epo receptor (EpoR) based on the following backgrounds. Epo has long been regarded as a hematopoietic hormone that acts exclusively in the proliferation and differentiation of erythroid progenitors. Although recent studies have demonstrated that EpoR is expressed in the cardiovascular system, the potential protective role of the vascular Epo/EpoR system in vivo remains to be examined. We hypothesized that the vascular Epo/EpoR system plays an important protective role against the development of cardiovascular disease. Using vascular EpoR-deficient mouse, we demonstrated that the vascular Epo/EpoR system plays a crucial role for endothelial function and vascular homeostasis. The vascular Epo/EpoR system is important for the activation of the vascular endothelial growth factor/vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 system, inhibits hypoxia-induced pulmonary endothelial damage and promotes ischemia-induced angiogenesis in vivo. These results indicate that the vascular Epo/EpoR system plays an important protective role against hypoxia/ischemia, demonstrating that this system is a novel therapeutic target in cardiovascular medicine.
Being geek - an attempt at building a theory of geekism

The present study aimed at exploring the concept of geekism and tried to identify important factors in the interaction of self-proclaimed geeks with technology. The main research question was “What does it mean to be a geek? ”. Based on the existing literature on this topic, a qualitative interview scheme has been developed in order to scrutinize vital contributors to the experiences of technology-affine individuals. This interview scheme covered such aspects as the definition of the term geek, possible differences within the geek culture, sources of interests as well as products and environments that might be important to the participants. Furthermore, emotional aspects, motivational driving forces, values of the geek-community and influences on development have been discussed. Ten participants have been interviewed during the course of this study. The recorded interviews have been transcribed and analyzed using the Grounded Theory approach. The results imply the existence of distinct types of geeks and proved the automatization of processes, understanding of technology and future developments to be main areas of interest to the participating geeks. A slight tendency towards the valuing of versatile and playful products could be discovered, but no key concepts could be established regarding geek preferences for specific products or environments. Yet, moments of challenge, accomplishment and new understanding were identified as important positive experiences, while feelings of frustration remained rather vague. Motivational sources include the improving of products, social acknowledgement and the geek-culture itself. The values of sharing and support and being objective were highlighted by the respondents of this study. Influences on the developments of geeks included paternal support, peer influences and the professional background. Future research therefore needs to focus on the negative emotions of geeks, possible product preferences and the role of control in technology-interaction. Following studies on the topic of geekism might use the findings of this as a basic framework for understanding the complex and individual experiences of geeks.