Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of negative affectivity in employee reactions to job characteristics: Bias effect or substantive effect?

The hypothesized role of the personality trait negative affectivity (NA) in employee reactions to jobs has been debated in recent years. Some researchers have argued that this dispositional variable biases self-reports of job-related variables, whereas others have argued that its role is substantive in that NA might affect or be affected by job variables. This study tested competing hypotheses concerning relations of two measures of NA with both incumbent and non-incumbent measures. Results supported the substantive and not the bias hypothesis: NA correlated significantly with non-incumbent, but not with incumbent, measures of job characteristics.
Chieftaincy succession disputes and the challenge to traditional authority in Mamprugu, northern Ghana

This paper examines the impact of chieftaincy succession disputes on the power and authority of traditional rulers among the Mamprusi of Northern Ghana. Using mainly participant observation, unstructured interviews and focus-group discussions, the author collected data from individuals, households and groups in several Mamprusi settlements between 2001 and 2003. Two succession disputes at the provincial and the sub-provincial level of the traditional political hierarchy are analysed in detail. Both cases represented a challenge to traditional authority and are an indication of the changing relationship between chiefs and their subjects in Mamprusi society and throughout Northern Ghana. Finally, the paper examines the factors accounting for the rising incidents of chieftaincy succession disputes and how it is affecting the power and authority of traditional rulers in Mamprugu and elsewhere in Northern Ghana. Institute of African Studies: Research Review Vol. 21(1): 45-57
Dantrolene sodium is able to reduce the resting ionic [Ca2+]i In muscle from humans with malignant hyperthermia

Malignant hyperthermia (MH) is a hereditary myopathy, triggered when susceptible patients are exposed to a depolarizing muscle relaxant and/or potent volatile anesthetics. We have studied the effects of dantrolene on the free [Ca2+]i of intercostal muscle biopsies obtained from two MH‐susceptible patients before and after administration of dantrolene orally (2.5 mg/kg for 3 days) and intravenously (1.0 mg/kg 2 hours before the biopsy). The free [Ca2+]i was measured by Ca2+‐selective microelectrodes. The mean resting free [Ca2+]i in the MH‐susceptible muscle before dantrolene treatment was 0.42 ± 0.01 μM (mean ± SEM, n = 12). The administration of dantrolene reduced this value to 0.27 ± 0.01 μM (n = 14). There was no detectable difference in the resting membrane potential after dantrolene. These results represent the first direct demonstration that dantrolene is able to reduc the resting free [Ca2+]i in skeletal muscle of MH‐susceptible patients.
Modulation of Neurotransmission by a Specified Oregano Extract Alters Brain Electrical Potentials Indicative of Antidepressant-Like and Neuroprotective Activities

Different behavioral states are characterized by distinct patterns of global brain activity. Therefore, the biological effects of herbal extracts on brain functions can be assessed by analyzing the local field potentials, the so-called electropharmacogram analysis. Inspired by our recent findings that a specified oregano extract (OE) exhibited a triple-reuptake activity in vitro, this extract was tested in model of Tele-Stereo-electroencephalogram (EEG) to elucidate how OE affects the electrical brain activity in freely moving rats. Furthermore, discriminant analysis was performed to compare the electric brain activity of four standardized brain regions with those produced by several reference compounds, representing a whole variety of clinical indications. Oral intake of OE produced fast and robust dose and time dependent EEG alterations consisting of significant changes of spectral power in comparison to controls. Strongest effects were seen with respect to alpha1, alpha2 and beta1 waves representing an activation of serotonergic, dopaminergic and glutamatergic neurotransmission, respectively. Moreover, the discriminant analysis revealed that OE’s pattern of activity locates in close vicinity to antidepressant and neuroprotective compound. The presented data support the hypothesis suggesting the use of OE as a neuroprotective dietary supplement to promote mood, motivation and mental wellbeing.
THE PROGNOSTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF VANILLYLMANDELLIC ACID IN NEUROBLASTOMA

The objective of this study was to evaluate urinary vanillylmandellic acid (VMA) as a marker for prognosis and progression of neuroblastoma. A retrospective file search of 444 patients during 33 years was performed and correlation of VMA with clinical prognostic parameters and outcome was evaluated. Event-free survivals (EFS) were 33.5% and 21% (P = .04) and overall survival (OS) were 36.6% and 25.8% (P = .1) for all patients with normal/negative and increased/positive VMA. EFS and OS were higher in VMA(−) pelvic (P = .03) and thoracic and neck (P = .04) tumors, compared to their VMA(+) counterparts. Survival was not different in patients with abdominal primaries according to VMA status. Positive urinary VMA prevalence was low in localized disease and high in disseminated disease (P < .001). In disseminated disease, 10-year EFS was higher in VMA(+) patients than VMA(−) patients (16%, 9.5%, P = .054). Two-year OS was higher in VMA-positive patients with stage 4 disease (20.6% and 7%, P = .04). The patients with VMA(+) progressive disease died later than those with VMA(−) tumors (P = .047). These results show that increased urinary VMA predicts poor outcome for patients with favorable tumor sites. Urinary VMA can be useful risk determinant in combination with other biological determinants to predict prognosis of patients with localized neck, thoracic or pelvic tumors. The relationship of positive or high urinary VMA and survival were inversely correlated in disseminated disease and in patients with progressive disease. In high-risk patients, negative spot test or normal level of urinary VMA at diagnosis might be used for identification of a group of patients with more favorable prognosis.
The Relationship Between Father Involvement in Family Leisure and Family Functioning: The Importance of Daily Family Leisure

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between fathers’ involvement in family leisure and aspects of family functioning from both a father and young adolescent perspective. The sample consisted of fathers and their adolescent child from 647 families throughout the United States. Results from both the father and youth perspective indicated significant relationships between father involvement in both core and balance family leisure with family cohesion, family adaptability, and overall family functioning. Satisfaction with core family leisure that included the father's involvement was the single strongest predictor of all aspects of family functioning from both perspectives highlighting the importance of regularly occurring home-based family activities such as eating dinner together, participating in hobbies and informal sports or yard activities together, watching television together, or playing board games and video games together. Discussion and implications for fathers, families, practitioners, and future research are presented.
HiZELS:a high-redshift survey of Hα emitters - II. the nature of star-forming galaxies at z = 0.84

New results from a large survey of Hα emission-line galaxies at z = 0.84 using the Wide Field Camera on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and a custom narrow-band filter in the J band are presented as part of the High-z Emission Line Survey (HiZELS). The deep narrow-band images reach an effective flux limit of F Hα ∼ 10 -16 erg s -1 cm -2 in a comoving volume of 1.8 × 10 5 Mpc 3, resulting in the largest and deepest survey of its kind ever done at z ∼ 1. There are 1517 potential line emitters detected across ∼1.4 deg 2, of which 743 are selected as Hα emitters, based on their photometric and spectroscopic redshifts. These are then used to calculate the Hα luminosity function, which is well fitted by a Schechter function with L* = 10 42.26±0.05 erg s -1, φ* = 10 -1.92±0.10 Mpc -3 and α = -1.65 ± 0.15, and are used to estimate the volume average star formation rate (SFR) at z = 0.845, ρ SFR: 0.15 ± 0.01 M ⊙ yr -1 Mpc -3 (corrected for 15 per cent active galactic nucleus contamination and integrated down to 2.5 M ⊙ yr -1). These results robustly confirm a strong evolution of ρ SFR from the present day out to z ∼ 1 and then flattening to z ∼ 2 using a single star formation indicator: Hα luminosity. Out to z ∼ 1, both the characteristic luminosity and space density of the Hα emitters increase significantly; at higher redshifts, L* continues to increase, but φ* decreases. The z = 0.84 Hα emitters are mostly disc galaxies (82 ± 3 per cent), while 28 ± 4 per cent of the sample shows signs of merger activity; mergers account for ∼20 per cent of the total integrated ρ SFR at this redshift. Irregulars and mergers dominate the Hα luminosity function above L*, while discs are dominant at fainter luminosities. These results demonstrate that it is the evolution of 'normal' disc galaxies that drives the strong increase in the SFR density from the current epoch to z ∼ 1, although the continued strong evolution of L* beyond z = 1 suggests an increasing importance of merger activity at higher redshifts. © 2009 RAS.
The Structural Transformation of The Democratic Corporatist Model: The Case of Finland

Abstract As in many other European countries, the Finnish political public sphere has been mediatised and commercialised over the last three decades at the same time that structural changes have taken place in the national media systems. By using Finland as an example, article considers the structural transformation of the “Democratic Corporatist Model” defined by Daniel C. Hallin and Paolo Mancini in their /Comparing Media Systems/ (2004). Article also examines what the Finnish case could bring to the discussions on the public sphere and its relation to empirical analysis in general.
Interactive Code Review for Systematic Changes

Developers often inspect a diff patch during peer code reviews. Diff patches show low-level program differences per file without summarizing systematic changes -- similar, related changes to multiple contexts. We present Critics, an interactive approach for inspecting systematic changes. When a developer specifies code change within a diff patch, Critics allows developers to customize the change template by iteratively generalizing change content and context. By matching a generalized template against the codebase, it summarizes similar changes and detects potential mistakes. We evaluated Critics using two methods. First, we conducted a user study at Salesforce.com, where professional engineers used Critics to investigate diff patches authored by their own team. After using Critics, all six participants indicated that they would like Critics to be integrated into their current code review environment. This also attests to the fact that Critics scales to an industry-scale project and can be easily adopted by professional engineers. Second, we conducted a user study where twelve participants reviewed diff patches using Critics and Eclipse diff. The results show that human subjects using Critics answer questions about systematic changes 47.3% more correctly with 31.9% saving in time during code review tasks, in comparison to the baseline use of Eclipse diff. These results show that Critics should improve developer productivity in inspecting systematic changes during peer code reviews.
Institutional Linkages and Organizational Mortality

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Office of Research Administration, University of Toronto. For helpful comments on this paper, we thank John Freeman and three anonymous ASO reviewers. For assistance with data collection and coding, we also thank Debbie Freeman, Brian Gaon, Gayle Greenbaum, and Sonja Saksida. This study examined the impact of institutional linkages on the failure of child care service organizations in Metropolitan Toronto, Canada, between 1971 and 1987. A dynamic analysis shows that organizations with institutional linkages exhibited a significant survival advantage that increased with the intensity of competition. The effectiveness of institutional linkages in contributing to survival also depended on the characteristics of organizations that established ties and theexternal legitimacy of the ties themselves. Institutional linkages also had a significant moderating influence on the relationship between organizational transformation and the risk of failure. The findings of this study suggest that efforts to establish the prepotency of institutional versus ecological explanations of organizational survival should not preclude inquiry into the causal consistencies and interactions between these theories' predictions. '
‘Doing research was inspiring’: building a research community with teachers

This paper reports on a mixed-methods study related to K–12 teachers’ understandings of what research is, and what enables or inhibits teacher use of research in the classroom towards informing their instructional practices. In a collaboration exemplifying school board and university partnerships, we examined the nature of associations between teachers and education research(ers). Our findings indicated that teachers felt both connected and disconnected to research practices in education. Participants suggested ways to establish and sustain better links and collaborations among the communities of teaching and research. This paper emphasizes the importance of universities, schools and teachers working together to conduct meaningful research and apply current knowledge in the field of education.
Scaling Up School Restructuring in Multicultural, Multilingual Contexts

Author(s): Stringfield, Sam; Datnow, Amanda; Ross, Steven M. | Abstract: Two of the most rapidly developing fields in educational research are diversity education (e.g., Tharp a Gallimore, 1988) and school restructuring/school reform (e.g., Murphy a Hallinger, 1993; Newmann a Wehlage, 1995; Tyack a Cuban, 1995). Unfortunately, the intersection of the two fields is virtually uncultivated. None of the nationally disseminated school restructuring models was developed specifically for multilingual, multicultural contexts. With the exception of Exito para Todos, the Spanish version of Success For All (Slavin, Madden, a Wasik, 1996), there is virtually no research on the effectiveness of the programs in achieving implementation, let alone improvements in student achievement, in multilingual, multicultural contexts. In the first study of its kind, three broad policy questions will be addressed through the study "Scaling Up School Restructuring in Multicultural, Multilingual Contexts. " They include the following:1. How effective are current generation school restructuring proposals in improving the achievement of students in schools serving large numbers of language minority students in a multicultural context? 2. Are some of the current school restructuring models better suited to multilingual, multicultural contexts than others? Can the various reforms be successfully modified to provide high quality educational services to all students in diverse multicultural, multilingual contexts? 3. What actions at the federal, state, school district, subdistrict, and school levels increase (or decrease) the probability of obtaining full benefits from any or all of the restructuring models when the models are being implemented in multicultural, multilingual contexts? This paper presents early observations of 13 culturally and linguistically diverse schools in Sunland County. 1 Each school is in the process of implementing an externally developed school restructuring design. Sunland County Public Schools provides education to students from a very richly diverse set of cultures and language groups. Sunland County has one of the largest second language populations of any district in the country, with Spanish and Haitian Creole being the most common of over 100 languages and dialects. In this paper, data from the 1st of 4 years of field work will be reported regarding early insights into the classroom, school, and district conditions and actions that are facilitating or hindering implementation of the various school reforms. Over the years 1998-2001, additional reports will be produced on issues related to institutionalization of the reforms at each school site and on the effects of the reforms on the academic progress of various groups of students at the schools.
COMPARISON OF THE EFFECT OF VARIOUS WEIGHT TRAINING LOADS ON STRENGTH.

Abstract Seventy-nine male subjects were used in this study to determine which proportions of maximum strength (1-RM) used in training were as effective for increasing strength as training with the 1-RM. Three groups trained twice weekly with 66, 80, or 90 percent of the 1-RM, plus one weekly effort with the 1-RM. A fourth group trained three times weekly with the 1-RM; a fifth group, with 66 percent of the 1-RM; a sixth group, with the 1-RM only once weekly; and the seventh group acted as a control. After six weeks of training, the group that trained with two-thirds of the 1-RM three times weekly and the control group had mean strength scores which were significantly less than the means of the other groups.
Prospective High-Resolution Respiratory-Resolved Whole-Heart MRI for Image-Guided Cardiovascular Interventions

Cardiovascular diseases, including arrhythmias and heart failure, are commonly treated with percutaneous procedures guided by X‐ray fluoroscopy. The visualization of the targeted structures can be enhanced using preacquired respiratory‐resolved anatomic data (dynamic roadmap), which is displayed as an overlay onto X‐ray fluoroscopy images. This article demonstrates how dynamic roadmaps using an affine motion model can be obtained from one respiratory‐resolved three‐dimensional whole‐heart acquisition using the previously introduced Radial Phase Encoding‐Phase Ordering with Automatic Window Selection method. Respiratory motion in different regions of the heart was analyzed in 10 volunteers, and it was shown that the use of dynamic roadmaps can reduce misalignment errors from more than 10 down to less than 1.5 mm. Furthermore, the results suggest that reliable motion information can be obtained from highly undersampled images due to the advantageous undersampling properties of the radial phase encoding trajectory. Finally, results of a three‐dimensional dynamic roadmap obtained from a patient before catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation treatment are presented. Magn Reson Med, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Can we win them all? Benefits and costs of structured and flexible innovation- implementations

Summary Bureaucratic job structuring was compared with person–job integration in an attempt to determine which of the two approaches was a better means for innovation implementation in the workplace. The solution was hypothesized to be complex, depending on the criteria chosen for innovation effectiveness. Seventy incumbents of new linking roles in healthcare organizations were recruited. They provided data on the innovation–implementation approach applied in their case. Measures for different stakeholders’ perceptions of innovation effectiveness were gathered. Three colleagues of the incumbents provided performance appraisals, reflecting internal customers’ criteria for innovation effectiveness, each incumbent completed a questionnaire about burnout as a reversed proxy of innovation effectiveness, and semi-structured observations of incumbents’ activities provided an index of the fit between their role behaviors and role requirements, reflecting external customers’ criteria for effectiveness. While performance appraisals were found to gain most from implementation through bureaucratic job structuring, the fit between incumbents’ role behaviors and role requirements benefited most from implementation through person–job integration. Decreased burnout required maximizing the two implementation processes. These findings point to possible trade-offs between the different criteria for innovation effectiveness, and call for combining features from the two implementation processes to produce a superior implementation approach. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Multiclass Extension To The Brownboost Algorithm

Brownboost is an adaptive, continuous time boosting algorithm based on the Boost-by-Majority (BBM) algorithm. Though it has been little studied at the time of writing, it is believed that it should prove especially robust with respect to noisy data sets. This would make it a very useful boosting algorithm for real-world applications. More familiar algorithms such as Adaboost, or its successor Logitboost, are known to be especially susceptible to overfitting the training data examples. This can lead to a poor generalization error in the presence of class noise, since weak hypotheses induced at later iterations to fit the noisy examples will tend to be given undue influence in the final combined hypothesis. Brownboost allows us to specify an expected base-line error rate in advance, corresponding to our prior beliefs about the proportion of noise in the training data, and thus avoid overfitting. The original derivation of Brownboost is restricted to binary classification problems. In this paper we propose a natural multiclass extension to the basic algorithm, incorporating error-correcting output codes and a multiclass gain measure. We test two-class and multiclass versions of the algorithm on a number of real and simulated data sets with artificial class noise, and show that Brownboost consistently outperforms Adaboost in these situations.
MicroRNA-34a Inhibits Cell Proliferation by Repressing Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Kinase 1 during Megakaryocytic Differentiation of K562 Cells

Phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) induces megakaryocytic differentiation of the human chronic myelocytic leukemia cell line K562. We examined the potential regulatory role of microRNAs (miRNAs) in this process. Genome-wide expression profiling identified 21 miRNAs (miRs) that were induced by the treatment of K562 cells with PMA. Among them, the expression of miR-34a, miR-221, and miR-222 was induced in the early stages and maintained throughout the late stages of differentiation. Cell signaling analysis showed that the activation of extracellular signal-regulated protein kinase (ERK) in response to PMA strongly induced miR-34a expression by transactivation via the activator protein-1 binding site in the upstream region of the miR-34a gene. Reporter gene assays identified mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 1 (MEK1) as a direct target of miR-34a and c-fos as a direct target of miR-221/222. Although overexpression of the three miRNAs had little effect on cell differentiation, overexpression of miR-34a significantly repressed the proliferation of K562 cells with a concomitant reduction in MEK1 protein expression. Conversely, a locked nucleic acid probe against miR-34a significantly enhanced the proliferation of PMA-treated K562 cells. Taken together, the results show that PMA activates the MEK-ERK pathway and strongly induces miRNA-34a expression, which in turn inhibits cell proliferation by repressing the expression of MEK1. Thus, the results highlight an important regulatory role for miR-34a in the process of megakaryocytic differentiation, especially in the arrest of cell growth, which is a prerequisite for cells to enter differentiation.