Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Four-year lower extremity disability trajectories among African American men and women.

BACKGROUND We examined 4-year lower extremity disability trajectories. METHODS Nine hundred ninety-eight African American men and women 49-65 years old were evaluated at baseline and at four annual follow-ups. Lower extremity disability was the number of difficulties with nine standard activities of daily living (ADL), instrumental ADLs (IADL), and lower body function items. Mixed-effect models were used. RESULTS The 9-item lower extremity disability measure had factorial validity and high reliability (alpha > 0.88). The mean baseline lower extremity disability score was 2.43, and at the subsequent follow-ups it was 2.23, 2.35, 2.60, and 2.70. The mixed-effect model included significant random intercept and aging effects. Fixed factors with the largest effect sizes (all p < or =.001) were physical performance (-0.238 lower extremity disabilities per point on the Short Physical Performance Battery [SPPB]), fear of falling (1.094), poor or fair self-rated health (0.735), self-reported arthritis (0.659), clinically relevant levels of depression symptoms (0.641), body mass index (0.047 per kg/m(2) unit), aging (0.082 per year), and asthma (0.558). CONCLUSIONS To improve lower extremity disability trajectories among African Americans, interventions should focus on improving SPPB scores. In addition, fear of falling, poor or fair self-rated health, and clinically relevant levels of depression symptoms should be considered potential intervention candidates warranting further evaluation.
Can Second-Generation Endogenous Growth Models Explain the Productivity Trends and Knowledge Production in the Asian Miracle Economies?

Abstract Using data for six Asian miracle economies over the period from 1953 to 2006, this paper examines the extent to which growth has been driven by R&D and tests which second-generation endogenous growth model is most consistent with the data. The results give strong support to Schumpeterian growth theory but only limited support to semi-endogenous growth theory. Furthermore, it is shown that R&D has played a key role for growth in the Asian miracle economies.
Tableaux for Dynamic Logic of Propositional Assignments

The Dynamic Logic for Propositional Assignments (DL-PA) has recently been studied as an alternative to Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL). In DL-PA, the abstract atomic programs of PDL are replaced by assignments of propositional variables to truth values. This makes DL-PA enjoy some interesting meta-logical properties that PDL does not, such as eliminability of the Kleene star, compactness and interpolation. We define and analytic tableaux calculus for DL-PA and show that it matches the known complexity results.
National study comparing the characteristics of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who committed homicide vs. those who died by suicide

Abstract Associations between serious mental disorder and violence are well-documented, but there is little epidemiological evidence linking these disorders and homicide risk. The reported study compares socio-demographic and clinical characteristics of people diagnosed with schizophrenia who committed homicide vs. those who died by suicide. The study is a national case series of male patients in England & Wales diagnosed with schizophrenia and convicted of homicide during 1997–2012 (n = 168), and a randomly selected comparison group of male patients with schizophrenia who died by suicide and who were matched to the homicide case series by age (n = 777). There are different patterns of behaviour in people with schizophrenia preceding homicide and suicide. Homicide perpetrators have frequently disengaged with services whilst patients who die by suicide are often in recent contact. This is important knowledge for clinical services as it indicates a different preventive emphasis despite the existence of other shared characteristics.
Diagnosis of implant stability and its impact on implant survival: a prospective case series study.

OBJECTIVES To assess the predictability of implant stability assessment either clinically or by resonance frequency analysis (RFA). MATERIAL AND METHODS This prospective case series study evaluated 4114 consecutive SLA Straumann implants in two private clinics. Primary stability was classified in four categories, depending on the degree of implant rotation when tightening the healing cap: A (no rotation at all), B (light rotation with a feeling of resistance), C (rotation without resistance) and D (rotation and lateral oscillation). In one clinic (n=542 implants), RFA method was also used the day of the surgery (Osstell 1) and at restoration placement (Osstell 2). Survival rates were stratified according to the clinical classification categories using life table analysis. The association between Osstell 1 and 2 and the clinical classification was tested with ANOVA. RESULTS 3899 implants were classified as stable (A) and 213 as unstable (B-D). Their survival rates were 99.1% and 97.2%, respectively. The unstable implants were further classified in B (158), C (51) and D (4), with survivals of 98.1%, 94.1% and 100%, respectively, being these differences statistically significant (P<0.009). Using Osstell, implants were stratified in two groups according to a predefined threshold of implant stability quotient (>or=60). At the Osstell 1 measurement there was no significant association between primary stability and implant survival (P<0.753). In Osstell 2, however, the association was significant (P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS Only secondary stability RFA values were able to significantly predict implant outcomes, but not primary stability values. There was a good correlation between RFA and the proposed clinical classification of primary stability.
Beyond the Hypercube: Evolutionary Accessibility of Fitness Landscapes with Realistic Mutational Networks

Evolutionary pathways describe trajectories of biological evolution in the space of different variants of organisms (genotypes). The probability of existence and the number of evolutionary pathways that lead from a given genotype to a better-adapted genotype are important measures of accessibility of local fitness optima and the reproducibility of evolution. Both quantities have been studied in simple mathematical models where genotypes are represented as binary sequences of two types of basic units, and the network of permitted mutations between the genotypes is a hypercube graph. However, it is unclear how these results translate to the biologically relevant case in which genotypes are represented by sequences of more than two units, for example four nucleotides (DNA) or 20 aminoacids (proteins), and the mutational graph is not the hypercube. Here we investigate accessibility of the best-adapted genotype in the general case of K > 2 units. Using computer generated and experimental fitness landscapes we show that accessibility of the global fitness maximum increases with K and can be much higher than for binary sequences. The increase in accessibility comes from the increase in the number of indirect trajectories exploited by evolution for higher K. As one of the consequences, the fraction of genotypes that are accessible increases by three orders of magnitude when the number of units K increases from 2 to 16 for landscapes of size N ~ 106 genotypes. This suggests that evolution can follow many different trajectories on such landscapes and the reconstruction of evolutionary pathways from experimental data might be an extremely difficult task.
Neuronal Nav1.8 Channels as a Novel Therapeutic Target of Acute Atrial Fibrillation Prevention

Background Ganglionated plexus have been developed as additional ablation targets to improve the outcome of atrial fibrillation (AF) besides pulmonary vein isolation. Recent studies implicated an intimate relationship between neuronal sodium channel Nav1.8 (encoded by SCN10A) and AF. The underlying mechanism between Nav1.8 and AF remains unclear. This study aimed to determine the role of Nav1.8 in cardiac electrophysiology in an acute AF model and explore possible therapeutic targets. Methods and Results Immunohistochemical study was used on canine cardiac ganglionated plexus. Both Nav1.5 and Nav1.8 were expressed in ganglionated plexus with canonical neuronal markers. Sixteen canines were randomly administered either saline or the Nav1.8 blocker A‐803467. Electrophysiological study was compared between the 2 groups before and after 6‐hour rapid atrial pacing. Compared with the control group, administration of A‐803467 decreased the incidence of AF (87.5% versus 25.0%, P<0.05), shortened AF duration, and prolonged AF cycle length. A‐803467 also significantly suppressed the decrease in the effective refractory period and the increase in effective refractory period dispersion and cumulative window of vulnerability caused by rapid atrial pacing in all recording sites. Patch clamp study was performed under 100 nmol/L A‐803467 in TSA201 cells cotransfected with SCN10A‐WT,SCN5A‐WT, and SCN3B‐WT. IN a,P was reduced by 45.34% at −35 mV, and IN a,L by 68.57% at −20 mV. Evident fast inactivation, slow recovery, and use‐dependent block were also discovered after applying the drug. Conclusions Our study demonstrates that Nav1.8 could exert its effect on electrophysiological characteristics through cardiac ganglionated plexus. It indicates that Nav1.8 is a novel target in understanding cardiac electrophysiology and SCN10A‐related arrhythmias.
WMR control via dynamic feedback linearization: design, implementation, and experimental validation

The subject of the paper is the motion control problem of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) in environments without obstacles. With reference to the popular unicycle kinematics, it is shown that dynamic feedback linearization is an efficient design tool leading to a solution simultaneously valid for both trajectory tracking and setpoint regulation problems. The implementation of this approach on the laboratory prototype SuperMARIO, a two-wheel differentially driven mobile robot, is described in detail. To assess the quality of the proposed controller, we compare its performance with that of several existing control techniques in a number of experiments. The obtained results provide useful guidelines for WMR control designers.
Neurological and Neuropsychological Bases of Empathy

Impairments of social behavior after cerebral damage are often problematic and difficult to assess and manage, with few models addressing evaluation, treatment options and prognosis. Recent studies suggest that a fundamental mechanism of social behavior disturbed by acquired cerebral damage is empathy. Empathy refers to the cognitive and emotional processes that bind people together in various kinds of relationships that permit sharing of experiences as well as understanding of others. Empathic changes are particularly evident after focal prefrontal cortex damage and closed head injury in adults, though early frontal lobe damage is also associated with poor empathic and social development. Although alterations in empathy have been studied in only a handful of neurologic samples thus far, it may be an important outcome variable of brain injury, particularly in patients’ adjustment to family, community and vocational settings. Treatment possibilities are presented, though more comprehensive research is needed.
An Exploratory Study of Violent Media Consumption and Aggression in Black College Students

One-hundred Black college students attending a historically Black college and university (HBCU) on the east coast of the United States participated in a study intended to explore and provide baseline information on the relationship between violent media consumption and aggression in Black college students. Results suggest that, consistent with college students and emerging adults in general, Black college students are heavy users of violent media and that violent media is related to aggression. This study makes an important contribution to the research literature by illuminating violent media consumption and the relationship between violent media consumption and aggression in a population that has been overlooked or understudied by previous media violence-aggression research.
Temporal withdrawal behaviors in an educational policy context

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the differential relations between two teacher withdrawal behaviors: work absence and lateness, and two types of school ethics: organizational justice (distributive, procedural) and ethical climate (formal, caring), all in the context of school turbulent environment. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 1,016 teachers in 35 Israeli high schools. The GLIMMIX procedure was used to consider simultaneously the hierarchical structure of the data, as well as the two dependent variables (absence and lateness). Findings The results showed that lateness was negatively related to two relatively short-term aspects of school ethics: distributive justice, in particular for women, and formal ethical climate. Absence was negatively related to a relatively long-term aspect of school ethics: caring climate, in particular for low- to medium-level seniority teachers. Research limitations/implications The paper’s theoretical contribution is to explicate the unique relation of each temporal withdrawal behavior to specific dimensions of the school ethical constructs studied. Practical implications In order to reduce teachers’ temporal withdrawal behaviors, school management may need to attenuate policy that taps into organizational ethics, while considering the effects of school culture and turbulent environment. Originality/value This study offers a time perspective, which fine-tunes understanding of teachers’ lateness and absence behaviors, while pointing out the unique relations of lateness and absence to school ethical within educational policy context.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEISURE-TIME PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE IN FEMALE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS: A CORRELATIONAL STUDY

Background : Association between physical activity and mental health has been well documented. Both leisure-time physical activity and emotional intelligence are related to health-related quality of life. Hence, it is important to explore the linkage between these two parameters. Methods : A total of 126 female university students of age 20-30 years participated in the study. The scores regarding leisure-time physical activity were assessed using International Physical activity questionnaire (long form). Emotional intelligence was assessed by administering a 5-point scale developed by Hyde et al (2002). Normality of data was tested using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Spearman’s rank order test was run to see the relationship between non-parametric continuous data. Results : Leisure-time physical activity level was significantly positively correlated with the overall emotional intelligence and sub-scales: self-awareness, Self-motivation, emotional stability, managing relations, integrity, self-development, value orientation and commitment (p < 0.05). Meanwhile, no significant correlations were assessed between leisure-time physical activity level and subscales: empathy and altruistic behavior. Conclusions : Findings of the present study revealed that there is a strong positive correlation between leisure-time physical activity and emotional intelligence. Article visualizations:
" -Capacities and Second-Order Coding Rates for Channels with General State

We consider state-dependent channels with general state available at both the encoder and the decoder. We establish the " -capacity and the optimistic " -capacity of such channels. The determination of these capacities allows us to provide a necessary and sufﬁcient condition for the strong converse property to hold. We also provide a simpler sufﬁcient condition on the ﬁrst-and second-order statistics of the state process that ensures that the strong converse property holds. We then seek a ﬁner characterization of these capacities in terms of second-order coding rates. The general results are supplemented by several examples including i.i. d. and Markov states and mixed channels. The proofs of the specializations of the general second-order result to the speciﬁc examples require new techniques such as multiple applications of various forms of the Berry-Esseen theorems
Is There a Distress Risk Anomaly? Corporate Bond Spread as a Proxy for Default Risk

Although financial theory suggests a positive relationship between default risk and equity returns, recent empirical papers find anomalously low returns for stocks with high probabilities of default. We show that returns to distressed stocks previously documented are really an amalgamation of anomalies associated with three stock characteristics leverage, volatility and profitability. In this paper we use a market based measure corporate credit spreads to proxy for default risk. Unlike previously used measures that proxy for a firm’s real-world probability of default, credit spreads proxy for a riskadjusted (or a risk-neutral) probability of default and thereby explicitly account for the systematic component of distress risk. We show that credit spreads predict corporate defaults better than previously used measures, such as, bond ratings, accounting variables and structural model parameters. We do not find default risk to be significantly priced in the cross-section of equity returns. There is also no evidence of firms with high default risk delivering anomalously low returns. JEL Classifications: G11, G12, G13, G14.
Practice effects on fast and accurate spatially constrained movements

Purpose. The effects of practice were analyzed in the control of fast and accurate spatially constrained movements. Methods. Twenty men (20–26 years old) evenly divided into an experimental and control group were analyzed in three time periods: pre-test, post-test, and retention. Discrete Aiming Task ver. 2.0 software simulated Fitts’ task (1954) and provided kinematic analysis of mouse cursor movements (displacement, velocity, and acceleration). The task consisted of using the mouse to click on two parallel targets as fast and accurately as possible. Four target widths (W = 2.0, 1.0, 0.5, and 2.5 inches) and three distances between the targets (D = 2.0, 4.0, and 8.0 inches) were used to provide indexes of difficulty (ID) from 1 to 6 bits. The experimental group performed 108 practice trials (three blocks of 36 trials on different days) while the control group had no practice. Results. Movement time (MT) decreased in the experimental group largely due in part to a reduction of time used for feedback. It is suggested that the improvement in performance as a function of practice occurred through the interdependence of programming and the feedback process. As the task was practiced, there was decreased need for feedback due to better pre-programming of the primary submovement and the improved use of sensorial feedback information. This strategy and a lengthened deceleration phase can help explain the paradigm of fast and accurate movement as a result of practice. Conclusions. Despite the improved performance changes as a consequence of practice, Fitts’ Law proved to be robust enough to predict MT as a function of ID.
Polarization for arbitrary discrete memoryless channels

Channel polarization, originally proposed for binary-input channels, is generalized to arbitrary discrete memoryless channels. Specifically, it is shown that when the input alphabet size is a prime number, a similar construction to that for the binary case leads to polarization. This method can be extended to channels of composite input alphabet sizes by decomposing such channels into a set of channels with prime input alphabet sizes. It is also shown that all discrete memoryless channels can be polarized by randomized constructions. The introduction of randomness does not change the order of complexity of polar code construction, encoding, and decoding. A previous result on the error probability behavior of polar codes is also extended to the case of arbitrary discrete memoryless channels. The generalization of polarization to channels with arbitrary finite input alphabet sizes leads to polar-coding methods for approaching the true (as opposed to symmetric) channel capacity of arbitrary channels with discrete or continuous input alphabets.
Statistical power and parameter stability when subjects are few and tests are many: comment on Peterson, Smith, Martorana, and Owens (2003).

Comments on the original article "The impact of chief executive officer personality on top management team dynamics: One mechanism by which leadership affects organizational performance", by R. S. Peterson et al. This comment illustrates how small sample sizes, when combined with many statistical tests, can generate unstable parameter estimates and invalid inferences. Although statistical power for 1 test in a small-sample context is too low, the experimentwise power is often high when many tests are conducted, thus leading to Type I errors that will not replicate when retested. This comment's results show how radically the specific conclusions and inferences in R. S. Peterson, D. B. Smith, P. V. Martorana, and P. D. Owens's (2003) study changed with the inclusion or exclusion of 1 data point. When a more appropriate experimentwise statistical test was applied, the instability in the inferences was eliminated, but all the inferences become nonsignificant, thus changing the positive conclusions.
Communication-induced memory biases in preverbal infants

Human teaching, a highly specialized form of cooperative information transmission, depends not only on the presence of benevolent communicators in the environment, but also on the preparedness of the students to learn from communication when it is addressed to them. We tested whether 9-month-old human infants can distinguish between communicative and noncommunicative social contexts and whether they retain qualitatively different information about novel objects in these contexts. We found that in a communicative context, infants devoted their limited memory resources to encoding the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which is preferentially retained in noncommunicative contexts. We propose that infants' sensitivity to, and interpretation of, the social cues distinguishing infant-directed communication events represent important mechanisms of social learning by which others can help determine what information even preverbal human observers retain in memory.
Testing a Social Cognitive Model of Well-Being With Women Engineers

The present study tests the utility of the Social Cognitive Model of Well-Being (SCWB) in the context of work, with a sample of 348 women engineers. Using structural equation modeling, we examined the relations of positive affect, self-efficacy, work conditions, goal progress, and environmental supports and barriers that were assumed to account for job satisfaction and life satisfaction of women engineers. Overall, the model provided a good fit to the data, and SCWB predictors accounted for a significant amount of variance in job satisfaction (63%) and life satisfaction (54%) with our sample of women engineers. As expected, most paths of the SCWB model were significant; however, we also found nonsignificant relations among variables in the model. In particular, goal progress did not play a critical role in the present study. In addition, we examined the indirect effects of environmental variables (e.g., supports and barriers) on job satisfaction via sociocognitive variables (e.g., self-efficacy and perceived work conditions) in the engineering work domain. Implications for practice, theory, and future vocational and organizational research in engineering are discussed.