Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Broadband Spectrum of Cygnus X-1 in Two Spectral States with BeppoSAX

We report on the 0.5-200 keV spectral properties of Cyg X-1 observed at different epochs with the Narrow Field Instruments of the BeppoSAX satellite. The source was in its soft state during the first observation of 1996 June. In the second observation of 1996 September, the source had parameters characteristic to its hard state. A soft X-ray excess, a broad Fe Kα line and Compton reflection are clearly detected in both states. The soft-state broadband continuum is well modeled by a disk blackbody (accounting for the soft excess) and Compton upscattering of the disk photons by a hybrid, thermal/nonthermal plasma, probably forming a corona above the disk (also giving rise to the Compton-reflection component). In the hard state, the primary hard X-ray spectrum can be well modeled by Compton upscattering of a weak blackbody emission by a thermal plasma at a temperature of ~60 keV. The soft excess is then explained by thermal Comptonization of the same blackbody emission by another hot plasma cloud characterized by a low value of its Compton parameter. Finally, we find the characteristic ratio of the bolometric flux in the soft state to that in the hard state to be about 3. This value is much more compatible with theories of state transitions than the previously reported (and likely underestimated) value of 1.5.
Actor-Partner Associations of Mindfulness and Marital Quality After Military Deployment.

Objective To explore dyadic associations between mindfulness and marital quality and gender differences in these associations-that is, the relation of each dyad member's mindfulness with his or her own marital quality and with his or her partner's marital quality. Background Recent studies have demonstrated the benefits of mindfulness for marital quality. However, associations of mindfulness and marital quality within and between partners are still unclear. In addition, despite marital challenges associated with deployment to war, the benefits of mindfulness for marital quality in military couples is yet unknown. Method A sample of 228 military couples following deployment of the male partner to recent conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan completed an online survey measuring mindfulness and marital quality. Results Actor-partner interdependence (APIM) analysis showed that, for both men and women, greater mindfulness was associated with one's own and one's partner's higher marital quality. There were no gender differences in this pattern. Conclusion Mindfulness engenders intra- and interpersonal benefits for the marital system in men and in women following deployment to war. Implications The results emphasize the importance of a dyadic approach when examining the role of mindfulness in marital or family relations, and suggest that interventions designed to facilitate change in marital relationships in the context of deployment may benefit from integrating mindfulness-based training.
A Qualitative Examination of Hope and Physical Activity in the No Limits Running Program

ABSTRACT Many physical activity programs evaluate effectiveness using physiological and survey measures, but few assessments include participants’ perceptions. This study examined changes in self-perceptions of individuals participating in a 12-week beginning running program—the No Limits program. Over the course of the program, three methods of data collection took place. First, observations were completed with the researcher as both a non-participant and participant observer. Second, online individual interviews were conducted with 18 adults (15 females, 3 males), ranging from 29 to 70 years of age (M = 50.2 years, SD = 12.2 years). Finally, focus group interviews were also conducted with an additional eight female participants aged 18–32 years of age (M = 24 years, SD = 7.6 years). In individual and focus group semi-structured interviews, participants were asked to describe their experiences in the No Limits program. Two major categories emerged from the data—social support and goal-striving. Social support included experiencing a sense of belonging and encouragement from peers and coaches. Goal-striving included setting and achieving goals, which were related to participant self-confidence. The results indicated that social support, goal setting, and self-confidence are important factors in helping beginners adhere to an exercise program. The No Limits program had a positive impact on participants’ self-confidence, which has implications for physical activity and exercise adherence. Overall, these findings suggest incorporating social support, formal goal setting sessions, and efforts to increase the running-related self-efficacy to foster positive self-perceptions, exercise adherence, and long-term physical activity participation.
“What’s Your Taste in Music?” A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Various Soundscapes in Evoking Specific Tastes

We report on the results of two online experiments designed to compare different soundtracks that had been composed (by various researchers and sound designers) in order to evoke/match different basic tastes. In Experiment 1, 100 participants listened to samples from 24 soundtracks and chose the taste (sweet, sour, salty, or bitter) that best matched each sample. Overall, the sweet soundtracks most effectively evoked the taste intended by the composer (participants chose sweet 56.9% of the time for the sweet soundtracks), whereas the bitter soundtracks were the least effective (participants chose bitter 31.4% of the time for the bitter soundtracks), compared with chance (choosing any specific taste 25% of the time). In Experiment 2, 50 participants rated their emotional responses (in terms of pleasantness and arousal) to the same 24 soundtrack samples and also to imaginary sweet/sour/salty/bitter-tasting foods. Associations between soundtracks and tastes were partly mediated by pleasantness for the sweet and bitter tastes and partly by arousal for the sour tastes. These results demonstrate how emotion mediation may be an additional mechanism behind sound-taste correspondences.
On capacity regions of non-multicast networks

We study the network coding capacity of multi-source, multi-sink networks with colocated sources, but where each sink may demand a different subset of the sources. We show that in this scenario, the set of admissible (zero probability of decoding errors) and achievable (vanishing probability of decoding errors) rate capacity tuples are the same. We also simplify the capacity region by showing that the outer bound obtained in “A First Course in Information Theory” (Yeung, 2002) is in fact tight. We conjecture that this bound remains tight, even when the sources are not colocated.
High Versus Low Consumer Attitude and Intention Towards Adoption of Mobile Banking in India: An Empirical Study

Although factors influencing adoption of technology-enabled banking has been studied by many researchers, the construct perceived usefulness had been analysed as a single construct. Moreover, the measurement of perceived usefulness by researchers does not discuss sub-dimensions or sub-factors, which could contribute to perceived usefulness associated with a particular technological innovation. This article empirically examines the influence of various factors on user attitude and intention towards adopting mobile banking. Based on focus-group discussion and personal interview with bankers, technology acceptance model (TAM) and studies on technology adoption, we propose a mobile banking adoption model in Indian context. We also examine the impact of demographics on user attitude and intention. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on a sample of 367 respondents resulted in seven factors which were found to be reliable. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated significant convergent and discriminant validity. Logistic regression equation was used to estimate the degree of correct prediction of user attitude and intention towards mobile banking adoption. Perceived trust, perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived lifestyle compatibility, perceived efficiency and perceived convenience significantly impacted user attitude. However, user attitude was not found to differ significantly between demographic variables. Similarly, perceived trust, PEOU, perceived lifestyle compatibility and perceived efficiency were found to positively and significantly affect user intention. User intention was found to significantly vary across demographic groups based on gender and household income.
Tungstate administration improves the sexual and reproductive function in female rats with streptozotocin-induced diabetes.

BACKGROUND Diabetes induces great alterations in female reproductive function. We analyzed the effects of tungstate, an anti-diabetic agent, on the reproductive function of healthy and diabetic female rats. METHODS Healthy and streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats were treated with sodium tungstate (2 mg/ml in their drinking water) for 12 weeks. Markers of reproductive function and diabetes were measured in serum, and in uterus and ovaries by Western blot or RT-PCR. Reproductive function was also assessed by mating. RESULTS Diabetic rats showed great impairment of libido, which was accompanied by a total loss of fertility (P < 0.05) and a decrease in the serum levels of FSH (P < 0.05) and LH (P < 0.05) compared with healthy rats. Tungstate treatment of diabetic rats partially recovered libido while fertility rate increased to 66.6%. This improvement was accompanied by a recovery of serum FSH (to a level higher than healthy rats) and LH. Moreover, tungstate treatment normalized ovarian expression of GLUT 3 hexose transporter, and estrogen, progesterone and FSH receptors, whereas only GLUT 3 and FSH receptors were normalized in the uterus. CONCLUSIONS Our results indicate that the alterations in female reproduction in diabetes were partially reversed after tungstate treatment by a mechanism(s) involving the normalization of serum FSH and LH levels, and ovarian and uterine expression of FSH receptors and GLUT3.
A robust trust region algorithm for solving general nonlinearprogramming

The trust region approach has been extended to solving nonlinear constrained optimization. Most of these extensions consider only equality constraints and require strong global regularity assumptions. In this paper, a trust region algorithm for solving general nonlinear programming is presented, which solves an unconstrained piecewise quadratic trust region subproblem and a quadratic programming trust region sub-problem at each iteration. A new technique for updating the penalty parameter is introduced. Under very mild conditions, the global convergence results are proved. Some local convergence results are also proved. Preliminary numerical results are also reported.
A Multiyear Daily Process Examination of Social Anxiety, Alcohol-Outcome Expectancies and Alcohol Use Among College Students

Background. Expectancies of the positive and negative effects of drinking have been posited to be important moderators of the association between social anxiety and alcohol use. However, investigations of these interactive effects have not examined the moderating role of within-person daily variation in such expectancies. Methods. We used a multi-year micro-longitudinal design to examine the interactive relationship between social anxiety and daily changes in alcohol-outcome expectancies in predicting later-day drinking among college students (N = 537; 51.7% female). In a baseline survey participants reported on their social anxiety, then approximately two weeks later, they reported daily for 30 days on their tension reduction and impairment alcohol-outcome expectancies and their drinking level. We repeated this procedure for up to three additional years. Results. The probability of drinking and the amount consumed were higher on days characterized by high levels of tension-reduction and impairment expect.
Perceived information technology risks and attitudes

Risk has been a focal dimension in much of the debate about attitudes toward technology. In the present paper, the development of research on risk perception is reviewed, from its beginnings in the end of the 1960's. The received view on factors in risk perception is that of the psychometric model and social trust. It is pointed out that this approach gives only an incomplete understanding of risk and risk acceptance, and some missing elements are delineated, such as Tampering with Nature, which is an important factor in technology acceptance, and trust (or distrust) in science, and the embracing of alternative views on the nature of the world and knowledge (New Age). Several methodological points are also important. Risks should be studied with regard to one’s own personal (personal risk), and to others (general risk), because these dimensions often differ and they have different implications. It should also be observed that the most important risk aspect is severity of consequences of unwanted events or accidents, not their probability. When it comes to attitudes toward technology it is argued that the replaceability of a technology is an important factor. IT risks have been investigated in a major survey carried out with a representative sample of the Swedish population. The main finding was that IT risks were seen as pertinent mainly to others, implying that people (rightly or wrongly) perceived that they could protect themselves from IT risks. IT risks are finally regarded in the light of Stigma Theory, which has been devised to understand some social and political reactions to risks, and it is held that it is unlikely that IT will become a stigmatized technology, partly because it is seen as irreplaceable. Yet, many IT risks are very real and many people are aware of them. In particular, personal integrity is threatened and the very novelty of the technology involved is probably the cause why ethical and legal developments lag far behind. Initial one-sided positive statements about IT are likely to be followed by more sober assessments of this technology which brings many blessings but also an increasing number of serious risks.
Learning styles' recognition in e-learning environments with feed-forward neural networks

People have unique ways of learning, which may greatly affect the learning process and, therefore, its outcome. In order to be effective, e-learning systems should be capable of adapting the content of courses to the individual characteristics of students. In this regard, some educational systems have proposed the use of questionnaires for determining a student learning style; and then adapting their behaviour according to the students' styles. However, the use of questionnaires is shown to be not only a time-consuming investment but also an unreliable method for acquiring learning style characterisations. In this paper, we present an approach to recognize automatically the learning styles of individual students according to the actions that he or she has performed in an e-learning environment. This recognition technique is based upon feed-forward neural networks.
Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent for PCA

We consider the problem of principal component analysis (PCA) in a streaming stochastic setting, where our goal is to find a direction of approximate maximal variance, based on a stream of i.i. d. data points in $\reals^d$. A simple and computationally cheap algorithm for this is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which incrementally updates its estimate based on each new data point. However, due to the non-convex nature of the problem, analyzing its performance has been a challenge. In particular, existing guarantees rely on a non-trivial eigengap assumption on the covariance matrix, which is intuitively unnecessary. In this paper, we provide (to the best of our knowledge) the first eigengap-free convergence guarantees for SGD in the context of PCA. This also partially resolves an open problem posed in \cite{hardt2014noisy}. Moreover, under an eigengap assumption, we show that the same techniques lead to new SGD convergence guarantees with better dependence on the eigengap.
Making “concreteness fading” more concrete as a theory of instruction for promoting transfer

Abstract To promote learning and transfer of abstract ideas, contemporary theories advocate that teachers and learners make explicit connections between concrete representations and the abstract ideas they are intended to represent. Concreteness fading is a theory of instruction that offers a solution for making these connections. As originally conceived, it is a three-step progression that begins with enacting a physical instantiation of a concept, moves to an iconic depiction and then fades to the more abstract representation of the same concept. The goals of this paper are: (1) to improve the theoretical framework of concreteness fading by defining and bringing greater clarity to the terms abstract, concrete and fading; and (2) to describe several testable hypotheses that stem from concreteness fading as a theory of instruction. Making this theory of instruction more “concrete” should lead to an optimised concreteness fading technique with greater promise for facilitating both learning and transfer.
Cerebral Microbleeds: Different Prevalence, Topography, and Risk Factors Depending on Dementia Diagnosis—The Karolinska Imaging Dementia Study

MR studies in more than 1500 patients with dementia revealed that 22% had microbleedsthat were predominantly lobar and occipital in cases of Alzheimer disease. Patients with microbleeds were older, male, and hypertensive. Prevalence, location, and risk factors of microbleeds varied depending on dementia diagnosis and may be taken into account when anticoagulating such patients. BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Cerebral microbleeds are thought to represent cerebral amyloid angiopathy when in lobar regions of the brain and hypertensive arteriopathy when in deep and infratentorial locations. By studying cerebral microbleeds, their topography, and risk factors, we aimed to gain an insight into the vascular and amyloid pathology of dementia diagnoses and increase the understanding of cerebral microbleeds in dementia. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyzed 1504 patients (53% women; mean age, 63 ± 10 years; 10 different dementia diagnoses) in this study. All patients underwent MR imaging as part of the dementia investigation, and all their clinical parameters were recorded. RESULTS: Among the 1504 patients with dementia, 22% had cerebral microbleeds. Cerebral microbleed topography was predominantly lobar (P = .01) and occipital (P = .007) in Alzheimer disease. Patients with cerebral microbleeds were significantly older (P < .001), were more frequently male (P < .001), had lower cognitive scores (P = .006), and more often had hypertension (P < .001). Risk factors for cerebral microbleeds varied depending on the dementia diagnosis. Odds ratios for having cerebral microbleeds increased with the number of risk factors (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, male sex, and age 65 and older) in the whole patient group and increased differently in the separate dementia diagnoses. CONCLUSIONS: Prevalence, topography, and risk factors of cerebral microbleeds vary depending on the dementia diagnosis and reflect the inherent pathology of different dementia diagnoses. Because cerebral microbleeds are seen as possible predictors of intracerebral hemorrhage, their increasing prevalence with an increasing number of risk factors, as shown in our study, may require taking the number of risk factors into account when deciding on anticoagulant therapy in dementia.
Currency options for emerging economies: Concepts and arguments

This paper frames policy debates around the appropriate choice of currency regimes for developing and transition economies, by clarifying and articulating arguments drawn from the scientific and applied economics literatures. In particular, arguments for, and against, “fixed” vs. “flexible” exchange rate regimes are elaborated and evaluated, including the celebrated “insulation” hypothesis of Friedman and “optimum currency area” concept of Mundell. Political economy arguments are also considered, including in the context of (actual) European and (putative) North American currency unions. The paper concludes with some policy-relevant reflections on currency options for emerging economies, and alternative visions for the future of the international monetary architecture.
Paradoxical Effects of Power on Moral Thinking: Why Power Both Increases and Decreases Deontological and Utilitarian Moral Decisions

The current research explores the role of power in moral decision-making. Some work suggests that power increases utilitarianism; other work suggests power increases deontological judgments. Conversely, we propose that power can both increase and decrease both deontological and utilitarian decisions by building on two recent insights in moral psychology. First, we utilize the moral orientation scale to assess four thinking styles that jointly predict moral dilemma decisions. Second, we employ process dissociation to assess deontological and utilitarian judgments as orthogonal rather than opposite constructs. We conducted two preregistered confirmatory studies that replicated exploratory findings. In Study 1, power increased three moral thinking styles: integration, deliberation, and rule orientation. In Study 2, these decision-making styles simultaneously mediated the effects of power on utilitarian and deontological responses in opposing ways, leading to null effects overall. These results reconcile previous findings and demonstrate the complex yet systematic effects power has on moral decision-making.
Regulation of Granulocyte and Macrophage Populations of Murine Bone Marrow Cells by G-CSF and CD137 Protein

Background Granulocytes and monocytes/macrophages differentiate from common myeloid progenitor cells. Granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) and CD137 (4-1BB, TNFRSF9) are growth and differentiation factors that induce granulocyte and macrophage survival and differentiation, respectively. This study describes the influence of G-CSF and recombinant CD137-Fc protein on myelopoiesis. Methodology/Principal Findings Both, G-CSF and CD137 protein support proliferation and survival of murine bone marrow cells. G-CSF enhances granulocyte numbers while CD137 protein enhances macrophage numbers. Both growth factors together give rise to more cells than each factor alone. Titration of G-CSF and CD137 protein dose-dependently changes the granulocyte/macrophage ratio in bone marrow cells. Both factors individually induce proliferation of hematopoietic progenitor cells (lin-, c-kit+) and differentiation to granulocytes and macrophages, respectively. The combination of G-CSF and CD137 protein further increases proliferation, and results in a higher number of macrophages than CD137 protein alone, and a lower number of granulocytes than G-CSF alone demonstrating that CD137 protein-induced monocytic differentiation is dominant over G-CSF-induced granulocytic differentiation. CD137 protein induces monocytic differentiation even in early hematopoietic progenitor cells, the common myeloid progenitors and the granulocyte macrophage progenitors. Conclusions/Significance This study confirms earlier data on the regulation of myelopoiesis by CD137 receptor - ligand interaction, and extends them by demonstrating the restriction of this growth promoting influence to the monocytic lineage.