Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Embodied experience in pregnancy and post-birth: body image and body-directed attending

Women’s experiences of the challenging embodied events of pregnancy and post-birth occur in a cultural context of widespread negative body images. The curre nt research takes a multidimensional, situated and experiential approach to exam ining women’s body-self relations in pregnancy and post-birth, with a view to identifyin g factors that underlie and support positive body-self relations. The body image constru t in contemporary usage emphasizes body-as-object dimensions of embodied experience. This thesis takes a multidimensional approach, including body-as-subject dimensions , and discerning dimensions of embodied life salient for women themselves. A broadly biopsychosocial approach was adopted, in which body, self and world are understood to exist in a perpetual and mutually influential interrelation with each other and wi th events and objects. Emphasis was given to experiential, moment by moment aspects of women’s embodied experience, investigating conscious embodied experience in pregnancy and post-birth at two levels – a relatively stable, constructed, stori ed level (“top-down”), and a plastic, present-oriented, experiential level (“bottom-up”). The purpose of the research was to discern experiential and ideational aspects of posi tive and negative body images, to investigate the phenomenon of body-directed attending, and to contribute to the understanding of women’s embodiment in pregnancy and postbirth. This thesis employed narrative and phenomenological research methods to elicit and analyze in-depth, first-person accounts of 13 women’s lived experience of embodied life in pregnancy and post-birth. The longitudinal design allowed for analys is of change across the trajectory of pregnancy and post-birth. The women partici pated in
Visual Tracking via Discriminative Sparse Similarity Map

In this paper, we cast the tracking problem as finding the candidate that scores highest in the evaluation model based upon a matrix called discriminative sparse similarity map (DSS map). This map demonstrates the relationship between all the candidates and the templates, and it is constructed based on the solution to an innovative optimization formulation named multitask reverse sparse representation formulation, which searches multiple subsets from the whole candidate set to simultaneously reconstruct multiple templates with minimum error. A customized APG method is derived for getting the optimum solution (in matrix form) within several iterations. This formulation allows the candidates to be evaluated accurately in parallel rather than one-by-one like most sparsity-based trackers do and meanwhile considers the relationship between candidates, therefore it is more superior in terms of cost-performance ratio. The discriminative information containing in this map comes from a large template set with multiple positive target templates and hundreds of negative templates. A Laplacian term is introduced to keep the coefficients similarity level in accordance with the candidates similarities, thereby making our tracker more robust. A pooling approach is proposed to extract the discriminative information in the DSS map for easily yet effectively selecting good candidates from bad ones and finally get the optimum tracking results. Plenty experimental evaluations on challenging image sequences demonstrate that the proposed tracking algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.
The Influence of Emotional Congruence in Detecting Lies THE INFLUENCE OF EMOTIONAL CONGRUENCE IN DETECTING LIES 2 Embodied Cognition and Deception: The Influence of Emotional Congruence in Detecting Lies

The influence of facial mimicry and emotional congruence on emotional information processing has previously only been studied in isolation. In the current study their influence on the ability to detect deception will be investigated. In order to recognize the emotional states of others one mimics their emotional facial expression, and being in a congruent emotional state as a person or an emotional message enables faster processing of emotional information. Can emotional congruence between the receiver’s emotional state and a message told affect participants’ ability to detect deception when judging whether a person at a video recording is telling the truth or not? How does emotional congruence affect participants’ speed and confidence when making these judgments? The results showed that participants reported higher confidence but slower response times when making an accurate judgment in the congruent scenario, when compared to the incongruent scenario, but did not perform better than what could be expected by chance in detecting deception. Consequently, emotional congruence had an impact, not on participants’ performance in detecting deception, but only on their meta-cognitive evaluations of their judgments, but confidence rating did not seem to be an indicator of accuracy. In future research the design can be used in order to investigate other potential aspects, such as emotional empathy and other types of emotional congruence, and their influence on the ability to detect deception.
Is Patient Activation Associated With Outcomes of Care for Adults With Chronic Conditions?

We examined the patient activation measure's (PAM's) association with process and health outcomes among adults with chronic conditions. Patients with high PAM scores were significantly more likely to perform self-management behaviors, use self-management services, and report high medication adherence, compared to patients with the lowest PAM scores. This population was 10 times more likely to report high patient-satisfaction scores, 5 times more likely to report high quality-of-life scores, and reported significantly higher physical and mental functional status scores, compared to those with the lowest scores. These results suggest that PAM scores are associated with key process and health outcome measures.
ARE EXCHANGE RATES REALLY RANDOM WALKS? SOME EVIDENCE ROBUST TO PARAMETER INSTABILITY

Many authors have documented that it is challenging to explain exchange rate fluctuations with macroeconomic fundamentals: a random walk forecasts future exchange rates better than existing macroeconomic models. This paper applies newly developed tests for nested models that are robust to the presence of parameter instability. The empirical evidence shows that for some countries we can reject the hypothesis that exchange rates are random walks. This raises the possibility that economic models were previously rejected not because the fundamentals are completely unrelated to exchange rate fluctuations, but because the relationship is unstable over time and, thus, difficult to capture by Granger causality tests or by forecast comparisons. We also analyze forecasts that exploit the time variation in the parameters and find that, in some cases, they can improve over the random walk.
A Bayesian classifier for photometric redshifts: identification of high-redshift clusters

Photometric redshift classifiers provide a means of estimating galaxy redshifts from observations using a small number of broad-band filters. However, the accuracy with which redshifts can be determined is sensitive to the star formation history of the galaxy, for example the effects of age, metallicity and ongoing star formation. We present a photometric classifier that explicitly takes into account the degeneracies implied by these variations, based on the flexible stellar population synthesis code of Kodama & Arimoto. The situation is encouraging, because many of the variations in stellar populations introduce colour changes that are degenerate. We use a Bayesian inversion scheme to estimate the likely range of redshifts compatible with the observed colours. When applied to existing multiband photometry for Abell 370, most of the cluster members are correctly recovered with little field contamination. The inverter is focused on the recovery of a wide variety of galaxy populations in distant (z∼ 1) clusters from broad-band colours covering the 4000-A break. It is found that this can be achieved with impressive accuracy (|Δ z| < 0.1), allowing detailed investigation into the evolution of cluster galaxies with little selection bias.
Amino Acid Intakes Are Associated With Bone Mineral Density and Prevalence of Low Bone Mass in Women: Evidence From Discordant Monozygotic Twins

Although a higher protein intake, particularly from vegetable sources, has been shown to be associated with higher bone mineral density (BMD) the relative impact of specific amino acids on BMD and risk of osteoporosis remains to be determined. Mechanistic research suggests that a number of specific amino acids, including five nonessential amino acids—alanine, arginine, glutamic acid, glycine, and proline—may play a role in bone health, principally through improved production of insulin and insulin‐like growth factor 1 and the synthesis of collagen and muscle protein. However to date, no previous studies have examined the associations between habitual intake of amino acids and direct measures of BMD and prevalence of osteoporosis or osteopenia, and no studies have examined this relationship in discordant identical twin‐pairs. In these analyses of female monozygotic twin‐pairs discordant for amino acid intake (n = 135), twins with higher intakes of alanine and glycine had significantly higher BMD at the spine than their co‐twins with within‐pair differences in spine‐BMD of 0.012 g/cm2 (SE 0.01; p = 0.039) and 0.014 g/cm2 (SE 0.01; p = 0.026), respectively. Furthermore, in cross‐sectional multivariable analyses of 3160 females aged 18 to 79 years, a higher intake of total protein was significantly associated with higher DXA‐measured BMD at the spine (quartile Q4 to quartile Q1: 0.017 g/cm2, SE 0.01, p = 0.035) and forearm (Q4 to Q1: 0.010 g/cm2, SE 0.003, p = 0.002). Intake of six amino acids (alanine, arginine, glutamic acid, leucine, lysine, and proline) were associated with higher BMD at the spine and forearm with the strongest association observed for leucine (Q4 to Q1: 0.024 g/cm2, SE 0.01, p = 0.007). When intakes were stratified by protein source, vegetable or animal, prevalence of osteoporosis or osteopenia was 13% to 19% lower comparing extreme quartiles of vegetable intake for five amino acids (not glutamic acid or proline). These data provide evidence to suggest that intake of protein and several amino acids, including alanine and glycine, may be beneficial for bone health, independent of genetic background. © 2015 The Authors. Journal of Bone and Mineral Research Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
Depression, Anxiety, and Self-Esteem in Sexually Abused Children

The authors report results of research on a sample of 83 sexually abused children. The girls' measures of depression, anxiety, and self-esteem were significantly different from those of standardization samples. These differences indicated higher levels of depression and anxiety and lower self-esteem. The boys' scores did not differ from norms on these measures. The findings' relevance to symptom development in sexual abuse and practice implications are discussed.
Towards the holy grail: Combining system dynamics and discrete-event simulation in healthcare

The idea of combining discrete-event simulation and system dynamics has been a topic of debate in the operations research community for over a decade. Many authors have considered the potential benefits of such an approach from a methodological or practical standpoint. However, despite numerous examples of models with both discrete and continuous parameters in the computer science and engineering literature, nobody in the OR field has yet succeeded in developing a genuinely hybrid approach which truly integrates the philosophical approach and technical merits of both DES and SD in a single model. In this paper we consider some of the reasons for this and describe two practical healthcare examples of combined DES/SD models, which nevertheless fall short of the “holy grail” which has been so widely discussed in the literature over the past decade.
A UNIFIED MODEL

There are three obvious differences between first and second language learners. First, infants who are learning language are also engaged in learning about how the world works. In contrast, second language learners already have a full understanding of the world and human society. Second, infants are able to rely on a highly malleable brain that has not yet been committed to other tasks (MacWhinney, Feldman, Sacco, & ValdesPerez, 2000). In contrast, second language learners have to deal with a brain that has already been committed in various ways to the task of processing the first language. Third, infants can rely on an intense system of social support from their caregivers (Snow, 1999). In contrast, second language learners are often heavily involved in social and business commitments in their first language that distract them from interactions in the new language. Together, these three differences might suggest that it would make little sense to try to develop a Unified Model of first and second language acquisition. In fact, many researchers have decided that the two processes are so different that they account for them with totally separate theories. For example, Krashen (1994) sees L1 learning as involving “acquisition” and L2 learning as based instead on “learning. ” Others (Bley-Vroman, Felix, & Ioup, 1988; Clahsen & Muysken, 1986) argue that Universal Grammar (UG) is available to children up to some critical age, but not to older learners of L2. Despite these differences, there are good reasons to want to develop a Unified Model. First, many of the tasks faced by L1 and L2 learners are identical. Both groups of learners need to segment speech into words. Both groups need to learn the meanings of these words. Both groups need to figure out the patterns that govern word combination in syntactic constructions. Both groups have to work to interleave their growing lexical and syntactic knowledge to achieve fluency. For both groups, the actual shape of the input language of the community is roughly the same.
Robust Estimation of Google Counts for Social Network Extraction

Various studies within NLP and Semantic Web use the so-called Google count, which is the hit count on a query returned by a search engine (not only Google). However, sometimes the Google count is unreliable, especially when the count is large, or when advanced operators such as OR and NOT are used. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that estimates the Google count robustly. It (i) uses the co-occurrence of terms as evidence to estimate the occurrence of a given word, and (ii) integrates multiple evidence for robust estimation. We evaluated our algorithm for more than 2000 queries on three datasets using Google, Yahoo! and MSN search engine. Our algorithm also provides estimate counts for any classifier that judges a web page as positive or negative. Consequently, we can estimate the number of documents with included references of a particular person (among namesakes) on the entire web.
Real-Time Price Discovery in Global Stock, Bond and Foreign Exchange Markets

Using a unique high-frequency futures dataset, we characterize the response of U.S., German and British stock, bond and foreign exchange markets to real-time U.S. macroeconomic news. We find that news produces conditional mean jumps; hence high-frequency stock, bond and exchange rate dynamics are linked to fundamentals. Equity markets, moreover, react differently to news depending on the stage of the business cycle, which explains the low correlation between stock and bond returns when averaged over the cycle. Hence our results qualify earlier work suggesting that bond markets react most strongly to macroeconomic news; in particular, when conditioning on the state of the economy, the equity and foreign exchange markets appear equally responsive. Finally, we also document important contemporaneous links across all markets and countries, even after controlling for the effects of macroeconomic news.
Induction of a Protective Response in Mice by the Dengue Virus NS3 Protein Using DNA Vaccines

The dengue non-structural 3 (NS3) is a multifunctional protein, containing a serino-protease domain, located at the N-terminal portion, and helicase, NTPase and RTPase domains present in the C-terminal region. This protein is considered the main target for CD4+ and CD8+ T cell responses during dengue infection, which may be involved in protection. However, few studies have been undertaken evaluating the use of this protein as a protective antigen against dengue, as well as other flavivirus. In the present work, we investigate the protective efficacy of DNA vaccines based on the NS3 protein from DENV2. Different recombinant plasmids were constructed, encoding either the full-length NS3 protein or only its functional domains (protease and helicase), fused or not to a signal peptide (t-PA). The recombinant proteins were successfully expressed in transfected BHK-21 cells, and only plasmids encoding the t-PA signal sequence mediated protein secretion. Balb/c mice were immunized with the different DNA vaccines and challenged with a lethal dose of DENV2. Most animals immunized with plasmids encoding the full-length NS3 or the helicase domain survived challenge, regardless of the presence of the t-PA. However, some mice presented clinical signs of infection with high morbidity (hind leg paralysis and hunched posture), mainly in animal groups immunized with the DNA vaccines based on the helicase domain. On the other hand, inoculation with plasmids encoding the protease domain did not induce any protection, since mortality and morbidity rates in these mouse groups were similar to those detected in the control animals. The cellular immune response was analyzed by ELISPOT with a specific-CD8+ T cell NS3 peptide. Results revealed that the DNA vaccines based on the full-length protein induced the production of INF-γ, thus suggesting the involvement of this branch of the immune system in the protection.
Involvement of GABAB receptors in convulsant‐induced epileptiform activity in rat neocortex in vitro

The role of γ‐aminobutyric acid B (GABAB) receptors in the generation and maintenance of bicuculline‐induced epileptiform activity in rat neocortical slices was studied using electrophysiological methods. A block of GABAB receptors in the presence of functional GABAA receptor‐mediated inhibition was not sufficient to induce epileptiform activity. In the presence of the GABAA receptor antagonist bicuculline (10 μm) and at suprathreshold stimulation, the GABAB receptor antagonist CGP 35348 (10–300 μm) significantly potentiated epileptiform activity. With stimulation at threshold intensity, low concentrations of CGP 35348 (10–30 μm) potentiated bicuculline‐induced activity, whereas higher concentrations (100–300 μm) invariably led to a reversible suppression of stimulus‐evoked epileptiform discharges. CGP 35348 also enhanced picrotoxin‐induced epileptiform activity, but at higher concentrations it was considerably less effective in suppressing such epileptiform discharges. The GABA uptake inhibitor nipecotic acid partially mimicked the actions of CGP 35348: with stimulation at threshold intensity, it reversibly suppressed bicuculline‐induced epileptiform field potentials, but it did not influence epileptiform activity induced by picrotoxin. We conclude that a postsynaptic blockade of GABAB receptors induces an amplification of epileptiform activity in neocortical slices disinhibited by GABAA receptor antagonists. An additional blockade of presynaptic GABAB receptors, especially under conditions of weak stimulation of the neurons, reduces the inhibitory auto‐feedback control of GABA release, leading to a displacement of competitive antagonists from the postsynaptic GABAA receptor and hence, to a suppression of epileptiform activity induced by competitive GABAA receptor antagonists.
The orientations of molecular clouds in the outer Galaxy: evidence for the scale of the turbulence driver?

Supernova (SN) explosions inject a considerable amount of energy into the interstellar medium (ISM) in regions with high-to-moderate star formation rates. In order to assess whether the driving of turbulence by supernovae is also important in the outer Galactic disc, where the star formation rates are lower, we study the spatial distribution of molecular cloud (MC) inclinations with respect to the Galactic plane. The latter contains important information on the nature of the mechanism of energy injection into the ISM. We analyse the spatial correlations between the position angles (PAs) of a selected sample of MCs (the largest clouds in the catalogue of the outer Galaxy published by Heyer et al). Our results show that when the PAs of the clouds are all mapped to values into the [0 ◦ ,9 0 ◦ ] interval, there is a significant degree of spatial correlation between the PAs on spatial scales in the range of 100–800 pc. These scales are of the order of the sizes of individual SN shells in low-density environments such as those prevailing in the outer Galaxy and where the metallicity of the ambient gas is of the order of the solar value or smaller. These findings suggest that individual SN explosions, occurring in the outer regions of the Galaxy and in likewise spiral galaxies, albeit at lower rates, continue to play an important role in shaping the structure and dynamics of the ISM in those regions. The SN explosions we postulate here are likely associated with the existence of young stellar clusters in the far outer regions of the Galaxy and the ultraviolet emission and low levels of star formation observed with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite in the outer regions of local galaxies.
The domestic benefits of tropical forests: a critical review.

This review focuses on forests in the humid tropics and on two of their potentially most important benefits. These include hydrological benefits, such as erosion control and regulation of stream flows, and non-timber forest products, such as rubber, rattan, fruits, and nuts. The first benefit is motivational. Host countries capture only a small proportion of the global benefits, which stem from biodiversity conservation. Demonstration of palpable local benefits could help to build support for biodiversity-oriented projects. The second benefit is the magnitude of domestic benefits that could influence project financing. Sufficiently large net domestic benefits could justify financing of a project on narrow economic grounds, with biodiversity conservation as a by-product. Overall, it is noted that the quantifiable benefits of forest preservation in providing hydrological services and non-timber forest products are highly variable. These classes of domestic benefits may in general be smaller than popularly supposed. In view of this, the need for financing conservation from the Global Environmental Facility or other global sources is emphasized rather than placing the burden on domestic resources.