Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Accounting Profession as a Career Choice for Tertiary Business Students in Japan-A Factor Analysis

This study aims to investigate the major factors that influence Japanese tertiary business students' vocational choice. A questionnaire-based survey was administered to both accounting and non-accounting students in Japanese tertiary institutions at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The results of two individualized factor analyses indicated significant differences between factors influencing the career profiles of both these groups of students. It further shows that the major influence affecting vocational choice for accounting students was based on intrinsic values. Non-accounting students indicated career prospects as the major contributing factor when choosing a career. These results are very important for accounting educators in Japan as they attempt to address the current unpopularity of the accounting profession.
Peer-assisted learning in school physical education, sport and physical activity programmes: a systematic review

Background: Peer-assisted learning (PAL) is a teaching strategy utilised in both the general classroom and physical education. Through the interaction with same-age or cross-age peers, learning can occur across various domains. Purpose: This review aimed to identify school-based PAL interventions and assess the tutor training provided, as well as the capacity of interventions to influence skill performance, physical activity and physical education participation, health and nutrition behaviours and anthropometric outcomes. Data collection: A systematic review of databases yielded 19 papers reporting PAL in school physical education, sport or physical activity programmes. Results: Only four randomised controlled trials were identified in this review and only two other studies had control groups. Nine of the 19 studies reported significant findings; the implementation of PAL in a range of different physical education and physical activity contexts led to a diverse range of outcomes. Tutor training varied considerably; 13 of the 19 studies provided some training. Conclusions: Despite support for and success of PAL in other subject areas within schools, there have been few interventions implemented and vigorously evaluated within school physical education, sport or physical activity programmes. There is a need for future research to consider the duration and quality of tutor training in addition to measuring outcomes for both the tutee and tutor. Importantly, the adaptability of PAL across a range of settings provides scope for future research to assess its ability to impact on children and adolescents within a range of healthy lifestyle interventions both inside and outside the school environment.
Visual identity: trappings or substance?

Describes the initiation and development of a corporate identity/visual identity programme, using a major UK university as a case study. Concludes that assessing a visual identity can be useful in identifying organizational weaknesses. However, whereas a weak visual identity may be a symptom of corporate malaise, a new visual identity, although powerful, should be used as part of an integrated approach when repositioning an organization.
Biological markers of alcohol consumption in nondrinkers, drinkers, and alcohol-dependent Brazilian patients.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to compare the sensitivity and specificity of some new and traditional biological markers and indicators of health among Brazilian nondrinkers, drinkers, and alcohol-dependent patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS We evaluated 130 nondrinkers, 167 drinkers, and 183 alcohol-dependent drinkers from Brazil who participated in the WHO/ISBRA Study on State and Trait Markers of Alcohol Use and Dependence. A standardized WHO/ISBRA Interview Schedule provided background information on the subjects' characteristics including reported health problems and alcohol consumption. Blood samples were analyzed for aspartate aminotransferase (AST), carbohydrate deficient transferrin (CDT), gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT), blood alcohol levels (BAL), and platelet adenylate cyclase activity (basal levels [AC] and levels after stimulation with Gpp(NH)p, cesium fluoride, and forskolin). RESULTS The alcohol-dependent drinkers presented higher levels of AST, GGT, AC, CDT, and BAL than the nondrinkers and drinkers, whose levels were similar. Sex differences in the sensitivity of CDT and AC were found. The alcohol-dependent women presented a lower prevalence of abnormal values of CDT and Gpp(NH)p-stimulated AC than the alcohol-dependent men, despite the fact that they presented similar alcohol consumption levels. The alcohol-dependent drinkers presented a higher prevalence of clinical disorders than the nondrinkers and drinkers. The drinkers and alcohol-dependent patients presented significantly higher rates of gastritis than the nondrinkers. CONCLUSIONS Sex differences in the sensitivity of CDT and AC suggest that these markers are not as sensitive at detecting excessive alcohol use in women as they are in men. If data from this Brazilian sample are compared with those reported for international samples, relevant differences are detected, which suggests that genetic and cultural differences should be considered in the selection of biological markers of heavy alcohol consumption.
Customers' Behavior Prediction Using Artificial Neural Network

In this paper, customer restaurant preference is predicted based on social media location check-ins. Historical preferences of the customer and the influence of the customer’s social network are used in combination with the customer’s mobility characteristics as inputs to the model. As the popularity of social media increases, more and more customer comments and feedback about products and services are available online. It not only becomes a way of sharing information among friends in the social network but also forms a new type of survey which can be utilized by business companies to improve their existing products, services, and market analysis. Approximately 121,000 foursquare restaurant check-ins in the Greater New York City area are used in this research. Artificial neural networks (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) are developed to predict the customers’ behavior regarding restaurant preferences. ANN provides 93:13% average accuracy across investigated customers, compared to only 54:00% for SVM with a sigmoid kernel function.
LANGUAGE COMPETENCE AND READING STRATEGIES: A COMPARISON OF FIRST‐AND SECOND‐LANGUAGE ORAL READING ERRORS1

The French oral reading errors of two groups of seventh-grade English-speaking students with intermediate and advanced competence in French as a second language were analyzed and compared to the errors of native French-speaking students. It was found that the intermediate students made a significantly lower proportion of deletion and insertion errors than did the advanced and nativespeaker students and a significantly higher proportion of substitution errors that graphically resembled the text than did the native speakers. Also, the intermediate students made a significantly higher proportion of errors that did not conform to the syntactic, semantic, or discourse constraints of the text than did the advanced and native-speaker students. It was concluded that both native French-speaking students and students with advanced competence in French as a second language appeared to use an interactive strategy of drawing on both graphic and contextual information in reading French. In contrast, students with less competence in French did not use contextual information to the same extent and instead employed a more “bottom-up” strategy of relying primarily on graphic information.
Current Research on an Integrative Test of English Grammar

measure an underlying competence in the structure of the language without. involving the examinee in. grammatical terminology and without using discrete-point test items of individual structural patterns? and 2) To what extent do the Egyptian secondary-school leaving examination (a comprehensive achievement test) and the American University in Cairo’s battery of proficiency tests required of applicants for admission correspond in their measurements? An attempt to answer these questions is involved in a correlation . study of the part and whole scores of three tests: the integrative grammar test, the AUC admissions battery (composed of the Michigan tests of English Language Proficiency and Aural Comprehension, plus a multiple-scored test of written composition), and the Egyptian secondary-school leaving examination, known as the Thanawiyya Amma, a serious and massive test that each year seals the career plans of 300,000 Egyptian secondaryschool graduates. ’
Time Demands and Gender Roles: The Case of a Big Four Firm in Mexico

This article studies time demands in a big four firm in Mexico. It does so by examining the way time demands are (re)created by masculinities and how their interplay with societal gender roles shape employees' professional and personal lives. Qualitative interviews with women and men across different hierarchical levels and departments show that long hours are an indicator of commitment and potential for career progression, thus suggesting that accounting firms' organizational culture and accountants' professional identity predominate in different cultural contexts. However, paternalistic masculinity and ‘the father’ figure appear to characterize management control in the Mexican context, in contrast to most previous studies conducted in developed countries. The article demonstrates how paternalistic relations prevent women from complying with time demands, which has important implications for career advancement. Finally, the article demonstrates how time demands perpetuate work–life conflict for all organizational members, albeit in different ways according to the individual's stage in life.
Validación española de una batería de películas para inducir emociones

Spanish validation of an emotion-eliciting set of films. One of the main difficulties in the study of emotion is the induction of a real emotional response by means of artificial techniques. The aim of the current study is to validate the Spanish version of a set of films with the capacity to induce emotions (PIE) under laboratory conditions and to analyze its capacity to provoke differentiated basic emotions. A sample of 127 subjects took part in the study; 57 excerpts of Spanish-dubbed films with capacity in previous studies to induce 7 emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, amusement, tenderness, and neutral emotion were used. Subjective emotional response was measured using the Self-Assessment Manikins and the Discrete Emotions Questionnaire. Films included showed a good capacity to induce positive and negative affects, high levels of emotional activation and variations in the perception of emotional control. They induced basic emotions of amusement and fear in a differentiated way. However, sadness and disgust could not be significantly differentiated from anger; or anger and tenderness from sadness. The PIE could be a useful tool for the experimental research of emotions in Spanish populations.
IMPACT OF BRIEF MEDITATION TRAINING ON STRESS, DISTRESS, AND QUALITY OF LIFE FOR HOMELESS ADULTS

Although the efficacy of meditation-based interventions has been widely studied, research with homeless groups is minimal. Homeless people suffer from increased levels of stress, emotional distress, and negative life events that can present a complicated web of inseparable stressors. Without question, food, shelter, and case management services are the first line of intervention and stabilization. However, mind-body practices such as meditation may have the potential to reduce the negative impacts on stress and quality of life that may accompany housing instability. The objective of the current study was to investigate the impact of brief training in Integrative Restoration Yoga Nidra (iRest), a yoga-based meditation program, on perceived stress, psychological distress, and quality of life in sheltered homeless adults. Self-report measures were collected from 117 meditation group participants and 79 participants who received shelter and services only. Due to significant baseline differences in the treatment and comparison groups, between-group comparisons could not be made. However, an examination of within-group differences suggests that treatment group participants did experience statistically significant improvements after only four
Nonlinear Control of a Variable-Speed Wind Turbine Using a Two-Mass Model

The paper presents a nonlinear approach, using a two-mass model and a wind speed estimator, for variable-speed wind turbine (WT) control. The use of a two-mass model is motivated by the need to deal with flexible modes induced by the low-speed shaft stiffness. The main objective of the proposed controllers is the wind power capture optimization while limiting transient loads on the drive-train components. This paper starts by an adaptation of some existing control strategies. However, their performance are weak, as the dynamics aspects of the wind and aeroturbine are not taken into consideration. In order to bring some improvements, nonlinear static and dynamic state feedback controllers, with a wind speed estimator, are then proposed. Concerning the wind speed estimator, the idea behind this is to exploit the WT dynamics by itself as a measurement device. All these methods have been first tested and validated using an aeroelastic WT simulator. A comparative study between the proposed controllers is performed. The results show better performance for the nonlinear dynamic controller with estimator in comparison with the adapted existing methods.
Students Cognitive Styles and the Need of Visual Control in Animation

Animation and visual presentation in multimedia provide the flexibility to exploit scientific knowledge and students' cognitive styles. The focus of this study is to report the use of two different visual control treatments (self-controlled vs. system-imposed) among students with different cognitive styles (Field Independent and Field Dependent). Eighth-grade students were tested to determine how they learned from different design approaches of instructional materials. The 2 (cognitive style) x 2 (treatment) ANCOVA, controlling for a covariate, prior physics scores, indicates a main significant effect with respect to visual control (p < 0.0005), but an insignificant effect with respect to cognitive style (p > 0.05). The effect of visual control treatment is significant among FD students (p < 0.05) but not FD students (p > 0.05).
Ethnoreligious Politics in France: Jews and Muslims

This article focuses on the relationship between the two major ethnoreligious communities – the Jews and the Muslims – and the state in France, as reflected in lobbying, electoral behaviour, and public policies. It shows how the evolution of that relationship, an aspect of the politics of ethnicity, religion and multiculturalism, has been both a cause and a consequence of modifications in approaches to secularism, communitarianism and affirmative action. Finally, it deals with the question to what extent this development corresponds to a pluralist or corporatist model of politics and argues that changes in the relationship between state and society suggest an evolving accommodationist pattern increasingly similar to that of the United States.
Using Mixed-Method Design and Network Analysis to Measure Development of Interagency Collaboration

In recent years, there has been increasing attention to the importance of interagency collaboration for improving community well-being, environmental and public health, and educational outcomes. This article uses a mixed-methods approach including network analysis to examine the changes in interagency collaboration in one site funded by the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative (SS/HS). Results of the evaluation demonstrated that although intraproject collaboration peaked in the middle of the grant and began to decline during the last year, interagency collaborations continued to grow during the last year of the grant. These results illustrate how network data can easily be collected and used to assess the development of interagency relationships.
Local CTLA4 blockade effectively restrains experimental pancreatic adenocarcinoma growth in vivo

Antibody-mediated blockade of CTLA4 has been shown to be effective in treating a select group of patients with late-stage melanoma. The precise mechanism underlying the clinical activity of CTLA4 immunotherapy is poorly understood, although recent experimental findings indicate that antibody-mediated depletion of regulatory T cells (Tregs) in the tumor microenvironment plays a key role in efficacious antitumor responses. In the current study, we used an experimental model of pancreatic adenocarcinoma to compare the antitumor efficacy of peritumoral low-dose anti-CTLA4 monoclonal antibody (mAb) administration to that of a commonly utilized systemic high-dose anti-CTLA4 regimen. We selected pancreatic adenocarcinoma as it presents a particular challenge to clinicians due to its aggressive behavior, metastatic spread and limited treatment options. Furthermore, Fc gamma receptor (FcγR)-dense myeloid cells commonly infiltrate pancreatic tumors, such that these tumor types exhibit increased susceptibility to CTLA4 antibody-targeted Treg depletion via antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC). Locally administered anti-CTLA4 mAb effectively reduced tumor growth at a low dose and no additional anti-tumor effects were apparent when increasing the dose or number of injections. No significant difference in overall survival was seen when comparing locally administered low-dose with standard systemic high-dose CTLA4 blockade therapy, and both delivery routes led to increased tumor-infiltrating effector T cells and reduced Treg cells. As opposed to low-dose peritumoral treatment, high-dose systemic therapy stimulated the accumulation of Tregs in secondary lymphoid organs, an effect that could potentially counteract the antitumor immunotherapeutic benefit of CTLA4 blockade. Our study confirms previous findings that local administration of low-dose anti-CTLA4 antibody generates sustained antitumor effects and provides rationale to devise ultrasound-guided intratumoral anti-CTLA4 antibody injection regimens to treat patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma and other types of solid tumors. In support, clinical relevancy could include reduced immune-related adverse events by limiting systemic antibody spread to immune cell-dense organs.
Difference in Postural Control during Quiet Standing between Young Children and Adults: Assessment with Center of Mass Acceleration

The development of upright postural control has often been investigated using time series of center of foot pressure (COP), which is proportional to the ankle joint torque (i.e., the motor output of a single joint). However, the center of body mass acceleration (COMacc), which can reflect joint motions throughout the body as well as multi-joint coordination, is useful for the assessment of the postural control strategy at the whole-body level. The purpose of the present study was to investigate children’s postural control during quiet standing by using the COMacc. Ten healthy children and 15 healthy young adults were instructed to stand upright quietly on a force platform with their eyes open or closed. The COMacc as well as the COP in the anterior–posterior direction was obtained from ground reaction force measurement. We found that both the COMacc and COP could clearly distinguish the difference between age groups and visual conditions. We also found that the sway frequency of COMacc in children was higher than that in adults, for which differences in biomechanical and/or neural factors between age groups may be responsible. Our results imply that the COMacc can be an alternative force platform measure for assessing developmental changes in upright postural control.
Postmodern values, dissatisfaction with conventional medicine and popularity of alternative therapies

This article reviews three competing hypotheses that address the reasons people turn to alternative medicine. According to the medical outcome hypothesis, the reason is dissatisfaction with the health outcomes of conventional medicine. According to the medical encounter hypothesis, the reason is dissatisfaction with the doctor-patient interaction patterns. According to the postmodern hypothesis, the reason is the recent emergence of a new value system that is congruent with the philosophical underpinnings of alternative medicine. Multivariate analyses of results based on a random sample of individuals support the medical encounter and postmodern hypothe ses and show that the set of postmodern values, in comparison to dissatisfaction with the medical encounter, is by far a better predictor of attitudes towards alternative medicine. Future research possibilities are discussed.
Fear appeal messages affect accessibility of attitudes toward the threat and adaptive behaviors

Fear appeals have long been used in persuasive messages to motivate people to perform adaptive behaviors. This research explored the influence of a fear appeal message concerning breast cancer on attitude accessibility. Messages advocating the efficacy of breast self‐examinations increased the accessibility of attitudes toward the adaptive behavior. Further, the accessibility of participants' attitudes toward the adaptive behavior predicted behavioral intentions to perform breast self‐examinations. Attitudes toward the threat became less accessible after exposure to a high fear‐arousing message, however. Analyses suggest that defensive reactions to the fear‐inducing message mediate the influence of the message on the accessibility of the attitudes toward breast cancer. Implications of these findings for models of fear appeals are discussed.
Hepatitis C Virus–Related Knowledge and Willingness to Receive Treatment Among Patients on Methadone Maintenance

Objectives: Although persons who inject drugs have high prevalence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, few receive treatment mostly because of lack of knowledge about the infection and its treatment. We assessed the level of HCV-related knowledge and willingness to participate in HCV treatment among methadone-maintained patients. Methods: A 30-item survey covering HCV-related knowledge and willingness to engage in HCV-related education and treatment was developed and completed by 320 methadone-maintained patients. Results: Respondents' mean age was 53 ± 8.7 years, 59.5% were male, 55.1% were African American, and 38.3% were Hispanic. The mean duration of methadone maintenance was 7 ± 6.7 years. In the preceding 6 months, 6.9% of patients reported injection drug use, whereas 37.3% used noninjection drugs. Hepatitis C virus seropositivity was self-reported by 46.3% of patients. The majority of patients (78%) expressed willingness to participate in HCV-related education and to receive HCV treatment. Most patients (54.7%) correctly answered 5 or more of 7 questions assessing HCV knowledge. Hepatitis C virus–seropositive individuals and prior attendees at HCV-related educational activities demonstrated a higher level of HCV-related knowledge (P < 0.001 and P = 0.002, respectively). Younger patients (P = 0.014), those willing to attend an HCV-related educational activity (P < 0.001), and those with higher–HCV-related knowledge (P = 0.029) were more accepting of HCV treatment. Fear of medication-related side effects was the most common reason for treatment avoidance. Conclusions: The majority of patients reported willingness to receive HCV-related education and treatment. Treatment willingness was significantly associated with previous attendance at an HCV educational activity and a higher level of HCV-related knowledge.