Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparative Analysis of Self-Report and Psychophysiological Measures of Emotion in the Context of Tourism Advertising

This study investigates the influence of emotional responses evoked by destination television advertisements on three common variables of interest when assessing tourism advertising effectiveness: attitude toward the advertisement, postexposure destination attitude and visit intention. In particular, this study used a combination of self-report and psychophysiological measures of emotion and explored the consistency between these two measurement techniques. A total of 101 participants were exposed to 18 existing destination commercials while their real-time psychophysiological responses and self-report data were collected. The results show that the influence of ad-evoked emotions on tourism advertising effectiveness varied according to the way emotion was measured. The effects of pleasure on tourism advertising effectiveness were much weaker when pleasure was measured physiologically than when self-report measures were used. Physiological arousal, however, was not found to be a significant indicator of advertising effectiveness. The results highlight the importance of valid and reliable measurement of emotion and raise concern over the possible overestimation of the relationship between self-reported emotional responses and advertising effectiveness.
Fast target prediction of human reaching motion for cooperative human-robot manipulation tasks using time series classification

Interest in human-robot coexistence, in which humans and robots share a common work volume, is increasing in manufacturing environments. Efficient work coordination requires both awareness of the human pose and a plan of action for both human and robot agents in order to compute robot motion trajectories that synchronize naturally with human motion. In this paper, we present a data-driven approach that synthesizes anticipatory knowledge of both human motions and subsequent action steps in order to predict in real-time the intended target of a human performing a reaching motion. Motion-level anticipatory models are constructed using multiple demonstrations of human reaching motions. We produce a library of motions from human demonstrations, based on a statistical representation of the degrees of freedom of the human arm, using time series analysis, wherein each time step is encoded as a multivariate Gaussian distribution. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach through offline statistical analysis of human motion data. The results indicate a considerable improvement over prior techniques in early prediction, achieving 70% or higher correct classification on average for the first third of the trajectory (<; 500msec). We also indicate proof-of-concept through the demonstration of a human-robot cooperative manipulation task performed with a PR2 robot. Finally, we analyze the quality of task-level anticipatory knowledge required to improve prediction performance early in the human motion trajectory.
Range-Efficient Consistent Sampling and Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Polygons

Locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is a fundamental technique for similarity search and similarity estimation in high-dimensional spaces. The basic idea is that similar objects should produce hash collisions with probability significantly larger than objects with low similarity. We consider LSH for objects that can be represented as point sets in either one or two dimensions. To make the point sets finite size we consider the subset of points on a grid. Directly applying LSH (e.g. min-wise hashing) to these point sets would require time proportional to the number of points. We seek to achieve time that is much lower than direct approaches. Technically, we introduce new primitives for range-efficient consistent sampling (of independent interest), and show how to turn such samples into LSH values. Another application of our technique is a data structure for quickly estimating the size of the intersection or union of a set of preprocessed polygons. Curiously, our consistent sampling method uses transformation to a geometric problem.
Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance of the MHC-SF in the USA

Abstract. This study examines the factor structure of the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) in a sample of 23,674 students at 26 American universities. The measurement invariance of the scale is also examined across gender, nationality, and sexual orientation. Exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are used for data analysis. The results support the three-dimensional factor structure of the scale as well as full or partial measurement invariance across the groups. Results show that Item 13 (related to autonomy) demonstrates differential item functioning across gender.
On the Cross-Country Comparability of Indicators of Socioeconomic Resources in PISA

ABSTRACT Large-scale international assessments rely on indicators of the resources that students report having in their homes to capture the financial capital of their families. The scaling methodology currently used to develop the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) background indices is designed to maximize within-country comparability over time. However, questions remain on the extent to which alternative scaling methodologies can ensure greater cross-country comparability. Establishing indicators of household resources that are comparable both across countries and over time is fundamental to assessing cross-country differences in socioeconomic inequalities in academic achievement. We use multigroup confirmatory factor analysis for categorical variables to examine the measurement equivalence of the household resource factors across the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries that participated in the PISA 2000 and 2012 cycles. We construct a series of alternative measures that use students’ reports on the availability of household resources and compare them to the index of home possessions that is generally used in analyses of PISA data. Our findings show that alternative scaling methodologies can be useful in developing cross-country indicators of socioeconomic status.
Evaluating the Temporal Location of Feedback: Providing Feedback Following Performance vs. Prior to Performance

ABSTRACT In order to make feedback as effective as possible, it is important to understand its function in the three-term contingency (TTC) and the impact of various factors involved in delivering feedback. Timing of feedback is one factor that can affect the impact of feedback on learner’s behavior. An analysis of timing of feeback may help us getting closer to better understanding how feedback functions in the TTC. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of feedback at different temporal locations. Specifically, feedback was provided either immediately (a) after a teaching session or (b) before the following teaching session, on teaching performance of undergraduate psychology students. The results indicated that feedback provided before the teaching session was more effective in improving teaching skills than feedback that was provided after the session. These findings suggest that feedback may function primarily as an antecedent to future performance and not necessarily as a consequence for past performance. However, the behavioral mechanism that explains these results is not yet clear. Future studies should investigate this further by manipulating the content of feedback prior to the teaching performance.
Political conversations on Facebook. Exploring the role of homophily in argumentation and communicative interaction

Research on online political talk has been overwhelmingly influenced by deliberative theory, as a result of the big hopes originally placed on the Internet capacity to revolutionize politics. However, two decades of empirical research point out that these informal communicative interactions hardly resemble deliberative ideals. In this study, we explore if Facebook contributors who share ideological stances are more likely to a) justify their points of view and b) interact with each other. We apply content analysis to a sample of 2,800 comments published on the Facebook walls of the four mayor Spanish political parties during General Election campaign 2015. Findings show that homophily is negatively related to both argumentation and interaction. It is the outsiders who are much more likely to reason their opinions, while it is those who hold neutral views who are more inclined towards interaction [1].
A Behavioual and Brain Science Perspective on Decision Making in Sport

The elite athlete routinely performs impressive cognitive feats. Not only do they undertake complex decision-making seemingly intuitively, they do so under conditions of intense pressure, limited time and restricted resources. Decision-making refers to the cognitive processes that underpin the selection of one course of action from several alternatives (Reason, 1990); it is essential for high-quality performance in sport (Farrow & Raab, 2008; Jordet & Hartman, 2008; Paserman, 2007). Decision-making is the focus of the following thesis. In particular, undertaken in the Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at UCL, this thesis has the translational goal of understanding and increasing insight into the decision-making of elite athletes. It focuses on how psychological knowledge can be of use in the ‘real world’, as well as aiming to learn about behaviour outside of a laboratory; this is undertaken by focusing on two areas. Initially the utility of transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) as a tool for modifying decision-making is explored to assess the potential for use in decision-making training in sport. The thesis then moves on to examining the influence that physical and mental performance pressures have on decision-making across different developmental stages of elite athlete expertise.
Open Access Research Article Comparison and Consolidation of Microarray Data Sets of Human Tissue Expression

article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Human tissue displays a remarkable diversity in structure and function. To understand how such diversity emerges from the same DNA, systematic measurements of gene expression across different tissues in the human body are essential. Several recent studies addressed this formidable task using microarray technologies. These large tissue expression data sets have provided us an important basis for biomedical research. However, it is well known that microarray data can be compromised by high noise level and various experimental artefacts. Critical comparison of different data sets can help to reveal such errors and to avoid pitfalls in their application. Results: We present here the first comparison and integration of four freely available tissue expression data sets generated using three different microarray platforms and containing a total of 377 microarray hybridizations. When assessing the tissue expression of genes, we found that the results considerably depend on the chosen data set. Nevertheless, the comparison also revealed statistically significant similarity of gene expression profiles across different platforms. This enabled us to construct consolidated lists of platform-independent tissue-specific genes using a set of complementary measures. Follow-up analyses showed that results based on consolidated data tend to be more reliable. Conclusions: Our study strongly indicates that the consolidation of the four different tissue expression data sets can increase data quality and can lead to biologically more meaningful results. The provided compendium of platform-independent gene lists should facilitate the identification of novel tissue-specific marker genes. Background Tissue in the human body shows a fascinating variety of structures and functions ranging from simple protection by the epidermis to complex information processing in the cortex. All these different types of tissues have in common that they are highly adapted to their specific task. How such variety can emerge from the same genetic code is not only scientifically an intriguing question, but also of fundamental medical relevance. To address this question, a necessary step is the generation of comprehensive catalogs of gene expression in different tissues. Microarrays have become highly suitable tools for such an ambitious endeavour as they allow the genome-wide measurement of transcription abundance. Most early gene expression studies of human tissues were disease
Options and the Bubble

Many believe that a bubble existed in Internet stocks in the 1999 to 2000 period, and that short-sale restrictions prevented rational investors from driving Internet stock prices to reasonable levels. In the presence of such short-sale constraints, option and stock prices could decouple during a bubble. Using intraday options data from the peak of the Internet bubble, we find almost no evidence that synthetic stock prices diverged from actual stock prices. We also show that the general public could cheaply short synthetically using options. In summary, we find no evidence that short-sale restrictions affected Internet stock prices. Copyright 2006 by The American Finance Association.
Consistency or discrepancy? Rethinking schools from organizational hypocrisy to integrity

Consistency in statements, decisions and practices is highly important for both organization members and the image of an organization. It is expected from organizations, especially from their administrators, to ‘walk the talk’ – in other words, to try to practise what they preach. However, in the process of gaining legitimacy and adapting to the organizational environment, discrepancies and even outright contradictions can arise between statements and real practice, and these paradoxical relations may lead to organizational hypocrisy in educational organizations. One of the mechanisms that eliminate the negative results of organizational hypocrisy in schools is ensuring organizational integrity. However, the number of theoretical and empirical studies on which parameters are affected by organizational hypocrisy, and what kind of outcomes it gives birth to in school contexts, are limited. In view of this, this study aims to evaluate organizational hypocrisy and organizational integrity theoretically, and make some inferences as regards schools.
HOW DOES ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS AFFECT DRINKING OUTCOMES? A GROUNDED THEORY PERSPECTIVE

HOW DOES ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS AFFECT DRINKING OUTCOMES? A GROUNDED THEORY PERSPECTIVE By Bryan R. Boyles, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University Virginia Commonwealth University, 2017 Major Director: Pat Dattalo, Ph.D. Professor School of Social Work The mutual aid of Alcoholics Anonymous helps more people with alcohol-related problems than all forms of clinical treatment combined. Yet, efforts to understand AA’s action have been conducted, almost exclusively, from a clinical perspective. Thus far, the literature representing Alcoholics Anonymous from the perspective of its members is very limited. This study uses qualitative content analysis of the AA literature and a grounded theory approach to AA’s fellowship to provide an insider’s perspective of change processes associated with AA involvement. This understanding of the AA literature posits that Alcoholics Anonymous involvement results in life improvement, changes in spirituality, improved well-being, an acceptance of powerlessness over alcohol and a sense of fellowship. This understanding of AA’s fellowship posits that Alcoholics Anonymous involvement results in increased life meaning, reduced insecurity, loneliness, anxiety and shame.
The Amsterdam Preoperative Anxiety and Information Scale (APAIS) - the first trial of a German version

Objective: Preoperative anxiety influences the result of the treatment in patients. To assess preoperative anxiety the Amsterdam Preoperative Anxiety and Information Scale (APAIS) [1] was developed. The APAIS measures anxiety and the need-for-information with 6 items, with good reliability and validity. This article presents the first test of the German version of this screening instrument. Methods: The German version of the APAIS was tested on 68 patients questioned before surgery on the lower extremities in the Orthopaedic Department of a University Hospital. From 68 patients, 47 (69%) were female and the average age was 55 years. Besides the APAIS, several additional questionnaires with similar or divergent content were administered for testing the convergent and discriminant validity of the APAIS (HADS, SCL-9-K, KASA, COSS, STOA). Results: The two scales anxiety and need-for-information could be replicated by a factor analysis and had high reliability (anxiety: Cronbachs Alpha = 0.92; need-for-information: Cronbachs Alpha = 0.86). As expected the scales of the APAIS correlated highly with different standard questionnaires which measure anxiety (KASA, STOA) and low with questionnaires of divergent contents (HADS depression, COSS). The APAIS-scales are independent of sex, age or previous surgeries. Patients with a higher need-for-information show higher anxiety (r=0.59) prior to surgery. Conclusions: During its first trial the German version of the APAIS proved to be a reliable and valid instrument. Furthermore, it is a good screening instrument to assess preoperative anxiety and need-for-information in clinical practice, especially due to its brevity. In further studies the predictive validity has to be examined in large heterogeneous samples.
Burial Depth and Stolon Internode Length Independently Affect Survival of Small Clonal Fragments

Disturbance can fragment plant clones into different sizes and unstabilize soils to different degrees, so that clonal fragments of different sizes can be buried in soils at different depths. As a short-term storage organ, solon internode may help fragmented clones of stoloniferous plants to withstand deeper burial in soils. We address (1) whether burial in soils decreases survival and growth of small clonal fragments, and (2) whether increasing internode length increases survival and growth of small fragments under burial. We conducted an experiment with the stoloniferous, invasive herb Alternanthera philoxeroides, in which single-node fragments with stolon internode of 0, 2, 4 and 8 cm were buried in soils at 0, 2, 4 and 8 cm depth, respectively. Increasing burial depth significantly reduced survival of the A. philoxeroides plants and increased root to shoot ratio and total stolon length, but did not change growth measures. Increasing internode length significantly increased survival and growth measures, but there was no interaction effect with burial depth on any traits measured. These results indicate that reserves stored in stolon internodes can contribute to the fitness of the A. philoxeroides plants subject to disturbance. Although burial reduced the regeneration capacity of the A. philoxeroides plants, the species may maintain the fitness by changing biomass allocation and stolon length once it survived the burial. Such responses may play an important role for A. philoxeroides in establishment and invasiveness in frequently disturbed habitats.
An Overview of the e-Governance Development in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) Countries: the Case of Russia

Since the foundation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the issue of the modernization, cooperation and promotion the effectiveness of the national economies of its member-states is one of the major priorities of the union. In particular, this aim can be reached including the coordinated policy in the sphere of e-governance development in EAEU member states. However, the matter of the effectiveness of e-governance system development in EAEU still remains debatable. The paper gives an overview of e-governance development in Russia. The attempt to analyze the socio-economic effects of e-governance initiatives in Russia have made.
The growth of structure in the intergalactic medium

ABSTRACT A stochastic adhesion model is introduced, with the purpose of describingthe formation and evolution of mildly nonlinear structures, such as sheets andﬁlaments, in the intergalacticmedium (IGM), after hydrogen reionization. Themodel is based on replacing the overall force acting on the baryon ﬂuid – as itresults from the composition of local gravity, pressure gradients and Hubbledrag – by a mock external force, self-consistently calculated from ﬁrst-orderperturbation theory. A small kinematic viscosity term prevents shell-crossingon small scales (which arises because of the approximate treatment of pressuregradients). The emerging scheme is an extension of the well-known adhesionapproximation for the dark matter dynamics, from which it only diﬀers bythe presence of a small-scale ‘random’ force, characterizing the IGM. Ouralgorithm is the ideal tool to obtain the skeleton of the IGM distribution,which is responsible for the structure observed in the low-column density Lyαforest in the absorption spectra of distant quasars.Keywords: Cosmology:theory–intergalacticmedium –large-scalestructureof universe
Analyzing Organizational Routines in Online Knowledge Collaborations: A Case for Sequence Analysis in CSCW

Research into socio-technical systems like Wikipedia has overlooked important structural patterns in the coordination of distributed work. This paper argues for a conceptual reorientation towards sequences as a fundamental unit of analysis for understanding work routines in online knowledge collaboration. We outline a research agenda for researchers in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) to understand the relationships, patterns, antecedents, and consequences of sequential behavior using methods already developed in fields like bio-informatics. Using a data set of 37,515 revisions from 16,616 unique editors to 96 Wikipedia articles as a case study, we analyze the prevalence and significance of different sequences of editing patterns. We illustrate the mixed method potential of sequence approaches by interpreting the frequent patterns as general classes of behavioral motifs. We conclude by discussing the methodological opportunities for using sequence analysis for expanding existing approaches to analyzing and theorizing about co-production routines in online knowledge collaboration.
Diameter, width, closest line pair, and parametric searching

We apply Megiddo's parametric searching technique to several geometric optimization problems and derive significantly improved solutions for them. We obtain, for any fixed ε>0, anO(n1+ε) algorithm for computing the diameter of a point set in 3-space, anO(8/5+ε) algorithm for computing the width of such a set, and onO(n8/5+ε) algorithm for computing the closest pair in a set ofn lines in space. All these algorithms are deterministic.