Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What If We Were Texas Sharpshooters? Predictor Reporting Bias in Regression Analysis

The author analyzes reporting biases in regression analyses. The consequences of researchers’ strategy to select significant predictors and omit nonsignificant predictors from regression analyses are examined, focusing on how this strategy—labeled the Texas sharpshooter (TS) approach—creates a predictor reporting bias (PRB) in primary studies and research syntheses. PRB was demonstrated in simulation studies when correlation coefficients from several primary regression studies with an underlying TS approach were aggregated in meta-analyses. Several important findings are noted. First, meta-analytical effect sizes of true effects can be overestimated because smaller, nonsignificant findings are omitted from regression models. Second, suppression effects of correlated predictor variables create biased effect size estimations for variables that are not related to the outcome. Finally, existing small effects are concealed, and between-study heterogeneity can be overestimated. Results show that PRB is contingent on sample size. While PRB is substantial in studies with small sample sizes (N < 100), it is negligible when large sample sizes (N > 500) are analyzed. Preconditions and remedies for reporting biases in regression analyses are discussed.
An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory

Notes on the Contributors - Introduction R.Harker, C.Mahar & C.Wilkes - The Basic Theoretical Position C.Mahar, R.Harker & C.Wilkes - Pierre Bourdieu: An Intellectual Project C.Mahar - Pierre Bourdieu and Ethnography: Reflexivity, Politics and Praxis H.B rnard - Bourdieu and Education R.Harker - Class, Dispositions and Bourdieu C.Wilkes - Making Distinctions: An Outline of Bourdieu's Sociology of Art J.Codd - Language, Truth, and Power: Bourdieu's Ministerium I.Snook - Bourdieu on Bourdieu: Learning the Lesson of the Le on I.Duncan - Conclusion: Critique: Friday Morning Group - Bibliography - Index
Amyloid Beta1-40-Induced Astrogliosis and the Effect of Genistein Treatment in Rat: A Three-Dimensional Confocal Morphometric and Proteomic Study

Astrocytes are highly involved in regulation and homeostasis of the extracellular environment in the healthy brain. In pathological conditions, these cells play a major role in the inflammatory response seen in CNS tissues, which is called reactive astrogliosis and includes hypertrophy and proliferation of astrocytes. Here, we performed 3D confocal microscopy to evaluate the morphological response of reactive astrocytes positive for glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) in rats, to the presence of Aβ1–40 in the rat brain before and after treatment with genistein. In 50 astrocytes per animal, we measured the volume and surface area for the nucleus, cell body, the entire cell, the tissue covered by single astrocytes and quantified the number and length of branches, the density of the astrocytes and the intensity of GFAP immunoreactivity. Injecting Aβ1–40 into the brain of rats caused astrogliosis indicated by increased values for all measured parameters. Mass spectrometric analysis of hippocampal tissue in Aβ1–40-injected brain showed decreased amounts of tubulins, enolases and myelin basic protein, and increased amounts of dihydropyrimidinase-related protein 2. In Aβ1–40-injected rats pretreated with genistein, GFAP intensity was decreased to the sham-operated group level, and Aβ1–40-induced astrogliosis was significantly ameliorated.
Education Participation Scale Factor Structure for Older Adults

Eighty-four older adults who had retired from the workforce and were enrolled in Vancouver adult education programs completed a short form of the Education Participation Scale (E.P.S.), from which items known to be job-related had been deleted. The new version of the E.P.S. was factor analyzed to examine the extent to which previously identified factors would re-emerge. The E.P.S. clustered into four independent factors: Escape/Stimulation, Social Welfare, Social Contact and Cognitive Interest. The extent to which the emergent factors were suitable for use with older adults was determined through a concurrent validation process. E.P.S. fac tors were correlated with scores on a Social Participation Scale, an Adjust ment to Later Life Scale, and a Life Satisfaction Index. Three factors were significantly correlated with one or more of these measures. The psychological foundations of the Social Contact factor remained as elusive with this group of older adults as they had in previous studies involving younger participants. The subjects were most "motivated" by Cognitive In terest and Social Contact. Escape/Stimulation was a very weak "motivator. "
Alpha-Tomatine Attenuation of In Vivo Growth of Subcutaneous and Orthotopic Xenograft Tumors of Human Prostate Carcinoma PC-3 Cells Is Accompanied by Inactivation of Nuclear Factor-Kappa B Signaling

Background Nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) plays a role in prostate cancer and agents that suppress its activation may inhibit development or progression of this malignancy. Alpha (α)-tomatine is the major saponin present in tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) and we have previously reported that it suppresses tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α)-induced nuclear translocation of nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) in androgen-independent prostate cancer PC-3 cells and also potently induces apoptosis of these cells. However, the precise mechanism by which α-tomatine suppresses NF-κB nuclear translocation is yet to be elucidated and the anti-tumor activity of this agent in vivo has not been examined. Methodology/ Principal Findings In the present study we show that suppression of NF-κB activation by α-tomatine occurs through inhibition of I kappa B alpha (IκBα) kinase activity, leading to sequential suppression of IκBα phosphorylation, IκBα degradation, NF-κB/p65 phosphorylation, and NF-κB p50/p65 nuclear translocation. Consistent with its ability to induce apoptosis, α-tomatine reduced TNF-α induced activation of the pro-survival mediator Akt and its inhibition of NF-κB activation was accompanied by significant reduction in the expression of NF-κB-dependent anti-apoptotic (c-IAP1, c-IAP2, Bcl-2, Bcl-xL, XIAP and survivin) proteins. We also evaluated the antitumor activity of α-tomatine against PC-3 cell tumors grown subcutaneously and orthotopically in mice. Our data indicate that intraperitoneal administration of α-tomatine significantly attenuates the growth of PC-3 cell tumors grown at both sites. Analysis of tumor material indicates that the tumor suppressing effects of α-tomatine were accompanied by increased apoptosis and lower proliferation of tumor cells as well as reduced nuclear translocation of the p50 and p65 components of NF-κB. Conclusion/ Significance Our study provides first evidence for in vivo antitumor efficacy of α-tomatine against the human androgen-independent prostate cancer. The potential usefulness of α-tomatine in prostate cancer prevention and therapy requires further investigation.
Noise Removal From Hyperspectral Images by Multidimensional Filtering

A generalized multidimensional Wiener filter for denoising is adapted to hyperspectral images (HSIs). Commonly, multidimensional data filtering is based on data vectorization or matricization. Few new approaches have been proposed to deal with multidimensional data. Multidimensional Wiener filtering (MWF) is one of these techniques. It considers a multidimensional data set as a third-order tensor. It also relies on the separability between a signal subspace and a noise subspace. Using multilinear algebra, MWF needs to flatten the tensor. However, flattening is always orthogonally performed, which may not be adapted to data. In fact, as a Tucker-based filtering, MWF only considers the useful signal subspace. When the signal subspace and the noise subspace are very close, it is difficult to extract all the useful information. This may lead to artifacts and loss of spatial resolution in the restored HSI. Our proposed method estimates the relevant directions of tensor flattening that may not be parallel either to rows or columns. When rearranging data so that flattening can be performed in the estimated directions, the signal subspace dimension is reduced, and the signal-to-noise ratio is improved. We adapt the bidimensional straight-line detection algorithm that estimates the HSI main directions, which are used to flatten the HSI tensor. We also generalize the quadtree partitioning to tensors in order to adapt the filtering to the image discontinuities. Comparative studies with MWF, wavelet thresholding, and channel-by-channel Wiener filtering show that our algorithm provides better performance while restoring impaired HYDICE HSIs.
The Use of Persian in the EFL Classroom–The Case of English Teaching and Learning at Pre-university Level in Iran

Inspired by the rise of Communicative Language Teaching, some scholars have vehemently rejected any use of L1 in L2 learning classes (e.g., Atkinson, 1987) while others have advocated the use of L1 as an efficient tool to facilitate communication (e.g., Nation, 2003). However, caution has been raised against the excessive use of L1 (Nation, 2001). This study was conducted to observe classroom dynamics in terms of the quantity of use of L1 in two randomly-selected pre-university English classes in Ahvaz, Iran. The objective was to seek both students and teachers’ perceptions and attitudes towards the use of L1 in L2 classes. The classes were observed and video-taped for 6 sessions and the teachers and four high-achieving/low-achieving students were interviewed. The findings showed that an excessive use of Persian could have a de-motivating effect on students. Hence, the interviewed students voiced dissatisfaction with the untimely use and domination of L1 in L2 classes.
Early educational provision – emphasised in education policy reforms in Norway? An analysis of education policy documents

The article analyses how the intentions of early provision in Norwegian schools have been expressed in the education policy reforms in Norway from the 1970s to the present day. The first area deals with the intentions that most explicitly cover early provision; prevention, early detection and intervention. The second area of analysis relates to the early provision intentions with an emphasis on the correlation between individual and environmental factors seen in light of differentiation and disability. The third area examines how significance is attached to pupils’ social background with regard to early provision in learning in schools. Finally, consideration is given to the relationship between early provision intentions and efforts to prevent pupils dropping out of upper secondary education. The analysis also shows that the policy guidelines on early provision for schools and teachers have been weak and unclear. This is due to the fact that the early provision intentions have primarily been expressed in reports to the Storting, and rarely given any kind of focus in national curricula.
When Do Elections Encourage Ideological Rigidity?

Elected officials are commonly accused of being ideologically rigid, or failing to alter their positions in response to relevant policy information. We examine this phenomenon with a theory in which politicians have private information about their ideological leanings and expected policy consequences. The theory shows that in many circumstances the informational differences create a context in which elections induce ideological rigidity. Correspondingly, elections often fail to provide incentives for information-based moderation, in which both left- and right-leaning politicians become more likely to use policy information. These seemingly perverse incentives occur because politicians wish to signal that they share voters' leanings; indeed, the motivation to signal preference similarity can induce rigidity even when voters want politicians to be responsive to new information. We show that such incentives for rigidity are greater when voters have less information about policy and politicians' preferences, and discuss possible tests of these predictions.
Understanding the Human Aspects of Flexible Manufacturing Systems through Management Development

Empirically examines the relative importance of technical and organizational factors in the implementation of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS). Identifies a list of eight technical and organizational factors. Describes a stepwise regression analysis which was performed with the level of perceived success of FMS implementation as the dependent variable. All organizational and technical factors were used as explanatory variables. In the stepwise regression analysis, three of the five organizational factors (i.e. team approach, employee commitment and top management involvement) entered the model, suggesting that they are significant factors to successful FMS implementation. Based on the results of the statistical analysis, three focus groups were further organized to develop a framework for an effective training and management development, to help managers better understand the scope of both the problems and opportunities associated with the human issues which arise while firms are undergoing technologi.
Disentangling Space and Time in Video with Hierarchical Variational Auto-encoders

There are many forms of feature information present in video data. Principle among them are object identity information which is largely static across multiple video frames, and object pose and style information which continuously transforms from frame to frame. Most existing models confound these two types of representation by mapping them to a shared feature space. In this paper we propose a probabilistic approach for learning separable representations of object identity and pose information using unsupervised video data. Our approach leverages a deep generative model with a factored prior distribution that encodes properties of temporal invariances in the hidden feature set. Learning is achieved via variational inference. We present results of learning identity and pose information on a dataset of moving characters as well as a dataset of rotating 3D objects. Our experimental results demonstrate our model's success in factoring its representation, and demonstrate that the model achieves improved performance in transfer learning tasks.
Changes of some Health Indicators in Patients with Type 2 Diabetes: A Prospective Study in three Community Pharmacies in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Aim: The study aimed to examine changes in some health indicators in people with type 2 diabetes mellitus, namely: reported self-care activity, health related quality of life, and patient opinion of the services provided by three community pharmacies in Sharjah, UAE. Method: A group of patients was followed over 24 months. Patients under investigation received reminders packages during the first three months of the study. No reminders were sent after 3 months after the study was underway. Repeated measures ANOVA were used to test differences between means over different periods. Results: All patients included in this study were found to have poor diet and exercise behavior at baseline. Three months into the study, more than 27% of the patients had acceptable diet, exercise, foot care and self-testing behavior. However, evaluation at six months and 24-months show that mean scores had almost returned to baseline levels. There were significant differences between the mean values of initial (baseline data) and final (at the end of the study) scores for general health (5.86, p=0.001), vitality (5.25, p<0.001), and role physical scales (3.81, p=0.02). There was a significant (p < 0.001) 25% increase in the patients’ perception of the ability of the pharmacist to assist in decreasing blood glucose level. Conclusion: Ongoing reminder packages are needed for continued progress in self-care activities and for achieving lasting changes in the behavior. Implementation of such a strategy through community pharmacies could help to improve patients’ views of the quality of services received from these pharmacies and patient’s quality of life, which should improve patient’s drug therapy and reduce complications of diabetes.
Personality Measures in Personnel Selection: Some New Contributions

With the increasing use of personality, several measurement issues have been raised. The papers included in the special section of this journal, across three issues, address some of these concerns. In this post-script, we summarize some of the major themes and conclusions that appear across papers published in the special issue. Questions around the magnitudes of validity coefficients associated with personality measures, the efforts to enhance the usefulness of personality assessments, the strategies on administering, scoring and analyzing personality tests, etc., are addressed. Promising directions for future research are delineated.
A comparative study of approaches to studying in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom

Background. The study was conducted in the context of a number of comparative studies into student approaches to studying, particularly in an Asian context, and used the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory (RASI). Aims. (i) Explore the cross cultural validity of the RASI; (ii) compare the approaches to studying of Hong Kong and UK students; (iii) examine the predictive validity of the RASI; (iv) investigate the relationships between age, gender and approach. Samples. The samples consisted of undergraduates at two institutions in Hong Kong (N = 183) and the UK (N = 225) following business studies and related degree programmes. Method. The RASI was administered in the course of a study skills workshop in which co-operation was voluntary. Learning performance data from summative and formative assessments were used to examine the predictive validity of the RASI. Results. Principal components analysis was generally successful in reconstructing the three RASI scales; however the ‘relying on memorising’ subscale loaded ambiguously. The RASI failed to predict any aspect of learning performance for the Hong Kong sample, whilst for the UK sample there were some low correlations. An interaction of age and gender in their effect upon deep and strategic approaches was observed for the Hong Kong sample. Conclusions. (i) The conception of ‘Asian learners as rote learners' is not supported; (ii) approaches to studying should not be seen in isolation from contextual factors, particularly the demands of assessment regimes; (iii) conceptualisations of memorisation require further theoretical and empirical elaboration.
Music genre preference and tempo alter alpha and beta waves in human non-musicians

This study examined the effects of music genre and tempo on brain activation patterns in 10 nonmusicians. Two genres (rock and jazz) and three tempos (slowed, medium/normal, and quickened) were examined using EEG recording and analyzed through Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis. When participants listened to their preferred genre, an increase in alpha wave amplitude was observed. Alpha waves were not significantly affected by tempo. Beta wave amplitude increased significantly as the tempo increased. Genre had no effect on beta waves. The findings of this study indicate that genre preference and artificially modified tempo do affect alpha and beta wave activation in non-musicians listening to preselected songs.
Manifestations of Levels of Functioning in Grieving Families

This article describes processes and patterns that are characteristic of levels of functioning in family systems where a child has died of cancer from two to nine years earlier. A beginning classification system is developed from Crosby and Jose's (1983) description of elements of functional and dysfunctional coping in families following a death. The analysis is based on 111 families in six states and one Canadian province. Validity is demonstrated with one subset of this sample.
Smart antennas for combined DOA and joint channel estimation in time-slotted CDMA mobile radio systems with joint detection

In cellular mobile radio systems, the directional inhomogeneity of the mobile radio channel can be exploited by smart antennas to increase the spectral efficiency. In this paper, a novel smart antenna concept applying receiver antenna diversity at the uplink receiver is investigated for a time-slotted code-division multiple-access (CDMA) mobile radio air interface termed time-division CDMA (TD-CDMA), which has been selected by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) in January 1998 to form part of the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) air interface standard. First, a combined direction-of-arrival (DOA) and joint channel estimation scheme is presented, which is based on DOA estimation using the Unitary ESPRIT algorithm and maximum likelihood estimation of the channel impulse responses associated with the estimated DOA's, which can also be used as an input for advanced mobile positioning schemes in UMTS. The performance of the combined DOA and joint channel estimation is compared with the conventional channel estimation through simulations in rural and urban propagation environments. Moreover, a novel joint data detection scheme is considered, which explicitly takes into account the signal DOA's and the associated channel impulse responses. The link level performance of a TD-CDMA mobile radio system using these novel schemes is evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations of data transmission, and average bit error rates (BER's) are determined for rural and urban propagation environments. The simulation results indicate that, depending on the propagation environment, the exploitation of the knowledge of the directional inhomogeneity of the mobile radio channel can lead to considerable system performance enhancements.
Action simulation: time course and representational mechanisms

The notion of action simulation refers to the ability to re-enact foreign actions (i.e., actions observed in other individuals). Simulating others' actions implies a mirroring of their activities, based on one's own sensorimotor competencies. Here, we discuss theoretical and experimental approaches to action simulation and the study of its representational underpinnings. One focus of our discussion is on the timing of internal simulation and its relation to the timing of external action, and a paradigm that requires participants to predict the future course of actions that are temporarily occluded from view. We address transitions between perceptual mechanisms (referring to action representation before and after occlusion) and simulation mechanisms (referring to action representation during occlusion). Findings suggest that action simulation runs in real-time; acting on newly created action representations rather than relying on continuous visual extrapolations. A further focus of our discussion pertains to the functional characteristics of the mechanisms involved in predicting other people's actions. We propose that two processes are engaged, dynamic updating and static matching, which may draw on both semantic and motor information. In a concluding section, we discuss these findings in the context of broader theoretical issues related to action and event representation, arguing that a detailed functional analysis of action simulation in cognitive, neural, and computational terms may help to further advance our understanding of action cognition and motor control.
Study of the Effects of Atmospheric Pressure in the Time Series of Muon Detector Using the Method of Spectral Analysis

This paper presented a study of the effects of atmospheric pressure in the time series of muon detector using the method of spectral analysis of iterative regression. In which it observed that the periods of 4.8, 5.7, 7.0, 8.7, 10.7, 14.1, 16.2, 21.0, 31.2 and 356.7 days present in the amplitude spectrum of atmospheric pressure are also present in the amplitude spectra of muons data. Also it observed that the standardization of muons data to eliminate the effects of atmospheric pressure is efficient for periods under 7 days.