Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What Does the “Terrorist” Label Really Do? Measuring and Explaining the Effects of the “Terrorist” and “Islamist” Categories

ABSTRACT Many scholars and practitioners claim that labeling groups or individuals as “terrorists” does not simply describe them but also shapes public attitudes, due to the label's important normative and political charge. Yet is there such a “terrorist label effect”? In view of surprisingly scant evidence, the present article evaluates whether or not the terrorist label—as well as the “Islamist” one—really impacts both the audience's perception of the security environment and its security policy preferences, and if yes, how and why. To do so, the article implements a randomized-controlled vignette experiment where participants (N = 481) first read one out of three press articles, each depicting a street shooting in the exact same way but labeling the author of the violence with a different category (“terrorist”/“shooter”/“Islamist”). Participants were then asked to report on both their perceptions and their policy preferences. This design reveals very strong effects of both the “terrorist” and “Islamist” categories on each dimension. These effects are analyzed through the lenses of social and cognitive psychology, in a way that interrogates the use of the terrorist category in society, the conflation of Islamism with terrorism, and the press and policymakers' lexical choices when reporting on political violence.
CARD9 mediates Dectin-1–induced ERK activation by linking Ras-GRF1 to H-Ras for antifungal immunity

CARD9 is dispensable for NF-κB activation induced by Dectin-1 ligands in mice. However, Dectin-1–induced H-Ras activation is mediated by a complex with CARD9, which leads to ERK activation for host innate immune responses to Candida albicans infection.
An exploration of EFL teachers’ job satisfaction in the light of stress coping strategies and emotional intelligence

The present study sought to explore the relationship between EFL teachers’ job satisfaction, emotional intelligence (EQ), and stress coping strategies. To this end, 188 EFL teachers were selected from private institutes and high schools of Mashhad. The participants were asked to complete three questionnaires: Teaching Satisfaction Scale (TSS), Teacher’s EQ Scale (WLEIS), and Stress Coping Strategy Scale (CISS). WLEIS contained four factors: self-emotion appraisal (SEA), others’ emotion appraisal (OEA), use of emotion (UOE), and regulation of emotion (ROE). The CISS focuses on three major dimensions of coping in response to a stressful situation: Task-oriented, Emotion-oriented, and Avoidance-oriented coping. Task-oriented coping refers to responses directed at either problem resolution or cognitively reframing the meaning of the stressful situation. Emotion-oriented coping refers to responses directed toward oneself rather than the problem at hand. An individual using this coping style may respond to a difficult situation by becoming emotionally distressed or engaging in fantasy activities. Avoidance-oriented coping refers to responses designed to avoid dealing with the stressful situation, such as distracting oneself with other situations (e.g., shopping) or through interacting with other persons. A structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to analyze the data. The results demonstrated that among the coping strategies, task is predicted positively and significantly by job satisfaction and job satisfaction had no role in adopting emotion and avoidance coping strategies. EQ had a positive influence on the adaptation of task strategy, a negative impact on emotion strategy, and no role in avoidance strategy. EQ also predicted job satisfaction positively and significantly. It implies, teachers who had higher levels of EQ were more satisfied with their profession. It was also found that job satisfaction has the highest correlation with UOE followed by SEA. Task had the highest correlation with ROE followed by UOE.
Pricing and Access: Lessons from Randomized Evaluations in Education and Health

This paper surveys evidence from recent randomized evaluations in developing countries on the impact of price on access to health and education. The debate on user fees has been contentious, but until recently much of the evidence was anecdotal. Randomized evaluations across a variety of settings suggest prices have a large impact on take-up of education and health products and services. While the sign of this effect is consistent with standard theories of human capital investment, a more detailed examination of the data suggests that it may be important to go beyond these models. There is some evidence for peer effects, which implies that for some goods the aggregate response to price will exceed the individual response. Time-inconsistent preferences could potentially help explain the apparently disproportionate effect of small short-run costs and benefits on decisions with long-run consequences.
MiR-26b is down-regulated in carcinoma-associated fibroblasts from ER-positive breast cancers leading to enhanced cell migration and invasion

Carcinoma‐associated fibroblasts (CAFs) influence the behaviour of cancer cells but the roles of microRNAs in this interaction are unknown. We report microRNAs that are differentially expressed between breast normal fibroblasts and CAFs of oestrogen receptor‐positive cancers, and explore the influences of one of these, miR‐26b, on breast cancer biology. We identified differentially expressed microRNAs by expression profiling of clinical samples and a tissue culture model: miR‐26b was the most highly deregulated microRNA. Using qPCR, miR‐26b was confirmed as down‐regulated in fibroblasts from 15 of 18 further breast cancers. Next, we examined whether manipulation of miR‐26b expression changed breast fibroblast behaviour. Reduced miR‐26b expression caused fibroblast migration and invasion to increase by up to three‐fold in scratch‐closure and trans‐well assays. Furthermore, in co‐culture with MCF7 breast cancer epithelial cells, fibroblasts with reduced miR‐26b expression enhanced both MCF7 migration in trans‐well assays and MCF7 invasion from three‐dimensional spheroids by up to five‐fold. Mass spectrometry was used to identify expression changes associated with the reduction of miR‐26b expression in fibroblasts. Pathway analyses of differentially expressed proteins revealed that glycolysis/TCA cycle and cytoskeletal regulation by Rho GTPases are downstream of miR‐26b. In addition, three novel miR‐26b targets were identified (TNKS1BP1, CPSF7, COL12A1) and the expression of each in cancer stroma was shown to be significantly associated with breast cancer recurrence. MiR‐26b in breast CAFs is a potent regulator of cancer behaviour in oestrogen receptor‐positive cancers, and we have identified key genes and molecular pathways that act downstream of miR‐26b in CAFs. © 2013 The Authors. Journal of Pathology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
‘Sense of presence’ experiences in bereavement and their relationship to mental health: A critical examination of a continuing controversy

The experience of sensing the presence of the deceased is a common occurrence following bereavement. Although this experience tends to be reported as positive and meaningful by perceivers, for most of the twentieth century it has been described in pathologising terms in the bereavement literature. Recent decades have seen the publication of numerous studies that point to normality of this experience and its potential benefits for the bereaved perceivers' wellbeing. However, there is an ongoing debate within bereavement scholarship regarding the nature and healthiness of this experience. This chapter critically examines the extant literature concerning 'sense of presence' experiences and draws attention to the diversity of definitions and conceptualisations within which this experience can be interpreted. Research from a variety of perspectives, including attachment theory and the continuing bonds perspective, is discussed and emerging evidence is reported which suggests that those who can make sense of their experience within culturally-sanctioned (spiritual) conceptual frameworks enjoy greater benefits as a result. The discussion then focuses on meaning-making concerns with regard to this phenomenon and concludes with relevant practice recommendations.
Motivation to the Past, Present, and Future: Time Orientation and Disorientation before Therapy

Objectives The aim of this research was to confirm the structure of time orientation and affects associated with the past, present, and future and self‐esteem of those beginning therapy and a comparison group. Method Responses from clinical respondents (n = 217; mean age 33-years) and non‐clinical respondent (n = 196; mean age 34-years) were used to analyse the structure of the measures. A matched group method was used to investigate group differences based on clinical status and gender of the respondent. Results The measures of time orientation and measures of affects associated with the past, present, and future were well structured and provide evidence of a balanced view in which an orientation to each time dimension is important. Results showed that the therapeutic group was less future, present, and past oriented. Further, the therapeutic group was consistently and significantly higher on negative affect and lower on positive affect and self‐esteem than the comparison group. The findings are discussed in reference to therapeutic and theoretical implications. Conclusions The concept of time orientation and the associated affects is of substantial interest to therapeutic interventions and the findings provide some evidence of the utility of attending to the strength of orientation to the three time dimensions and the dependency between them over their apparent separateness. The measures have utility in providing insights that inform the focus of therapy.
An efficient bitmap indexing method for similarity search in high dimensional multimedia databases

The paper proposes a new indexing mechanism for similarity search in high-dimensional multimedia database; it quickly filters out irrelevant objects using a bitmap index, in which the characteristic of each object is approximated as a bit-string. The bits in a bitstring that are set to '1' denote the representative dimensions of an object that their attribute values are a relatively larger value than others. Since two objects are dissimilar if their representative dimensions are so much different, the degree of dissimilarity can be computed easily by XORing the bit-strings of two objects and counting the number of '1' s in the resulting bit-string. Experimental results with more than 100,000 images show that a remarkable speed-up can be obtained with the proposed indexing method compared to the VA-file and linear scan method because of the simple XORing operation in the filtering process, although there is some loss in search accuracy
Design, Implementation and Evaluation of SPOCs at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has been offering several face-to-face remedial courses for new students to review or learn concepts and practical skills that they should know before starting their degree program. During 2012 and 2013, our University adopted MOOC-like technologies to support some of these courses so that a blended learning methodology could be applied in a particular educational context, i.e. by using SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses). This paper gathers a list of issues, challenges and solutions when implementing these SPOCs. Based on these challenges and issues, a design process is proposed for the implementation of SPOCs. In addition, an evaluation is presented of the different use of the offered courses based on indicators such as the number of videos accessed, number of exercises accessed, number of videos completed, number of exercises correctly solved or time spent on the platform.
Performance Analysis of the Interrogation-based Failure Detector

In this paper, we analyze the performance of the implementation of the phi failure detector with interrogation-style interaction though many failure detector implementations have been evaluating based on heartbeat interaction. Intuitively, interrogation-based failure detector seems to be imprecise due to the difficulty on the estimation of two-ways transmission delay rather than heartbeat-based implementation, however it has lots of implementation advantages, for example, this style of failure detectors can simply use ICMP standard for their interaction and it is easy to monitor lots of network resources including nodes, routers and switches. We have done the experiment in a LAN and evaluated the behavior of the interrogation-based implementation for showing availability of this type of failure detectors from a practical point of view.
Goodwillie towers and chromatic homotopy: an overview

This paper is based on talks I gave in Nagoya and Kinosaki in August of 2003. I survey, from my own perspective, Goodwillie's work on towers associated to continuous functors between topological model categories, and then include a discussion of applications to periodic homotopy as in my work and the work of Arone-Mahowald.
Which Continuous-Time Model is Most Appropriate for Exchange Rates?

This paper evaluates the most appropriate ways to model diffusion and jump features of high-frequency exchange rates in the presence of intraday periodicity in volatility. We show that periodic volatility distorts the size and power of conventional tests of Brownian motion, jumps and (in)finite activity. We propose a correction for periodicity that restores the properties of the test statistics. Empirically, the most plausible model for 1-min exchange rate data features Brownian motion and both finite activity and infinite activity jumps. Test rejection rates vary over time, however, indicating time variation in the data generating process. We discuss the implications of results for market microstructure and currency option pricing.
Scan Line Based Road Marking Extraction from Mobile LiDAR Point Clouds†

Mobile Mapping Technology (MMT) is one of the most important 3D spatial data acquisition technologies. The state-of-the-art mobile mapping systems, equipped with laser scanners and named Mobile LiDAR Scanning (MLS) systems, have been widely used in a variety of areas, especially in road mapping and road inventory. With the commercialization of Advanced Driving Assistance Systems (ADASs) and self-driving technology, there will be a great demand for lane-level detailed 3D maps, and MLS is the most promising technology to generate such lane-level detailed 3D maps. Road markings and road edges are necessary information in creating such lane-level detailed 3D maps. This paper proposes a scan line based method to extract road markings from mobile LiDAR point clouds in three steps: (1) preprocessing; (2) road points extraction; (3) road markings extraction and refinement. In preprocessing step, the isolated LiDAR points in the air are removed from the LiDAR point clouds and the point clouds are organized into scan lines. In the road points extraction step, seed road points are first extracted by Height Difference (HD) between trajectory data and road surface, then full road points are extracted from the point clouds by moving least squares line fitting. In the road markings extraction and refinement step, the intensity values of road points in a scan line are first smoothed by a dynamic window median filter to suppress intensity noises, then road markings are extracted by Edge Detection and Edge Constraint (EDEC) method, and the Fake Road Marking Points (FRMPs) are eliminated from the detected road markings by segment and dimensionality feature-based refinement. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by three data samples and the experiment results indicate that road points are well extracted from MLS data and road markings are well extracted from road points by the applied method. A quantitative study shows that the proposed method achieves an average completeness, correctness, and F-measure of 0.96, 0.93, and 0.94, respectively. The time complexity analysis shows that the scan line based road markings extraction method proposed in this paper provides a promising alternative for offline road markings extraction from MLS data.
Matching-adjusted indirect comparisons of efficacy of BAY 81-8973 vs two recombinant factor VIII for the prophylactic treatment of severe hemophilia A

Background No head-to-head trials comparing recombinant factor VIII (rFVIII) products currently exist. This was a matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC) study of efficacy of BAY 81-8973 with antihemophilic factor (recombinant) plasma/albumin-free method (rAHF-PFM) and turoctocog alfa for the prophylaxis of severe hemophilia A. Methods A systematic literature review was conducted to identify trials of rAHF-PFM and turoctocog alfa. Comparisons were conducted using BAY 81-8973 individual patient data (IPD) from LEOPOLD trials and published data from rAHF-PFM and turoctocog alfa trials. Differences in outcome reporting were reconciled using transformation of BAY 81-8973 IPD. Patients in pooled LEOPOLD trials were weighted to match baseline characteristics for rAHF-PFM or turoctocog alfa trials using MAICs. After matching, annualized bleed rates (ABRs) were compared using weighted t-tests. Results Two rAHF-PFM trials and one turoctocog alfa trial were identified. In these trials, rFVIIIs were dosed thrice weekly or every other day; in LEOPOLD trials, BAY 81-8973 was dosed twice- or thrice weekly. Three MAICs were conducted because the two rAHF-PFM trials calculated ABRs differently, matching for age, race, and weight (turoctocog alfa only). BAY 81-8973 had similar ABR of all bleeds vs rAHF-PFM (two trials: 4.8 vs 6.3, 1.9 vs 1.8 [square root transform]) and lower ABR of spontaneous bleeds and trauma bleeds (2.6 vs 4.1, 2.1 vs 4.7; both P<0.05). BAY 81-8973 showed lower ABR of all bleeds and spontaneous bleeds vs turoctocog alfa (4.3 vs 6.5, 2.8 vs 4.3; both P<0.05) and similar ABR of trauma bleeds (1.5 vs 1.6). In subgroup analysis, twice-weekly BAY 81-8973 had similar ABRs of all bleeds, spontaneous bleeds, and trauma bleeds compared to rAHF-PFM and turoctocog alfa. Conclusion This indirect comparison found that prophylaxis with BAY 81-8973, even including the lower frequency of two times a week and lower factor VIII consumption, has efficacy comparable to rAHF-PFM and turoctocog alfa, which were dosed thrice weekly or every other day. The use of IPD enabled adjustments for differences in calculation of ABRs and population characteristics between trials.
Scorza quartics of trigonal spin curves and their varieties of power sums

Our fundamental result is the construction of new subvarieties in the varieties of power sums for the Scorza quartic of any general pairs of trigonal curves and non-effective theta characteristics. This is a generalization of Mukai's description of smooth prime Fano threefolds of genus twelve as the varieties of power sums for plane quartics. Among other applications, we give an affirmative answer to the conjecture of Dolgachev and Kanev on the existence of the Scorza quartic for any general pairs of curves and non-effective theta characteristics.
SecSIFT: Privacy-preserving Outsourcing Computation of Feature Extractions Over Encrypted Image Data.

Advances in cloud computing have greatly motivated data owners to outsource their huge amount of personal multimedia data and/or computationally expensive tasks onto the cloud by leveraging its abundant resources for cost saving and flexibility. Despite the tremendous benefits, the outsourced multimedia data and its originated applications may reveal the data owner's private information, such as the personal identity, locations or even financial profiles. This observation has recently aroused new research interest on privacy-preserving computations over outsourced multimedia data. In this paper, we propose an effective and practical privacy-preserving computation outsourcing protocol for the prevailing scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) over massive encrypted image data. We first show that previous solutions to this problem have either efficiency/security or practicality issues, and none can well preserve the important characteristics of the original SIFT in terms of distinctiveness and robustness. We then present a new scheme design that achieves efficiency and security requirements simultaneously with the preservation of its key characteristics, by randomly splitting the original image data, designing two novel efficient protocols for secure multiplication and comparison, and carefully distributing the feature extraction computations onto two independent cloud servers. We both carefully analyze and extensively evaluate the security and effectiveness of our design. The results show that our solution is practically secure, outperforms the state-of-theart, and performs comparably to the original SIFT in terms of various characteristics, including rotation invariance, image scale invariance, robust matching across affine distortion, addition of noise and change in 3D viewpoint and illumination.
Recent developments in evolutionary and genetic algorithms: theory and applications

This paper provides a review on current developments in genetic algorithms. The discussion includes theoretical aspects of genetic algorithms and genetic algorithm applications. Theoretical topics under review include genetic algorithm techniques, genetic operator technique, niching techniques, genetic drift, method of benchmarking genetic algorithm performances, measurement of difficulty level of a test-bed function, population genetics and developmental mechanism in genetic algorithms. Examples of genetic algorithm application in this review are pattern recognition, robotics, artificial life, expert system, electronic circuit design, cellular automata, and biological applications. While the paper covers many works on the theory and application of genetic algorithms, not much details are reported on genetic programming, parallel genetic algorithms, in addition to more advanced techniques e.g. micro-genetic algorithms and multiobjective optimisation.
Iranian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences Effect of Nigella Sativa on Ischemia-reperfusion Induced Rat Kidney Damage

Objective(s): There are a few previously reported studies about the effect of Nigella sativa oil on renal ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI). The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis whether pre-or post-treatment with N. sativa hydroalcoholic extract (NSE) would reduce tissue injury and oxidative damages in a clinically relevant rat model of renal IRI. Materials and Methods: IRI was induced by clamping of bilateral renal arteries for 40 min fallowed by reperfusion for 180 min. NSE was prepared in a Soxhlet extractor and administrated with doses of 150 mg/kg or 300 mg/kg at 1 hr before ischemia induction (P-150 and 300) or at the beginning of reperfusion phase (T-150 and 300), via jugular catheter intravenously. The kidneys were then removed and subjected to biochemical analysis, comet assay or histopathological examination. Results: The kidneys of untreated IRI rats had a higher histopathological score (P<0.001), while in P-150, as well as T-150 and T-300 groups tubular lesions significantly decreased (P<0.001). Pre-and post-treatment with NSE also resulted in a significant decrease in malondialdehyde (MDA) level (P<0.001) and DNA damage (P<0.001) that were increased by renal I/R injury. NSE treatment also significantly restore (P<0.01) the decrease in renal thiol content caused by IRI. Conclusion: The present study shows N. sativa extract has marked protective action against renal IRI, which may be partly due to its antioxidant effects. Nigella sativa on ischemia-reperfusion induced rat kidney damage.