Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Generalised scepticism: how people navigate news on social media

ABSTRACT Social media is an increasingly widely used and important source of news. News on social media is ‘selected’ by a variety of actors, including the editors and journalists that produce the content, and the algorithms developed by technology companies to make automatic display decisions based on users’ past behaviour and the actions of their friends. We analyse how people navigate news on social media, and focus on their perception of the different kinds of news selection involved. The analysis uses a mixed-methods design based on focus group material and survey data from Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across all four countries, with their different political and media systems, we find (i) that the majority do not understand exactly how the information they receive is filtered by algorithms, but they do not uncritically accept it either, because they are sceptical of all forms of selection ‒ including that performed by editors and journalists, (ii) that approval for algorithmic selection is stronger amongst younger people, and (iii) that those with a high level of interest in ‘soft’ news topics (and low interest in ‘hard’ news topics) are more likely to approve of news algorithmically selected on the basis of what their friends have consumed. We argue that the way in which most people navigate news on social media is thus based on a ‘generalised scepticism’ where people question all kinds of selection.
CPR - curved planar reformation

Visualization of tubular structures such as blood vessels is an important topic in medical imaging. One way to display tubular structures for diagnostic purposes is to generate longitudinal cross-sections in order to show their lumen, wall, and surrounding tissue in a curved plane. This process is called curved planar reformation (CPR). We present three different methods to generate CPR images. A tube-phantom was scanned with computed tomography (CT) to illustrate the properties of the different CPR methods. Furthermore we introduce enhancements to these methods: thick-CPR, rotating-CPR and multi-path-CPR.
Deuterium at high redshift: Primordial or evolved?

On the basis of arguments from galactic chemical evolution we suggest that the recent observations of D=H vs. metallicity in several high redshift absorbers are best understood if the primordial D value is in the range DP=H 2 310 5 . This range points to a rather high baryonic density (Bh 2 =0 :019 0:026) compatible to the one obtained by recent estimates based on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy measurements. Slightly higher values (D=H 4 10 5 ) are found in Lyman limit systems. Such values are still compatible with CMB estimates but, if taken at face value, suggest a trend of decreasing D abundance with metallicity. We argue that special assumptions, like dierential enrichment, are required to explain the data in that case. A clear test of such a dierential enrichment would be an excess of products of low mass stars like C and/or N in those systems, but currently available data of N/Si in DLAs do not favour such a \non-standard" scenario.
Differential Expression of Full-length Telomerase Reverse Transcriptase mRNA and Telomerase Activity between Normal and Malignant Renal Tissues

Activation of telomerase, a key event during immortalization and malignant transformation, requires expression of the telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT). Consistently, lack of telomerase activity and hTERT expression occurs in most normal human somatic cells. However, it has been observed that both normal and cancerous renal tissues express hTERT whereas only the latter exhibits telomerase activity. The mechanism underlying the dissociation between hTERT expression and telomerase activity is unclear. In the present study, we examined telomerase activity and alternative splicing of hTERT transcripts in renal cell carcinoma (RCC) specimens and adjacent normal tissues from 33 patients with RCC. Telomerase activity was detectable in 27 of 33 (82%) RCC samples but none in their normal counterparts. Thirty-two of 33 tumors expressed overall hTERT mRNA and 27 of them contained full-length hTERT transcripts, all with telomerase activity. Although 42% (14 of 33) of normal renal samples expressed hTERT mRNA, none of them had full-length hTERT transcripts, coinciding with lack of telomerase activity. The presence of full-length hTERT mRNA and telomerase activity was significantly associated with c-MYC induction. In tumors, absence of full-length hTERT mRNA or telomerase activity defines a subgroup of nonmetastatic, early-stage RCCs. Taken together, telomerase repression in normal renal tissues is attributed to the absence of full-length hTERT transcripts, whereas telomerase activation is achieved via induction of or switch to expression of full-length hTERT mRNA during the oncogenic process of kidneys, and associated with aggressive RCCs.
The Influence of Individual and Team Cognitive Ability on Operators’ Task and Safety Performance: A Multilevel Field Study in Nuclear Power Plants

While much research has investigated the predictors of operators’ performance such as personality, attitudes and motivation in high-risk industries, its cognitive antecedents and boundary conditions have not been fully investigated. Based on a multilevel investigation of 312 nuclear power plant main control room operators from 50 shift teams, the present study investigated how general mental ability (GMA) at both individual and team level can influence task and safety performance. At the individual level, operators’ GMA was predictive of their task and safety performance and this trend became more significant as they accumulated more experience. At the team level, we found team GMA had positive influences on all three performance criteria. However, we also found a “big-fish-little-pond” effect insofar as team GMA had a relatively smaller effect and inhibited the contribution of individual GMA to workers’ extra-role behaviors (safety participation) compared to its clear beneficial influence on in-role behaviors (task performance and safety compliance). The possible mechanisms related to learning and social comparison processes are discussed.
Psychological Flexibility at Work and Employees' Proactive Work Behaviour: Cross‐Level Moderating Role of Leader Need for Structure

How to promote employees to be proactive behaviourally is a significant issue in the literature because it would benefit organisations in several ways. Drawing on the acceptance and commitment model, we proposed a new antecedent, psychological flexibility that might contribute to employees proactive work behaviour. Furthermore, we investigated how the contextual role of supervisor need for structure exhibits a cross-level moderating effect on the relationship between employee psychological flexibility at work and proactive work behaviour based on interactionism. Data from 241 full-time employees and their corresponding 45 managers indicated that employee psychological flexibility was positively associated with proactive work behaviour. More importantly, the supervisor need for structure played a moderating role, suggesting that employees would demonstrate greater proactive work behaviour especially when the supervisors have a high need for structure. Implications for psychological flexibility, proactivity, and personsituation interactional research are discussed.
Multidimensional Models of Social Perception, Cognition, and Behavior

A common assumption of social psychological theo ries is that interpersonal behavior is mediated by struc tured cognitive representations of self and others, in teraction episodes, interpersonal roles and relation ships, group goals and tasks, as well as more general social environments and situations. A second basic theoretical assumption is that both individual adjust ment and group effectiveness depend on some degree of consensus and stability in conceptions of these do mains; thus, investigation of communalities and differ ences in perception and structuring of social stimuli is an important prerequisite for prediction of both indi vidual differences and intraindividual consistency in social behavior. The present paper reviews theoretical, empirical and methodological work that is relevant to these issues, with an emphasis on research that has employed mul tidimensional scaling, clustering techniques, and re lated multivariate methods to investigate problems in social cognition. Work in three major areas is re viewed : (1) interpersonal perception and attraction in intact groups; (2) perception of political and fictional figures; and (3) perception of social roles, relation ships, and situations. For each area, one or more ex emplary studies are discussed, related work is cited, and relevant theoretical and methodological issues are raised.
Nest-site preference and maternal effects on offspring growth

Maternal preferences for oviposition sites are assumed to be adaptive, but offspring fitness is not always higher at preferred sites and, thus, further study of the selection pressures that influence oviposition behavior is warranted. Among birds, predation is regarded as the primary agent of selection on nest-site microhabitat preferences, but alternatives are rarely considered. We tested the hypothesis that avian nest-site preferences are an adaptive response to fitness costs imposed by variation in nest-site microclimate. We documented that Chestnut-collared Longspurs (Calcarius ornatus) strongly preferred to orient nests towards the southeast and showed that this preference influenced microclimate: nests facing southeast had the highest midday temperatures. Yet, preferences were not adaptive because nestlings in nests with the preferred orientation gained mass at a slower rate, had retarded skeletal growth, and reached a smaller final size. We experimentally tested this result by altering orientation of nests and confirmed, for the first time, that variation in nestling growth was causally linked to variation in nest microclimate arising from nest-orientation preferences. Adults responded to the high temperatures at preferred southeast-facing nests by spending more time shading young from the sun, apparently attempting to ameliorate heat costs. This response, however, resulted in parents spending less time feeding young, potentially explaining slower growth in these nests. Direct effects of higher temperatures may also play a role in slower growth. Although we lack an explanation for this apparently maladaptive preference, these results demonstrate that nest-site choices of birds can yield fitness costs imposed by variation in nest microclimate. Copyright 2004.
Electrochemotherapy with bleomycin induces hallmarks of immunogenic cell death in murine colon cancer cells

Electrochemotherapy (ECT) is a local cancer treatment that has been used over the course of more than 2 decades for the removal of cutaneous and subcutaneous tumors. Several lines of evidence support the premise that the immune system is an important factor underlying anticancer treatment efficacy, potentially including patient responses to ECT. The concept of immunogenic cell death (ICD) arose a few years ago, stating that some cancer treatments generate danger-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) that trigger an adaptive immune response against tumors. Hence, dying cancer cells behave as a therapeutic vaccine, eliciting a cytotoxic immune response against surviving malignant cells. In our study, we sought to evaluate the ability of ECT to generate cancer cell death encompassing the immunostimulatory characteristics of ICD. To this end, we assayed CT26 murine colon cancer cells in vitro in response to either electric pulses (EPs) application only or in combination with the anticancer drug bleomycin (that is ECT) by quantification of calreticulin (CRT) membrane externalization, as well as the liberation of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1) protein. We show here that cell permeabilizing yet non-lethal electric pulses induce CRT exposure on the cell surface of EP-only treated cancer cells, as well as ATP release. However, the association of electric pulses along with the chemotherapeutic agent bleomycin was mandatory for HMGB1 release coincident with regimen-induced cell death. These data obtained in vitro were then substantiated by vaccination protocols performed in immunocompetent mice, showing that the injection of dying ECT-treated cells elicits an antitumor immune response that prevents the growth of a subsequent administration of viable cancer cells. We also confirmed previous results showing ECT treatment is much more efficient in immunocompetent animals than in immunodeficient ones, causing complete regressions in the former but not in the latter. This supports a central role for immunity in this beneficial outcome. In conclusion, we show that ECT not only possesses an intrinsic cytotoxic property toward cancer cells but also generates a systemic anticancer immune response via the activation of ICD. Hence, ECT may represent an interesting approach to treat solid tumors while preventing recurrence and metastasis, possibly in combination with immunostimulating agents.
Security Effectiveness and a Hardware Firewall for MPSoCs

There is a constant increase in the interest shown for trusted computing in the embedded domain. In an MPSoC each processing element such as a CPU could request accessing any physical resource of the device such as a memory or an I/O component. Along with normal requests, malevolent ones could occur produced by malware applications or processes running in one or more CPUs. A protection mechanism is required to prevent injection of malicious data across the device, e.g. Unsafe data written by a CPU into a memory address, which are read later by another CPU. A considerable amount of research has been devoted in security for MPSoCs, but limited work exists in performing protection at the source instead of the target, thus cutting-off malicious content at an early stage prior to entering the on-chip network. In the present work we focus on the side of the CPU connected to the SoC network. We are envisioning a self-contained NoC firewall, which by checking the physical address of a request to a memory-mapped device against a set of rules, rejects untrusted CPU requests to the on-chip memory, thus protecting all legitimate applications running in a shared-memory SoC. To sustain high-performance we implemented the firewall in hardware, while rule-checking is performed at segment-level based on deny rules. To evaluate the impact of security mechanisms we developed a novel framework based on gem5, coupling ARM technology and an instance of a commercial point-to-point interconnect from STMicroelectronics called Spider on STNoC. Tests include several scenarios with legitimate and malicious processes running in different CPUs requesting access to shared memory. Preliminary results show that the incorporation of a security mechanism in the network interface can have a positive effect on network performance by reducing both the end-to-end delivery time of packets, and the power consumed from unnecessary transmissions. From the network aspect, this effect is independent of the performance of implementation itself, e.g. Either a hardware or a software solution equally relieves the network from unnecessary loads. Finally, we compare the performance of our hardware approach over a simple equivalent software solution. Certainly, this comparison favours hardware by considerable margins, however we use it only as reference to illustrate the merit from implementing protection in hardware. The purpose of the present study is three-fold. First, we present the proposed hardware NoC firewall. Then we examine the effect on network transmissions from incorporating a security mechanism in the network interface, to do this we developed a novel framework. Finally, we include preliminary performance results of our NoC firewall and a simple yet indicative comparison with a software solution.
Recombinant Human Interferon Alpha 2b Prevents and Reverses Experimental Pulmonary Hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a progressive and fatal disease with no cure. Vascular remodeling in PH involves intraluminal growth of endothelial and smooth muscle cells, leading to obliterative vascular lesions. Cell growth in these lesions is quasi-neoplastic, with evidence of monoclonality, apoptosis resistance and cancer-like metabolic derangements. Herein we tested the effect of human interferon alpha 2b (IFNα), a pleiotropic cytokine and anti-cancer therapeutic, on the development and progression of PH in the rat SU5416/hypoxia (SUH) model and mouse hypoxia model of the disease. In both models IFNα attenuated the development of PH and reversed established PH as assessed by measuring right ventricular systolic pressure and right ventricular hypertrophy. The effect of IFNα was dependent on the type I interferon receptor (IFNAR) since mice lacking a subunit of the IFNAR were not protected by IFNα. Morphometric analysis of pulmonary aterioles from hypoxic mice or SUH rats showed that IFNα inhibited pulmonary vascular remodeling in both models and that IFNα reversed remodeling in SUH rats with established disease. Immunohistochemical staining revealed that IFNα decreased the number of PCNA and Tunel positive cells in the wall of pulmonary arterioles. In vitro, IFNα inhibited proliferation of human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells and as well as human pulmonary artery endothelial cell proliferation and apoptosis. Together these findings demonstrate that IFNα reverses established experimental PH and provide a rationale for further exploration of the use of IFNα and other immunotherpies in PH.
Pharmacological treatment of asthma today

The current concept of asthma therapy is based on a stepwise approach, depending on disease severity, and the aim is to reduce the symptoms that result from airway obstruction and inflammation, to prevent exacerbations and to maintain normal lung function. β2‐Adrenoceptor agonists and glucocorticoids are at present the most effective drugs for the treatment of airway obstruction and inflammation, with theophylline, leukotriene receptor antagonists and anticholinergics as second- or third-line therapy. There are, to date, no additional or newly developed drugs available that add substantially to the current strategies or even replace β2‐adrenoceptor agonists or glucocorticoids. New approaches in asthma therapy recommend drug combinations of inhaled steroids, primarily with long-acting β2‐adrenoceptor agonists, based on their improved efficacy and the potential for a steroid-sparing effect. Although existing drug entities are able to control the vast majority of patients with mild and moderate asthma, patients' (and doctors') adherence to guidelines and treatment strategies falls well short of the desired standards. Treatment choices, however, differ between countries and should take into account convenience to the patient and the occurrence of side-effects. Additionally, the cost of therapy and reimbursement policies also influences therapeutic strategies.
Labor market rigidities and economic e ffi ciency : Considering labor as a dynamic input ∗

The aim of this paper is to discuss the efficiency consequences of labor market rigidities. First, we estimate a production function that takes into account the duality of the Spanish labor market. We consider two types of labor input depending on the magnitude of the dismissal costs: a dynamic input determined by permanent contract workers and a variable, non dynamic input determined by fixed-term contract workers. Second, we discuss the effects of labor market reforms in the 1990s that removed the flexibility of temporary workers. Toward this end, we estimate the gap between the marginal revenue product of labor and its marginal cost and then examine the changes in this gap during the 1990s. Third, we analyze the relationship between share of temporary contract workers and productivity growth. The data used to conduct this analysis come from a panel of small Spanish manufacturing firms from 1990 to 2001. Our findings suggest that the reforms resulted in a loss of efficiency. Moreover, our results suggest that temporary workers are not significantly less productive than permanent workers. Finally, we do not find a clear negative relationship between temporary contract workers and firm productivity.
A Tool for Classifying Individuals with Chronic Back Pain: Using Multivariate Pattern Analysis with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data

Chronic pain is one of the most prevalent health problems in the world today, yet neurological markers, critical to diagnosis of chronic pain, are still largely unknown. The ability to objectively identify individuals with chronic pain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is important for the advancement of diagnosis, treatment, and theoretical knowledge of brain processes associated with chronic pain. The purpose of our research is to investigate specific neurological markers that could be used to diagnose individuals experiencing chronic pain by using multivariate pattern analysis with fMRI data. We hypothesize that individuals with chronic pain have different patterns of brain activity in response to induced pain. This pattern can be used to classify the presence or absence of chronic pain. The fMRI experiment consisted of alternating 14 seconds of painful electric stimulation (applied to the lower back) with 14 seconds of rest. We analyzed contrast fMRI images in stimulation versus rest in pain-related brain regions to distinguish between the groups of participants: 1) chronic pain and 2) normal controls. We employed supervised machine learning techniques, specifically sparse logistic regression, to train a classifier based on these contrast images using a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure. We correctly classified 92.3% of the chronic pain group (N = 13) and 92.3% of the normal control group (N = 13) by recognizing multivariate patterns of activity in the somatosensory and inferior parietal cortex. This technique demonstrates that differences in the pattern of brain activity to induced pain can be used as a neurological marker to distinguish between individuals with and without chronic pain. Medical, legal and business professionals have recognized the importance of this research topic and of developing objective measures of chronic pain. This method of data analysis was very successful in correctly classifying each of the two groups.
Time Series Analysis of Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome: A Case Study in Jiaonan County, China

Exact prediction of Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) epidemics must improve to establish effective preventive measures in China. A Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model was applied to establish a highly predictive model of HFRS. Meteorological factors were considered external variables through a cross correlation analysis. Then, these factors were included in the SARIMA model to determine if they could improve the predictive ability of HFRS epidemics in the region. The optimal univariate SARIMA model was identified as (0,0,2)(1,1,1)12. The R2 of the prediction of HFRS cases from January 2014 to December 2014 was 0.857, and the Root mean square error (RMSE) was 2.708. However, the inclusion of meteorological variables as external regressors did not significantly improve the SARIMA model. This result is likely because seasonal variations in meteorological variables were included in the seasonal characteristics of the HFRS itself.