Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enduring Gender Differences in Political Interest

Although women now vote in national elections at the same rate as men, they are still less politically interested. Using regression analysis and two new scales to tap an orientation toward women's place in the public arena (Traditional Feminine Role Scale) and political interest (Political Apathy Scale), this article seeks to test the utility of the three standard explanations for women's political orientations (situational, structural, and sex-role socialization) in understanding the continuing "gender gap" in political interest. Other than education, situational and structural factors are found to have minimal explanatory capacity. Aside from education, political dispositions far outstrip situational and structural factors as predictors of attentiveness. Strongest support for the impact of socialization is provided by the different predictors of interest among different age groups. Among women under 30 education is less important as a predictor than is partisanship. Among women over 45, the Traditional Feminine Role Scale emerges as an increasingly important predictor as they age. We also report different motivations behind men's and women's decisions to vote or to abstain.
Mentalization Mediates the Relationship between Early Maltreatment and Potential for Violence in Adolescence

Aim: The present study investigates the role of attachment representation and mentalization as possibly protective factors in the relationship between early maltreatment and potential for violence in adolescence. Methods: For the current study, 161 adolescents, aged 14-21 years, were recruited from high schools and youth psychiatry. Early maltreatment was assessed by the Childhood Experiences of Care and Abuse Questionnaire, attachment was assessed using the Adult Attachment Projective Picture System, and mentalization was coded with the Reflective Functioning Scale from Adult Attachment Interviews. Potential for violence was operationalized using the Reactive-Proactive Aggression Questionnaire, and the presence of conduct disorder was assessed by the Structured Clinical Interview. Using structural equation modeling, reflective functioning and attachment were tested as mediators on the direct effect of early maltreatment on potential for violence. Results: There was a direct effect of early maltreatment on potential for violence. Furthermore, this direct effect was partially mediated by reflective functioning but not by attachment representations. Discussion: The results contribute to the idea that mentalization serves as a protective factor that may suspend the pathway from early maltreatment to violence in adolescence. Because of the transformation of attachment patterns into generalized cognitive models of attachment, attachment in adolescence may have a less pronounced effect on violence in this specific developmental phase. Future studies should test for further group differences in community and clinical groups, which was not possible in the present study due to the limited sample size.
Realism in Financial Reporting: What’s Really at Stake in the Disputes

This paper develops the arguments in several recent papers in both the philosophical literature and the accounting literature concerning the nature of economic reality and the stake of preserving realism as an ontological presupposition in financial reporting. We base much of our analysis on Searle (1965, 1995) as well as on his later works (Searle 2005, 2006a, 2006b) which have not yet been taken into consideration in accounting ontological debates, and his claims to defend a heavily nuanced (read: watered down) version of external reality. The analysis is a critical one, as we fear that both the attempts to explain the ontology of accounting information by means of different philosophical theories, as well as the very theories chosen for such purposes are subject to inconsistencies which need to be made explicit in the account.
Factors influencing pre-service teachers' perception of teaching games for understanding: a constructivist perspective

This study aims to examine the factors influencing pre-service Physical Education (PE) teachers’ perception of a specific constructivist approach — Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) in Hong Kong. By adopting a qualitative approach, 20 pre-service PE teachers were recruited for individual semi-structured interviews. Deductive data analysis was utilised to identify unique themes with broad aspects of influencing factors. Using Piaget's cognitive constructivism and Vygotsky's social constructivism as the theoretical frameworks, individual factors such as game knowledge, teacher beliefs, learning and teaching experience and social factors including government policy, teacher support and professional culture were identified as key influences in pre-service teachers’ perception of TGfU. Furthermore, individual and social factors interplay with each other. In conclusion, cognitive and social constructivism was identified as a useful theoretical framework for illustrating and analysing the factors influencing pre-service teachers’ perception of TGfU.
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Success Assessment: an Integrative Framework Systems Success Assessment: an Integrative Framework Enterprise Resource Planning Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Success Assessment: an Integrative Framework Enterprise Resource Planning Princely Emili Ifinedo Sy

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems are among the most popular information technology (IT) software being adopted in organizations globally; such systems offer strategic and operational improvements to firms. The increasing popularity of the system in organizations has resulted in several studies investigating their implementations; our study of the literature suggests that only few have discussed ERP beyond the implementation phase. Similarly, studies have shown that the practitioners using such systems often lack knowledge on which issues to pay attention to when assessing the success of such technologies. This thesis is designed to increase knowledge in ERP studies for both researchers with interests in the success assessment of such systems and for practitioners using them. We are dealing with three areas here: We intend to extend the available ERP success measurement models in the literature, provide empirical evidence of the nature of relationships between selected contingencies from both the external and internal environments of the organization, and to present the viewpoints of selected organizational stakeholder groups of ERP success (i.e., the evaluator's perspective). In order to discourse the foregoing issues we develop a research framework, which we have termed " An integrative framework for assessing ERP success ". The nature of our research objectives means that positivist research tradition would be suitable for our study, and that is what we eventually employed; however, in addition, we used other approaches to facilitate insight. We conducted surveys in firms in Finland and Estonia, two small countries with a record for ERP systems implementations. In our main survey, we got responses from 62 key individuals in 44 diverse firms. With respect to the objectives of this thesis; first, we succeeded in extending the available ERP systems success measurement by incorporating two new, relevant dimensions of ERP success (i.e., Vendor/Consultant Quality and Workgroup Impact) not considered in the previous models. Second, we found that the selected contingencies in the studies positively influence ERP success. Third, regarding the perspective of the evaluator of ERP success we did not notice major significant statistical differences in our study. Overall, the findings of this study contribute to the growing body of knowledge on IS success assessment in general and to ERP success assessment in particular. It is envisaged that this study may serve as a base for future research in this area of studies. Practitioners will also benefit from the insights offered. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to extend my …
Lazy selection

This paper presents Lazy Selection, a scribble-based tool for quick selection of one or more desired shape elements by roughly stroking through the elements. Our algorithm automatically refines the selection and reveals the user's intention. To give the user maximum flexibility but least ambiguity, our technique first extracts selection candidates from the scribble-covered elements by examining the underlying patterns and then ranks them based on their location and shape with respect to the user-sketched scribble. Such a design makes our tool tolerant to imprecise input systems and applicable to touch systems without suffering from the fat finger problem. A preliminary evaluation shows that compared to the standard click and lasso selection tools, which are the most commonly used, our technique provides significant improvements in efficiency and flexibility for many selection scenarios.
Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies

Acknowledgments Ch. 1 Value Systems: The Subjective Aspect of Politics and Economics Ch. 2 Individual-Level Change and Societal-Level Change Ch. 3 Modernization and Postmodernization in 43 Societies Ch. 4 Measuring Materialist and Postmaterialist Values Ch. 5 The Shift toward Postmaterialist Values, 1970-1994 Ch. 6 Economic Development, Political Culture, and Democracy: Bringing the People Back In Ch. 7 The Impact of Culture on Economic Growth Ch. 8 The Rise of New Issues and New Parties Ch. 9 The Shift toward Postmodern Values: Predicted and Observed Changes, 1981-1990 Ch. 10 The Erosion of Institutional Authority and the Rise of Citizen Intervention in Politics Ch. 11 Trajectories of Social Change App. 1 A Note on Sampling: Figures A.1 and A.2 App. 2 Partial 1990 WVS Questionnaire, with Short Labels for Items Used in Figure 3.2 App. 3 Supplementary Figures for Chapters 3, 9, and 10 Figures A.3 (Chapter 6), A.4-A.21 (Chapter 9), A.22-A.26 (Chapter 10), and A.27 (Chapter 11) App. 4 Construction of Key Indices Used in This Book App. 5 Complete 1990 WVS Questionnaire, with Variable Numbers in ICPSR Dataset References Index
The Communication of Wisdom

Wisdom has played a central role in the attempt to understand the positive nature of human behavior for more than 4,000 years. Neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and life span developmental scholars have joined this discussion in recent years to empirically investigate the physical and mental nature of wisdom. The social dimension of wisdom has not received as much scientific attention and is rather disjointed. I propose that communication scholars enter into this multidisciplinary discussion by placing communication and language at the core of the scientific study of wisdom and by investigating wisdom as enacted in our changing communication and language behaviors across the life span. An understanding and exploration of the communication of wisdom can significantly advance the positive role wisdom plays at both the individual and societal levels.
Natural Health Discourses and the Therapeutic Production of Consumer Resistance

Social critics of the natural health movement charge that it indoctrinates consumers in a therapeutic consumerist ideology. This “dominated consumer” thesis ignores that socially situated individuals must negotiate a plethora of institutionally specific power structures aiming to classify and govern their identities. Accordingly, resistance toward specific institutional constructions of identity can be produced through marketplace ideologies. I explore this understudied ideological effect by analyzing the narratives of women who are using natural health alternatives to resist their ascribed medico-administrative identities. Natural health's therapeutic ideology enables these women to contest the degenerative implications of their medical diagnoses and, conversely, to reconstruct their chronic illnesses as an opportunity for discovering their inner regenerative potential and expanding their spiritual horizons. This analysis has implications for prior studies suggesting that resistance toward the technocratic and bureaucratic aspects of conventional medicine exemplifies a Foucauldian “care of the self. ” I argue that a postmodern adaptation of Foucauldian theory is needed to address the complex interrelationships among the care of the self, medical consumerism, and the therapeutic ideology of the natural health marketplace.
MOVING THE CROWD AT THREADLESS

Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model already in use by businesses such as Threadless.com, iStockphoto.com, and InnoCentive.com. This model, which harnesses the collective intelligence of a crowd of Web users through an open-call format, has the potential for government and non-profit applications. Yet, in order to explore new applications for the crowdsourcing model, there must be a better understanding of why crowds participate in crowdsourcing processes. Based on 17 interviews conducted via instant messenger with members of the crowd at Threadless, the present study adds qualitatively rich data on a new crowdsourcing case to an existing body of quantitative data on motivations for participation in crowdsourcing. Four primary motivators for participation at Threadless emerge from these interview data: the opportunity to make money, the opportunity to develop one's creative skills, the potential to take up freelance work, and the love of community at Threadless. A fifth theme is also discussed that addresses the language of ‘addiction’ used by the interviewees to describe their activity on the site. Understanding this kind of ‘addiction’ in an online community is perhaps the most important finding for future public crowdsourcing ventures. This study develops a more complete – though ongoing – composite of what motivates the crowd to participate in crowdsourcing applications generally, information crucial to adapt the crowdsourcing model to new forms of problem-solving.
Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare

Shattered Bonds is a stirring account of a worsening American social crisis--the disproportionate representation of black children in the U.S. foster care system and its effects on black communities and the country as a whole. Tying the origins and impact of this disparity to racial injustice, Dorothy Roberts contends that child-welfare policy reflects a political choice to address startling rates of black child poverty by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. Using conversations with mothers battling the Chicago child-welfare system for custody of their children, along with national data, Roberts levels a powerful indictment of racial disparities in foster care and tells a moving story of the women and children who earn our respect in their fight to keep their families intact.
The Relationship of Reflection-Impulsivity to Intelligence and Field Dependence in Older Adults

Summary The relationship between reflection-impulsivity, intelligence, and field dependence-independence was examined in 24 older adults (mean age = 67.6 years). Reflection-impulsivity was not significantly correlated with any of the other variables; subject age was negatively correlated with intelligence and field dependence-independence. Differences between reflectives and impulsives in the performance of these tasks failed to reach statistical significance. The results provide some support for the assumption that reflection-impulsivity does not have the same significance for the elderly as it does for children.
Insurgency in Nigeria: Addressing the Causes as Part of the Solution

Taking a cue from recent pronouncements by Chief Justice Dahiru Musdapher on the current precarious situation in Nigeria, this article examines the issues raised by the learned Chief Justice and concludes that none of those issues, working alone, is capable of making Nigeria a failed state. The one exception is the issue of insurgency, which is growing in strength and sophistication and becoming quite ominous for Nigeria. The article examines the growth of various insurgency movements in Nigeria, noting the strengths and impact of each and their potential to destabilise the country to the point of state failure and possible disintegration. The article then addresses the causative factors of insurgency in Nigeria, including the religious and ideological discontent which appears to be propelling the current conflict in Northern Nigeria. The article then considers some of the policy options for addressing these causes and conflict and recommends, among other measures, the establishment of a constitutional body - a supreme council for interreligious conflict - to function as a final arbiter in all interreligious conflicts that are potentially explosive conflicts that threaten a serious breach of the peace.
Point Cloud Denoising via Moving RPCA

We present an algorithm for the restoration of noisy point cloud data, termed Moving Robust Principal Components Analysis (MRPCA). We model the point cloud as a collection of overlapping two‐dimensional subspaces, and propose a model that encourages collaboration between overlapping neighbourhoods. Similar to state‐of‐the‐art sparse modelling‐based image denoising, the estimated point positions are computed by local averaging. In addition, the proposed approach models grossly corrupted observations explicitly, does not require oriented normals, and takes into account both local and global structure. Sharp features are preserved via a weighted ℓ1 minimization, where the weights measure the similarity between normal vectors in a local neighbourhood. The proposed algorithm is compared against existing point cloud denoising methods, obtaining competitive results.
Contrasting effects of long distance seed dispersal on genetic diversity during range expansion

Currently many attempts are made to reconstruct the colonization history of plant species after the last ice age. A surprising finding is that during the colonization phase genetic diversity did not decrease as much as expected. In this paper we examine whether long distance seed dispersal events could play a role in the unexpected maintenance of genetic diversity during range expansion. This study is based on simulations carried out with a maternally inherited haploid locus using a cellular automaton. The simulations reveal a close relationship between the frequency of long distance seed dispersal events and the amount of genetic diversity preserved during colonization. In particular, when the colonized region is narrow, a complete loss of genetic diversity results from the occurrence of very rare long distance dispersal (LDD) events. We call this phenomenon the ‘embolism effect’. However, slightly higher rates of LDD events reverse this effect, up to the point that diversity is better preserved than in a pure diffusion model. This phenomenon is linked to the reorganization of the genetic structure during colonization and is called the ‘reshuffling effect’.
Ethnic Status and Adolescent Self-Evaluations: An Extension of Research on Minority Self-Esteem

This paper extends the study of ethnic status and self-esteem, traditionally restricted to blacks, to encompass Chicanos, and re-examines arguments about the impact of racial consonance and dissonance on perceived racial mistreatment and self-esteem. The results support the conclusion that ethnic minorities in the United States do not suffer from low self-esteem relative to whites, despite the fact that they do experience insults based on their status. Moreover, racial consonance or dissonance has no consistent impact on the self-esteem of whites or blacks. In contrast, dissonance does affect perceived racial mistreatment, and whites actually appear more sensitive to dissonant status than do blacks. We conclude that the effect of dissonance on self-esteem observed in other research may be limited to a comparison of extremes or may be contingent on the history of dissonant experiences. Blacks may appear higher in self-esteem than whites because of use of white comparison groups with unusually low self-esteem.
Obstacles et situations didactiques en sciences : processus intellectuels et confrontations : L'exemple des transformations de la matière

Dans quelle mesure est-il possible de realiser dans le milieu scolaire des situations de travail qui prennent en compte les obstacles aux apprentissages scientifiques, dans le but de permettre leur depassement, sinon du moins leur travail par les eleves ? Une serie de realisations, s'appuyant sur l'idee d'objectif obstacle, nous permet de cerner les possibilites et les limites d'une telle orientation, dans le domaine conceptuel des transformations de la matiere aux niveaux de l'ecole elementaire, du college et de la classe de seconde de lycee. Nous examinons ici de facon comparative les caracteristiques, la pertinence par rapport a ce projet, les tendances generales de ces realisations. Ceci montre comment un tel projet peut prendre corps dans le systeme educatif, en informant a la fois sur la variete des realisations possibles et leurs limites. Les differents agencements entre mouvement 1 de deconstruction des systemes de representations et construction d'un nouveau paradigme contribuent a definir differentes strategies. Une orientation visant a developper une vigilance critique des eleves sur les obstacles auxquels ils sont eux- memes confrontes est abordee par des situations ou on conduit les eleves a identifier eux-memes ces obstacles. Des processus intellectuels suscites dans ces situations chez les eleves sont reperes. Ils mettent en lumiere les possibilites cognitives d'un travail sur les obstacles et renseignent plus particulierement sur les reseaux d'obstacles en jeu dans le domaine conceptuel considere. Ce travail contribue a fournir des outils pour l'enseignement, tels que le reperage d'obstacles relatifs au domaine des transformations de la matiere, susceptibles de guider des choix d'objectifs obstacles, et des elements de dispositifs exportables dans d'autres situations, pouvant etre recombines selon differentes logiques.
Eliciting Self-Explanations Improves Understanding

Learning involves the integration of new information into existing knowledge. Generoting explanations to oneself (self-explaining) facilitates that integration process. Previously, self-explanation has been shown to improve the acquisition of problem-solving skills when studying worked-out examples. This study extends that finding, showing that self-explanation can also be facilitative when it is explicitly promoted, in the context of learning declarative knowledge from an expository text. Without any extensive training, 14 eighth-grade students were merely asked to self-explain after reading each line of a possage on the human circulatory system. Ten students in the control group read the same text twice, but were not prompted to self-explain. All of the students were tested for their circulatory system knowledge before and after reading the text. The prompted group had a greater gain from the pretest to the posttest. Moreover, prompted students who generated o large number of self-explanations (the high explainers) learned with greater understanding than low explainers. Understanding was assessed by answering very complex questions and inducing the function of a component when it was only implicitly stated. Understanding was further captured by a mental model onolysis of the self-explanation protocols. High explainers all achieved the correct mental model of the circulatory system, whereas many of the unprompted students as well as the low explainers did not. Three processing characteristics of self-explaining are considered as reasons for the gains in deeper understanding.