Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
13 Prosocial , Antisocial , and Other Effects of Recreational Video Games

Video games are immensely popular around the world. They are played on computers, handheld devices, cell phones, and game consoles. They are played at home, at arcades, at school, in automobiles, and virtually anywhere that an electronic device can be operated. The video game industry’s revenues surpassed the movie industry’s several years ago and surpassed the music industry’s in 2008. A recent, nationally representative sample of U.S. teens found that 99% of boys and 94% of girls played video games (Lenhart et al., 2008). The amount of time spent playing games has increased over time (Escobar-Chaves & Anderson, 2008; Gentile & Anderson, 2003).
Investment in Fixed Capital Stock: Testing for the Impact of Sectoral and Systemic Uncertainty

This paper applies current theory recognizing the irreversibility of investment, in order to test for the impact of uncertainty on investment expenditure for a middle income country. The contribution of the paper is unique in two respects. First, it employs dynamic heterogeneous panel estimation techniques not previously applied to investment functions. Secondly, it explicitly tests for the impact of both sectoral and systemic uncertainty on investment expenditure. We find that both sectoral (as measured by output volatility) and systemic uncertainty (as measured by political instability) have a negative impact on investment rates in a middle income country context. Liquidity constraints and growth in total factor productivity are found to have no impact on investment, while trade liberalization has the impact predicted by Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory. Finally, we find complementarity effects between physical capital and skilled human capital, suggesting that South African educational policies may have hampered investment in physical capital as well as the growth performance of the economy. Policy implications emphasize the importance of lowering uncertainty for investors, and the need for sound human capital investment. Copyright 2004 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Peer Support for Coping as a Moderator of the Relation Between Victimization by Relational Aggression and Adjustment

Eric F. Dubow, Advisor Over the past few decades, relational aggression (RA) has received increased attention in research and the media. Relational aggression is defined as aggressive acts that are aimed at damaging others’ relationships. There is evidence that youth with supportive friends may be buffered in some way from the negative impact of being a victim of relational aggression, but there is limited research on how exactly youth’s friends help their victimized peers. The purpose of the current study was to examine the association between relational aggression victimization and adjustment (e.g., loneliness, academic adjustment, aggression) and how peer support for coping with victimization may moderate the association. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses supported the hypothesis that peer support for coping would moderate the association between relational aggression victimization and academic adjustment, with an effect being shown for all three types of coping (engagement, disengagement, and externalizing). Specifically, peer support for engagement coping and disengagement coping generally provided a buffer for youth against academic maladjustment; however, the advantage lessened as the level of RA victimization increased. Peer support for externalizing coping acted as a risk factor for academic maladjustment in general, such that youth who received higher peer support for externalizing coping methods showed poorer academic adjustment. Although the study is correlational and thus causality cannot be determined, these findings have implications for theory and practice. Awareness of how victimization by relational aggression impacts youth in the classroom and how peers play a role in how children cope with RA may help teachers, peers, and parents better support victimized youth’s academic adjustment.
Native Language Adaptation to Novel Verb Argument Structures by Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation

Linguists often use native speaker judgments as a basis for linguistic theories. One assumption underlying this process is that native-like competence, once acquired, does not change very much in adulthood. However, research in bilingualism has shown that the native language of bilinguals is subject to influence from learning a second language, thereby changing the way the native language is processed, including for judgments of grammaticality. These findings come mostly from behavioral research and have focused on syntactic structures that are shared by both languages. Two key questions remain unanswered: 1) do language-specific syntactic structures in the L2 also influence processing in the L1, and 2) does the influence extend to neural processes underlying language processing? I will describe a study that investigates whether verb argument structure information associated with L2 verbs can be accessed during L1 sentence comprehension. Spanish-English bilinguals heard Spanish sentences that were constructed like the English induced motion causative construction (e.g., John ran the mouse around the maze). Without access to their knowledge of English structures, these sentences are ungrammatical to Spanish speakers (e.g., Juan corrió al ratón por el laberinto). Applying their knowledge of how these verbs behave in English, however, would allow listeners to assign an interpretation to the construction. Findings from electrophysiology and acceptability judgments will be discussed.
Ion condensation in a polyelectrolyte gel

Anomalous small angle X-ray scattering is used to determine the distribution of divalent ions in a neutralized polyelectrolyte gel of sodium polyacrylate in the vicinity of the volume transition. At the five different energies of the incident beam used to vary the contrast, the scattering curves have similar shapes, and are separated only by constant multiplying factors. This result, in conjunction with SANS results from the same sample, indicates that the divalent ion (strontium) is confined on the polymer backbone.
The Ubiquitous Dermokine Delta Activates Rab5 Function in the Early Endocytic Pathway

The expression of the recently identified dermokine (Dmkn) gene leads to four families of proteins with as yet unknown functions. The secreted α, β and γ isoforms share an epidermis-restricted expression pattern, whereas the δ isoform is intracellular and ubiquitous. To get an insight into Dmknδ function, we performed yeast two-hybrid screening and identified the small GTPases Rab5 as partners for Dmknδ. The Rab5 proteins are known to regulate membrane docking and fusion in the early endocytic pathway. GST pull-down assays confirmed the direct interaction between Rab5 and Dmknδ. Transient expression of Dmknδ in HeLa cells led to the formation of punctate structures colocalized with endogenous Rab5 and clathrin, indicating Dmknδ involvement in the early steps of endocytosis. Dmknδ indeed colocalized with transferrin at early stages of endocytosis, but did not modulate its endocytosis or recycling kinetics. We also showed that Dmknδ was able to bind both inactive (GDP-bound) and active (GTP-bound) forms of Rab5 in vitro but preferentially targeted GDP-bound form in HeLa cells. Interestingly, Dmknδ expression rescued the Rab5S34N-mediated inhibition of endosome fusion. Moreover, Dmknδ caused the enlargement of vesicles positive for Rab5 by promoting GTP loading onto the small GTPase. Together our data reveal that Dmknδ activates Rab5 function and thus is involved in the early endosomal trafficking.
Weekly Paclitaxel and Trastuzumab as a First-Line Therapy in Patients with HER2-Overexpressing Metastatic Breast Cancer: Magnitude of HER2/neu Amplification as a Predictive Factor for Efficacy

We evaluated the efficacy and safety of weekly paclitaxel plus trastuzumab as firs-tline chemotherapy in women with HER2-overexpressing metastatic breast cancer (MBC), and we investigated the prognostic factors including magnitude of HER2/neu amplification in this population. We analyzed 54 patients with HER2-overexpressing MBC that were treated with weekly paclitaxel plus trastuzumab as first-line chemotherapy from February 2004 to December 2006. At a median follow-up of 28 months, median time to progression (TTP) was 16.6 months (95% CI, 9.4 to 23.7 months) and median overall survival was 25.6 months (95% CI, 21.8 to 27.3 months). Therapy was generally well tolerated, although three patients (5.5%) experienced reversible, symptomatic heart failure. Of the 27 patients evaluable for the HER2 FISH, patients with a HER2/CEP17 ratio of ≤4.0 had significantly shorter TTP than those with a HER2/CEP17 ratio of >4.0 (10.8 vs. 23.2 months, P=0.034). A HER2/CEP17 ratio of >4.0 was identified as significant predictive factor of TTP by multivariate analysis (P=0.032). The combination of weekly paclitaxel plus trastuzumab as first-line chemotherapy is an effective regimen in patients with HER2-FISH-positive MBC. Furthermore, the magnitude of HER2 amplification is an independent predictive factor of TTP.
Binary Blue Metal-poor Stars: Evidence for Asymptotic Giant Branch Mass Transfer

We present new abundance analyses of six blue metal-poor (BMP) stars with very low iron abundances ([Fe/H] < -2), based on new high-resolution echelle spectra. Three are spectroscopic binaries, and three have constant radial velocities. The chemical compositions of these two groups are very different, as the binary BMP stars have large enhancements of carbon and neutron-capture elements that are products of s-process nucleosynthesis. One star, CS 29497-030, has an extreme enhancement of lead, [Pb/Fe] = +3.7, the largest abundance in any star yet discovered. It probably also has an oxygen overabundance compared to the other BMP stars of our sample. The binary BMP stars must have attained their status via mass transfer during the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) evolutions of their companion stars, which are now unseen and most likely are compact objects. We have not found any examples of AGB mass transfer among BMP binaries with [Fe/H] > -2.
Hyperspectral Imagery Super-Resolution by Spatial–Spectral Joint Nonlocal Similarity

Hyperspectral (HS) super-resolution reconstruction is an ill-posed inversion problem, for which the solution from reconstruction constraint is not unique. To address this, an HS image super-resolution method is proposed to first utilize the joint regulation of spatial and spectral nonlocal similarities. We then fused the HS and panchromatic images with sparse regulation. With these two regulation terms, edge sharpness and spectrum consistency are preserved and noises are suppressed. The proposed method is tested with Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) and Hyperion images and evaluated by quantitative measures. The resulting enhanced images from the proposed method are superior to the results obtained by other well-known methods.
The Lack of Side Effects of an Ineffective Treatment Facilitates the Development of a Belief in Its Effectiveness

Some alternative medicines enjoy widespread use, and in certain situations are preferred over conventional, validated treatments in spite of the fact that they fail to prove effective when tested scientifically. We propose that the causal illusion, a basic cognitive bias, underlies the belief in the effectiveness of bogus treatments. Therefore, the variables that modulate the former might affect the latter. For example, it is well known that the illusion is boosted when a potential cause occurs with high probability. In this study, we examined the effect of this variable in a fictitious medical scenario. First, we showed that people used a fictitious medicine (i.e., a potential cause of remission) more often when they thought it caused no side effects. Second, the more often they used the medicine, the more likely they were to develop an illusory belief in its effectiveness, despite the fact that it was actually useless. This behavior may be parallel to actual pseudomedicine usage; that because a treatment is thought to be harmless, it is used with high frequency, hence the overestimation of its effectiveness in treating diseases with a high rate of spontaneous relief. This study helps shed light on the motivations spurring the widespread preference of pseudomedicines over scientific medicines. This is a valuable first step toward the development of scientifically validated strategies to counteract the impact of pseudomedicine on society.
Parental interpretations of “childhood innocence”: Implications for early sexuality education

Purpose Despite general recognition of the benefits of talking openly about sexuality with children, parents encounter and/or create barriers to such communication. One of the key barriers is a desire to protect childhood innocence. The purpose of this paper is to explore parental interpretations of childhood innocence and the influence this has on their reported practices relating to sexuality-relevant communication with young children. Design/methodology/approach In all, 110 UK parents and carers of children aged between four and seven years were involved in focus group discussions. The discussions were transcribed and thematic network analysis was subsequently applied to the data. Following the reading and re-reading of the transcripts for meaning, context and content, individual comments and statements were identified within the data set and grouped to generate themes. Findings Childhood innocence was commonly equated with non-sexuality in children and sexual ignorance. Parents displayed ambiguity around the conceptualisation of non-innocence in children. Parents desire to prolong the state of childhood innocence led them to withhold certain sexual knowledge from their children; however, the majority also desired an open relationship whereby their child could approach them for information. Originality/value UK parents have a strong desire to maintain the social construction of their children as inherently innocent. This discourse is affecting the way in which they communicate about sexually relevant information with their children.
Automatic appearance‐based loop detection from three‐dimensional laser data using the normal distributions transform

We propose a new approach to appearance‐based loop detection for mobile robots, using three‐dimensional (3D) laser scans. Loop detection is an important problem in the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) domain, and, because it can be seen as the problem of recognizing previously visited places, it is an example of the data association problem. Without a flat‐floor assumption, two‐dimensional laser‐based approaches are bound to fail in many cases. Two of the problems with 3D approaches that we address in this paper are how to handle the greatly increased amount of data and how to efficiently obtain invariance to 3D rotations. We present a compact representation of 3D point clouds that is still discriminative enough to detect loop closures without false positives (i.e., detecting loop closure where there is none). A low false‐positive rate is very important because wrong data association could have disastrous consequences in a SLAM algorithm. Our approach uses only the appearance of 3D point clouds to detect loops and requires no pose information. We exploit the normal distributions transform surface representation to create feature histograms based on surface orientation and smoothness. The surface shape histograms compress the input data by two to three orders of magnitude. Because of the high compression rate, the histograms can be matched efficiently to compare the appearance of two scans. Rotation invariance is achieved by aligning scans with respect to dominant surface orientations. We also propose to use expectation maximization to fit a gamma mixture model to the output similarity measures in order to automatically determine the threshold that separates scans at loop closures from nonoverlapping ones. We discuss the problem of determining ground truth in the context of loop detection and the difficulties in comparing the results of the few available methods based on range information. Furthermore, we present quantitative performance evaluations using three real‐world data sets, one of which is highly self‐similar, showing that the proposed method achieves high recall rates (percentage of correctly identified loop closures) at low false‐positive rates in environments with different characteristics. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Estimation of suitable box height based on engineering properties of pomegranate fruit ( var . Malas )

The static force may be calculated from the weight of the fruit column being transported while the dynamic load is a consequence of vibration caused by transport. In avoiding damage to fruit species the permissible falling height and permissible static pressure are of great importance. The former is important in planning harvesting and handling operations, the latter in selecting the height of transport containers. The permitted static load for a given fruit may be determined experimentally. In this study, physical properties of interest were determined for fresh pomegranate fruit (var. Malas) then calculations for the design of a suitable height were conducted based on the measured properties using Ross and Isaacs’s theory. Maximum height for packing and storing of fresh pomegranate fruit in the box was determined to be less than 120 cm based on a rupture force of 40 N.
INVERSE MEDIUM SCATTERING PROBLEMS IN NEAR-FIELD OPTICS *1)

A regularized recursive linearization method is developed for a two-dimensional inverse medium scattering problem that arises in near-field optics, which reconstructs the scatterer of an inhomogeneous medium deposited on a homogeneous substrate from data accessible through photon scanning tunneling microscopy experiments. In addition to the ill-posedness of the inverse scattering problems, two difficulties arise from the layered background medium and limited aperture data. Based on multiple frequency scattering data, the method starts from the Born approximation corresponding to the weak scattering at a low frequency, each update is obtained via recursive linearization with respect to the wavenumber by solving one forward problem and one adjoint problem of the Helmholtz equation. Numerical experiments are included to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method.
Dependence of P-wave dispersion on mean arterial pressure as an independent hemodynamic variable in school children

Introduction: The relationship between diastolic dysfunction and P-wave dispersion (PWD) in the electrocardiogram has been studied for some time. In this regard, echocardiography is emerging as a diagnostic tool to improve risk stratification for mild hypertension. Objective: To determine the dependence of PWD on the electrocardiogram and on echocardiographic variables in a pediatric population. Methods: 515 children from three elementary schools were studied from a total of 565 children. Those whose parents did not want them to take part in the study, as well as those with known congenital diseases, were excluded. Tests including 12-lead surface ECGs and 4 blood pressure (BP) measurements were performed. Maximum and minimum P-values were measured, and the PWD on the electrocardiogram was calculated. Echocardiography for structural measurements and the pulsed Doppler of mitral flow were also performed. Results: A significant correlation in statistical variables was found between PWD and mean BP for pre-hypertensive and hypertensive children, i.e., r = 0.32, p <0.01 and r = 0.33, p <0.01, respectively. There was a significant correlation found between PWD and the left atrial area (r = 0.45 and p <0.01). Conclusions: We highlight the dependency between PWD, the electrocardiogram and mean blood pressure. We also draw attention to the dependence of PWD on the duration of the mitral inflow A-wave. This result provides an explanation for earlier changes in atrial electrophysiological and hemodynamic characteristics in pediatric patients.
Impact of maternal postpartum tetanus and diphtheria toxoids and acellular pertussis immunization on infant pertussis infection.

BACKGROUND Mothers often are the source of pertussis illness in young infants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend tetanus and diphtheria toxoids and acellular pertussis (Tdap) vaccine for postpartum women before hospital discharge. In January 2008, this recommendation was implemented in a predominantly Hispanic, medically underserved population at Ben Taub General Hospital (BTGH) in Houston (hereafter the intervention population). METHODS A cross-sectional study compared preintervention (July 2000 through December 2007) and postintervention (January 2008 through May 2009) periods. Pertussis diagnosis was determined using International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) codes and microbiology reports from 4 major children's hospitals in Houston. Only those infants ≤6 months of age with laboratory-confirmed pertussis illness were included. The proportions of pertussis-infected infants born at BTGH in the pre- and postintervention periods were compared. RESULTS Of 514 infants with pertussis, 378 (73.5%) were identified during preintervention and 136 (26.5%) during postintervention years. These groups were similar in age (mean, 79.3 vs 72 days; P = .08), sex (males, 55% vs 52%; P = .48), length of hospitalization (mean, 9.7 vs 10.7 days; P = .62), mortality (2 deaths each; P = .29) and hospital of pertussis diagnosis. After adjustment for age, sex, and ethnicity, the proportions of pertussis-infected infants born at BTGH and potentially protected through maternal postpartum Tdap immunization were similar for the 2 periods (6.9% vs 8.8%; odds ratio, 1.06; 95% confidence interval, 0.5-2.2; P = .87). CONCLUSIONS Immunizing only postpartum mothers with Tdap vaccine did not reduce pertussis illness in infants ≤6 months of age. Efforts should be directed at immunizing all household and key contacts of newborns with Tdap, not just mothers.
The association between anthropometric parameters, the metabolic syndrome and microalbuminuria in black Africans: the SABPA study

Summary We aimed to determine which surface anthropometric and metabolic syndrome (MS) markers could be associated with the development of microalbuminuria (MA), and assessed 200 urban Africans (25–60 years) stratified into low (≤ 0.90 and ≤ 0.85) and high (> 0.90 and > 0.85) waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) groups from the North-West province. Anthropometric and fasting MS markers, such as systolic and diastolic blood pressure (BP), and glucose, triglyceride (TG) and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels, as well as MA markers were measured. Males revealed higher lifestyle risk factors (body mass index, smoking, alcohol consumption, low physical activity), anthropometric and MS markers compared to the females. The same overall trend was seen for high-WHR males but not for high-WHR females compared to their low-WHR counterparts. Both high-WHR groups revealed increased glucose values (males, 6.34 mmol/l; females, 6.13 mmol/l). Multiple linear regression analysis, independent of confounders, showed positive associations between diastolic blood pressure (DBP) (high WHR and all males), TG, waist circumference (WC) and development of MA in all males. In high-WHR females, positive associations existed only between WC and the development of MA, while neck circumference (NC) was associated with MA development in all females. To conclude, vascular BP, TG and WC were associated with risk of renal impairment in males, while in females, NC and WC circumferences were associated with this risk.