Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
No Room for New Families? : A Field Experiment Measuring Rental Discrimination against Same-Sex Couples and Single Parents

We suggest that new forms of family households, especially same-sex couples and single parents, are likely to face discrimination in their interactions with rental markets. Following the contact hypothesis, we hypothesize that the geographic distribution of discrimination is likely to vary. Specifically, in places with more new family households we are likely to find less discrimination against these households. We investigate these issues in the metropolitan area of Vancouver, Canada, through analysis of 1,669 inquiries made about one- and two-bedroom apartments. Using a field experimental design similar to audit studies, we analyze landlord responses to five different two-person household scenarios, including one heterosexual couple, two same-sex couples, and two single parents. Evidence suggests that male same-sex couples, single mothers, and single fathers all face significant discrimination relative to heterosexual couples. The contact hypothesis was supported for male same-sex couples, but not for single parents. This could indicate that single parents are facing discrimination primarily based upon their economic marginalization rather than other forms of prejudice.
DirecTL: a Language Independent Approach to Transliteration

We present DirecTL: an online discriminative sequence prediction model that employs a many-to-many alignment between target and source. Our system incorporates input segmentation, target character prediction, and sequence modeling in a unified dynamic programming framework. Experimental results suggest that DirecTL is able to independently discover many of the language-specific regularities in the training data.
Skin susceptibility of atopic individuals

The relevance of the irritant skin reaction of individuals with an atopic history (atopic dermatitis, rhinoconjunctivitis or atopic asthma) to sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), a widely used irritant, is still controversial. The aim of this study was to evaluate transepidermal water loss (TEWL) as an indicator of stratum corneum integrity, before and after SLS patch testing, in various groups of atopic individuals with and without atopic dermatitits. 95 volunteers were divided into 4 groups: (1) individuals with active atopic dermatitis; (2) individuals with a history of atopic dermatitis but without active skin lesions; (3) individuals with rhinoconjunctivitis or atopic asthma without any symptoms at the time of testing; (4) healthy individuals serving as controls. The volunteers were patch‐tested at the unaffected volar side of the forearm with aqueous SLS 0.5% for 48 h. TEWL was measured before application and after removal of the patch. Individuals with active atopic dermatitis showed a significantly higher TEWL value after SLS and a tendency to a higher basal TEWL as compared to the 3 other groups. There were no significant differences in TEWL between individuals who were classified as atopic but without active dermatitis, individuals with rhinoconjunctivitis or atopic asthma and healthy controls, either at the basal or at the post‐SLS measurement. Enhanced skin susceptibility is only present in individuals with active dermatitis. The skin susceptibility of atopic individuals might therefore be increased as soon as the skin becomes ec‐zematous, suggesting a reduced epidermal integrity probably caused by the endogenous atopy and/ or respiratory allergens. When interpreting the atopy score in relation to skin susceptibility, the actual condition of the skin should hence be taken into consideration.
Incorporating Fairness into Infinitely Repeated Games with Conflicting Interests for Conflicts Elimination

In many multi-agent applications, game theory can serve as a useful tool to model these multi-agent scenarios and analyse the strategic interactions among agents. Fairness is an important goal to consider in a variety of multi-agent applications such as resource allocation or job scheduling problems, but it is not taken into consideration in traditional game theory. However, in many cases the solution concepts of pure strategy or mixed strategy Nash equilibria from traditional game theory can lead to unfair and inefficient outcomes. In this paper, we explicitly introduce the concept of fairness strategy in the context of infinitely repeated game inspired from fairness motive observed in human behaviors. We show that using fairness strategy, not only the agents can receive equal payoffs (achieving fairness) but also the sum of their payoffs is maximized (achieving efficiency) in the infinitely repeated games with conflicting interests. More importantly, we prove that this desirable pair of fairness strategies is in a new type of equilibrium - fairness strategy equilibrium, which thus provides an intuitive solution concept for the agents to make their decisions and coordinate with other agents or even humans.
Issues of Recruitment and Rationale for Conducting Clinical Trials on Mutans Streptococci Suppression in Mothers

The aims of this study are (1) to describe issues related to recruitment of mothers participating in a clinical trial of transmission of mutans streptococci (MS) from mother to child in Bauru, Brazil and (2) to perform cross-cultural and temporal comparisons of levels of infection of the MS in mothers of Bauru. A total of 1422 mothers were visited at their domiciles. Cutoff levels for the MS were established at ≥105 CFU/mL saliva. The main reason for a mother not enrolling was not being highly infected by the MS, yet 76% of mothers presented with levels ≥105 CFU/mL saliva. Recent studies in industrialized countries showed a negative coefficient for linear tests indicating significant decline overtime in the levels of MS in mothers. Intercountry comparisons for mothers' salivary levels of the MS with the Bauru study as the reference revealed significant differences with studies conducted in the last two decades.
Scene Text Localization Using Gradient Local Correlation

In this paper, we propose an efficient scene text localization method using gradient local correlation, which can characterize the density of pair wise edges and stroke width consistency to get a text confidence map. Gradient local correlation is insensitive to the gradient direction and robust to noise, small character size and shadow. Based on the text confidence map, the regions with high confidence are segmented into connected components (CCs), which are classified to text CCs and non-text CCs using an SVM classifier. Then, the text CCs with similar color and stroke width are grouped into text lines, which are in turn partitioned into words. Experimental results on the ICDAR 2003 text locating competition dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Cytogenetic Damage in Cells Exposed to Ionizing Radiation under Conditions of a Changing Dose Rate

Abstract The current international paradigm on the biological effects of radiation is based mainly on the effects of dose with some consideration for the dose rate. No allowance has been made for the potential influence of a changing dose rate (second derivative of dose), and the biological effects of exposing cells to changing dose rates have never been analyzed. This paper provides evidence that radiation effects in cells may depend on temporal changes in the dose rate. In these experiments, cells were moved toward or away from an X-ray source. The speed of movement, the time of irradiation, and the temperature during exposure were controlled. Here we report the results of the first experiments with TK6 cells that were exposed at a constant dose rate, at an increasing dose rate, or at a decreasing dose rate. The average dose rate and the total dose were same for all samples. Micronuclei were scored as the end point. The results show that the level of cytogenetic damage was higher in cells exposed to a decreasing dose rate compared to both an increasing and a constant dose rate. This finding may suggest that the second derivative of dose may influence radiation risk estimates, and the results should trigger further studies on this issue.
How Can Language Minority Parents Help Their Children Become Bilingual In Familial Context? A Case Study of a Language Minority Mother and Her Daughter

Abstract Language Minority (LM) parents who communicate on a daily basis with their children have a crucial influence on the development of their children’s bilingualism. It is better for them to take initial actions to enable their children to develop both their first language (L1) and second language (L2), and to get together with the two respective cultures, rather than wait passively for schools and communities to reach out to them. The present case study illustrated this topic by presenting the author’s personal observations of her 12-year-old daughter in Hawaii over a five-month period. It addressed the issue from two perspectives: (1) LM parents’ attitudes toward L1/L2 and the cultures (valuing the heritage and respecting the new), and (2) Parent-child interactions (family talk aiming at keeping up L1 and bridging the generation gap; academic study confirming the interdependent hypothesis of L1 and L2; two-language nurturing home environment including parents’ own involvement in learning by means o.
Prevention and protection against cerebral ischemic injury using acupuncture

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Stroke is the second leading cause of death above the age of 60 years and the leading cause of acquired disability in adults. The main type of stroke is ischemic stroke (80%) and it is subclassified as thrombotic or embolic in nature. A thrombotic stroke or infarction occurs when a clot forms in an artery supplying the brain and accounts for approximately 50% of all strokes, whereas an embolic stroke is the result of a clot formed elsewhere in the body which was subsequently transported through the bloodstream to the brain. The only FDA-approved intervention for ischemic strokes is intravenous administration of tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), which acts by dissolving the blood clot (or recanalization) within 4.5 hours of stroke onset and thereby, improving blood flow to the part of the brain being deprived of blood. Transcranial laser therapy (TLT), administered close to the time of stroke onset, initially showed promising results in ischemic stroke patients but the most recent large scale, multi-center clinical trial NEST-3 was terminated after a futility analysis showed no difference between TLT and sham treatment in the primary endpoint which was disability at 90 days. Critical factors for TLT are the amount of energy that would penetrate the skull and be received by deeper structures in the brain, and the time interval between stroke onset and the initiation of treatment.
Transmission characteristics of tuberculosis in the foreign-born and the Canadian-born populations of Alberta, Canada.

SETTING All notified cases of tuberculosis in the province of Alberta, Canada, 1994-1998. OBJECTIVE To compare the transmission characteristics of tuberculosis among foreign-born and Canadian-born cases. DESIGN Retrospective analysis using DNA fingerprinting (IS6110 restriction fragment length polymorphism and spoligotyping) and patient information from the Alberta Tuberculosis Registry. Transmission indexes were determined by calculating the average number of culture-positive pulmonary cases generated by a single source case. RESULTS Of the 750 cases of active tuberculosis, 437 (58.3%) were in the foreign-born. DNA fingerprinting of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from all 573 culture-positive cases over the 5 years from 1994 to 1998 showed that there was significantly less clustering among foreign-born isolates (9.8%) compared to Canadian-born non-Aboriginal (28.8%) and Aboriginal (44.7%) isolates. The transmission index was significantly higher for males, lower for those > or =65 years of age, and higher for Aboriginals. CONCLUSION Although cases of tuberculosis in the foreign-born constitute the majority in Alberta, there is little transmission to other foreign-born or to Canadian-born individuals. Transmission of tuberculosis among the Aboriginal population remains a significant problem in Alberta.
Zebrafish Crip2 Plays a Critical Role in Atrioventricular Valve Development by Downregulating the Expression of ECM Genes in the Endocardial Cushion

The initial step of atrioventricular (AV) valve development involves the deposition of extracellular matrix (ECM) components of the endocardial cushion and the endocardialmesenchymal transition. While the appropriately regulated expression of the major ECM components, Versican and Hyaluronan, that form the endocardial cushion is important for heart valve development, the underlying mechanism that regulates ECM gene expression remains unclear. We found that zebrafish crip2 expression is restricted to a subset of cells in the AV canal (AVC) endocardium at 55 hours post-fertilization (hpf). Knockdown of crip2 induced a heart-looping defect in zebrafish embryos, although the development of cardiac chambers appeared to be normal. In the AVC of Crip2-deficient embryos, the expression of both versican a and hyaluronan synthase 2 (has2) was highly upregulated, but the expression of bone morphogenetic protein 4 (bmp4) and T-box 2b (tbx2b) in the myocardium and of notch1b in the endocardium in the AVC did not change. Taken together, these results indicate that crip2 plays an important role in AV valve development by downregulating the expression of ECM components in the endocardial cushion.
Dependency Analysis in Distributed Systems using Fault Injection: Application to Problem Determination in an e-commerce Environment

──────────────────────────────────────── Distributed networked applications that are being deployed in enterprise settings, increasingly rely on a large number of heterogeneous hardware and software components for providing end-to-end services. In such settings, the issue of problem diagnosis becomes vitally important, in order to minimize system outages and improve system availability. This motivates interest in dependency characterization among the different components in distributed application environments. A promising approach for obtaining dynamic dependency information is the Active Dependency Discovery technique in which a dependency graph of e-commerce transactions on hardware and software components in the system is built by individually “perturbing” the system components during a testing phase and collecting measurements corresponding to the external behavior of the system. In this paper, we propose using fault injection as the perturbation tool for dynamic dependency discovery and problem determination. We describe a method for characterizing dependencies of transactions on the system resources in a typical e-commerce environment, and show how it can aid in problem diagnosis. The method is applied to an application server middleware platform, running end-user activity composed of TPC-W transactions. Representative fault models for such an environment, that can be used to construct the fault injection campaign, are also presented.
‘Bullets as bacteria’

Surveys of mass media content related to social violence suggest that it generally focuses on the individual, atomistic ‘act’ (e.g. the bang-bang car chase) rather than issues of cause and prevention. Yet, increasingly - but with controversy - doctors, health officials and activists have pushed for a ‘public health’ model of reporting news about crime and violence that looks at interactions between the victim, the agent of injury or death, and the environment in which the injury or death took place rather than viewing it in strictly individual terms. In this study of television news-magazine stories, we found a strong emphasis on episodic and personal stories, with minor allusions to greater social issues. The emphasis on entertainment seemed to negate any promised ‘public health’ angles. We conclude that the challenge for the public health model is to find ‘scripts’ that journalists deem to be publicly consumable and ratings friendly.
Intensity in Vocabulary Instruction and Effects on Reading Comprehension

Prior research has shown that vocabulary instruction can enhance the comprehension of passages when instruction includes definitional and contextual information, provides multiple instructional encounters with the words, and requires learners to engage actively in processing of word meanings (M. F. Graves, 1986; S. A. Stahl & M. M. Fairbanks, 1986). However, measures have not been reported to estimate the relative intensity of vocabulary interventions that promote comprehension. The procedure of S. F. Warren, M. E. Fey, and P. J. Yoder (2007) designed to document the intensity in communication and language development intervention research was applied to 3 classic vocabulary instructional studies. Although the procedure could not be applied directly to the studies, 2 statistics similar to those generated by the procedure of S. F. Warren et al. could be gleaned from the research reports: the Average Minutes of Instruction per Word (MI) and the Average Exposure-Minutes of Instruction per Word (E-MI), which accounts for the total instructional time, the number of words taught, and the exposures per word. Application of the analysis to the 3 studies revealed that there were threshold intensity values for ME and E-MI for vocabulary interventions to affect comprehension. Difficulties in applying the framework of Warren et al. to vocabulary instruction research are addressed.
Grading and Anxiety: a Strategy for Coping

We have found it helpful to identify two separate sources of role conflict which cause anxiety about the grading processes. One has to do with the distribution of the grades that are given. In this case the conflict arises when our colleagues pressure us for low grades (since too few low grades are often equated with lack of academic &dquo;rigor&dquo; and/or a popularity contest if student evaluations are used in promotion, tenure, and salary decisions for faculty); whereas our students pressure us for high grades (to reduce their anxiety and, if we are effective, as a legitimate reward for their greater learning). The second source of role conflict has to do with the kinds of behavior for which grades are given. In this case, a dilemma arises from OB faculty convictions that their courses should foster the development of interpersonal and group skills, which are unfamiliar to students who are used to performance criteria based solely on the acquisition of facts and concepts (see Mezoff et al., 1979, p. 31). Coping with the Grade Distribution Dilemma : With respect to the grading distribution dilemma, we have adopted an approach that we feel takes advantage of the nature of organizational norms that could otherwise be threatening to either our students or to ourselves. On the opening day of class we:
Characterization of Revenue Equivalence

A saw blade guard for a sawing power tool, particularly a mitre saw, comprises a protective element having two side walls each formed as a part of a circle, and a peripheral wall connecting the side walls with one another, the side walls having a center and an edge spaced from the center, the protective element being formed as an integral element and provided with a member in the region of the edge for turning the protective element as a whole.
ARS Dictaminis Perverted: The Personal Solicitation E-Mail as a Genre

Phishing e-mails deceive individuals into giving out personal information which may then be utilized for identity theft. One particular type, the Personal Solicitation E-mail (PSE) mimics personal letters—modern perversions of ars dictaminis (the classical art of letter writing). In this article, I determine and discuss 19 appeals common to the PSE. These appeals were established first by conducting generative rhetorical analysis, then by volunteer coding, on 170 e-mails collected over a 12-month period. After defining these categories, I show how these letters are excellent twenty-first century teaching tools for pathos-based argumentation, logical appeals, the creation of ethos, and kairos in the development of perceived exigency.
Families as Contexts for Attachment: Reflections on Theory, Research, and the Role of Family Rituals

This commentary draws on Shaver and Mikulincer's (2012) article to discuss key aspects of adult attachment, family theory, and research. First, a reflection is presented on why the historical development of attachment theory calls for a better understanding of the role of the whole-family context. Second, the issue of the cross-fertilization of research traditions related to attachment theory and family systems theory is addressed. Third, a brief overview of research on attachment and family processes is presented. Finally, to illustrate the relationship between attachment and whole-family variables, the particular example of family rituals is discussed. More precisely, a mediational hypothesis is discussed, whereby attachment security is linked to positive outcomes for families via the development of meaningful family rituals.
Genome-Wide SNP Analysis Reveals Distinct Origins of Trypanosoma evansi and Trypanosoma equiperdum

Abstract Trypanosomes cause a variety of diseases in man and domestic animals in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In the Trypanozoon subgenus, Trypanosoma brucei gambiense and Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense cause human African trypanosomiasis, whereas Trypanosoma brucei brucei, Trypanosoma evansi, and Trypanosoma equiperdum are responsible for nagana, surra, and dourine in domestic animals, respectively. The genetic relationships between T. evansi and T. equiperdum and other Trypanozoon species remain unclear because the majority of phylogenetic analyses has been based on only a few genes. In this study, we have conducted a phylogenetic analysis based on genome-wide SNP analysis comprising 56 genomes from the Trypanozoon subgenus. Our data reveal that T. equiperdum has emerged at least once in Eastern Africa and T. evansi at two independent occasions in Western Africa. The genomes within the T. equiperdum and T. evansi monophyletic clusters show extremely little variation, probably due to the clonal spread linked to the independence from tsetse flies for their transmission.
Economic Inequality, Legitimacy, and Cross-National Homicide Rates

This research is concerned with explicating and modeling the causal linkages from economic inequality to homicide among nation-states. Specifically, the authors posit that the effect of economic inequality on cross-national homicide rates is mediated by the perceived legitimacy of the system of stratification; that is, the effect of economic inequality on cross-national homicide rates should be substantially attenuated once perceived legitimacy is controlled. The authors test this hypothesis with data from 33 of the 44 nation-states that participated in the third wave of the World Values Survey. Negative binomial regression analyses reveal that perceptions of legitimacy do not mediate the effects of economic inequality on homicide. However, they do indicate that the impact of economic, and political, illegitimacy on homicide depends on the level of modernity. The implications of these findings for the economic inequality-homicide relationship are explored.