Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trait-Based Individual Differences on Discomfort Glare Rating Responses and Related Visual Contrast Sensitivity

The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between Trait-based Individual differences (neuroticism and extraversion) on glare subjective responses and contrast sensitivity performance when exposed to same manipulated glare conditions. An attempt was made to explore the relationship between the glare subjective responses and actual contrast sensitivity. Thirty-six individuals (9 high neuroticism scorers, 9 low neuroticism scorers, 9 high extraversion scorers, and 9 low extraversion scorers) were tested on subjective discomfort glare rating responses and visual contrast sensitivity. The International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) was used to assess trait-based individual differences, while the subjective glare experience was examined utilizing modified glare De Boer discomfort rating scale. The visual performance was measured through the contrast sensitivity level using adjustable contrast level of the Landolt's C target. Results indicated significant effect of extraversion trait on rating response while insignificant effect on visual related performance. The relationship between rating response and visual performance was also found to be quite minimal. In conclusion, the expected model was supported but only on the extraversion trait. Overall, the research was directed towards improving our understanding of influencing factors on the experience of discomfort glare, which may eventually have practical implications in the design of glare measurement methods, training and selection of drivers and workers who work under conditions of glare.
Loss of Least-Loaded Class in Asexual Populations Due to Drift and Epistasis

We consider the dynamics of a nonrecombining haploid population of finite size that accumulates deleterious mutations irreversibly. This ratchet-like process occurs at a finite speed in the absence of epistasis, but it has been suggested that synergistic epistasis can halt the ratchet. Using a diffusion theory, we find explicit analytical expressions for the typical time between successive clicks of the ratchet for both nonepistatic and epistatic fitness functions. Our calculations show that the interclick time is of a scaling form that in the absence of epistasis gives a speed that is determined by size of the least-loaded class and the selection coefficient. With synergistic interactions, the ratchet speed is found to approach zero rapidly for arbitrary epistasis. Our analytical results are in good agreement with the numerical simulations.
Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?

A 70 per cent failure rate is frequently attributed to organizational-change initiatives, raising questions about the origins and supporting evidence for this very specific statistic. This article critically reviews five separate published instances identifying a 70 per cent organizational-change failure rate. In each instance, the review highlights the absence of valid and reliable empirical evidence in support of the espoused 70 per cent failure rate. Organizational-change research and scholarship now exists which enables us to question the belief in inherent organizational-change failure rates. Inherent failure rates are critically questioned in terms of the ambiguities of change, the context-dependent nature of change, competing perceptions, temporal aspects and measurability. In conclusion, whilst the existence of a popular narrative of 70 per cent organizational-change failure is acknowledged, there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support such a narrative.
BER estimation of optical WDM RZ-DPSK systems through the differential phase Q

The optical return-to-zero differential phase-shift keying system is analyzed to determine the accuracy of the differential phase Q method in estimating the bit-error rate (BER). It is found that it consistently underestimates the BER though it successfully predicts the qualitative behavior of single-channel and wavelength-division-multiplexed systems for back-to-back and point-to-point configurations. A simple modification reduced the underestimation and produced accurate results.
Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline (review)

active participation in the creation of community (pp. 27–29). It remains somewhat less clear how this project of expansive education should be carried out in practice. Ben-Porath is discouraged by prevalent “peace education” programs. They are often apolitical, she notes, and tend to suffer either from narrowness (when construed as conflict resolution or anger management skills) or from overbreadth (when construed to equate all forms of violence, from schoolyard bullying to interstate war). BenPorath tentatively suggests other approaches that might be used. The first is including feminist approaches that challenge stereotypes and social assumptions (pp. 87–89). The second is the inclusion of multicultural education’s emphasis on acknowledging past wrongs and seeking forgiveness as a condition for “sustaining democracy while striving for peace” (p. 112). Those hoping for more than broad outlines of what expansive education or the formation of “shared fate” might look like in practice will come away hoping Ben-Porath will write a second volume. In addition, while Ben-Porath’s choice to frame her argument in the context of post-9/11 America and modern Israel is stimulating, she does not always provide sufficient depth to fully contextualize or illustrate her arguments. But these limitations do not detract from the seriousness of this work, which should be read and discussed widely and will significantly impact the way many of us think about the democratic purposes and possibilities of civic education for the twenty-first century. Ben-Porath renews an important conversation with Citizenship under Fire, challenging us to consider the ways in which the democratic “task before us” can be both more compelling and more complex during times of war than in pacific times.
Improved Cheeger's inequality: analysis of spectral partitioning algorithms through higher order spectral gap

Let φ(G) be the minimum conductance of an undirected graph G, and let 0=λ<sub>1</sub> ≤ λ<sub>2</sub> ≤ . ≤ λ<sub>n</sub> ≤ 2 be the eigenvalues of the normalized Laplacian matrix of G. We prove that for any graph G and any k ≥ 2, [φ(G) = O(k) l<sub>2</sub>/√l<sub>k</sub>,] and this performance guarantee is achieved by the spectral partitioning algorithm. This improves Cheeger's inequality, and the bound is optimal up to a constant factor for any $k$. Our result shows that the spectral partitioning algorithm is a constant factor approximation algorithm for finding a sparse cut if l<sub>k</sub> is a constant for some constant k. This provides some theoretical justification to its empirical performance in image segmentation and clustering problems. We extend the analysis to spectral algorithms for other graph partitioning problems, including multi-way partition, balanced separator, and maximum cut.
Trypanosome RNA editing: the complexity of getting U in and taking U out

RNA editing, which adds sequence information to RNAs post‐transcriptionally, is a widespread phenomenon throughout eukaryotes. The most complex form of this process is the uridine (U) insertion/deletion editing that occurs in the mitochondria of kinetoplastid protists. RNA editing in these flagellates is specified by trans‐acting guide RNAs and entails the insertion of hundreds and deletion of dozens of U residues from mitochondrial RNAs to produce mature, translatable mRNAs. An emerging model indicates that the machinery required for trypanosome RNA editing is much more complicated than previously appreciated. A family of RNA editing core complexes (RECCs), which contain the required enzymes and several structural proteins, catalyze cycles of U insertion and deletion. A second, dynamic multiprotein complex, the Mitochondrial RNA Binding 1 (MRB1) complex, has recently come to light as another essential component of the trypanosome RNA editing machinery. MRB1 likely serves as the platform for kinetoplastid RNA editing, and plays critical roles in RNA utilization and editing processivity. MRB1 also appears to act as a hub for coordination of RNA editing with additional mitochondrial RNA processing events. This review highlights the current knowledge regarding the complex molecular machinery involved in trypanosome RNA editing. WIREs RNA 2016, 7:33–51. doi: 10.1002/wrna.1313
Geometric Decision Tree

In this paper, we present a new algorithm for learning oblique decision trees. Most of the current decision tree algorithms rely on impurity measures to assess the goodness of hyperplanes at each node while learning a decision tree in top-down fashion. These impurity measures do not properly capture the geometric structures in the data. Motivated by this, our algorithm uses a strategy for assessing the hyperplanes in such a way that the geometric structure in the data is taken into account. At each node of the decision tree, we find the clustering hyperplanes for both the classes and use their angle bisectors as the split rule at that node. We show through empirical studies that this idea leads to small decision trees and better performance. We also present some analysis to show that the angle bisectors of clustering hyperplanes that we use as the split rules at each node are solutions of an interesting optimization problem and hence argue that this is a principled method of learning a decision tree.
Bulimic and Depressive Symptoms: Self-Discrepancies and Acceptance

We tested 342 female undergraduate students to test predictions derived from self-discrepancy theory with the goal of distinguishing self-perceptions associated with commonly comorbid bulimic and depressive symptoms. Consistent with our predictions and previous research, symptoms of eating pathology no longer remained correlated significantly when we statistically controlled for generic actual-ideal self-discrepancy scores associated with depressive symptoms. Furthermore, the correlation between bulimic symptoms and specific self-discrepancies (i.e., physical attractiveness, perfectionism, self-control, acceptance by others, self-acceptance, and social competence) was larger than correlations related to generic self-discrepancies. Two self-discrepancies—self-control and physical attractiveness — accounted for the most variance in bulimic symptoms above and beyond depression. Scores on an acceptance scale were negatively correlated with scores on measures of bulimic symptoms, depression, anxiety, and social desirability, as well as with self-discrepancies related to openness to new experiences, acceptance by self, and acceptance by others (p < .01). Our results highlight the value of self-discrepancy theory in distinguishing individuals with depressive and eating disordered symptoms. Treatment and theoretical implications are discussed.
Experimental approach to assessing actual wine purchase behavior

Purpose – The use of intentions to forecast behavior follows from the assumption that intentions are a strong indicator of an individual's actual purchase behavior. Yet most studies found the relationship between intent and actual behavior varies considerably. The purpose of this study was to explore how marketers should combine expressed measures of intention with other available data to forecast the probability of purchase and thus to set pricing decisions.Design/methodology/approach – Through a two‐stage approach, this study measured consumer psychographics and expressed purchase intention to predict actual purchase behavior using an online survey, the Vickrey auction method, and logistic regression.Findings – The results found that individuals' attitudes and intentions are strong predictors of actual behavior. However, of particular interest are lower‐purchase‐intention individuals, who acted in line with their expressed willingness to pay more than individuals with higher purchase intentions.Research.
The Cyberians : an empirical study of sociality in a virtual community

This paper presents some field results of a study of an on-line community : the cyberians. Backed up by our empirical findings we discuss the concept of community in order to gain a better understanding of the sense of the still problematic notion of virtual community. We suggest a set of issues defining, in our opinion, virtual communities and allowing their empirical study. We follow two main lines of investigation : the construction of Self and the relationship to the Other in the CMC settings and the social structures of the virtual community of the cyberians. Internet users clients of Cyberia, a French access provider. We selected a population who is active on newsgroups and has its own homepage. Five newsgroups are reserved to Cyberia clients, and namely one dedicated to technical help. This newsgroup is quite active : an average of around 200 messages are posted every day, to be compared with the average of 24 messages a day calculated on 500 newsgroups by Whittaker & al. (1998). We started with an ethnographic account and analysis of productions of cyberians on the net : their homepages and their messages on the newsgroups. Those provide new communication spaces, which are opportunities for relations in public in Goffman's sense (presentation of self, meeting and interacting). Three issues are of concern to us here : the presentation of self, the building of the relations with others, and the construction and social life of Internet communities. We tried to use the classical sociological notions on community, and see to what extent they were useful for the study of " virtual " groups. We hope to contribute to clarify the term " virtual community " and facilitate its empirical description. We use the notion of sociality in Alfred Schutz's (1976, p. 230) sense as " the common intersubjective world of communication and social action ". This definition highlights the founding value of common-sense shared knowledge for the constitution of social groups. The notion of sociality refers here to the social constructs which enable communication and interaction. When studying cyberian everyday life, we tried to see whether there was a specific form of sociality in the situation of CMC
Human action recognition via multiview discriminative analysis of canonical correlations

This paper proposes a novel Multiview Discriminative Analysis of Canonical Correlations (MDACC) for multiview learning. The proposed MDACC can capture discriminative features. Furthermore, we present a human action recognition framework by using MDACC to fuse multimodal features, which include the hierarchical Pyramid of Depth Motion Map (HP-DMM) for the depth images, the Histogram of Oriented Displacement (HOD) for the skeleton, and the statistical measurements for the accelerometer. The proposed framework was evaluated using two datasets MSR-Action3D dataset and UTD multimodal human action dataset. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework can achieve a higher average accuracy compared to several existing methods.
A Late Acceptance Strategy in Hill-Climbing for Exam Timetabling Problems

Over the years, many variants, extensions and adaptations of local search techniques have appeared in the literature. Some of them have become extremely famous, such as Simulated Annealing. Other ones have almost been forgotten, for example, “Record-toRecord Travelling” (Dueck 1993) or the “Old Bachelor Acceptance Algorithm” (Hu et al. 1995). In this abstract, we are proposing another new local search strategy. It is simple and, in many ways, rather obvious. We have made an exhaustive search through the optimization literature, but have not found the same idea in a published paper. We have termed this method the “Late Acceptance Strategy”. However, if it eventually emerges that the same approach has already been published then this paper could be considered to be a reminder about a “forgotten” way of improving a local search procedure.
Extensions and further examination of the job embeddedness construct.

The purpose of this study was to further examine the utility of Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, Sablynski, and Erez’s (2001) job embeddedness construct. The authors tested a revised version of their original multi-item scale, as well as a new global-item measure. Data were gathered from two independent samples (intercollegiate softball coaches, n = 214, and athletic department employees, n = 189). Results from both studies provide the strongest support for the global-item measure. The convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the measure was established. Results demonstrate the efficacy of the job embeddedness construct in explaining why people choose to stay in their organizations.
Exercise and Anxiety Reduction: Examination of Temperature as an Explanation for Affective Change

Although body temperature elevation resulting from exercise has been implicated as one mechanism underlying anxiety reduction, no published evidence exists which establishes the relationship between body temperature and anxiety with respect to exercise. To examine this relationship, 20 males ran for 30 min at 75% VO2max in three temperature-manipulated conditions: (a) Normal—normal temperature change associated with exercise; (b) Cooler—attenuation of normal rise in temperature; and (c) Warmer—accentuation of normal rise in temperature. Significant temperature differences resulted from the three conditions. Although anxiety was reduced following exercise in all conditions and relationships between changes in temperature and anxiety were strong (rs>.75), manipulations of temperature accounted for only a small percentage of the variance in anxiety. It appears that elevated body temperature may not be necessary for exercise-related anxiety reduction to occur. Other variables which might have a greater effect.
Parent-centered parenting values among Latino immigrant mothers

Abstract This study examined parent-centered parenting values (parenting qualities considered important to be a ‘successful’ parent) of Latino immigrant mothers in the United States (US) as well as their perception of parenting values in the dominant US culture. Latino mothers (N = 98) living in the US with at least one child between the ages of1 and 12 years completed a survey on parenting values. Relational qualities, role modeling values, and firm control were highly valued, whereas low parental control and having economic resources were rated relatively low. Participants also indicated that mothers in the dominant culture valued low parental control and having economic resources more than they themselves valued these qualities. Parent-centered values endorsed by Latino mothers in the study were very similar across countries of origin and levels of education. Overall results were consistent with the hypothesis that Latino mothers endorse parent-centered parenting values that adhere to a relational perspective, which emphasizes affection and loyalty towards other family members.
SPEECH ACCENT CATEGORIZATION IN INFANCY

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the period of time during which infants begin to categorize accents in natural speech, and the role of experience in mediating the development of speech accent categorization. The approach consists of establishing the adult state of speech accent categorization and measuring infantsi¦ speech accent categorization at 4 and 10 months using the infant-controlled visual habituation paradigm. The studies presented here were designed to examine if infants and adults can discriminate a local accent from a novel accent in the native language, if they can discriminate two novel accents in the native language, and if they can discriminate two accents in an unfamiliar language. Study 1 examined discrimination of the Western Pennsylvania accent, the Hispanic New York Bronx accent, and the Chinese accent in the English language by 26 native English speakers from Western Pennsylvania, and 17 native Chinese speakers from Taiwan. The same participants also categorized the Mainland and Taiwanese accents in the Chinese language. Participants in both linguistic groups were equally competent at categorizing accents in their native language, and they were equally poor at categorizing accents in the foreign language. Study 2 examined discrimination of the Western Pennsylvania accent and the Hispanic New York Bronx accent in the English language in 18 4-month-old and 20 10-month-old infants from the greater Pittsburgh area. The 10-month-old infants showed significant discrimination of the familiar accent from the novel one, whereas the 4-month-old infants failed to do so. Study 3 examined discrimination of the Hispanic New York Bronx accent and the Chinese accent in the English language in 16 10-month-old infants. These infants showed significant discrimination between the two unfamiliar accents. Study 4 examined discrimination of the Mainland and Taiwanese accents in the Chinese language in 20 4-month-old and 16 10-month-old infants. Both groups failed to discriminate accents in this foreign language. These studies demonstrate that the ability to categorize speech accent emerges by 10 months of age, is language-specific, and results from experience with the native language.
Effects of Reading Comprehension Interventions for Students with Learning Disabilities

We examined 48 studies of interventions designed to affect the reading comprehension of students with learning disabilities and coded their characteristics and effect sizes. Our analyses revealed that students who received the researchers' experimental methods obtained reading comprehension scores that were higher than those of 87% of students in comparison groups. Strong effects were more likely when students' performance was assessed on lower level comprehension measures, when the study author delivered the interventions, and when the experimental students' performance was compared to that of students who did not receive any special intervention. These results indicate that although effective reading comprehension interventions exist, there are gaps between their use in research and practice.
Relationships among Self Efficacy, Social Support, and Health Promoting Behaviors in Correctional Officers

Purpose: The purpose of this descriptive, cross-sectional study was to examine relationships among self efficacy, social support, and health promoting behaviors in correctional officers. Factors that influence health promoting behaviors of correctional officers were also assessed. Methods: Two hundred correctional officers completed a pack of self-report questionnaires. Collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, one-way ANOVA, and multiple regression. Results: There were statistically significant differences in health promoting behaviors depending on marital status and subjective health status. Significant positive correlations among self-efficacy, social support, and health promoting behaviors were found. Factors influencing health promoting behaviors of correctional officers were social support, subjective health status, marital status, and self-efficacy. Conclusion: Considering the findings from this study, health care providers need to develop effective nursing interventions which increase the level of self-efficacy and social support for correctional officers and to help correctional officers practice health promoting behaviors.