Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bladder‐cancer incidence in relation to vegetable and fruit consumption: A prospective study of atomic‐bomb survivors

We examined the relation between consumption of 22 dietary items and subsequent bladder‐cancer incidence in a cohort of atomic‐bomb survivors in Japan. Subjects were 38,540 people (14,873 men and 23,667 women) who responded to a mail survey carried out between 1979 and 1981 and who had no known cancer diagnosed before the start of follow‐up (1 January 1980 for men, 1 February 1981 for women). Consumption frequencies for 22 dietary items were ascertained with pre‐coded answers. As of the end of 1993, there were 114 (83 men and 31 women) incident cases of bladder cancer among 450,326 person‐years at risk. Statistical analysis was done using Poisson regression for grouped survival data. Consumption of green‐yellow vegetables and fruit were protectively associated with risk. Adjusted for gender, age, radiation exposure, smoking status, educational level, body‐mass index and calendar time, the relative risk (RR) for those consuming green‐yellow vegetables 2–4 times per week and almost everyday was 0.62 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.39–0.98] and 0.54 (95% CI 0.30–0.94) respectively, as compared with those consuming once per week or less. The corresponding RR for fruit consumption was 0.50 (0.30–0.81) and 0.62 (0.39–0.99) respectively. Chicken consumption was unexpectedly associated with decreased risk, but additional adjustment for consumption did not change the relation of green‐yellow vegetables or of fruit to risk. The consumption of the other dietary items, including meat and green tea, was not related to risk. The findings add to evidence that high consumption of vegetables and fruit are protective against bladder cancer. Int. J. Cancer 86:132–138, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
It's what you do and the way that you do it: Team task, team size, and innovation-related group processes

This article describes a study of the relationships between team inputs (task type and team size) and team processes in 87 cross industry Portuguese teams, some of which had high and some low requirements to innovate. Team processes were measured using the Team Climate Inventory (TCI), which focuses on clarity of and commitment to team objectives, levels of participation, support for innovation, and quality emphases. Three hypotheses were tested. The first proposed that teams carrying out tasks with a high innovation requirement would have high scores on a measure of team processes. This was supported insofar as such teams reported higher levels of participation and support for innovation. The second hypothesis proposed that large teams would have poorer team processes. This hypothesis was confirmed. The third hypothesis concerned the interaction between size and innovation. The results suggested that large teams operating under a relatively high pressure to innovate have poorer team processes than large teams that do not have a high requirement to innovate.
Working Time Mismatch and Subjective Well-Being

This study uses nationally representative panel survey data for Australia to identify the role played by mismatches between hours actually worked and working time preferences in contributing to reported levels of job and life satisfaction. Three main conclusions emerge. First, it is not the number of hours worked that matters for subjective well-being, but working time mismatch. Second, overemployment is a more serious problem than is underemployment. Third, while the magnitude of the impact of overemployment may seem small in absolute terms, relative to other variables, such as disability, the effect is quite large.
Measuring party positions in Europe

This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999−2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and the 2009 European Elections Studies survey, and explore basic trends on party positioning since 1999. The dataset is available at the CHES website.
Use of Health Information Technology to Manage Frequently Presenting Emergency Department Patients

Objective: To determine if the effective use of Health Information Technologies (HIT) and the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) affects emergency department (ED) usage in a complicated frequently presenting patient population. Methods: A retrospective, observational study of 45 patients enrolled in our Frequent User Program called Community Resources for Emergency Department Overuse (CREDO) between June 2005 and July 2007. The study was conducted at an urban hospital with greater than 95,000 annual visits. Patients served as their own historical controls. In this pre-post study, the pre-intervention control period was determined by the number of months the patient had been enrolled in the program. The pre- and post-intervention time periods were the same for each patient but varied between patients. The intervention included using HIT to identify the most frequently presenting patients and creating individualized care plans for those patients. The care plans were made available through the EMR to all healthcare providers. Study variables in this study intervention included ED charges, lab studies ordered, number of ED visits, length of stay (LOS), and Total Emergency Department Contact Time (TEDCT), which is the product of the number of visits and the LOS. We analyzed these variables using paired T-tests. This study was approved by the institutional review board. Results: Forty-five patients were enrolled, but nine were excluded for no post enrollment visits; thus, statistical analysis was conducted with n=36. The ED charges decreased by 24% from $64,721 to $49,208 (p=0.049). The number of lab studies ordered decreased by 28% from 1847 to 1328 (p=0.04). The average number of ED visits/patient decreased by 25% from 67.4 to 50.5 (p=0.046). The TEDCT decreased by 39% from 443.7 hours to 270.6 hours (p=0.003). Conclusion: In this pre-post analysis of an intervention targeting ED frequent users, the use of HIT and the EMR to identify patients and store easily accessible care plans significantly reduced ED charges, labs ordered, number of ED visits, and the TEDCT.
Who gets caught at maturity gap? A study of pseudomature, immature, and mature adolescents

This research examined links among adolescents’ maturity status, their biological, social, and psychological characteristics, and parents’ perceptions of their adolescents’ maturity. The participants were 430 Canadian adolescents in the sixth and ninth grades, and a subsample of their parents. Pattern-centred analyses confirmed the existence of three clusters of adolescents differing in maturity status: pseudomature (25%), immature (30%), and mature (44%). Further analyses found differences among the clusters in adolescents’ pubertal status, the social context (presence of older siblings and friends), and their desired age, involvement in pop culture, school and peer involvement, and close friendships. Analysis of mother and father reports revealed some differences in how parents of pseudomature, immature, and mature adolescents perceived their adolescents’ maturity, and in how they felt about their adolescents’ maturity. There were few grade differences in the findings. The results suggest that pseudomature adolescents, and to a smaller extent, immature adolescents, are caught in a maturity gap, which could have longer-term implications for their transition to adulthood.
Adults Engaged in Lifelong Learning in Taiwan: Analysis by Gender and Socioeconomic Status.

This study examines the nature of adult engagement in lifelong learning in Taiwan. Previous studies have shown that gender and socioeconomic status (SES) are key variables related to equal access to education. Are these variables related to adults’ engagement in lifelong learning in a specific country? This study analysed data from a survey of adults that was administered by the Ministry of Education in 2009. The results show a strong relationship between gender, SES and the learning experiences of adults. Women in low and middle SES groups were more likely to engage in lifelong learning. This study reveals that women’s engagement in lifelong learning depended on their family concerns. Men’s engagement in lifelong learning, in contrast, was often for career or work-related reasons. By explaining the connections between the gender and SES of adult learners engaging in lifelong learning, the results of this study will enrich the context of lifelong learning.
Re-Thinking the Nature of the Informal Economy: Some Lessons from Ukraine

This article provides a critical evaluation of the competing discourses that variously represent the informal economy as a residue or leftover of some pre-capitalist era, a by-product of a new type of emergent formal economy, an alternative mode of work organization or a complement to the formal economy. Drawing upon evidence from a study of 600 households in Ukraine that unravels the heterogeneous forms of work in the informal economy, the finding is that although each and every representation is wholly valid in relation to specific types of informal work, no one articulation fully captures the diverse nature and multiple meanings of the informal economy. Here, in consequence, it is contended that only by using all of them will a finer-grained and more comprehensive understanding of the complex and multifarious character of the informal economy be achieved. To display how this can be achieved, a conceptual framework is then presented that couples together these contrasting representations in order to provide a more multi-layered and nuanced depiction of the informal economy, followed by a discussion of the implications for urban and regional development and policy of recognizing the multiple and diverse types of informal work.
Concreteness effects in word production but not word comprehension in deep dyslexia

We present a patient, LW, who, like all deep dyslexics, is more able to read aloud concrete than abstract words. In order to explore the cause of this concreteness effect in word production, we tested LW's comprehension of concrete and abstract words, in the Shallice and McGill word-picture matching task, in a synonym judgement task, and in a definition-to-word matching task. LW showed no significant impairment of her comprehension of abstract high-frequency words in these tasks, despite being unable to read most of the words aloud. We conclude that the concreteness effect in oral reading in LW cannot be due solely to a semantic deficit for abstract words. We propose the NICE model, in which concreteness is an important dimension of normal lexicalisation, and suggest that deep dyslexia reflects the ability of qualitatively normal but isolated semantics to access or “drive” unique entries in a phonological output lexicon subject to a pathological increased aphasic “threshold” for lexicalisation.
Nonadaptive Amino Acid Convergence Rates Decrease over Time

Convergence is a central concept in evolutionary studies because it provides strong evidence for adaptation. It also provides information about the nature of the fitness landscape and the repeatability of evolution, and can mislead phylogenetic inference. To understand the role of adaptive convergence, we need to understand the patterns of nonadaptive convergence. Here, we consider the relationship between nonadaptive convergence and divergence in mitochondrial and model proteins. Surprisingly, nonadaptive convergence is much more common than expected in closely related organisms, falling off as organisms diverge. The extent of the convergent drop-off in mitochondrial proteins is well predicted by epistatic or coevolutionary effects in our “evolutionary Stokes shift” models and poorly predicted by conventional evolutionary models. Convergence probabilities decrease dramatically if the ancestral amino acids of branches being compared have diverged, but also drop slowly over evolutionary time even if the ancestral amino acids have not substituted. Convergence probabilities drop-off rapidly for quickly evolving sites, but much more slowly for slowly evolving sites. Furthermore, once sites have diverged their convergence probabilities are extremely low and indistinguishable from convergence levels at randomized sites. These results indicate that we cannot assume that excessive convergence early on is necessarily adaptive. This new understanding should help us to better discriminate adaptive from nonadaptive convergence and develop more relevant evolutionary models with improved validity for phylogenetic inference.
Corporate Cultural Fit and Performance in Mergers and Acquisitions

While cultural fit has been acknowledged to be a potentially important factor in mergers and acquisitions, the concept has been ill-defined. Hence, its relationships to other human aspects in mergers have not been rigorously examined. Further, the relationships between cultural differences and other human factors to the effectiveness of the integration process and financial performance have not been subject to rigorous research that use relatively large samples of mergers and acquisitions. The present study assesses the role of corporate cultural fit, autonomy removal, and commitment of managers to the merger in predicting effective integration between merger partners in different industry sectors. The relationships between, and role of, these variables are found to be complex; they vary across industries and have different relationships with different measures of performance.
Teaching as Clinical Problem Solving: A Critical Examination of the Analogy and Its Implications

In 1974, when research on teachers’ cognitions became a major focus of inquiry, teaching, like the practice of medicine, was described as a form of clinical problem solving. The concept of clinical problem solving was invoked primarily in terms of its traditional definition: the diagnosis and treatment of dysfunction. Today, after 14 years of studying teachers’ cognitions, educational researchers are beginning to provide models of classroom teaching that reflect a very different, hierarchical kind of clinical problem solving. Empirical models of each kind of clinical problem solving (diagnosis/treatment vs. hierarchical) are described and compared, as a means of evaluating the distance researchers of teachers’ cognitions have traveled. The author suggests that the transition from the initial to the newer model represents a shift in perspective that has effectively moved teaching farther from science and closer to art. The implications of this shift are discussed in terms of how pre- and inservice teachers are evaluated and trained.
‘Evidence. What evidence?’: evidence-based policy making and School Sport Partnerships in North West England

Based upon semi-structured interviews conducted with 14 representatives of one School Sport Partnership (SSP) in North West England, this paper examines several aspects of the policy and practice of the Partnership within a policy climate characterized by a preference for evidence-based policy making and practice. The findings indicate that providing young people with two hours of physical education and school sport (PESS) each week, and awarding primary schools with an Activemark, was central to the government's policy aspirations for SSPs, whilst considerably less attention was paid to the quality of pupils' experiences of PESS. All of the participants explained that where the SSP programme was monitored and evaluated, this was undertaken through self-completion of the Physical Education, School Sport and Club Links (PESSCL) survey, which they saw as an inadequate outcome-based evaluation measure designed to ensure that they were ‘hitting targets’ and ‘jumping through hoops’ to meet the government's objectives. Being constrained to engage in this essentially political exercise was encouraged by the insatiable appetite amongst policy-makers for simple, ‘killer facts’, as indicators of policy success and required participants to assemble ‘evidence’ in support of their contribution to delivering government's policy goals. It is concluded that, notwithstanding the alleged commitment to monitoring and evaluation, and to the need for assembling evidence of the effectiveness of the SSP programme, the frequency with which political imperatives dominated evidence meant that it is likely that evidence-based policy making and practice will remain very much an aspiration, rather than a reality, in the pragmatic world of policy making.
Dimensionality and construct validity of language tests

At times 'unidimensional' tests have been characterized as being unduly constrained in what they can measure, and ultimately as lacking construct validity for communicative language assessment since communicative lan guage ability is held to be 'multidimensional' in nature. This simulation study considers the effects on statistical measures of test dimensionality that result from systematic sampling variation in both a single and a double-trait assessment model. Results are offered as evidence that there are both psychological and psychometric states of test dimensionality that are distinct, and that psychometric unidimensionality is not at all exclusive of psycho logical multidimensionality. Moreover, it is argued that psychometric uni dimensionality may often be rather more reflective than detractive of construct validity, even when complex multidimensional constructs underlie performance on the test.
Using Pencil-and-Paper Lexical-Decision Tests to Assess Word Decoding Skill: Aspects of Validity and Reliability.

The viability of a pencil-and-paper version of the lexical-decision (LD) task to assess children's word decoding skill was investigated. Participants in this study were Dutch second and third graders. Lexical decision and oral reading appear to be highly correlated, in second grade more than in third grade. Retest reliability of the LD tests is sufficient, at least for screening purposes, to good. The correlation with tests designed to measure pencil-and-paper test-taking skills shows that such skills at most play a minor role. Materials of different phonological and morphological structure caused systematic differences in score level, but a single factor suffices to explain common reading test variance. LD scores appear not to be particularly subject to inappropriate strategies.
Young Children's Acquisition of Alphabet Knowledge

This study documented children's acquisition of the following critical aspects of alphabet knowledge: letter recitation, naming, printing, and association of letters with sounds and words. These skills were tested for the entire set of upper- and lowercase letters in 188 children whose ages ranged from 2 1/2 to 7 1/2 years. Performance improved with age, at different rates for the different tasks, and the tasks were all highly correlated with one another. The children performed better on upper- than lowercase letters, and there were no sex differences in alphabet acquisition. Rank order correlations showed the degree to which letter difficulty was consistent across the age groups and across the various alphabet tasks.
Retrospective study of juvenile spondylarthropathies in Croatia over the last 11 years.

OBJECTIVES To determine the frequency of juvenile spondylarthropathies (JSpA) among other rheumatic diseases in a pediatric clinic population in an 11-year period in Croatia and to review their clinical, epidemiological, radiographic and laboratory. METHODS Of the 1264 patients with rheumatic diseases seen at a pediatric rheumatology center, 103 (8.2%) were diagnosed as having JSpA (56 boys, mean age 13.1 years, range 4.4-17.8 years), following the strict criteria of the European Spondylarthropathy Study Group. Medical history, clinical laboratory and imaging data of the 103 patients with JSpA were analyzed. RESULTS Eighty-two (79.6%) patients had undifferentiated spondylarthropathy, 6 (5.8%) patients had reactive arthritis/Reiter's disease, 6 (5.8%) had arthritis associated with inflammatory bowel disease, 5 (4.9%) had psoriatic arthritis, and only 4 (3.9%) patients had ankylosing spondylitis. The most common symptoms at the disease onset in patients with JSpA were peripheral and axial arthritis, followed by enthesitis. A significant increase in the number of patients with axial arthritis, peripheral arthritis, ocular symptoms and enthesitis was found during mean period of follow-up of 6.45 years. HLA-B27 was present in 78 (75.7%) patients. CONCLUSION In our hospital population the frequency of JSpA among other rheumatic disease was 8.2%. The disease was equally distributed among male and female patients, with onset around the age of 13 years. Most of the patients were diagnosed with undifferentiated spondylarthropathy.
European Enlargement, Secularisation and Religious Re-publicisation in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between closer integration into the European Union and the vitality and public presence of religion in three relatively recent accession states: Poland, Hungary and Romania. Using Moyser's (T. Moyser, Politics and Religion in the Modern World, London, Routledge, 1991) model of five levels of political secularisation, we find that there is evidence of growth of religious influence in public life in each of these societies between 1989 and 2007, while using World Values Survey data we find that different patterns of religious vitality are exhibited: growth in Romania, decline from a high level in Poland, and decline from a modest level in Hungary. We argue that to explain this religious ‘re-publicisation’ (growth in the public presence of religion) and different patterns of religious vitality, it is necessary to move beyond secularisation theory to a model which views the social processes identified as underlying secularisation not as the direct cause of decline in religious vitality, but rather as second-order factors creating conditions which can tend, depending on intermediate variables, as much towards growth in public presence of religion as to decline.
The personalization model revisited: An experimental investigation of the role of five personalization-based strategies on prejudice reduction

In this paper, we report findings from a series of experimental studies investigating the role of five personalization-based strategies (individuation, self-disclosure, decategorization, self–other comparison, and empathy) on prejudice reduction. As anticipated, participants who were in the self-disclosure or individuation conditions developed more favorable attitudes towards other out-group members (Study 1). In Study 2, decategorization or self–other comparison allowed group members to discover similarities between the self and members of the out-group, thereby reducing negative out-group memory. Interestingly, when we explored the processes underlying the generalization of prejudice reduction to the out-group (Study 3), we found that the affective component of personalization (i.e., empathy) emerged as a more robust predictor of prejudice reduction than self–other comparison and decategorization. In conclusion, these studies provide the first empirical evidence of the effects of the five components of personalization in reducing prejudice across different contexts and different experimental paradigms.