Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Smokers' Neurological Responses to Imagery From Cigarette Package Warning Labels

iii DEDICATION I would like to dedicate my thesis work to my wife, Erla and my wonderful children, especially Gudrun Elfa who has been my biggest cheerleader all through my studies abroad. A special feeling of gratitude goes out to my loving parents, Anna and Fridrik whose encouragement has brought me a long way. I will always appreciate all they have done for me. My sister Gudrun, and my brothers Georg and Julius who are the best role models a younger brother can have, get special thanks. I would also dedicate this thesis to my mentor, Chris Rorden for all his help and support. I would also like to thank my committee for their guidance through this process. Last but not least, I like to thank Emily Garnett for the many hours of proofreading and Scott Vendemia for his support during the whole research process. iv ABSTRACT Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was signed into law in 2009 and gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to implement pictorial health warning labels (HWLs) on cigarette packages. Multiple studies investigating self-reported affective, cognitive and behavioral impacts of HWLs suggest that the most effective warnings include imagery that depicts physical damage to the body due to smoking. However, self-report methods of assessment used in these studies may be biased. Far less is known about how HWLs directly modulate brain activity. To address this issue, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine cortical activity in smokers while they viewed pictorial HWLs (including both HWLs proposed by the FDA as well as more graphic HWLs implemented in other countries) and a set of scrambled images, using an event related design. Each participant underwent fMRI while viewing stimuli and performing a simple visual discrimination task. The results revealed greater activity bilaterally in the lateral occipital cortex in response to foreign images compared to the FDA images, and there was no evidence that this effect was reduced with repeated exposure. These findings suggest that more graphic HWL imagery elicits more salient cortical response, perhaps due to their more explicit emphasis on the negative consequences of smoking on v human health. These findings bring us a step closer to understanding ways to evaluate effective HWLs and may strengthen the case for implementing even more graphic HWLs …
Looking for the heart of interactive media: reflections on video games' emotional expression

Ever since they first originated, video games have been perceived as an inferior form of media expression. One major concern has been that they do not seem able to elicit a wide spectrum of emotions, thus being perceived as emotionally shallow. Sustained by a theoretical overview of the nature of play activities and studies on emotion elicitation by video games, this paper hypothesizes on a relationship between certain elements of traditional games and subsequent elicited emotions. From these ensue concerns regarding the narrow spectre of emotions elicited by certain prototypical game structures employed by the game design process.
Capturing and representing brdfs for virtual reality

Photorealistic rendering of real world environments and high quality material models are becoming increasingly important in a range of different areas, including Visual Special effects, Interior/Exterior Modelling, Architectural Modelling, Cultural Heritage, Computer Games, Automotive Design and Virtual Reality. Currently, rendering systems are able to produce photorealistic simulations of the appearance of many real-world materials. In the real world, viewer perception of objects depends on the lighting and object/material/surface characteristics, the way a surface interacts with the light and on how the light is reflected, scattered, absorbed by the surface and the impact these characteristics have on material appearance. In order to re-produce this, it is necessary to understand how materials interact with light. Thus the representation and acquisition of material models has become such an active research area. Currently, no material model nor acquisition setup is without limitations in terms of the variety of existing materials and they range considerably in terms of portability and ease of use. In this course we describe the state of the art in material appearance acquisition and modelling. We also discuss the need for high quality material models from the Interior Design industry perspectives, by means of a case study which highlights the importance of appropriate material models. Yulio, a new platform for the creation, delivery, and visualization of VR will be used for the case study, visually demonstrating the importance of acquired material models and reverse engineered cloth models in immersive experiences for architecture and design.
Milk Yield, Composition, and Fatty Acid Profile in Dairy Cows Fed a High-concentrate Diet Blended with Oil Mixtures Rich in Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids

To evaluate the effects of feeding linseed oil or/and sunflower oil mixed with fish oil on milk yield, milk composition and fatty acid (FA) profiles of dairy cows fed a high-concentrate diet, 24 crossbred primiparous lactating dairy cows in early lactation were assigned to a completely randomized design experiment. All cows were fed a high-concentrate basal diet and 0.38 kg dry matter (DM) molasses per day. Treatments were composed of a basal diet without oil supplement (Control), or diets of (DM basis) 3% linseed and fish oils (1:1, w/w, LSO-FO), or 3% sunflower and fish oils (1:1, w/w, SFO-FO), or 3% mixture (1:1:1, w/w) of linseed, sunflower, and fish oils (MIX-O). The animals fed SFO-FO had a 13.12% decrease in total dry matter intake compared with the control diet (p<0.05). No significant change was detected for milk yield; however, the animals fed the diet supplemented with SFO-FO showed a depressed milk fat yield and concentration by 35.42% and 27.20%, respectively, compared to those fed the control diet (p<0.05). Milk c9, t11-conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) proportion increased by 198.11% in the LSO-FO group relative to the control group (p<0.01). Milk C18:3n-3 (ALA) proportion was enhanced by 227.27% supplementing with LSO-FO relative to the control group (p<0.01). The proportions of milk docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) were significantly increased (p<0.01) in the cows fed LSO-FO (0.38%) and MIX-O (0.23%) compared to the control group (0.01%). Dietary inclusion of LSO-FO mainly increased milk c9, t11-CLA, ALA, DHA, and n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), whereas feeding MIX-O improved preformed FA and unsaturated fatty acids (UFA). While the lowest n-6/n-3 ratio was found in the LSO-FO, the decreased atherogenecity index (AI) and thrombogenicity index (TI) seemed to be more extent in the MIX-O. Therefore, to maximize milk c9, t11-CLA, ALA, DHA, and n-3 PUFA and to minimize milk n-6/n-3 ratio, AI and TI, an ideal supplement would appear to be either LSO-FO or MIX-O.
The identification of an optical counterpart to the super-Eddington X-ray source, NGC 5204 X-1

We report the identification of a possible optical counterpart to the super-Eddington X-ray source NGC 5204 X-1. New CHANDRA data shows that the X-ray source is point-like, with a luminosity of 5.2× 10 39 erg s 1 (0.5 - 8 keV). It displays mediumand long-term X-ray variability in observations spanning a period of 20 years. The accurate CHANDRA position allows us to identify a blue optical continuum source (mv = 19.7) at the position of NGC 5204 X-1, using newly-obtained optical data from the INTEGRAL instrument on the William Herschel Telescope. The X-ray and optical source properties are consistent with the scenario in which we are observing the beamed X-ray emission of a high-mass X-ray binary in NGC 5204, composed of an O star with either a black hole or neutron star companion.
Gender Classiﬁcation with Deep Learning

For our project, we consider the task of classifying the gender of an author of a blog, novel, tweet, post or comment. Previous attempts have considered traditional NLP models such as bag of words and n-grams to capture gender differences in authorship, and apply it to a speciﬁc media (e.g. formal writing, books, tweets, or blogs). Our project takes a novel approach by applying deep learning models developed by Lai et al to directly learn the gender of blog authors. We further reﬁne their models and present a new deep learning model, the Windowed Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (WRCNN), for gender classiﬁcation. Our approaches are tested and trained on several datasets: a blog dataset used by Mukherjee et al, and two datasets representing 19th and 20th century authors, respectively. We report an accuracy of 86% on the blog dataset with our WRCNN model, comparable with state-of-the-art implementations.
Innovation Characteristics, Perceived Risk, Permissibility and Trustworthiness in the Adoption of Mobile Marketing

Despite the increasing number of companies investing in mobile marketing campaigns, research investigation on the adoption process of mobile marketing from the perspective of consumers has been limited. Although mobile devices are a promising marketing tool, mobile spam (i.e. unsolicited SMS messages) raises privacy concerns relating to the utilisation of the personal and location data used to personalise mobile marketing. The Structural Equation Modeling outputs suggest that the trust, perceived risk, and permissibility (assurance stage) do influence the adoption process of mobile marketing through the perceived innovative characteristics in the persuasion stage.
On halo formation times and assembly bias

In this paper, we use the ‘Millennium Simulation’ to re-examine the mass assembly history of dark matter haloes and the age dependence of halo clustering. We use eight different definitions of halo formation times to characterize the different aspects of the assembly history of a dark matter halo. We find that these formation times have different dependence on halo mass. While some formation times characterize well the hierarchical nature of halo formation, in the sense that more massive haloes have later formation, the trend is reversed for other definitions of the formation time. In particular, the formation times that are likely to be related to the formation of galaxies in dark haloes show strong trends of ‘downsizing’, in that lower mass haloes form later. We also investigate how the correlation amplitude of dark matter haloes depends on the different formation times. We find that this dependence is quite strong for some definitions of formation time but weak or absent for other definitions. In particular, the correlation amplitude of haloes of a given mass is almost independent of their last major merger time. For the definitions that are expected to be more related to the formation of galaxies in dark haloes, a significant assembly bias is found only for haloes less massive than M∗ . We discuss our results in connection to the hierarchical assembly of dark matter haloes, the ‘archaeological downsizing’ observed in the galaxy population, and the observed colour-dependence of the clustering strength of galaxy groups and clusters.
Performance Optimization for All Flash Scale-Out Storage

The proliferation of the big data analysis and the wide spread usage of public/private cloud services make it important to expand the storage capacity as the demand is increased. The scale-out storage is gaining more attention since it can inherently provide scalable storage capacity. The flash SSD, on the other hand, is getting popular as the drop-in replacement of the slow HDD, which seems to boost the system performance somewhat at least. However, the performance of traditional scale-out storage system does not get much better even though its HDD is replaced with the flash based high performance SSD since the whole system is designed based on HDD as its underlying storage device. In this paper, we identify performance problems of a representative scale-out storage system, Ceph, and analyze that these problems are caused by 1) Coarse-grained lock, 2) Throttling logic, 3) Batching based operation latency and 4) Transaction Overhead. We propose some optimization techniques for flash-based Ceph. First, we minimize coarse-grained locking. Second, we introduce throttle policy and system tuning. Third, we develop non-blocking logging and light-weight transaction processing. We found that our optimized Ceph shows up to 20 times improvement in the case of small random writes and it also shows more than two times better performance in the case of small random read through our experiments. We also show that the system exhibits linear performance increase as we add more nodes.
The Interplay of Temperature and Genotype on Patterns of Alternative Splicing in Drosophila melanogaster

Alternative splicing is the highly regulated process of variation in the removal of introns from premessenger-RNA transcripts. The consequences of alternative splicing on the phenotype are well documented, but the impact of the environment on alternative splicing is not yet clear. We studied variation in alternative splicing among four different temperatures, 13, 18, 23, and 29°, in two Drosophila melanogaster genotypes. We show plasticity of alternative splicing with up to 10% of the expressed genes being differentially spliced between the most extreme temperatures for a given genotype. Comparing the two genotypes at different temperatures, we found <1% of the genes being differentially spliced at 18°. At extreme temperatures, however, we detected substantial differences in alternative splicing—with almost 10% of the genes having differential splicing between the genotypes: a magnitude similar to between species differences. Genes with differential alternative splicing between genotypes frequently exhibit dominant inheritance. Remarkably, the pattern of surplus of differences in alternative splicing at extreme temperatures resembled the pattern seen for gene expression intensity. Since different sets of genes were involved for the two phenotypes, we propose that purifying selection results in the reduction of differences at benign temperatures. Relaxed purifying selection at temperature extremes, on the other hand, may cause the divergence in gene expression and alternative splicing between the two strains in rarely encountered environments.
Student teachers’ psychological needs, subjective experience and perceived competence in teaching during practicum

ABSTRACT This paper, using the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as the underpinning framework, examines student teachers’ basic psychological needs, their subjective experience and their perceived teaching competence during practicum. It attempted to establish whether there were distinct groups of student teachers with different needs satisfaction, and how their levels of needs satisfaction were related to the groups’ subjective experience and perceived teaching competence. Quantitative data were collected. Data were analysed using cluster analysis and MANOVA. Overall, the results suggest that SDT can be effectively utilized as a framework for looking at how needs satisfaction is related to student teachers’ subjective experiences and perceived competence in teaching during practicum. The findings from this study are useful in providing evidence for teacher educators to strengthen their practicum model and plan mentoring workshops. The findings also provide much-needed insights into groups of student teachers that may need more support during practicum. Finally, the findings may help mentors understand their mentees better.
A Search for OH Megamasers at z > 0.1. II. Further Results

We present current results of an ongoing survey for OH megamasers in luminous infrared galaxies at the Arecibo Observatory.1 The survey is now two-thirds complete, and has resulted in the discovery of 35 new OH megamasers at z > 0.1, 24 of which are presented in this paper. We discuss the properties of each source in detail, including an exhaustive survey of the literature. We also place upper limits on the OH emission from 107 nondetections and list their IR, radio, and optical properties. The survey detection rate is one OH megamaser for every six candidates overall, but is a strong function of the far-IR luminosity of candidates and may depend on merger stage or on the central engine responsible for the IR luminosity in the merging galaxy pair. We also report the detection of IRAS 12032+1707, a new OH gigamaser.
The Racial and Gender Differences in the Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Juvenile Residential Placement

Research has demonstrated a relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and a variety of juvenile offending outcomes. No study to date, however, has examined the relationship between ACEs and juvenile residential placement. The current study utilized a large sample of 4,733 adjudicated juveniles in Florida in order to examine the relationship between ACEs and residential placement across gender and race/ethnicity. For the entire study sample, ACEs significantly increased the odds of residential placement by age 17. For males, ACEs significantly increased the odds of residential placement for Black and Hispanic males but had a null effect on White males. For females, ACEs were predictive of residential placement for Black females but not for White or Hispanic females. Consistent predictors of residential placement across demographic groups included the presence of antisocial peers, substance abuse issues, and anger problems.
Cascade Effects in Heterogeneous Populations

We present a model of sequential choice which explains the emergence and persistence of unpopular, inefficient behavioral norms in society. We model individuals as naïve Bayesian norm followers, rational agents whose subjective expected utility is increased by adherence to an established norm. Agents use Bayesian reasoning to combine their private preferences and prior beliefs with empirical observations of others’ decisions. When agents must infer the preferences of others from observation, this can result in negative cascades, causing the majority of agents to choose a dispreferred action (because they believe, incorrectly, that they are following the majority preference). We demonstrate that negative cascades can result even when the degree of conformity is relatively low, and under a wide range of conditions (including heterogeneity in preferences, priors, and impact of public opinion). This allows us to present a general model of how rational norm-following behavior can occur, and how unpopular norms might emerge, in real populations with heterogeneous preferences and beliefs.
A cosmic ray current-driven instability in partially ionised media

Context. We investigate the growth of hydromagnetic waves driven by streaming cosmic rays in the precursor environment of a supernova remnant shock. Aims. It is known that transverse waves propagating parallel to the mean magnetic field are unstable to anisotropies in the cosmic ray distribution, and may provide a mechanism to substantially amplify the ambient magnetic field. We quantify the extent to which temperature and ionisation fractions modify this picture. Methods. Using a kinetic description of the plasma we derive the dispersion relation for a collisionless thermal plasma with a streaming cosmic ray current. Fluid equations are then used to discuss the effects of neutral-ion collisions. Results. We calculate the extent to which the environment into which the cosmic rays propagate influences the growth of the magnetic field, and determines the range of possible growth rates. Conclusions. If the cosmic ray acceleration is efficient, we find that very large neutral fractions are required to stabilise the growth of the non-resonant mode. For typical supernova parameters in our Galaxy, thermal effects do not significantly alter the growth rates. For weakly driven modes, ion-neutral damping can dominate over the instability at more modest ionisation fractions. In the case of a supernova shock interacting with a molecular clouds, such as in RX J1713.7-3946, with high density and low ionisation, the modes can be rapidly damped.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the WAIS-IV/WMS-IV

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—fourth edition (WAIS-IV) and the Wechsler Memory Scale—fourth edition (WMS-IV) were co-developed to be used individually or as a combined battery of tests. The independent factor structure of each of the tests has been identified; however, the combined factor structure has yet to be determined. Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to the WAIS-IV/WMS-IV Adult battery (i.e., age 16-69 years) co-norming sample (n = 900) to test 13 measurement models. The results indicated that two models fit the data equally well. One model is a seven-factor solution without a hierarchical general ability factor: Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Reasoning, Processing Speed, Auditory Working Memory, Visual Working Memory, Auditory Memory, and Visual Memory. The second model is a five-factor model composed of Verbal Comprehension, Perceptual Reasoning, Processing Speed, Working Memory, and Memory with a hierarchical general ability factor. Interpretative implications for each model are discussed.
Automatic Extraction of Non-Iterated System Behavior from Verilog Specifications

In this paper we present an algorithm for automatic extraction of system behavior from a structural Verilog specification. The algorithm generates a series-parallel poset expression for the behavior of the system, which is then used for verification purposes in the context of the SPPV Formal Verification Environment. The issues of correctness and time complexity of the algorithm are briefly discussed. A small example is presented to illustrate the conversion process from specification to a series-parallel poset expression.
Disrupted TH17/Treg Balance in Patients with Chronic Low Back Pain

Chronic low back pain (CLBP) is a leading cause of disability and costs in health care systems worldwide. Despite extensive research, the exact pathogenesis of CLBP, particularly the individual risk of chronification remains unclear. To investigate a possible role of the adaptive immune system in the pathophysiology of CLBP, we analyzed T cell related cytokine profiles, T cell related mRNA expression patterns and the distribution of T cell subsets in 37 patients suffering from nonspecific CLBP before and after multimodal therapy in comparison to 25 healthy controls. Serum patterns of marker cytokines were analyzed by Luminex technology, mRNA expression of cytokines and specific transcription factors was measured by real-time PCR, and distribution of TH1-, TH2-, TH17- and regulatory T cell (Tregs) subsets was determined by multicolor flow cytometry. We found that CLBP patients exhibit an increased number of anti-inflammatory Tregs, while pro-inflammatory TH17 cells are decreased, resulting in an altered TH17/Treg ratio. Accordingly, FoxP3 and TGF-β-mRNA expression was elevated, while expression of IL-23 was reduced. Serum cytokine analyses proved to be unsuitable to monitor the adaptive immune response in CLBP patients. We further show that even after successful therapy with lasting reduction of pain, T cell subset patterns remained altered after a follow-up period of 6 months. These findings suggest an involvement of TH17/Treg cells in the pathogenesis of CLBP and emphasize the importance of these cells in the crosstalk of pain and immune response. Trial Registration German Clinical Trial Register: Registration Trial DRKS00005954.