Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct, extended, and mass-mediated contact with immigrants in Italy: their associations with emotions, prejudice, and humanity perceptions

Two correlational studies investigated the associations between different forms of intergroup contact, on the one hand, and Italians' prejudice and humanity attributions toward immigrants in Italy, on the other. Study 1 examined the effects of direct contact, extended contact, and parasocial contact through mass-media, assessing separately contact through TV news and newspapers and contact through entertainment programs. Study 2 analyzed the distinct effects of positive and negative episodes of the contact forms considered in Study 1. Across the studies, we tested the mediational role of intergroup anxiety, empathy, and trust. Overall, results showed the importance of taking into account different forms of contact and considering the emotional processes during contact experiences to understand intergroup attitudes.
Impact of Cerebellar Lesions on Reading and Phonological Processing

The relationship between cerebellar function and reading abilities is unclear. One theory of developmental dyslexia implicates the cerebellum in this reading disorder. Neuroimaging studies in normal readers consistently show cerebellar activation in tasks that involve reading. However, neuropsychological evidence for a relationship between cerebellar function and skilled reading is sparse. To further examine the role of the cerebellum in reading, we assessed reading skills and phonological processing in a group of patients with focal damage to the cerebellum. The patients' accuracy in naming single words and nonwords and their reading fluency and comprehension did not differ from that of age‐ and education‐matched healthy controls. The patients' performance on phonological awareness and phonological memory tasks was also within the range of the control group, although their performance was highly variable. In contrast, cerebellar damage did significantly compromise performance in two other tasks associated with phonological processing. In a visual rhyme judgment task, a subset of the patient group was impaired on items with a mismatch between orthographic and phonological information. On a verbal working memory task, the cerebellar compared to the control group recalled fewer items from a list of nonwords, but not from lists of familiar items. On the basis of the patients' pattern of behavioral impairments, we propose that cerebellar damage affects an articulatory monitoring process. Our findings indicate that intact cerebellar function is not necessary for skilled reading; however, we cannot exclude the potential contribution of the cerebellum to reading acquisition.
Scoring Imprecise Credences: A Mildly Immodest Proposal

Jim Joyce argues for two amendments to probabilism. The first is the doctrine that credences are rational, or not, in virtue of their accuracy or "closeness to the truth" (1998). The second is a shift from a numerically precise model of belief to an imprecise model represented by a set of probability functions (2010). We argue that both amendments cannot be satisfied simultaneously. To do so, we employ a (slightly generalized) impossibility theorem of Seidenfeld, Schervish, and Kadane (2012), who show that there is no strictly proper scoring rule for imprecise probabilities. The question then is what should give way. Joyce, who is well aware of this no-go result, thinks that a quantifiability constraint on epistemic accuracy should be relaxed to accommodate imprecision. We argue instead that another Joycean assumption— called strict immodesty—should be rejected, and we prove a representation theorem that characterizes all "mildly" immodest measures of inaccuracy.
ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTITUDES : AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS IN SECONDARY EDUCATION STUDENTS

European and National institutions have recently expressed the need to encourage entrepreneurship in early aged formative stages. In this context, the aim of this paper is to identify factors that influence Secondary Education students' propensity towards an entrepreneurial option in their professional career. This analysis has been performed taking into account psychological factors such as entrepreneurial attitudes (creativity, proactivity and risk tolerance) and sociocultural factors such as the entrepreneurship role models and the businessmen perception. The results show differences in entrepreneurial skills developed by students who prefer to work for others and students who prefer to start their own business. Also, they confirm that entrepreneur role models positively influence a student preferences towards an entrepreneurial career. Specifically, we obtain that students will more likely wish to be an entrepreneur if they have a higher positive perception about the selected skills and if their role model has her/his own business. The main implications of this work involve new perspectives to design educational activities where both parents and students take part, and where entrepreneurial role model activities and entrepreneurial attitudes are remarked and supported. It would be very useful for the design of new educational activities for both students and parents to promote entrepreneurship from early ages.
The role of vowel quality in ELF misunderstandings

Abstract Misunderstandings are natural occurrences in conversation. Though they are the exception to the norm, and furthermore they do not necessarily result in communication breakdown, they do sometimes occur, and it is important to find out what causes them. Deterding (2013. Misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca: An analysis of ELF interactions in South-East Asia. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.) investigates misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in data from the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and discusses the role of phonological, lexical and grammatical features in causing them to occur. He reports that over 86 % of the tokens of misunderstandings in his corpus involve pronunciation. The current paper analyses this data further, specifically to determine the role of vowels, as Jenkins (2000. The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) has suggested that vowel quality is not important in English as a Lingua Franca, so she excludes vowel quality from the Lingua Franca Core, the set of pronunciation features that she suggests are important for maintaining intelligibility in an international setting. In fact, a total of over half the tokens of misunderstanding listed in Deterding’s Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca involve the quality of vowels, though in many cases this appears to be a minor factor. The current paper analyses these 98 tokens involving vowel quality in detail, to find out if some shifts in vowel quality are more important than others, and to investigate if vowel quality really is unimportant for intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca. It was found that vowel quality rarely causes a problem, and only in one token, in which the speaker was making a joke, is vowel quality the main factor causing the misunderstanding.
Jane Dancer Module Number Mba 12 Dissertation Biotechnology Funding in Cambridge Biotechnology Funding in Cambridge

Hand in date Monday 2 nd September 2002 11972 (Excluding Appendices and Bibliography) I give permission for the following people to have access to my dissertation: Tick Box PAPER COPY Confidential (unavailable for viewing, except to authorised personnel) Available to University staff and students Available only after consultation with me ELECTRONIC COPY Unavailable Available on the Judge Institute Website (Internet) Available on the Judge Institute Intranet (where it can only be viewed or downloaded within the Judge) I confirm that this piece of work is my own unaided effort and conforms to the Judge Institute's guidelines on Plagiarism. ABSTRACT Biotechnology companies present a particular challenge to the capital markets. They demand large amounts of investment and face high risks and long timeframes before achieving profitability. Analysis of the funding received by private biotechnology companies in Cambridge in the period January 2000 to June 2002 shows that funding is dependent on the business model adopted by a company and broadly follows the financial cycle described by Berger and Udell (1998). The vast majority of funding is provided as venture capital, reflecting the high information asymmetries and low collateral associated with biotechnology. Parent companies and Government schemes are an important source of finance for very young companies as are local, specialised venture capital firms. Publicly available data suggests that there is very limited funding from business angels. This was confirme d in interviews. However, Cambridge has well-developed angel networks, and this source of finance is anticipated to increase in the future. Funding for small, entrepreneurial companies is critically related to overcoming information problems (Berger and Udell 1998). Social ties have been reported to influence funding decisions and are particularly important within a close community like the Cambridge biotechnology industry. Networking organisations have evolved specifically to establish and maintain these relationships. Cambridge also has a large number of agents who intermediate in, and appropriate value from, the funding process. These include not only the classic financial intermediaries such as venture capital firms and business angel networks, but also specialised firms that have evolved to address information problems. These contribute by reducing transaction costs, in this case associated with the identification and evaluation of funding opportunities (Campbell and Kracaw 1980). There are two mechanisms by which this is achieved: providing channels of communication and increasing the transparency of the information that is communicated. Consultants exploit their knowledge of the funding network by providing direct …
Spatiotemporal sensitivity of cortical responses to self- and object-related motion in human adults

Motion provides animals with fast and robust cues for navigation and object detection. In the first case, stereotyped patterns of motion referred to as “optic flow” inform a moving observer about the direction and speed of its movement. In the case of object detection, regional differences of rigid motion allow for the segmentation of figures from their background, even in the absence of color or shading cues. Both classes of patterns are examples of complex motion, and are thus both dependent upon the integration of basic motion information across the visual field. Previous studies have attempted to chart visual evoked potential (VEP) response sensitivity to global space-time information in order to understand integrative versus local motion processing in the brain. However, important gaps remain, and so the experiments of this dissertation attempt to address these gaps. For instance, previous VEP studies on speed sensitivity concentrated only on one pattern type at a time, and only on optic flow. Experiments 1 and 3 therefore investigated the influence of pattern type on speed sensitivity for optic flow patterns and motion-defined figures, respectively. Experiments 2 and 4 provide human electrophysiological data for comparison with other studies on the temporal properties of motion integration mechanisms. Here, dot lifetimes were varied to determine the temporal constraints of the VEP responses to optic flow and motion-defined figures. Some of the results point to common mechanisms for the selfand object-motion patterns. Largely, however, the data suggest differential sensitivity: not only across the two classes of motion, but also across the patterns within each class, across scalp, and across speeds. Thus, the results demonstrate that normal cortical processing of integrative motion is much more complex than is often assumed.
Overview of the TREC 2010 Relevance Feedback Track ( Notebook )

This year the relevance feedback track further examined relevance feedback with a single document relevance feedback task. Seven groups participated in the track. At this time, relevance judging is on-going and no results are available. This notebook version of the track describes the track, presents the current status of the track, and includes participant summaries.
An Exact solution for the investment and value of a firm facing uncertainty, adjustment costs, information costs and irreversibility

Following the analysis in Abel and Eberly (1997), I derive closed-form solutions for the investment and value of a competitive firm with a constantreturns-to-scale production function and convex costs of adjustment. The analysis concerns reversible and irreversible investments under incomplete information. Optimal investment seems to be a non-decreasing function of q, the shadow value of capital. This depends also on the magnitude of shadow costs of incomplete information.
Wilful Ignorance and the Emotional Regime of Schools

ABSTRACT This article explores how ignorance of vulnerability – particularly of others’ vulnerability – may be produced and maintained in schools, especially in the context of pedagogical engagement with difficult histories. A focus on ignorance forces educators to ask not only about the epistemological presence of ‘difficult knowledge’ in schools, but also how epistemological absences operate affectively, formulating particular ‘emotional regimes’ of ignorance. The article shows how the denial of others’ vulnerability – in the name of race/racism, nation-state/nationalism and the like – invokes and moulds particular emotional regimes that reproduce the ignorance of vulnerability underlying difficult histories. It is argued that only with a systematic analysis of the production and reproduction of emotional regimes of ignorance can educators conceive of vulnerability as being a pedagogical resource for ethical response and political resistance to regimes of ignorance in schools. The article discusses the implications for critical education.
Optimal Routing and Scheduling in Transportation : Using Genetic Algorithm to Solve Difficult Optimization Problems

1. Introduction Whenever an organization, in the business of providing mobility, is entrusted with moving goods and people a natural question that arises is how efficiently can that organization provide the services. This basic requirement of efficient mobility of goods and passengers gives rise to, among many other things, the subject areas of optimal routing and scheduling. In the following sections the problems of optimal routing and optimal scheduling are explained. Finally, how these optimization problems, which are often difficult to solve using traditional optimization tools, have been solved using genetic algorithms are explained.
Cryptanalysis of a Password-based Group Key Exchange Protocol Using Secret Sharing

Yuan et al. recently introduced a password-based group key transfer protocol that uses secret sharing, which they claim to be efficient and secure [9]. We remark its resemblance to the construction of Harn and Lin [1], which Nam et al. proved vulnerable to a replay attack [3]. It is straightforward that the same attack can be mount against Yuan et al.’s protocol, proving that the authors’ claim is false. In the same paper, Nam et al. propose a countermeasure that may also apply to Yuan et al.’s protocol. However, we show that their protocol remains susceptible to an insider attack (even if it stands against the replay attack): any malicious participant can recover the long-term secret password of any other user and therefore becomes able to compute group keys he is unauthorized to know.
Meaning of working and expectations: a research on professional soldier candidates in Turkey

Previous studies on the relationship between individual’s enlistment decisions and their personal characteristics examined a number of variables such as age, marital status, gender, family background, geographical background, employment situation and education level. However, attitudes towards working, expectations from a good job and centrality of working are also important determinants in this process. This paper examines the profile of juveniles who seek a career as gendarmerie non-commissioned officers (NCO) in the Turkish Armed Forces and their attitudes and expectations towards working in general within the framework of Meaning of Working (MOW) researches. According to the results of the survey conducted with 500 NCO candidates in Turkey, learning something new, good relations with colleagues and employment guarantee are detected as the main expectations of juveniles who seek a career in military. Results also show that having a job is so important for these young people that they consider having a job even prior to their families.
What Instructional Leaders Need to Know about the Effects of Inclusion.

Effective school administrators and teachers are those who provide the least restrictive learning environments for all students. The main goal of this study was to analyze the effects of inclusive science education on the general education population of middle school students’ scientific conceptual understandings. The study was designed as a quasi-experimental model and conducted in a middle school in a large urban school district in Midwestern US. Approximately 4% of students in the school were receiving special education services. The participants in the study were selected through non-random selection. The participants of this study included 20 students without disabilities in each classroom with a total number of 120 students from a total of six different middle school classrooms. The study included two classrooms (one inclusive and one non-inclusive) for each grade level (6, 7, and 8). The conceptual change of students without disabilities was measured using the Density Assessment, which included 20 multiple choice questions. SPSS program was used for data analyses. Paired samples t-test and a multivariate group analysis test were conducted to investigate significant differences on students’ conceptual understandings. The findings showed that the effect of inclusive education was significant and positive on the conceptual understanding of students without disabilities in inclusive science classrooms
Do Asset Price Bubbles have Negative Real Effects ?

In the recent recession and current economic recovery, policymakers have supported asset prices in the U.S. treasury and mortgage markets, expecting that improvement in the balance sheet of banks will lead to more commercial lending. In general, we document that increases in housing prices in a bank’s deposit base lead banks to decrease commercial lending. Further, we find that a one-standard deviation increase in housing prices is associated with a 10.3 percentage point decrease in investment of borrowing firms and a 4.2 percentage point decrease in leverage. These results suggest that when asset prices increase in one sector (such as the housing market), banks may respond by reallocating capital away from other sectors (such as commercial lending) towards the supported sectors. JEL Code: G21, G31, G32.
Failure-Driven Refinement Search with Local Repair-Based Heuristics for Constraint Satisfaction Problems

There has been substantial recent interest in two new families of search techniques. One family consists of systematic approaches, which use the idea of dependency directed backtracking (DDB) and dynamic backtracking (DB) as an antidote for the inefficiencies of chronological backtracking. Based on backtracking, systematic approaches are able to produce an optimal assignment, when no time limit is imposed. The other contains non-systematic methods such as Min-Conflict Repair Heuristic or Selman’s GSAT. Based on local improvement mechanisms, these methods cann’t guarantee optimality, but may produce better quality assignments in a limited time. The main attractions are their reactivity and applicability to optimization problems. Our aim in this paper is to describe a new search procedure that combines the benefits of both of the earlier approaches. To achieve this goal, we describe a complete’ hybrid method called failure driven search control with min-conflict repair (FDB-MC) for solving constraint satisfaction problems. The failure explanationbackmarking process controls the search space of this combined approach, a method of learning constraints during search (at each failure point) that may be used to avoid the repeated traversing of failed path in a search tree. The approach is based on repair-based algorithms, and can be proved to find an optimal solution.
A sub-optimal joint subcarrier and power allocation algorithm for multiuser OFDM

This paper investigates subcarrier and power allocation in multiuser OFDM. The aim is to maximize the overall rate while achieving proportional fairness amongst users under a total power constraint. Achieving the optimal solution is computationally demanding thereby necessitating the use of sub-optimal techniques. Existing sub-optimal techniques either use fixed power allocation and perform only subcarrier allocation or handle subcarrier and power allocation separately. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that performs joint subcarrier and power allocation. Simulation results are shown to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with that of existing algorithms.
University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics Social Evaluation of Asian Accented English Social Evaluation of Asian Accented English Social Evaluation of Asian Accented English

This paper examines evaluations of Asian accented English by American listeners. Despite widely circulating stereotypes about Asian accents, and the substantial body of work on attitudes toward different language varieties, relatively few studies have looked at American attitudes toward Asian accented English, and those that exist have produced rather ambiguous results. In an online survey, respondents from across the United States rated different voices on several traits grouped into three dimensions: Attractiveness, Status, and Dynamism. Three different Accent Conditions were tested: Mainstream US English [MUSE], Asian Accented English [AA], and Brazilian Portuguese Accented English [BP]. Results indicate generally negative evaluations of Asian accented English. RM ANOVAs (N = 69) reveal that AA voices were rated significantly lower than MUSE voices on all dimensions, and significantly lower than BP voices on Attractiveness and Dynamism. Even on intelligence, a trait that forms a cornerstone of the 'Model Minority' stereotype of Asian Americans, AA voices were rated significantly lower than the other two groups. There were also differences according to Speaker Gender, with a tendency for female speakers in the AA and BP conditions to be rated more favorably than male speakers. Overall, this study provides important evidence of the significant attitudinal obstacles that anyone who speaks English with an Asian accent in the US is likely to encounter, and points to the need for further work that explores the social and linguistic factors behind accent bias.