Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of Cognitive Improvement in Alcohol-Dependent Inpatients Using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) Score

Background. Cognitive dysfunction is a common feature in alcohol use disorders. Its persistence following alcohol detoxification may impair quality of life and increase the risk of relapse. We analyzed cognitive impairment changes using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) score in a large sample of alcohol-dependent inpatients hospitalized for at least 4 weeks. Method. This was an observational longitudinal survey. Inclusion criteria were alcohol dependence (DSM-IV) and alcohol abstinence for at least one week. The MoCA test was administered on admission and at discharge. Results. 236 patients were included. The mean MoCA score significantly increased from 22.1 ± 3.7 on admission to 25.11 ± 3.12 at discharge. The corresponding effect-size of improvement was high, 1.1 [95% CI 1.0–1.2]. The degree of improvement was inversely correlated with the baseline MoCA score. The rate of high and normal, that is, >26, MoCA values increased from 15.8% on admission to 53.8% at discharge. MoCA score improvement was not correlated with the total length of abstinence prior to admission. Conclusion. The MoCA score seems to be a useful tool for measuring changes in cognitive performance in alcohol-dependent patients. A significant improvement in cognitive function was observed whatever the degree of impairment on admission and even after a long abstinence period.
Broad‐band colours and overall photometric properties of template galaxy models from stellar population synthesis

We present here a new set of evolutionary population synthesis models for template galaxies along the Hubble morphological sequence. The models, which account for the individual evolution of the bulge, disc, and halo components, provide basic morphological features, along with bolometric luminosity and colour evolution (including Johnson/Cousins, Gunn g, r, i, and Washington C, M, T1, T2 photometric systems) between 1 and 15 Gyr. The luminosity contribution from residual gas is also evaluated, both in terms of nebular continuum and Balmer-line enhancement. Our theoretical framework relies on the observed colours of present-day galaxies, coupled with a minimal set of physical assumptions related to simple stellar population (SSP) evolution theory, to constrain the overall distinctive properties of galaxies at earlier epochs. A comparison with more elaborate photometric models, and with empirical sets of reference spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for early- and late-type galaxies is accomplished, in order to test output reliability and investigate the internal uncertainty of the models. The match with observed colours of present-day galaxies tightly constrain the stellar birth rate, b, which smoothly increases from E to Im types. The comparison with the observed supernova (SN) rate in low-redshift galaxies shows, as well, a pretty good agreement, and allows us to tune up the inferred star formation activity and the SN and hypernova rates among the different galaxy morphological types. Among others, these results could find useful application also in cosmological studies, given for instance the claimed relationship between hypernova events and gamma-ray bursts. One outstanding feature of the back-in-time evolution model is the prevailing luminosity contribution of the bulge at early epochs. As a consequence, the current morphological look of galaxies might drastically change when moving to larger distances, and we discuss here how sensibly this bias could affect the observation (and the interpretation) of high-redshift surveys. In addition to broad-band colours, the modelling of Balmer line emission in disc-dominated systems shows that striking emission lines, like Hα, can very effectively track stellar birth rate in a galaxy. For these features to be useful age tracers as well, however, one should first assess the real change of b versus time on the basis of supplementary (and physically independent) arguments.
Regulatory architecture determines optimal regulation of gene expression in metabolic pathways

In response to environmental changes, the connections (“arrows”) in gene regulatory networks determine which genes modulate their expression, but the quantitative parameters of the network (“the numbers on the arrows”) are equally important in determining the resulting phenotype. What are the objectives and constraints by which evolution determines these parameters? We explore these issues by analyzing gene expression changes in a number of yeast metabolic pathways in response to nutrient depletion. We find that a striking pattern emerges that couples the regulatory architecture of the pathway to the gene expression response. In particular, we find that pathways controlled by the intermediate metabolite activation (IMA) architecture, in which an intermediate metabolite activates transcription of pathway genes, exhibit the following response: the enzyme immediately downstream of the regulatory metabolite is under the strongest transcriptional control, whereas the induction of the enzymes upstream of the regulatory intermediate is relatively weak. This pattern of responses is absent in pathways not controlled by an IMA architecture. The observation can be explained by the constraint imposed by the fundamental feedback structure of the network, which places downstream enzymes under a negative feedback loop and upstream ones under a positive feedback loop. This general design principle for transcriptional control of a metabolic pathway can be derived from a simple cost/benefit model of gene expression, in which the observed pattern is an optimal solution. Our results suggest that the parameters regulating metabolic enzyme expression are optimized by evolution, under the strong constraint of the underlying regulatory architecture.
Bullying and negative behaviour in commercial kitchens

13 Declaration 14 Copyright statement 14 Acknowledgement 15 Chapter One: Introduction 16 1.1 Background and rationale of the study 16 1.2 The concept under investigation 16 1.3 Definitions 17 1.4 The hospitality industry 18 1.5 The structure of the commercial kitchen 19 1.6 The education and training process 21 1.7 The research aims and their contribution to knowledge 23 1.8 The structure of the thesis 23 1.9 Summary 26 Chapter Two: A Review of the Literature: The Bullying Phenomenon 27 2.
The Allocation of Competencies in an International Union: A Positive Analysis

This paper presents a positive theory of centralization of political decisions in an international union. My central claim is that lobbies play a role in determining the assignment of competencies to the union because their power of influence can increase or decrease under centralization. I show that in this setting a misallocation of prerogatives between the international union and national governments can be an outcome, both leading to excessive decentralization and/or non necessary centralization. This result reconciles a partial inconsistency that recent studies pointed out between the allocation of prerogatives in the EU and normative criteria, as laid out in the theoretical literature. JEL Classification: F02, D72, H77, P16
Culture and corporate voluntary reporting: a comparative exploration of the chairperson's report in India and New Zealand

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the cultural underpinnings of accounting practices through a comparative analysis of India and New Zealand, using the chairperson's report, which is increasingly becoming one of the most important segments of the corporate annual report. Design/methodology/approach - The annual reports of Indian and New Zealand companies from 2001 to 2005 were selected to investigate the extent and nature of information disclosure in their chairperson's report. “Content analysis” is the main methodological orientation of the paper. Findings - The paper argues that, contrary to propositions based on Hofstede's cultural framework, Indian companies provide more disclosure in their chairperson's report than their New Zealand counterparts. This leads to the conclusion that voluntary disclosure, more generally, is a complex phenomenon and cultural variables alone may not be sufficient predictors of the voluntary disclosure practices of a country. Originality/value - Using India and New Zealand, two countries with significant cultural differences, according to Hofstede's typology, the paper extends the literature by focusing on the chairperson's report, a more recent accounting phenomenon which is gaining popularity across the globe.
An Unsupervised Approach for Discovering Relevant Tutorial Fragments for APIs

Developers increasingly rely on API tutorials to facilitate software development. However, it remains a challenging task for them to discover relevant API tutorial fragments explaining unfamiliar APIs. Existing supervised approaches suffer from the heavy burden of manually preparing corpus-specific annotated data and features. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised approach, namely Fragment Recommender for APIs with PageRank and Topic model (FRAPT). FRAPT can well address two main challenges lying in the task and effectively determine relevant tutorial fragments for APIs. In FRAPT, a Fragment Parser is proposed to identify APIs in tutorial fragments and replace ambiguous pronouns and variables with related ontologies and API names, so as to address the pronoun and variable resolution challenge. Then, a Fragment Filter employs a set of non-explanatory detection rules to remove non-explanatory fragments, thus address the non-explanatory fragment identification challenge. Finally, two correlation scores are achieved and aggregated to determine relevant fragments for APIs, by applying both topic model and PageRank algorithm to the retained fragments. Extensive experiments over two publicly open tutorial corpora show that, FRAPT improves the state-of-the-art approach by 8.77% and 12.32% respectively in terms of F-Measure. The effectiveness of key components of FRAPT is also validated.
Traditional Food Products: The Effect of Consumers’ Characteristics, Product Knowledge, and Perceived Value on Actual Purchase

The study demonstrates the importance of customer orientation in markets dominated by small food and drink manufacturers. The study evaluates the effect of consumers’ personal characteristics and perceptions on purchase and provides better understanding of their role in business development in specialty food markets. The United Kingdom’s Mediterranean food market was chosen as a context, focusing specifically on Greek feta. Two hundred seventy-three UK specialty food shoppers were surveyed online to determine what aspects of consumers’ cognition and what personal characteristics would affect purchase decisions. The findings reveal, through 3 models (R2 = .26/.20/.19), that product knowledge (p < .01), country of origin (p < .10), perceived transactional value (p < .10), consumers’ life stage (p < .05), and available income (p < .01) are 5 critical factors affecting decision making. The managerial implications for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) lie in the need to create and deliver value to consumers by informing production decisions on consumers’ insight rather than on customers’ (wholesalers, retailers) specifications.
New Methodologies in the Valuation of Interest Rate Options

This paper values interest rate options using an improved parametric pricing kernel in the Merton (1973) intertemporal capital asset pricing model framework. In contrast to Liu, Kuo and Coakley (2007), the pricing kernel is driven by the following three state variables: the real interest rate, the Jensen's alpha, and the market volatility. Parameters in the pricing kernel are estimated using the Hansen (1982) two-step generalized method of moments. The results show that all three state variables are significant in the pricing kernel of LIBOR options. The Chebyshev polynomial pricing kernel dominates the iso-elastic power function pricing kernel. Finally, the five-term polynomial pricing kernel is superior to the fourth order polynomial which in turn is superior to the three-term expansion in the Hansen and Jagannathan (1997) distance measure comparison.
Choosing to Make an Effort: The Role of Striatum in Signaling Physical Effort of a Chosen Action

The possibility that we will have to invest effort influences our future choice behavior. Indeed deciding whether an action is actually worth taking is a key element in the expression of human apathy or inertia. There is a well developed literature on brain activity related to the anticipation of effort, but how effort affects actual choice is less well understood. Furthermore, prior work is largely restricted to mental as opposed to physical effort or has confounded temporal with effortful costs. Here we investigated choice behavior and brain activity, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, in a study where healthy participants are required to make decisions between effortful gripping, where the factors of force (high and low) and reward (high and low) were varied, and a choice of merely holding a grip device for minimal monetary reward. Behaviorally, we show that force level influences the likelihood of choosing an effortful grip. We observed greater activity in the putamen when participants opt to grip an option with low effort compared with when they opt to grip an option with high effort. The results suggest that, over and above a nonspecific role in movement anticipation and salience, the putamen plays a crucial role in computations for choice that involves effort costs.
The Analysis Of Supply Responsiveness Of Jambi’s Rice Farming

Farmers’ supply responsiveness and input demand planting rice in Jambi Province were estimated using profit function analysis. The objective of study is to analyze rice farmers’ supply response. Research was conducted in Jambi Province in the year of 2014. Result showed that farmers do maximise their profit in short term and response to price changing efficiently. Changing in real wages were estimated to have a greater impact on rice profit and supplies than changes in the real prices of mechanised land preparation, fertilizer or pesticides. Rice supply elasticity considering their price was closed to one.
The cage preferences of laboratory rats

Preference tests were used to assess a range of enrichment options for rats kept under standard New Zealand (and similar) caging conditions. The rats did not show significant preferences for most of the options, over an empty cage. The exceptions were shredded paper, a nesting box and a semi-enriched condition incorporating a range of modifications. These cage modifications are recommended for the enrichment of laboratory rats.
Testing the cognitive burden of two choice modeling valuation variants. The between and within sample approaches

Scores are commonly used in environmental valuation exercises. The two main procedures when testing for score differences are the within sample and the between sample approaches. Their conclusions do not always coincide. With a case study involving scores on difficulty of responding to two choice modeling variants –contingent ranking and contingent grouping–, the paper shows the strength of the within sample approach when relying on the coherent arbitrariness principle. Results suggest that the grouping is significantly less difficult to complete than the ranking task. The validity of these results is enhanced by the fact that they are independent of the exercise order, which is tested by randomizing the sequence order in which respondents face the two methods.
Research on Relationship between China and Ghana: Trade and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)

Foreign direct investment (FDI) refers to long term participation by country A into country B. There are two types of FDI: inward FDI and outward FDI. Many African countries have already done much to create a more business-friendly environment and many have made impressive progress towards political and economic stability. In their efforts to revive economic activity they have scaled down bureaucratic obstacles band interventions in their economies, embarked on privatization programs and are putting in place pro-active investment measures. These efforts helped by other factors such as high commodity prices have borne fruit in recent years. Research on the impact of China on other developing countries is still at an early stage and there are still a number of key areas where current knowledge is limited. The result indicated that, China is the second highest country in terms of trade and FDI in Ghana. Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment, Development, trade, industries and Economic
Adaptive Online Hyper-Parameters Tuning for Ad Event-Prediction Models

Yahoo's native advertising (also known as Gemini native) is one of its fastest growing businesses, reaching a run-rate of several hundred Millions USD in the past year. Driving the Gemini native models that are used to predict both, click probability (pCTR) and conversion probability (pCONV), is OFFSET - a feature enhanced collaborative-filtering (CF) based event prediction algorithm. OFFSET is a one-pass algorithm that updates its model for every new batch of logged data using a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based approach. As most learning algorithms, OFFSET includes several hyper-parameters that can be tuned to provide best performance for a given system conditions. Since the marketplace environment is very dynamic and influenced by seasonality and other temporal factors, having a fixed single set of hyper-parameters (or configuration) for the learning algorithm is sub-optimal. In this work we present an online hyper-parameters tuning algorithm, which takes advantage of the system parallel map-reduce based architecture, and strives to adapt the hyper-parameters set to provide the best performance at a specific time interval. Online evaluation via bucket testing of the tuning algorithm showed a significant 4.3% revenue lift overall traffic, and a staggering 8.3% lift over Yahoo Home-Page section traffic. Since then, the tuning algorithm was pushed into production, tuning both click- and conversion-prediction models, and is generating a hefty estimated revenue lift of 5% yearly for Yahoo Gemini native. The proposed tuning mechanism can be easily generalized to fit any learning algorithm that continuously learns on incoming streaming data, in order to adapt its hyper-parameters to temporal changes.
Elementary School Teachers’ Attitudes toward Classroom Accommodations: The Effects of Disability and School Type

ATTITUDES TOWARD ACCOMMODATIONS ii Acknowledgments The challenge of writing a thesis was a daunting one to say the least. Here I am, a year and a half later, with a finished product, and I feel like someone should pinch me to make sure this is not a dream. The number of wonderful people that have helped me along the way serves as a constant reminder of how important it is to surround yourself with good friends, influential advisors, and a supportive family. I would like to thank Professor Audrey Zakriski, for her endless understanding, patience, support, and feedback. As my thesis advisor she went above and beyond to help me every step of the way from designing my study to reading, re-reading, and re-reading draft after draft. Without her knowledge and guidance, this study would not be complete. thank you for inspiring me to be the best that I can be. Professor Devlin, as my academic advisor you guided me through my journey here at Connecticut College and always had complete faith in my ability to take on just a little too much. Professor Vyse, you challenged me academically and served as a constant reminder to smile, to pursue my passion, and that statistics is not all that scary. Friends, thank you for answering my endless questions about " How exactly do I write a thesis? " And also for the hours we logged at the library, the reminder that everything will get done, and for being there at the end of the day. Lastly, to my Mom and Dad, thank you for dealing with my anxious phone calls and for assuring me that the world is not going to end, and that I just had to take a deep breath. ATTITUDES TOWARD ACCOMMODATIONS iii Abstract The purpose of this study was to compare the attitudes of elementary school teachers toward the inclusion of a student with either a moderate intellectual, physical, or behavioral disability. Participants were from eight different elementary schools; two magnet schools, one charter school, and five public schools from one school district. Participants were provided with a vignette describing one of three disability types and then rated 25 accommodations made for that student. Teachers' attitudes toward these accommodations were measured by the three adapted subscales of the Adaptation Evaluation Instrument (AEI; Schumm & Vaughn, 1991), which addressed how desirable teachers believe each accommodation to be for …
Association of six susceptibility Loci with prostate cancer in northern chinese men.

BACKGROUND/AIM Six prostate cancer (PCa) susceptibility loci were identified in a genome-wide association study (GWAS) in populations of European decent. However, the associations of these 6 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with PCa has remained tobe clarified in men in Northern China. This study aimed to explore the loci associated with PCa risk in a Northern Chinese population. METHODS Blood samples and clinical information of 289 PCa patients and 288 controls from Beijing and Tianjin were collected. All risk SNPs were genotyped using polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-high resolution melting curve technology and gene sequencing. Associations between PCa and clinical covariates (age at diagnosis, prostate-specific antigen [PSA], Gleason score, tumor stage, and level of aggressiveness) and frequencies of alleles and genotypes of these SNPs were analyzed using genetic statistics. RESULTS Among the candidate SNPs, 11p15 (rs7127900, A) was associated with PCa risk (P = 0.02, odds ratio [OR] = 1.64, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.09-2.46). Genotypes showed differences between cases and controls on 11p15 (rs7127900, A), 11q13 (rs7931342, T), and HNF1B (rs4430796, A) (P = 0.03, P = 0.01, and P = 0.04, respectively). The genotype TG on 11q13 (rs7931342, T) was positively associated with an increased Gleason score (P = 0.04, OR = 2.15, 95% CI = 1.02-4.55). Patients carrying TG on 17q24 (rs1859962, G) were negatively associated with an increased body mass index (BMI) (P = 0.03, OR = 0.44, 95% CI = 0.21-0.92) while those with AG on HNF1B (rs4430796, A) were more likely to have PSA increase (P = 0.002). CONCLUSION Our study suggests that 11p15 (rs7127900, A) could be a susceptibility locus associated with PCa in Northern Chinese. Genotype TG on 11q13 (rs7931342, T) could be related to an increased Gleason score, AG on HNF1B (rs4430796, A) could be associated with PSA increase, and TG on 17q24 (rs1859962, G) could be negatively associated with an increased BMI in Chinese men with PCa.
Modeling the Conformational Changes Underlying Channel Opening in CFTR

Mutations in the gene encoding the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator protein (CFTR) cause cystic fibrosis (CF), the most common life-shortening genetic disease among Caucasians. Although general features of the structure of CFTR have been predicted from homology models, the conformational changes that result in channel opening and closing have yet to be resolved. We created new closed- and open-state homology models of CFTR, and performed targeted molecular dynamics simulations of the conformational transitions in a channel opening event. The simulations predict a conformational wave that starts at the nucleotide binding domains and ends with the formation of an open conduction pathway. Changes in side-chain interactions are observed in all major domains of the protein, and experimental confirmation was obtained for a novel intra-protein salt bridge that breaks near the end of the transition. The models and simulation add to our understanding of the mechanism of ATP-dependent gating in this disease-relevant ion channel.