Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is Transformational Leadership Universal? A Meta-Analytical Investigation of Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire Means Across Cultures

The authors investigated the effects of cultural values on reported levels of transformational leadership. The authors used dimensions of cultural variability developed by Schwartz and Hofstede to predict that higher cultural mastery and higher egalitarianism would be associated with greater transformational leadership. Hypotheses were tested using mixed-effects meta-analysis of articles published between 1985 and 2006 using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, based on 40 articles and 54 independent samples from 18 nations. Supporting the hypotheses, there was significant variability between countries in reported transformational leadership. Schwartz’s dimensions of cultural values performed slightly better in the analyses. Implications for cross-cultural leadership research are discussed.
Personal History-Based Beliefs as Relevant Prior Knowledge in Course Work

This study explores the relationship between the personal history-based beliefs preservice teachers brought to their study of teaching and the principles of reading, writing, and discussing to learn that one professor advocated. This analysis represents an effort to look closely at how preservice teachers use the knowledge they bring with them from their lives as students to make decisions while engaged in course work about the value of ideas they hear there. This study documents (a) the lay theories and beliefs that participants had developed out of their personal history-based experiences, (b) the decisions that participants made about the potential value of the principles of good instruction encountered as part of their course work, and (c) the relationship between their personal history-based beliefs and those decisions as explained by each preservice teacher.
The distribution of the ABO blood groups among diabetes mellitus patients in Qatar.

BACKGROUND There is strong evidence in the literature that there is an association between ABO blood group and certain diseases. AIM The aim of this study was to investigate any association between the ABO blood groups and diabetes mellitus (DM) in Qatar. DESIGN This was a sex-matched case-control study. SETTING This study was carried out in the diabetic outpatient clinics and blood bank of the Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) from April 2011 to December 2012. SUBJECTS AND METHODS The study included 1633 diabetic patients and 1650 nondiabetic apparently healthy controls. A total of 2148 adult patients above 18 years of age were selected consecutively from the diabetic clinics of the hospitals and 1633 patients gave consent to take part in this study, thus giving a response rate of 76%. A total of 2150 nondiabetic healthy adults above 18 years of age were recruited from the blood bank and 1650 individuals agreed to take part in this study, giving a response rate of 76.7%. Blood group of the recruited subjects was taken from the database of the Blood Bank, Central laboratory, HMC. RESULTS The data revealed that the blood group B was significantly more common in diabetic patients as compared with healthy population (25.7% vs. 20.4%; P < 0.001). Blood group O was significantly less common in diabetic patients compared with nondiabetics (38.5% vs. 45.4%; P < 0.001). Among diabetic men, the frequency of only blood group B was significantly higher, while on the contrary among diabetic women the frequency of both A and B (29.7% vs. 24.8%; P = 0.03 and 25.5% vs. 20%; P < 0.009, respectively) were significantly higher as compared with nondiabetic healthy population. CONCLUSION The findings in this study suggest that ABO antigens are associated with DM. DM is more common in individuals with blood group B.
Physical capacity after 7 weeks of low-intensity wheelchair training

Purpose. To simulate the effect of low-intensity exercise in early rehabilitation, we investigated the effect of a 7-week low-intensity norm duration hand rim wheelchair training on the physical capacity in untrained able-bodied individuals. Method. Twenty-five able-bodied participants were randomly assigned to an experimental and control group: 10 participants exercised 7 weeks, three times a week at 30% heart rate reserve (HRR) for 30 min (experimental group). The control group consisted of 15 participants who did not receive training. Physical capacity (maximal isometric strength, sprint power, peak power output and peak oxygen uptake) and submaximal performance [heart rate (HR), oxygen uptake (VO2), mechanical efficiency (ME)] were assessed pre- and post-training. The levels of upper-body discomfort were determined with the use of a Local Perceived Discomfort scale. Results. Compared to the control group the experimental group significantly improved on sprint power (+31.2%), peak aerobic power output (+34%), submaximal HR, VO2 and ME (+16.9%). The participants did not experience high levels of local discomfort in the upper body during the training. Conclusions. Low-intensity norm duration hand rim wheelchair training which significantly improved peak aerobic and sprint power output, efficiency and physical strain in able-bodied untrained individuals. Training at 30% HRR (3 × /week, 30 min/session) may be appropriate in untrained individuals, such as novice wheelchair users at the start of their rehabilitation, to prevent early fatigue and overuse and enhance motivation. Please note that this article was published in error in a previous issue of the Journal. This paper was submitted and accepted as part of the Special Issue entitled 4th International State-of-the-art-Congress ‘Rehabilitation: Mobility, Exercise & Sports’ and has therefore been republished in this issue. The publisher apologises for this error.
iGSLR: personalized geo-social location recommendation: a kernel density estimation approach

With the rapidly growing location-based social networks (LBSNs), personalized geo-social recommendation becomes an important feature for LBSNs. Personalized geo-social recommendation not only helps users explore new places but also makes LBSNs more prevalent to users. In LBSNs, aside from user preference and social influence, geographical influence has also been intensively exploited in the process of location recommendation based on the fact that geographical proximity significantly affects users' check-in behaviors. Although geographical influence on users should be personalized, current studies only model the geographical influence on all users' check-in behaviors in a universal way. In this paper, we propose a new framework called iGSLR to exploit personalized social and geographical influence on location recommendation. iGSLR uses a kernel density estimation approach to personalize the geographical influence on users' check-in behaviors as individual distributions rather than a universal distribution for all users. Furthermore, user preference, social influence, and personalized geographical influence are integrated into a unified geo-social recommendation framework. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation for iGSLR using two large-scale real data sets collected from Foursquare and Gowalla which are two of the most popular LBSNs. Experimental results show that iGSLR provides significantly superior location recommendation compared to other state-of-the-art geo-social recommendation techniques.
Chapter I: Hypothesis Testing in Relation to Statistical Methodology

THE SHORTCOMINGS in the methodology of statistical hypothesis testing used in educational and psychological research have been emphasized repeatedly in recent behavioral science and statistical literature (Binder, 1963; Edwards, Lindman, and Savage, 1963; Grant, 1962; Lubin, 1962; McNemar, 1960; Mowrer, 1960; Nunnally, 1960; Rozeboom, 1960; Savage, 1957). This chapter reviews the salient points of the criticisms. Since this issue of the REVIEW marks the first time an entire chapter has been devoted to the statistical methodology of hypothesis testing, a brief account of several theories of statistical inference is included to provide a background for evaluating the rationales of significance tests compared with other methods for statistical inferences, as well as the modifications in the function of the null hypothesis in testing statistical hypotheses. The problems in statistical inference which have been associated with the widespread use of significance tests are reviewed. The limitations in and the effectiveness of significance tests as methods for informative inference are described. The applications of interval estimation contrasted with significance tests in the investigation of hypotheses and models and in the development of a body of empirical data are summarized.
A Novel Trajectory-based Spatial-Temporal Spectral Features for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech is one of the most natural form of human communication. Recognizing emotion from speech continues to be an important research venue to advance human-machine interface design and human behavior understanding. In this work, we propose a novel set of features, termed trajectory-based spatial-temporal spectral features, to recognize emotions from speech. The core idea centers on deriving descriptors both spatially and temporally on speech spectrograms over a sub-utterance frame (e.g., 250ms) - an inspiration from dense trajectory-based video descriptors. We conduct categorical and dimensional emotion recognition experiments and compare our proposed features to both the well-established set of prosodic and spectral features and the state-of-the-art exhaustive feature extraction. Our experiment demonstrate that our features by itself achieves comparable accuracies in the 4-class emotion recognition and valence detection task, and it obtains a significant improvement in the activation detection. We additionally show that there exists complementary information in our proposed features to the existing acoustic features set, which can be used to obtain an improved emotion recognition accuracy.
Contact lens use and its compliance for care among healthcare workers in Pakistan

Background: Poor care and hygiene of contact lens (CL) results in eye problems and infections. Healthcare workers have an important role in advocating correct lens care. Objectives: To determine the practices of CL care and the adverse consequences of poor CL care among healthcare workers. Setting and Design: A cross-sectional study in one public and three private sector hospitals in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2009–2010. Materials and Methods: We questioned 500 healthcare workers of all ages and both sexes, who wore CL, about compliance with advice on care and any complications due to improper hygiene practices. Ethical approval was obtained. Chi-square tests were used to determine significance and p-value less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Of the total CL users, 385 (77%) were females. Most (75%) respondents wore CL to correct myopia, whereas 54% wore CL only occasionally. Surprisingly, only 24% knew the CL cleaning protocol. Lens solution was changed daily by 33% of users and after more than 2 weeks by 42%. Although 412 (82%) participants practised reasonable hand hygiene before inserting CL, 88 (18%) did not. Infection and eye dryness were statistically significantly (P < 0.01) associated with sex, hand-washing, and frequency of CL use. Conclusion: Noncompliance with the CL protocol was common among healthcare workers in our society. This behavior calls for targeted health education and awareness programs for healthcare workers.
A Review on ‘Capital in the 21th Century’

This paper is a brief review on the book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ by the French scholar Thomas Piketty. The book has started a new debate about inequality and capital taxation in Europe. It provides interesting empirical facts and develops a theory of the functioning of capitalist economies. However, I personally think the book is less convincing than recognized in the public debate. The demonstrated theory of economic growth in the book is elusive and lacks a psychological and behavioral underpinning. In fact, I do think that the increasing inequality and economic divergence are caused by capitalism but the psychological and behavioral aspects of humans are of similar or greater significance. Therefore, Piketty’s argument does not stimulate an open and scientifically founded debate in all aspects.
Accessing and affording sustainability: the experience of fashion consumption within young families

Despite the ever increasing levels of fashion consumption, neither retailers nor consumers have as yet implemented sustainability principles to a significant degree. This is despite the fact that sustainability principles are increasingly understood and will be applied by consumers, as long as affordable alternatives in mainstream fashions are available. In a highly competitive fashion retail sector, there exists an opportunity for UK high street fashion retailers to differentiate their brand image through aligning products with consumers' moral frameworks. Using phenomenological interviews, this research explores the fashion consumption experiences of professional women with young children and living in or near Edinburgh, with particular focus on their expression of their own sustainability concerns in their day-to-day practices. The findings reveal that in the absence of suitable products, information and labelling, consumers apply heuristics to their choices, especially price. They refer to the more familiar ethical food market which serves as a metaphor for fashion-related practices. They talk about trustworthy retailers and about how they deal with and rationalize their own practices where they reveal an obvious attitude-behaviour gap. The women's role of providing for the family adds further complexity in a sector which provides affordable alternative options. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Accurate and Automatic Alignment of Range Surfaces

This paper describes an automatic pipeline that is able to take a set of unordered range images and align them into a full 3D model. A global voting scheme is employed for view matching, inspired by 2D techniques for image mosaicing. Then a multiple view registration approach is introduced, which aims at optimizing the alignment error simultaneously for all the views. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.
Evidence for Extensive Distribution of Oestrogen Receptor αImmunoreactivity in the Cerebral Cortex of Adult Rats

The presence of oestrogen receptor alpha (ERα)‐immunoreactivity (IR) in the cerebral cortex of adult rats has been investigated. Previous studies have reported a negligible presence of ERα or ERα mRNA in this region of the adult rat brain. We have used immunoprecipitation and immunohistochemistry, with various antibodies and fixatives, to detect this protein in the cingulate cortex. When the tissue was fixed using paraformaldehyde alone only faint ERα–IR was observed at this site. In contrast, following fixation either with acrolein (with or without paraformaldehyde) or with a mixture of paraformaldehyde and glutaraldehyde there was extensive ERα–IR throughout layers II to VI; this was absent when the antibodies were preincubated with the peptide fragment used in their production. The presence of ERα–IR in the nonfixed cingulate cortex of adult rats was confirmed by immunoprecipitation.
Developing observation skills in school settings: The importance and impact of ‘work discussion groups’ for staff

Within mainstream school settings and teacher trainings little attention is given to the importance of harnessing observational skills as a central element of effective teaching and classroom management. Rather than being thought of as a potentially enabling tool, ‘observation’ is frequently associated with scrutiny, exposure and Ofsted inspections. In this paper, I will describe the ways in which work discussion groups offered on-site in schools, can introduce a different experience of observation to staff and, by extension, to the life and culture of a school. Through the use of detailed examples of these work discussion groups in action, I will illustrate the ways in which the development of observational skills can result in staff deepening their understanding about the meaning of behaviour and extending their capacity to manage the complex behaviour of their pupils. I will show how staff can be helped to observe and reflect on their own internal reactions to their pupils and begin to understand these as possible communications from and about their pupils. Finally, I will describe how this increased understanding can have a significant impact on their own learning, teaching and roles within the school.
Are you a protean talent? The influence of protean career attitude, learning-goal orientation and perceived internal and external employability

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between protean career attitude and perceived internal and external employability, along with the mediating effect of learning-goal orientation. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected by distributing paper-based questionnaires to 527 workers in private banking sectors in Taiwan. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the results of the relationships. Findings – The results supported the idea that protean career attitude is a significant antecedent of perceived internal and external employability. Protean talents with a higher degree of protean attitude toward value-driven career orientation and self-directed career management have an external employability that is greater than their internal employability. Learning-goal orientation fully mediated the effect of protean career attitude on perceived internal employability, but only partially mediated external employability. Practical implications – The findings can help human resource managers gain a better understanding of the use of an appropriate strategy to influence an employee’s perceived internal and external employability, which can increase the motivation and improve employer-employee relationships that contribute to organizational success and performance. Employees should recognize the increased importance of continuous learning with goal-setting in order to deal with changes at work. Originality/value – This paper empirically establishes the association between protean career attitude and perceived internal and external employability. The protean career concept may provide organizations with a valuable perspective in the evolution of careers. Valuable and protean talents place an emphasis on individuals’ core values, and while learning goals are meant to suit employer organizations, they may also establish opportunities that could cross-organizational boundaries.
Impaired cerebrovascular reactivity as a risk marker for first-ever lacunar infarction: A case-control study.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Functional assessment of small arteries and arterioles could provide valuable information regarding the extent of diffuse arteriolosclerosis in patients with small-vessel disease. Therefore we attempted to clarify the role of cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) as a risk marker for first-ever symptomatic lacunar infarction. METHODS Forty-six patients with lacunar infarction and 46 sex- and age-matched control subjects were prospectively evaluated. Cerebral hemodynamics were studied with transcranial Doppler ultrasonography. CVR was examined by calculating the percent increase in mean flow velocity occurring after 15 mg/kg acetazolamide administration (Diamox test). RESULTS CVR was significantly (P<0.0001, Student's t test) lower in cases (50.0+/-12. 7%) as compared with control subjects (65.2+/-12.4%). A multiple logistic regression analysis identified male sex (odds ratio [OR] 2. 3, P=0.02), age (OR 3.6, P<0.005), and the presence of lacunar infarction on magnetic resonance imaging (OR 5.3, P<0.001) as significant and independent factors associated with a reduction of CVR. Moreover, a cut-point of 55.6% (sensitivity 67%, specificity 82%) was established as the threshold value for distinguishing between pathological and normal CVR. CVR was significantly (P=0.02) lower in patients with multiple (46.38+/-12.6%) than with single (54. 83+/-11.58%) lacunar infarction. In addition, a trend of negative correlation was found between CVR and the number of lacunar infarctions (r=-0.26, P=0.08). In the multiple logistic model, history of hypertension (OR 7.24; 95% confidence interval 2.95 to 17. 79) and CVR (OR 0.8; 95% confidence interval 0.81 to 0.93) emerge as significant and independent predictors of first-ever lacunar infarction. CONCLUSIONS These data suggest that impaired CVR is a risk marker for first-ever lacunar infarction.
Hope amidst judgement: the meaning mothers accessing opioid treatment programmes ascribe to interactions with health services in the perinatal period

ABSTRACT Six women were recruited through ‘Methadone Clinics’ in a metropolitan local health district in Sydney, Australia to examine how mothers accessing opioid treatment programmes in the perinatal period make meaning of their interactions with universal and targeted health services. Narrative inquiry informed data collection and analysis, with the two main themes of judgement and hope juxtaposed throughout the mothers’ stories, and movement towards a change of identity from ‘drug user’ to ‘good mother’. Fear of removal of their child by child protection services, self-judgement and judgement by health professionals as a ‘bad mother’ reduced interactions with services. This contrasted with increased mothering confidence and hope for a better future where staff were non-judgemental and supported the mothers in the care of their baby. Knowledge of the importance of the transition to motherhood, or motherhood again, for this group has implications for individual professional practice and services aiming to improve health outcomes.
Multiple testing in fMRI: An empirical case study on the balance between sensitivity, specificity, and stability

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a widespread technique in cognitive psychology that allows visualizing brain activation. The data analysis encompasses an enormous number of simultaneous statistical tests. Procedures that either control the familywise error rate or the false discovery rate have been applied to these data. These methods are mostly validated in terms of average sensitivity and specificity. However, procedures are not comparable if requirements on their error rates differ. Moreover, less attention has been given to the instability or variability of results. In a simulation study in the context of imaging, we first compare the Bonferroni and Benjamini–Hochberg procedures. Considering Bonferroni as a way to control the expected number of type I errors enables more lenient thresholding compared to familywise error rate control and a direct comparison between both procedures. We point out that while the same balance is obtained between average sensitivity and specificity, the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure appears less stable. Secondly, we have implemented the procedure of Gordon et al. ( ) (originally proposed for gene selection) that includes stability, measured through bootstrapping, in the decision criterion. Simulations indicate that the method attains the same balance between sensitivity and specificity. It improves the stability of Benjamini–Hochberg but does not outperform Bonferroni, making this computationally heavy bootstrap procedure less appealing. Third, we show how stability of thresholding procedures can be assessed using real data. In a dataset on face recognition, we again find that Bonferroni renders more stable results.