Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From Nationalistic Diaspora to Transnational Diaspora: The Evolution of Identity Crisis among the Korean-Japanese

This paper presents an evolutionary explanation of diaspora for the Korean-Japanese using a method of ‘global ethnographic revisits’. By expanding the scope of the Korean-Japanese to those who repatriated to South Korea and North Korea in addition to those who remained in Japan, the paper finds that their migration trajectory has gradually evolved from passive nationalistic migration to active transnational diaspora, a conclusion that was not easily replicable using the conventional method of observing Korean residents only in Japan. The three-stage evolution process includes passive diaspora during the colonial period, post-diaspora during the cold-war era, and transnational diaspora after the cold war. The three ethnographic cases presented in this paper indicate that motivation and environmental structures affect the whole evolutionary process, whereas distancing from their imaginary homeland is key in evolving into transnational diaspora for the Korean-Japanese.
Trends in Canadian Newspaper Coverage of Gay–Straight Alliances, 2000–2009

Gay–straight alliances (GSAs) in Canadian public schools have gained considerable attention from print media since reports first surfaced in the year 2000. This study tracked and analyzed Canadian newspaper reporting about GSA creation. It summarized the shift in public opinion toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth activism by analyzing how Canadian newspapers reported on emerging GSAs. The emergence of Canadian GSAs was grounded in what is known about the social, political, geographical, and legal contexts of the first decade of the 21st century. This study framed the textual evidence of emerging Canadian GSAs that was reported in the newspapers as one measure of public opinion toward LGBTQ youth activism.
Implementation of a rule-based expert system for application of weapon system of systems

In order to meet the needs of teaching military commanders to make good use of weapon systems, a distributed system architecture with rule-based inference engine was built for the teaching and simulation system for application of weapon system of systems. Furthermore, the idea of expert knowledge-oriented rule components was put forward for the sake of strengthening the interoperability between different systems, and in this way, the teaching and simulation system was developed and realized successfully. Moreover, the visual simulation platform VegaPrime and multimedia technologies were utilized to model 3D virtual battlefield environment, which could improve the users' sense of immersion and interactivity significantly. This system applied in the course had achieved favorable results, which had broad application prospects and good promotional values.
Prevalence of depression amongst medical students: a meta‐analysis

Medical schools are known to be stressful environments for students and hence medical students have been believed to experience greater incidences of depression than others. We evaluated the global prevalence of depression amongst medical students, as well as epidemiological, psychological, educational and social factors in order to identify high‐risk groups that may require targeted interventions.
Waveform substitution techniques for recovering missing speech segments in packet voice communications

Packet communication systems cannot, in general, guarantee accurate and prompt delivery of every packet. The effect of network congestion and transmission impairments on data packets is extended delay; in voice communications these problems lead to lost packets. This paper describes techniques for replacing missing speech with waveform segments from correctly received packets in order to increase the maximum tolerable missing packet rate. After presenting a simple formula for predicting the probability of waveform substitution failure as a function of packet duration and packet loss rate, we introduce two techniques for selecting substitution waveforms. One method is based on pattern matching and the other technique explicitly estimates voicing and pitch. Both approaches achieve substantial improvements in speech quality relative to silence substitution.
Civilized Unions, Civilized Rights: Same-Sex Relationships in Aotearoa New Zealand

Much research on same-sex relationships has involved comparisons with opposite-sex relationships, often in order to develop frameworks to understand the dynamics of such same-sex relationships, or to demonstrate readiness for legal recognition such as marriage or “civil union. ” Civil unions for both same- and opposite-sex couples have been legal in New Zealand since April 2005. A large national study of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) persons in New Zealand carried out during the national debate on recognising same-sex relationships showed overwhelming support for government recognition of those relationships regardless of relationship status. This article examines a number of indicators in LGB singles and couples, including public identification, social conformity, individual characteristics including family support, wishes around sexual exclusivity, political awareness, and desires for government recognition of relationships. It also considers the hypothesis few differences by relationship status (or any other characteristic) exist among LGB individuals who want legal recognition of same-sex relationships. The author proposes that it is the right to legal recognition of same-sex relationships, rather than recognition of relationships per se, that forms the foundation of LGB support for government recognition of same-sex relationships.
Predictors of criminal recidivism among male batterers

The present study examined recidivism risk factors in a sample of 320 male batterers attending community treatment. Recidivism was assessed by new charges for violence or for any offence during a 5-year follow-up period. The variables associated with recidivism among male batterers were similar to those found for other criminal populations (e.g. young, unstable lifestyle, substance abuse, criminal history). There was no evidence that potential offenders were deterred by expectations of negative consequences, either social (e.g. friends would disapprove) or official (e.g. being arrested, losing job). Maintaining positive relationships with treatment providers was associated with reduced recidivism.
Risk Taking in Latin American Economic Restructuring: Lessons from Prospect Theory

Prospect theory, a psychological theory of decision making that has shed new light on foreign policy choices, maintains that people tend to take high risks when facing losses, while proceeding with great caution when anticipating gains. This article introduces prospect theory to the study of comparative politics in order to account for the bold economic policy choices that presidents made in crisis-ridden Argentina, Brazil, and Peru, and the surprising degree of popular support that such risky and costly measures commanded in these countries; and conversely, to explain the cautious course of reform recently pursued in Chile, a country with better economic prospects. Theories based on rational choice, the leading approach to political decision making, did not anticipate these decisions. Particularly, these theories predicted that fear for their political survival would prevent democratic leaders from enacting tough economic policies. This article thus suggests that hypotheses derived from prospect theory serve as a useful alternative to extant rational choice explanations in elucidating decision making during crises. Why did democratic governments in contemporary Argentina, Brazil, and Peru run enormous risks by enacting tough shock programs of neoliberal adjustment and restructuring? 1 These reforms impose high costs on many sectors of society, can elicit fierce resistance from powerful groups, and have a low likelihood of success. Why did governments in fledgling democracies jeopardize their fate by embarking on such risky measures? And why did large numbers of people who knew they would be hurt by neoliberal reforms endorse their adoption? Why, on the other hand, did many Venezuelans protest violently against similarly harsh adjustment measures which their president, Carlos Andres Perez, boldly enacted in 1989? Why, by contrast, has the government in Chile's new democracy avoided all risk and accepted the basic outlines of the free-market model imposed by General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), which it had severely criticized before coming to power? And why have most Chileans supported this highly cautious stance?
Elderly Nursing Home and Day Care Participants Are Less Likely Than Young Adults to Approach Imbalance During Voluntary Forward Reaching

The goal of this study was to determine whether differences exist between young and elderly adults in cautiousness or tendency to approach imbalance during a forward reaching task. Young (n = 26) and elderly (n = 25) adults participated in trials that required them to reach forward as quickly as possible to contact a target that moved back and forth, in and out of reach. “Voluntary reach” was calculated as the 75th percentile in reach distance over 20 trials. Measures were also acquired separately of “maximum attainable reach. ” Voluntary reach averaged 53% smaller in elderly than young subjects. This was due to differences in maximum attainable reach, and to increased cautiousness among elderly in approaching maximum attainable reach (voluntary reach averaged 65% ± 23% of maximum attainable reach in elderly, and 95% ± 5% in young; p < .001). Thus, cautiousness in approaching imbalance reduces voluntary reach in elderly but not young subjects. Furthermore, physical capacity (as measured by maximum attainable reach) and capacity utilization (as measured by voluntary reach) are independent predictors of reaching behavior among nursing home elderly.
Elemental Mercury Vapour Toxicity: Treatment and Levels in Plasma and Urine

1 We report two cases of acute mercury vapour intoxication in humans. The mercury vapour was released from smelting alloys (gold-mercury amalgam). The alloy was apparently contaminated with an unknown amount of mercury. 2 Within half an hour of the incident, the victims began having moderate headache, nausea, lumbar pain and shortness of breath at rest. The patients were treated with BAL (2,3 dimercaptopropanol), followed by DMSA (2,3 dimercaptosuccinic acid). 3 Serial measurements of mercury metal in plasma and in urine were made for ten days. 4 The results suggest that in spite of the treatment, relatively high concentrations of mercury remain in the plasma for a very long time, and this could be explained by the progressive release of mercury from red blood cells and tissues after oxidation. However, BAL and DMSA did not seem to be the most efficient antidotes. They reduce the piasma inorganic mercury uptake at concentrations of <50 μg l-1.
Parallel Tempering for Training of Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Alternating Gibbs sampling between visible and latent units is the most common scheme used for sampling from Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), a crucial component in deep architectures such as Deep Belief Networks (DBN). However, we find that it often does a very poor job of rendering the diversity of modes captured by the trained model. We suspect that this property hinders RBM training methods such as the Contrastive Divergence and Persistent Contrastive Divergence algorithm that rely on Gibbs sampling to approximate the likelihood gradient. To alleviate this problem, we explore the use of tempered Markov Chain Monte-Carlo for sampling in RBMs. We find both through visualization of samples and measures of likelihood on a toy dataset that it helps both sampling and learning.
Myofibroblast phenotypes expression in experimental renal scarring.

BACKGROUND Myofibroblasts have been implicated in the pathogenesis of wound healing and tissue fibrosis. A role has also been put forward for these cells in the development of experimental and clinical renal scarring. SUBJECTS AND METHODS We examined the expression of myofibroblast phenotypes by immunohistochemistry, relying on an avidin-biotin-peroxidase method, during the course of renal scarring in rats submitted to subtotal (5/6) nephrectomy (SNx). We also attempted to identify changes in immunoreactive transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) and collagen (III and IV) within remnant kidneys in order to determine their association with the expression of the myofibroblasts. RESULTS In normal sham-operated rats, alpha-smooth muscle actin (alpha-SMA) was confined to the media of renal arteries and arterioles. In contrast, in rats with renal ablation we observed the early (day 7) appearance of myofibroblasts expressing alpha-SMA (A) in the interstitium of remnant kidneys particularly around vessels. Interstitial cells expressing alpha-SMA increased with time as tubulointerstitial fibrosis progressed. By day 30 some interstitial cells also expressed vimentin (V). Various interstitial myofibroblast phenotypes (A, V, VA) were expressed during the course of experimental renal scarring. Interstitial myofibroblasts appeared to be associated with TGF-beta as these cells' cytoplasm stained for both this growth factor and alpha-SMA. Interstitial fibrosis was also associated with increased interstitial expression of both collagen III and IV. Some atrophic tubular cells showed positive immunostaining for vimentin during the late stages of renal scarring (days 90-150). In the glomeruli, a segmental expression of alpha-SMA was noted from day 21 after SNx onward. Normal glomerular endothelial cells appeared to express vimentin while epithelial cells expressed both vimentin and desmin (D). The glomerular immunostain for vimentin increased with time but decreased as glomerulosclerosis progressed. In contrast, glomerular desmin and alpha-SMA immunostain continued to rise with progressive glomerulosclerosis. This was associated with the appearance of type III collagen within scarred glomeruli. Both vimentin and desmin appeared within the walls of the renal arterioles and increased with time from day 7 and 15, respectively. Vimentin was also expressed in the peritubular capillaries of remnant kidneys. By contrast, alpha-SMA, normally present in the media of arterioles, decreased as arteriolar sclerosis progressed. These changes cannot be exclusively attributed to systemic hypertension as they were absent in a group of age-matched, sham-operated, spontaneously hypertensive rats. DISCUSSION Myofibroblasts may play a role in the pathogenesis of glomerulosclerosis, tubulointerstitial fibrosis and vascular sclerosis. Further, the acquisition of new myofibroblastic phenotypes by glomerular and tubular cells may contribute to renal fibrosis.
Fusing active orientation models and mid-term audio features for automatic depression estimation

In this paper, we predict a human's depression level in the BDI-II scale, using facial and voice features. Active orientation models (AOM) and several voice features were extracted from the video and audio modalities. Long-term and mid-term features were computed and a fusion is performed in the feature space. Videos from the Depression Recognition Sub-Challenge of the 2014 Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2014) were used and support vector regression models were trained to predict the depression level. We demonstrated that the fusion of AOMs with audio features leads to better performance compared to individual modalities. The obtained regression results indicate the robustness of the proposed technique, under different settings, as well as an RMSE improvement compared to the AVEC 2014 video baseline.
Effects of length, complexity, and grammatical correctness on stuttering in Spanish-speaking preschool children.

PURPOSE To explore the effects of utterance length, syntactic complexity, and grammatical correctness on stuttering in the spontaneous speech of young, monolingual Spanish-speaking children. METHOD Spontaneous speech samples of 11 monolingual Spanish-speaking children who stuttered, ages 35 to 70 months, were examined. Mean number of syllables, total number of clauses, utterance complexity (i.e., containing no clauses, simple clauses, or subordinate and/or conjoined clauses), and grammatical correctness (i.e., the presence or absence of morphological and syntactical errors) in stuttered and fluent utterances were compared. RESULTS Findings revealed that stuttered utterances in Spanish tended to be longer and more often grammatically incorrect, and contain more clauses, including more subordinate and/or conjoined clauses. However, when controlling for the interrelatedness of syllable number and clause number and complexity, only utterance length and grammatical incorrectness were significant predictors of stuttering in the spontaneous speech of these Spanish-speaking children. Use of complex utterances did not appear to contribute to the prediction of stuttering when controlling for utterance length. CONCLUSIONS Results from the present study were consistent with many earlier reports of English-speaking children. Both length and grammatical factors appear to affect stuttering in Spanish-speaking children. Grammatical errors, however, served as the greatest predictor of stuttering.
Sleepiness, quality of life, and sleep maintenance in REM versus non-REM sleep-disordered breathing.

RATIONALE The impact of REM-predominant sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) on sleepiness, quality of life (QOL), and sleep maintenance is uncertain. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the association of SDB during REM sleep with daytime sleepiness, health-related QOL, and difficulty maintaining sleep, in comparison to their association with SDB during non-REM sleep in a community-based cohort. METHODS Cross-sectional analysis of 5,649 Sleep Heart Health Study participants (mean age 62.5 [SD = 10.9], 52.6% women, 22.6% ethnic minorities). SDB during REM and non-REM sleep was quantified using polysomnographically derived apnea-hypopnea index in REM (AHI(REM)) and non-REM (AHI(NREM)) sleep. Sleepiness, sleep maintenance, and QOL were respectively quantified using the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), the Sleep Heart Health Study Sleep Habit Questionnaire, and the physical and mental composites scales of the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form (SF)-36. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS AHI(REM) was not associated with the ESS scores or the physical and mental components scales scores of the SF-36 after adjusting for demographics, body mass index, and AHI(NREM) x AHI(REM) was not associated with frequent difficulty maintaining sleep or early awakening from sleep. AHI(NREM) was associated with the ESS score (beta = 0.25; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.16 to 0.34) and the physical (beta = -0.12; 95% CI, -0.42 to -0.01) and mental (beta = -0.20; 95% CI, -0.20 to -0.01) components scores of the SF-36 adjusting for demographics, body mass index, and AHI(REM). CONCLUSIONS In a community-based sample of middle-aged and older adults, REM-predominant SDB is not independently associated with daytime sleepiness, impaired health-related QOL, or self-reported sleep disruption.
School-based Standard Testing.

School-based standard testing continues to evolve, yet in some ways it remains surprisingly close to its roots in the first two decades of the twentieth century. After use for many years as a diagnostic and as a filter for access to education, in the closing years of the century it has been pressed into service for state-run political accountability programs. In this role, it is generating vehement controversy that recalls protests over intelligence testing in the early 1920s. This background article explores primary characteristics and issues in the development of school-based standard testing, reviews its typical lack of qualification for political accountability programs, and suggests remedies to address major problems. In general, the attitude toward new techniques of assessment is skeptical, in light of the side-effects and unexpected problems that developed during the evolution of current techniques.
Costs of mating competition limit male lifetime breeding success in polygynous mammals

Although differences in breeding lifespan are an important source of variation in male fitness, the factors affecting the breeding tenure of males have seldom been explored. Here, we use cross-species comparisons to investigate the correlates of breeding lifespan in male mammals. Our results show that male breeding lifespan depends on the extent of polygyny, which reflects the relative intensity of competition for access to females. Males have relatively short breeding tenure in species where individuals have the potential to monopolize mating with multiple females, and longer ones where individuals defend one female at a time. Male breeding tenure is also shorter in species in which females breed frequently than in those where females breed less frequently, suggesting that the costs of guarding females may contribute to limiting tenure length. As a consequence of these relationships, estimates of skew in male breeding success within seasons overestimate skew calculated across the lifetime and, in several polygynous species, variance in lifetime breeding success is not substantially higher in males than in females.
Performance Adaptations to Sprint, Endurance and Both Modes of Training

Sprint (S, n=12) and endurance (E, n=14) training were performed independently and concurrently (C, n=6) for eight weeks to determine adaptive responses to each and their capability. Group S trained three days per week performing six 100m and six 50m sprints at 95 percent maximum speed. Group E ran continuously for 30 minutes at 85 percent HRmax three days per week. Group C trained six days per week, alternating days of sprint and endurance training. Group S improved (p<0.05) 50m and 100m sprint times (2.5 and 4.5 percent, respectively), 30-second run distance (2.5 percent), showed no change (p>0 .05) in 30-minute run distance or &OV0312;O2 max, and decreased (p<0.05) average power output 20.9 percent during the 30- to 45-second interval of a 60-second continuous jump test (CJT) Group E improved (p<0.05) 30-minute run distance (12.6 percent), &OV0312;O2, max (5.9 percent), and sprint performance (2.2 percent in 50m, 2.5 percent in 100m), but showed no change (p>0.05) in 30-second run distance. Group C showed (p<0.05) improvements of similar magnitude to group E in &OV0312;O2, max (7.5 percent) and 30-minute run distance 9.9 percent), and to Group S in 50m (2.4 percent) and l00m (3.5 percent) times and 30-second run distance (3.5 percent). All groups decreased (p<0.05) average power output during the 45- to 60-second interval of the GO-second CJT. Our result sug gest that optimum improvements in performance are specific to the mode of training (sprint or endurance) and are independent of concurrent performance of both modes of exercise.