Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The information needs and information-seeking behaviour of fishermen in Lagos State, Nigeria

This research investigated the information needs and information seeking behaviour of fishermen in Lagos State, Nigeria. The survey was carried out in the rural fishing communities of the state. Using questionnaire supported with interviews, personal observation and examination of relevant records, data were collected from 500 fishermen in the different fishing communities in the state. The simple percentage was used to analyse the data. The study examined information needs, sources and information seeking behaviour as well as problems encountered by the fishermen in a bid to obtain information. Results show that the information needs of fishermen in Lagos state are mostly occupation directed. Their chief sources of information include colleagues, friends, neighbours and relatives. Results also show that the fishermen in Lagos State are mostly illiterate, married and male adults in their middle ages; where and how to obtain credit facilities remain the most important information need of the fishermen; lack of awareness about where to obtain information on modern fishing technology is the most common problem of the fishermen in their attempt to seek information. This shows that there is acute shortage of information and fisheries extension officers in the field of information dissemination. It was concluded that the means and sources of information seeking found in fishermen in Lagos State are no longer adequate to meet advanced technology in the field and this can be detrimental to the profession. Suggestions that would facilitate information seeking and use among fishermen in Lagos state were given.
Virtues, Vices, and Political Influence in the U.S. Senate

What qualities make a political leader more influential or less influential? Philosophers, political scientists, and psychologists have puzzled over this question, positing two opposing routes to political power—one driven by human virtues, such as courage and wisdom, and the other driven by vices, such as Machiavellianism and psychopathy. By coding nonverbal behaviors displayed in political speeches, we assessed the virtues and vices of 151 U.S. senators. We found that virtuous senators became more influential after they assumed leadership roles, whereas senators who displayed behaviors consistent with vices—particularly psychopathy—became no more influential or even less influential after they assumed leadership roles. Our results inform a long-standing debate about the role of morality and ethics in leadership and have important implications for electing effective government officials. Citizens would be wise to consider a candidate’s virtue in casting their votes, which might increase the likelihood that elected officials will have genuine concern for their constituents and simultaneously promote cooperation and progress in government.
Approaches to empirical research on inclusive education

Empirical and critical studies of inclusion and inclusive practices in school represent different understandings of inclusion and different approaches to studying the phenomenon. They give a contrasting and diffuse picture of what inclusion is and about how inclusion is practiced. This article discusses two different ways of researching inclusive education and defining inclusion to be found in the Norwegian research literature. It is argued that by adopting either just a macro-orientation, studying the school structures, or only a micro-orientation, studying what selected teachers do in class, obscures other important issues that determine the quality of what goes on in school and that have to be addressed for inclusion to be operative.
Potential Natural Products for Alzheimer’s Disease: Targeted Search Using the Internal Ribosome Entry Site of Tau and Amyloid-β Precursor Protein

Overexpression of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) and the hyperphosphorylation of the tau protein are vital in the understanding of the cause of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). As a consequence, regulation of the expression of both APP and tau proteins is one important approach in combating AD. The APP and tau proteins can be targeted at the levels of transcription, translation and protein structural integrity. This paper reports the utilization of a bi-cistronic vector containing either APP or tau internal ribosome entry site (IRES) elements flanked by β-galactosidase gene (cap-dependent) and secreted alkaline phosphatase (SEAP) (cap-independent) to discern the mechanism of action of memantine, an N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist. Results indicate that memantine could reduce the activity of both the APP and tau IRES at a concentration of ~10 μM (monitored by SEAP activity) without interfering with the cap-dependent translation as monitored by the β-galactosidase assay. Western blot analysis of the tau protein in neuroblastoma (N2A) and rat hippocampal cells confirmed the halting of the expression of the tau proteins. We also employed this approach to identify a preparation named NB34, extracts of Boussingaultia baselloides (madeira-vine) fermented with Lactobacillus spp. , which can function similarly to memantine in both IRES of APP and Tau. The water maze test demonstrated that NB34 could improve the spatial memory of a high fat diet induced neurodegeneration in apolipoprotein E-knockout (ApoE−/−) mice. These results revealed that the bi-cistronic vector provided a simple, and effective platform in screening and establishing the mechanistic action of potential compounds for the treatment and management of AD.
Divergent Thinking and Age-Related Changes

Aging can affect cognition in different ways. The extent to which aging affects divergent thinking is unclear. In this study, younger and older adults were compared at the performance on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking in visual and verbal form. Results showed that older adults can think divergently as younger participants, although they produce fewer visual ideas. This finding involves implications for active aging, given that also older adults can be still capable to produce original ideas and improve living conditions surrounding them.
End-to-end Sequence Labeling via Bi-directional LSTM-CNNs-CRF

State-of-the-art sequence labeling systems traditionally require large amounts of task-specific knowledge in the form of hand-crafted features and data pre-processing. In this paper, we introduce a novel neutral network architecture that benefits from both word- and character-level representations automatically, by using combination of bidirectional LSTM, CNN and CRF. Our system is truly end-to-end, requiring no feature engineering or data pre-processing, thus making it applicable to a wide range of sequence labeling tasks. We evaluate our system on two data sets for two sequence labeling tasks --- Penn Treebank WSJ corpus for part-of-speech (POS) tagging and CoNLL 2003 corpus for named entity recognition (NER). We obtain state-of-the-art performance on both the two data --- 97.55\% accuracy for POS tagging and 91.21\% F1 for NER.
Keepin' it Real

The relationship between Black youth and hip-hop culture is the focus of this article. The author considers how African American youth use hip-hop as a form of cultural capital in everyday settings. By focusing on how Black youth interact with one another at the City Youth Center, the article examines how this particular form of cultural capital may be used to authenticate a Black identity. Finally, how the articulation of this identity is based on traditional gender roles is explored. Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital is heavily relied on to investigate how Black youth construct legitimate racial boundaries in predominately Black settings. The intention is to provide an extension of Bourdieu's theory by examining how Black youth identity is formed and renegotiated in everyday interactions with other Black youth and how this negotiation is mediated through hip-hop culture.
A prospective study of dietary calcium, dairy products and prostate cancer risk (Finland)

High dietary intakes of calcium and dairy products have been hypothesized to enhance prostate cancer risk, but available prospective data regarding these associations are inconsistent. We examined dietary intakes of calcium and dairy products in relation to risk of prostate cancer in the Alpha‐Tocopherol, Beta‐Carotene (ATBC) Cancer Prevention Study, a cohort of 29,133 male smokers aged 50–69 years at study entry. Dietary intake was assessed at baseline using a validated 276‐item food use questionnaire. Cox proportional hazards regression was used to adjust for known or suspected risk factors for prostate cancer. During 17 years of follow‐up, we ascertained 1,267 incident cases of prostate cancer. High versus low intake of dietary calcium was associated with a marked increase in prostate cancer risk. The multivariate relative risk (RR) of prostate cancer for ≥2,000 mg/day compared to <1,000 mg/day of calcium intake was 1.63 (95% confidence interval (CI), 1.27–2.10; p trend < 0.0001). Total dairy intake was also positively associated with risk of prostate cancer. The multivariate RR of prostate cancer comparing extreme quintiles of intake was 1.26 (95% CI, 1.04–1.51; p trend = 0.03). However, no association with total dairy intake remained after we adjusted for calcium (p trend = 0.17). Findings were similar by stage and grade of prostate cancer. The results from this large prospective study suggest that intake of calcium or some related component contained in dairy foods is associated with increased prostate cancer risk. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Parents Don't (Always) Know Their Children Have Been Bullied: Child-Parent Discrepancy on Bullying and Family-Level Profile of Communication Standards.

Discrepancy between bullied victims’ experience and their parents’ understanding indicates underutilization of family support system, and thus presents an important risk factor. An online survey (N = 300 child-father-mother triads) was conducted to establish a framework that helps distinguish families with different child-parent discrepancy levels. This family-level variability was modeled by profiling child-father-mother triad’s family communication standard (FCS) orientations. This “FCS profile” indeed distinguished families with different levels of discrepancies. Further, SEM analyses revealed that those discrepancies presented a distinct risk factor vis-a-vis effects of bullying reports per se. Finally, FCS profile had an indirect association with victims’ well-being via mediation by child-parent discrepancy. These findings are discussed with regard to the role of family communication in bullied individuals’ coping processes.
Bayesian estimation of climate sensitivity based on a simple climate model fitted to observations of hemispheric temperatures and global ocean heat content

Predictions of climate change are uncertain mainly because of uncertainties in the emissions of greenhouse gases and how sensitive the climate is to changes in the abundance of the atmospheric constituents. The equilibrium climate sensitivity is defined as the temperature increase because of a doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere when the climate reaches a new steady state. CO2 is only one out of the several external factors that affect the global temperature, called radiative forcing mechanisms as a collective term. In this paper, we present a model framework for estimating the climate sensitivity. The core of the model is a simple, deterministic climate model based on elementary physical laws such as energy balance. It models yearly hemispheric surface temperature and global ocean heat content as a function of historical radiative forcing. This deterministic model is combined with an empirical, stochastic model and fitted to observations on global temperature and ocean heat content, conditioned on estimates of historical radiative forcing. We use a Bayesian framework, with informative priors on a subset of the parameters and flat priors on the climate sensitivity and the remaining parameters. The model is estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Hα Balmer line as an effective temperature criterion I. Calibration using 1D model stellar atmospheres

Aims. We attempt to derive the true effective temperature of a star from the spectroscopic observation of its Hα Balmer line profile. Methods. The method is possible thanks to advances in two respects. First there have been progresses in the theoretical treatment of the broadening mechanisms of Hα. Second, there has been a rapid increase in the number of stars with an apparent diameter measured with an accuracy of the order of 1 percent, enabling us to obtain an accurate effective temperature Teff for a dozen of stars using the direct method by means of combining the apparent diameter and the bolometric flux. Results. For the eleven stars with an accurate effective temperature derived from their apparent angular diameter we determined the effective temperature of the Kurucz Atlas9 model that provides the best fit of the computed theoretical Hα profile (using the recent theoretical advances) with the corresponding observed profile, extracted from the S4N spectroscopic database. The two sets of effective temperatures have a significant offset, but are tightly correlated, with a correlation coefficient of 0.9976. The regression straight line of Teff(direct) versus Teff(Hα) enables us to reach the true effective temperature from the spectroscopic observation of the Hα profile, with an rms error of only 30 K. This provides a way of obtaining the true effective temperature of a reddened star. Conclusions. We succeeded in obtaining empirically the true stellar effective temperature from Hα profile using Kurucz’s Atlas9 grid of 1D model atmospheres. Full understanding of the difference between Teff(direct) and Teff(Hα) would require a 3D approach, with radiative hydrodynamical models, which will be the subject of a future paper.
GI4GI: Improving Genetic Improvement Fitness Functions

Genetic improvement (GI) has been successfully used to optimise non-functional properties of software, such as execution time, by automatically manipulating program's source code. Measurement of non-functional properties, however, is a non-trivial task; energy consumption, for instance, is highly dependant on the hardware used. Therefore, we propose the GI4GI framework (and two illustrative applications). GI4GI first applies GI to improve the fitness function for the particular environment within which software is subsequently optimised using traditional GI.
Task sensitivity of animacy effects: evidence from German picture descriptions

In this article we (re) consider how animacy, a conceptual property of referents, affects word order. It is commonly assumed that animacy effects arise during conceptualization, taken broadly to include processing at a mental model level. The order in which referents are conceptualized can directly affect word order. That is, animates tend to surface in the initial position in sentences, regardless whether or not it is a subject position. There is, however, some indication that animacy and thematic role interact under certain task conditions (e.g. Ferreira 1994). We suggest that such interactions occur when speakers change the time course of referent processing to reduce the processing workload during the upcoming utterance. When they compact preutterance planning sufficiently, for example, by overlapping processing of referents, they can cram in more processing with minimal lengthening of planning time. But this overlap facilitates an interaction of referent information that does not occur with more sequential planning. We present data from three German picture description experiments that, taken together, support this account.
Do Negotiation Interventions Matter? Resolving Conflicting Interests and Values

This study compared the effects of three interventions and a no-intervention control on the settlement of resource and value conflicts. These variables were arranged in a two (conflict issue: resources vs. values) by four (no intervention vs. other affirmation vs. shared identity vs. transaction costs) between-dyads design in which 127 dyads engaged in a negotiation task. Negotiators reached generally lower joint outcomes in the value conflict compared to the resource conflict, but after the other-affirmation intervention, this pattern was reversed. The shared-identity intervention did not result in higher joint outcomes for value conflicts. Stressing positive concern for the other negotiator may be a more effective strategy than stressing commonalities between the parties: increased concern for self and decreased defense of own opinions may account for this result. Forcing and logrolling behavior are shown to be mediating variables between the type of conflict and outcomes.
Relating Structure and Function in the Human Brain: Relative Contributions of Anatomy, Stationary Dynamics, and Non-stationarities

Investigating the relationship between brain structure and function is a central endeavor for neuroscience research. Yet, the mechanisms shaping this relationship largely remain to be elucidated and are highly debated. In particular, the existence and relative contributions of anatomical constraints and dynamical physiological mechanisms of different types remain to be established. We addressed this issue by systematically comparing functional connectivity (FC) from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data with simulations from increasingly complex computational models, and by manipulating anatomical connectivity obtained from fiber tractography based on diffusion-weighted imaging. We hypothesized that FC reflects the interplay of at least three types of components: (i) a backbone of anatomical connectivity, (ii) a stationary dynamical regime directly driven by the underlying anatomy, and (iii) other stationary and non-stationary dynamics not directly related to the anatomy. We showed that anatomical connectivity alone accounts for up to 15% of FC variance; that there is a stationary regime accounting for up to an additional 20% of variance and that this regime can be associated to a stationary FC; that a simple stationary model of FC better explains FC than more complex models; and that there is a large remaining variance (around 65%), which must contain the non-stationarities of FC evidenced in the literature. We also show that homotopic connections across cerebral hemispheres, which are typically improperly estimated, play a strong role in shaping all aspects of FC, notably indirect connections and the topographic organization of brain networks.
Subclassification of β‐Adrenergic Receptors in Cultured Rat Cardiac Myoblasts and Fibroblasts

β-Adrenergic receptors in primary cultures of neonatal rat cardiac cells were identified with the radioligand [l25I]iodohydroxybenzylpindolol ([125I]IHYP). At the time of cell plating, a differ-ential attachment procedure was employed to separate myocardial (M) cells from fibroblast-like (F) cells. After 3-4 days, the cultures enriched in M cells were still more than 80% pure and the cultures enriched in F cells were more than 95% pure. For binding studies, confluent cell layers were nonenzy-matically detached as single cell suspensions. Both M and F cells contained a limited number of β-adrenergic receptors (M, 7600 % 2100 sites/cell; F, 9000 ± 2400 sites/cell) which had very high affinity (M, Kd = 88 % 33 PM; F, Kd = 71 % 23 pM) for [125I]IHYP. For each cell type, the binding sites were stereoselective for the I-isomers of agonists and antagonists. Further binding studies on the relative potency of β-agonists showed that the β-receptors in M cells could be subclassified as β1 (isoproterenol > epinephrine = norepinephrine), whereas the β-receptors in F cells were more typical of β2 (isoproterenol > epinephrine > norepinephrine). The order of potency of these catecholamines in stimulating the adenylate cyclase activity in M and F cells was consistent with the order of potency observed in binding studies. Practolol, a β1 inhibitor, was 30 times more effective as a competitor of [125I]IHYP binding in M cells than in F cells. It thus appears that, whereas M and F cells share a similar number of receptors per cell and similar affinities for [125I]IHYP, the receptors in the two cell types nevertheless can be distinguished on the basis of their subclassification. These results also emphasize the importance of obtaining a homogeneous cell population for studies of the β-adrenergic receptor in cultured cardiac tissue. Circ Res 47: 41-48, 1980
Immigrants and Associations: A Global and Historical Perspective

Drawing on the international literature on migration and immigrant associations, mainly in the context of North and South America, but also including several other global immigration contexts, this essay highlights several main questions and issues. It discusses the definition of voluntary associations and the principal impetus for associational activities among immigrant newcomers. Using examples from specific types of organisation (secret societies, credit associations, mutual benefit societies, religious groups, hometown associations, political groups), it examines the factors that shape immigrants’ formal sociability. The paper then addresses the class and gender composition of memberships, compares the associative practices of the mostly European immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the mostly Asian, Latin American and African arrivals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and discusses the issue of state involvement. The essay approaches the topic from a global and historical perspective to show how quasi-universal processes on the one hand, and local and temporal specificities on the other, shaped associational practices in a way that transcended the ethno-national traditions and characteristics of particular immigrant groups and host countries.
Principal and Teacher Leadership Effects: A replication

Survey data from an achieved sample of 1818 teachers and 6490 students in one large Canadian school district were used to explore the relative effects of principal and teacher leadership on student engagement with school. Results demonstrated greater effects on student engagement of principal as compared with teacher sources of leadership. The effects of principal leadership were weak but significant, whereas the effects of teacher leadership were not significant. Both forms of leadership were mediated by many of the same elements of the school organisation.
Long short-term memory in recurrent neural networks

These Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne EPFL, n° 2366 (2001)Faculte informatique et communicationsJury: Paolo Frasconi, Roger Hersch, Martin Rajman, Jurgen Schmidhuber Public defense: 2001-4-6 Reference doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-2366Print copy in library catalog Record created on 2005-03-16, modified on 2016-08-08