Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Loneliness is negatively related to Facebook network size, but not related to Facebook network structure

High levels of loneliness are associated with poorer outcomes for physical and mental health and a large body of research has examined how using social media sites such as Facebook is associated with loneliness. Time spent on Facebook tends to be associated with higher levels of loneliness, whereas a larger number of Facebook Friends and more active use of Facebook tends to be associated with lower levels of loneliness. However, whilst the network size and structure of ‘offline’ networks have been associated with loneliness, how the network structure on Facebook is associated with loneliness is still unclear. In this study, participants used the Getnet app to directly extract information on network size (number of Facebook Friends), density, number of clusters in the network, and average path length from their Facebook networks, and completed the 20-item UCLA Loneliness questionnaire. In total, 107 participants (36 men, 71 women, Mage = 20.6, SDage = 2.7) took part in the study. Participants with a larger network size reported significantly lower feelings of loneliness. In contrast, network density, number of clusters, and average path length were not significantly related to loneliness. These results suggest that whilst having a larger Facebook network is related to feelings of social connection to others, the structure of the Facebook network may be a less important determinant of loneliness than other factors such as active or passive use of Facebook and individual characteristics of Facebook users.
"Settling In": Postgraduate Research Student Experiences; An International Perspective.

International student cohorts continue to be increasingly vital to higher education institutions in Australia; currently, they account for 20 per cent of enrolments. However, there is concern that over the past few years, enrolment numbers have been dropping. Reasons for this decrease may vary from: tuition fee increases, new overseas universities adding to competition, the global financial crisis, student preferences toward US and UK universities, or perceived lack of Australian scholarship support for international students. At a time when uncertainty in financial markets loom, it is crucial that recruitment, retention, and overall experience, of international student’s remain a focus in a university’s strategic intent Studies on international students highlight that adjustment is crucial to a student’s positive educational experience abroad. Cross-cultural differences and English language barriers are main factors in adjustment—influencing well-being and academic achievement. Although literature on international students is extensive, studies of international postgraduate research students is limited. Problems experienced by this cohort are heightened due to the somewhat isolated nature of research programs. The focus of this paper is on international postgraduate research students and factors that contribute to how they adjust or ‘settle in’, to their research student candidature. The research involved in-depth interviews and focus groups with a cohort of postgraduate research students in a Group of Eight, research-intensive university in Sydney, Australia. The findings revealed that students had problems with: selection of supervisors, work opportunities within the faculty, knowing what is expected of them and lack of sense of belonging as means of connecting with a broader community of peers and academics. As faculties become aware of international research student challenges, even prior to enrolment, they can provide targeted support in order to contribute to and optimize the educational experience abroad.
Information Technology and Patient Health: Analyzing Outcomes, Populations, and Mechanisms

We study the effect of hospital adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) on health outcomes, focusing on patient safety indicators. We link data on hospital-level EMR adoption from the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Analytics Database to patient-level data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, and we exploit within-hospital variation in EMR adoption over time. We find evidence that EMRs reduce the likelihood of adverse patient safety events, particularly for less complex patients. Our results point to decision support as the most likely mechanism driving our findings. We find the most consistent effects for the following: a technology with decision support features, outcomes likely to respond to decision support, and patient populations likely to benefit from decision support. In addition, these findings suggest the negligible impacts found by previous studies of the Medicare population and/or mortality do not apply in all settings.
Hybrid DOM-Sensitive Change Impact Analysis for JavaScript

JavaScript has grown to be among the most popular programming languages. However, performing change impact analysis on JavaScript applications is challenging due to features such as the seamless interplay with the DOM, event-driven and dynamic function calls, and asynchronous client/server communication. We first perform an empirical study of change propagation, the results of which show that the DOM-related and dynamic features of JavaScript need to be taken into consideration in the analysis since they affect change impact propagation. We propose a DOM-sensitive hybrid change impact analysis technique for Javascript through a combination of static and dynamic analysis. The proposed approach incorporates a novel ranking algorithm for indicating the importance of each entity in the impact set. Our approach is implemented in a tool called Tochal. The results of our evaluation reveal that Tochal provides a more complete analysis compared to static or dynamic methods. Moreover, through an industrial controlled experiment, we find that Tochal helps developers by improving their task completion duration by 78% and accuracy by 223%.
Hadronic decays of η and η ′ with coupled channels 1

The hadronic decays η → πππ, η′ → πππ and η′ → ηππ are investigated within a U(3) chiral unitary approach. Final state interactions are included by deriving the effective s-wave potentials for meson meson scattering from the chiral effective Lagrangian and iterating them in a Bethe-Salpeter equation. With only a small set of parameters we are able to explain both rates and spectral shapes of these decays. PACS: 12.39. Fe, 13.25. Jx
Monitoring based on statistical analysis for evaluating speech quality of calls in VoIP environment

Monitoring call quality in a Voice over IP (VoIP) environment has great importance to collect information about those calls on the network. Packet loss on the network and de-jitter buffer, delay and subjective speech evaluation using the E-Model will enable the manager to verify the quality of calls. This article proposes the development of an agent to implement objects with statistical data about quality of call evaluation in a VoIP environment
Maintaining a Competitive Edge: Dominance Hierarchies, Food Competition and Strategies To Secure Food in Green Anoles (Anolis carolinensis) and Firemouth Cichlids (Thorichthys meeki)

We explored whether the opportunity to learn about the arrival of food, a scarce resource, might fa- cilitate subordinates' food-stealing attempts and dominants' strategies to prevent stealing in two species, namely green anole lizards (Anolis carolinensis) and firemouth cichlid fish (Thorichthys meeki). Following establishment of a dominance hierarchy, each group was randomly assigned to one of two treatment conditions, either a learning treatment in which a signal preceded the appearance of food, or a control treatment in which both signal and food appeared at randomly determined times. Dominants and subordinates of both species learned to anticipate food arrival using learned cues, which in turn changed their social dynamic. In anoles, learning enabled subordinates to steal food more effectively, and both dominants and subordinates to capture it more quickly. Alternatively, learning enabled dominant cichlids to protect their food more successfully by mounting a more ag- gressive defense. These results suggest that learning could play an important role in the competition for a scarce resource amongst many animals that form dominance hierarchies. Many animals that defend the exclusive use of territories during the breed-
Life Satisfaction and Work-Related Satisfaction among Anesthesiologists in Poland

The aim of the study was to assess the level of life and job satisfaction of Polish anesthesiologists and to explore the impact of extrinsic-hygiene and intrinsic-motivating determinants. Materials and Methods. A cross-sectional questionnaire study was conducted among consultant anesthesiologists in Lodz region. The questionnaire concerned patient care, burden, income, personal rewards, professional relations, job satisfaction in general, and life satisfaction. Respondents were asked to rate their level of satisfaction for each item on a seven-point Likert scale (1: extremely dissatisfied; 7: extremely satisfied). Results. 86.03% of anesthesiologists were satisfied with their economic status, 77.94% found their health status satisfactory, and 52.21% viewed their personal future optimistically. In general, 71.32% of anesthesiologists were satisfied with their current job situation. Among the less satisfying job aspects were work-related stress (2.49; SD = 1.23), administrative burden (2.85; SD = 1.47), workload (3.63; SD = 1.56), and leisure time (3.09; SD = 1.44). Conclusions. Considerable work-related stress leads to job dissatisfaction among anesthesiologists. There is an association between job satisfaction and health status, social life, and economic status. Working for long hours by anesthesiologists results in a high risk of burnout.
ADHD and Gender: subjective experiences of children in Chile

Abstract Although research on ADHD has tended to ignore gender differentials, recent contributions produced mainly from epidemiology have revealed that this diagnostic category seems to be strongly related to gender. However, these contributions seem to limit their scope to the study of the symptoms as well as cognitive, affective and social functioning of children, leaving aside subjective aspects associated with the ADHD practices of diagnosis and treatment. Thus, this article aims to explore how the gender dimension crosses the subjective experience of children diagnosed with ADHD. Based on open interviews conducted with children between the ages of 7 and 13, we show general trends that articulate gender and characteristics associated with the ADHD diagnosis, while at the same time, with children’s experiences that dislocate such trends. The findings were grouped according to four emerging axes: (1) locations, (2) abilities, (3) approches, (4) interactions. Thus, we will show how the experience of boys and girls is multiple in relation to the diagnosis and it is not possible to be reduced to a gender binary perspective.
Do private equity investors trigger financial distress in their portfolio companies?

There is some controversy on the key sources of success in the private equity model and on how this business model affects the portfolio companies. We investigate operating performance and financial constraints of European companies around the buyout event in the period between 2000 and 2008. In addition, we analyze whether these companies go bankrupt more often than comparable non-buyout companies. Our paper suggests that private equity investors select companies which are less financially constrained than comparable companies and that financial constraints tighten after the buyout. This is true in particular for stand-alone transactions and in times in which cheap debt financing is available. Despite tighter financial constraints, private equity-backed companies do not suffer from higher mortality rates, unless they are backed by inexperienced private equity funds. Finally, we find only modest effects of private equity investors on changes in the companies’ operating performance.
Steganography and Its Various Techniques

Communication is in progress since many years. Internet expeditious development and information technology made it is easy and fast to receive and send messages, pictures, video etc. With this transmission privacy and authentication became very important and this leads to the development of more and enhanced secure data hiding techniques. To achieve secure communications, the cousins cryptography and steganography are used. Steganography provide a secure form of communication. Many different image file formats exist, most of them for specific applications. Here different types of techniques for data hiding and securing information are described with their advantages and disadvantages. Keyword: Steganography, cryptography.
European Disintegration: Tendencies of Renationalization within the European Union and its Impact on the Common Labor Market and EU Consumer Markets

Starting in 1952 with Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the European Union (EU) successively enlarged to 27 member states in 2011. Since 2004, 10 Eastern European countries have joined the EU and, at the time of writing, five countries still have official EU candidate status and may join the EU in the near future. The permanent enlargement of the EU has led, and continues to lead, to social, cultural, economic, and linguistic pluralization and heterogenization and, more and more, causes a feeling of alienation among EU citizens. This comes along with a reduced willingness to share power, labor, and money among EU states, provokes tendencies of renationalization, and the resurgence of national thinking and acting. In the European common labor market these tendencies are attended by emerging exclusive nationalistic working climates and therefore undermine the formal freedom of movement for workers within the EU. In the European markets for consumer products (especially for food) these tendencies are reflected in augmented efforts that are undertaken to accentuate the national origin of domestic products. Empirical data of several EU member states will be analyzed and discussed. As a case study, the actual nationalistic tendencies of the Austrian consumer market will be parsed and integrated in a broader European picture. (author's abstract)
The impact of aging, cognition, and symptoms on functional competence in individuals with schizophrenia across the lifespan.

OBJECTIVE Life expectancy in individuals with schizophrenia continues to increase. It is not clear whether cognitive deficits associated with schizophrenia remain as strong predictors of function in older and younger individuals. Thus, we assessed the relationship between cognition and functional competence in individuals with schizophrenia across 7 decades of life. METHODS We analyzed data obtained in 232 community-dwelling participants with schizophrenia (age range: 19-79 years). Cognition was assessed using the Measurement and Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia Consensus Cognitive Battery. Functional competence was assessed using the UCSD Performance-based Skills Assessment, which includes measures of Comprehension and Planning of Recreational Activities Skills, Financial Skills, Communication Skills, Transportation Skills, and Household Management Skills. To assess the effects of Global Cognition on functional competence, we performed hierarchical multivariate linear or logistic regression analyses controlling for age, education, gender, and negative symptoms. RESULTS Participants' mean age was 49.1 (SD = 13.2, range = 19-79 years), 161 (69%) were male, and 55 (24%) were aged ≥60. Global Cognition was a predictor of Comprehension and Planning Skills (Exp(β) = 1.048), Financial Skills (Exp(β) = 1.104), Communication Skills (ΔR (2) = . 31) and Transportation Skills (Exp(β) = 1.066), but not Household Management Skills after adjusting for age, education, gender, and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. CONCLUSION Cognition remains a strong predictor of functional competence across the lifespan. These findings suggest that treating cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia could improve individuals' function independent of their age.
Insight into the physics of foam densification via numerical simulation

Foamed materials are increasingly finding application in engineering systems on account of their unique properties. The basic mechanics which gives rise to these properties is well established, they are the result of collapsing the foam microstructure. Despite a basic understanding, the relationship between the details of foam microstructure and foam bulk response is generally unknown. With continued advances in computational power, many researchers have turned to numerical simulation to gain insight into the relationship between foam microstructure and bulk properties. However, numerical simulation of foam microscale deformation is a very challenging computational task and, to date, simulations over the full range of bulk deformations in which these materials operate have not been reported. Here a particle technique is demonstrated to be well-suited for this computational challenge, permitting simulation of the compression of foam microstructures to full densification. Computations on idealized foam microstructures are in agreement with engineering guidelines and various experimental results. Dependencies on degree of microstructure regularity and material properties are demonstrated. A surprising amount of porosity is found in fullydensified foams. The presence of residual porosity can strongly influence dynamic material see front matter Published by Elsevier Ltd. . jmps.2004. 09.003 nding author. Tel. : +1505 665 5323; fax: +1 505 606 0455. dress: bard@lanl.gov (S.G. Bardenhagen).
Factors Influencing Charity Shop Customers’ Intention to Use Online Charity Shops

Elektronik ticaretin onem kazandigi son yillarda, bircok yardim kurulusu da kendi online alisveris sitesi veya eBay magazasi basta olmak uzere internet araciligiyla satis yapmaya baslamistir. Bu calisma, Birlestirilmis Teknoloji Kabul ve Kullanimi Teorisi 2 (BTKKT2) ile yardim kuruluslarina bagli hayir magazalarindan alisveris yapan musterilerin online alisveris yapma niyetlerini belirleyen faktorleri arastirmaktadir. Ayrica, bu calismayla mevcut ve potansiyel online hayir magazasi musterilerinin yas ve cinsiyet gibi demografik ozellikleriyle birlikte hayir magazalarindan ne siklikta alisveris yaptiklari da belirlenmistir.
Global Integration of Central and Eastern European Financial Markets: The Role of Economic Sentiments

This paper examines the importance of different economic sentiments, e.g. consumer moods, for the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) during the transition process. We first analyze the importance of economic confidence with respect to the CEEC's financial markets. Since the integration of formerly strongly regulated markets into global markets can also lead to an increase of the dependence of the CEECs' domestic market performance from global sentiments, we also investigate the relationship between global economic sentiments and domestic income and share prices. Finally, we test whether the impact of global sentiments and stock prices on domestic variables increases proportionally with the degree of integration. For these purposes, we apply a structural cointegrating VAR (CVAR) framework based upon a restricted autoregressive model which allows us to distinguish between the long-run and the short-run dynamics. For the long run we find evidence supporting relationships between sentiments, income and share prices in case of the Czech Republic. Our results for the short run suggest that economic sentiments in general are strongly influenced by share prices and income but also offer some predictive power with respect to the latter. What is more, global sentiments play an important role in particular for the CEECs' share prices and income. The significance of this link increases with economic integration.
The gut microflora of Reticulitermes flavipes, its relation to oxygen, and evidence for oxygen-dependent acetogenesis by the most abundant Enterococcus sp.

We previously demonstrated a potentially deep penetration of oxygen into the hindgut lumen of wood-feeding termites, high oxygen consumption rates of the symbiotic gut microbiota, and an indispensable role of oxygen in the mineralization of aromatic compounds. Here we characterize the gut microflora of the wood-feeding termite Reticulitermes flavipes, focusing on metabolic capacities and relation to oxygen of the most prevalent physiotypes. The carbohydrate-utilizing isolates, enumerated on liquid and solid growth media (3.1×105 cells per gut; gut liquid volume ∼0.3 μl), consisted of aerotolerant lactic acid bacteria (58%) and surprisingly large numbers of facultatively aerobic (20%) and even strictly aerobic bacteria (22%). The second largest group of cultivable gut bacteria were hydrogen-oxidizing methanogens (3.0×105 cells per gut), which were cultivated only on liquid media. Together, these two groups represented 10% of the total microscopic counts obtained by DAPI staining. The large number of lactic acid bacteria agreed with the metabolic product profiles in anoxic serial dilutions of gut homogenates in which lactate was the main product from glucose in the highest dilutions. Other physiological groups, e.g. propionate and butyrate producers, were much less abundant. Lactate was not, however, a major metabolite in the hindgut fluid, a phenomenon hitherto explained by a rapid turnover of lactate by other gut bacteria. In view of the relatively small number of lactate-oxidizing and lactate-fermenting bacteria, this explanation is not sufficient. We show that the isolate Enterococcus strain RfL6, representing the most abundant physiotype among the carbohydrate-utilizing gut bacteria, was not purely fermentative, but consumed oxygen during growth on glucose, accompanied by a complete shift in the product spectrum from lactate to acetate, and was able to oxidize lactate to acetate when oxygen was present. This agrees with the observation that acetate is the major product of the hindgut metabolism of R. flavipes (∼70 mM in the hindgut fluid). Together with previous findings, these results underline the obvious but so far neglected importance of oxygen and contribute to the emerging concept that the termite hindguts are far from simple, anoxic fermenters, but axially and radially structured, heterogeneous systems characterized by steep gradients of metabolites.
Calculus on Surfaces with General Closest Point Functions

The closest point method for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) posed on surfaces was recently introduced by Ruuth and Merriman J. Comput. Phys., 227 (2008), pp. 1943--1961 and successfully applied to a variety of surface PDEs. In this paper we study the theoretical foundations of this method. The main idea is that surface differentials of a surface function can be replaced with Cartesian differentials of its closest point extension, i.e., its composition with a closest point function. We introduce a general class of these closest point functions (a subset of differentiable retractions), show that these are exactly the functions necessary to satisfy the above idea, and give a geometric characterization of this class. Finally, we construct some closest point functions and demonstrate their effectiveness numerically on surface PDEs.