Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing competence and acceptance explanations of self-esteem

Recent theorizing suggests that both competence and acceptance contribute to global self-esteem. However, relatively little empirical work has focused on the relative contributions of competence and acceptance. We tested in four studies (N = 332) two competing hypotheses about how competence and acceptance play a role in self-esteem. According to the acceptance hypothesis, acceptance should influence self-esteem more than competence should. According to the competence/acceptance hypothesis, acceptance and competence should influence self-esteem roughly equally. The studies assessed state self-esteem in several ways: responses to feedback in an experimental setting (Studies 1 and 2), predicted changes in self-esteem in response to hypothetical events (Study 3), and recall of changes in self-esteem in retrospective accounts (Study 4). Overall, results supported the acceptance hypothesis: acceptance influenced self-esteem more than did competence.
Identification of Small Molecule Inhibitors of Neurite Loss Induced by Aβ peptide using High Content Screening*

Background: Amyloid-β-induced degeneration of neurites is a key event in Alzheimer disease. Results: We describe NeuriteIQ high content screening platform for analysis of neurite degeneration. Conclusion: We identified multiple cyclooxygenase inhibitors and agonists of PPARγ as suppressors of Aβ-induced neurite loss. Significance: Our study demonstrates the feasibility of using NeuriteQ to discover inhibitors of neurite loss and provide a new insight into neurite degeneration. Multiple lines of evidence indicate a strong relationship between Αβ peptide-induced neurite degeneration and the progressive loss of cognitive functions in Alzheimer disease (AD) patients and in AD animal models. This prompted us to develop a high content screening assay (HCS) and Neurite Image Quantitator (NeuriteIQ) software to quantify the loss of neuronal projections induced by Aβ peptide neurons and enable us to identify new classes of neurite-protective small molecules, which may represent new leads for AD drug discovery. We identified thirty-six inhibitors of Aβ-induced neurite loss in the 1,040-compound National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) custom collection of known bioactives and FDA approved drugs. Activity clustering showed that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) were significantly enriched among the hits. Notably, NSAIDs have previously attracted significant attention as potential drugs for AD; however their mechanism of action remains controversial. Our data revealed that cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) expression was increased following Aβ treatment. Furthermore, multiple distinct classes of COX inhibitors efficiently blocked neurite loss in primary neurons, suggesting that increased COX activity contributes to Aβ peptide-induced neurite loss. Finally, we discovered that the detrimental effect of COX activity on neurite integrity may be mediated through the inhibition of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ) activity. Overall, our work establishes the feasibility of identifying small molecule inhibitors of Aβ-induced neurite loss using the NeuriteIQ pipeline and provides novel insights into the mechanisms of neuroprotection by NSAIDs.
DETERRENCE AND MORAL PERSUASION EFFECTS ON CORPORATE TAX COMPLIANCE: FINDINGS FROM A RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL*

Previous studies on tax compliance have focused primarily on the tax-reporting behavior of individuals. This study reports results from a randomized field test of the effects of deterrence and moral persuasion on the tax-reporting behavior of 4,395 corporations in Israel. Two experimental groups received tax letters, one conveying a deterrent message and the other a moral persuasion message. Three types of measures are used to evaluate compliance based on the magnitude of the difference-in-differences of means in 1) gross sales values reported to the authority, 2) tax dollars paid to the authority, and 3) tax deductions. Overall, both deterrence and moral persuasion approaches do not produce statistically significant greater compliance compared with control conditions. These results do not support the ability of a policy of sending tax letters to increase substantively the reporting of true tax liability or tax payments by corporations. However, these results also show that moral persuasion can be counterproductive: Corporations in this experimental group show an increase rather than a decrease in tax deductions, which translates into loss of state revenues. The implications for theory, research, and tax policy are discussed.
Capsular contracture of subcutaneous breast implant following hypofractionated stereotactic body radiotherapy for early stage lung cancer.

BACKGROUND Development of capsular contracture around subcutaneously implanted breast prostheses, producing poor cosmetic outcome and pain, has been reported following standard fractionated external beam radiotherapy to whole implants for breast cancer. We report capsular contracture following partial implant irradiation from hypofractionated stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) for lung cancer in a 64 year-old female with augmentation mammaplasty. METHODS The patient had biopsy-proven, T1 non-small cell lung carcinoma, adjacent to the implant. She received 50 Gy in 4 fractions to 91% of planning target volume using a 7-field, 3D-conformal plan with 6 MV photons and daily CT-guided target localization. The implant received 9.3 Gy mean dose, 51.7 Gy maximum point dose, with V10 41%, V20 15% and V30 4%. RESULTS At seven months, the patient reported left breast pain requiring narcotic analgesics and demonstrated modified Baker/Palmer grade 4 capsular contracture. Breast retraction assessment measurement increased from baseline 10.4 mm to 19.8 mm. CONCLUSIONS This represents the first reported case of capsular contracture from partial breast implant radiation following SBRT for lung cancer. Further investigation to elucidate maximum tolerated dose of radiation given to breast implants in this setting is needed.
Existence and convergence to a propagating terrace in one-dimensional reaction-diffusion equations

We consider one-dimensional reaction-diffusion equations for a large class of spatially periodic nonlinearities – including multistable ones – and study the asymptotic behavior of solutions with Heaviside type initial data. Our analysis reveals some new dynamics where the profile of the propagation is not characterized by a single front, but by a layer of several fronts which we call a terrace. Existence and convergence to such a terrace is proven by using an intersection number argument, without much relying on standard linear analysis. Hence, on top of the peculiar phenomenon of propagation that our work highlights, several corollaries will follow on the existence and convergence to pulsating traveling fronts even for highly degenerate nonlinearities that have not been treated before.
Nonlinear Radiation Heat Transfer Effects in the Natural Convective Boundary Layer Flow of Nanofluid Past a Vertical Plate: A Numerical Study

The problem of natural convective boundary layer flow of nanofluid past a vertical plate is discussed in the presence of nonlinear radiative heat flux. The effects of magnetic field, Joule heating and viscous dissipation are also taken into consideration. The governing partial differential equations are transformed into a system of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations via similarity transformations and then solved numerically using the Runge–Kutta fourth-fifth order method with shooting technique. The results reveal an existence of point of inflection for the temperature distribution for sufficiently large wall to ambient temperature ratio. Temperature and thermal boundary layer thickness increase as Brownian motion and thermophoretic effects intensify. Moreover temperature increases and heat transfer from the plate decreases with an increase in the radiation parameter.
Machine learning based online performance prediction for runtime parallelization and task scheduling

With the emerging many-core paradigm, parallel programming must extend beyond its traditional realm of scientific applications. Converting existing sequential applications as well as developing next-generation software requires assistance from hardware, compilers and runtime systems to exploit parallelism transparently within applications. These systems must decompose applications into tasks that can be executed in parallel and then schedule those tasks to minimize load imbalance. However, many systems lack a priori knowledge about the execution time of all tasks to perform effective load balancing with low scheduling overhead. In this paper, we approach this fundamental problem using machine learning techniques first to generate performance models for all tasks and then applying those models to perform automatic performance prediction across program executions. We also extend an existing scheduling algorithm to use generated task cost estimates for online task partitioning and scheduling. We implement the above techniques in the pR framework, which transparently parallelizes scripts in the popular R language, and evaluate their performance and overhead with both a real-world application and a large number of synthetic representative test scripts. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach significantly improves task partitioning and scheduling, with maximum improvements of 21.8%, 40.3% and 22.1% and average improvements of 15.9%, 16.9% and 4.2% for LMM (a real R application) and synthetic test cases with independent and dependent tasks, respectively.
Holding complexity and searching for meaning: Teaching as reflective practice

This paper explores differences between traditions in relation to teaching and learning. As a relative newcomer from the Anglo/American curriculum tradition, I seek to highlight the ways in which Central and Northern European tradition of Didaktik has offered a new dimension and fresh insights to the notion of reflective practice. In particular, the paper seeks to emphasize the significance of Klafki's notion of Didaktik analysis, with its focus on meaning and its aim to re-enact the rationale for subject matters. Against this background, teaching is seen as a moral and reflecting activity that is primarily concerned with a search for meaning.
Understanding the meanings of children: a reflexive process

This paper identifies a number of children's voices within qualitative academic writing. It suggests that researchers can discover a variety of children's voices by employing reflexive techniques to ensure that their interpretations are not influenced by their personal prejudice, or the ethics, tools, roles and theories of their professional paradigm. It concludes that those who work with children may be able to reinforce the theme of the UN Convention on Rights of the Child by employing this reflexive approach to enable them to attribute equal status to the views of all the children whom they encounter.
Prediction of dementia by subjective memory impairment: effects of severity and temporal association with cognitive impairment.

CONTEXT Subjective memory impairment (SMI) is receiving increasing attention as a pre-mild cognitive impairment (MCI) condition in the course of the clinical manifestation of Alzheimer disease (AD). OBJECTIVES To determine the risk for conversion to any dementia, dementia in AD, or vascular dementia by SMI, graded by the level of SMI-related worry and by the temporal association of SMI and subsequent MCI. DESIGN Longitudinal cohort study with follow-up examinations at 1(1/2) and 3 years after baseline. SETTING Primary care medical record registry sample. PARTICIPANTS A total of 2415 subjects without cognitive impairment 75 years or older in the German Study on Aging, Cognition and Dementia in Primary Care Patients. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Conversion to any dementia, dementia in AD, or vascular dementia at follow-up 1 or follow-up 2 predicted by SMI with or without worry at baseline and at follow-up 2 predicted by different courses of SMI at baseline and MCI at follow-up 1. RESULTS In the first analysis, SMI with worry at baseline was associated with greatest risk for conversion to any dementia (hazard ratio [HR], 3.53; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.07-6.03) or dementia in AD (6.54; 2.82-15.20) at follow-up 1 or follow-up 2. The sensitivity was 69.0% and the specificity was 74.3% conversion to dementia in AD. In the second analysis, SMI at baseline and MCI at follow-up 1 were associated with greatest risk for conversion to any dementia (odds ratio [OR], 8.92; 95% CI, 3.69-21.60) or dementia in AD (19.33; 5.29-70.81) at follow-up 2. Furthermore, SMI at baseline and amnestic MCI at follow-up 1 increased the risk for conversion to any dementia (OR, 29.24; 95% CI, 8.75-97.78) or dementia in AD (60.28; 12.23-297.10), with a sensitivity of 66.7% and a specificity of 98.3% for conversion to dementia in AD. CONCLUSION The prediction of dementia in AD by SMI with subsequent amnestic MCI supports the model of a consecutive 3-stage clinical manifestation of AD from SMI via MCI to dementia.
Teacher‐student mediation of content area texts

Sitting in classrooms observing how teachers teach and students learn from their content area texts has been a focus of researchers for some time (Mathews & Toepfer, 1936; McCallister, 1930). Not until Durkin's (1978-79) study of reading comprehension instruction during basal reading and elementary social studies lessons, however, have researchers begun to concentrate on verbal interactions between teachers and students engaged in textbook learning. Studies at the secondary level that deal with textbook related teacher-student in-
Developing Measures of Job Performance for Support Staff in Housing Services for People with Intellectual Disabilities

There is an absence of research concerning the assessment of housing support worker job performance, particularly in the development of job performance measures that reflect the priorities of people with intellectual disabilities and their families. A worker-oriented job analysis method was used to develop four short job performance measures for direct housing support staff, from the perspective of people with intellectual disabilities (n = 82), family members (n = 38), support staff (n = 122) and service managers (n = 115). All four job performance measures showed adequate internal and test-retest reliability and showed very few associations with staff and resident characteristics, although there were no associations between the job performance measures. The service user and manager-rated job performance measures showed the widest range of associations with aspects of staff well-being, service quality and service user choice and satisfaction with life, and show the most promise as short, practical measures of the job performance of direct housing support workers. These methods of developing job performance measures show promise, and further investigation of user-defined staff competencies is warranted.
Does Cognitive Style Affect Bloggers’ Attitude In An Online Learning Environment?

The prevalence of using blogs among college students has great impact in online communication. It is therefore important to identify how learners with different characteristics use this technology. This study examines if bloggers’ cognitive styles particularly field-dependency affects students’ attitudes toward blogs. The subjects were a class of undergraduate students enrolled in an obligatory course. The Group Embedded Figures Test was administered which classified them as either field dependent or field independent. Then, they were requested to respond to a questionnaire designed to assess their attitudes toward blogs on three factors: blog anxiety, blog desirability, and blog self-efficacy. Although field-dependents had lower blog anxiety, blog desirability, and blog self-efficacy than field-independents in using blogs, the difference was not statistically significant. Moreover, conclusions drawn from the interview questions support the notion that both field dependents and field independents appeared to have positive attitudes towards using blogs in a learning environment.
Militant Democracy: The Institutional Bases of Democratic Self-Preservation

Over the past two decades, the concept of militant democracy—the use of legal restrictions on political expression and participation to curb extremist actors in democratic regimes—has again captured the attention of comparative constitutional lawyers and political scientists. In comparative constitutional law, the old neutral model of liberal democracy, according to which all political views are entitled to the same rights of expression and association, has given way to a general consensus that restrictions on basic rights designed to preserve democracy are legitimate. At the same time, legal scholars attribute the considerable cross-national variation in the formal design and use of such restrictions to the particular historical background of each country. In political science, a large body of work now examines specific militant restrictions on extremist actors. Although this scholarship consists mainly of descriptive analyses, it has begun to advance causal hypotheses explaining variation in important m.
Synchrony, binding, and consciousness - How are they related?

LaRock provides a rather perplexing critique of the binding problem. He argues that neural synchrony, the proposed solution to the binding problem, is not sufficient to explain the unity of objects in visual consciousness. Did anyone claim it was? Neural synchrony can at best be necessary for consciousness, not sufficient. The binding problem originally has nothing to do with the conscious content of our perception. Misidentification of binding and consciousness may lead to tunnel vision with respect to other roles that neural synchrony could play in conscious experience. A different perspective is offered on how neural synchrony relates to visual consciousness.
Evaluation of Immunogenicity and Efficacy of Anthrax Vaccine Adsorbed for Postexposure Prophylaxis

ABSTRACT Antimicrobials administered postexposure can reduce the incidence or progression of anthrax disease, but they do not protect against the disease resulting from the germination of spores that may remain in the body after cessation of the antimicrobial regimen. Such additional protection may be achieved by postexposure vaccination; however, no anthrax vaccine is licensed for postexposure prophylaxis (PEP). In a rabbit PEP study, animals were subjected to lethal challenge with aerosolized Bacillus anthracis spores and then were treated with levofloxacin with or without concomitant intramuscular (i.m.) vaccination with anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA) (BioThrax; Emergent BioDefense Operations Lansing LLC, Lansing, MI), administered twice, 1 week apart. A significant increase in survival rates was observed among vaccinated animals compared to those treated with antibiotic alone. In preexposure prophylaxis studies in rabbits and nonhuman primates (NHPs), animals received two i.m. vaccinations 1 month apart and were challenged with aerosolized anthrax spores at day 70. Prechallenge toxin-neutralizing antibody (TNA) titers correlated with animal survival postchallenge and provided the means for deriving an antibody titer associated with a specific probability of survival in animals. In a clinical immunogenicity study, 82% of the subjects met or exceeded the prechallenge TNA value that was associated with a 70% probability of survival in rabbits and 88% probability of survival in NHPs, which was estimated based on the results of animal preexposure prophylaxis studies. The animal data provide initial information on protective antibody levels for anthrax, as well as support previous findings regarding the ability of AVA to provide added protection to B. anthracis-infected animals compared to antimicrobial treatment alone.
The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking

The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was developed in 1966 and renormed five times: in 1974, 1984, 1990, 1998, and 2008. The total sample for all six normative samples included 272,599 kindergarten through 12th grade students and adults. Analysis of the normative data showed that creative thinking scores remained static or decreased, starting at sixth grade. Results also indicated that since 1990, even as IQ scores have risen, creative thinking scores have significantly decreased. The decrease for kindergartners through third graders was the most significant.
Induction of male sterility in plants by metabolic engineering of the carbohydrate supply

Extracellular invertase mediates phloem unloading via an apoplastic pathway. The gene encoding isoenzyme Nin88 from tobacco was cloned and shown to be characterized by a specific spatial and temporal expression pattern. Tissue-specific antisense repression of Nin88 under control of the corresponding promoter in tobacco results in a block during early stages of pollen development, thus, causing male sterility. This result demonstrates a critical role of extracellular invertase in pollen development and strongly supports the essential function of extracellular sucrose cleavage for supplying carbohydrates to sink tissues via the apoplast. The specific interference with phloem unloading, the sugar status, and metabolic signaling during pollen formation will be a potentially valuable approach to induce male sterility in various crop species for hybrid seed production.
Representing Dynamic Performance Information in Grid Environments with the Network Weather Service

In this paper, we discuss requirements for integrating dynamic performance information from the Network Weather Service (NWS) into the Grid Information Service infrastructure (GIS). We describe the object model that NWS uses internally and provide some rationale for its structure. Finally, we present the NWS 's implementation of a caching LDAP daemon that integrates NWS information into the reference GIS -the Glob s MDS.
Entrepreneurial intent: A twelve‐country evaluation of Ajzen's model of planned behavior

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to test the ability of Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior to predict entrepreneurial intent in 12 countries representing all ten of the global regional clusters as identified in the GLOBE project. Design/methodology/approach – Ajzen's model was operationalized to address entrepreneurial intent and a questionnaire was developed consisting of previously used scales, as well as a new measure of entrepreneurial autonomy. A total of 1,748 usable questionnaires were collected from university business students in 12 countries. Findings – The results suggest that Ajzen's model of planned behavior, as operationalized in this study, does successfully predict entrepreneurial intent in each of the study countries, although as foreseen by Ajzen, the significant contributing model elements differ by country as does the percent of the variance explained by the model, although one model element, social norms, was a significant predictor of entrepreneurial intent in each country. Originality/value – This is the first paper to provide insight to the role of cognition in the entrepreneurial process by examining a model of planned behavior in countries representing all global regional culture clusters. The paper also provides guidance for future entrepreneurial research and individual development of entrepreneurs.