Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Embodied Conversational Agents

It was analyzed whether an embodied conversational agent (ECA) has specific advantages when employed with privacy invading technologies such as a biometric security system. The study compares the effects of an ECA interface with the effects of conventional text-based and voice-based interfaces on user acceptance and usability. An additional variable was whether the biometric system falsely rejected the user twice or whether it directly accepted him/her. Results of the 2 × 3 between-subjects design indicated that, although overall the text interface is rated most positive, voice and ECA yield distinct social effects: They have more advantageous consequences when problems arise – i.e., when the user is rejected repeatedly. The implications for social psychology in terms of applicability of new research methods as well as insights concerning fundamental research are discussed.
An incentives' mechanism promoting truthful feedback in peer-to-peer systems

We propose a mechanism for providing the incentives for reporting truthful feedback in a peer-to-peer system for exchanging services. This mechanism is to complement reputation mechanisms that employ ratings' feedback on the various transactions in order to provide incentives to peers for offering better services to others. Under our approach, both transacting peers (rather than just the client) submit ratings on performance of their mutual transaction. If these are in disagreement, then both transacting peers are punished, since such an occasion is a sign that one of them is tying. The severity of each peer's punishment is determined by his corresponding non-credibility metric; this is maintained by the mechanism and evolves according to the peer's record. When under punishment, a peer is not allowed to transact with others. We present the results of a multitude of experiments of dynamically evolving peer-to-peer systems. The results show clearly that our mechanism detects and isolates effectively liar peers, while rendering lying costly. Also, our mechanism diminishes the efficiency losses induced to sincere peers by the presence of large subsets of the population of peers that provide their ratings either falsely or according to various unfair strategies. Finally, we explain how our approach can be implemented in practical cases of peer-to-peer systems.
The ferret, Mustela putorius furo, as a new species in toxicology

Summary Comprehensive studies on the haematology, urine chemistry, serum chemistry and gross pathology have been carried out and reported. Seasonal weight changes were confirmed and were initiated, together with sexual activity, when ferrets were brought in to a constant temperature (18–19°C) and 14–hour daylight cycle during the winter months. Levels of haemoglobin, erythrocytes and haematocrit were higher than in most common laboratory species. Similarly, serum electrolytes and glucose levels were higher than in Wistar rats or beagle dogs. Ovaries, uteri and testes displayed a seasonal maturation and atrophy. All other parameters were similar to common laboratory species.
Production and characterization of monoclonal antibodies to Rickettsia rickettsii

Five mouse ascitic fluids (MAFs) containing monoclonal antibody to Rickettsia rickettsii were produced from three original fusions by murine hybridoma technology. The five MAFs were fractionated and purified; each contained monoclonal antibody of the immunoglobulin G2a subclass. Each monoclonal antibody-containing MAF was titrated by indirect immunofluorescence against three R. rickettsii isolates from humans and four other spotted fever group rickettsiae. Each MAF was also titrated in the complement fixation, latex agglutination, microagglutination, and indirect hemagglutination tests. Two of the MAFs were examined for their ability to prevent fever and rickettsemia in susceptible guinea pigs after a 1:100 dilution of each was mixed with viable R. rickettsii, and all five MAFs were titrated in the mouse toxicity phenomenon assay. All MAFs had high indirect immunofluorescence titers to the three strains of R. rickettsii (1:200,000 to 1:800,000), reduced indirect immunofluorescence titers to R. montana, and were nonreactive with R. akari, R. sibirica, and R. conorii. Each MAF was able to fix complement in the presence of spotted fever group antigen reagent and agglutinate a suspension of purified R. rickettsii, and each was negative in both the latex agglutination and the indirect hemagglutination tests. The two MAFs which were tested proved to be capable of preventing rickettsemia and death in guinea pigs, and each MAF was able to prevent death in mice at dilutions ranging from 1:40 to 1:80.
Mobbing w środowisku pracy pielęgniarek

Wstep. Przemoc w miejscu pracy nie jest zjawiskiem nowym, ale dopiero kilkanaście lat temu na świecie, a w ostatnich latach w Polsce, zaczeto interesowac sie tym zagadnieniem, analizowac jego źrodla i konsekwencje. Wystepowanie agresji w miejscu pracy moze przybierac rozne formy i niezaleznie od nich jest czynnikiem, ktory w sposob istotny wplywa na zdrowie psychiczne, motywacje do pracy i jej efektywnośc. Przemoc niezaleznie od jej natezenia stanowi jeden z powazniejszych stresorow zawodowych i moze wywolywac konsekwencje w zakresie funkcjonowania psychicznego, fizycznego, ale takze spolecznego i zawodowego. Cel pracy. Proba określenia skali zjawiska, analiza źrodel, przyczyn i form mobbingu oraz jego konsekwencji w grupie pielegniarek w zalezności od wyksztalcenia i miejsca pracy. Material i metody. Badania przeprowadzono metodą sondazu diagnostycznego z uzyciem kwestionariusza w grupie 198 losowo wybranych pielegniarek pracujących w lecznictwie otwartym i zamknietym wojewodztwa świetokrzyskiego. Wyniki. Z badan wynika, ze 40,4% badanych doświadczylo agresji w pracy. Stwierdzono statystyczną zaleznośc skali mobbingu od wyksztalcenia (82,2% pielegniarki z wyksztalceniem wyzszym) i miejsca pracy (74,0% na oddzialach zabiegowych). Jako mobberow 83% badanych wskazalo swoich przelozonych (w tym najwiecej 57,3% - pielegniarki, a 23,2% - lekarzy). Az 87,6% respondentek zglaszalo problemy zdrowotne spowodowane mobbingiem. Zdaniem 80,5% badanych mobbing wplynąl negatywnie na efektywnośc pracy. Wnioski. Pielegniarki w swojej pracy są narazone na rozne formy agresji. Sprawcami mobbingu są najcześciej przelozeni - pielegniarki, co moze świadczyc o niedoskonalości zarządzania w tej grupie zawodowej. Wydaje sie, ze istnieje potrzeba prowadzenia profilaktyki antymobbingowej Problemy Pielegniarstwa 2010; 18 (2): 212-219
Cross‐Case Analysis and Implications for Research, Theory, and Practice

Chapter 2 of this volume provided a close look at the evaluation capacity of eight distinct organizations. The organizations were selected on the basis of their interest in and commitment to evaluation as leverage for program and organizational change. Having examined each of the organizations in terms of context, evaluation drivers, evaluation capacity to do and use evaluation, and forces and factors that affect such capacity, this chapter looks across them in order to learn more about the complexities of evaluation capacity. Beginning with a cross‐case lens, we recapitulate what we found from the cases about organizational evaluation capacity and then present an emergent thematic analysis and discussion. The chapter ends with some implications for research, theory, and practice in the area.
Curcumin: A new candidate for melanoma therapy?

Melanoma remains among the most lethal cancers and, in spite of great attempts that have been made to increase the life span of patients with metastatic disease, durable and complete remissions are rare. Plants and plant extracts have long been used to treat a variety of human conditions; however, in many cases, effective doses of herbal remedies are associated with serious adverse effects. Curcumin is a natural polyphenol that shows a variety of pharmacological activities including anti‐cancer effects, and only minimal adverse effects have been reported for this phytochemical. The anti‐cancer effects of curcumin are the result of its anti‐angiogenic, pro‐apoptotic and immunomodulatory properties. At the molecular and cellular level, curcumin can blunt epithelial‐to‐mesenchymal transition and affect many targets that are involved in melanoma initiation and progression (e.g., BCl2, MAPKS, p21 and some microRNAs). However, curcumin has a low oral bioavailability that may limit its maximal benefits. The emergence of tailored formulations of curcumin and new delivery systems such as nanoparticles, liposomes, micelles and phospholipid complexes has led to the enhancement of curcumin bioavailability. Although in vitro and in vivo studies have demonstrated that curcumin and its analogues can be used as novel therapeutic agents in melanoma, curcumin has not yet been tested against melanoma in clinical practice. In this review, we summarized reported anti‐melanoma effects of curcumin as well as studies on new curcumin formulations and delivery systems that show increased bioavailability. Such tailored delivery systems could pave the way for enhancement of the anti‐melanoma effects of curcumin.
Benchmarking Is Associated With Improved Quality of Care in Type 2 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE To assess prospectively the effect of benchmarking on quality of primary care for patients with type 2 diabetes by using three major modifiable cardiovascular risk factors as critical quality indicators. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Primary care physicians treating patients with type 2 diabetes in six European countries were randomized to give standard care (control group) or standard care with feedback benchmarked against other centers in each country (benchmarking group). In both groups, laboratory tests were performed every 4 months. The primary end point was the percentage of patients achieving preset targets of the critical quality indicators HbA1c, LDL cholesterol, and systolic blood pressure (SBP) after 12 months of follow-up. RESULTS Of 4,027 patients enrolled, 3,996 patients were evaluable and 3,487 completed 12 months of follow-up. Primary end point of HbA1c target was achieved in the benchmarking group by 58.9 vs. 62.1% in the control group (P = 0.398) after 12 months; 40.0 vs. 30.1% patients met the SBP target (P < 0.001); 54.3 vs. 49.7% met the LDL cholesterol target (P = 0.006). Percentages of patients meeting all three targets increased during the study in both groups, with a statistically significant increase observed in the benchmarking group. The percentage of patients achieving all three targets at month 12 was significantly larger in the benchmarking group than in the control group (12.5 vs. 8.1%; P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS In this prospective, randomized, controlled study, benchmarking was shown to be an effective tool for increasing achievement of critical quality indicators and potentially reducing patient cardiovascular residual risk profile.
The Feminization of American Culture

The Feminization of American Culture is a significant study of the domination of late nineteenth-century American culture by a feminine ethic and spirit. As religion lost its hold on the public mind, clergymen and educated women, powerless in the male-dominated industrial society, banded together to have a profound effect on the only areas still open to their influence - the arts and literature. Ann Douglas explores their impact on the best-selling novels and magazines of the day to show how women exploited their feminine image and idealized the very qualities that kept them powerless: timidity, piety, narcissism, and a disdain for competition. The result was a far-reaching social preoccupation with banal melodrama which failed to address the real issues of the day. This is a major, polemical rethinking of the American past which seeks to explain values prevalent in today's popular culture by tracing them back to their roots in Victorian times.
The International Society for Bipolar Disorders-Battery for Assessment of Neurocognition (ISBD-BANC).

OBJECTIVES Although cognitive impairment is recognized as an important clinical feature of bipolar disorder, there is no standard cognitive battery that has been developed for use in bipolar disorder research. The aims of this paper were to identify the cognitive measures from the literature that show the greatest magnitude of impairment in bipolar disorder, to use this information to determine whether the Measurement and Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (MATRICS) Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB), developed for use in schizophrenia, might be suitable for bipolar disorder research, and to propose a preliminary battery of cognitive tests for use in bipolar disorder research. METHODS The project was conducted under the auspices of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders and involved a committee that comprised researchers with international expertise in the cognitive aspects of bipolar disorder. In order to identify cognitive tasks that show the largest magnitude of impairment in bipolar disorder, we reviewed the literature on studies assessing cognitive functioning (including social cognition) in bipolar disorder. We further provided a brief review of the cognitive overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and evaluated the degree to which tasks included in the MCCB (or other identified tasks) might be suitable for use in bipolar disorder. RESULTS Based on evidence that cognitive deficits in bipolar disorder are similar in pattern but less severe than in schizophrenia, it was judged that most subtests comprising the MCCB appear appropriate for use in bipolar disorder. In addition to MCCB tests, other specific measures of more complex verbal learning (e.g., the California Verbal Learning Test) or executive function (Stroop Test, Trail Making Test-part B, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) also show substantial impairment in bipolar disorder. CONCLUSIONS Our analysis reveals that the MCCB represents a good starting point for assessing cognitive deficits in research studies of bipolar disorder, but that other tasks including more complex verbal learning measures and tests of executive function should also be considered in assessing cognitive compromise in bipolar disorder. Several promising cognitive tasks that require further study in bipolar disorder are also presented.
START TO END SIMULATIONS OF LOW EMITTANCE TUNING AND STABILIZATION

The principal beam dynamics challenge to the subsystems between the damping ring and the collision point of future linear colliders is expected to be the tuning and stabilization required to preserve the transverse emittance and to collide nanometer-scale beams. Recent efforts have focused on realistically modelling the operation and tuning of this region, dubbed the Low Emittance Transport (LET). We report on the development of simulation codes which permit integrated simulation of this complex region, and on early results of these simulations. Future directions of LET simulation are also revealed.
Motivation and Justice at Work: The Role of Emotion and Cognition Components of Personal and Collective Work Identity

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of personal and collective work identity (including emotion and cognition components), in predicting work motivation (operationalized as work self-determined motivation) and organizational justice (operationalized as organizational pay justice). Digitized questionnaires were distributed by e-mail to 2905 members, teachers, of a Swedish trade union. A total of 768 individuals answered the questionnaire and by that participated in this study. Personal- compared to collective work identity was shown to positively associate with self-determined motivation accounted for by the emotion component of personal work identity. Collective compared to personal work identity was reported to positively associate with organizational pay justice accounted for by the cognition component of collective work identity. All this suggests that both work-related motivation and organizational justice might be, to some extent, accounted for by the psychological mechanisms of work identity and that, as predicted, different types of work identity, play different significant roles in predicting motivation and justice at work. More precisely, the emotion component of work identity was more pronounced in personal work-bonding relationships, and the cognitive component, of work identity in contrast, was more pronounced in collective work-bonding relationships.
Gender Relations in a Refugee Camp: A Case of Chechens Seeking Asylum in the Czech Republic

ALICE SZCZEPANIKOVADepartment of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapestalice.szczepanikova@gmail.comThis article aims to give an account of how refugees’ family relations are construc-tedinexile. ItisbasedonﬁeldworkconductedamongChechenasylumseekerslivingin a refugee camp in the Czech Republic in April 2004. It argues that althoughtraditional norms deﬁning women’s and men’s position in Chechen families haveoften beentransgressed in the actualexperiences of menand women in situations ofemergencysuchaswar,ﬂightandlifeinthecamp,theyremainrelativelyunchangedat the level of refugees’ ideal notions of femininity and masculinity. It also showsthat the environment of the refugee camp provides, on the one hand, some oppor-tunities for the increase of women’s power in the family and men’s involvement inchildcare and household duties. But on the other hand, the assistance in the camp isbasedonanundiversiﬁed andgender-blind perceptionandconstructionofrefugeesas passive objects of aid, and latently sustains gendered violence.
Locally Weighted Naive Bayes

Despite its simplicity, the naive Bayes classifier has surprised machine learning researchers by exhibiting good performance on a variety of learning problems. Encouraged by these results, researchers have looked to overcome naive Bayes' primary weakness-attribute independence-and improve the performance of the algorithm. This paper presents a locally weighted version of naive Bayes that relaxes the independence assumption by learning local models at prediction time. Experimental results show that locally weighted naive Bayes rarely degrades accuracy compared to standard naive Bayes and, in many cases, improves accuracy dramatically. The main advantage of this method compared to other techniques for enhancing naive Bayes is its conceptual and computational simplicity.
Feed intake, growth, digestibility of dry matter and nitrogen in young pigs as affected by dietary cation-anion difference and supplementation of xylanase.

An experiment was conducted to test the effect of dietary cation-anion difference (CAD, Na(+) + K(+)-Cl(-), mEq/kg diet) and xylanase addition on feed consumption, digestibility of nutrients, plasma electrolyte balance and growth performance in young pigs. A 2 x 3 factorial arrangement with three dietary CAD levels (-100, 200, and 500 mEq/kg) and two levels of xylanase supplementation (0 and 0.1% xylanase derived from Trichoderma longibrachiatum) was used. Thirty-six individually housed, castrated pigs (5 weeks old) with an initial body weight of 9.34 +/- 0.28 kg (mean +/- SEM) were randomly assigned to the six treatments. Diets were provided to pigs as cold pellets. Pigs had ad libitum access to feed and water. Venous plasma Cl(-) concentration was higher (p < 0.0001) in dietary CAD of - 100 mEq/kg group compared with the other two CAD groups. Dietary CAD did not affect Na(+) and K(+) concentrations in the venous plasma. Growth rates were higher (p < 0.05) in pigs receiving dietary CAD of 200 mEq/kg (657 g/pig.day) and dietary CAD of 500 mEq/kg (603 g/pig.day) than in pigs receiving dietary CAD of -100 mEq/kg (484 g/pig.day). Faecal dry matter and nitrogen decreased with increasing dietary CAD. Faecal apparent digestibility of dry matter and nitrogen was higher (p < 0.05) in the dietary CAD of 500 mEq/kg compared to the two lower level CAD groups. Supplementation of xylanase did not affect the performance of pigs. Xylanase addition in the diet significantly increased apparent faecal digestibility of dry matter and tended to increase apparent digestibility of nitrogen. No interaction between dietary CAD and xylanase was found. In conclusion, dietary CAD influenced the performance and digestibility of nutrients of pigs. Xylanase supplementation improved digestibility of dry matter.
Simulation of real-time scheduling with various execution time models

In this paper, we present SimSo, a simulator that aims at facilitating the design of experimental evaluations for real-time scheduling algorithms. Currently, more than twenty-five algorithms were implemented. Special attention is paid to the execution time model of tasks. We show that the worst-case execution time for experimental simulation can introduce a bias in evaluation and we discuss as a work in progress how cache effects could be taken into consideration in the simulation.
Domestic violence during pregnancy. The prevalence of physical injuries, substance use, abortions and miscarriages.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of physical injuries, alcohol and tobacco use, abortions and miscarriages due to domestic violence during pregnancy and to compare socio-economic background factors between abused and non abused women. METHOD Personal interview combined with a standardized questionnaire involving 207 pregnant Swedish born women married to or cohabiting with Swedish born men. The women were consecutively chosen from three different antenatal clinics in Göteborg, Sweden. RESULTS Overall 30 women were abused during the current pregnancy as defined from the category 'symbolic violence' in the Severity of Violence Against Women Scale (SVAW). The most frequent targets for physical abuse were: the upper arm, the forearm, and the face and neck region. Ninety-five percent of women abused during pregnancy had been abused prior to the pregnancy. Notable was the finding that 4.3% of the pregnant women had been exposed to serious violence. Abused women were significantly younger and single, had lower income and education compared to the non abused women. In the group of abused women a higher proportion of women had undergone one or more abortions than in the non-abused group. Smoking and alcohol use among partners were strongly correlated with physical and sexual abuse. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that in antenatal and obstetric clinics, emphasis should be focused on previous history of abuse and a complete physical examination of the women. Since bruises often were located at hidden areas of the body, it is of importance to scrutinize those sites as part of a routine examination. It is also important to look for common defensive marks on the forearms. The partner's cigarette and alcohol use is also an important piece of information regarding risk factors connected to domestic violence.