Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Life domain conflicts in elite sport

Elite athletes have to contend with potential conflicts between the demands of their sport and other aspects of their lives. However, the impact of such conflicts has been under-investigated. This thesis adopts concepts from organisational research into life domain conflicts and applies them to elite sport. The thesis comprises a general introduction, four empirical chapters, and a general discussion. The main goals were to: extend life-sport conflicts research by developing sound measures for both directions of conflict (i.e., life to sport and sport to life); examine a self-determination theory-based model where life-sport conflicts are conceptualised as social contexts that influence motivation towards sport, and how perfectionism moderates this relationship; and explore prospectively whether life domain conflicts and perfectionism predict the extent to which international athletes’ remain within the elite level of sport across a two year period. Advanced statistical procedures (e.g., Bayesian structural equation modelling) are deployed to rigorously achieve these goals. Findings from the studies provide evidence that: life-sport conflicts and sport-life conflicts can be problematic for elite athletes; life domain conflicts are bi-directional and distinct, so only by examining conflicts in both directions can they be adequately represented; life-sport conflicts can be conceptualised as antecedents to self-determined motivation; adaptive perfectionism can attenuate, whereas maladaptive perfectionism can amplify the negative motivational impact of life-sport conflicts; and that sport-free time conflict, a combination of family-sport conflict and adaptive perfectionism, and maladaptive perfectionism prospectively predict international standing at two years. The focus of the thesis is innovative, being the first research to demonstrate that conflicts between life domains exist in elite sports. It contributes to motivation research by showing that life-sport conflicts are negatively associated with self-determined motivation. Findings also highlight that perfectionism plays an important role in the relationship between life-sport conflicts and athlete motivation and maintaining elite performance levels.
Different Neural Mechanisms Underlie Deficits in Mental Flexibility in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Compared to Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Mental flexibility is a core executive function that underlies the ability to adapt to changing situations and respond to new information. Individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) complain of a number of executive function difficulties, one of which is mental inflexibility or an inability to switch between concepts. While the behavioral presentation of mental inflexibility is similar in those with PTSD or mTBI, we hypothesized that the differences in their etiology would manifest as differences in their underlying brain processing. The neural substrates of mental flexibility have been examined with a number of neuroimaging modalities. Functional magnetic resonance imaging has elucidated the brain regions involved, whereas electroencephalography has been applied to understand the timing of the brain activations. Magnetoencephalography, with its high temporal and spatial resolution, has more recently been used to delineate the spatiotemporal progression of brain processes involved in mental flexibility and has been applied to the study of clinical populations. In a number of separate studies, our group has compared the source localization and brain connectivity during a mental flexibility set-shifting task in a group of soldiers with PTSD and civilians with an acute mTBI. In this article, we review the results from these studies and integrate the data between groups to compare and contrast differences in behavioral, neural, and connectivity findings. We show that the different etiologies of PTSD and mTBI are expressed as distinct neural profiles for mental flexibility that differentiate the groups despite their similar clinical presentations.
Measuring lung function using sound waves: role of the forced oscillation technique and impulse oscillometry system

Measuring lung function is an important component in the decision making process for patients with obstructive airways disease (OAD). Not only does it help in arriving at a specific diagnosis, but it also helps in evaluating severity so that appropriate pharmacotherapy can be instituted, it helps determine prognosis and it helps evaluate response to therapy. Spirometry is currently the most commonly performed lung function test in clinical practice and is considered to be the gold standard diagnostic test for asthma and COPD. However, spirometry is not an easy test to perform because the forceful expiratory and inspiratory manoeuvres require good patient co-operation. Children aged <5 years, elderly people and those with physical and cognitive limitations cannot perform spirometry easily.
Effects of gender and perceived identifiability on whistle-blowing behavior

Whistle-blowing--the disclosure of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate organizational practices--has received increased attention in recent years as a possible method for organizations to prevent loss due to theft, injury, law suits, etc. Few studies to date have examined this topic from more than a descriptive or correlational perspective. A new emphasis on controlled studies may shed more light on the topic. This study used a 3 x 2 x 2 design to examine the causal influences of three levels of perceived identifiability of the potential whistle-blower and the effects of the gender of both the potential whistle-blower and the authority to whom the whistle-blower might reveal information. Results concerning identifiability were insignificant but in the hypothesized direction. Results concerning the gender hypothesis were also insignificant but point to the potentially important role of the authority figure's gender upon the subjects' propensity to blow the whistle.
The Sea Anemone Toxins BgII and BgIII Prolong the Inactivation Time Course of the Tetrodotoxin-Sensitive Sodium Current in Rat Dorsal Root Ganglion Neurons

We have characterized the effects of BgII and BgIII, two sea anemone peptides with almost identical sequences (they only differ by a single amino acid), on neuronal sodium currents using the whole-cell patch-clamp technique. Neurons of dorsal root ganglia of Wistar rats (P5-9) in primary culture (Leibovitz′s L15 medium; 37°C, 95% air/5% CO2) were used for this study (n = 154). These cells express two sodium current subtypes: tetrodotoxin-sensitive (TTX-S; K i = 0.3 nM) and tetrodotoxin-resistant (TTX-R;K i = 100 μM). Neither BgII nor BgIII had significant effects on TTX-R sodium current. Both BgII and BgIII produced a concentration-dependent slowing of the TTX-S sodium current inactivation (IC50 = 4.1 ± 1.2 and 11.9 ± 1.4 μM, respectively), with no significant effects on activation time course or current peak amplitude. For comparison, the concentration-dependent action of Anemonia sulcata toxin II (ATX-II), a well characterized anemone toxin, on the TTX-S current was also studied. ATX-II also produced a slowing of the TTX-S sodium current inactivation, with an IC50 value of 9.6 ± 1.2 μM indicating that BgII was 2.3 times more potent than ATX-II and 2.9 times more potent than BgIII in decreasing the inactivation time constant (τh) of the sodium current in dorsal root ganglion neurons. The action of BgIII was voltage-dependent, with significant effects at voltages below −10 mV. Our results suggest that BgII and BgIII affect voltage-gated sodium channels in a similar fashion to other sea anemone toxins and α-scorpion toxins.
The Neural Representation of Interaural Time Differences in Gerbils Is Transformed from Midbrain to Cortex

Interaural time differences (ITDs) are the dominant cue for the localization of low-frequency sounds. While much is known about the processing of ITDs in the auditory brainstem and midbrain, there have been relatively few studies of ITD processing in auditory cortex. In this study, we compared the neural representation of ITDs in the inferior colliculus (IC) and primary auditory cortex (A1) of gerbils. Our IC results were largely consistent with previous studies, with most cells responding maximally to ITDs that correspond to the contralateral edge of the physiological range. In A1, however, we found that preferred ITDs were distributed evenly throughout the physiological range without any contralateral bias. This difference in the distribution of preferred ITDs in IC and A1 had a major impact on the coding of ITDs at the population level: while a labeled-line decoder that considered the tuning of individual cells performed well on both IC and A1 responses, a two-channel decoder based on the overall activity in each hemisphere performed poorly on A1 responses relative to either labeled-line decoding of A1 responses or two-channel decoding of IC responses. These results suggest that the neural representation of ITDs in gerbils is transformed from IC to A1 and have important implications for how spatial location may be combined with other acoustic features for the analysis of complex auditory scenes.
NMDA Receptors and L-Type Voltage-Gated Calcium Channels Contribute to Long-Term Potentiation and Different Components of Fear Memory Formation in the Lateral Amygdala

Long-term potentiation (LTP) at sensory input synapses to the lateral amygdala (LA) is a candidate mechanism for memory storage during fear conditioning. We evaluated the effect of L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (VGCC) and NMDA receptor (NMDAR) blockade in LA on LTP at thalamic input synapses induced by two different protocols in vitro and on fear memoryin vivo. When induced in vitro by pairing weak presynaptic stimulation with strong (spike eliciting) postsynaptic depolarization, LTP was dependent on VGCCs and not on NMDARs, but, when induced by a form of tetanic stimulation that produced prolonged postsynaptic depolarization (but not spikes), LTP was dependent on NMDARs and not on VGCCs. In behavioral studies, bilateral infusions of NMDAR antagonists into the LA impaired both short-term and long-term memory of fear conditioning, whereas VGCC blockade selectively impaired long-term memory formation. Collectively, the results suggest that two pharmacologically distinct forms of LTP can be isolated in the LAin vitro and that a combination of both contribute to the formation of fear memories in vivo at the cellular level.
Completing the Educational Career: High School Graduation, Four-year College Enrollment, and Bachelor’s Degree Completion among Black, Hispanic, and White Students

Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study, the author investigates racial disparities in high school graduation, four-year college enrollment, and bachelor’s degree completion. In addition, the author considers how conditionally relevant college and early adult variables shape bachelor’s degree completion. The results indicate that although comparable numbers of black and Hispanic students obtain bachelor’s degrees, their educational career trajectories differ substantially. Compared with white students, black students are more likely to end their educational careers after starting college without completing a bachelor’s degree, whereas Hispanic students are more likely to end their educational careers without entering a four-year college. Moreover, early adult and college-specific variables have a substantial impact on bachelor’s degree completion and explain black-white disparities in bachelor’s degree attainment. This research shows the continuing significance of race in shaping the educational outcomes of young adults at all stages of their educational careers.
Litigation Costs and Returns to Experience

We develop a model linking maximum damage awards available to plaintiffs in wrongful termination lawsuits, workers' propensity to sue as a function of experience, and returns to experience. Using Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data on protected-worker discrimination complaints and labor-market data from the Current Population Survey, we examine how returns to experience among protected workers changed around the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. We show that employers' reactions to employment protections may induce redistributive effects. Furthermore, these effects operate not merely across groups of differing protected status, but also within groups of identical protected status. (JEL D21, J31, J71, K31)
TAKING E-MODERATING SKILLS TO THE NEXT LEVEL: REFLECTING ON THE DESIGN OF CONFERENCING ENVIRONMENTS

This paper reports an analysis of computer conference structures set up for a distance education course in which major components of the teaching and learning involve group discussions and collaboration via asynchronous text-based conferencing. As well as adopting traditional e-moderator roles, tutors were required to design appropriate online spaces and navigation routes for students. Tutors’ views concerning conference structures focussed on tensions between enabling easy access to conference areas, facilitating the successful running of activities, and addressing students’ subsequent needs for retrieval of conference material for assessment tasks. The geographically dispersed course tutors initially explored these issues in reflective online conversations. Comparisons were made between structures that were set up differently but all used for essentially the same tasks and purposes. Evidence from conference messages, from student feedback given in questionnaire and interview responses, as well as from students’ written assignments, provided insights into the impact such structures may have on the student learning experience. Students found conference areas for their own group easy to navigate, but they had concerns about managing the large number of messages; these concerns centred on the volume, threading, linking, length, and language of messages.
Intimal Hyperplasia in Rats after Subcutaneous Injection of a Somatostatin Analog

The somatostatin analog octreotide was administered to male and female Sprague-Dawley rats by subcutaneous injection for thirteen weeks at 0 (saline control), 0 (placebo control [mannitol and lactic acid; pH 4.2]), 1.25 mg/kg/day and 2.5 mg/kg/day to explore its potential effect on cutaneous vascular morphology. The placebo caused an increase in the incidence of intimal hyperplasia compared to saline controls in female rats; octreotide increased the incidence and severity of intimal hyperplasia in males and females. Intimal hyperplasia consisted of increased numbers of cells located between the endothelial cell layer and the internal elastic lamina. Severity was based on the degree of compromise of the vascular lumen (regardless of vessel size and number), with severely affected vessels having no visible lumen. Intimal hyperplasia in rats treated with octreotide was considered to be an unexpected and adverse finding, given that this compound and other somatostatin analogs have been investigated as reducers of intimal proliferation or restenosis after angioplasty in humans and that no such lesion has been reported in the literature for this class of compound to date. The induction of intimal hyperplasia by the placebo is also a notable finding; this may be because of the low pH of the formulation.
Deep Recurrent Convolutional Networks for Video-based Person Re-identification: An End-to-End Approach

In this paper, we present an end-to-end approach to simultaneously learn spatio-temporal features and corresponding similarity metric for video-based person re-identification. Given the video sequence of a person, features from each frame that are extracted from all levels of a deep convolutional network can preserve a higher spatial resolution from which we can model finer motion patterns. These low-level visual percepts are leveraged into a variant of recurrent model to characterize the temporal variation between time-steps. Features from all time-steps are then summarized using temporal pooling to produce an overall feature representation for the complete sequence. The deep convolutional network, recurrent layer, and the temporal pooling are jointly trained to extract comparable hidden-unit representations from input pair of time series to compute their corresponding similarity value. The proposed framework combines time series modeling and metric learning to jointly learn relevant features and a good similarity measure between time sequences of person. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance for video-based person re-identification on iLIDS-VID and PRID 2011, the two primary public datasets for this purpose.
Hubungan antara Love of Money, Machiavellian dengan Persepsi Etis: Analisis Berdasarkan Perspektif Gender

Ethical behavior is important since help educators and researchers understand future managers and executives’ ethical behavior in organization. The research investigates the relationship between gender, love of money, machiavellian and ethic behavior. Data collected from 102 student of departemen of accounting. Result of the whole sample revealed that Machiavellian has significant effect on ethic behavior and there’s different perception on ethic behavior based from gender.
Analysis of the Bias on the Beidou GEO Multipath Combinations

The Beidou navigation satellite system is a very important sensor for positioning in the Asia-Pacific region. The Beidou inclined geosynchronous orbit (IGSO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites have been analysed in some studies previously conducted by other researchers; this paper seeks to gain more insight regarding the geostationary earth orbit (GEO) satellites. Employing correlation analysis, Fourier transformation and wavelet decomposition, we validate whether there is a systematic bias in their multipath combinations. These biases can be observed clearly in satellites C01, C02 and C04 and have a great correlation with time series instead of elevation, being significantly different from those of the Beidou IGSO and MEO satellites. We propose a correction model to mitigate this bias based on its daily periodicity characteristic. After the model has been applied, the performance of the positioning estimations of the eight stations distributed in the Asia-Pacific region is evaluated and compared. The results show that residuals of multipath series behaves random noise; for the single point positioning (SPP) and precise point positioning (PPP) approaches, the positioning accuracy in the upward direction can be improved by 8 cm and 6 mm, respectively, and by 2 cm and 4 mm, respectively, for the horizontal component.
Tarih Öğretmeni Adaylarının Okuma Alışkanlıkları Üzerine Bir İnceleme

Bir toplumda okuma aliskanliginin gelismesinde aile ve okul cevresinin etkisi buyuktur. Ogretmenlerin, bu konuda bas sorumlulardan biri oldugunu soylemek ise yanlis olmayacaktir. Ortaogretim duzeyinde tarih ogretmenleri hem alanlari hem de misyonlari geregi okuma aliskanligina en cok sahip olmasi gereken dal ogretmenleri arasinda sayilabilir. Bu sebeple, tarih ogretmenlerinin meslege baslamadan once okumaya yonelik tutumlarini belirlemenin ve okuma aliskanliklarini saptamanin yararli olacagi dusunulmus ve tarih ogretmeni adaylarinin okuma aliskanliklarini incelemek uzere calisma yapilmistir. Bu calisma, 150 tarih ogretmeni adayi ile 2014-2015 ve 2015-2016 ogretim yillarinda gerceklestirilmistir. Arastirmada hem nicel hem de nitel boyutlari iceren karma yontem kullanilmistir. Arastirma sonucunda tarih ogretmeni adaylarinin orta-zayif bir okuma aliskanligina sahip olduklari tespit edilmistir. Ayrica ogretmen adaylari; egitim sistemi, zamansizlik ve ekonomik sikintilar gibi faktorlerin okuma aliskanliklarini olumsuz etkiledigini bildirmislerdir. Okuma aliskanliginin ve okuma kulturunun gelistirilmesi icin her ogretim kademesinde uygun calismalarin yapilmasi gerektigi sonucuna varilmistir. Family and school are two factors that have a great impact for the development of reading practice and it is not wrong to indicate that teachers are major responsible in this issue. At the secondary education level, history teachers in compliance with both their subject and missions, could be considered among in-field teachers who should have a maximum level of reading practice. Consequently, it is considered that before they start their career it would be useful to determine the attitudes of history teachers related with reading and also their reading practice level. For this purpose a study is performed to search the reading practice of history teacher candidates. This study has been carried out on 150 history teacher candidates. In this research a mix method consisting of both quantitative and qualitative aspects has been used. Result of the research shows that history teacher candidates have a relatively intermediate-low level of reading practice. Furthermore it has been indicated that timelessness and economic problems have a negative effect on reading practice. It has been concluded that appropriate studies should have to be performed at every education level for the development of reading practice and culture.
Association of a SNP in SLC35F3 Gene with the Risk of Hypertension in a Chinese Han Population

A recent study suggested that SLC35F3 which encoded a thiamine transporter was a new candidate gene for hypertension. The goal of this study was to investigate the association between the single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the SLC35F3 gene and hypertension in a Chinese population. Sanger sequencing was performed in 93 samples to find SNPs in coding regions and intron–exon boundaries in the SLC35F3 gene. We found eight genetic variants in the coding regions of SLC35F3 and subsequently genotyped a non-synonymous variant rs34032258 (C > G) in 1060 hypertension patients and 1467 controls. After adjusting for age and gender, multivariate analysis of covariance showed that the variant was associated with hypertensive traits. In detail, diastolic blood pressure (DBP) was 8 mmHg higher, blood urea nitrogen was 12 mmol/L higher, and creatinine was 15 mmol/L lower in G/G group compared with C/C group (p = 0.007; 0.012 and 0.029, respectively). Further study suggested that C/G+G/G had higher DBP than C/C genotype in those whose DBP ≥ 90 mmHg (98.02 mmHg vs. 94.04 mmHg, p = 0.021). No significant difference has been found in systolic blood pressure between different genotypes. Additionally, in the subgroup of obesity, allele distribution of this variant has shown significant difference between hypertensive patients and normotensive controls (p = 0.018). In conclusion, we found that the rs34032258 in the SLC35F3 gene was associated with high blood pressure and may increase the risk of hypertension. The new hypertension-susceptibility locus may involve in the pathogenesis of hypertension and indicate some novel treatment implications.