Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cyclical Food Insecurity and Electronic Benefit Transfer *

Intra-month cycles in household consumption and expenditure are considered hallmarks of dynamically inconsistent behavior. I find that Electronic Benefit Transfer reduced the severity of the these cycles for SNAP (food stamp) households with children and dual-parent households. The evidence suggests an explanation based on collective dynamic inconsistency – present bias generated by the aggregation of different preferences– is more reasonable than alternative explanations, most notably stigma. The findings have implications for the optimal design of transfer disbursements, why some households fail to budget successfully and why policies that affect property rights within a household may have dynamic effects. JEL Classifications: D13; D14; D91; I38
Eosinophilic Esophagitis Is an Underlying Cause for Gastrointestinal Concerns in Children

Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) is a chronic immune antigen-mediated disorder characterized by symptoms of esophageal dysfunction in combination with dense esophageal eosinophilia. The clinical presentation of EoE can vary depending on children's age and their ability to report symptoms, therefore a high index of suspicion for EoE is required because children and teenagers may develop coping strategies around eating. The development of symptoms measurement tools in EoE assists in not only assessing symptoms, but also coping strategies children may have developed. While the diagnosis of EoE requires endoscopic evaluation with histologic assessment of esophageal mucosal biopsy samples, several emerging methods to assess and survey the esophageal mucosa have been developed. Advances in the field to better understand the natural history, clinical and molecular features of phenotypes in EoE will be important in considering novel therapeutic options and assessing outcomes.
Employee environmentally friendly behaviors in and out of organizations and across cultures

EMPLOYEE ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY BEHAVIORS IN AND OUT OF ORGANIZTIONS AND ACROSS CULTURES by Lilia Hayrapetyan Advisor: Professor Charles Scherbaum A rising number of organizations are making changes to minimize their impact on the environment. In order to successfully implement such changes for the long term it is important for organizations to not only address operational, structural and process factors, but also their employees’ environmentally significant behaviors (e.g., Siero et al., 1996). Unfortunately, there remains a general lack of understanding of factors affecting employees’ environmentally friendly behaviors. In an effort to reduce this gap, the present study employed the Values Beliefs Norms theory (Stern et al., 1999, Stern, 2000) to gain a comprehensive understanding of individuals’ environmentally friendly behaviors in organizations as well as at home. The study used an archival dataset from a Fortune 50 global organization to investigate the factors influencing individuals’ environmentally friendly behaviors in an organization, at home, and how they vary across cultures. The results confirmed the applicability of VBN theory to different spheres of life: private – at home and public – in an organization. The study further provided support for extending the theory to include perceived ability of an organization to reduce the threat to the environment (Organizational AR), organization’s motivation for sustainability efforts, and social norms. The study failed to find any support for variance in the results across difference cultures. Future studies including more than one organization with varying commitment to environmental sustainability efforts will be necessary to investigate the role of culture.
Immune-Related Concepts in Biology and Treatment of Germ-Cell Tumors

Germ-cell tumors (GCTs) are highly curable with chemotherapy. Salvage chemotherapy or surgery can cure a proportion of patients, but the ones failing these treatments will die of their disease in the young age. Immune checkpoint pathways are emerging as powerful targetable biomarkers, and a significant preclinical and clinical research is underway to widen our knowledge and expand the treatment possibilities with immune therapy. The concept of immune modulation that was currently adopted in many solid tumors is understudied in GCTs. Herein, we summarize the current knowledge of published literature discussing the immune mechanisms and immune therapy in GCTs.
Consensus paper of the WFSBP Task Force on Biological Markers: Criteria for biomarkers and endophenotypes of schizophrenia part II: Cognition, neuroimaging and genetics

Abstract Objectives: Schizophrenia is a group of severe psychiatric disorders with high heritability but only low odds ratios of risk genes. Despite progress in the identification of pathophysiological processes, valid biomarkers of the disease are still lacking. Methods: This comprehensive review summarises recent efforts to identify genetic underpinnings, clinical and cognitive endophenotypes and symptom dimensions of schizophrenia and presents findings from neuroimaging studies with structural, functional and spectroscopy magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography. The potential of findings to be biomarkers of schizophrenia is discussed. Results: Recent findings have not resulted in clear biomarkers for schizophrenia. However, we identified several biomarkers that are potential candidates for future research. Among them, copy number variations and links between genetic polymorphisms derived from genome-wide analysis studies, clinical or cognitive phenotypes, multimodal neuroimaging findings including positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, and the application of multivariate pattern analyses are promising. Conclusions: Future studies should address the effects of treatment and stage of the disease more precisely and apply combinations of biomarker candidates. Although biomarkers for schizophrenia await validation, knowledge on candidate genomic and neuroimaging biomarkers is growing rapidly and research on this topic has the potential to identify psychiatric endophenotypes and in the future increase insight on individual treatment response in schizophrenia.
Caught in the Balance: An Organizational Analysis of Science Teaching in Schools with Elementary Science Specialists.

Elementary schools are under increasing pressure to teach science and teach it well; yet, research documents that classroom teachers must overcome numerous personal and school-based challenges to teach science effectively at this level, such as access to materials and inadequate instructional time. The elementary science specialist model represents an alternative to the traditional model of classroom teachers providing science instruction. Although changing who teaches science may remove personal challenges, we do not know if the specialist alone can overcome the school-based challenges to teaching science. This study explored how school supports for science teaching varied across five elementary schools with science specialists through a qualitative comparative case study methodology. Drawing upon theory from organizational studies, school supports were conceptualized as four interrelated dimensions: (1) leadership, (2) resources, (3) culture, and (4) the external environment. Findings indicate that the science specialist model alone is insufficient to overcome school-based challenges to science teaching. Findings also reveal the potential danger of the specialist model to marginalize science as a content area. Overall, this study clarifies the importance of the principal to provide schoolwide leadership for science and to establish the value of science necessary to support a strong elementary science program.
Modelling Formation of Online Temporal Communities

Contemporary social media networks can be viewed as a break to the early two-step flow model in which influential individuals act as intermediaries between the media and the public for information diffusion. Today's social media platforms enable users to both generate and consume online contents. Users continuously engage and disengage in discussions with varying degrees of interaction leading to formation of distinct online communities. Such communities are often formed at high-level either based on metadata, such as hashtags on Twitter, or popular content triggered by few influential users. These online communities often do not reflect true connectivity and lack the cohesiveness of traditional communities. In this study, we investigate real-time formation of temporal communities on Twitter. We aim at defining both high and low levels connections and to reveal the magnitude of clustering cohesion on temporal basis. Inspired by a real-life event center sitting arrangement scenario, the proposed method aims to cluster users into distinct and cohesive online temporal communities. Membership to a community relies on intrinsic tweet properties to define similarity as the basis for interaction networks. The proposed method can be useful for local event monitoring and clique-based marketing among other applications.
Cubes3D: Neural Network based Optical Flow in Omnidirectional Image Scenes

Optical flow estimation with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has recently solved various tasks of computer vision successfully. In this paper we adapt a state-of-the-art approach for optical flow estimation to omnidirectional images. We investigate CNN architectures to determine high motion variations caused by the geometry of fish-eye images. Further we determine the qualitative influence of texture on the non-rigid object to the motion vectors. For evaluation of the results we create ground truth motion fields synthetically. The ground truth contains cubes with static background. We test variations of pre-trained FlowNet 2.0 architectures by indicating common error metrics. We generate competitive results for the motion of the foreground with inhomogeneous texture on the moving object.
Dynamically Improving Branch Prediction Accuracy Between Contexts

Branch prediction is a standard feature in most processors, significantly improving the run time of programs by allowing a processor to predict the direction of a branch before it has been evaluated. Current branch prediction methods can achieve excellent prediction accuracy through global tables, various hashing methods, and even machine learning techniques such as SVMs or neural networks. Such designs, however, may lose effectiveness when attempting to predict across context switches in the operating system. Such a scenario may lead to destructive interference between contexts, therefore reducing overall predictor accuracy. To solve this problem, we propose a novel scheme for deciding whether a context switch produces destructive or constructive interference. First, we present evidence that shows that destructive interference can have a significant negative impact on prediction accuracy. Second, we present an extensible framework that keeps track of context switches and prediction accuracy to improve overall accuracy. Experimental results show that this framework effectively reduces the effect of destructive interference on branch prediction.
Phylogeny of the Genus Drosophila

Understanding phylogenetic relationships among taxa is key to designing and implementing comparative analyses. The genus Drosophila, which contains over 1600 species, is one of the most important model systems in the biological sciences. For over a century, one species in this group, Drosophila melanogaster, has been key to studies of animal development and genetics, genome organization and evolution, and human disease. As whole-genome sequencing becomes more cost-effective, there is increasing interest in other members of this morphologically, ecologically, and behaviorally diverse genus. Phylogenetic relationships within Drosophila are complicated, and the goal of this paper is to provide a review of the recent taxonomic changes and phylogenetic relationships in this genus to aid in further comparative studies.
A Memory Controller with Row Buffer Locality Awareness for Hybrid Memory Systems

Non-volatile memory (NVM) is a class of promising scalable memory technologies that can potentially offer higher capacity than DRAM at the same cost point. Unfortunately, the access latency and energy of NVM is often higher than those of DRAM, while the endurance of NVM is lower. Many DRAM-NVM hybrid memory systems use DRAM as a cache to NVM, to achieve the low access latency, low energy, and high endurance of DRAM, while taking advantage of the large capacity of NVM. A key question for a hybrid memory system is what data to cache in DRAM to best exploit the advantages of each technology while avoiding the disadvantages of each technology as much as possible. We propose a new memory controller design that improves hybrid memory performance and energy efficiency. We observe that both DRAM and NVM banks employ row buffers that act as a cache for the most recently accessed memory row. Accesses that are row buffer hits incur similar latencies (and energy consumption) in both DRAM and NVM, whereas accesses that are row buffer misses incur longer latencies (and higher energy consumption) in NVM than in DRAM. To exploit this, we devise a policy that caches heavily-reused data that frequently misses in the NVM row buffers into DRAM. Our policy tracks the row buffer miss counts of recently-used rows in NVM, and caches in DRAM the rows that are predicted to incur frequent row buffer misses. Our proposed policy also takes into account the high write latencies of NVM, in addition to row buffer locality and more likely places the write-intensive pages in DRAM instead of NVM.
Determination of 17β-estradiol concentration in aquatic environment of peninsular Malaysia using the ELISA technique

Effluents from municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants, agricultural run-off and domestic drainage add numerous pollutants to the aquatic system. Among them is 17β-estradiol (E2), which is known as one of the strongest estrogenic chemical in the environment and commonly found in wastewater. This study was conducted to assess present concentration of E2 in aquatic environment of Peninsular Malaysia. Water samples were collected from rivers, estuaries and lakes at the northern, central and southern regions of Peninsular Malaysia. E2 concentration was determined using ELISA technique. Results revealed that the center region has the highest E2 average concentration (149.19 ng/L), followed by the northern region (95.04 ng/L) and southern region (15.66 ng/L). These results exhibit size of human population and activities may directly related with E2 elevation in aquatic environment as reflected by high human population in the central region. The lakes have the lowest concentration (11.83 ng/L), thus suggesting E2 discharges flow directly into river system. Comparison with other countries demonstrates E2 in aquatic environment in Peninsular Malaysia is higher several folds. If no immediate actions are implemented to control E2 level in the environment, there could be some adverse effects, especially to male aquatic animals, such as ova-testis, feminization, fertility reduction and villetogenin gene expression. Application of suitable bio-indicator is recommended in order to monitor estrogenic activities in aquatic environment.
Robust Non-Rigid Registration with Reweighted Position and Transformation Sparsity

Non-rigid registration is challenging because it is ill-posed with high degrees of freedom and is thus sensitive to noise and outliers. We propose a robust non-rigid registration method using reweighted sparsities on position and transformation to estimate the deformations between 3-D shapes. We formulate the energy function with position and transformation sparsity on both the data term and the smoothness term, and define the smoothness constraint using local rigidity. The double sparsity based non-rigid registration model is enhanced with a reweighting scheme, and solved by transferring the model into four alternately-optimized subproblems which have exact solutions and guaranteed convergence. Experimental results on both public datasets and real scanned datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and is more robust to noise and outliers than conventional non-rigid registration methods.
Photochromism of vacancy-related centres in diamond

Optical experiments, involving photoluminescence (PL), the PL excitation and quenching spectra, as well as transmission and its quenching, were used to analyse the photochromic behaviour of some vacancy-related complexes in diamond. The 2.156 eV, 1.945 eV and 1.68 eV optical centres in CVD diamond are attributed to the neutral nitrogen-vacancy, negative nitrogen-vacancy and neutral silicon-vacancy ([Si-V]0 ) centres, respectively. Oscillatory behaviour in the excitation spectrum of the 1.68 eV luminescence is observed and from the threshold of the oscillations a position of EC - 2.05 eV is suggested for the ground state of the [Si-V]0 centre.
Highly Elastic Micropatterned Hydrogel for Engineering Functional Cardiac Tissue

Heart failure is a major international health issue. Myocardial mass loss and lack of contractility are precursors to heart failure. Surgical demand for effective myocardial repair is tempered by a paucity of appropriate biological materials. These materials should conveniently replicate natural human tissue components, convey persistent elasticity, promote cell attachment, growth and conformability to direct cell orientation and functional performance. Here, microfabrication techniques are applied to recombinant human tropoelastin, the resilience‐imparting protein found in all elastic human tissues, to generate photocrosslinked biological materials containing well‐defined micropatterns. These highly elastic substrates are then used to engineer biomimetic cardiac tissue constructs. The micropatterned hydrogels, produced through photocrosslinking of methacrylated tropoelastin (MeTro), promote the attachment, spreading, alignment, function, and intercellular communication of cardiomyocytes by providing an elastic mechanical support that mimics their dynamic mechanical properties in vivo. The fabricated MeTro hydrogels also support the synchronous beating of cardiomyocytes in response to electrical field stimulation. These novel engineered micropatterned elastic gels are designed to be amenable to 3D modular assembly and establish a versatile, adaptable foundation for the modeling and regeneration of functional cardiac tissue with potential for application to other elastic tissues.
Source, long‐range transport, and characteristics of a heavy dust pollution event in Shanghai

[1] Daily particulate matter with particles less than 2.5 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM2.5) and total suspended particulates (TSP) were analyzed for chemical composition and daily PM10, SO2, and NO2 were monitored by automatic monitoring systems on the seven sites over China along the pathway of the long-range transport of the dust from 20 March to 19 April 2007. The highest recorded dust and daily Air Pollution Index topped 500 for the first time since 2002, when the routine continuous monitoring of PM10 was initiated in Shanghai. The daily 24 h average PM10 concentration of 648 μg m−3 was observed on 2 April 2007. The ratios of SO2/PM10, NO2/PM10, and PM2.5/PM10 were 0.066, 0.077, and 15.5% on 2 April 2007, which were significantly different from the nondust day and could be used as the index to judge the occurrence of dust in Shanghai. On the peak dusty day, the ratios of crustal matter rose to 70% and 64% of the total mass of PM2.5 and TSP, respectively, while the ratios were 13% and 37% on nondust days. The ratio of Ca/Al in the dust aerosol in Shanghai was much closer to that in Duolun and Yulin near Mongolia Gobi rather than that in Tazhong of Taklimakan desert, indicating that the dust was transported from Mongolia Gobi instead of Taklimakan desert in Xinjiang province. The compositions of sea salt aerosol in PM2.5 and TSP, combined with back trajectories, indicated that the dust passed through the East China Seas before reaching Shanghai, which is one of the typical dust pathways that lead to heavily polluted days in Shanghai due to dust transport. The anthropogenic sources along the pathway also partially contributed to the PM pollution in Shanghai during this dust event.
On the Drive Specificity of Freudian Drives for the Generation of SEEKING Activities: The Importance of the Underestimated Imperative Motor Factor

Doubters of Freud’s theory of drives frequently mentioned that his approach is outdated and therefore cannot be useful for solving current problems in patients with mental disorders. At present, many scientists believe that affects rather than drives are of utmost importance for the emotional life and the theoretical framework of affective neuroscience, developed by Panksepp, strongly underpinned this view. Panksepp evaluated seven so-called command systems and the SEEKING system is therein of central importance. Panksepp used Pankseppian drives as inputs for the SEEKING system but noted the missing explanation of drive-specific generation of SEEKING activities in his description. Drive specificity requires dual action of the drive: the activation of a drive-specific brain area and the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Noticeably, as Freud claimed drive specificity too, it was here analyzed whether a Freudian drive can evoke the generation of drive-specific SEEKING activities. Special importance was addressed to the imperative motor factor in Freud’s drive theory because Panksepp’s formulations focused on neural pathways without specifying underlying neurotransmitter/endocrine factors impelling motor activity. As Panksepp claimed sleep as a Pankseppian drive, we firstly had to classified sleep as a Freudian drive by using three evaluated criteria for a Freudian drive. After that it was possible to identify the imperative motor factors of hunger, thirst, sex, and sleep. Most importantly, all of these imperative motor factors can both activate a drive-specific brain area and release dopamine from dopaminergic neurons, i.e., they can achieve the so-called drive specificity. Surprisingly, an impaired Freudian drive can alter via endocrinological pathways the concentration of the imperative motor factor of a second Freudian drive, obviously in some independence to the level of the metabolic deficit, thereby offering the possibility to modulate the generation of SEEKING activities of this second Freudian drive. This novel possibility might help to refine the general understanding of the action of Freudian drives. As only imperative motor factors of Freudian drives can guarantee drive specificity for the generation of SEEKING activities, the impact of Freud’s construct Eros (with its constituents hunger, thirst, sex, and sleep) should be revisited.