Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributed cognition: an alternative framework for analysing and explaining collaborative working

This paper examines the theoretical and practical problems that arise from attempts to develop formal characterizations and explanations of many work activities, in particular, collaborative activities. We argue that even seemingly discrete individual activities occur in, and frequently draw upon a complex network of factors: individual, social and organizational. Similarly, organizational and social constraints and practices impact upon individual cognitive processes and the realization of these in specific tasks. Any adequate characterization of work activities therefore requires the analysis and synthesis of information from these traditionally separate sources. We argue that existing frameworks, emanating separately from the respective disciplines (cognitive, social and organizational) do not present an adequate means of studying the dynamics of collaborative activity in situ. An alternative framework, advocated in this paper, is distributed cognition. Its theoretical basis is outlined together with examples of applied studies of computer-mediated work activities in different organizational settings.
An Exploration of One Girl’s Experiences in Elective Physical Education: Why Does She Continue?

Participation in high school Physical Education (PE) contributes to the overall health of adolescents. However, many girls discontinue enrollment in PE as soon as the mandatory credits are met. Tailored PE courses designed to meet the needs and interests of girls may motivate them to continue participating in PE. This case study explored one girl’s story of her past experiences in PE, as well as her current experiences in a tailored elective PE course. We explored how this girl’s experiences with the course content, learning environment, and assessment affected her perceptions of PE. Findings emphasized the importance of variety within PE course content, a welcoming environment, fair and private assessment, and feelings of confidence, social safety, and competence for girls in PE.
Cell-type expression, immunolocalization, and deoxyribonucleic acid-binding activity of basic transcription element binding transcription factor, an Sp-related family member, in porcine endometrium of pregnancy.

Basic transcription element binding (BTEB) protein is a newly identified member of the C2H2 zinc finger family that also includes the transcription factors, Sp1, Sp2, Sp3, and Sp4. This family of proteins binds GC-rich motifs widely distributed in gene promoters, resulting in distinct activation or repression of transcriptional activities. Whereas Sp proteins are ubiquitously expressed, expression of BTEB appears more limited and has not been documented in the female reproductive tract of any mammalian species. This study was designed to identify and characterize the cellular distribution of BTEB in the porcine endometrium and placenta at known stages of pregnancy. Northern analysis of uterine endometrium detected BTEB mRNA that corresponds in size (5 kilobases) to that of the major BTEB transcript in rat brain. The steady-state levels of BTEB mRNA were higher (p < 0.05) in endometrium than placenta at corresponding days of pregnancy, although for each tissue, the levels did not change with pregnancy stage (p > 0.05). Luminal epithelial (LE), glandular epithelial (GE), and stromal (ST) cells isolated from pregnancy endometrium expressed the BTEB gene, but mRNA abundance varied with cell type (LE, GE > ST). Western blot analysis using an antiserum generated against the N-terminal region of a porcine BTEB fusion protein produced in Escherichia coli revealed the presence of BTEB protein only in endometrium, not in placenta. Immunohistochemical studies localized BTEB predominantly to the nuclei of endometrial GE and LE cells. Consistent with the presence of functional BTEB protein, binding to a double-stranded oligonucleotide containing multiple GC motifs was demonstrated in nuclear extracts prepared from endometrium and from endometrial LE and GE, but not ST, cells by electrophoretic mobility shift assay. These results demonstrate the preferential endometrial cell-type expression of BTEB and suggest its regulatory role in pregnancy-associated endometrial epithelial gene expression.
On improving econometric analyses of generic advertising impacts

It is possible to obtain robust estimates of structural parameters using observational data, but it is difficult to do so. Necessary, but not sufficient, conditions are to adopt a modeling philosophy and to undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the results. Using a general-to-specific modeling philosophy, we obtained stable estimates of the long-run advertising elasticity for fluid milk. This result contrasts with an earlier, published model which did not provide stable estimates as new data points became available. It is difficult, however, to apply the general-to-specific modeling approach because it requires the researcher to specify an initial general model. But analysts are unlikely to agree on this initial model, and if this is true, then the “generality” of the model is in question. Moreover, it is a fact that the quality of the available data is sometimes insufficient to obtain the desired stable estimates. lEcon-Lit citations: Q11, M13, C5r © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Productivity Growth, Capital Accumulation, and the Banking Sector: Some Lessons from Malaysia

How did the East Asian miracle turn into one of the worst financial crisis of the century? The authors address the question using Malaysia as a case study. Many discussions of the East Asian crisis address proximate and short-run causes of the crisis, such as the current account deficit, exchange rate misalignment, and disproportionate short-run external debt relative to foreign exchange reserves. These indicators of vulnerability are themselves endogenous outcomes of deeper institutional features. The authors argue that some long-term features of the development strategy that helped sustain high growth in the first place also contributed to the economy's increasing vulnerability. High output growth was driven by rapid growth in capital stock, for example. The banking sector played a critical role in transforming (and accelerating the transformation of) large savings into capital accumulation. But the banking sector may not have been allocating capital efficiency. The authors find that the rapid growth in bank lending in Malaysia is negatively associated with total factor productivity growth. On the other hand, the economy's other structural strengths, such as openness to foreign direct investment and technology, helped improve productivity growth. Malaysia's exceptional growth record over the past quarter century was driven largely by the growth in physical capital stock. Total factor productivity growth may have slowed in the late 1990s, and sustaining high output growth will require greater emphasis on productivity improvements. Policies that encouraged the flow of foreign direct investment and better access to imported capital goods contributed to productivity growth. But rapid growth in bank lending relative to GDP may have slowed it. How policymakers can best slow the growth of credit is a question that remains unanswered.
Psychiatry beyond the current paradigm

Summary A series of editorials in this Journal have argued that psychiatry is in the midst of a crisis. The various solutions proposed would all involve a strengthening of psychiatry's identity as essentially ‘applied neuroscience’. Although not discounting the importance of the brain sciences and psychopharmacology, we argue that psychiatry needs to move beyond the dominance of the current, technological paradigm. This would be more in keeping with the evidence about how positive outcomes are achieved and could also serve to foster more meaningful collaboration with the growing service user movement.
Unconscious Behavioral Guidance Systems

It is the duty of the natural scientist to attempt a natural explanation before he contents himself with drawing upon factors extraneous to nature. Introduction In the early days (by which we mean way way back in the 1980s), discoveries of nonconscious processes were seen as magical, mysterious-if they were believed at all. The conscious-process account of how one gets from A to B (say, from attitudes to behavior, or from a witnessed behavior to one's attribution of its cause) involved self-reportable steps or stages, clear and easy for all to see. But when the same effects began to be demonstrated without conscious awareness or involvement, the underlying process was invisible, and quite mysterious (especially mysterious, for some reason, to journal editors and reviewers! ). Happily, in the three decades that followed, our understanding of how these nonconscious or automatic processes operate has improved a hundredfold (see Bargh, 2006). No longer are these effects viewed as miraculous; today they are just as theoretically tractable as conscious or controlled processes, and appeals to divine miracles are no longer necessary to explain them. Purposive behavior is widespread among living organisms, although only a few possess anything approaching the information processing capacities of human consciousness (Mayr, 1976; Tomasello et al., 2005). The behavior of most organisms living today—the fly, the venus fly trap, and perhaps the alligator and its fellow reptiles—is under the guidance of what we humans consider to be unconscious control. (For a treatment regarding the presence of consciousness in non-human animals, see Gray, 2004.) Moreover, for millions of years prior to the advent of consciousness, the actions of intelligent life forms, both toward the world and toward each other, was under the control of exclusively unconscious systems. Conscious mental processes (e.g., conscious intentions) were 3 relatively late comers in the phylogeny of intelligent behavior Thus, as difficult as it may be for us to imagine—because consciousness encompasses the totality of what 'we' are and could ever experience—the history of our planet and its organisms was for the most part one devoid of consciousness: A zombie-like world having colorful plants, streams, and gigantic creatures performing complex acts and communicating with each other, but possessing nothing that could ever be conscious of any of it. Hence, despite our intuitions and how much consciousness may mean to 'us,' consciousness is actually an atypical phenomenon and tool with respect to both the natural world and …
Parametric smoothing of spline interpolation

Cubic spline interpolation is commonly applied in signal reconstruction problems. However, overshooting between samples is normally observed, and typically the reconstructed signal does not preserve the statistical properties of the original data or other desired properties such as monotonicity or convexity. These undesirable effects are minimized in the case of piecewise linear (PWL) interpolation, of course with a discontinuous derivative. In this paper we use a parameterized family of splines, named /spl alpha/splines, that allows a smooth transition from PWL (/spl alpha/ = 0) to cubic spline interpolation (/spl alpha/ = 1). Closed-form expressions that relate /spl alpha/ to the smoothness and variance of the interpolation are derived. Moreover, a fast interpolation technique based on digital filtering can be applied.
Growth of marine planktonic copepods: Global rates and patterns in relation to chlorophyll a, temperature, and body weight

We compiled a global data set of copepod in situ weight‐specific fecundity and growth rates, together with measurements of their body weights, and the chlorophyll a and temperature of the natural water in which these animals were growing. Juveniles can achieve half‐saturation of their growth (Km) at chlorophyll a concentrations almost an order of magnitude lower than adult females can their weight‐specific fecundity. Adult weight‐specific fecundity rates in situ are correlated with temperature, but the Q10s of 1.59 and 1.43 in broadcast and sac spawners, respectively, are much lower than under food saturated laboratory conditions (Q10s of 2.75 and 3.98). By comparing the in situ and laboratory food saturated results we are able to assess food limitation in the environment. The degree of food limitation increases with increasing temperature for adults; in situ rates approximate food saturated rates at low temperatures (0–10°C), at 25°C they are on average only about one‐fifth of those at food saturation. By contrast, in situ juvenile rates are more strongly temperature‐dependent than their adults and close to food saturation even at high temperatures. Juveniles grow much more rapidly and closer to food saturation than do adults of a similar size. There are several possible reasons for this. Compounds needed for egg production may simply be more dilute than those used in somatic growth. However, it is also possible that food limitation acts very differently in adults than juveniles. Molting rates in juveniles are strongly temperature dictated, and if sufficient weight is not added between molts, these slower growing juveniles do not survive. Adults, by contrast, can survive for long periods without having sufficient food to produce eggs.
CHARACTERIZATION OF STABILIZED AND UNSTABILIZED BEERS

The preparation and properties of polyvinylpolypyrrolidone (PVPP) and silica gel and the mechanisms by which they stabilize beer are discussed. In stabilized beer, chill stability was associated with lower protein sensitivity to precipitation with tannins. Approximately 60% of the proteoses were of low molecular weight (<10,000 daltons). The most acidic of these proteoses were the least stable in solution, being precipitated from beer by cold treatment and adsorbents.
A (Simple) Experimental Demonstration that Cultural Evolution is not Replicative, but Reconstructive — and an Explanation of Why this Difference Matters

Two complementary approaches to a naturalistic theory of culture are, on the one hand, mainstream cultural evolution research, and, on the other, work done under the banners of cultural attraction and the epidemiology of representations. There is much agreement between these two schools of thought, including in particular a commitment to population thinking. Both schools also acknowledge that the propagation of culture is not simply a matter of replication, but rather one of reconstruction. However, the two schools of thought differ on the relative importance of this point. The cultural attraction school believes it to be fundamental to genuinely causal explanations of culture. In contrast, most mainstream cultural evolution thinking abstracts away from it. In this paper I make flesh a simple thought experiment (first proposed by Dan Sperber) that directly contrasts the effects that replication and reconstruction have on cultural items. Results demonstrate, in a simple and graphic way, that (i) normal cultural propagation is not replicative, but reconstructive, and (ii) that these two different modes of propagation afford two qualitatively different explanations of stability. If propagation is replicative, as it is in biology, then stability arises from the fidelity of that replication, and hence an explanation of stability comes from an explanation of how and why this high-fidelity is achieved. If, on the other hand, propagation is reconstructive (as it is in culture), then stability arises from the fact that a subclass of cultural types are easily re-producible, while others are not, and hence an explanation of stability comes from a description of what types are easily re-producible, and an explanation of why they are. I discuss two implications of this result for research at the intersection of evolution, cognition, and culture.
Dynamics of embedded bars and the connection with AGN - I. ISAAC/VLT stellar kinematics

We present new stellar kinematical profiles of four galaxy hosts of active galactic nuclei, using the 12 CO bandhead around 2.3 μ m with the ISAAC/VLT spectrograph. We find that the nuclear bars or discs, embedded in large-scale primary bars, have all a decoupled kinematics, in the sense that the maximum of the rotational velocity occurs in the nuclear region. In three cases (NGC 1097, NGC 1808 and NGC 5728), the velocity dispersion displays a significant drop at the nucleus, a rarely observed phenomenon. We also detect kinematical asymmetries ($m=1$ mode) along the nuclear bar major-axis of NGC 1808 and NGC 5728, dynamical counterparts of corresponding asymmetries in the surface brightness. We have derived simple dynamical models in an attempt to fit the kinematics of each galaxy and reconstruct the full velocity field. For all four targets, the fits are good, and confirm the presence of the decoupled nuclear components. These models cannot however reproduce the observed central drop in the dispersion. We suggest that this drop is due to a transient cold nuclear disc, fuelled by gas inflow along the bar, that has recently formed new stars.
Supporting situation awareness on the move - The role of technology for spatial orientation in the field

The study presented in this paper has investigated how technology can support spatial awareness when moving in wooded terrain. By “spatial awareness”, we refer to the ability to point in the approximate direction of several objects while navigating in unknown terrain. The ability to localize objects in the terrain has importance for emergency operations, for example firefighting and search and rescue operations. A field experiment was conducted with two conditions, one with technical support and one without. The results show that technical support in terms of GPS, digital maps and electronic compass can dramatically improve the ability to accurately indicate directions to objects. Further, findings concerning use of tests on spatial orientation to predict the ability to indicate directions to objects in the terrain when having no technical support are presented.
Behavioural Biometrics Using Electricity Load Profiles

Modelling behavioural biometric patterns is a key issue for modern user centric applications, aimed at better monitoring users' activities, understanding their habits and detecting their identity. Following this trend, this paper investigates whether the electrical energy consumption of a user can be a distinctive behavioural biometric trait. In particular we analyse daily and weekly load profiles showing that they are closely related to the identity of the users. Hence, we believe that this level of analysis can open interesting application scenarios in the field of energy management and it provides a good working framework for the continuous development of smart environments with demonstrable benefits on real-world implementations.
Direct magnetic resonance imaging of histological tissue samples at 3.0T

Direct imaging of a histological slice is challenging. The vast difference in dimension between planar size and the thickness of histology slices would require an RF coil to produce a uniform RF magnetic (B1) field in a 2D plane with minimal thickness. In this work a novel RF coil designed specifically for imaging a histology slice was developed and tested. The experimental data demonstrate that the coil is highly sensitive and capable of producing a uniform B1 field distribution in a planar region of histological slides, allowing for the acquisition of high‐resolution T2 images and T2 maps from a 60‐μm‐thick histological sample. The image intensity and T2 distributions were directly compared with histological staining of the relative iron concentration of the same slice. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using a microimaging histological coil to image thin slices of pathologically diseased tissue to obtain a precise one‐to‐one comparison between stained tissue and MR images. Magn Reson Med 57:835–841, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Acceptance of Smartphone-Based Mobile Shopping: Mobile Benefits, Customer Characteristics, Perceived Risks, and the Impact of Application Context

Despite their generally increasing use, the adoption of mobile shopping applications often differs across purchase contexts. In order to advance our understanding of smartphone-based mobile shopping acceptance, this study integrates and extends existing approaches from technology acceptance literature by examining two previously underexplored aspects. Firstly, the study examines the impact of different mobile and personal benefits (instant connectivity, contextual value and hedonic motivation), customer characteristics (habit) and risk facets (financial, performance, and security risk) as antecedents of mobile shopping acceptance. Secondly, it is assumed that several acceptance drivers differ in relevance subject to the perception of three mobile shopping characteristics (location sensitivity, time criticality, and extent of control), while other drivers are assumed to matter independent of the context. Based on a dataset of 410 smartphone shoppers, empirical results demonstrate that several acceptance predictors are associated with ease of use and usefulness, which in turn affect intentional and behavioral outcomes. Furthermore, the extent to which risks and benefits impact ease of use and usefulness is influenced by the three contextual characteristics. From a managerial perspective, results show which factors to consider in the development of mobile shopping applications and in which different application contexts they matter.
Introducing fees for services with professional uncertainty

A change in payment system of general practitioners from capitation to a mix of one-half capitation and one-half fee for service in Copenhagen, Denmark, resulted in a significant overall increase in diagnostic and curative services. The rate of increase differs between services. In this article, it is assumed that the rate of increase varies with doctors' professional uncertainty relative to the services studied. Professional uncertainty is measured as the degree to which performances of a service are determined by diagnoses made. The data validate the measure given the assumption.