Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Making Sense of Odd Couples: Mood Effects on the Perception of Mismatched Relationships

Are our judgments of unusual, atypical couples more likely to be distorted due to temporary mood? Two experiments based on a recent multiprocess theory developed by Forgas predicted and found greater mood-consistent bias in judgments of atypical rather than typical relationships. In Experiment 1, happy and sad subjects judged couples who were well-matched or ill-matched in terms of physical attractiveness. In Experiment 2, a false-feedback mood induction was used, followed by judgments of typical and atypical couples. In both studies, mood effects on judgments were consistently greater for mismatched couples. The results are interpreted as suggesting the greater use of mood-based inferences in judgments of unusual targets that require more constructive processing. The role of typicality in mediating mood effects on judgments is discussed, and the implications of the findings for everyday judgments about relationships are considered.
Moral judgments and emotions: A less intimate relationship than recently claimed

It has long been claimed that moral judgements are dominated by reason. In recent years, however, the tide has turned. Many psychologists and philosophers now hold the view that there is a close empirical association between moral judgements and emotions. In particular, they claim that emotions (1) co-occur with moral judgements, (2) causally influence moral judgements, (3) are causally sufficient for moral judgements, and (4) are causally necessary for moral judgements. At first sight these hypotheses seem well-supported. In this paper I show, however, that appearances are deceiving. If one considers the relevant scientific studies in detail, one finds that in many interpretations the above hypotheses are either not supported or even contradicted by the available evidence. This conclusion is significant both for our understanding of moral judgements qua empirical phenomena and for normative ethics and metaethics.
Nitrifying Community Analysis in a Single Submerged Attached‐Growth Bioreactor for Treatment of High‐Ammonia Waste Stream

This study investigated the nitrifying community structure in a single‐stage submerged attached‐growth bioreactor (SAGB) that successfully achieved stable nitrogen removal over nitrite of a high‐strength ammonia wastewater. The reactor was operated with intermittent aeration and external carbon addition (methanol). With influent ammonia and total Kjeldahl nitrogen ranging from 537 to 968 mg/L and 643 to1510 mg/L, respectively, 85% nitrogen removal was obtained, and effluent was dominated by nitrite (NO2 −/NOx >0.95). Nitrifying community analysis using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), with a hierarchical set of probes targeting known ammonia‐oxidizing bacteria (AOB) within beta‐proteobacteria, showed that the AOB community of the biofilter consists almost entirely of members of the Nitrosomonas europaea/eutropha and the Nitrosococcus mobilis lineages. Image analysis of FISH pictures was used to quantify the identified AOB, and it was estimated that Nitrosomonas europaea/eutropha‐like AOB accounted for 4.3% of the total volume of the biofilm, while Nitrosococcus mobilis‐like AOB made up 1.2%; these numbers summed up to a total AOB fraction of 5.5% of the total volume on the biofilm. Nitrite‐oxidizing bacteria (NOB) were not detectable in the biofilm samples with probes for either Nitrospira sp. or Nitrobacter sp. , which indicated that NOB were either absent from the biofilters or present in numbers below the detection limit of FISH (<0.1% of the total biofilm). Nitrite oxidizers were likely outcompeted from the system because of the free ammonia inhibition and the possibility that the aeration period (from intermittent aeration) was not sufficiently long for the NOB to be released from the competition for oxygen with heterotrophs and AOB. The nitrogen removal via nitrite in a SAGB reactor described in this study is applicable for high‐ammonia‐strength wastewater treatment, such as centrate or industrial wastes.
Comparative description of males of two species of Achtheres von Nordmann, 1832 (Copepoda: Siphonostomatoida: Lernaeopodidae) infecting zander and European perch.

Achtheres percarum von Nordmann, 1832 and Achtheres sandrae Gadd, 1901 (Lernaeopodidae) are common parasitic copepods infecting fishes in Eurasia. The former is specific to perch, Perca fluviatilis L. , while the latter, to zander, Sander lucioperca (L.). Until recently these copepods have been regarded a single species. The present study was intended to analyse details of male morphology and provide their complete descriptions with differential diagnosis. Males of A. percarum and A. sandrae were collected from perch and zander at Lake Dabie (north-western Poland). The males of A. sandrae are larger than those of A. percarum. They also differ in proportions of the first antenna, mandibular denticulation, structure of the first maxilla, and the armament of caudal ramus. The reported differences in male morphology constitute a conclusive confirmation of the separate identity of the two species.
The Role of Wholesale-Salespersons and Incentive Plans in Promoting Supply Chain Performance

Almost all research into the operations and behavior of salespeople has focused on sales at the retail level. But in many supply chains, manufacturers use a sales force to promote sales and improve coordination with retailers. In this note, we add an important piece to the science of sales operations by investigating the impact of two primary tasks performed by wholesale-salespersons: (1) enhancing retail demand, and (2) convincing the retailer to order more stock (i.e., enhancing wholesale demand). We show how the sales force can play an important role in supply chain coordination, even when it does not directly promote retail level demand. We also examine the relative effectiveness of the following compensation schemes in salesperson performance: (1) a salary plan in which the salesperson’s effort is observable (first-best salary), and (2) a commission plan based on retailer order quantity. We find that although the commission plan is less efficient than the first-best salary plan in motivating the salesperson, it is more robust to uncertainty in performance and motivation parameters. Finally, we compare a wholesale-salesperson with a traditional retail-salesperson and conclude that although a retail-salesperson is more efficient at increasing supply chain profit than is a wholesale-salesperson, the wholesale-salesperson raises manufacturer profit more than does a retailsalesperson (even if both promote the same retail demand). Furthermore, we show that wholesalesalespersons promote higher wholesale and retail prices than do retail-salespersons.
Maladaptive social behaviour of students in secondary vocational education

The aim of this thesis was twofold: Firstly to create a reliable and valid new instrument to measure maladaptive social behaviour (MSB) of students in secondary vocational education, and secondly to assess which school context variables could predict MSB at school. Three data-waves were conducted between December 2001 and July 2003. At the first data-wave 1800, at the second 931, and at the third 642 students participated from several schools, several departments, and several courses, spread over the Netherlands. Using several pilot-studies a new instrument was developed: The Questionnaire for Maladaptive Social Behaviour (QMSB). It consists of 49 items referring to five categories of behaviour: MSB toward Schoolwork and Rules, Delinquent Behaviour, Unfriendly Behaviour, Withdrawn Behaviour and Impolite Behaviour. Three studies were conducted to explore external validity of the instrument. Boys reported more MSB for all categories than girls. When controlled for gender, no differences in MSB were found between students with different ethnic origin, course level, or educational level of parents. School context variables predicted a small amount of variance of MSB. For Boys, feeling alienated from school appeared the most important predictor for their MSB at school; it predicted each type of MSB. For girls, the perception of a competitive school environment predicted their MSB best.
Social cohesion and the notion of ‘suspect communities’: a study of the experiences and impacts of being ‘suspect’ for Irish communities and Muslim communities in Britain

In this article, we consider how the practice of conceiving of groups within civil society as ‘communities’ meshes with conceptualisations of certain populations as ‘suspect’ and consider some of the impacts and consequences of this for particular populations and for social cohesion. We examine how Irish and Muslim people in Britain have become aware of and have experienced themselves to be members of ‘suspect communities’ in relation to political violence and counterterrorism policies from 1974 to 2007 and investigate the impacts of these experiences on their everyday lives. The study focuses on two eras of political violence. The first coincides with the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) bombing campaigns in England between 1973 and 1996, when the perpetrators were perceived as ‘Irish terrorists’; and the second since 2001, when, in Britain and elsewhere, the main threat of political violence has been portrayed as stemming from people who are assumed to be motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam and are often labelled as ‘Islamic terrorists’. We outline why the concept of ‘suspect communities’ continues to be analytically useful for examining: the impact of ‘bounded communities’ on community cohesion policies; the development of traumatogenic environments and their ramifications; and for examining how lessons might be learnt from one era of political violence to another, especially as regards the negative impacts of practices of suspectification on Irish communities and Muslim communities. The research methods included discussion groups involving Irish and Muslim people. These demonstrated that with the removal of discourses of suspicion the common ground of Britain's urban multiculture was a sufficient basis for sympathetic exchanges.
Keeping it all inside: Shyness, internalizing coping strategies and socio-emotional adjustment in middle childhood

Despite growing research results indicating that shyness is a risk factor for psychosocial maladjustment in childhood, less is known about the conceptual mechanisms that may underlie these associations. The purpose of the current study was to explore links between self-reported shyness, coping strategies and social functioning in middle childhood. As well, we sought to examine the reliance on internalizing coping strategies as a potential mediator of the link between shyness and social functioning. Participants were 355 children aged 9 to 11 years who completed measures of shyness, loneliness, positive and negative affect, social anxiety, self-concept, well-being, and coping strategies. Results indicated that shyness was associated with greater internalizing difficulties and lower well-being. Moreover, internalizing coping was found to partially mediate the relation between shyness and certain indices of internalizing problems. These results suggest a conceptual pathway, where an over-reliance on internalizing coping may partially explain why shy children experience internalizing difficulties in middle childhood.
Serum antinuclear antibody may be associated with less severe disease activity in neuromyelitis optica

Antinuclear antibody‐positive multiple sclerosis (MS) patients have shorter disease duration and lower Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) scores. The aim of this study was to compare clinical and laboratory features between MS and neuromyelitis optica (NMO) patients with and without autoantibodies and to investigate the prognosis of NMO in patients with and without autoantibodies.
January Effect - a Re-Examination

The multitude of explanations for the January effect leaves the reader confused about its primary cause(s): is it tax-loss selling, window-dressing, information, bid-ask bounce, or a combination of these causes? The confusion arises, in part, because evidence has been presented in support of a particular hypothesis though the same evidence may be consistent with more than one hypothesis. Furthermore, prior work has not adequately controlled for the bid-ask bounce. In this paper, we try to disentangle different explanations of the January effect and identify its primary cause. We find that tax-related selling is the most important cause, overshadowing other possible explanations.
An efficient VLSI design of CAVLC encoder

The present research work introduces a novel VLSI design of Context-Based Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) entropy encoder. The proposed design is intended to be used for H.264/AVC CAVLC entropy encoder. The architecture is designed to be used as a part of a comprehensive H.264 video coding system. This hardware works in parallel and pipelined fashion and demonstrates a fair trade-off between speed and area. The proposed CAVLC encoder performs at an optimum clock frequency of 134 MHz when incorporated in Xilinx 9.2i, Virtex-5 technology. It offers higher speed performance when compared to the existing CAVLC architectures. While considering HD-1080 format video sequence, the proposed architecture satisfies the required real time processing requirement.
The structure of the human mitochondrial ribosome

The whole mitoribosome at high resolution Mitochondria are thought to be the descendents of a prokaryotic cell that took up residence in a protoeukaryotic cell. Mitochondria retain a few genes involved in oxidative phosphorylation. To translate these genes, mitochondria contain highly divergent mitochondrial ribosomes, or mitoribosomes. Amunts et al. determined the high-resolution structures of complete mammalian mitoribosomes using cryoelectron microscopy. Mitoribosomes include an unusual mRNA binding channel. The findings elucidate how aminoglycoside antibiotics can inadvertently inhibit mitoribosomes and how mutations in mitoribosomes can lead to disease. Science, this issue p. 95 Structures of mammalian mitoribosomes reveal details underlying the function of this divergent class of ribosome. The highly divergent ribosomes of human mitochondria (mitoribosomes) synthesize 13 essential proteins of oxidative phosphorylation complexes. We have determined the structure of the intact mitoribosome to 3.5 angstrom resolution by means of single-particle electron cryogenic microscopy. It reveals 80 extensively interconnected proteins, 36 of which are specific to mitochondria, and three ribosomal RNA molecules. The head domain of the small subunit, particularly the messenger (mRNA) channel, is highly remodeled. Many intersubunit bridges are specific to the mitoribosome, which adopts conformations involving ratcheting or rolling of the small subunit that are distinct from those seen in bacteria or eukaryotes. An intrinsic guanosine triphosphatase mediates a contact between the head and central protuberance. The structure provides a reference for analysis of mutations that cause severe pathologies and for future drug design.
Bellerophontes: an RNA-Seq data analysis framework for chimeric transcripts discovery based on accurate fusion model

MOTIVATION Next-generation sequencing technology allows the detection of genomic structural variations, novel genes and transcript isoforms from the analysis of high-throughput data. In this work, we propose a new framework for the detection of fusion transcripts through short paired-end reads which integrates splicing-driven alignment and abundance estimation analysis, producing a more accurate set of reads supporting the junction discovery and taking into account also not annotated transcripts. Bellerophontes performs a selection of putative junctions on the basis of a match to an accurate gene fusion model. RESULTS We report the fusion genes discovered by the proposed framework on experimentally validated biological samples of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) and on public NCBI datasets, for which Bellerophontes is able to detect the exact junction sequence. With respect to state-of-art approaches, Bellerophontes detects the same experimentally validated fusions, however, it is more selective on the total number of detected fusions and provides a more accurate set of spanning reads supporting the junctions. We finally report the fusions involving non-annotated transcripts found in CML samples. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION Bellerophontes JAVA/Perl/Bash software implementation is free and available at http://eda.polito. it/bellerophontes/.
A Big World Inside Small-World Networks

Real networks, including biological networks, are known to have the small-world property, characterized by a small “diameter”, which is defined as the average minimal path length between all pairs of nodes in a network. Because random networks also have short diameters, one may predict that the diameter of a real network should be even shorter than its random expectation, because having shorter diameters potentially increases the network efficiency such as minimizing transition times between metabolic states in the context of metabolic networks. Contrary to this expectation, we here report that the observed diameter is greater than the random expectation in every real network examined, including biological, social, technological, and linguistic networks. Simulations show that a modest enlargement of the diameter beyond its expectation allows a substantial increase of the network modularity, which is present in all real networks examined. Hence, short diameters appear to be sacrificed for high modularities, suggesting a tradeoff between network efficiency and advantages offered by modularity (e.g., multi-functionality, robustness, and/or evolvability).
Drag force in SYM plasma with B field from AdS/CFT

We investigate drag force in a thermal plasma of N=4 super Yang-Mills theory via both fundamental and Dirichlet strings under the influence of non-zero NSNS B-field background. In the description of AdS/CFT correspondence the endpoint of these strings correspondes to an external monopole or quark moving with a constant electromagnetic field. We demonstrate how the configuration of string tail as well as the drag force obtains corrections in this background.
The Impact of Hospital and ICU Organizational Factors on Outcome in Critically Ill Patients: Results From the Extended Prevalence of Infection in Intensive Care Study*

Objective:To investigate the impact of various facets of ICU organization on outcome in a large cohort of ICU patients from different geographic regions. Design:International, multicenter, observational study. Setting:All 1,265 ICUs in 75 countries that contributed to the 1-day point prevalence Extended Prevalence of Infection in Intensive Care study. Patients:All adult patients present on a participating ICU on the study day. Interventions:None. Measurements and Main Results:The Extended Prevalence of Infection in Intensive Care study included data on 13,796 adult patients. Organizational characteristics of the participating hospitals and units varied across geographic areas. Participating North American hospitals had greater availability of microbiologic examination and more 24-hour emergency departments than did the participating European and Latin American units. Of the participating ICUs, 82.9% were closed format, with the lowest prevalence among North American units (62.7%) and the highest in ICUs in Oceania (92.6%). The proportion of participating ICUs with 24-hour intensivist coverage was lower in North America than in Latin America (86.8% vs 98.1%, p = 0.002). ICU volume was significantly lower in participating ICUs from Western Europe, Latin America, and Asia compared with North America. In multivariable logistic regression analysis, medical and mixed ICUs were independently associated with a greater risk of in-hospital death. A nurse:patient ratio of more than 1:1.5 on the study day was independently associated with a lower risk of in-hospital death. Conclusions:In this international large cohort of ICU patients, hospital and ICU characteristics varied worldwide. A high nurse:patient ratio was independently associated with a lower risk of in-hospital death. These exploratory data need to be confirmed in large prospective studies that consider additional country-specific ICU practice variations.
The development of diachronic thinking between 6 and 11 years

The development of a diachronic conception of biology has rarely been explored during childhood, except by Maurice-Naville and Montangero (1992). The aim of the present study was to further explore this issue. In the course of an interview, 163 children aged between 6 and 11 expressed their diachronic conceptions of the growth and death of several living things. Results confirmed previous data and extended them to humans and animals, highlighting some diachronic dimensions previously identified by Maurice-Naville and Montangero regarding trees: past and future, seriation and identity appear before 10 years of age, while time span and rhythm, as well as irreversibility, were only mastered at 11 years. Our results confirm that the mastery of biological properties during childhood is partly contingent upon diachronic thinking.
Active inference and epistemic value

We offer a formal treatment of choice behavior based on the premise that agents minimize the expected free energy of future outcomes. Crucially, the negative free energy or quality of a policy can be decomposed into extrinsic and epistemic (or intrinsic) value. Minimizing expected free energy is therefore equivalent to maximizing extrinsic value or expected utility (defined in terms of prior preferences or goals), while maximizing information gain or intrinsic value (or reducing uncertainty about the causes of valuable outcomes). The resulting scheme resolves the exploration-exploitation dilemma: Epistemic value is maximized until there is no further information gain, after which exploitation is assured through maximization of extrinsic value. This is formally consistent with the Infomax principle, generalizing formulations of active vision based upon salience (Bayesian surprise) and optimal decisions based on expected utility and risk-sensitive (Kullback-Leibler) control. Furthermore, as with previous active inference formulations of discrete (Markovian) problems, ad hoc softmax parameters become the expected (Bayes-optimal) precision of beliefs about, or confidence in, policies. This article focuses on the basic theory, illustrating the ideas with simulations. A key aspect of these simulations is the similarity between precision updates and dopaminergic discharges observed in conditioning paradigms.
Dynamic bandwidth allocation and buffer dimensioning under equal segment scheme to support video‐on‐demand services

This paper focuses on the optimization of network bandwidth allocation and buffer dimensioning to transport pre‐stored MPEG video data from source to playback destination across ATM networks. This is one of the most important issues in the support of video‐on‐demand (VoD) service. This paper provides a novel scheme in the dynamic allocation of bandwidth to segments of video using ABR mode. The dynamic bandwidth allocation is based on a new concept, called playback tunnel which is obtained from the traffic characteristics of the pre‐stored MPEG video trace to determine the optimum of transmission bandwidth as well as the buffer capacity to ensure that the playback buffer neither underflows nor overflows. The proposed scheme is tested with real‐life MPEG video traces. The obtained results have shown its significant performance improvement in terms of the capacity of playback buffer, the start‐up playback delay, the size of video segment and the network multiplexing gain. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.