Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning Adinkra symbols: The effect of testing

The testing effect (i.e., long-term memory is improved more by intermediate testing than by restudying the information) has been studied using a variety of materials. However, almost all testing effect studies to date have used purely verbal materials such as word pairs, facts and prose passages. The testing effect has not yet been established using symbol–word pairs. In the present study symbol–word pairs were used as to-be-learned materials to demonstrate the generalisability of the testing effect to symbol learning. The results showed that there was no difference in final memory-test performance after a retention interval of 5 minutes, but after a retention interval of a week tested pairs were retained better than repeatedly studied pairs. Hence, the present research suggests that the testing effect can also be obtained in symbol learning.
The Sociology of Gambling

Widespread resentment against gambling may be explained by the failure of gamblers to perform normally expected productive functions. The degree of antipathy differs according to clas. The chance element in human life is particularly exploited in those societies where status is largely competitive and dependent upon pecuniary standards. The stabilizing and routinized mechanisms of social living are antithetical to gambling, which resists arbitrary social control.
Automatic position calibration and sensor displacement detection for networks of laser range finders for human tracking

Laser range finders are a non-invasive tool which can be used for anonymously tracking the motion of people and robots in real-world environments with high accuracy. Based on a commercial system we have developed, this paper addresses two practical issues of using networks of portable laser range finders in field environments. We first describe a technique for automated calibration of sensor positions and orientations, by using velocity-based matching of observed human trajectories to define constraints between the sensors. We then propose a mechanism for detecting when a sensor has been moved out of alignment, which can be used to alert an operator of the condition and automatically exclude erroneous data from tracking calculations. After describing our techniques for solving these problems, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our calibration and error detection systems in live trials with our real-time system, as well as offline tests based on scan data recorded from field trials.
Postmenopausal changes in serum cytokine levels and hormone replacement therapy.

OBJECTIVE Our purpose was to investigate the effect of hormone replacement therapy on the postmenopausal changes in serum cytokine levels. STUDY DESIGN Fifteen cytokines were measured by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay in 97 untreated and hormone replacement-treated women. Thirteen women were examined before and during hormone replacement therapy. RESULTS Serum concentrations of macrophage colony-stimulating factor were significantly (P < .05) lower during the early postmenopausal period (< or = 10 years) than the values in premenopause and the elevated levels in the late postmenopausal period (< or = 30 years). A significant increase in tumor necrosis factor alpha and a decline in transforming growth factor beta1 were found in late postmenopausal women. Serum levels of macrophage colony-stimulating factor in women receiving hormone replacement therapy were significantly higher than those in untreated postmenopausal women. Furthermore, hormone replacement therapy induced a significant (P < .01) increase in serum levels of macrophage colony-stimulating factor, whereas serum levels of other cytokines were not affected. CONCLUSION It is well documented that macrophage colony-stimulating factor lowers serum cholesterol concentrations and prevents atherosclerosis. Inducing the production of macrophage colony-stimulating factor is a possible additional mechanism of hormone replacement therapy in mediating the antiatherogenic effect.
Developmental comparisons of the ability to discriminate between memories for symbolic play enactments

Children's memory errors reveal the kinds of processing that may occur during source-monitoring judgments. After symbolically enacting everyday actions using toys or substitutes, preschoolers were more likely to claim they played with a toy when a substitute was involved as the instrument of action than the reverse (Experiments 1-3). We interpret this bias as evidence for the importance of the functional similarity between actions for children's source-monitoring judgments
Mining User Consumption Intention from Social Media Using Domain Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network

Social media platforms are often used by people to express their needs and desires. Such data offer great opportunities to identify users’ consumption intention from user-generated contents, so that better tailored products or services can be recommended. However, there have been few efforts on mining commercial intents from social media contents. In this paper, we investigate the use of social media data to identify consumption intentions for individuals. We develop a Consumption Intention Mining Model (CIMM) based on convolutional neural network (CNN), for identifying whether the user has a consumption intention. The task is domain-dependent, and learning CNN requires a large number of annotated instances, which can be available only in some domains. Hence, we investigate the possibility of transferring the CNN mid-level sentence representation learned from one domain to another by adding an adaptation layer. To demonstrate the effectiveness of CIMM, we conduct experiments on two domains. Our results show that CIMM offers a powerful paradigm for effectively identifying users’ consumption intention based on their social media data. Moreover, our results also confirm that the CNN learned in one domain can be effectively transferred to another domain. This suggests that a great potential for our model to significantly increase effectiveness of product recommendations and targeted advertising.
Unifying local and non-local signal processing with graph CNNs

This paper deals with the unification of local and non-local signal processing on graphs within a single convolutional neural network (CNN) framework. Building upon recent works on graph CNNs, we propose to use convolutional layers that take as inputs two variables, a signal and a graph, allowing the network to adapt to changes in the graph structure. In this article, we explain how this framework allows us to design a novel method to perform style transfer.
Functional characterization of FABP3, 5 and 7 gene variants identified in schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder and mouse behavioral studies

Disturbances of lipid metabolism have been implicated in psychiatric illnesses. We previously reported an association between the gene for fatty acid binding protein 7 (FABP7) and schizophrenia. Furthermore, we identified and reported several rare non-synonymous polymorphisms of the brain-expressed genes FABP3, FABP5 and FABP7 from schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), diseases known to part share genetic architecture. Here, we conducted further studies to better understand the contribution these genes make to the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and ASD. In postmortem brains, we detected altered mRNA expression levels of FABP5 in schizophrenia, and of FABP7 in ASD and altered FABP5 in peripheral lymphocytes. Using a patient cohort, comprehensive mutation screening identified six missense and two frameshift variants from the three FABP genes. The two frameshift proteins, FABP3 E132fs and FABP7 N80fs, formed cellular aggregates and were unstable when expressed in cultured cells. The four missense mutants with predicted possible damaging outcomes showed no changes in intracellular localization. Examining ligand binding properties, FABP7 S86G and FABP7 V126L lost their preference for docosahexaenoic acid to linoleic acid. Finally, mice deficient in Fabp3, Fabp5 and Fabp7 were evaluated in a systematic behavioral test battery. The Fabp3 knockout (KO) mice showed decreased social memory and novelty seeking, and Fabp7 KO mice displayed hyperactive and anxiety-related phenotypes, while Fabp5 KO mice showed no apparent phenotypes. In conclusion, disturbances in brain-expressed FABPs could represent an underlying disease mechanism in a proportion of schizophrenia and ASD sufferers.
A study in social change

Taiwan has dramatically improved its response to domestic violence within the last fifteen years, becoming the first East Asian country to pass major legislation criminalizing domestic violence. Ethnographic research on the origins, development, and operations of the domestic violence prevention movement shows how individuals from diverse backgrounds acted collectively to achieve this social reversal. Activists have profited from feminist social networks, the growing economic and political power of women, domestic violence models from other countries, a unified vision of creating new legislation, and an atmosphere open to change. Their efforts were catalyzed by three widely publicized cases regarding violence against women and culminated in the passage of the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act in 1998. The domestic violence prevention movement in Taiwan provides a valuable case study of social change and a model for other East Asian countries interested in passing similar legislation.
Size‐Dependent Interactions Inhibit Coexistence in Intraguild Predation Systems with Life‐History Omnivory

Growth in body size during ontogeny often results in changes in diet, leading to life‐history omnivory. In addition, growth is often dependent on food density. Using a physiologically structured population model, we investigated the effects of these two aspects of individual growth in a system consisting of two size‐structured populations, an omnivorous top predator and an intermediate consumer. With a single shared resource for both populations, we found that life‐history omnivory decreases the likelihood of coexistence between top predator and intermediate consumer in this intraguild predation (IGP) system. This result contrasts with previous unstructured models and stage‐structured models without food‐dependent development. Food‐dependent development and size‐dependent foraging abilities of the predator resulted in a positive feedback between foraging success on the shared resource at an early life stage and foraging success on the intermediate consumer later in life. By phenomenologically incorporating this feedback in an unstructured IGP model, we show that it also demotes coexistence in this simple setting, demonstrating the robustness of the negative effect of this feedback.
Phonological spelling in a DAT patient: The role of the segmentation subsystem in the phoneme-to-grapheme conversion

We are presenting a single-case study of a DAT patient whose writing output is severely impaired while performance in reading aloud and repetition is almost flawless. The large corpus of errors collected from written and oral spelling tasks shows two important characteristics: (1) in both tasks, OE relies on the non-lexical route for spelling and produces 'phonologically plausible errors" (PPEs) and non-phonologically plausible errors" (NPPEs), and (2) the proportion of NPPEs affecting four phonological features [+/- voiced], [+/- nasal], [a continuant], and [+/- rounded] is higher in written than in oral spelling. Analysis of PPEs and NPPEs reveals that the proportion of PPEs varies in inverse relation to the phonological complexity of the stimuli, i.e. fewer PPEs are produced in syllabically complex stimuli. According to our proposal, OE's functional lesion is localised in the segmentation subsystem of the phoneme-to-grapheme conversion mechanism. More specifically, OE suffers from a phonological impairment, that is, a lowered tolerance to syllabic complexity, which is exacerbated in any task, including phonological spelling, that requires an explicit segmentation of the auditory input form. A second deficit affecting the phonological working memory system is responsible for the production of the single feature errors. We suggest that the single feature errors are more abundant in written than in oral spelling because OE suffers from a deficit affecting the transfer from abstract graphemic representations to letter forms without affecting the transfer to letter names.
Looking for obscured QSOs in the X-ray emitting ERO population

We present XMM-Newton data centered on one of the MUNICS Near Infrared Cluster Survey fields (S2F1) and we discuss the X-ray properties of the 6 X-ray emitting EROs found. For one of them we have already obtained the redshift using near-infrared spectroscopic data, while for the remaining 5 EROs the analysis is based on photometric redshifts. We find evidence for the presence of an X-ray obscured QSO in at least 5 out of the 6 X-ray emitting EROs. For these 5 objects we derive intrinsic (2–10 keV) luminosities in excess of 1044 erg s−1 and intrinsic column densities higher than 1022 cm−2. These values have been obtained through a basic X-ray spectral analysis for the three brightest sources and through the analysis of the hardness ratios for the remaining two. All of these 5 X-ray emitting EROs appear extended in the optical/near-infrared bands indicating that the host galaxy emission dominates at these wavelengths. This suggests that the hosted AGNs are likely to be absorbed also in the optical/near-infrared bands: i.e. they are likely X-ray obscured possible type 2 QSOs. For the remaining ERO the presence of an AGN is suggested both by its high 0.5–2 keV luminosity (L0.5−2keV ∼ 1043 erg s−1) and by its X-rayto- optical flux ratio. In this case the quality of the present data prevents us from placing firm constraints on the AGN type hosted. Finally, the near-IR spectrum obtained for one of the 6 EROs classifies the host galaxy as an elliptical at z 1.7 with a stellar mass well in excess of 1011 M⊙. This result corroborates the possible link between the QSO activity and the formation of massive spheroids.
Oppositely imprinted genes H19 and insulin-like growth factor 2 are coexpressed in human androgenetic trophoblast.

Human uniparental gestations such as gynogenetic ovarian teratomas and androgenetic complete hydatidiform moles provide a model to evaluate the integrity of parent-specific gene expression--i.e., imprinting--in the absence of a complementary parental genetic contribution. We studied expression, in these tissues, of the oppositely imprinted genes H19, which is an embryonic nontranslated RNA, and insulin-like growth factor type 2 (IGF2). Normal gestations only express H19 from the maternal allele and express IGF2 from the paternal allele, whereas neither is expressed from the maternal genome of gynogenetic gestations, and both are expressed from the paternal genome of androgenetic gestations. Coexpression of H19 and IGF2 in the androgenetic tissues was in a single population of cells, mononuclear trophoblast--the same cell type expressing these genes in biparental placentas. These results demonstrate that a biparental genome may be required for expression of the reciprocal IGF2/H19 imprint. Alternatively, biparental expression may be a normal feature of some imprinted genes in specific cell types. Additional experiments with other imprinted genes will clarify whether this reflects global failure of the imprinting process or a change specific to the IGF2/H19 locus.
Leadership Effectiveness in Jordanian Educational Institutions

Senior leadership positions in Jordanian Ministry of Education are held predominantly by men. Women are teachers and/or school principals. This under-representation of women is primarily due to culturally derived stereotypes that see women as teachers or school principals, but not as superintendents. The purpose of this study was to investigate, in practice, the difference between Jordanian men and women in their effectiveness as leaders as rated by themselves and their direct reports in Jordanian educational institutions. In other words, this study came to examine empirically the stereotypical assumption that women are rated by themselves and others to be less effective leaders than their male counterparts. This quantitative investigation employed the survey method as its research design. A variety of statistical techniques were utilized in this research. One-way analysis of variance, t-test, means, and standard deviations were used as the main statistical techniques. Results of the study revealed that female leaders in Jordanian educational institutions, their female direct reports, and their male direct reports underrated their leadership effectiveness compared to male leaders, their male direct reports, and their female direct reports. However, this difference in rating is very slight and not statistically significant.
A Further Examination of Relational and Item-Specific Processing Effects on Cued Recall Hypermnesia

Abstract Previous studies in a laboratory showed that in cued recall, relational processing produces a greater hypermnesic effect than item-specific processing does. However, in those studies, relational processing also resulted in a lower level of performance. The present experiment examined two item-specific processing tasks that were designed to produce a lower level of performance than the relational processing task. One hundred college students processed 60 word pairs, using either a relational or item-specific processing task. The relational processing task was a category-sorting task. The three item-specific processing tasks were pleasantness rating, rhyme rating, and vowel counting. As expected, the rhyme-rating and vowel-counting tasks produced lower performance than the relational processing task did. However, the hypermnesic effect was greater for the relational processing than for the item-specific processing conditions. It was concluded that in cued recall, relational processing does produce .
The Journey of the Counselor and Therapist: Research Findings and Perspectives on Professional Development

This article summarizes a reformulation of the main findings and perspectives from a cross-sectional and longitudinal qualitative study of the development of 100 counselors and therapists. The results are presented as a phase model and as a formulation of 14 themes of counselor/therapist development. The following six phases are described: The phases of the lay helper, the beginning student, the advanced student, the novice professional, the experienced professional, and the senior professional. The themes describe central processes of counselor/therapist development. The themes are addressing different issues such as shifts in attentional focus and emotional functioning, the importance of continuous reflection for professional growth, and a life-long personal/profession integration process. Sources of influence for professional functioning and development are described. The results show consistently that interpersonal experiences in the personal life domain (early family life and adult personal life) and the professional life domain (interacting with clients, professional elders, and peers) are significant sources of influence for professional development.
Assessment and significance of abdominal aortic calcification in chronic kidney disease.

BACKGROUND Abdominal aortic calcification is a common complication and a predictor of cardiovascular mortality in dialysis patients. However, abdominal aortic calcification in pre-dialysis chronic kidney disease (CKD) is poorly understood. METHODS A cohort study of 101 adult Japanese patients (mean age 66.6 +/- 11.3 years old) with pre-dialysis CKD (18, 29 and 54 in stages 3, 4 and 5, respectively) was performed. At entry, a non-contrast computed tomography scan was used to determine the abdominal aortic calcification index (ACI). Clinical characteristics and laboratory variables were also assessed. The patients were followed for a mean period of 48 +/- 12 months. RESULTS Among the subjects, 82% had abdominal aortic calcification (50, 83 and 91% for CKD stages 3, 4 and 5, respectively), and the median ACI was 16.7% (8.5, 20.0 and 21.4%, respectively). Multivariate logistic regression analyses identified older age, presence of diabetes and decreased estimated glomerular filtration rate (e-GFR) as independent predictors of the presence (ACI > 0%) and extent (ACI >or= 20%) of aortic calcification. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis identified ACI >or= 20% and diabetes as independent predictors for de novo cardiovascular events in CKD stages 4 and 5. CONCLUSION Decreased GFR may be associated with the presence and extent of abdominal aortic calcification, and a high level of calcification may be associated with de novo cardiovascular events in pre-dialysis CKD, suggesting that elucidation of the mechanism through which CKD contributes to vascular calcification may lead to an improved prognosis in patients with pre-dialysis CKD.
Predicting germination response to temperature. III. Model validation under field-variable temperature conditions.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Two previous papers in this series evaluated model fit of eight thermal-germination models parameterized from constant-temperature germination data. The previous studies determined that model formulations with the fewest shape assumptions provided the best estimates of both germination rate and germination time. The purpose of this latest study was to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of these same models in predicting germination time and relative seedlot performance under field-variable temperature scenarios. METHODS The seeds of four rangeland grass species were germinated under 104 variable-temperature treatments simulating six planting dates at three field sites in south-western Idaho. Measured and estimated germination times for all subpopulations were compared for all models, species and temperature treatments. KEY RESULTS All models showed similar, and relatively high, predictive accuracy for field-temperature simulations except for the iterative-probit-optimization (IPO) model, which exhibited systematic errors as a function of subpopulation. Highest efficiency was obtained with the statistical-gridding (SG) model, which could be directly parameterized by measured subpopulation rate data. Relative seedlot response predicted by thermal time coefficients was somewhat different from that estimated from mean field-variable temperature response as a function of subpopulation. CONCLUSIONS All germination response models tested performed relatively well in estimating field-variable temperature response. IPO caused systematic errors in predictions of germination time, and may have degraded the physiological relevance of resultant cardinal-temperature parameters. Comparative indices based on expected field performance may be more ecologically relevant than indices derived from a broader range of potential thermal conditions.
Boundary Superstring Field Theory Annulus Partition Function in the Presence of Tachyons

We compute the Boundary Superstring Field Theory partition function on the annulus in the presence of independent linear tachyon profiles on the two boundaries. The R-R sector is found to contribute non-trivially to the derivative terms of the space-time effective action. In the process we construct a boundary state description of D-branes in the presence of a linear tachyon. We quantize the open string in a tachyonic background and address the question of open/closed string duality.