Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Persuasive Route to Sustainable Mobility: Elaboration Likelihood Model and Emotions predict Implicit Attitudes

Persuasive communication campaigns are often used to promote proenvironmental actions, even though their effectiveness has been mixed. Previous research has tested cognitive-based models in explaining proenvironmental choice, but few studies have examined the potential impact of emotional dimensions. This experimental study tests the persuasive effect of argument quality, source expertise, and emotions on the implicit attitudes toward sustainable travel choices. This was a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects research design with an additional measured variable of involvement with the topic of sustainable transport. A video including the experimental manipulations was presented, followed by the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Consistent with the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), in the case of high involvement, implicit attitudes were more positive in the condition of high-quality arguments, while in case of low involvement, implicit attitudes were more positive in the condition of high source expertise. In addition, the main effect of anticipated negative emotions was significant.
Role of host xanthine oxidase in infection due to enteropathogenic and Shiga-toxigenic Escherichia coli

Xanthine oxidase (XO) has been recognized as an important host defense enzyme for decades. In our recent study in Infection and Immunity, we found that enteropathogenic and Shiga-toxigenic E. coli (EPEC and STEC) were far more resistant to killing by the XO pathway than laboratory E. coli strains used in the past. Although XO plus hypoxanthine substrate rarely generated enough H2O2 to kill EPEC and STEC, the pathogens were able to sense the H2O2 and react to it with an increase in expression of virulence factors, most notably Shiga toxin (Stx). H2O2 produced by XO also triggered a chloride secretory response in T84 cell monolayers studied in the Ussing chamber. Adding exogenous XO plus its substrate in vivo did not decrease the number of STEC bacteria recovered from ligated intestinal loops, but instead appeared to worsen the infection and increased the amount of Stx2 toxin produced. XO plus hypoxanthine also increases the ability of Stx2 to translocate across intestinal monolayers. With regard to EPEC and STEC, the role of XO appears more complex and subtle than what has been reported in the past, since XO also plays a role in host-pathogen signaling, in regulating virulence in pathogens, in Stx production and in toxin translocation. Uric acid produced by XO may also be in itself an immune modulator in the intestinal tract.
Improved Cosmological Constraints from New, Old, and Combined Supernova Data Sets

We present a new compilation of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), a new data set of low-redshift nearby-Hubble-flow SNe, and new analysis procedures to work with these heterogeneous compilations. This “Union” compilation of 414 SNe Ia, which reduces to 307 SNe after selection cuts, includes the recent large samples of SNe Ia from the Supernova Legacy Survey and ESSENCE Survey, the older data sets, as well as the recently extended data set of distant supernovae observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). A single, consistent, and blind analysis procedure is used for all the various SN Ia subsamples, and a new procedure is implemented that consistently weights the heterogeneous data sets and rejects outliers. We present the latest results from this Union compilation and discuss the cosmological constraints from this new compilation and its combination with other cosmological measurements (CMB and BAO). The constraint we obtain from supernovae on the dark energy density is ΩΛ = 0.713+ 0.027−0.029(stat)+ 0.036−0.039(sys) , for a flat, ΛCDM universe. Assuming a constant equation of state parameter, w, the combined constraints from SNe, BAO, and CMB give w = − 0.969+ 0.059−0.063(stat)+ 0.063−0.066(sys) . While our results are consistent with a cosmological constant, we obtain only relatively weak constraints on a w that varies with redshift. In particular, the current SN data do not yet significantly constrain w at z > 1. With the addition of our new nearby Hubble-flow SNe Ia, these resulting cosmological constraints are currently the tightest available.
Practicing a Musical Instrument in Childhood is Associated with Enhanced Verbal Ability and Nonverbal Reasoning

Background In this study we investigated the association between instrumental music training in childhood and outcomes closely related to music training as well as those more distantly related. Methodology/Principal Findings Children who received at least three years (M = 4.6 years) of instrumental music training outperformed their control counterparts on two outcomes closely related to music (auditory discrimination abilities and fine motor skills) and on two outcomes distantly related to music (vocabulary and nonverbal reasoning skills). Duration of training also predicted these outcomes. Contrary to previous research, instrumental music training was not associated with heightened spatial skills, phonemic awareness, or mathematical abilities. Conclusions/Significance While these results are correlational only, the strong predictive effect of training duration suggests that instrumental music training may enhance auditory discrimination, fine motor skills, vocabulary, and nonverbal reasoning. Alternative explanations for these results are discussed.
A 15-year followup of 646 schizophrenic outpatients.

The 15-year hospitalization course of 646 chronic schizophrenic outpatients treated between 1958 and 1963 was determined using records of the research clinic, the Kings County Psychiatric Hospital, and the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene. The cohort was heterogeneous with regard to previous history of hospitalization: 20.6 percent had never been hospitalized, 22.0 percent had experienced only crisis admissions, and 57.4 percent had experienced long-term psychiatric hospitalization. The results indicate that 58.8 percent were hospitalized subsequent to project entry. A relationship was observed between previous history and hospitalization and hospitalization during the followup period. Patients with no previous history of hospitalization was less likely to be hospitalized than patients with crisis admissions only, who in turn were less likely to be hospitalized than patients with a history of hospitalization in a long-term psychiatric treatment facility (39.1 percent vs. 53.5 percent vs. 67.9 percent; p less than .001). The implications of these findings for future followup studies are discussed.
Analysis of human antibodies to erythrocyte binding antigen 175 peptide 4 of Plasmodium falciparum.

BACKGROUND The IgG1 and IgG3 antibodies are considered cytophilic and protective against Plasmodium falciparum, whereas IgG2 and IgG4 are thought to block protective mechanisms. OBJECTIVES The main objective was to measure antibodies directed against erythrocyte binding antigen-175 (EBA-175) peptide 4 and analyze the relationship between such antibodies and clinical malaria attack. METHODS Using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, a retrospective analysis of naturally acquired antibodies to synthetic peptide from EBA-175 peptide 4 has been carried out in 158 school children from the village of Dienga in Gabon. RESULTS The overall prevalence rates of antibodies to EBA-175 peptide 4 were 85.2%, 66.8%, 52.6%, 71.6% and 64.0% for total IgG, IgG1, IgG2, IgG3 and IgG4, respectively. Protection from clinical malaria, determined after a prospective 1-year study, was associated with the levels of IgG and IgG1 antibodies that increased with age. CONCLUSION Together, these data suggest that age/exposure-related acquisition of anti-EBA-175 antibodies may contribute to the development of clinically protective immunity and could be taken into account in malaria control strategies when they are confirmed.
Geometric evolution equations for order parameters

Energy-decreasing continuum flows of geometric order parameters are considered. The dynamics of pattern formation for an arbitrary geometric quantity is derived using a generalization of Darcy’s law based on the geometric nature of the order parameter. We consider flows in both Lagrangian and Eulerian formulations. The Lagrangian formulation includes a dissipative modification of fluid mechanics. Eulerian equations for self-organization of scalars, 1-forms and 2-forms are shown to reduce to nonlocal characteristic equations. We identify singular solutions of these equations corresponding to collapsed (clumped) states and discuss their evolution.
A Multitask Learning Approach to Document Representation using Unlabeled Data

Text categorization is intrinsically a supervised learning task, which aims at relating a given text document to one or more predefined categories. Unfortunately, labeling such databases of documents is a painful task. We present in this paper a method that takes advantage of huge amounts of unlabeled text documents available in digital format, to counter balance the relatively smaller available amount of labeled text documents. A Siamese MLP is trained in a multi-task framework in order to solve two concurrent tasks: using the unlabeled data, we search for a mapping from the documents' bag-of-word representation to a new feature space emphasizing similarities and dissimilarities among documents; simultaneously, this mapping is constrained to also give good text categorization performance over the labeled dataset. Experimental results on Reuters RCV1 suggest that, as expected, performance over the labeled task increases as the amount of unlabeled data increases.
Head Start Teachers’ Attitudes and Perceived Competence Toward Inclusion

The purpose of this article is to share findings about Head Start teachers’ attitudes and perceived competence toward inclusion based on data gathered from 41 instructional professionals in 18 Head Start classrooms using surveys and interviews. Results showed that all of the participating teachers agreed with inclusion and identified several benefits that students and teachers could obtain from inclusion. However, teachers’ ratings on their skills and knowledge in using inclusive practices were significantly lower than their ratings on attitudes and beliefs toward inclusion. The teachers also identified several challenges (e.g., limited resources, difficulties in individualization) that they had in inclusive classrooms. Based on the results, suggestions for research and implications for practice are discussed.
Enhancing access privacy of range retrievals over B+-trees

Users of databases that are hosted on shared servers cannot take for granted that their queries will not be disclosed to unauthorized parties. Even if the database is encrypted, an adversary who is monitoring the I/O activity on the server may still be able to infer some information about a user query. For the particular case of a B+-tree that has its nodes encrypted, we identify properties that enable the ordering among the leaf nodes to be deduced. These properties allow us to construct adversarial algorithms to recover the B+-tree structure from the I/O traces generated by range queries. Combining this structure with knowledge of the key distribution (or the plaintext database itself), the adversary can infer the selection range of user queries. To counter the threat, we propose a privacy-enhancing PB+-tree index which ensures that there is high uncertainty about what data the user has worked on, even to a knowledgeable adversary who has observed numerous query executions. The core idea in PB+-tree is to conceal the order of the leaf nodes in an encrypted B+-tree. In particular, it groups the nodes of the tree into buckets, and employs homomorphic encryption techniques to prevent the adversary from pinpointing the exact nodes retrieved by range queries. PB+-tree can be tuned to balance its privacy strength with the computational and I/O overheads incurred. Moreover, it can be adapted to protect access privacy in cases where the attacker additionally knows a priori the access frequencies of key values. Experiments demonstrate that PB+-tree effectively impairs the adversary's ability to recover the B+-tree structure and deduce the query ranges in all considered scenarios.
Mixing beliefs among interacting agents

We present a model of opinion dynamics in which agents adjust continuous opinions as a result of random binary encounters whenever their difference in opinion is below a given threshold. High thresholds yield convergence of opinions towards an average opinion, whereas low thresholds result in several opinion clusters: members of the same cluster share the same opinion but are no longer influenced by members of other clusters.
Improvement of Tactile Discrimination Performance and Enlargement of Cortical Somatosensory Maps after 5 Hz rTMS

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is increasingly used to investigate mechanisms of brain functions and plasticity, but also as a promising new therapeutic tool. The effects of rTMS depend on the intensity and frequency of stimulation and consist of changes of cortical excitability, which often persists several minutes after termination of rTMS. While these findings imply that cortical processing can be altered by applying current pulses from outside the brain, little is known about how rTMS persistently affects learning and perception. Here we demonstrate in humans, through a combination of psychophysical assessment of two-point discrimination thresholds and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), that brief periods of 5 Hz rTMS evoke lasting perceptual and cortical changes. rTMS was applied over the cortical representation of the right index finger of primary somatosensory cortex, resulting in a lowering of discrimination thresholds of the right index finger. fMRI revealed an enlargement of the right index finger representation in primary somatosensory cortex that was linearly correlated with the individual rTMS-induced perceptual improvement indicative of a close link between cortical and perceptual changes. The results demonstrate that repetitive, unattended stimulation from outside the brain, combined with a lack of behavioral information, are effective in driving persistent improvement of the perception of touch. The underlying properties and processes that allow cortical networks, after being modified through TMS pulses, to reach new organized stable states that mediate better performance remain to be clarified.
Limitations of the SSIM quality metric in the context of diagnostic imaging

Lossy image compression is increasingly used in medical applications, but great care must be taken to ensure that no diagnostically relevant features are altered. Guidelines based on compression ratios are often use to mitigate this issue, but are criticized due to the considerable compressibility variations between images. Objective image quality assessment metrics should be used instead, but the most common, mean squared error, is known to be poorly correlated with our perception of quality. Structural similarity (SSIM) is probably currently the most popular alternative, but it is also increasingly criticized. Using computed tomography simulations, this paper shows some of the limitations of SSIM when used with medical images: uniform pooling, distortion underestimation near hard edges, instabilities in regions of low variance and insensitivity in regions high intensities. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates the effect of these limitations when SSIM is used to bound compression in a block coder such as JPEG 2000.
Welfare State Attitudes and Support for Social Europe: Spillover or Obstacle?

Abstract This study investigates how support for Social Europe is related to citizens’ welfare attitudes. On the one hand, welfare attitudes can spill over from the national to the European level, given that Social Europe aims to achieve similar goals to those of national welfare states. On the other hand, support for the welfare state can be an obstacle, if citizens perceive the nation state and the European Union as competing or substituting governance levels. Using data from the 2014 Belgian National Election Study, we take a multidimensional approach to Social Europe, capturing attitudes toward social regulations, member state solidarity, European social citizenship, and a European social security system. Results demonstrate that citizens who are more positive about the welfare state are also more supportive of Social Europe. However, positive welfare attitudes do not affect all dimensions of Social Europe to the same extent. The spillover effect of support for basic welfare state principles is strongest for policy instruments of Social Europe that are less intrusive to national welfare states (EU social regulations). By contrast, welfare state critique has a stronger impact on support for more intrusive instruments (European social citizenship).
AMPK Subcellular Localisation in Dictyostelium discoideum

The Dictyostelium discoideum AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) snfA subcellular localization was studied in AX2 and stable HPF strains by use of AMPK antipeptide antibody and goat anti-rabbit Alexa-Flour 488-conjugated IgG antibody. The AMPK exhibited cytosolic localization patterns and uniform focalised concentrations in wild type and the strains alike. Constitutive activation and attenuation of the α subunit expression did not affect subcellular distribution of AMPK. However, snfA expression was more intense in strains in which AMPK was constitutively active compared with the AX2 but lesser in attenuation strains. The localisation of the snfA reinforced the putative standing that it had a plethora of cytoplasmic functions. Moreover, the oxidative cellular function would require a ubiquitous system and might coordinately regulate responses to metabolic requirements. Furthermore, the developmental phases of the life cycle would support the cytosolic localization; and since organelles were potentially reorganized or removed entirely during the transition from vegetative living to fruiting body morphology. This study provided insight into the subcellular distribution of AMPK in Dictyostelium discoideum. We demonstrated that AMPK localization was steady in AX2 and derived strains whether constitutively active or anti-sense inhibited depicting extreme genetic states.
Multi-objective optimisation using S-metric selection: application to three-dimensional solution spaces

The S-metric or hypervolume measure is a distinguished quality measure for solution sets in Pareto optimisation. Once the aim to reach a high S-metric value is appointed, it seems to be promising to directly incorporate it in the optimisation algorithm. This idea has been implemented in the SMS-EMOA, an evolutionary multi-objective optimisation algorithm (EMOA) using the hypervolume measure within its selection operator. Solutions are rated according to their contribution to the dominated hypervolume of the current population. Up to now, the SMS-EMOA has only been applied to functions with two objectives. The work at hand extends these studies, by surveying the behaviour of the algorithm on three-objective problems. Additionally, a new efficient algorithm for the computation of the contributions to the dominated hypervolume in three-dimensional solution spaces is presented. Different variants of selection operators are proposed. Among these, a new one is presented that rates a solution concerning the number of solutions dominating it. So, solutions in less explored regions are preferred. This rating is an efficient alternative to the S-metric criterion whenever a selection among dominated solutions has to be made. Comparative studies on standard benchmark problems show that the SMS-EMOA clearly outperforms other well established EMOA. First results on a challenging real-world problem have been obtained, namely the multipoint design of an airfoil involving three objectives and nonlinear constraints. Not only a clear improvement of the baseline design but a good coverage of the Pareto front with a small limited number of points has been achieved.
Systemic Risk, Contagion, and Financial Networks: A Survey

The recent crisis has highlighted the crucial role that existing linkages among banks and financial institutions plays in channeling and amplifying shocks hitting the system. The structure and evolution of such web of linkages can be fruitfully characterized using concepts borrowed from the theory of (complex) networks. This paper critically surveys recent theoretical work that exploits this concept to explain the sources of contagion and systemic risk in financial markets. We taxonomize existing contributions according to the impact of network connectivity, bank heterogeneity, existing uncertainty in financial markets, portfolio composition of the banks. We end with a discussion of the most important challenges faced by theoretical network-based models of systemic risk. These include a better understanding of the causal links between network structure and the likelihood of systemic risk and increasingly using the empirical knowledge about real-world financial-network structures to calibrate theoretical models.
Variable Clinical Presentations of Nasal and Waldeyer Ring Natural Killer/T-Cell Lymphoma

Purpose: To determine the clinical characteristics, prognosis, and treatment outcome for patients with nasal natural killer (NK)/T-cell lymphoma (N-NKTL) and Waldeyer ring NK/T-cell lymphoma (WR-NKTL). Experimental Design: A total of 145 patients with N-NKTL and 95 patients with WR-NKTL were compared. Results: Compared with N-NKTL, WR-NKTL exhibited distinct differences in clinical features with a propensity for nodal involvement, more advanced stages, low elevated lactate dehydrogenase, intermediate chemosensitivity, and a favorable prognosis. Compared with patients with WR-NKTL, patients with N-NKTL were associated with a lower overall response (54% versus 89%) and higher persistent or progressive disease after initial chemotherapy (46% versus 11%; P = 0.000). The 5-year overall survival and progression-free survival rates were 67% and 56% for N-NKTL and 65% and 47% for WR-NKTL, respectively. Patients with stage II WR-NKTL showed favorable prognosis compared with those with stage II N-NKTL. Compared with radiotherapy alone, patients with early-stage WR-NKTL that received radiotherapy and chemotherapy showed a superior progression-free survival and improved overall survival. In contrast, the addition of chemotherapy to radiotherapy did not provide any survival benefit for patients with early-stage N-NKTL. Conclusions: N-NKTL and WR-NKTL represent heterogeneous groups with variable clinical features, responses, prognosis, and treatment options.
Business and Default Cycles for Credit Risk

Various economic theories are available to explain the existence of credit and default cycles. There remains empirical ambiguity, however, as to whether these cycles coincide. Recent papers suggest by their empirical research set-up that they do, or at least that defaults and credit spreads tend to co-move with macroeconomic variables. If true, this is important for credit risk management as well as for regulation and systemic risk management. In this paper, we use 1933-1997 US data on real GDP, credit spreads and business failure rates to shed new light on the empirical evidence. We use a multivariate unobserved components framework to disentangle credit and business cycles. We distinguish two types of cycles in the data, corresponding to periods of around 6 and 11-16 years, respectively. Cyclical co-movements between GDP and business failures mainly arise at the longer frequency. At the higher frequency of 6 years, co-cyclicality is less clear-cut. We also show that spreads reveal a positive and negative co-cyclicality with failure rates and GDP, respectively. This pattern disappears, however, if we concentrate on the post World War II period. We comment on the implications of our findings for credit risk management. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.