Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Media Capital and the Representation of South Asian Muslims in the British Press: An Ideological Analysis

This paper is a theoretical attempt to explain the ideological nature of anti-Muslim discourse found in the British press. It is argued that dominant media capital, that is held in ever fewer hands, seeks to subvert South Asian Muslims by endeavouring to de ne an explicitly negative view of Islam. The development has been especially pertinent since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the end of the Cold War that effectively came with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The paper is based on an evaluation of intricate historical and contemporary debates, undertaking an assessment of the economic and social marginalisation of South Asian Muslims and the way in which ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is manufactured in the British press, much to the detriment of otherwise disadvantaged ethnic minority groups in an increasingly xenophobic society. The idea of Islamophobia is certainly not new. It has existed since the dawn of Islam. It is at the end of the twentieth century, however, with Islam as the fastest growing religion on the globe that greatest anti-Muslim sentiment is found in the British press. This paper is an attempt to theoretically explain the way in which newspapers in Britain represent Islam and considers the impact and implications for Muslims in Britain and throughout the rest of the globe. The paper begins with a delineation of historical developments pertaining to the migration of British South Asian Muslims, determining the nature of settlement and community expansion. It is followed by an examination of the newspaper industry, how ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ are constructed in the press, and the resultant position of South Asian Muslim minorities within the content of national British newspapers. The empirical basis for this paper originates from events portrayed in British newspapers on British South Asian and other Muslims since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. As such, it forms part of a wider attempt to explore the processes of misrepresentation and exclusion of Muslims by large media capital.
More Missing Variables: A Response to Shale Horowitz

Shale Horowitz’s assessment of the existing quantitative literature on ethnic war is to be welcomed. Horowitz develops a number of important insights that the data-based community would do well to respond to. Certainly he is right that ethnic civil wars have different causes than non-ethnic ones, so lumping all civil wars together is theoretically incoherent: at best, ‘estimated statistical relations and significance levels may be distorted and weakened’. Horowitz is right that models lumping together short-term and long-term influences, and indirect and direct influences, and factors that operate on single and multiple pathways, also generate misleading or hard-to-interpret results; and he is right that most statistical studies need to pay more attention to elite preferences and to external support for opposing groups. Horowitz is too kind to the existing quantitative literature, however, when he asserts that it involves ‘efforts to construct an exhaustive list of explanatory variables’. This is far from the case. As Horowitz himself notes, for example, leaders’ preferences are critically important in determining the actions of states and ethnic groups, but measures of these preferences are rarely included in quantitative studies of ethnic war. The reason for the exclusion is obvious: data sets on leaders’ preferences do not currently exist, and it would be not only expensive but also conceptually difficult to measure them. Databased scholars understandably go ahead and analyze the data they can get, but in doing so are not always mindful of the massive missing-data problems, or of the problems with the data that do exist. To take one example of the latter, I see no theoretical reason to expect any consistent relationship between ethnic war and ethno-linguistic fractionalization. Donald Horowitz (1985) suggested decades ago that ethnic issues tend to aggregate at the national level into a single, usually binary, cleavage; more fractionalization does not necessarily generate more or more intense conflicts, as long as there is some ethnic diversity. This variable gets so much attention because it is measured, not because it is theoretically important. Given these problems with existing data sets, continual reexamination of them may end up emulating the mythical drunk looking for his keys under the lamppost because the light is good there, even though he actually lost the Ethnopolitics, Vol. 7, Nos. 2–3, 333–336, June–September 2008
Public Opinion in Puerto Rico on Alcohol Control Policies

This article discusses the first study to assess public opinion of alcohol policies in Puerto Rico. In 2001, a telephone survey of 514 adults on the island assessed levels of support for 20 alcohol control policies covering five domains: (a) raising alcohol taxes, (b) restricting alcohol consumption in public places, (c) punishing adult providers of alcohol, (d) restricting youth access to alcohol, and (e) restricting marketing of alcohol. Results show high-level support for all alcohol policies, especially for restrictions on alcohol consumption in public places (93% to 95% support) and increases in alcohol taxes earmarked for alcohol treatment, prevention, and education (92% support). Multiple regression analyses reveal older respondents, compared to younger respondents, and respondents reporting lower levels of alcohol consumption were more supportive of alcohol control policies. Results demonstrate a willingness in Puerto Rico to consider public policy solutions to social and health problems associated with drinking.
E-ducating the gaze: the idea of a poor pedagogy

Educating the gaze is easily understood as becoming conscious about what is ‘really’ happening in the world and becoming aware of the way our gaze is itself bound to a perspective and particular position. However, the paper explores a different idea. It understands educating the gaze not in the sense of ‘educare’ (teaching) but of ‘e-ducere’ as leading out, reaching out. E-ducating the gaze is not about getting at a liberated or critical view, but about liberating or displacing our view. It is not about becoming conscious or aware, but about becoming attentive, about paying attention. E-ducating the gaze, then, is not depending on method, but relying on discipline; it does not require a rich methodology, but asks for a poor pedagogy, i.e. for practices which allow to expose ourselves. One example of such practice is that of walking. Consequently e-ducating the gaze could be about an invitation to go walking. This idea is explored b way of a comment on two quotations, one by Walter Benjamin and one by Michel Foucault.
Leadership and Creative Performance Behaviors in R&D Laboratories

The present study examines the direct relationship between leadership and creative performance behaviors as well as the mediating role of justice perceptions for this relationship in a R&D context. Data were collected using a survey questionnaire from 482 scientists working in 11 public-owned Indian R&D laboratories. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships between the study variables. The study found evidence for both direct and indirect relationships between leadership and creative performance behaviors. Justice perceptions partially mediate the relationship between leadership and creative performance behaviors. The study presents a process model of creativity linking leadership to creative performance behaviors through employee justice perceptions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Secondary chemicals protect mould from fungivory

The vast repertoire of toxic fungal secondary metabolites has long been assumed to have an evolved protective role against fungivory. It still remains elusive, however, whether fungi contain these compounds as an anti-predator adaptation. We demonstrate that loss of secondary metabolites in the soil mould Aspergillus nidulans causes, under the attack of the fungivorous springtail Folsomia candida, a disadvantage to the fungus. Springtails exhibited a distinct preference for feeding on a mutant deleted for LaeA, a global regulator of Aspergillus secondary metabolites. Consumption of the mutant yielded a reproductive advantage to the arthropod but detrimental effects on fungal biomass compared with a wild-type fungus capable of producing the entire arsenal of secondary metabolites. Our results demonstrate that fungal secondary metabolites shape food choice behaviour, can affect population dynamics of fungivores, and suggest that fungivores may provide a selective force favouring secondary metabolites synthesis in fungi.
Automated recognition of retroviral sequences in genomic data—RetroTector©

Eukaryotic genomes contain many endogenous retroviral sequences (ERVs). ERVs are often severely mutated, therefore difficult to detect. A platform independent (Java) program package, RetroTector© (ReTe), was constructed. It has three basic modules: (i) detection of candidate long terminal repeats (LTRs), (ii) detection of chains of conserved retroviral motifs fulfilling distance constraints and (iii) attempted reconstruction of original retroviral protein sequences, combining alignment, codon statistics and properties of protein ends. Other features are prediction of additional open reading frames, automated database collection, graphical presentation and automatic classification. ReTe favors elements >1000-bp long due to its dependence on order of and distances between retroviral fragments. It detects single or low-copy-number elements. ReTe assigned a ‘retroviral’ score of 890–2827 to 10 exogenous retroviruses from seven genera, and accurately predicted their genes. In a simulated model, ReTe was robust against mutational decay. The human genome was analyzed in 1–2 days on a LINUX cluster. Retroviral sequences were detected in divergent vertebrate genomes. Most ReTe detected chains were coincident with Repeatmasker output and the HERVd database. ReTe did not report most of the evolutionary old HERV-L related and MalR sequences, and is not yet tailored for single LTR detection. Nevertheless, ReTe rationally detects and annotates many retroviral sequences.
Genetic variants and environmental factors associated with hormonal markers of ovarian reserve in Caucasian and African American women

BACKGROUND The ovarian reserve (number and quality of oocytes) is correlated with reproductive potential as well as somatic health, and is likely to have multiple genetic and environmental determinants. Several reproductive hormones are closely linked with the oocyte pool and thus can serve as surrogate markers of ovarian reserve. However, we know little about the underlying genes or genetic variants. METHODS We analyzed genetic variants across the genome associated with two hormonal markers of ovarian reserve, FSH and anti-Mullerian hormone, in a reproductively normal population of Caucasian (n = 232) and African American (n = 200) women, aged 25–45 years. We also examined the effects of environmental or lifestyle factors on ovarian reserve phenotypes. RESULTS We identified one variant approaching genome-wide significance (rs6543833; P= 8.07 × 10−8) and several nominal variants nearby and within the myeloid-associated differentiation marker-like (MYADML) gene, that were associated with FSH levels in African American women; these were validated in Caucasian women. We also discovered effects of smoking and oral contraceptive use on ovarian reserve phenotypes, with alterations in several reproductive hormones. CONCLUSIONS This work is the largest study on ovarian reserve in women of reproductive age and is the only genome-wide study on ovarian reserve markers. The genes containing or near the identified variants have no known roles in ovarian biology and represent interesting candidate genes for future investigations. The discovery of genetic markers may lead to better long-range predictions of declining ovarian function, with implications for reproductive and somatic health.
Distance metric learning for posteriorgram based keyword search

In this paper, we propose a neural network based distance metric learning method for a better discrimination in the sequence-matching based keyword search (KWS). In this technique, we conduct a version of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based similarity search on the speaker independent posteriorgram space. With this, we aim to compensate for the scarcity of the resources and overcome the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) term problem, which is one of the main issues for KWS on low-resource languages. This distance measure is then used in the DTW-based similarity search, as an alternative and in comparison to the widely and generally used distance metrics. The experiments ran on IARPA Babel Program's Turkish search data show that, the proposed system outperforms the baseline by 6.3% and when combined with the baseline system, the improvement reaches 44.9%.
In Vitro Biomechanical Studies of an Anterior Thoracolumbar Implant

After L1 corpectomy in T11–L3 human cadaveric spine, anterior thoracolumbar instrumentation with strut grafting restores spinal stability. T12–L2 angular rotation was measured in response to moments of 0.0, 1.5, 3.0, 4.5, and 6.0 Nm in flexion, extension, lateral bending, and axial rotation, respectively. The spines were tested: 1) intact; 2) after partial L1 corpectomy, grafting, and instrumentation (Profile plate, DePuy-AcroMed, Raynham, MA), with the wooden dowel graft screwed to the plate; 3) without graft screw fixation; and 4) after flexion–extension cyclic fatiguing for 5000 cycles at a load of ±3.0 Nm. Before and after fatiguing, the instrumented spine was significantly (p ≤ 0.05) stiffer than the intact spine in flexion, extension, and right and left lateral bending but not in axial rotation. There were no significant differences between the constructs with or without graft-to-plate fixation before or after fatigue. The instrumented spines were more rigid in bending away from the implant than bending toward the implant. Anterior spinal instrumentation with the Profile implant augments stiffness in the sagittal and coronal planes but not in the axial plane. Although graft-to-plate fixation may prevent graft migration into the canal, it does not contribute to spinal rigidity.
Microscopic Colitis: Epidemiology, Pathophysiology, Diagnosis and Current Management—An Update 2013

Microscopic colitis is a common cause of chronic diarrhea. Over the last years the incidence and the prevalence of microscopic colitis are rising and this rise is largely attributed to a rising awareness, and concomitantly an increasing number of diagnoses are made. Patients with microscopic colitis report watery, nonbloody diarrhea of chronic, intermittent, or chronic recurrent course. Following an unremarkable physical examination the diagnosis of microscopic colitis is made by colonoscopy, which shows essentially a normal colonic mucosa. Biopsies taken during the colonoscopy procedure will then finally establish the correct diagnosis. Histological workup can then confirm a diagnosis of microscopic colitis and can distinguish the two distinct histological forms, namely, collagenous colitis and lymphocytic colitis. Presently both forms are diagnosed and treated in the same way; thus the description of the two forms is not of clinical value, though this may change in future. Depending on the patients age and gender 10–30% of patients investigated for chronic diarrhea will be diagnosed with microscopic colitis if biopsies are taken. Microscopic colitis is most common in older patients, especially in female patients and is frequently associated with autoimmune disorders and the consumption of several drugs. This review summarizes the present knowledge of the epidemiology, the pathophysiology, and the diagnosis of microscopic colitis and discusses the former and the present treatment options.
Approximation Algorithms for Perishable Inventory Systems

We develop the first approximation algorithms with worst-case performance guarantees for periodic-review perishable inventory systems with general product lifetime, for both backlogging and lost-sales models. The demand process can be nonstationary and correlated over time, capturing such features as demand seasonality and forecast updates. The optimal control policy for such systems is notoriously complicated, thus finding effective heuristic policies is of practical importance. In this paper, we construct a computationally efficient inventory control policy, called the proportional-balancing policy, for systems with an arbitrarily correlated demand process and show that it has a worst-case performance guarantee less than 3. In addition, when the demands are independent and stochastically nondecreasing over time, we propose another policy, called the dual-balancing policy, which admits a worst-case performance guarantee of 2. We demonstrate through an extensive numerical study that both policies perform consistently close to optimal.
Thermolabile L-A virus-like particles from pet18 mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

pet18 mutations in Saccharomyces cerevisiae confer on the cell the inability to maintain either L-A or M double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs) at the nonpermissive temperature. In in vitro experiments, we examined the effects of pet18 mutations on the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase activity associated with virus-like particles (VLPs). pet18 mutations caused thermolabile RNA polymerase activity of L-A VLPs, and this thermolability was found to be due to the instability of the L-A VLP structure. The pet18 mutations did not affect RNA polymerase activity of M VLPs. Furthermore, the temperature sensitivity of wild-type L-A RNA polymerase differed substantially from that of M RNA polymerase. From these results, and from other genetic and biochemical lines of evidence which suggest that replication of M dsRNA requires the presence of L-A dsRNA, we propose that the primary effect of the pet18 mutation is on the L-A VLP structure and that the inability of pet18 mutants to maintain M dsRNA comes from the loss of L-A dsRNA.
The distribution of hypothalamic and extrahypothalamic vasotocinergic cells and fibers in the brain of a lizard, Gekko gecko: Presence of a sex difference

The distribution of vasotocin in the brain of the lizard Gekko gecko was studied with immunocytochemical methods. Vasotocinergic cells were found in the nucleus supraopticus, the nucleus paraventricularis, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in the rhombencephalon. Vasotocinergic fibers were found in the preoptic area, the lateral and ventral hypothalamus, and in many extrahypothalamic brain areas.
The Economic Value of Volunteer Work

Despite the socioeconomic interest that is associated with volunteer work, the practice of valuing it is limited, and few scientific advances have been made. In this context, this study first analyses why these advances are scarce, paying special attention to the limitations of micro- and macro-accounting systems, including volunteer work accounts. It then proposes a method with heuristic capacity for valuing the various economic dimensions of volunteer work. The third part of this article applies this proposal to social and environmental volunteer work in the Spanish region of Valencia. The conclusions bring to focus the fact that whereas the technical obstacles faced in conducting empirical analysis are not insurmountable, obstacles of a sociopolitical nature and of scientific mindsets continue to hinder the advance of research in this field of the social sciences.
Longitudinal Relationships Between Neuroticism, Avoidant Coping, and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in Adolescents Following the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in China

The Wenchuan earthquake, which occurred in southwestern China in May 2008, was a source of severe psychological distress to adolescents. This study explored the developmental trajectory of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and the longitudinal relationships between neuroticism, avoidant coping, and PTSD symptoms measured at three time points: 1 year (T1), 1.5 years (T2), and 2 years (T3) after the earthquake. The participants included 636 adolescents from several high schools located in the areas that were most severely affected by the earthquake. Structural equation modeling results revealed bidirectional effects between neuroticism, avoidant coping, and PTSD symptoms. More severe PTSD symptoms predicted higher levels of avoidant coping at T1–T2 and T2–T3 but only predicted higher levels of neuroticism at T1–T2. Higher levels of neuroticism at T1 predicted more severe PTSD symptoms at T1–T2, while higher levels of avoidant coping at T1 predicted more severe PTSD symptoms at T2–T3.
Controller placement strategies for a resilient SDN control plane

Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides efficient network control and management by introducing a logically centralized control plane. However, outsourcing of the control plane intelligence to an SDN controller requires reliable switch-to-controller connection. This paper presents two strategies to address the Reliable Controller Placement (RCP) problem, which protect the control plane against single link and node failures and provide seamless failover by exploiting the principles of resilient routing. The first approach considers that switches have to be connected to a controller over two Disjoint Control Paths (RCP-DCP). The second approach considers that switches have to be connected to two Different Controller Replicas (RCP-DCR) over two disjoint paths. Both approaches are finding working and protection control paths of minimum length to enable fast and efficient failover. The two models have been compared with respect to the unprotected scenario, in terms of control path length, expected control path loss in different failure scenarios and average control path availability. The results show that both models RCP-DCP and RCP-DCR improve significantly the resilience of the control plane, while adding very limited penalty to the average control path length. If link failures are the dominating failures, both RCP-DCP and RCP-DCR offer similar performance and the best strategy depends on the topological characteristics and the number of the controllers in the network. RCP-DCR provides additional protection against controller failures and it shows better performance when node failures are dominating or are comparable to link failures.
Comparison of impairment and disability measures for assessing severity of, and improvement in, aphasia

The relationship between impairment and disability measures was examined for assessing initial severity of, and change in, aphasia. Twenty two aphasic adults were administered three aphasia tests at two points in time. Videotaped speech samples were collected and scored using Correct Information Unit and Main Concept analyses. Ten normal listeners viewed randomized, paired pre and post samples to provide a social judgement of change. Most impairment measures were significantly related, and most predicted disability scores. Change on most impairment measures was not related, and change on only one impairment measure predicted change in disability. Three of the connected speech measures predicted listener judgements. Thus, some redundancy was observed among measures in the ability to determine severity and measure change, but the results do not support one measure as an adequate replacement for another. Moreover, the relationship between change on the standardized impairment and disability measures and list.