Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Having an Anthropocene Body

What does it mean to have an Anthropocene body? The Anthropocene period is putatively defined by flows of hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon derivatives (fuels, plastics, fertilizers, etc.), and the very term ‘Anthropocene’ suggests an increasing awareness of the finitude and contingency of contemporary corporealities. This article explores the idea of modelling an Anthropocene body as a living/non-living metabolic process. While identifying bodies with molecules raises a host of problems, metabolism and hydrocarbon biomolecules display a gamut of forms of possession and ways of having a body. Conversion between living and non-living forms of possession can be traced in contemporary genomic science and particularly in synthetic biology as they engineer microbes to produce next-generation biofuels. In contrast to fossil fuels, these fuels derive from genomically re-engineered microbes that digest biomass or photosynthesize to produce hydrocarbons. The problematic contemporary production of these fuels might help us to articulate what it means to have a body as a metabolic manifold of living and non-living forms of possession.
Institutional Continuity and the Dutch Construction Industry Fiddle

The article deals with the question of how institutional continuity is realized. It presents an analysis of the continuation of the institution of pre-consultation in the Dutch construction industry over a period of nine years, after this was declared illegal as a consequence of European Union regulations. The analysis utilizes a structuration-based practice approach to institutionalization. The findings suggest that institutional continuity is a matter of a social mechanism which emerges as a consequence of the particular way in which practices are enacted, and which has the effect of repairing and/or concealing contradiction so that change is not initiated.
Depression and disease severity as correlates of everyday physical activity in heart transplant candidates

It is unclear to what extent patients awaiting heart transplantation (HTx) engage in physical activities. We examined the everyday physical activity and its associations with depressive symptoms and disease severity in 318 patients newly registered for HTx in the multi‐site study ‘Waiting for a New Heart’ (aged 53.5 ± 11.4 years, 18% female patients). Participants completed questionnaires assessing depressive symptomatology and physical activity (number of physical activities, caloric expenditure associated with each activity), and estimated the distance they were able to walk without a break. Medical parameters at the time of listing [e.g. peak oxygen consumption (peakVO2); the German Transplant Society Score (GTSS)] were provided by Eurotransplant. Almost 50% of patients engaged in activities of daily living (housework, walking), but <10% engaged in regular exercise. All physical activity measures correlated significantly with peakVO2 (Ps < 0.01). Elevated depression scores were present in 39% of patients. Controlling for confounding variables (e.g. peakVO2, diastolic blood pressure, GTSS, age), depressive symptomatology accounted for additional variance in all physical activity measures (Ps < 0.05). The association of depressive symptoms with reduced physical activity suggests two important perspectives: attempts to increase physical activity (especially in the area of daily living) might benefit from targeting depression, and increased physical activity might also help to reduce depressive symptoms.
The Effects of Distractions and Driver’s Age on the Type of Crash and the Injury Severity Sustained by Occupants Involved in a Crash

This thesis investigates the associations between crash outcomes, the existence and type of driver distraction as well as driver’s age. Only a limited number of studies have investigated driver distraction as it relates to crash outcomes. Moreover, these studies were limited to specific demographics (i.e., young drivers and police officers). This thesis addresses a gap in the literature by considering and comparing drivers of all ages. The crash outcomes considered in this thesis consist of the type of crash as well as the injury severity sustained by occupants (i.e., passengers and drivers) involved in the crash. An ordered logit model was built to predict the likelihood of severe injuries and a multinomial model was developed to predict the likelihood that a driver will be involved in one of three common crash types: singular, angular, and rearend. The models were built on a national crash database: U.S. General Estimates System (2003 to 2008). In these models, various factors (e.g., weather, driver’s gender, and speeding) have been statistically controlled for, but the main focus was on the interaction of driver’s age and distraction type. The findings of this thesis have implications for policy making and prioritizing capabilities of distraction-related safety systems.
Effects of Global Climate Change On Nigerian Agriculture: An Empirical Analysis

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the effects of global warming on Nigerian agriculture and estimation of the determinants of adaptation to climate change. Data used for this study are from both secondary and primary sources. The set of secondary sources of data helped to examine the coverage of the three scenarios (1971-1980; 1981-1990 and 1991-2000). The primary data set consists of 1500 respondents’ but only 1250 cases were useful. This study analyzed determinants of farm-level climate adaptation measures using a Multinomial choice and stochastic-simulation model to investigate the effects of rapid climatic change on grain production and the human population in Nigeria. The model calculates the production, consumption and storage of grains under different climate scenarios over a 10-year scenery. In most scenarios, either an optimistic baseline annual increase of agricultural output of 1.85% or a more pessimistic appraisal of 0.75% was used. The rate of natural increase of the human population exclusive of excess hunger-related deaths was set at 1.65% per year. Results indicated that hunger-related deaths could double if grain productions do not keep pace with population growth in an unfavourable climatic environment. However, Climate change adaptations have significant impact on farm productivity.
Academic Cross-Pollination: The Role of Disciplinary Affiliation in Research Collaboration

Academic collaboration is critical to knowledge production, especially as teams dominate scientific endeavors. Typical predictors of collaboration include individual characteristics such as academic rank or institution, and network characteristics such as a central position in a publication network. The role of disciplinary affiliation in the initiation of an academic collaboration between two investigators deserves more attention. Here, we examine the influence of disciplinary patterns on collaboration formation with control of known predictors using an inferential network model. The study group included all researchers in the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS) at Washington University in St. Louis. Longitudinal data were collected on co-authorships in grants and publications before and after ICTS establishment. Exponential-family random graph models were used to build the network models. The results show that disciplinary affiliation independently predicted collaboration in grant and publication networks, particularly in the later years. Overall collaboration increased in the post-ICTS networks, with cross-discipline ties occurring more often than within-discipline ties in grants, but not publications. This research may inform better evaluation models of university-based collaboration, and offer a roadmap to improve cross-disciplinary collaboration with discipline-informed network interventions.
Candidate Faces and Election Outcomes 1 Prepared for Publication on Andrew Gelman ’ s Blog

Recent research finds that inferences from candidate faces predict aggregate vote margins. Many have concluded this to mean that voters choose the candidate with the better face. We implement a survey with participant evaluations of over 167,000 candidate face pairings. Through regression analysis using individualand district-level vote data we find that the face-vote correlation is explained by a relationship between candidate faces, incumbency, and district partisanship. We argue that the face-vote correlation is not just the product of simple voter reactions to faces, but also of party and candidate behavior that affects which candidates compete in which contests. Recent work in psychology demonstrates that the naive, rapid evaluations by survey participants of the facial competence of candidates linearly predict United States Congressional candidate vote share (Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, & Hall 2005). Todorov et al. (2005) showed college students the faces of candidates contesting United States House and Senate elections in 2000, 2002, and 2004, and asked them to unreflectively choose the more competent looking candidate in each contest. They find that the candidate more frequently selected as appearing competent won the actual election in 66.8 percent of House and 71.6 percent of Senate contests. They also find that the proportion of paired evaluations in which one candidate’s face is judged more competent than the opponent’s correlates to the difference in vote share between the two candidates in both the House (r = .40) and in the Senate (r = .44). In Figure 1 we reproduce Todorov et al.’s (2005) main finding using participant evaluations to predict Democratic vote share. Similar findings have subsequently shown that candidate faces predict gubernatorial elections (Benjamin & Shapiro 2006, Ballew II & Todorov 2007) and that executive faces predict corporate profits (Rule & Ambady 2008). Although Todorov et al. (2005) were careful to discuss their results as predictive rather than causal, there has been a tendency among popular commentators and some scholars to interpret the results as an indictment of the ability of American voters to make reasoned decisions. An item in The New York Times Magazine, writing about Little, Burriss, Jones, & Roberts (2007), declared that “Faces Decide Elections” (Skloot 2007), and a National Public Radio segment suggested we “[f]orget political polls . voters prefer candidates who look competent, even if they are not” (Hamilton 2005). In fact, some have implied the need for electoral reform so that voters will not be duped by candidates’ faces (Zebrowitz & Montepare 2005). Todorov et al. (2005) measure relative candidate facial competence in a laboratory environment. This innovative approach to measuring a candidate characteristic may have led We thank Alex Todorov for generously sharing with us his data.
Effect of Feedback on Base-Rate Utilization

The effect of direct training with feedback on a base-rate problem of the engineers-lawyers type is assessed. Analysis indicates that feedback leads to adjusted probability estimates closer to the Bayesian norm than those in the no-feedback training-only condition. For a second base-rate problem (the so called “divorce problem”), however, no effect of training was shown, even though thinking-aloud protocols for this problem showed that subjects mentioned base-rates more often in the feedback than in the no-treatment condition.
Visions for literacy: parents’ aspirations for reading in children with Down syndrome

Although children with Down syndrome (DS) can learn to read, few studies have explored parental perspectives on the reading development of this group of children. This article, written by Leila Ricci and Anna Osipova, from California State University, explores visions and expectations regarding reading held by parents of children with Down syndrome in the US. Parents of 50 children with DS (aged three to 13 years) completed a survey about their children's interest in reading and responded to open-ended questions inquiring about their views on their children's reading development. A majority of parents in this study described their children's positive attitude toward reading, stated their reading-related goals for their children, defined their children's relative strengths in reading, and shared strategies used in the home to promote literacy in this population. Parents pay close attention to and have high expectations for their children's reading achievement, and thereby would benefit from partnerships with informed educators willing and capable of teaching reading to children with DS.
A Concomitant Examination of the Relations of Perceived Racist and Sexist Events to Psychological Distress for African American Women

Conceptualizations of the role of racism and sexism in African American women's lives suggest that racism and sexism may have unique and interactive links to psychological distress. Path analysis was used to examine concomitantly these links for a sample of 133 African American university and community women. Respondents'·self-reported experiences of perceived racist and sexist events and psychological distress were gathered. Results indicated that perceived racist and sexist events correlated positively, and comparably, with psychological distress; but when examined concomitantly, only perceived sexist events accounted for unique variance in psychological distress. Furthermore, racist and sexist events did not interact to predict distress. The substantial correlation between reports of racist and sexist events and the overlap in their relations to psychological distress suggest that the constructs of racism and sexism may, at least in part, be fused for African American women.
A Simple Method for Estimating the Variation Among Sites Parameter of Substitution Rate

When the rate variation among sites is described by a gamma distribution, an important problem is how to estimate the shape parameter 01, which is an index of the degree of among-site rate variation. The parsimony-based methods for estimating (Y are simple but biased, i.e., (Y tends to be overestimated. On the other hand, the likelihood-based methods are asymptotically unbiased but take a huge amount of computational time. In this paper, we have developed a new method to solve this problem: we first estimate the expected number of substitutions at each site, which is corrected for multiple hits, and then estimate the parameter (Y. Our method is computationally as fast as the parsimony method, and the estimation accuracy is much higehr than that of parsimony and similar to that of the likelihood method.
Lipopolysaccharide Intranigral Injection Induces Inflammatory Reaction and Damage in Nigrostriatal Dopaminergic System

Abstract: The pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease is still poorly understood. To address the hypothesis that immunemediated events, such as microglial activation, may be involved in the dopaminergic neurodegeneration, we have studied the effect that intranigral injection of the immunostimulant lipopolysaccharide has on monoaminergic neurotransmitters in rats. Activation of microglial cells, visualized by immunohistochemistry with a specific monoclonal antibody, was already obvious 2 days after injection. In relation to the biochemical parameters studied, we found a significant decrease of dopamine levels in both the substantia nigra and striatum up to at least 21 days after intranigral injection of lipopolysaccharide. This result was supported by the decrease in tyrosine hydroxylase activity and the loss of tyrosine hydroxylase‐positive neuronal bodies, shown by immunohistochemistry. These alterations of the dopaminergic system did not reverse during the interval studied (21 days); conversely, the serotoninergic system suffered only transient damage. In addition, we found that the neurotoxic effect of lipopolysaccharide was not mediated by nitric oxide. Based on our results we suggest that the nigrostriatal dopaminergic system is susceptible to damage by inflammatory events and that these may be implicated in neurodegeneration processes such as Parkinson's disease.
The Syntax and Psycholinguistics of Bilingual Code Mixing.

Psychologists have traditionally focused on the functional separation of the two languages in the 'ideal' bilingual. However, recent studies on intrasentential code-switching, or Code Mixing (CM), show this to be a legitimate, highly structured bilingual communicative device with its own syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints. An examination of the syntactic properties of CM in particular the Dual Structure Constraint — reveals that CM is a highly sophisticated cognitive skill requiring an interactional bilingual competence. It is argued that CM throws new light on bilingual processing, e.g., the 'separate storage' hypothesis seems to be even less plausible, the 'assembly line' model of sentence production receives support, the view of CM as a simple subsitution of second language elements at surface structure level is rejected, and there seems to be a "comparison stage" in code-mixed sentence production.
The class imbalance problem in pattern classiﬁcation and learning

It has been observed that class imbalance (that is, signiﬁcant diﬀerences in class prior probabilities) may produce an important deterioration of the performance achieved by existing learning and classiﬁcation systems. This situation is often found in real-world data describing an infrequent but important case. In the present work, we perform a review of the most important research lines on this topic and point out several directions for further investigation
A Social Gradient in Fatal Opioids and Cocaine Related Overdoses?

Background To determine the existence of a social gradient in fatal overdose cases related to non-prescribed opioids and cocaine use, recorded in Luxembourg between 1994 and 2011. Methods Overdose cases were individually matched with four controls in a nested case-control study design, according to sex, year of birth, drug administration route and duration of drug use. The study sample, composed of 272 cases and 1,056 controls, was stratified according to a Social Inequality Accumulation Score (SIAS), based on educational attainment, employment, income, financial situation of subjects and the professional status of their father or legal guardian. Least squares linear regression analysis on overdose mortality rates and ridit scores were applied to determine the Relative Index of Inequality (RII) of the study sample. Results A negative linear relationship between the overdose mortality rate and the relative socioeconomic position was observed. We found a difference in mortality of 29.22 overdose deaths per 100 drug users in the lowest socioeconomic group compared to the most advantaged group. In terms of the Relative Inequality Index, the overdose mortality rate of opioid and cocaine users with lowest socioeconomic profiles was 9.88 times as high as that of their peers from the highest socioeconomic group (95% CI 6.49–13.26). Conclusions Our findings suggest the existence of a marked social gradient in opioids and cocaine related overdose fatalities. Harm reduction services should integrate socially supportive offers, not only because of their general aim of social (re)integration but crucially in order to meet their most important objective, that is to reduce drug-related mortality.
Rare variants in PPARG with decreased activity in adipocyte differentiation are associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes

Significance Genome sequencing of individuals in the population reveals new mutations in almost every protein coding gene; interpreting the consequence of these mutations for human health and disease remains challenging. We sequenced the gene PPARG, a target of antidiabetic drugs, in nearly 20,000 individuals with and without type 2 diabetes (T2D). We identified 49 previously unidentified protein-altering mutations, characterized their cellular function in human cells, and discovered that nine of these mutations cause loss-of-function (LOF). The individuals who carry these nine LOF mutations have a sevenfold increased risk of T2D, whereas individuals carrying mutations we classify as benign have no increased risk of T2D. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPARG) is a master transcriptional regulator of adipocyte differentiation and a canonical target of antidiabetic thiazolidinedione medications. In rare families, loss-of-function (LOF) mutations in PPARG are known to cosegregate with lipodystrophy and insulin resistance; in the general population, the common P12A variant is associated with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D). Whether and how rare variants in PPARG and defects in adipocyte differentiation influence risk of T2D in the general population remains undetermined. By sequencing PPARG in 19,752 T2D cases and controls drawn from multiple studies and ethnic groups, we identified 49 previously unidentified, nonsynonymous PPARG variants (MAF < 0.5%). Considered in aggregate (with or without computational prediction of functional consequence), these rare variants showed no association with T2D (OR = 1.35; P = 0.17). The function of the 49 variants was experimentally tested in a novel high-throughput human adipocyte differentiation assay, and nine were found to have reduced activity in the assay. Carrying any of these nine LOF variants was associated with a substantial increase in risk of T2D (OR = 7.22; P = 0.005). The combination of large-scale DNA sequencing and functional testing in the laboratory reveals that approximately 1 in 1,000 individuals carries a variant in PPARG that reduces function in a human adipocyte differentiation assay and is associated with a substantial risk of T2D.
Suicide and homicide by people with mental illness

Papers pp 1235, 1240 The national confidential inquiry into suicide and homicide by people with mental illness began in 1992 in response to concern about mental health services in the United Kingdom. The usefulness of the initial reports was limited by the disappointing case ascertainment rate.1–3 Two papers in this issue (pp 1235, 1240) 4 5 report the methods and results of Safer Services , the 1999 inquiry report.6 Case finding has now been much improved and the new report provides a valuable descriptive cross section of the characteristics of suicides and homicides in relation to the mental health services. About 1000 people who commit suicide each year (a quarter of all UK suicides) and about 40 of those who commit homicide (about 8% of all UK homicides) have had some contact with the mental health services in the year before death. In patients committing suicide comorbidity, including substance misuse, and previous self harm are common. In people convicted of homicide, personality …