Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A micromodel of voter choice: understanding the dynamics of Australian voter characteristics in a federal election

This study focuses on applying consumer-behavior theory to understand voter characteristics and electoral behavior. The focus is on developing a micromodel that incorporates demographics, voter involvement, political opinion leadership, political knowledge, confidence, and satisfaction. The study was undertaken in an election in Australia for a Federal Lower House of Representatives Seat. Data were gathered from a sample of registered voters, with the results showing strong support for the theory developed. The results indicated strong influences for demographics on voter involvement, resulting in a significant influence of involvement on political opinion leadership. Political opinion leadership was also shown to influence subjective voter knowledge and knowledge impacting on voter decision confidence. The findings also confirmed a strong difference in voter satisfaction depending on voter involvement. The findings have significant implications for political marketing and voter-behavior research. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Defining an agenda for the geography of children: review and prospect

There is still only a limited development of a solidly grounded social and cultural geography prepared to conceptualize children as a neglected social grouping undergoing various forms of sociospatial marginalization. Given the focus and momentum of the ‘new’ cultural geography, we contend that this is an apposite time to define an agenda for the geography of children, which not only takes into account earlier studies which can inform contemporary debate, largely drawn from an environmental psychology tradition, but which also recognizes the interface between sociology, anthropology and cultural studies and draws upon important work being undertaken by feminist and critical geographers. To date, much of the research on the geography of children has been blighted by fragmentation, narrow disciplinary perspectives and methodologies which do not sufficiently engage themselves with the lifeworld of children in the ‘here and now’. In this article we propose a working agenda based upon a set of seven generic propositions which highlight different aspects of children's relationship with their physical and built environment, beyond the home, school and playground. Our emphasis in this review is on work which examines the experiences of children and how they ‘see the world’ around them. We recognize, however, that part of what children see are structures which constrain them. These may include the adult values imprinted on the physical and built landscapes in which they live, or the social constraints of the adult gaze. We argue that research on the lives of children should not just be reported for its own sake, but should lead to outcomes which encourage empowerment, participation and self-determination consistent with levels of competence.
Immunohistochemical evaluation of microvascular rarefaction in hypertensive humans and in spontaneously hypertensive rats.

OBJECTIVE No data are presently available about changes in capillary density in the skeletal muscle and in the brain of spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) in relation to the development of hypertension. DESIGN AND METHODS We have investigated 4 week-old and 12 week-old SHR and age-matched normotensive Wistar-Kyoto controls (WKY). Microvessel density (MVD) in the cerebral cortex and in a skeletal muscle were evaluated in sections stained for CD31. We also evaluated MVD in the dermal tissue of normotensive subjects and essential hypertensive patients. Subcutaneous small resistance arteries were dissected and mounted in a micromyograph and the media to lumen ratio (M/L) was measured. RESULTS A significant reduction in MVD in the skeletal muscle and in the brain of SHR was clearly observed at 12 weeks of age, after the development of hypertension, but not at 4 weeks of age (pre-hypertensive condition). In hypertensive patients a significant reduction in the dermal MVD and an inverse correlation between M/L and MVD was observed. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that, in the brain and skeletal muscle of adult SHR after the development of hypertension, and in the derma of adult essential hypertensive patients microvascular rarefaction may occur.
They are all after you: investigating the viability of a threat model that involves multiple shoulder surfers

Many of the authentication schemes for mobile devices that were proposed lately complicate shoulder surfing by splitting the attacker's attention into two or more entities. For example, multimodal authentication schemes such as GazeTouchPIN and GazeTouchPass require attackers to observe the user's gaze input and the touch input performed on the phone's screen. These schemes have always been evaluated against single observers, while multiple observers could potentially attack these schemes with greater ease, since each of them can focus exclusively on one part of the password. In this work, we study the effectiveness of a novel threat model against authentication schemes that split the attacker's attention. As a case study, we report on a security evaluation of two state of the art authentication schemes in the case of a team of two observers. Our results show that although multiple observers perform better against these schemes than single observers, multimodal schemes are significantly more secure against multiple observers compared to schemes that employ a single modality. We discuss how this threat model impacts the design of authentication schemes.
Confiabilidade das medidas de arquitetura do músculo Vasto Lateral pela ultrassonografia

Reliability of the measurements of the muscle architecture variables by ultrasound are important references for applied studies of muscle mechanics. The aim this study was to analyze the reliability of measurements of Vastus Lateralis (VL) muscle thickness (MT), pennation angle (PA) and fiber length (FL). Ultrasound images were obtained in two days (N=14, 22 ± 1,75 years) with a total of sixty measurements in each subject. Reliability was determined by intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), coefficient of variation (CV) and typical error of measurement (TEM). Results show high reliability: MT (0,96 a 0,99), PA (0,83 a 0,99) and FL (0,80 a 0,99) ICC; MT (3,12 a 3,84%), PA (3,68 a 6,34%) and FL (3,98 a 6,33%) CV; MT (0,014 a 0,15mm), PA (0,18 a 0,59o) and FL (0,07 a 1,47mm) TEM. These measures should be considered in studies of the impact of conditioning programs in the architecture of the vastus lateralis muscle.
Analysis of the lytic activity of the Serpulina hyodysenteriae hemolysin

The hemolysins of Serpulina hyodysenteriae are active at 27 to 40 degrees C and pH 3 to 9 and are unaffected by enzymatic inhibitors. Pore formation was demonstrated by the inhibition of hemolysis with molecules of 2.0 to 2.3 nm in diameter and the release of 86rubidium from erythrocytes without hemoglobin release after exposure to native hemolysin.
Tag SNPs detect association of the CYP1B1 gene with primary open angle glaucoma

Purpose The cytochrome p450 family 1 subfamily B (CYP1B1) gene is a well known cause of autosomal recessive primary congenital glaucoma. It has also been postulated as a modifier of disease severity in primary open angle glaucoma (POAG), particularly in juvenile onset families. However, the role of common variation in the gene in relation to POAG has not been thoroughly explored. Methods Seven tag single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), including two coding variants (L432V and N543S), were genotyped in 860 POAG cases and 898 examined normal controls. Each SNP and haplotype was assessed for association with disease. In addition, a subset of 396 severe cases and 452 elderly controls were analyzed separately. Results There was no association of any individual SNP in the full data set. Two SNPs (rs162562 and rs10916) were nominally associated under a dominant model in the severe cases (p<0.05). A common haplotype (AGCAGCC) was also found to be nominally associated in both the full data set (p=0.048, OR [95%CI]=0.83 [0.69–0.90]) and more significantly in the severe cases (p=0.004, OR [95%CI]=0.68 [0.52–0.89]) which survives correction for multiple testing. Conclusions Although no major effect of common variation at the CYP1B1 locus on POAG was found, there could be an effect of SNPs tagged by rs162562 and represented on the AGCAGCC haplotype.
Bacterial social networks: structure and composition of Myxococcus xanthus outer membrane vesicle chains.

The social soil bacterium, Myxococcus xanthus, displays a variety of complex and highly coordinated behaviours, including social motility, predatory rippling and fruiting body formation. Here we show that M. xanthus cells produce a network of outer membrane extensions in the form of outer membrane vesicle chains and membrane tubes that interconnect cells. We observed peritrichous display of vesicles and vesicle chains, and increased abundance in biofilms compared with planktonic cultures. By applying a range of imaging techniques, including three-dimensional (3D) focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy, we determined these structures to range between 30 and 60 nm in width and up to 5 μm in length. Purified vesicle chains consist of typical M. xanthus lipids, fucose, mannose, N-acetylglucosamine and N-acetylgalactoseamine carbohydrates and a small set of cargo protein. The protein content includes CglB and Tgl outer membrane proteins known to be transferable between cells in a contact-dependent manner. Most significantly, the 3D organization of cells within biofilms indicates that cells are connected via an extensive network of membrane extensions that may connect cells at the level of the periplasmic space. Such a network would allow the transfer of membrane proteins and other molecules between cells, and therefore could provide a mechanism for the coordination of social activities.
Moderating Effects of Consumer Involvement and the Need for Cognition on Goal Framing

Goal framing effect refers to the finding that different ways of presenting the same communication content to a consumer tends to generate distinct levels of persuasion for the emitted message. This research is aimed at investigating the interaction between goal framing effect, consumer involvement and the Need for Cognition (NfC) on consumer decision making. Two experiments have been carried out to test the hypothesis that the level of persuasion for a promotional text elevates as consumer involvement increases, independent of the message frame or the NfC. Results showed that consumer’s involvement
Qualitatively different university student experiences of inquiry: Associations among approaches to inquiry, technologies and perceptions of the learning environment

There is variation in the university student experience of learning. Prior research has shown that factors that shape this include student characteristics, the learning context, student perceptions of that context and approaches to learning and their learning outcomes. In blended contexts, there is a need to identify variables which can explain why some students are more successful than others in order to shed light on why students in the same course completing the same activities in the same teaching environment experience these perhaps very differently and also achieve different outcomes. To address these issues, this study looks at first-year university students who were required to engage in online inquiry as a key part of their learning experience. This study offers a way of revealing qualitative differences in the student experience of learning in the students’ blended course. It suggests that differences in the quality of the experience can be revealed by variation in the quality of approaches to inquiry and learning technologies, differences in student perceptions of online workload and the integration of the class and online contexts. These differences were found to be logically and positively related to student achievement indicated by course marks, which provide implications for the design and teaching of courses in blended contexts.
Text-level Discourse Parsing with Rich Linguistic Features

In this paper, we develop an RST-style text-level discourse parser, based on the HILDA discourse parser (Hernault et al., 2010b). We significantly improve its tree-building step by incorporating our own rich linguistic features. We also analyze the difficulty of extending traditional sentence-level discourse parsing to text-level parsing by comparing discourse-parsing performance under different discourse conditions.
Donor-Shared Siblings or Genetic Strangers

Donor-shared sibling families have recently emerged. Families who conceived using the same anonymous donor are locating one another through websites designed to match children with their biogenetic half-siblings. Based on a survey of 587 parents with donor-conceived children, we discovered that a growing number of unrelated parents whose children are genetically related are organizing into durable groups. These groups mainly exist on the Internet where members can choose their level of participation. A smaller group has met offline, but most select one or two families they especially connect with. Overall, these families illustrate that genetics cannot be ignored. Whereas some respondents view donor-siblings as a latent affiliation—an insurance policy for future questions by their children—others have used the Internet as a social arena to connect and form relationships. In this new world, the Internet is altering how kinship is discovered and formed.
One Sentence One Model for Neural Machine Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) becomes a new state-of-the-art and achieves promising translation results using a simple encoder-decoder neural network. This neural network is trained once on the parallel corpus and the fixed network is used to translate all the test sentences. We argue that the general fixed network cannot best fit the specific test sentences. In this paper, we propose the dynamic NMT which learns a general network as usual, and then fine-tunes the network for each test sentence. The fine-tune work is done on a small set of the bilingual training data that is obtained through similarity search according to the test sentence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this method can significantly improve the translation performance, especially when highly similar sentences are available.
A dynamic analysis of the relationship among inflation, investment, population growth, export and economic growth in Pakistan

This paper investigates the relationship among inflation, investment, population, export and gross domestic product (GDP) in Pakistan. GDP is taken as dependent variable while inflation, investment, exports and population growth as independent variables. The results show Economic Growth in Pakistan has positive relation with investment, export, population and negative relation with inflation. The Paper suggests policy prescription that the government of Pakistan should encourage investment, export and effective labor force as these are necessary for the progress of the country and discourage inflation as it is harmful for progress of the country.
Motion mechanisms and cortical areas in human vision: psychophysics and fMRI

OUR visual world contains both luminance(first-order) and contrast-defined (secondorder) information. Distinct mechanisms underlying the perception of first-order and second-order motion have been proposed from electrophysiological, psychophysical and neurological studies. In this thesis psychophysical and human brain imaging (fMRI) experiments are described that support the notion of distinct mechanisms, but extend the previous studies by providing evidence for a functional dissociation and a relative cortical specialization for firstand second-order motion. Using psychophysical methods, a directional anisotropy was found for second-order but not first-order motion in peripheral vision. This anisotropy is interpreted as a functional dissociation implicating the second-order mechanism in optic flow processing. Identification of early visual cortical areas is a prerequisite to any functional assessment of these visual areas. To this aim a novel human brain mapping method has been developed which automatically segments early human retinotopic visual areas. Unlike previous methods this procedure does not depend on a cortical surface reconstruction and thereby greatly simplifies the analysis. In a combined psychophysical and fMRI study, distinct cortical regions, in occipital and parietal lobes, were preferentially activated by either firstor second-order motion. These results provide evidence for the idea that first-order motion is computed in V1 and second-order motion in later occipital visual areas. In addition the results suggest a functional dissociation of the two kinds of motion beyond the occipital lobe consistent with a role for the second-order mechanism in optic flow analysis.
Does the Internet Increase, Decrease, or Supplement Social Capital?

How does the Internet affect social capital? Do the communication possibilities of the Internet increase, decrease, or supplement interpersonal contact, participation, and community commitment? This evidence comes from a 1998 survey of 39,211 visitors to the National Geographic Society Web site, one of the first large-scale Web surveys. The authors find that people's interaction online supplements their face-to-face and telephone communication without increasing or decreasing it. However, heavy Internet use is associated with increased participation in voluntary organizations and politics. Further support for this effect is the positive association between offline and online participation in voluntary organizations and politics. However, the effects of the Internet are not only positive: The heaviest users of the Internet are the least committed to online community. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the Internet is becoming normalized as it is incorporated into the routine practices of everyday life.
Environmental destruction as (objectively) uneventful and (subjectively) irrelevant

This essay contributes to the recent criticism against individualism and cognitivism in environmental social scientific theorizing by conceptualizing two undertheorized phenomena related to environmental changes: uneventfulness and irrelevance. Under much of environmental predicament lies a process characterized by recurrent acts through which pieces of sociomateriality are taken from or added to a particular sociomaterial system. Such process not only produces cumulative sociomaterial changes, but also the corresponding withdrawals and additions lose their eventfulness over time. Elaborating on Theodore Schatzki’s work, complexity is built into the concept of practice rather than accounting for complexity with the interrelatedness of practices. Another part of the essay analyzes the subjectivity of the actor, focusing on the relevance structures of the ordinary citizens in the Global North. Environmental changes are imposed to the consciousness as intellectual problems, which tend to be incommensurate with the pragmatic necessities of everyday life. Applying Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological sociology to environmental phenomena opens up new avenues for empirical environmental sociology. Understanding the objective uneventfulness and subjective irrelevance associated with much of environmental changes helps explain the inactivity of the masses amid widespread attention on the environmental predicament.
‘Dig In’ to Social Capital: Community Gardens as Mechanisms for Growing Urban Social Connectedness

This article reports on research undertaken with members of a Melbourne urban community garden to explore the extent to which such a natural amenity provides opportunities for enhancing social capital. It is apparent even from this small qualitative study that membership of ‘Dig In’ community garden offers many benefits to its members. These benefits include increased social cohesion (the sharing of values enabling identification of common aims and the sharing of codes of behaviour governing relationships), social support (having people to turn to in times of crisis) and social connections (the development of social bonds and networks). However, the study indicates that, at least in the early stages of development, such benefits do not necessarily extend beyond the garden setting. This raises a question about the time required to develop high levels of social capital, and points to the need for further research into ‘time’ and ‘space’ aspects of community gardens.
Effect of Some Containers, Chemicals and Indigenous Materials on Incidence of Wheat Pests in Storage

The experiment was conducted to evaluate the effect of some containers, chemicals and indigenous materials for protection of wheat seed in storage at the Entomology Laboratory of Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University (SAU), Dhaka. Wheat seeds were stored in four types of containers (Tin kouta, earthen pot, plastic container and gunny bag) with two types of chemicals (Naphthalene and camphor) and two indigenous materials (neem leaf powder and sand). Among the different containers, the lowest population of grain moth (1.40-7.93), red flour beetle (6.40-35.33) and rice weevil (0.20-9.13) was recorded from the plastic containers. At the initial stage of storage, grain moth was dominant but red flour beetle was abundant at the middle and later stage of storage. Population of rice weevil was gradually increased with storage period. Considering the storage materials, the lowest population of grain moth (3.92-28.98), red flour beetle (7.58-43.08) and rice weevil (0.75-9.08) was found in naphthalene. Camphor had the similar population level of those three insect pests during the study period. Key words: Grain moth; rice weevil; red flour beetle; neem leaf powder; camphor; naphthalene. DOI: 10.3329/jard.v7i1. 4429 J Agric Rural Dev 7 (1&2), 107-113, June 2009
Residential Land Use, the Urban Heat Island, and Water Use in Phoenix: A Path Analysis

While previous studies have shown that urban heat islands (UHI) tend to increase residential water use, they have not yet analyzed the feedbacks among vegetation intensity, diurnal temperature variation, water use, and characteristics of the built environment. This study examines these feedback relationships with the help of a path model applied to spatially disaggregated data from Phoenix, Arizona. The empirical evidence from the observations in Phoenix suggests the following: (1) impervious surfaces contribute to increased residential water use by exacerbating UHI; (2) larger lots containing pools and mesic vegetation increase water demand by reducing diurnal temperature difference; and (3) smart design of urban environments needs to go beyond simplistic water body- and vegetation-based solutions for mitigating uncomfortably high temperatures and consider interactions between surface materials, land use, UHI, and water use.
Tourism, cultural resources and regional competitiveness: a case study in Romania

For many regional economies tourism can offer effective solutions to the question of regional competitiveness. As a niche market, cultural tourism responds at present to a growing demand, more and more travellers ranking arts, heritage and other cultural activities as one of the main reasons of travelling. This paper proposes a case study in Romania, which discusses the current state and the perspectives of cultural tourism development at national and regional level. A special emphasis will be put on the possibility to correlate the policy measures supporting tourism development with those addressing the creation of a competitive specialisation profile, infrastructure improvement, sustainability, institutional capacity building, financial management and control so as to contribute to economic recovery and reducing intra and interregional disparities.