Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Feminist meanings and the (de)politicization of the lexicon

ABSTRACT In arguing for the necessity of gender-based language reform, feminist theorists have generally assumed that language is not a neutral and transparent means of representing reality. Rather, language is assumed to codify an androcentric worldview. While sexist language clearly reflects sexist social practices, the continuing existence of such practices throws into question the possibility of successful language reform. Because linguistic meanings are, to a large extent, socially constructed and constituted, terms initially introduced to be nonsexist and neutral may lose their neutrality in the mouths of a sexist speech community and/or culture. In this article we first examine the way in which nonsexist innovations have been appropriated by a sexist speech community. More specifically, we examine uses of neutral generics such as chairperson, spokesperson; singular they; he or she; and neutral titles such as Ms.; and we demonstrate that these terms are often not used nor interpreted in their intended (neutral) way. Rather, they are used in ways that maintain sexist stereotypes and distinctions. Then we examine the use of feminist linguistic innovations as they appear in the print media. We demonstrate the extent to which such terms get redefined and depoliticized by a speech community that is not predominantly feminist and is often sexist. (Language and gender, language and race, nonsexist language, gender-based language reform, neutral generics, discourse analysis)
On-board real-time optic-flow for miniature event-based vision sensors

This paper presents a novel, drastically simplified method to compute optic flow on a miniaturized embedded vision system, suitable on-board of miniaturized indoor flying robots. Estimating optic flow is a common technique for robotic motion stabilization in systems without ground contact, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Because of high computing power requirements to process video camera data, most optic flow algorithms are implemented off-board on PCs or on dedicated hardware, connected through tethered or wireless links. Here, in contrast, we present a miniaturized stand-alone embedded system that utilizes a novel neuro-biologically inspired event-based vision sensor (DVS) to extract optic flow on-board in real-time with minimal computing requirements. The DVS provides asynchronous events that resemble temporal contrast changes at individual pixel level, instead of full image frames at regular time intervals. Such a representation provides high temporal resolution while simultaneously reducing the amount of data to be processed. We present a simple algorithm to extract optic flow information from such event-based vision data, which is sufficiently efficient in terms of data storage and processing power to be executed on an embedded 32bit ARM7 microcontroller in real-time. The developed stand-alone system is small, lightweight and energy efficient, and is ready to serve as sensor for ego motion estimates based on optic flow in autonomous UAVs.
Graphic Forms in Network Television News

This study compares different forms of graphics—such as symbols, film, video and still photographs—used by CBS, ABC and NBC in 430 stories sampled in 1988. There were 674 graphics used by the networks in these stories, an average of 25 per evening news program. A total of 78% of the stories used some kind of visual, with ABC using more visuals than the other two networks. The study speculates on the potential influence of graphics in such areas as agenda-setting.
God, Love, and Health: Findings from a Clinical Study

This study identifies a significant health effect of a loving relationship with God. Based on work by Sorokin, an eight-item scale was developed and validated to assess what he termed religious love: the feeling of loving and being loved by God. Using a sample of 205 family practice outpatients, hierarchical OLS regression was used to investigate the effect of this construct on a standard self-rating of health. Several sets of factors were hypothesized to mediate the relationship between religious love and self-rated health: religious involvement, social resources, psychological resources, objective health status, and sociode-mographic factors. These effects were controlled for in six successive models. In the end, despite controlling for effects of 15 variables and scales that accounted for nearly 40% of the variance in self-rated health, the statistically significant association between religious love and self-rated health at baseline (β =.33, p <.001) remained strong, significant, and only marginally affected (β =.24, p < .05). These findings provide evidence that loving and being loved by God exerts a positive influence on perceptions of health.
Regulation of mammalian fatty-acid synthetase. The roles of carbohydrate and insulin.

The regulation of fatty-acid synthetase has been studied in liver, adipose tissue, and brain of diabetic and normal rats in relation to insulin administration and glucose or fructose feeding. The data indicate that: (1) insulin is not necessary for regulation of synthetase activity in liver but may be necessary in adipose tissue; (2) synthetase of liver can be regulated by carbohydrate, which can enter the glycolytic scheme in the absence of insulin (e.g., fructose), suggesting the possibility that regulation of synthetase may depend on the concentration of certain intermediates of the glycolytic pathway or beyond; (3) fructose feeding affects the synthetase by causing an increase in the rate of synthesis of fatty-acid synthetase; and (4) unlike fatty-acid synthetase of liver and adipose tissue, the enzyme of brain is unaffected by the diabetic state or by glucose or fructose feeding.
Relationships Between Personality and Organization Switching: Implications for Utility Estimates

This study examined individuals' tendencies to migrate from one organization to another (i.e., the propensity to switch employers). Previous researchers have suggested that switching organizations throughout the career span may be partially heritable and therefore related to individual differences in personality traits. If personality traits are indeed related to a tendency to turnover from organizations, this suggests that current procedures for calculating utility may be inaccurate. Using a database of 1081 individuals who have been in the workforce for several years, results indicated that personality traits measured by the Occupational Personality Questionnaire (non-ipsative; OPQn) were modestly related to organization switching (i.e., repeated moves from organization to organization). We found that higher scores on extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness-related traits were modestly correlated with more frequent organization switching. However, we demonstrate that these modest relationships can produce large inaccuracies in utility estimates.
Key Role of the Endothelial TGF-β/ALK1/Endoglin Signaling Pathway in Humans and Rodents Pulmonary Hypertension

Mutations affecting transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-β) superfamily receptors, activin receptor-like kinase (ALK)-1, and endoglin (ENG) occur in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). To determine whether the TGF-β/ALK1/ENG pathway was involved in PAH, we investigated pulmonary TGF-β, ALK1, ALK5, and ENG expressions in human lung tissue and cultured pulmonary-artery smooth-muscle-cells (PA-SMCs) and pulmonary endothelial cells (PECs) from 14 patients with idiopathic PAH (iPAH) and 15 controls. Seeing that ENG was highly expressed in PEC, we assessed the effects of TGF-β on Smad1/5/8 and Smad2/3 activation and on growth factor production by the cells. Finally, we studied the consequence of ENG deficiency on the chronic hypoxic-PH development by measuring right ventricular (RV) systolic pressure (RVSP), RV hypertrophy, and pulmonary arteriolar remodeling in ENG-deficient (Eng+/−) and wild-type (Eng+/+) mice. We also evaluated the pulmonary blood vessel density, macrophage infiltration, and cytokine expression in the lungs of the animals. Compared to controls, iPAH patients had higher serum and pulmonary TGF-β levels and increased ALK1 and ENG expressions in lung tissue, predominantly in PECs. Incubation of the cells with TGF-β led to Smad1/5/8 phosphorylation and to a production of FGF2, PDGFb and endothelin-inducing PA-SMC growth. Endoglin deficiency protected mice from hypoxic PH. As compared to wild-type, Eng+/− mice had a lower pulmonary vessel density, and no change in macrophage infiltration after exposure to chronic hypoxia despite the higher pulmonary expressions of interleukin-6 and monocyte chemoattractant protein-1. The TGF-β/ALK1/ENG signaling pathway plays a key role in iPAH and experimental hypoxic PH via a direct effect on PECs leading to production of growth factors and inflammatory cytokines involved in the pathogenesis of PAH.
Breakfast, Time, and “Breakfast Time”

What is occurring in practice worldwide, under the aegis of postmodern capitalism, is the increasing colonization of the times and spaces of people's everyday lives for the purposes of media audiencehood. But this process shouldn't be mistaken, in theory, as encompassing our “whole way of life,” not even in the postmodern world. Unless we succumb to the fallacy of conceiving modernity as a one-dimensional, totalized reality, then, we must remain sensitive to those spatio-temporal instances when/where the social exceeds the topography of consumption, where/when people enter into modes of interaction (still) not appropriated by, or which cannot be properly understood from the perspective of, their subject position(ing)s as media audiences.
Direct Prediction Methods on Lifetime Distribution of Organic Light-Emitting Diodes From Accelerated Degradation Tests

Accelerated degradation testing (ADT) expedites product degradation by stressing the product beyond its normal use. To extrapolate the product's reliability at use condition, the ADT requires a known functional link relating the harsh testing environment to the usual use environment. Practitioners are often faced with a great challenge to designate an explicit form of the stress-degradation relationship a priori in accelerated degradation models. In this paper, we propose three methods to make direct inference on the lifetime distribution itself without invoking arbitrary assumptions on the degradation model: delta approximation, multiple imputation of failure-times, and the lifetime distribution-based (LDB) method. The methods are easy to implement without computational difficulty, hence they have potential in a wide range of applications for estimating lifetime distributions from ADT data. We applied the methods to two ADT data sets including a real application of commercial organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). The analysis of the examples and simulation results suggests parametric LDB and multiple imputation method as more potential alternatives to traditional failure-time approaches, especially for the case where there is neither enough physical background, nor historical evidence supporting presumed relationships between stress and the parameters of the degradation model.
Geosphere

This paper presents the design and implementation of Geosphere, a physical- and link-layer design for access point-based MIMO wireless networks that consistently improves network throughput. To send multiple streams of data in a MIMO system, prior designs rely on a technique called zero-forcing, a way of "nulling" the interference between data streams by mathematically inverting the wireless channel matrix. In general, zero-forcing is highly effective, significantly improving throughput. But in certain physical situations, the MIMO channel matrix can become "poorly conditioned," harming performance. With these situations in mind, Geosphere uses sphere decoding, a more computationally demanding technique that can achieve higher throughput in such channels. To overcome the sphere decoder's computational complexity when sending dense wireless constellations at a high rate, Geosphere introduces search and pruning techniques that incorporate novel geometric reasoning about the wireless constellation. These techniques reduce computational complexity of 256-QAM systems by almost one order of magnitude, bringing computational demands in line with current 16- and 64-QAM systems already realized in ASIC. Geosphere thus makes the sphere decoder practical for the first time in a 4 × 4 MIMO, 256-QAM system. Results from our WARP testbed show that Geosphere achieves throughput gains over multi-user MIMO of 2× in 4 × 4 systems and 47% in 2 × 2 MIMO systems.
Media use and political participation reconsidered: the actual and perceived influence of political campaign messages

This study examines the actual and perceived effects of political advertising on the voting intention of less-experienced eligible voters. Elaborating on the demobilization, stimulation, and influence of presumed influence hypotheses, this study examines the effects of political disaffection, presumed influence, and political efficacy on political mobilization. The study analyzes the effects of political advertisements on 311 college voters. The results of the structural equation modeling (SEM) suggest that instead of demobilizing turnout, self-reported exposure to political advertisements boosts young voters' sense of political efficacy and stimulates their political participation by raising the degree to which they perceive that campaign advertisements affect other voters.
Classroom Effects of a Hybrid Universal and Indicated Prevention Program for Preschool Children: A Comparative Analysis Based on Social and Emotional Competence Screening

Research Findings: The current study's main aim was to implement a multifocused, community-based intervention for preventing conduct problems in preschool children. Our assumption was that the same intervention program could be delivered concomitantly as a universal prevention program for all children as well as an indicated prevention program for high-risk children selected after screening for social and emotional competencies development. We used a quasi-experimental design with a between-subjects variable (intervention vs. comparison) and a within-subjects variable (preintervention, postintervention, and 3-month follow-up). The efficacy of the intervention was assessed for high-risk children targeted by the indicated intervention as well as for moderate- and low-risk children, who received the universal intervention. Practice or Policy: First, our results demonstrate the capacity of classroom-based interventions, without added pull-out sessions, to generate significant changes in high-risk children's competencies as well as externalizing and internalizing problems. Second, similar results were found for the moderate-risk, but not the low-risk, group, and these data suggest that marginally at-risk children are the most likely to benefit from participating in universal interventions. And third, comparing data from social and emotional competence risk groups indicates that underdeveloped emotional competencies might have a prolonged negative effect on children's social skills, which increases as a function of higher risk status.
Weber’s Daoism: A failure of orthodoxy

The paper fills a gap in the discussion of The Religion of China by focusing on Weber’s treatment of Daoism. First, it presents an examination of Weber’s use of sources in his construction of Daoism and his location of mysticism and religion in the early Daoist text Daodejing. Second, his treatment of Daoism – and Confucianism – within the orthodox/heterodox framework is examined and shown to be a European projection inadequate for understanding Chinese state practices. Finally, it is shown that Weber’s approach prevents appreciation of the contribution of Daoist thought to a Chinese entrepreneurial spirit. By reformulating Weber’s argument concerning culture and economy, this important and neglected aspect of Daoism is highlighted.
An error estimate for a finite volume scheme for a diffusion–convection problem on a triangular mesh

We study here a finite volume scheme for a diffusion-convection equation on an open bounded set Ω of ℝ2, using a triangular mesh for the discretization of Ω. The 4-point numerical scheme is presented along with the geometrical assumptions on the mesh. An error estimate of order h on the discrete L2 norm is obtained, where h denotes the “size” of the mesh. The proof uses an estimate of order h of the consistency error on the fluxes and an estimate of the number of edges of the mesh between one given triangle and the boundary Ω. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Implementing Quality Improvements in Public Transport Margareta Friman

This study addresses two questions: (1) What effect does quality improvement have on satisfaction with public transport services? (2) What effect does quality improvement have on passengers’ perceived frequency of negative critical incidents? A representative sample was used of people 16 to 75 years old in the 13 regions in Sweden that were conducting quality improvements in public transport. Data were collected before and after implementation (n=2797). The before and after samples consisted of independent groups of respondents. The response rate was 54 percent. The main conclusion of the study is that the satisfaction people experience when using public transport services is influenced by quality improvements only to a limited extent. Furthermore, the effect was directionally opposite in that respondents reported less satisfaction and higher frequencies of negative critical incidents after the quality improvements had been implemented. Introduction Recent years have witnessed an emphasis on delivering high-quality services to customers using public transport (e.g., Cunningham, Young, and Kroeter 1995; Ieda et al. 2000). Empirical evidence exists from other services that support the link between quality improvements and customer satisfaction (e.g., Bolton and Drew Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2004 5
Experiential ‘hot’ knowledge and its influence on low-SES students' capacities to aspire to higher education

The Australian Government has recently signalled its intention to fund programs that assist in ‘raising’ the aspirations of low socio-economic status (SES) students. However, this objective can imply that low-SES students lack adequate aspirations for their future. This implication supports deficit views of low-SES students and elides the aspirations that families and communities do hold for their futures. In response, this paper pursues a more complex exploration of how access to different kinds of social, cultural and economic resources affects students' capacities to articulate and pursue their aspirations. It draws on Appadurai's notion of the ‘capacity to aspire’, which repatriates aspirations into the cultural domain in order to pursue a more collective analysis than is possible when focusing on individual wants and choices. Ball and Vincent's concepts of ‘hot’ (informal) and ‘cold’ (formal) knowledge provide a complimentary resource for exploring how the social networks through which students from low-SES backgrounds access knowledge can resource their capacities to aspire. Through this conceptual framework, and drawing on empirical data collected in a secondary school on the northern urban fringes of Adelaide, Australia, the paper explores how low-SES students form aspirations within social networks that provide different degrees of access to, and the decoding of, information about higher and further education. The resources available to participants and the different strategies they employ in relation to both kinds of knowledge affect the relative strength or weakness of their capacity to aspire.
Media, Politics and Climate Change: Towards a New Research Agenda

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, and the media have been demonstrated to play a key role in shaping public perceptions and policy agendas. Journalists are faced with multiple challenges in covering this complex field. This article provides an overview of existing research on the media framing of climate change, highlighting major research themes and assessing future potential research developments. It argues that analysis of the reporting of climate science must be placed in the wider context of the growing concentration and globalization of news media ownership, and an increasingly 'promotional culture', highlighted by the rapid rise of the public relations industry in recent years and claims-makers who employ increasingly sophisticated media strategies. Future research will need to examine in-depth the targeting of media by a range of actors, as well as unravel complex information flows across countries as media increasingly converge.
Social Safety for Young Children

Young children in today's society may find themselves in situations that require appropriate action in order to avoid dire consequences, such as injury or death. These situations may be the result of contact with objects in the physical environment such as guns, knives, or toxins. In other cases, children may be faced with confronting dangers in the social environment, such as avoiding the lures of strangers or responding to the abuse or neglect of a caregiver. Although safety education programs are implemented frequently in school settings, few research studies have systematically evaluated the methodology for teaching safety skills to young children. The purpose of this article is to provide a review of the empirical literature related to social safety skills instruction for young children with and without disabilities. Findings are classified into two groups: lures of strangers and sexual abuse. Implications for future research are discussed.
A study on the effects of quarterly financial reports on systematic risk and return on assets: A case study of Tehran Stock Exchange

Article history: Received January 18, 2013 Received in revised format 10 May 2013 Accepted May 15 2013 Available online May 18 2013 Financial statements are considered as primary sources of information for most investors to make investment decisions. A crystal clear and comprehensive annual report helps many interested parties about the performance of any business unit. However, many rules and regulations ask management teams of organizations to provide quarterly financial results. In this paper, we perform an empirical investigation to study the effects of quarterly financial reports on three ratios including systematic risk, return on assets and firm size. The proposed study gathers the necessary data from 72 firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange over the period of 2000-2006. The study determined the performances of these 72 firms before and after the releases of three quarterly reports and using Freedman test determined whether there were any meaningful differences between two groups of data or not. The results of Freedman test indicate that there were not any meaningful differences between stock performance and systematic risk before and after quarterly results. The survey also examines the relationship between systematic risk and size of firms using Pearson correlation test and the results indicate there were some meaningful differences size and systematic risk. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.