Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Catastrophic medical payment and financial protection in rural China: evidence from the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in Shandong Province.

OBJECTIVE To measure the impact of China's New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) on catastrophic medical payments of rural households in Linyi County, Shandong Province. METHOD In 2005, from a stratified cluster sample of 3101 rural households, we identified 375 households that might be at risk of catastrophic payments by searching through NCMS claims and interviewing key informants. We interviewed these 375 households and confirmed that 231 had had catastrophic payments (> or = 40% of the households' capacity to pay; CTP) during 2004. A validity test of our screening method found another eight cases among immediate neighbours of these 375 households; by extrapolation, we obtained an adjusted total of 289 catastrophic households in the sample of 3101. We measured the impact of the NCMS on hardship alleviation by counterfactual analysis, comparing catastrophic payments before and after NCMS reimbursements. RESULT The effect was twofold. Before NCMS intervention 8.98% of Linyi population had had catastrophic out-of-pocket payments compared with 8.25% after reimbursements. Catastrophic severity for households remaining in catastrophe after reimbursement dropped by 18.7% to an average of 6.34 times the household's CTP. CONCLUSION Out-of-pocket medical payments remain a burden for rural households. Financial protection from the NCMS, with an average reimbursement of 17.8%, was modest and should be restructured to provide better benefits that are targeted to those in most need.
Reflective Teaching via a Problem Exploration–Teaching Adaptations–Resolution Cycle

We explore development of elementary preservice teachers’ reflective practices as they solved problems encountered while teaching in a reading clinic. Written reflections (N = 175) were collected across 8 weeks from 23 preservice teachers and analyzed to investigate relationships among problem exploration, teaching adaptations, and problem resolution. In this sequential mixed methods design, exploratory qualitative analysis revealed co-occurrence of problem exploration, instructional adaptation, and problem resolution. Confirmatory quantitative analysis found significant relationships: preservice teachers who engaged in more problem exploration or description of instructional adaptations reported more problem resolutions the following week. Results support mixed method, longitudinal analyses to analyze preservice teachers’ written reflections, and use of written reflections with responsive feedback to develop preservice teachers’ agency for problem solving.
A Boolean map theory of visual attention.

UNLABELLED A theory is presented that attempts to answer two questions. What visual contents can an observer consciously access at one moment? ANSWER only one feature value (e.g., green) per dimension, but those feature values can be associated (as a group) with multiple spatially precise locations (comprising a single labeled Boolean map). How can an observer voluntarily select what to access? ANSWER in one of two ways: (a) by selecting one feature value in one dimension (e.g., selecting the color red) or (b) by iteratively combining the output of (a) with a preexisting Boolean map via the Boolean operations of intersection and union. Boolean map theory offers a unified interpretation of a wide variety of visual attention phenomena usually treated in separate literatures. In so doing, it also illuminates the neglected phenomena of attention to structure.
A Contextualized View on Long-Term Predictors of Academic Performance.

$a Several studies show that parents' and teachers' perceptions of children's academic competence are important predictors of children's subsequent academic performance. However, there is a lack of evidence on what precedes these perceptions as well as the dynamics within a comprehensive model. The aim of this study was to investigate the simultaneous influences of child (general intelligence, problem behavior) and family (socioeconomic status, migration background) characteristics as well as parents' and teachers' perceptions of children's competence on children's academic performance in a 3-year longitudinal study with 221 children (52% girls) who were 5 to 7 years of age when they were first measured (M = 6.15 years, SD = 0.80 years). Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that parents' and teachers' perceptions of children's competence were positively associated with children's general intelligence and negatively associated with family adversity and child problem behavior. Further, parents' perceptions fully mediated the association between family adversity as well as child problem behavior and academic performance. Teachers' perceptions partially mediated the association between child problem behavior and academic performance.
Trap investigation under class AB operation in AlGaN/GaN HEMTs based on output-admittance frequency dispersion, pulsed and transient measurements

This paper presents a detailed trap investigation based on combined pulsed I/V measurements, Drain Current Transient (DCT) measurements and Low Frequency output-admittance (LF Y22) dispersion measurements. DCT characterization is carried out over a 7-decade time scale. LF Y22 measurements are carried out over the frequency range from 10 Hz to 10 MHz. These combined measurements were performed for AlGaN/GaN HEMTs under class AB operation and allowed the extraction of the activation energy Ea and the capture cross section σa of the identified traps. Low-frequency small-signal, (LF Y22) and large-signal voltage steps (DCT) results for trap characterization were found to be correlated. They allow identifying the same 0.64 eV deep level, attributed to a native defect of GaN, possibly located in the buffer layer.
PKscan: a program to identify H-type RNA pseudoknots in any RNA sequence with unlimited length

A computer program written in C++ has been developed which can detect all potential H-type RNA pseudoknots within any given RNA sequence. There is no limit on the length of the input sequence. A validation run of the program using the full-length (8173 nt) genomic mRNA of simian retrovirus type-1 (SRV-1) identifies the established -1 frameshift stimulating pseudokont at the gagpro junction as the most stable pseudoknot within the genomic mRNA.
Competitive Societies Are Happy If the Women Are Less Competitive Than the Men

Societies are less happy to the extent that their members are more competitive. A 42-nation regression study, based on aggregated indicators of female competitiveness, male competitiveness, four components of happiness, and national development restricts this negative cultural link between overall competitiveness and average happiness to certain countries. A more competitive society is less happy only if its members deviate from the stereotype that women are less competitive than men. A populace is least happy if both genders are highly competitive.
Experiments with Language-based Aids in Information Retrieval Systems

The fact that a lexeme can appear in various forms causes problems in information retrieval. As a solution to this problem, we have developed methods for automatic root lemmatization, automatic truncation and automatic splitting of compound words. All the methods have as their basis a set of rules which contain information regarding inflected and derived forms of words – and not a dictionary. The methods have been tested on several collections of texts, and have produced very good results. By controlled experiments in text retrieval, we have studied the effects on search results. These results show that both the method of automatic root lemmatization and the method of automatic truncation make a considerable improvement on search quality. The experiments with splitting of compound words did not give quite the same improvement, however, but all the same this experiment showed that such a method could contribute to a richer and more complete search request.
Memory Latency Reduction via Thread Throttling

Memory Wall is a well-known obstacle to processor performance improvement. The popularity of multi-core architecture will further exaggerate the problem since the memory resource is shared by all cores. Interferences among requests from different cores may prolong the latency of memory accesses thereby degrading the system performance. To tackle the problem, this paper proposes to decouple application threads into compute and memory tasks, and restrict the number of concurrent memory tasks to avoid the interference among memory requests. Yet with this scheduling restriction, a CPU core may unnecessarily stay idle, which incurs adverse impact on the overall performance. Therefore, we develop a memory thread throttling mechanism that tunes the allowable memory threads dynamically under workload variation to improve system performance. The proposed run-time mechanism monitors memory and computation ratios of a program for phase detection. It then decides the memory thread constraint for the next program phase based on an analytical model that can estimate system performance under different constraint values. To prove the concept, we prototype the mechanism in some real-world applications as well as synthetic workloads. We evaluate their performance on real machines. The experimental results demonstrate up to 20% speedup with a pool of synthetic workloads on an Intel i7 (Nehalem) machine and match with the speedup estimated by the proposed analytical model. Furthermore, the intelligent run-time scheduling leads to a geometric mean of 12% performance improvement for real-world applications on the same hardware.
Powerful cultural productions: Identity politics in diasporic same-sex South Asian weddings

Queer diasporic subjects are multiply displaced and often excluded from familial, local, national, and transnational spheres. This ethnographic study examines five same-sex South Asian American Hindu wedding ceremonies to demonstrate that these events are spaces where power and one’s inclusion into the dominant social structure are negotiated. The ritualized performances and social interactions surrounding these ceremonies serve to enact, articulate and transform culture. The ceremonies enable the actors to claim ownership of tradition, and insert their subjectivities into one of its most fundamental institutions. While the structures of power operate most visibly on macro-political levels, they are often replicated, resisted, and subverted in numerous intimate arenas of lived experience, such as wedding ceremonies.
Actuarial Prediction of Sexual Recidivism

An actuarial approach to predicting sexual recidivism among known sex offenders is illustrated with a reanalysis of follow-up data of rapists and child molesters. One hundred seventy-eight sex offenders who had been assessed at a maximum security psychiatric facility were followed for an average of 59 months of opportunity to reoffend. Twenty-eight percent were convicted of a new sex offense and 40% were arrested, convicted, or returned to the psychiatric facility for a violent (including sex) offense. Rapists were more likely to recidivate than child molesters. Psychopathy, measures of previous criminal history, and phallometric indexes of deviant sexual interests were found to be useful predictors of sexual recidivism. A predictor scale was formed by weighting each predictor that was significant in the regression analyses by a number reflecting its univariate correlation with the criterion. A linear relationship (r = .45) was found between scores on the predictor scale and reconviction for a sexual offense.
Competitive adsorption of a phthalate esters mixture by chitosan bead and α‐cyclodextrin‐linked chitosan bead

The competitive adsorption effect by chitosan bead and α‐cyclodextrin‐linked chitosan bead on a mixture of six phthalate esters (PAEs) was investigated. The adsorption efficiency of short‐chain hydrophilic PAEs was reduced when long‐chain hydrophobic PAEs co‐existed in the solution. Moreover, the adsorption efficiency of adsorbents for PAE is correlated to the distribution ratio (Kd), which shows that the Kd of hydrophobic PAEs is higher than that of hydrophilic PAEs. Both chitosan bead and α‐cyclodextrin‐linked chitosan bead exhibit the same phenomenon. The effect of α‐cyclodextrin (CD)‐linked chitosan bead is more significant compared with that of chitosan bead. Furthermore, it is observed that both adsorbents spontaneously adsorb PAEs by free energy (ΔG0), but the hydrophilic PAE co‐existing with DMP (dimethyl phthalate) results in less entropy (ΔS0) change compared with a hydrophobic PAE co‐existing with DMP. In a continuous system to treat a PAE mixture, hydrophobic PAE shows a higher breakthrough capacity than hydrophilic PAE. Moreover, the competitive adsorption results in the laboratory were comparable with those in field studies.
Gender in Jeopardy!

Uptalk is the use of a rising, questioning intonation when making a statement, which has become quite prevalent in contemporary American speech. Women tend to use uptalk more frequently than men do, though the reasons behind this difference are contested. I use the popular game show Jeopardy! to study variation in the use of uptalk among the contestants’ responses, and argue that uptalk is a key way in which gender is constructed through interaction. While overall, Jeopardy! contestants use uptalk 37 percent of the time, there is much variation in the use of uptalk. The typical purveyor of uptalk is white, young, and female. Men use uptalk more when surrounded by women contestants, and when correcting a woman contestant after she makes an incorrect response. Success on the show produces different results for men and women. The more successful a man is, the less likely he is to use uptalk; the more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to use uptalk.
Excitability scores of pigs administered ascorbic acid and transported during the harmattan season.

1 Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Agriculture, Makurdi, Nigeria 2Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria 3Department of Surgery and Medicine, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria 4Department of Human Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria 5College of Agriculture and Animal Science, Ahmadu Bello University, Kaduna, Nigeria
Controllability of the Heat Equation with an Inverse-Square Potential Localized on the Boundary

This article is devoted to analyzing control properties for the heat equation with singular potential $-\mu/|x|^2$ arising at the boundary of a smooth domain $\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^N$, $N\geq 1$. This problem was first studied by Vancostenoble and Zuazua [J. Funct. Anal. , 254 (2008), pp. 1864--1902] and then generalized by Ervedoza [Comm. Partial Differential Equations, 33 (2008), pp. 1996--2019] in the context of interior singularity. Roughly speaking, these results showed that for any value of parameters $\mu\leq \mu(N):=(N-2)^2/4$, the corresponding parabolic system can be controlled to zero with the control distributed in any open subset of the domain. The critical value $\mu(N)$ stands for the best constant in the Hardy inequality with interior singularity. When considering the case of boundary singularity a better critical Hardy constant is obtained, namely, $\mu_{N}:=N^2/4$. In this article we extend the previous results of Vancostenoble and Zuazua and of Ervedoza to the case of boundary singula.
Assigning trust to Wikipedia content

The Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia: anyone can contribute to its articles simply by clicking on an "edit" button. The open nature of the Wikipedia has been key to its success, but has also created a challenge: how can readers develop an informed opinion on its reliability? We propose a system that computes quantitative values of trust for the text in Wikipedia articles; these trust values provide an indication of text reliability. The system uses as input the revision history of each article, as well as information about the reputation of the contributing authors, as provided by a reputation system. The trust of a word in an article is computed on the basis of the reputation of the original author of the word, as well as the reputation of all authors who edited text near the word. The algorithm computes word trust values that vary smoothly across the text; the trust values can be visualized using varying text-background colors. The algorithm ensures that all changes to an article's text are reflected in the trust values, preventing surreptitious content changes. We have implemented the proposed system, and we have used it to compute and display the trust of the text of thousands of articles of the English Wikipedia. To validate our trust-computation algorithms, we show that text labeled as low-trust has a significantly higher probability of being edited in the future than text labeled as high-trust.
L'e-réputation ou le renforcement de la gouvernance par le marché de l'hôtellerie ?

Avec le Web 2.0, les entreprises decouvrent une nouvelle contrainte qui est celle de la gestion de leur reputation electronique (e-reputation) et ses incidences directes sur les volumes de transaction et/ou les couts de transaction qui leur sont inherents. Les acteurs du secteur de l’hotellerie, compte-tenu de l’evolution des processus de recherche d’information et d’achat des clients dans ce secteur doivent etre specialement attentifs a ce nouvel outil de gouvernance qu’est l’e-reputation.
Are Physical Activity and Symptoms Correlates of Functional Limitations and Disability in Multiple Sclerosis

Objective: This study examined physical activity and symptoms as correlates of functional limitations and disability among individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS). The authors hypothesized that physical activity and symptoms would be interrelated and that physical activity would be indirectly associated with disability through a pathway that involved functional limitations, whereas symptoms would be directly associated with both functional limitations and disability. Methods: Individuals with MS (N 133) who were recruited through a community organization wore an accelerometer for a 7-day period and completed a paper-and-pencil survey containing the Godin Leisure-Time Exercise Questionnaire (G. Godin & R. J. Shephard, 1985), Symptom Inventory (C. E. Schwartz, T. Vollmer, & H. Lee, 1999), MS-Related Symptom Checklist (E. E. Gulick, 1989), and abbreviated Late-Life Function and Disability Inventory (E. McAuley, J. F. Konopack, R. W. Motl, K. Rosengren, & K. S. Morris, 2005). The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling in AMOS 6.0. Results: The standardized coefficients indicated that (a) physical activity and symptoms were negatively correlated ( .59); (b) those who were more physically active had better function ( .40); (c) those with fewer symptoms had better function ( .46) and less disability ( .29); and (d) those with better function had less disability ( .63). Conclusion: Findings indicate that physical activity is associated with reduced disability through a pathway that is consistent with S. Z. Nagi’s disablement model in individuals with MS.
Psychiatric Services: Organizing Impossibility

This paper explores the proposition thatelements of the work of psychiatric services areimpossible. The notion of impossibility is consideredfrom three perspectives: societal, interpersonal, andorganizational.Organizational elements of impossibility areevidenced in attempts to work with madness, a phenomenonthat defies clear definition. Resultant confusion inrole and task boundaries is exacerbated by madinterpersonal interactions. The situation iscompounded by societal conflicts between the mad and thesane. Attempts to house and treat the mad over the past200 years are reviewed, and recent illustrativecase material is presented from two communitytreatment teams. It is argued that primarilysolution-focused approaches to madness have limitedsuccess. To acknowledge impossible elements of the workmay enable psychiatric institutions to be designedin ways that help make individual and collective madnessmore bearable rather than something to be controlled andor denied.
Multiple Hits, Including Oxidative Stress, as Pathogenesis and Treatment Target in Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH)

Multiple parallel hits, including genetic differences, insulin resistance and intestinal microbiota, account for the progression of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Multiple hits induce adipokine secretion, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and oxidative stress at the cellular level that subsequently induce hepatic steatosis, inflammation and fibrosis, among which oxidative stress is considered a key contributor to progression from simple fatty liver to NASH. Although several clinical trials have shown that anti-oxidative therapy can effectively control hepatitis activities in the short term, the long-term effect remains obscure. Several trials of long-term anti-oxidant protocols aimed at treating cerebrovascular diseases or cancer development have failed to produce a benefit. This might be explained by the non-selective anti-oxidative properties of these drugs. Molecular hydrogen is an effective antioxidant that reduces only cytotoxic reactive oxygen species (ROS) and several diseases associated with oxidative stress are sensitive to hydrogen. The progress of NASH to hepatocellular carcinoma can be controlled using hydrogen-rich water. Thus, targeting mitochondrial oxidative stress might be a good candidate for NASH treatment. Long term clinical intervention is needed to control this complex lifestyle-related disease.
Implicit processing goals combine with explicit goal standards to motivate performance through underlying comparison processes

This research investigates whether explicit goals interact with implicit processing goals that are activated simultaneously. Based on the idea that (a) explicit goals are used as comparison standards, and (b) implicit processing goals have motivational consequences by influencing the process of comparison with those standards, these studies elucidate the mechanism by which explicit and implicit goals combine to influence task performance. Study 1 demonstrated that a primed goal to process similarities versus differences interacted with explicit goal standards in influencing subsequent task performance. High explicit goals resulted in better performance when participants had the implicit goal of processing similarities, whereas low explicit goals resulted in better performance when the implicit goal was processing differences. Study 2 provided evidence that perceived similarity to a target person is a critical factor for the pursuit of explicit goals and that this similarity influences task performance in the same way as the primed goal to process similarities. Study 3 indicated that processing similarities results from assimilation to a moderately high goal, whereas processing differences is the result of contrasting away from an extremely high goal. These findings confirm that implicit processing of similarities versus differences has a combined influence with explicit goals on task performance. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.