Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
El anclaje sociocultural de la Experiencia emocional de las naciones. Un análisis colectivo

Subjective emotional experience reported in two lar ge college students sample (N=2.955 and 5142) from 26 and 32 countries, and EPQ's scores on ext raversion and neuroticism from 24 countries (N=24.196 ), conceived of as indexes of positive and negative affect, were correlated with ecological (latitude), social (Human Developme nt Index) and cultural characteristics of the nations (Individualism, Masculinity, Avoidance Uncertainty and Power Distance nation scores in Hofstede's dimensions). Collective level analyses, using nations as units and collective variables and aggregate means as data, c onfirm that high uncertainty avoidance cultures score higher on neuroticism, anxiety and a re related to high intensity and high frequency of negative emotions. Uncertainty avoidan ce was also related to higher social desirability and intensity of positive emotions, co nfirming that these cultures shows a highly emotional profile, not restricted to negative affec t. Cultural femininity was related to emotional energy, lower neuroticism, lower frequency of negat ive emotions and higher frequency of positive emotions. Higher power distance cultures w ere associated with neuroticism, higher anxiety and high frequency of negative emotions. Co ld climate, socio-economic development and individualism were partially related to higher emotional intensity and introversion.
Sharing Care and Education: Parents' Perspectives

In Early Childhood services the goal of parent-teacher interactions is to involve parents in the development of a shared caring, rearing and educational experience for children. Yet little investigation has been undertaken to seek out parents' own ideas and suggestions about how they can and might wish to share the care and education of their young children. This paper reports an investigation that used focus groups to identify parents' perspectives detailing what is important to them and their suggestions about how such sharing could be achieved. Four themes were developed from focus group data. These related to methods staff used to report information to parents, omissions of pertinent information, limitations of communication methods used and parent's contributions. Based on these parents' perspectives, teachers' sharing is ‘inside out’ and inwardly focused. Parents suggested teachers rethink their approach to ‘parent engagement’ so parents can positively influence the quality of care and education their children receive.
Service brand identity: definition, measurement, dimensionality and influence on brand performance

Creating and maintaining brand identity is regarded as a formative brand building step with the benefits contributing to the creation of valuable brands. Consequently, research that provides brand identity management insights has the potential to be of considerable academic and managerial interest. Several brand identity frameworks have been published in the brand marketing literature. However, a reliable, valid and parsimonious brand identity scale has yet to be developed. This has restricted the academic community and practitioners from obtaining an empirically informed understanding of the construct’s dimensionality and influence on brand performance. Furthermore, the generic nature of these frameworks does not account for a specific goods or services context. Informed by these issues, a valid, reliable and parsimonious service brand identity scale was developed to reveal the construct’s dimensionality and assess its influence on brand performance in the UK’s IT service sector. A quantitative research design was employed to gather primary data with 421 senior executive working in the UK’s IT service sector. Following a series of pretests and a pilot study, Cronbach’s α and exploratory factor analysis were used to purify the measure. Confirmatory factor analysis then helped verify the exploratory factor structure and establish the psychometric properties of the scale. These analyses find support for a service brand identity scale comprising of five dimensions: employee and client focus, corporate visual identity, brand personality, consistent communications and human resource initiatives. The service brand identity scale is then incorporated into the full structural model to assess the construct’s influence on brand performance. Across the calibration, validation and full samples service brand identity has a positive and significant (p<0.001) influence on brand performance. The discussion outlines how these findings provide partial support for the dimensionality implied by existing conceptual brand identity frameworks. Furthermore, the data provides encouraging results for those that wish to invest in brand identity given the construct’s positive and significant influence on brand performance. Concluding remarks highlight theoretical and managerial implications with limitations and directions for future also being noted.
Off-line signature verification by local granulometric size distributions

A fundamental problem in the field of off-line signature verification is the lack of a signature representation based on shape descriptors and pertinent features. The main difficulty lies in the local variability of the writing trace of the signature which is closely related to the identity of human beings. In this paper, we propose a new formalism for signature representation based on visual perception. A signature image consists of 512/spl times/128 pixels and is centered on a grid of rectangular retinas which are excited by local portions of the signature. Granulometric size distributions are used for the definition of local shape descriptors in an attempt to characterize the amount of signal activity exciting each retina on the focus of the attention grid. Experimental evaluation of this scheme is made using a signature database of 800 genuine signatures from 20 individuals. Two types of classifiers, a nearest neighbor and a threshold classifier, show a total error rate below 0.02 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively, in the context of random forgeries.
Gender differences in the symptoms of major depression and in the level of social functioning in public primary care patients

Abstract Background: There are no great differences in the symptom profiles of depression between the genders in observer rating scales, but women self-report more symptoms. Objective: To compare gender differences in symptom profiles of clinical depression in primary care with a short self-report depression scale and an observer-rated scale for social functioning. Methods: A sample of 436 primary care patients aged 18–64 years were screened using the Depression Scale (DEPS) and interviewed using the Present State Examination (PSE). Level of social functioning was also assessed. Sum scores and single items of DEPS were compared between men and women in the groups of both depressive and non-depressive patients, and the interactions between gender and depression were analysed. Results: Depressive men scored poorer on both instruments. Feeling that everything is an effort and feeling worthless were typical for depressive men. Feeling blue was more typical for non-depressive women than for non-depressive men. Conclusion: In this sample of primary care patients, there were differences in the symptom profiles of depression between men and women. Depressive men more commonly had serious symptoms than depressive women. Clinically, male depression deserves more attention. The psychosocial profile of public primary care patients in Finland warrants further research.
Vitamin D increases serum levels of the soluble receptor for advanced glycation end products in women with PCOS.

CONTEXT Elevation of serum proinflammatory advanced glycation end products (AGEs) is involved in the pathogenesis of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). The soluble receptor for AGEs (sRAGE) acts as a decoy by binding circulating AGEs. Vitamin D supplementation attenuates the deposition of AGEs in the vascular system of diabetic animals and improves some metabolic aspects of vitamin D-deficient women with PCOS. Additionally, serum anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) is elevated in women with PCOS, reflecting abnormal ovarian folliculogenesis. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to evaluate the effect of 1,25 dihydroxyvitamin D3 (vit D3) supplementation on serum sRAGE and AMH in vitamin D-deficient women with PCOS. DESIGN, SETTINGS, PARTICIPANTS, AND INTERVENTION: Sixty-seven women with (n = 22) or without (control; n = 45) PCOS who were diagnosed with vitamin D deficiency were enrolled. Fifty-one women were replaced with oral vit D3 for 8 weeks (16 with PCOS and 35 controls) and 16 women were not treated (six with PCOS and 10 controls). Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25 OH-D), sRAGE, and AMH concentrations were measured at baseline and after vit D3 supplementation in the treated group and 8 weeks apart in the nontreated group. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S) Changes in serum sRAGE and AMH concentrations after vit D3 replacement were measured. RESULTS In all participants, there was a negative correlation between body mass index and serum sRAGE levels (r = -0.3, P = .01). In women with PCOS, but not in controls, vit D3 increased serum sRAGE (P = .03) and decreased serum AMH levels (P < .001). The increase in serum sRAGE positively correlated with the increase in serum 25 OH-D after supplementation in women with PCOS (r = 0.6, P = .01). CONCLUSION In women with PCOS, vit D3 might exert a protective effect against the inflammatory action of AGEs by increasing circulating sRAGE. The normalization in serum AMH induced by vit D3 replacement suggests an improvement in folliculogenesis.
Capacity and coding for the Gilbert-Elliot channels

The Gilbert-Elliott channel, a varying binary symmetric channel, with crossover probabilities determined by a binary-state Markov process, is treated. In general, such a channel has a memory that depends on the transition probabilities between the states. A method of calculating the capacity of this channel is introduced and applied to several examples, and the question of coding is addressed. In the conventional usage of varying channels, a code suitable for memoryless channels is used in conjunction with an interleaver, with the decoder considering the deinterleaved symbol stream as the output of a derived memoryless channel. The transmission rate is limited by the capacity of this memoryless channel, which is often considerably less than the capacity of the original channel. A decision-feedback decoding algorithm that completely recovers this capacity loss is introduced. It is shown that the performance of a system incorporating such an algorithm is determined by an equivalent genie-aided channel, the capacity of which equals that of the original channel. The calculated random coding exponent of the genie-aided channel indicates a considerable increase in the cutoff rate over that of the conventionally derived memoryless channel. >
Trainable performance upper bounds for image and video captioning

The task of associating images and videos with a natural language description has attracted a great amount of attention recently. Rapid progress has been made in terms of both developing novel algorithms and releasing new datasets. Indeed, the state-of-the-art results on some of the standard datasets have been pushed into the regime where it has become more and more difficult to make significant improvement. This work takes a step back, and begs two questions: "what is the best performance one could possibly achieve on a specific dataset? " and "How many visual elements does a given model capture? ". To answer the first question, we first utilize existing natural language parsers to extract key concepts from ground truth captions. Then a conditional language model is trained to reproduce the original captions given various amount of extracted conceptual hints. By adjusting the amount of visual hints to the language model, we establish empirically dataset-dependent upper bounds on various automatic evaluation metrics commonly used to compare models. We demonstrate the construction of such bounds on MS-COCO, YouTube2Text and LSMDC (a combination of M-VAD and MPII-MD). As an upper bound, it suggests the best possible performance one could achieve on a particular dataset. To answer the second question, the current state-of-the-art results are compared against the proposed upper bounds. Based on such a comparison, we experimentally quantify several important factors concerning image and video captioning: the number of visual concepts captured by different models, the trade-off between the amount of visual elements captured and their accuracy,and the intrinsic difficulty and blessing of different datasets.
Highly Sensitive, Room Temperature Methane Gas Sensor Based on Lead Sulfide Colloidal Nanocrystals

A solid-state methane gas sensor based on PbS colloidal nanocrystals has been fabricated and tested for the first time. PbS nanoparticles have been synthesized during an all-chemical process and its X-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern has been analyzed to verify the quality and estimate the particle size of produced nano-powder. TEM microscopy and size estimation by XRD analysis both confirm the production of 40-nm PbS nanoparticles. The sensor was fabricated by the drop casting method on interdigitated electrodes and tested at different conditions. The best achieved sensitivity was 47.6% for 5% methane concentration at room temperature. A comprehensive discussion on sensing mechanism, temperature dependence, and sensor's benefits is also provided in this paper. The sensor has the benefit of room temperature detection and being highly sensitive. Moreover, the sensor's detection range is 1%-5% which is of superior importance in air quality monitoring and safety control systems in industrial environments to prevent suffocation and explosion.
Noncooperative Power Control Game with Exponential Pricing for Cognitive Radio Network

In cognitive radio network, power control is necessary to not only decrease the interference among the unlicensed users, but also avoid the negative effect to the licensed users. In this paper, a noncooperative power control model is proposed for the unlicensed users using game theory. In order to restrict the interference to the licensed users, an exponential part indicating the effect to the licensed users is added into the pricing function. Through game theoretic deduction, it is obtained that a unique Nash equilibrium solution exists under appropriating parameter value of the payoff function. Further, the Nash equilibrium solution of the proposed power control game with exponential pricing is Pareto optimality and achieves maximum total throughput under strict constraint of the interference temperature limitation. The appropriate value of the new parameter in the pricing function is discussed. The performance of the proposed power control algorithm is investigated by numeral results.
Genome-Wide Molecular Clock and Horizontal Gene Transfer in Bacterial Evolution

ABSTRACT We describe a simple theoretical framework for identifying orthologous sets of genes that deviate from a clock-like model of evolution. The approach used is based on comparing the evolutionary distances within a set of orthologs to a standard intergenomic distance, which was defined as the median of the distribution of the distances between all one-to-one orthologs. Under the clock-like model, the points on a plot of intergenic distances versus intergenomic distances are expected to fit a straight line. A statistical technique to identify significant deviations from the clock-like behavior is described. For several hundred analyzed orthologous sets representing three well-defined bacterial lineages, the α-Proteobacteria, the γ-Proteobacteria, and the Bacillus-Clostridium group, the clock-like null hypothesis could not be rejected for ∼70% of the sets, whereas the rest showed substantial anomalies. Subsequent detailed phylogenetic analysis of the genes with the strongest deviations indicated that over one-half of these genes probably underwent a distinct form of horizontal gene transfer, xenologous gene displacement, in which a gene is displaced by an ortholog from a different lineage. The remaining deviations from the clock-like model could be explained by lineage-specific acceleration of evolution. The results indicate that although xenologous gene displacement is a major force in bacterial evolution, a significant majority of orthologous gene sets in three major bacterial lineages evolved in accordance with the clock-like model. The approach described here allows rapid detection of deviations from this mode of evolution on the genome scale.
Influence of amine substituents on 5-HT2A versus 5-HT2C binding of phenylalkyl- and indolylalkylamines.

The effect of 15 different amine substituents on 5-HT2A and 5-HT2C serotonin receptor binding was investigated for two series of compounds (i.e., phenylalkylamine and indolylalkylamine derivatives). In general, amine substitution decreases receptor affinity; however, N-(4-bromobenzyl) substitution results in compounds that bind at 5-HT2A receptors with high affinity (Ki < 1 nM) and with > 100-fold selectivity. Although parallel structural modification in the two series result in parallel shifts in 5-HT2C binding, these same modifications alter 5-HT2A binding in a less consistent manner.
Cellular and regional specific changes in multidrug efflux transporter expression during recovery of vasogenic edema in the rat hippocampus and piriform cortex

In the present study, we investigated the characteristics of drug efflux transporter expressions following status epilepticus (SE). In the hippocampus and piriform cortex (PC), vasogenic edema peaked 3-4 days after SE. The expression of breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP), multidrug resistance protein-4 (MRP4), and p-glycoprotein (p-GP) were decreased 4 days after SE when vasogenic edema was peaked, but subsequently increased 4 weeks after SE. Multidrug resistance protein-1 (MRP1) expression gradually decreased in endothelial cells until 4 weeks after SE. These findings indicate that SE-induced vasogenic edema formation transiently reduced drug efflux pump expressions in endothelial cells. Subsequently, during recovery of vasogenic edema drug efflux pump expressions were differentially upregulated in astrocytes, neuropils, and endothelial cells. Therefore, we suggest that vasogenic edema formation may be a risk factor in pharmacoresistent epilepsy. [BMB Reports 2015; 48(6): 348-353]
THE MEMBRANE TRANSPORT OF ASCORBIC ACID *

A system for measuring the rate of transport of dehydroascorbate into human red blood cells shows Michaelis-Menten type kinetics with substrate inhibition at levels above 150 muM DHA. The addition of sugars impairs this transport in the diminishing hierarchy D-glucose, D-mannose, D-xylose, D-galactose, L-lyxose, D-araboascorbate, L-sorbose and 2-deoxy-D-ribose. The effect of glucose on transport of ascorbate is marked at physiological levels. Transport of DHA is accelerated by copper ion and allows dehydroascorbate to move against a concentration gradient. The evidence supports the hypotheses proposing that hyperglycemia will impair the intracellular availability of vitamin C.
RR Lyrae stars in the inner Large Magellanic Cloud: halo-like location with a disk-like distribution

Aims. The distribution of RR Lyrae stars (RRLS) in the inner Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and the structure of the halo of the LMC delineated by these stars are studied here. Methods. RRLS identified by the OGLE II survey are used to estimate their number density distribution in the bar region of the LMC. To find their location, I estimated the scale-height of their distribution in the LMC using extinction corrected average magnitudes of ab type stars. Results. The density is found to vary differently along and across the bar of the LMC, and the difference is found to be statistically significant. The density distribution is found to be elongated like the LMC bar and the position angle (PA) of the elongation is estimated to be 112$\fdg$5 ± 15$\fdg$3. This value of PA is found to be same as the PA maj of the bar, within the errors, estimated using red clump stars and giants. The ellipticity of their density distribution is estimated to be ~0.5, very similar to the ellipticity of the bar, estimated from giants. The above results show that majority of the population of RRLS in the central region of the LMC are found to have the signature of the bar. This result could mean that most of these stars are located in the disk, considering the bar as a disk feature. On the other hand, their scale-height was found to be 3.0 ± 0.9 kpc. This indicates that RRLS are located in the halo and not in the disk. Conclusions. Thus these stars in the inner LMC have halo-like location and a disk-like density distribution. I discuss some possible formation scenarios for this puzzling combination.
Acyclic Colourings of Planar Graphs with Large Girth

A proper vertex‐colouring of a graph is acyclic if there are no 2‐coloured cycles. It is known that every planar graph is acyclically 5‐colourable, and that there are planar graphs with acyclic chromatic number χa = 5 and girth g = 4. It is proved here that a planar graph satisfies χa ⩽ 4 if g ⩾ 5 and χa ⩽ 3 if g ⩾ 7.
Genetic screen of African Americans with Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy

Purpose Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy (FECD) is a genetically heterogeneous disorder that has been primarily studied in patients of European or Asian ancestry. Given the sparse literature on African Americans with FECD, we sought to characterize the genetic variation in three known FECD candidate genes in African American patients with FECD. Methods Over an 8-year period, we enrolled 47 African American probands with FECD. All participants were clinically examined with slit-lamp biomicroscopy, and when corneal tissue specimens were available, histopathologic confirmation of the clinical diagnosis was obtained. The coding regions of known FECD susceptibility genes collagen, type VIII, alpha 2 (COL8A2); solute carrier family 4, sodium borate transporter, member 11 (SLC4A11); and zinc finger E-box binding homeobox 1 (ZEB1 [also known as TCF8]) were Sanger sequenced in the 47 probands using DNA isolated from blood samples. Results Twenty-two coding variants were detected across the COL8A2, SLC4A11, and ZEB1 genes; six were nonsynonymous variants. Three novel coding variants were detected: a synonymous variant each in COL8A2 and SLC4A11 and one nonsynonymous variant in ZEB1 (p.P559S), which is predicted to be benign and tolerated, thus making its physiologic consequence uncertain. Conclusions Variation in the COL8A2, SLC4A11, and ZEB1 genes is present in only a small fraction of our African American cases and as such does not appear to significantly contribute to the genetic risk of FECD in African Americans. This observation is on par with findings from previous sequencing studies involving European or Asian ancestry patients with FECD.