Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Why Migrate? A Test of the Evolutionary Precursor Hypothesis

The question of why birds migrate is still poorly understood despite decades of debate. Previous studies have suggested that use of edge habitats and a frugivorous diet are precursors to the evolution of migration in Neotropical birds. However, these studies did not explore other ecological correlates of migration and did not control for phylogeny at the species level. We tested the evolutionary precursor hypothesis by examining the extent to which habitat and diet are associated with migratory behavior, using a species‐level comparative analysis of the Tyranni. We used both migratory distance and sedentary versus migratory behavior as response variables. We also examined the influences of foraging group size, membership in mixed‐species flocks, elevational range, and body mass on migratory behavior. Raw species analyses corroborated some results from studies that put forth the evolutionary precursor hypothesis, but phylogenetically independent contrast analyses highlighted an important interaction between habitat and diet and their roles as precursors to migration. Foraging group size was consistently associated with migratory behavior in both raw species and independent contrast analyses. Our results lead to a resource variability hypothesis that refines the evolutionary precursor hypothesis and reconciles the results of several studies examining precursors to migration in birds.
Meditation for meaning in life and happiness of older adults: A multi-city experiment of the Brahma Kumaris’ Raja yoga practice

ABSTRACT This article reports on a multi-city experiment of a customized Raja yoga meditation program in enhancing the meaning in life and happiness of older adults. Participant cohort was comprised of 698 older adult followers across 10 European and African cities with an equal number in the comparison group. Results indicated that meditation positively impacted the life satisfaction and happiness of participants. Post-test outcome measure scores were higher for participants from European cities, women, middle class, retired, never married, and widowed, with good self-rated health, who regularly attended the meditation sessions and self-practiced. Participants’ personal engagement through regular self-practice was the most significant predictor of higher post-test meaning in life and subjective happiness. Results imply that this specially designed Raja yoga meditation is a strong pastoral care practice that could be used with older adults with some variations based on cultural, biographical, and health profiles of participants and regular self-practice as a prerequisite.
Endogenous Na,K Pump Ligands Are Differentially Regulated During Acute NaCl Loading of Dahl Rats

BackgroundTwo mammalian digitalis-like factors, an ouabain-like compound (OLC) and marinobufagenin (MBG), exhibit specificity to &agr;-3 and &agr;-1 Na+,K+-ATPase isoforms, respectively. We compared regulation of MBG and OLC by acute NaCl loading in Dahl salt-sensitive (DS) and salt-resistant (DR) rats. Methods and ResultsAn intraperitoneal NaCl load (0.8 g/kg) was given to adult male rats (24 DS and 24 DR). Diuresis, natriuresis, renal excretion, and tissue levels of MBG and OLC were measured. Inhibition of renal Na+,K+-ATPase by MBG and ouabain was compared in DS, DR, and Wistar rats. DS (versus DR) exhibited a smaller peak (2 hours) natriuretic response (1.34±0.10 versus 2.08±0.14 mmol · kg−1 · h−1;P <0.01), despite a greater plasma Na+ (153±2 versus 145±1 mmol/L;P <0.01). In DS and DR, pituitary, adrenal, and plasma OLC exhibited transient 2-fold to 3-fold increases, followed by a decrease to baseline levels. Plasma and adrenal MBG doubled in both strains within 1 hour of NaCl loading and remained elevated. Eight-hour MBG excretion in DS was 4-fold greater than in DR (15.8±0.8 versus 3.6±0.4 pmol;P <0.01), whereas OLC excretion in DS was only 30% greater than in DR (16.1±1.1 and 11.9±0.8 pmol;P <0.05). Kidney Na+,K+-ATPase (&agr;-1 isoform) from Wistar rats and DS exhibited greater sensitivity to MBG than to ouabain. ConclusionsNaCl loading of DS causes transient increase in OLC but sustained increases in MBG tissue levels and excretion. We hypothesize that increased MBG production occurs in an attempt to compensate for genetically impaired pressure-natriuresis mechanisms.
Data-Mining Discovery of Pattern and Process in Ecological Systems

Abstract Most ecologists use statistical methods as their main analytical tools when analyzing data to identify relationships between a response and a set of predictors; thus, they treat all analyses as hypothesis tests or exercises in parameter estimation. However, little or no prior knowledge about a system can lead to creation of a statistical model or models that do not accurately describe major sources of variation in the response variable. We suggest that under such circumstances data mining is more appropriate for analysis. In this paper we 1) present the distinctions between data-mining (usually exploratory) analyses and parametric statistical (confirmatory) analyses, 2) illustrate 3 strengths of data-mining tools for generating hypotheses from data, and 3) suggest useful ways in which data mining and statistical analyses can be integrated into a thorough analysis of data to facilitate rapid creation of accurate models and to guide further research.
The Legitimization of Paltry Favors Effect: A Review and Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis was conducted on the legitimization of paltry favors (LPF) effect (Cialdini & Schroeder, 1976). A total of 19 studies met the inclusion criteria, with a combined sample of 2,730 subjects. Excluding studies in which the LPF request was delivered via mail and those studies that accepted pledges as the dependent variable resulted in a homogeneous set of effect sizes (r = .18, OR = 2.41). While the data provide clues as to possible mediating mechanisms, the cause of the effect is still not clear. Directions for future research are suggested.
The Effects of International Accents and Shared First Language on Listening Comprehension Tests

This study examines the effect of incorporating a variety of international English accents into a simulated TOEFL listening comprehension test in growing recognition of internationalization of language teaching and learning in the field of TESOL. Although some highstakes English proficiency exams have begun incorporating speech samples produced by speakers from a range of inner circle Englishspeaking backgrounds (e.g., Britain, the United States, Australia), the inclusion of samples produced by speakers of outer and expanding circle English varieties (e.g., India, Nigeria, Mexico, South Korea) has been largely avoided. For this study the researchers recruited speakers from six distinct English varieties to produce speech samples for a mock TOEFL iBT listening exam. Listeners who spoke with the same six international English accents were then recruited to take the resulting tests. Results indicate that when accented English is highly comprehensible, listening test scores for stimuli based on high-proficiency speakers of outer and expanding circle varieties of English are not significantly lower than they are in response to stimuli based on inner circle varieties of English. With respect to a shared first language effect on test scores when test materials are spoken in the test taker’s own accent, results are complex but inconclusive. doi: 10.1002/tesq.463
Significant Productivity Improvement of the Baculovirus Expression Vector System by Engineering a Novel Expression Cassette

Here we describe the development of a baculovirus vector expression cassette containing rearranged baculovirus-derived genetic regulatory elements. This newly designed expression cassette conferred significant production improvements to the baculovirus expression vector system (BEVS), including prolonged cell integrity after infection, improved protein integrity, and around 4-fold increase in recombinant protein production yields in insect cells with respect to a standard baculovirus vector. The expression cassette consisted of a cDNA encoding for the baculovirus transactivation factors IE1 and IE0, expressed under the control of the polyhedrin promoter, and a homologous repeated transcription enhancer sequence operatively cis-linked to the p10 promoter or to chimeric promoters containing p10. The prolonged cell integrity observed in cells infected by baculoviruses harbouring the novel expression cassette reduced the characteristic proteolysis and aberrant forms frequently found in baculovirus-derived recombinant proteins. The new expression cassette developed here has the potential to significantly improve the productivity of the BEVS.
Role Emerging Placements: Skills Development, Postgraduate Employment, and Career Pathways

Occupational therapy educators are increasingly using role emerging placements (REPs) as a forum for students to develop skills required to work in emerging areas of practice. This study explores the impact of REPs on skill development, postgraduate employment, and career pathways for occupational therapists. An online survey was sent to occupational therapists across Canada (n = 1,763). Occupational therapists who had completed a REP responded to the online survey (n = 88). Descriptive analysis was used to examine trends in the quantitative data, and content analysis was used to code categories derived from qualitative survey data. Results indicated five skills that developed in REPs and were used throughout an occupational therapist’s career. REPs appeared to have no impact on choice of practice field postgraduation, career pathways, or employment status. However, a group who identified their current job titles other than occupational therapy indicated a positive experience regarding their skills, career pathways, and employment status. Study results highlight the need to further understand the experiences of graduates in their REPs and the factors in REPs that may influence the career trajectory of occupational therapists. Comments The authors report they have no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Inducing Multilingual Text Analysis Tools via Robust Projection across Aligned Corpora

This paper describes a system and set of algorithms for automatically inducing stand-alone monolingual part-of-speech taggers, base noun-phrase bracketers, named-entity taggers and morphological analyzers for an arbitrary foreign language. Case studies include French, Chinese, Czech and Spanish.Existing text analysis tools for English are applied to bilingual text corpora and their output projected onto the second language via statistically derived word alignments. Simple direct annotation projection is quite noisy, however, even with optimal alignments. Thus this paper presents noise-robust tagger, bracketer and lemmatizer training procedures capable of accurate system bootstrapping from noisy and incomplete initial projections.Performance of the induced stand-alone part-of-speech tagger applied to French achieves 96% core part-of-speech (POS) tag accuracy, and the corresponding induced noun-phrase bracketer exceeds 91% F-measure. The induced morphological analyzer achieves over 99% lemmatization accuracy on the complete French verbal system.This achievement is particularly noteworthy in that it required absolutely no hand-annotated training data in the given language, and virtually no language-specific knowledge or resources beyond raw text. Performance also significantly exceeds that obtained by direct annotation projection.
Character-level Convolutional Network for Text Classification Applied to Chinese Corpus

This article provides an interesting exploration of character-level convolutional neural network solving Chinese corpus text classification problem. We constructed a large-scale Chinese language dataset, and the result shows that character-level convolutional neural network works better on Chinese corpus than its corresponding pinyin format dataset. This is the first time that character-level convolutional neural network applied to text classification problem.
Experiences of educational transition: young women with ASD, and the staff supporting them, speak

The article describes research into the factors that facilitate a smooth transition for young women with High Functioning Autism (HFA) as they move between secondary school and Sixth form or Further Education (FE) College. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with four young women with HFA and, additionally, with four members of education staff responsible for supporting young women with HFA, across a variety of school and FE settings. This research revealed that transition planning focuses almost exclusively on academic progression and is likely to be an ad hoc collection of arrangements, which places an undue burden of organisation upon parents and carers. The data suggests that, in order for transition to be successful, it needs to be systematically planned over an extended time period and to take into account the social, organisational, employment and residential elements which affect an individual's educational experience. The evidence also points to the importance of 'taster' experiences to inform decisions and prepare students for impending change. The final recommendation arising is that support for these students should continue to be sustained after transition points, being reduced only as the students settle into their new environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
On the Constrained CramÉr–Rao Bound With a Singular Fisher Information Matrix

The problem considered in this letter is to bound the performance of estimators of a deterministic parameter which satisfies given constraints. Specifically, previous work on the constrained Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) is generalized to include singular Fisher information matrices and biased estimators. A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a finite CRB is obtained. A closed form for an estimator achieving the CRB, if one exists, is also provided, as well as a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such an estimator. It is shown that biased estimators achieving the CRB can be constructed in situations for which no unbiased technique exists.
The Start-Up and Growth Stages in Enterprise Formation: The 'New View' of Dividend Taxation Reconsidered

Early-stage uncertainty makes the initial cost of capital greater than the expansion-stage one. Tax effects on enterprise formation, entrepreneurial effort and quality, and on capital costs are derived. For an incorporated enterprise (i) the entrepreneur’s ability threshold rises with the tax rate of the corporate form, (ii) the initial cost of capital due to a dividend tax is above the old view double-tax one, (iii) the start-up investment is not affected by undervaluation, but the discouragement engendered by dividend taxation is compensated by realization-based capital gains tax, (iv) with undervaluation, the expansion-stage cost of capital corresponds to the Johansson-Samuelson tax which is lower than the new view suggests, (v) without undervaluation, the dividend tax boosts expansion investment.
Artesunate: The Best Drug in the Treatment of Severe and Complicated Malaria

This review summarizes progress in treating severe and complicated malaria, which are global problems, claiming at least one million lives annually, and have been accompanied by advances in our understanding of the pathogenesis of severe malaria complications. New drugs such as intravenous artesunate (AS) and intramuscular artemether (AM) are improving outcomes and decreasing malaria deaths. Trials comparing AM to the traditional parenteral drug, quinine, have not demonstrated however convincing evidence of a mortality advantage for AM. The South East Asian Quinine Artesunate Malaria Trials (SEAQUAMAT), a multicenter, randomized, open-label study comparing AS with quinine showed that parenteral AS was shown to be associated with a 35% reduction in the risk of mortality compare to quinine, and is now the recommended treatment by the WHO for severe and complicated malaria in low-transmission areas and in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, with almost all the benefit reported in those with high parasite counts. Artesunate is a semisynthetic derivative of artemisinin whose water solubility facilitates absorption and provides an advantage over other artemisinins because it can be formulated as oral, rectal, intramuscular, and intravenous preparations. Artesunate is rapidly hydrolyzed to dihydroartemisinin, which is the most active schizonticidal metabolite. Injectable AS results in a more rapid systemic availability of AS compared with intramuscular AM. This pharmacokinetic advantage may provide a clinical advantage in the treatments of severe and complicated malaria.
Streaming Transmitter over Block-Fading Channels with Delay Constraint

Data streaming transmission over a block fading channel is studied. It is assumed that the transmitter receives a new message at each channel block at a constant rate, which is fixed by an underlying application, and tries to deliver the arriving messages by a common deadline. Various transmission schemes are proposed and compared with an informed transmitter upper bound in terms of the average decoded rate. It is shown that in the single receiver case the adaptive joint encoding (aJE) scheme is asymptotically optimal, in that it achieves the ergodic capacity as the transmission deadline goes to infinity; and it closely follows the performance of the informed transmitter upper bound in the case of finite transmission deadline. On the other hand, in the presence of multiple receivers with different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), memoryless transmission (MT), time sharing (TS) and superposition transmission (ST) schemes are shown to be more robust than the joint encoding (JE) scheme as they have gradual performance loss with decreasing SNR.
Pengaruh Motivasi Kerja dan Komitmen Organisasional terhadap Kepuasan Kerja pada Perawat Rumah Sakit Umum Daerah Bobong

This study aims to determine the effect of work motivation and organizational commitment to job satisfaction nurses Bobong Hospital. This research is a causal research. The entire population in the study was used as a sample (census study). Data were collected through questionnaires and then processed by multiple regression analysis technique using SPSS program. The object of this research is nurses Bobong Hospital. The number of samples used in this study amounted to 68 respondents. The result of this research is work motivation have an effect on signifikan to job satisfaction. Hence hypothesis 1 is fulfilled. In addition, other results indicate that organizational commitment has no effect on job satisfaction. Thus the 2nd hypothesis is rejected.
Image-Browser Taxonomy and Guidelines for Designers

In many applications users must browse large images. Most designers merely use two one-dimensional scroll bars or ad hoc designs for two-dimensional scroll bars. However, the complexity of two-dimensional browsing suggests that more careful analysis, design, and evaluation might lead to significant improvements. Our exploration of existing 2D browsers has led us to identify many features and a wide variety of tasks performed with the browsers. We introduce an informal specification technique to describe 2D browsers and a task taxonomy, suggest design features and guidelines, and assess existing strategies. We focus on the tools to explore a selected image and so do not cover techniques to browse a series of images or to browse large-image databases. >
Enhancing Survival of Mouse Oocytes Following Chemotherapy or Aging by Targeting Bax and Rad51

Background Therapeutic approaches to preserve fertility in females undergoing cancer treatments are currently ineffective. This is partly due to limited knowledge of the molecular mechanisms that injured germ cells elicit to repair damage and survive or to abort repair and activate biochemical pathways leading to death. So far, we know that following spontaneously occurring or drug-induced DNA damage, the efficiency of DNA repair is a critical determinant of the cell's fate. The protein encoded by the Rad51 gene is one of several components recruited for homologous recombination-dependent DNA double-strand break repair in both somatic cells and germ cells. Recently, we showed that microinjection of recombinant Rad51 into AKR/J mouse oocytes decreased the extent of spontaneous DNA double-strand breaks, suppressed apoptosis, and restored the developmental competence in AKR/J embryos. Herein we characterized the nature of chemotherapy-induced lesions in oocytes, and the associated individual components of the DNA damage sensor and repair apparatus. For comparison, we also assessed parallel spontaneous changes in aging oocytes. Methods Data collected were derived from: analysis of apoptosis; immunodepletion; oocyte microinjections; immunocytochemistry; immunofluorescence; and CHIP-like assays. Results Our data show that: (i) DNA damage in oocytes can be induced by both chemotherapy and spontaneously by the aging process; (ii) oocytes possess the machinery and capability for repairing such DNA damage; (iii) Rad51 is a critical player in the repair of both chemotherapy-induced and spontaneously-sustained DNA damage; and (iv) in response to damage, oocytes exhibit an inverse functional relationship between presence of Bax and activity of Rad51. Conclusion/Significance Our results establish Rad51 and/or Bax as potential candidates that can be targeted for development of individualized chemotherapeutic interventions that are effective, but minimal in toxicity. The use of Rad51 and Bax modulating compounds could offer women the opportunity to maintain fully functional germ cells despite cancer treatments or aging.
Different Numbers, Different Stories: Problematizing "Gaps" in Ontario and the TDSB.

As an urban district reform for equity, the Model Schools for Inner Cities (MSIC) Program in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) was founded as a response to inequities in the city and opportunity gaps among groups of students. This study critically explores the equity discourses among various stakeholders in the MSIC Program between 2004-14, with a specific focus on how opportunity gaps are conceptualized. Critical discourse analysis was used with attention to how these discourses interacted within and between two sets of sixteen participant interviews and the analysis of twelve documents, as well as how the discourses changed over time. A spectrum of thinking emerged from the data on opportunity gap discourses, with Affirmative Discourses on the one hand, and transformative discourse s on the other and included four components. Three of the four components were adapted from the work of Fraser’s (2005) tripartite theory of justice ( Redistribution, Recognition and Representation ). The fourth component emerged from the data and will be referred to as Re-education .