Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Political interest of adolescents before and after lowering the voting age: the case of Austria

Young people are said to be uninterested in politics. This lack of political interest among adolescents has been used as an argument against lowering the voting age. But why should someone be interested in politics if he or she is not eligible to vote? In this paper, we examine the differences in political interest of 16- and 17-year-old Austrians before and after lowering the voting age to 16, using cross-sectional survey data. Doing so, we capture a broad concept of political interest, including situational and individual interest. We observe that political interest of 16- and 17-year-olds was higher after lowering the voting age. In addition, the patterns concerning the determinants of political interest changed as well: study findings indicate that parents were of utmost importance in influencing political interest of young people who were not yet enfranchised. The impact of schools on political interest among young people emerged after the voting age had been lowered. In the specific societal and situational context of Austria, the development of political interest among young people seems to be associated with the ‘life event’ of enfranchisement.
Nestleaving and Coresidence by Young Adult Children

Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households on focal children in 1987-1988 aged 18 years and older and out of high school in 1992-1993, the authors investigated associations between parent-child coresidence in early adulthood and parents' reports of the quality of parent-child and marital relations. The quality of parent-child or marital relations at Wave 1 had little relation to whether children coresided at Wave 2; child situations were the primary predictors. Children who left and returned tended to be negatively selected on prior relationship quality, but parents accommodated them nonetheless. Coresidence between waves did not affect marital quality or general parent-child relations at Wave 2, though it was associated with increased parent-child disagreements, particularly when prior disagreement was greater. Coresidence appeared to be experienced as part of ongoing exchanges between parents and adult children.
Component Selection in the Additive Regression Model

Abstract. Similar to variable selection in the linear model, selecting significant components in the additive model is of great interest. However, such components are unknown, unobservable functions of independent variables. Some approximation is needed. We suggest a combination of penalized regression spline approximation and group variable selection, called the group‐bridge‐type spline method (GBSM), to handle this component selection problem with a diverging number of correlated variables in each group. The proposed method can select significant components and estimate non‐parametric additive function components simultaneously. To make the GBSM stable in computation and adaptive to the level of smoothness of the component functions, weighted power spline bases and projected weighted power spline bases are proposed. Their performance is examined by simulation studies. The proposed method is extended to a partial linear regression model analysis with real data, and gives reliable results.
Do Hours Spent Viewing Television at Ages 3 and 4 Predict Vocabulary and Executive Functioning at Age 5?

We examined the impact of television viewing at ages 3 and 4 on vocabulary and at age 5 on executive functioning in the context of home learning environment and parental scaffolding. Children (N = 263) were seen in the lab when they were 3 years old and then again at ages 4 and 5. Parents completed measures assessing child television viewing and the home environment at ages 3 and 4, and mother–child interaction was observed during a problem-solving task. At age 5, children completed measures of vocabulary and executive functioning. Results indicated that although the amount of television viewing was negatively related to vocabulary and executive functioning, this association was no longer significant once background variables, home learning environment, and parental scaffolding were taken into consideration. Parental scaffolding emerged as a primary predictor of vocabulary above demographic covariates. Implications of the research are discussed in terms of recommendations for parents regarding television viewing by preschool children.
Identity work and play

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of identity play defined as people's engagement in provisional but active trial of possible future selves.Design/methodology/approach – Current research and theorizing on the variety of strategies and behaviors used by individuals to tailor, adapt or otherwise change their identities has converged on the notion of identity work to conceptualize these processes. This paper introduces an alternative but complementary notion – identity play – and develops a framework that specifies how identity work and play differ from each other, and proposes a set of ideas about the process of identity play in role transitions.Findings – The authors theorize that role transitions are a useful context to explore identity play and that just as individuals move between cycles of career stability and professional transitions so may they move between periods of identity work and play.Originality/value – The concept of identity play provides a useful starting point.
Needle electromyography at 1 month predicts paralysis of elbow flexion at 3 months in obstetric brachial plexus lesions

Aim Treatment decisions in obstetric brachial plexus lesions are often based on clinical paralysis of elbow flexion at 3 months of age, when electromyography (EMG) is misleading because motor unit potentials (MUPs) occur in clinically paralytic muscles. We investigated whether EMG at 1 week or 1 month identifies infants with flexion paralysis at 3 months, allowing early referral.
Toward an Organizational Model of Achievement in High Schools: The Significance of Collective Efficacy

In this study, a theoretical model to explain school achievement in high schools is developed and tested. Collective efficacy is the key variable in a proposed theoretical system that also includes academic press and socioeconomic status. The authors postulate that both socioeconomic status and academic press have positive effects on school achievement in mathematics as well as improve the collective efficacy of the school. Collective efficacy, in turn, is hypothesized to have a positive effect on school mathematics achievement. Finally, the analysis concludes with a discussion of strategies to enhance collective efficacy of schools.
Spherules and IBV

Infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) is an economically important virus infecting chickens, causing large losses to the poultry industry globally. While vaccines are available, there is a requirement for novel vaccine strategies due to high strain variation and poor cross-protection. This requires a more detailed understanding of virus-host cell interactions to identify candidates for targeted virus attenuation. One key area of research in the positive sense RNA virus field, due to its central role in virus replication, is the induction of cellular membrane rearrangements by this class of viruses for the assembly of virus replication complexes. In our recent work, we identified the structures induced by IBV during infection of cultured cells, as well as primary cells and ex vivo organ culture. We identified structures novel to the coronavirus family, which strongly resemble replication sites of other positive sense RNA viruses. We have begun to extend this work using recombinant IBVs, which are chimera of different virus strains to study the role of viral proteins in the induction of membrane rearrangements.
High mortality after abdominal operation in patients with large‐volume malignant ascites

Advanced intra‐abdominal cancers are frequently associated with malignant ascites. The aim of this study was to document the frequency and clinical course of patients found to have large‐volume (≥3 L) malignant ascites when undergoing a major abdominal operation. Between October 1, 1987 and September 1, 1992, 385 patients with malignant ascites were admitted to hospitals associated with a university medical center. Seventeen with large volume ascites underwent exploration for palliation of bowel obstruction or debulking of tumor. Operative mortality was 41% and mortality correlated with the presence of a nonovarian primary and advanced age. We conclude that patients with large volume nonovarian malignant ascites have a high mortality rate following a major abdominal operation. New approaches such as neoadjuvant or intraperitoneal chemotherapy or possibly peritoneovenous shunt placement at the time of the abdominal operation, are needed to improve the dismal results in this subgroup of patients. © 1996 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Framing and Reviewing Hip-Hop Educational Research

Hip-hop has become relevant to the field of education because of its implications for understanding language, learning, identity, curriculum, and other areas. This integrative review provides historical context and cohesion for the burgeoning and discursive body of hip-hop scholarship by framing it according to three heuristic categories and briefly discussing the strengths and weaknesses for the field of education. The article then critically reviews three major strands of selected literature across these categories that are relevant to educational research. Finally, the article outlines new directions for future research and corresponding theoretical perspectives and strategic methods. With these purposes, this review is intended to inform both researchers unfamiliar with hip-hop and scholars who have centered hip-hop in their research agendas.
EFFECTIVE INTERVENTION IN PRIMARY SCHOOLS: WHAT NURTURE GROUPS ACHIEVE

In this paper Marion Bennathan describes the nature and development of nurture groups, which are a system of early intervention for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties in the early years of schooling. The theoretical origins of the approach, which draw heavily on the on developmental theories, are briefly described. Evidence is provided of the effectiveness of nurture group in addressing children's emotional and educational needs and enabling them to return to mainstream classes after relatively short periods of intensive treatment. Data is also provided which demonstrates the cost‐effectiveness of the approach. The relevance and importance of such early intervention to the current educational climate are stressed and the compatibility of the approach with current thinking about the value of inclusive approaches to SEN is demonstrated. The paper concludes with a discussion of directions for future development of the nurture groups movement.
‘I’ll tell you what suits me best if you don’t mind me saying’: ‘lay participation’ in health‐care

‘I’ll tell you what suits me best if you don’t mind me saying’: ‘lay participation’ in health-careIncreasing ‘lay participation’ in healthcare has become a popular notion in recent years and is generally considered to be a good thing in both nursing and wider policy circles. Yet despite the widespread acceptance of this overall idea, there is a dearth of theorising in this area. This has resulted in a lack of conceptual clarity which has not only hamstrung the development of empirical work in the field, but has also led to a tendency by both nurses and policy-makers to assume that greater ‘lay participation’ in health will lead to a concomitant increase in lay power vis-a-vis health professionals. The data presented in this paper indicate that this is, at best, an over-simplistic assumption and, at worst, an erroneous one. Drawing on sociological theories of the division of labour, I suggest that one way in which we might begin to clarify our thinking in this area is by differentiating between the ‘role’ and ‘task’ components of ‘lay participation’. I illustrate my argument with reference to two separate ethnographic studies undertaken between 1994 and 1998 in which participation at the level of the individual was examined.
Algorithms for Computing the Triplet Quartet Distances for Binary General Trees

Distance measures between trees are useful for comparing trees in a systematic manner, and several different distance measures have been proposed. The triplet and quartet distances, for rooted and unrooted trees, respectively, are defined as the number of subsets of three or four leaves, respectively, where the topologies of the induced subtrees differ. These distances can trivially be computed by explicitly enumerating all sets of three or four leaves and testing if the topologies are different, but this leads to time complexities at least of the order n3 or n4 just for enumerating the sets. The different topologies can be counted implicitly, however, and in this paper, we review a series of algorithmic improvements that have been used during the last decade to develop more efficient algorithms by exploiting two different strategies for this; one based on dynamic programming and another based on coloring leaves in one tree and updating a hierarchical decomposition of the other.
The judgment of intelligence from photographs.

Individuals with considerable experience in judging strangers in a brief period were asked to judge the intelligence of 150 subjects, on the hypothesis that the wide discrepancies in previous studies have been due to their use of a small sample and inexperienced judges. All the judges in this study estimated intelligence with an approximately equal degree of inaccuracy. They were no more accurate in estimating extremes of intelligence than in estimating average or near-average levels. Factors believed to be common to the 10 photographs estimated to be of the highest intelligence and missing from those estimated to be of lowest intelligence, were: symmetry and regularity of features, pleasantness of expression, and neatness of appearance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)
Factors Associated with Physical Activity in a Sample of British Secondary School Students.

Background: The purpose of this study was to investigate the demographic, social and psychological factors associated with moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) among a sample of secondary school students (N = 402). Methods: Students completed a questionnaire which examined their level of participation in MVPA and sedentary behaviours along with a number of potential correlates. Hierarchical regression was used to explore the relationship between hypothesised factors and MVPA. Results: Approximately a third of students (31.9%) reported involvement in at least five sessions of MVPA in the previous week. The students reported an average of 2.8 hours per day watching television and 1.7 hours per day using the computer. In the final regression model, 33% of variance in MVPA was explained. Perceived barriers, peer support and family support were statistically significant predictors. Conclusions: This study confirmed a number of factors to be associated with participation in MVPA. No relationship was found between sedentary behaviour and MVPA.
Fin-flicking behaviour: a visual antipredator alarm signal in a characin fish, Hemigrammus erythrozonus


Glowlight tetras, Hemigrammus erythrozonus, show a conspicuous visual display ('fin flicking') upon detecting a conspecific chemical alarm signal (alarm pheromone). We conducted laboratory studies to test two, nonmutually exclusive hypotheses regarding the function of this behaviour. To test the hypothesis that fin flicking acts as a visual alarm signal to conspecifics, we paired shoals of tetras with a stimulus tetra in an adjacent tank (separated by a one-way mirror) and exposed the stimulus tetras to conspecific skin extract (with alarm pheromone) or swordtail skin extract (which lacks ostariophysan alarm pheromone). Stimulus tetras significantly increased their frequency of fin flicking when exposed to conspecific skin extract, but not to the swordtail skin extract control. The test shoals showed a significant increase in antipredator behaviour in response to fin-flicking stimulus tetras, but not to stimulus tetras that did not fin-flick. To test the hypothesis that fin flicking serves as a predator deterrent, we paired predatory Jack Dempsey cichlids, Cichlasoma octofaciatum, with tetras in adjacent tanks and exposed the tetras to either conspecific or swordtail skin extract. Predators remained further away from the stimulus tetra, took longer to initiate a bite and displayed fewer bites towards tetras that fin-flicked compared with tetras that did not fin-flick. These results support our hypothesis that fin flicking in tetras serves as both a visual alarm signal to conspecifics and a deterring signal to predators, and suggest that individual tetras may reduce their risk of predation by fin flicking upon detecting a predation threat. Copyright 1999 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.
The Red Hat Society®: Exploring the Role of Play, Liminality, and Communitas in Older Women's Lives

ABSTRACT There is an extensive literature on play. Yet, the role of play in older adults' lives has received limited attention. Strikingly absent is research on play and older women. Missing from the literature is how older women use play as a liminal context for social interaction and communitas. This is odd because by 2030 one in four American women will be over the age of sixty-five. The primary purpose of this study is to explore the roles of play, liminality, and communitas in older women's lives. The focus is the Red Hat Society®, a social group for women over age 50 that fosters play and fun. Using qualitative interviews with focus groups and participant observation of a regional Red Hat Society® event, the study highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses of current conceptualizations of play, liminality, and communitas.
Elevated Levels of Maternal Serum Inhibin Immunoreactivity in Second Trimester Pregnancies Affected by Down's Syndrome

The placenta synthesizes and secretes protein and peptide hormones that are active both in the fetalmaternal compartment and within the placenta. These hormones include human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) , the dimeric glycoprotein hormone that regulates progesterone production from the corpus luteum and placenta. A placental gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH) has been postulated as a local modulator of hCG secretion and a role for placental Inhibin has also been postulated in the feedback control of hCG secretion.l-' The Inhibins are part of a complex interrelated group of gonadal proteins that modulate FSH secretion by the pituitary. They have a molecular mass of 32 kD and are composed of common 01 subunits with similar but distinguishable {j subunits. In pregnancies affected by Trisomy 21 there is an increased output of hCG, such that measurement of maternal serum total hCG levels have been proposed as a second trimester screening test for pregnancies affected by Trisomy 21.3 More recently, the measurement of the Free {j subunit of hCG has been shown to be a superior marker for this condition across both the first" and second trimester of pregnancy.S In gestational trophoblastic disease such as hydatidiform mole, serum inhibin immunoreactivity has been shown to be significantlyelevated and levels fall to normal menstrual cycle levels after evacuation of the mole. Furthermore, serum inhibin immunoreactivity in such cases prior to evacuation are highly correlated with Total hCG concentrations," Kratzner et al.6 showed that in cases of Trisomy 21 the hCG bioactivity was not
Testing Mediation and Suppression Effects of Latent Variables

Because of the importance of mediation studies, researchers have been continuously searching for the best statistical test for mediation effect. The approaches that have been most commonly employed include those that use zero-order and partial correlation, hierarchical regression models, and structural equation modeling (SEM). This study extends MacKinnon and colleagues (MacKinnon, Lockwood, Hoffmann, West, & Sheets, 2002; MacKinnon, Lockwood, & Williams, 2004, MacKinnon, Warsi, & Dwyer, 1995) works by conducting a simulation that examines the distribution of mediation and suppression effects of latent variables with SEM, and the properties of confidence intervals developed from eight different methods. Results show that SEM provides unbiased estimates of mediation and suppression effects, and that the bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals perform best in testing for mediation and suppression effects. Steps to implement the recommended procedures with Amos are presented.
Sex differences in cognitive dysfunction among bipolar disorder patients

Introduction Studies have proposed that cognitive deficits are present in a variety of mood states in bipolar disorder (BD). In addition, a few studies have pointed to the presence of sex-related differences in cognitive dysfunction in BD. Aim of the work This comparative study aimed to study the cognitive functioning of BD patients in different episodes, and detect any sex-related differences in cognitive functioning in the studied sample. Patients and methods The recruited sample consisted of 150 patients selected at random from El Maamoura Mental Hospital over 6 months. Four groups were formed: group I, comprising 38 (19 male and 19 female) BD patients having manic episodes; group II, comprising 26 (12 male and 14 female) BD patients having depressive episodes; group III, comprising 36 (20 male and 16 female) patients in remission (euthymic); and group IV, comprising 50 controls matched for age, sex, and education. Clinical and psychiatric evaluations were carried out and psychometric assessment was performed using the 17-item Hamilton Depressive Scale and the Young Mania Rating Scale, as well as cognitive assessments using three tests: Wisconsin′s Card Sorting Test (WCST), the digit span subtest of the WAIS-R and DSST (the digit symbol subtest of the WAIS-R). Results The BD patients in the three groups having BD showed significant cognitive deficits compared with controls. Manic and depressive patients showed impairment in attention, working memory, and executive functions. Euthymic patients showed significant impairment in working memory and executive functions. Only euthymic patients revealed a statistically significant sex-related difference in terms of short-term memory, attention, and working memory, with women being worse than men. Interestingly, in the control group a difference in executive functions was reported wherein healthy control women performed significantly better than control men on the WCST-128 (completed significantly more number of categories and committed significantly fewer perseverative errors). Conclusion Cognitive dysfunction should be regarded as a core feature of BD as it was present across all mood states in our sample. In addition, discrepancy has been found between male and female euthymic patients regarding cognitive functions, suggesting a sex-related difference in the clinical expression of BD.
Application of Gabor Filter and Multi-class SVM in Baking Bread Quality Classification

This paper presents a method in classifying the baking quality-test bread based on Gabor filters and SVMs. Gray images of the field of view are transformed with different orientations and scales by filters. The texture features are denoted by the energy standard value and standard variance. A multi-class Support Vector Machine is proposed to implement the quick classification of baking bread according to small amount samples. The results indicate the practicability and feasibility of the method