Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficient Local Search in Coordination Games on Graphs

We study strategic games on weighted directed graphs, where the payoff of a player is defined as the sum of the weights on the edges from players who chose the same strategy augmented by a fixed non-negative bonus for picking a given strategy. These games capture the idea of coordination in the absence of globally common strategies. Prior work shows that the problem of determining the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium for these games is NP-complete already for graphs with all weights equal to one and no bonuses. However, for several classes of graphs (e.g. DAGs and cliques) pure Nash equilibria or even strong equilibria always exist and can be found by simply following a particular improvement or coalition-improvement path, respectively. In this paper we identify several natural classes of graphs for which a finite improvement or coalition-improvement path of polynomial length always exists, and, as a consequence, a Nash equilibrium or strong equilibrium in them can be found in polynomial time. We also argue that these results are optimal in the sense that in natural generalisations of these classes of graphs, a pure Nash equilibrium may not even exist.
Product market competition, corporate governance and firm performance: An empirical analysis for Germany

This study examines the impact of product market competition and corporate governance on productivity growth in German manufacturing. Using a panel of almost 500 firms over the years 1986 to 1994, we find that firms experience higher productivity growth when operating in markets with intense competition. Similarly, productivity growth is higher for firms under control of a strong ultimate owner, but not when the ultimate owner is a financial institution (a group that consisted almost exclusively of German banks and insurance firms in our sample period). Our results also indicate that competition and tight control are complements: The positive effect of competition is enhanced by the presence of a strong ultimate owner.
Another Venue for Problematic Interpersonal Behavior: The Effects of Depressive and Anxious Symptoms on Social Networking Experiences

The current study examined the influence of depressive, global anxiety, and social anxiety symptoms on the frequency and quality of social networking experiences among young adults. Three hundred and one participants (62% female; mean age = 19.44 years, SD = 2.05) completed an initial survey and a follow-up survey three weeks later. Results indicated that depressive, global anxiety, and social anxiety symptoms were not significantly associated with changes in time spent engaging in social networking activities. In contrast, depressive symptoms were generally associated with increases in negative interactions and negative affect following interactions. Further, global and social anxiety symptoms were generally not significantly associated with changes in the quality of social networking interactions. These findings suggest that social networking activities are another venue in which psychological problems manifest in dysfunctional interpersonal interactions. Further, different types of psychological proble.
Molecular characterization of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency in patients from the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, RS

Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH; EC 1.1.1.49) deficiency is one of the most common human enzymopathies throughout the world. Although most affected individuals are asymptomatic, there is a risk of neonatal jaundice and acute hemolytic anemia which can be triggered by infection, some pharmaceuticals and, in older individuals, eating fava beans. We characterized the molecular basis of G6PDH deficiency in a sample of 348 adults from Porto Alegre (population about 1.5 million), the capital of the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Genomic DNA was extracted from peripheral blood leukocytes. We studied the three G6PDH mutations that appear to be the most frequent in Southern Brazil, the G202A and A376G A minus (A-) variants and the C563T Mediterranean (Med) variant. From July 2004 to October 2005, 348 patients (162 Females plus 186 males, age range 0 to 82 years) from Porto Alegre were referred to our laboratory for G6PDH analysis, 36 (9.7%) of which showed deficient G6PDH activity. These 36 patients and 34 randomly-selected non-deficient control individuals were submitted to molecular analysis which revealed a predominance of G6PDH A- allele among the deficient patients. The prevalence of the G6PDH A- variant agrees with its distribution among the ethnic groups that colonized RS, especially those of African, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian origin.
The Learning Experience of Students with Disabilities in Higher Education. A case study of a UK university

This paper summarises the results of an investigation into the social and learning experiences of students with disabilities in a UK University. The students' experiences were evaluated in three broad areas: with respect to the categories used by the Higher Education Council to examine the quality of the learning experience for all students in higher education; against the issues conventionally included in studies and policy developments for independent living for people with disabilities; and in relation to the impact coming to university has on the lives of students with disabilities. The paper highlights the issues of central concern to students with disabilities in the University and draws some conclusions with policy implications from a discussion of student perception of services, the practical constraints facing the institution, and the social values which underpin the framework of support for students with disabilities in Higher Education in England and Wales.
Temporal pattern of alcohol consumption in the United States.

Alcohol is a major risk factor for many causes of injuries. A preliminary assessment of alcohol's involvement in specific causes of injuries must take into account when people are drinking. This study quantified the weekly and diurnal rhythm of alcohol consumption for the general U.S. population using data collected in a national survey. The data showed a strong temporal pattern consisting of more drinking on weekends with daily peaks in the early evening and troughs in the early morning. The national temporal drinking pattern was positively correlated (0.22 to 0.56) with national temporal patterns of motor vehicle accidents, a cause of injury commonly associated with drinking.
Emergency department use by nursing home residents: effect of severity of cognitive impairment.

PURPOSE To examine the 1-year prevalence and risk of emergency department (ED) use and ambulatory care-sensitive (ACS) ED use by nursing home (NH) residents with different levels of severity of cognitive impairment (CI). DESIGN AND METHODS We used multinomial logistic regression to estimate the effect of CI severity on the odds of any ED visit and any ACS ED visit in a 2006 national random sample of NH residents, controlling for predisposing, enabling, and need characteristics. RESULTS Of 132,753 NH residents, 62% had at least one ED visit and approximately 24% had at least one ACS ED visit in 2006. The probability of any ED visit or any ACS ED visit varied with the severity of resident CI. Residents with mild CI had up to 15% higher odds of any ED or any ACS ED visit and those with more moderate CI had 9% higher odds of an ACS ED visit compared with those without CI. The probability of any ED visit was negatively associated with advanced dementia (adjusted odds ratio = 0.60; 95% CI = 0.55-0.65). IMPLICATIONS Earlier identification of persons with mild CI may facilitate patient, family, and staff education, as well as advanced care planning to reduce ACS ED visits. Both ACS ED use and hospitalizations, adjusted for case mix, should be used as quality indicators to help ensure greater accountability for high-quality NH care and more appropriate utilization of ED resources.
Does the Revolving Door Affect the SEC's Enforcement Outcomes?

We provide empirical evidence on the consequences of the “revolving door” phenomenon at the SEC. If future job opportunities make SEC lawyers exert more enforcement effort to showcase their expertise, then the revolving door phenomenon will promote more aggressive regulatory activity (the “human capital” hypothesis). In contrast, SEC lawyers can relax enforcement efforts in order to curry favor with prospective employers in the private sector (the “rent seeking” hypothesis”). We collect data on the career paths of 336 SEC lawyers that span 284 SEC enforcement actions against fraudulent financial reporting over the period 1990-2007. We find evidence consistent with the human capital hypothesis. Specifically, the intensity of enforcement efforts, proxied by the fraction of losses collected as damages, the likelihood of criminal proceedings and the likelihood of naming the CEO as a defendant, are higher when the SEC lawyer leaves to join law firms that defend clients charged by the SEC. Our evidence is thus inconsistent with popular concerns that revolving doors undermine the SEC’s enforcement efforts.
"THAT'S THE ONLY PLACE WHERE YOU CAN HANG OUT": URBAN YOUNG PEOPLE AND THE SPACE OF THE MALL

Consumption spaces such as shopping malls have become central parts of many young people's geographical imaginations and social worlds. In this paper, we utilize qualitative evidence to examine the role of the shopping mall in the lives of young people (ages 12 to 13) living in a set of economically distressed inner-city neighborhoods in a southern city. We argue that understanding these young people's preference for the space of the mall requires an approach that takes into account aspects of their local context, including their perception of neighborhood violence and resource availability. Our findings suggest that many of these young people's expressed preferences for the mall reflect relatively mainstream desires, such as to be safe, to interact with other young people, and to feel a sense of possibility and choice, which they cannot successfully enact in other spaces. These findings can inform recent debates regarding young people's use of "public" spaces. [
Force Amplitude Modulation of Tongue and Hand Movements

Rapid, precise movements of the hand and tongue are necessary to complete a wide range of tasks in everyday life. However, the understanding of normal neural control of force production is limited, particularly for the tongue. Functional neuroimaging studies of incremental hand pressure production in healthy adults revealed scaled activations in the basal ganglia, but no imaging studies of tongue force regulation have been reported. The purposes of this study were (1) to identify the neural substrates controlling tongue force for speech and nonspeech tasks, (2) to determine which activations scaled to the magnitude of force produced, and (3) to assess whether positional modifications influenced maximum pressures and accuracy of pressure target matching for hand and tongue movements. Healthy older adults compressed small plastic bulbs in the oral cavity (for speech and nonspeech tasks) and in the hand at specified fractions of maximum voluntary contraction while magnetic resonance images were acquired. Volume of interest analysis at individual and group levels outlined a network of neural substrates controlling tongue speech and nonspeech movements. Repeated measures analysis revealed differences in percentage signal change and activation volume across task and effort level in some brain regions. Actual pressures and the accuracy of pressure matching were influenced by effort level in all tasks and body position in the hand squeeze task. The current results can serve as a basis of comparison for tongue movement control in individuals with neurological disease. Group differences in motor control mechanisms may help explain differential response of limb and tongue movements to medical interventions (as occurs in Parkinson disease) and ultimately may lead to more focused intervention for dysarthria in several conditions such as PD.
Thinking in Working Memory

It is not an accident that this discussion of working memory is positioned near the center of a volume on thinking and reasoning. Central to higher-level cognitive processes is the ability to form and manipulate mental representations (see Doumas & Hummel, Chap. 4). Working memory is the cognitive construct responsible for the maintenance and manipulation of information and therefore is neccessary for many of the types of complex thought described in this book. Likewise, the development and failures of working memory are critical to understanding thought changes with development (see Halford, Chap. 22) and aging (see Salthouse, Chap. 24) as well as many types of higher-level cognitive impairments (see Bachman & Cannon, Chap. 21 ). In spite of its obvious importance for thinking and reasoning, working memory’s role in complex thought is just beginning to be understood. In this chapter, we review several dominant models of working memory, viewing them from different methodological perspectives, including dual-task experiments, individual differences, and cognitive neuroscience.
MENTAL AEROBICS: EXERCISES FOR THE MIND IN LATER LIFE

Mental aerobics is a program designed to enhance the self-esteem and cognitive functioning of older adults in the context of weekly group sessions where the emphasis is on having fun, the cooperative sharing of ideas, and the development of solutions to challenging problems. Loosely based on the creative thinking concepts of the Odyssey of the Mind program, the counselor/facilitator brings to the group puzzles, logical and matrices problems, and both math and word problems to be solved. Older persons who may no longer believe they can produce creative answers and solve such problems are encouraged to believe in themselves by their own successful performance. The program is quite adaptable, and its format can be changed to fit a variety of settings to include integenerational ones.
Comparisons of Beginning Literacy Programs: Alternative Paths to the Same Learning Outcome

University-based researchers consulted with first-grade teachers in a comparison of Integrated Reading-Writing (IR-W) and DISTAR programs in comparable urban schools with students “at risk” for literacy problems. Students in the two programs made comparable relative gains in achievement outcomes in word recognition from the beginning to the end of first grade. Level of orthographic and phonological awareness at the end of the first grade, but not instructional program, predicted level of reading achievement at the end of first grade. However, differences in processes underlying end-of-year achievement outcome were observed. Children in Integrated Reading-Writing tended to acquire orthographic-phonological connections at the whole word and subword levels, whereas children in DISTAR tended to acquire only subword connections. No differences were noted in developmental level of composition between the two instructional programs at the middle or end of first grade when coded compositions were available. The results are consistent with the notion that there is more than one way to learn to read and write.
Employing topic modeling for statistical machine translation

The mixture modeling approaches have dominated the research of domain adaptation in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Such approaches construct a general model and several sub-models in advance and focus on the way of determining the relative importance of all the models. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach for better domain adaptation in phrase-based SMT via topic modeling. Different from existing approaches, our topic modeling approach employs one additional feature function to capture the topic inherent in the source phrase and help the decoder dynamically choose related target phrases according to the specific topic of the source phrase. Evaluation on a conversation corpus shows very encouraging results.
Moduli spaces of polarized symplectic O'Grady varieties and Borcherds products

We study moduli spaces of O'Grady's ten-dimensional irreducible symplectic manifolds. These moduli spaces are covers of modular varieties of dimension 21, namely quotients of hermitian symmetric domains by a suitable arithmetic group. The interesting and new aspect of this case is that the group in question is strictly bigger than the stable orthogonal group. This makes it different from both the K3 and the K3[n] case, which are of dimension 19 and 20 respectively.
Lifestyle Questionnaire to Evaluate Risk for Reduced Bone Mineral Density in Women

Objective:To determine the contribution of various risk factors to quantitative ultrasound parameters in a sample of women, and to develop a tool to assess osteopenia risk, with a view to targeted early intervention. Design:Questionnaire study. Setting:A local center comprising a fitness center, conference center, and administrative offices for various businesses and sports. Patients or Participants:A convenience sample of 187 Caucasian women who volunteered as part of a free public health screening initiative. Main Outcome Measurements:A questionnaire was designed to collect data on history of osteoporosis, current physical activity, calcium, alcohol and caffeine intakes, smoking, and various reproductive measures. Historical physical activity data were also collected, and lifetime energy expenditure and impact scores were calculated. Quantitative ultrasound was performed on the left calcaneus. Odds ratios (ORs) were calculated to determine the odds of being osteopenic (T-score ≤−1 SD) against not being osteopenic (T-score >−1SD), due to exposure to the aforementioned risk factors. Results:Significant ORs were obtained for age (OR: 1.042; 95% CI: 1.016-1.068), current physical activity (≥3 times/wk; OR: 0.320; 95% CI: 0.140-0.732), and lifetime energy expenditure score (OR: 0.957; 95% CI: 0.926-0.989). A regression model based on age and current physical activity correctly identified 57% of women with or without osteopenia. Conclusions:Although the model we developed was not sensitive or specific enough to assess osteopenic risk accurately, the results show that frequency of physical activity, independent of age, is an important lifestyle factor to consider when quantifying osteopenic risk.
The Effectiveness of Hippotherapy for Children With Language-Learning Disabilities

This study examined the effectiveness of hippotherapy versus traditional therapy for children with language-learning disabilities. Three boys, ages 9, 10, and 12 years, and their parents independently completed a satisfaction questionnaire at the end of traditional therapy (T1) and again at the end of hippotherapy (T2). A comparison of the responses from T1 and T2 indicated that both the parents and the children reported improvement in speech and language abilities after both therapies. Overall, responses were noticeably higher following hippotherapy, with additional benefits of improved motivation and attention also reported.
News Driven Business Cycles: Insights and Challenges

There is a widespread belief that changes in expectations may be an important independent driver of economic fluctuations. The news view of business cycles offers a formalization of this perspective. In this paper we discuss mechanisms by which changes in agents' information, due to the arrival of news, can cause business cycle fluctuations driven by expectational change, and we review the empirical evidence aimed at evaluating its relevance. In particular, we highlight how the literature on news and business cycles offers a coherent way of thinking about aggregate fluctuations, while at the same time we emphasize the many challenges that must be addressed before a proper assessment of its role in business cycles can be established.
Alleviating the small sample-size problem in i-vector based speaker verification

This paper investigates the small sample-size problem in i-vector based speaker verification systems. The idea of i-vectors is to represent the characteristics of speakers in the factors of a factor analyzer. Because the factor loading matrix defines the possible speaker and channel-variability of i-vectors, it is important to suppress the unwanted channel variability. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA), within-class covariance normalization (WCCN), and probabilistic LDA are commonly used for such purpose. These methods, however, require training data comprising many speakers each providing sufficient recording sessions for good performance. Performance will suffer when the number of speakers and/or number of sessions per speaker are too small. This paper compares four approaches to addressing this small sample-size problem: (1) preprocessing the i-vectors by PCA before applying LDA (PCA+LDA), (2) replacing the matrix inverse in LDA by pseudo-inverse, (3) applying multi-way LDA by exploiting the microphone and speaker labels of the training data, and (4) increasing the matrix rank in LDA by generating more i-vectors using utterance partitioning. Results based on NIST 2010 SRE suggests that utterance partitioning performs the best, followed by multi-way LDA and PCA+LDA.
Fully automatic segmentation of lumbar vertebrae from CT images using cascaded 3D fully convolutional networks

We present a method to address the challenging problem of segmentation of lumbar vertebrae from CT images acquired with varying fields of view. Our method is based on cascaded 3D Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) consisting of a localization FCN and a segmentation FCN. More specifically, in the first step we train a regression 3D FCN (we call it "LocalizationNet") to find the bounding box of the lumbar region. After that, a 3D U-net like FCN (we call it "Segmentation-Net") is then developed, which after training, can perform a pixel-wise multi-class segmentation to map a cropped lumber region volumetric data to its volume-wise labels. Evaluated on publicly available datasets, our method achieved an average Dice coefficient of 95.77 ± 0.81% and an average symmetric surface distance of 0.37 ± 0.06 mm.