Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rule-Selection and Action-Selection have a Shared Neuroanatomical Basis in the Human Prefrontal and Parietal Cortex

The human capacity for voluntary action is one of the major contributors to our success as a species. In addition to choosing actions themselves, we can also voluntarily choose behavioral codes or sets of rules that can guide future responses to events. Such rules have been proposed to be superordinate to actions in a cognitive hierarchy and mediated by distinct brain regions. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to study novel tasks of rule-based and voluntary action. We show that the voluntary selection of rules to govern future responses to events is associated with activation of similar regions of prefrontal and parietal cortex as the voluntary selection of an action itself. The results are discussed in terms of hierarchical models and the adaptive coding potential of prefrontal neurons and their contribution to a global workspace for nonautomatic tasks. These tasks include the choices we make about our behavior.
Decreasing incidence and mortality among hospitalized patients suffering a ventilator-associated pneumonia

Abstract The aim of this study was to describe trends in the incidence and outcomes of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) among hospitalized patients in Spain (2010–2014). This is a retrospective study using the Spanish national hospital discharge database from year 2010 to 2014. We selected all hospital admissions that had an ICD-9-CM code: 997.31 for VAP in any diagnosis position. We analyzed incidence, sociodemographic and clinical characteristics, procedures, pathogen isolations, and hospital outcomes. We identified 9336 admissions with patients suffering a VAP. Incidence rates of VAP decreased significantly over time (from 41.7 cases/100,000 inhabitants in 2010 to 40.55 in 2014). The mean Charlson comorbidity index (CCI) was 1.08 ± 0.98 and it did not change significantly during the study period. The most frequent causative agent was Pseudomonas and there were not significant differences in the isolation of this microorganism over time. Time trend analyses showed a significant decrease in in-hospital mortality (IHM), from 35.74% in 2010 to 32.81% in 2014. Factor associated with higher IHM included male sex, older age, higher CCI, vein or artery occlusion, pulmonary disease, cancer, undergone surgery, emergency room admission, and readmission. This study shows that the incidence of VAP among hospitalized patients has decreased in Spain from 2010 to 2014. The IHM has also decreased over the study period. Further investigations are needed to improve the prevention and control of VAP.
The Socio-Emotional Guidance Questionnaire (SEG-Q)

Since facilitating the fullest development of each student in terms of enriching their intellectual development as well as their personal, social, and emotional development has become an important objective, social and emotional guidance has become an integral part of education. This recent acknowledgment has stimulated research interest into how to measure, evaluate, and optimize guidance activities in schools. This interest, however, is contingent on a valid assessment of integrated socioemotional guidance, which despite the growing attention still remains a problem. This study therefore aims to investigate the validity and generalizability of the Socio-Emotional Guidance Questionnaire (SEG-Q). Measurement invariance across three groups of teachers teaching in different stages of secondary education (Total n = 3,336) was tested, by means of multigroup confirmatory factor analyses (MGCFA) in Mplus. The results show partial invariance of the SEG-Q across the teacher groups, confirming that the SEG-Q is a psychometrically sound self-report instrument for secondary education teachers which can be used by researchers and practitioners to measure, map, describe, or evaluate integrated socioemotional guidance.
From reflection to action? Barriers and bridges between higher education teachers’ thoughts and actions

Within higher education, reflection has been seen as a prerequisite to quality teaching and developing as a teacher. However, little empirical research exists concerning the link between teacher reflection and action, which defines the extent to which the teacher’s reflection-based views are channelled to the benefit of the students. This article focuses on this link, as manifested through interviews with 76 university teachers. The findings shed light on practical challenges and obstacles along higher education teachers’ path from reflection to practice, and indicate that, despite the strong emphasis on reflection, it is far from being a self-evident tool for developing a teacher’s practice. Besides the pedagogical perspective, this link also appears essential from the viewpoint of the teacher experiencing teaching as rewarding. Issues that arise when theories of learning and reflection are applied to the context of the development of university teacher are considered.
Relationships of work–family coping strategies with work–family conflict and enrichment: The roles of gender and parenting status

This study investigated individual work–family coping strategies (WFCS). We focused on four types of coping efforts and behaviours that employees take up in order to balance their work and family life: (1) ‘Being super at work/home’, (2) ‘Being good enough at work/home’, (3) ‘Prioritizing at work/home’ and (4) ‘Delegating at work/home’. We examined the relationships between WFCS and work–family conflict and between WFCS and work–family enrichment. In addition, we investigated whether parenting status and gender relate to the use of WFCS and their potential moderator role in the linkage between WFCS and work–family conflict and enrichment. The study was based on a sample of Finnish health care and service employees (N = 2340). The results showed, first, that WFCS were related to work–family conflict and enrichment, but also that the relationships varied according to the type of WFCS and the outcome studied. For example, ‘Delegating’ and ‘Being super’ were related to higher enrichment, whereas ‘Prioritizing’ associated with higher conflict. Second, women prioritized more at home than men, whereas men prioritized more at work than women. Third, parents reported a higher use of delegation at work than non-parents. Fourth, a few relationships were moderated by parenting, for example, mothers and fathers benefited more from ‘Prioritizing at home’ in terms of higher work-to-family enrichment and ‘Good enough at work/home’ in terms of lower family-to-work conflict and higher work-to-family enrichment than non-parents.
Understanding India's skewed sex ratio problem using cognitive maps

Recent studies have confirmed that the problem of female deficit in India is the result of sex selective abortion, negligence of girls, infanticides and foeticide, preference of son for the preservation for clan, gender bias and emergence of new technologies in medical field. This paper addresses this critical problem of gender inequality in India using fuzzy cognitive maps. Fuzzy cognitive maps model the world as a collection of classes and causal relation between classes. Authors have attempted to explore the relationships and the relative impacts among the causes; that fuels this crucial problem.
A distributed architecture of edge proxy servers for cooperative transcoding

The large variety of devices that are gaining access to the Internet requires novel server functionalities to tailor Web content at run-time, namely transcoding. Traditional schemes assign transcoding operations to the Web server or single edge proxies. We propose an alternative architecture consisting of cooperative proxy servers which collaborate in discovering and transcoding multiple versions of Web objects. The transcoding functionality opens an entirely new space of investigation in the research area of cache cooperation, because it transforms the proxy servers from content repositories into pro-active network elements providing computation and adaptive delivery. We investigate and evaluate experimentally different schemes for cooperative discovery of multiversion content and transcoding in the context of a flat topology of edge servers.
The Mitochondrial Genome Impacts Respiration but Not Fermentation in Interspecific Saccharomyces Hybrids

In eukaryotes, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has high rate of nucleotide substitution leading to different mitochondrial haplotypes called mitotypes. However, the impact of mitochondrial genetic variant on phenotypic variation has been poorly considered in microorganisms because mtDNA encodes very few genes compared to nuclear DNA, and also because mitochondrial inheritance is not uniparental. Here we propose original material to unravel mitotype impact on phenotype: we produced interspecific hybrids between S. cerevisiae and S. uvarum species, using fully homozygous diploid parental strains. For two different interspecific crosses involving different parental strains, we recovered 10 independent hybrids per cross, and allowed mtDNA fixation after around 80 generations. We developed PCR-based markers for the rapid discrimination of S. cerevisiae and S. uvarum mitochondrial DNA. For both crosses, we were able to isolate fully isogenic hybrids at the nuclear level, yet possessing either S. cerevisiae mtDNA (Sc-mtDNA) or S. uvarum mtDNA (Su-mtDNA). Under fermentative conditions, the mitotype has no phenotypic impact on fermentation kinetics and products, which was expected since mtDNA are not necessary for fermentative metabolism. Alternatively, under respiratory conditions, hybrids with Sc-mtDNA have higher population growth performance, associated with higher respiratory rate. Indeed, far from the hypothesis that mtDNA variation is neutral, our work shows that mitochondrial polymorphism can have a strong impact on fitness components and hence on the evolutionary fate of the yeast populations. We hypothesize that under fermentative conditions, hybrids may fix stochastically one or the other mt-DNA, while respiratory environments may increase the probability to fix Sc-mtDNA.
Spousal Choice among the Children of Turkish and Moroccan Immigrants in Six European Countries: Transnational Spouse or Co-ethnic Migrant? 1

Transnational marriages of migrants in Western Europe tend to be seen as hampering integration. In response, policies have been tightened, despite little knowledge on transnational marriages and the effects of such measures. This paper investigates the role of individual preferences and contextual factors such as family reunification policies, group size and development levels of the regions of origin in partner choice of the children of Turkish and Moroccan immigrants. We draw on a novel dataset collected in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Our findings suggest that transnational marriages are partly associated with contextual factors such as a rural origin and family reunification policies. The analysis indicates higher rates of transnational marriages under open family reunification policies, providing tentative evidence of policy effects. On the individual level, the choice of a partner from the parents’ origin country is associated with religiosity.
A Hybrid Deep Learning Architecture for Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid deep learning archtecture which is highly efficient for sentiment analysis in resource-poor languages. We learn sentiment embedded vectors from the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). These are augmented to a set of optimized features selected through a multi-objective optimization (MOO) framework. The sentiment augmented optimized vector obtained at the end is used for the training of SVM for sentiment classification. We evaluate our proposed approach for coarse-grained (i.e. sentence level) as well as fine-grained (i.e. aspect level) sentiment analysis on four Hindi datasets covering varying domains. In order to show that our proposed method is generic in nature we also evaluate it on two benchmark English datasets. Evaluation shows that the results of the proposed method are consistent across all the datasets and often outperforms the state-of-art systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the very first attempt where such a deep learning model is used for less-resourced languages such as Hindi.
Finding News-Topic Oriented Influential Twitter Users Based on Topic Related Hashtag Community Detection

Recently, more and more users would like to collect and provide information about news topics in Twitter, which is one of the most popular microblogging services. Virtual communities defined by hashtags in Twitter are created for exchanging information about the news topic. Finding influential Twitter users in these communities related to a news topic would help us understand why some opinions are popular, and get valuable and reliable information for the news topic. In this paper, we propose a new approach to detect news-topic-related user communities defined by hashtags based on characteristic co-occurrence word detection. We also propose RetweetRank and MentionRank to find two types of influential Twitter users from these news-topic-related communities based on user's retweet and mention activities. Experimental results show that our characteristic co-occurrence word detection methods could detect words which are highly relevant to the news topic. RetweetRank could find influential Twitter users whose tweets about the news topic are valuable and more likely to interest others. MentionRank could find influential Twitter users who have high authority on the news topic. Our methods also outperform other related methods in evaluations.
Partisan Conflict

American politics have become extremely polarized in recent decades. This deep political divide has caused significant government dysfunction. Political divisions make the timing, size, and composition of government policy less predictable. According to existing theories, an increase in the degree of economic policy uncertainty or in the volatility of fiscal shocks results in a decline in economic activity. This occurs because businesses and households may be induced to delay decisions that involve high reversibility costs. In addition, disagreement between policymakers may result in stalemate, or, in extreme cases, a government shutdown. This adversely affects the optimal implementation of policy reforms and may result in excessive debt accumulation or inefficient public-sector responses to adverse shocks. Testing these theories has been challenging given the low frequency at which existing measures of partisan conflict have been computed. In this paper, I provide a novel high-frequency indicator of the degree of partisan conflict. The index, constructed for the period 1891 to 2013, uses a search-based approach that measures the frequency of newspaper articles that report lawmakers' disagreement about policy. I show that the long-run trend of partisan conflict behaves similarly to political polarization and income inequality, especially since the Great Depression. Its short-run fluctuations are highly related to elections, but unrelated to recessions. The lower-than-average values observed during wars suggest a "rally around the flag" effect. I use the index to study the effect of an increase in partisan conflict, equivalent to the one observed since the Great Recession, on business cycles. Using a simple VAR, I find that an innovation to partisan conflict increases government deficits and significantly discourages investment, output, and employment. Moreover, these declines are persistent, which may help explain the slow recovery observed since the 2007 recession ended.
Effects of Carbonization Parameters of Moso-Bamboo-Based Porous Charcoal on Capturing Carbon Dioxide

This study experimentally analyzed the carbon dioxide adsorption capacity of Moso-bamboo- (Phyllostachys edulis-) based porous charcoal. The porous charcoal was prepared at various carbonization temperatures and ground into powders with 60, 100, and 170 meshes, respectively. In order to understand the adsorption characteristics of porous charcoal, its fundamental properties, namely, charcoal yield, ash content, pH value, Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) surface area, iodine number, pore volume, and powder size, were analyzed. The results show that when the carbonization temperature was increased, the charcoal yield decreased and the pH value increased. Moreover, the bamboo carbonized at a temperature of 1000°C for 2 h had the highest iodine sorption value and BET surface area. In the experiments, charcoal powders prepared at various carbonization temperatures were used to adsorb 1.854% CO2 for 120 h. The results show that the bamboo charcoal carbonized at 1000°C and ground with a 170 mesh had the best adsorption capacity, significantly decreasing the CO2 concentration to 0.836%. At room temperature and atmospheric pressure, the Moso-bamboo-based porous charcoal exhibited much better CO2 adsorption capacity compared to that of commercially available 350-mesh activated carbon.
Intrinsic motivation, perception of sport competence, and life-satisfaction of children in a Greek summer sport camp

Abstract In the last 20 years, the Greek children's summer sport camp industry has grown in numbers and significance and has become very competitive. Few studies have been conducted on sport camps, especially of their impact on children's intrinsic motivation, their sport competence, and life satisfaction. The aim of this paper was to: (i) study the relationship between intrinsic motivation, perception of sport competence, and life satisfaction of children who participated in a sport camp; (ii) examine differences between boys and girls on these factors. Pearson Correlation analyses showed some relationship between intrinsic motivation, perception of sports competence, and life-satisfaction. Independent t-tests revealed differences between boys and girls in the way they perceive the above parameters during their stay in the camp. Sport camp managers and leaders can assist the intrinsic motivation of young sport campers by offering pleasurable, interesting, and manageable activities which help them to better appreciate their sporting competence and life satisfaction.
Intelligence From the Standpoint of a (Pragmatic) Behaviorist

Intelligence is defined as a phenotypic behavioral trait. It is the size of the intellectual repertoire measured at a particular point in time. Circularity is avoided by defining intellectual by consensus among persons doing research in the area. Information about the intercorrelations of elements in the intellectual repertoire is used to delineate further the construct. When assumptions about human development are added, the resulting theory allows testable predictions to be made about the trait. The theory is, however, one of small scale. It provides no theorems about how problems are solved, and it is not antithetical to research that leads to understanding the anatomical and biochemical mechanisms underlying the behavioral trait. The latter is assumed to have both genetic and environmental substrates. Intelligence so defined has many important correlates that are congruent with the theory.
Differential Detection of Avian Oncogenic Viruses in Poultry Layer Farms and Turkeys by Use of Multiplex PCR

ABSTRACT Avian oncogenic viruses include Marek's disease virus (MDV), a highly contagious herpesvirus, as well as retroviruses such as avian leukosis virus (ALV) subgroups A to J and reticuloendotheliosis virus (REV). In this study, we examined the incidence of these viruses in suspected samples collected from poultry layer farms of South India, mainly in the Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu, a highly dense poultry-growing area in India. The histopathology-positive tissue sections were identified and further confirmed by immunohistochemistry using virus-specific antibodies. The viruses belonging to all 3 groups (MDV, ALV, and REV) were isolated in a cell culture system and confirmed by immunofluorescence using virus-specific antibodies. PCR appeared to be the method of choice for rapid and accurate diagnosis of these viruses. The multiplex PCR primers specific to MDV, ALV, REV, and chicken DNA were designed for rapid differential diagnosis. The specificity of the primers was checked by amplification of DNA from virus-infected cell culture in comparison with uninfected samples, and sensitivity was evaluated by calculating the minimum copy number at which amplification occurs in the cloned PCR products. The sequences of the amplicons were compared by BLAST analysis. PCR tests demonstrated the presence of single, dual, or triple viruses in some of the samples. Of 169 samples screened by multiplex PCR, 9 samples were positive for MDV, 17 samples were positive for ALV, 12 samples were positive for REV, and 17 samples were positive for both ALV and REV. Three samples were positive for all three viruses. ALV-positive samples were further subjected to subgroup-specific PCR, which gave positive results for subgroups B and D but not for subgroup J. Multiplex PCR appeared to be a useful technique for rapid differential diagnosis of avian oncogenic viruses and detection of multiple infections of avian oncogenic viruses under field conditions.
Chitin-Methacrylate: Preparation, Characterization and Hydrogel Formation

Chitin-methacrylate (CM) was prepared by the reaction of methacrylic acid on chitin in 5% LiCl/DMAc in the presence of N,N’-dicyclocarbodiimide and dimethylaminopyridine. The resultant chitin-methacrylate product was isolated in 61% yield and was found to be readily water-soluble. The derivative was found to be a mixture of methacrylate and methacrylic-dimethylaminopyridine complex substituents at the C-6 position in approximately equal amounts. In order to evaluate the activity of the methacrylate double bond, a chitin-methacrylate water solution was photo-crosslinked in the presence of Irgacure 2959 photo-initiator to generate CM-hydrogel. The CM-hydrogel was evaluated for its biodegradability characteristics by enzymatic degradation with lysozyme solutions of varying concentrations. Completely water-soluble products were obtained within 48 h. In vitro cytotoxicity assays of the CM-hydrogel and its extract against three cell lines, NCTC clone 929, IMR-90 and MG-63, indicated the hydrogel was non-cytotoxic with cells able to adhere and proliferate well on the hydrogel.