Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Descriptive Finding Family influence in fertility : A longitudinal analysis of sibling correlations in first birth risk and completed fertility among Swedish men and women

BACKGROUND The intergenerational transmission of fertility has received much attention in demography. This has been done by estimating the correlation between parents’ and offsprings’ fertility. An alternative method that provides a more comprehensive account of the role of family background sibling correlations has not been used before. OBJECTIVE I estimate the overall importance of family background on entry into parenthood and completed fertility and whether it changed over time. Furthermore, I compare the intergenerational correlation in completed fertility with corresponding sibling correlations. METHODS Brother and sister correlations in first birth hazard and in final family size were estimated using multi-level event-history and multi-level linear regression on Swedish longitudinal register data. RESULTS The overall variation in fertility that can be explained by family of origin is approximately 15%-25% for women and 10%-15% for men. The overall importance of the family of origin has not changed over the approximately twenty birth cohorts that were studied (1940-63 for women, 1940-58 for men). Parents’ completed fertility accounts for only a small share of the total family background effect on completed fertility. CONCLUSIONS This study contributes to the existing understanding of intergenerational transition of fertility, both methodologically, by introducing a new and powerful method to study the overall importance of family of origin, and substantially, by estimating the overall 1 Stockholm University. Email: johan.dahlberg@sociology.su. se. Dahlberg: Family influence in fertility 234 http://www.demographic-research.org importance of family of origin and its development over time. A non-negligible proportion of the variation in fertility can be attributed to family of origin and this effect has remained stable over twenty birth cohorts.
Effect of Cultural Treatments on Regeneration of Native Woodlands on the Northern Great Plains

Two cultural treatments were evaluated over a 6-year post-treatment period to determine their effect on regeneration of native woodlands in southwestern North Dakota. Cultural treatments included livestock exclusion and the combination of felling and removal of low-vigor trees and transplanting of woody plants. Shrub density varied by species when grazed and ungrazed treatments were compared. American elm (Ulmus americana) increased on grazed areas. Thinning and removal of decadent tree stems stimulated sprout regeneration of green ash (Fraxinum penn- sylvanica) and American elm, and resulted in increased densities of seedlings. Survival of trees in- creased with sprouting even on grazed stands. Transplanting of woody plants was successful, and when grazing was excluded, survival of plants improved by about 36%.
Denominational school identity and the formation of personal identity

Three important factors determine the institutional identity of denominational (Christian) schools: their interpretation of the religious truth claim, their conception of the nature of education, and their view of cultural differences as content of education. We investigate conceptually which of these interpretations of identity are consonant with a view of education as a place where the personal identity of students is constructed. We interpret personal identity in a narrative way, as a permanent process of reflexive construction where consistency over time is not seen as an ideal, given the plurality of postmodern culture.
Quasar tomography: unification of echo mapping and photoionization models

Reverberation mapping aims to use time-delayed variations in photoionized emission lines to map the geometry and kinematics of emission-line gas in the vicinity of an active galactic nucleus. By fitting to a time-variableemission-line profile, we can reconstruct a two-dimensional map Ψ(τ, v), where r is the time delay and ν is the Doppler shift, for each emission line. In this paper we develop quasar tomography, which combines the time delay and velocity information with photoionization physics in order to map the reprocessing region using information assembled from many different emission lines. The observed spectral variations are modelled in terms of direct light from the active nucleus and time-delayed reprocessed light from surrounding gas clouds. We use the photoionization code CLOUDY to evaluate line and continuum reprocessing efficiencies ∈(λ, Φ H , n H , N H , θ) for clouds of hydrogen density n H and column density N H exposed to hydrogen-ionizing photon flux Φ H . The gas distribution is described by a five-dimensional map, the differential covering fraction f(R, θ, n H , N H , v), which we reconstruct from the two-dimensional data F λ (λ, t) by using maximum entropy techniques. Tests with simulated data and a variety of geometries (shells, rings, discs, clouds, jets) are presented to illustrate some of the capabilities and limitations of the method. Specifically, we reconstruct three-dimensional geometry-density maps, f(R, 0, n H ), by fitting to well-sampled light curves for the continuum and seven ultraviolet emission lines. The maps are distorted in ways that we understand and discuss. The most successful test recovers a hollow shell geometry, determining correctly its radius and density. The data constrain the ionization parameter U R - 2 n - 1 H to about 0.1 dex, the radius R to 0.15 dex, and n H to 0.3 dex. We expect better constraints to arise from future fits using more lines and velocity profiles as well as velocity-integrated line fluxes. The maps are sensitive to the assumed distance, offering some prospects for using emission-line reverberations to measure the luminosities and distances of active galactic nuclei.
Mind the (Knowledge-to-Action) Gap: Exploring Factors that Affect Physical Activity in Breast Cancer Survivors

This program of research aimed to assess the predisposing, reinforcing and enabling factors that influence physical activity (PA) among women with breast cancer from individual, environmental and provider perspectives. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study involving an online questionnaire completed by breast cancer survivors (BCS; N=201). This study aimed to identify unmet needs and preferences for PA resources among BCS. Various forms of social support for PA were identified as salient unmet needs or preferences. Study 2 involved an environmental scan of regional cancer centres in Ontario (N=14) and textual analysis of free and available materials collected from the centres (N=58). The aim of this study was to evaluate cancer centers for PA information and infrastructure. The infrastructure of the cancer centres provided some opportunities for dissemination of PA information. Gathered textual materials were rated favourably, included consequences of physical inactivity, yet included only some behaviour change techniques (BCTs) that are critical for initiating or maintaining PA. Study 3 involved four focus groups with cancer care clinicians (N=27) from cancer centres in southern regions of Ontario. The aim of the focus groups was to examine factors affecting PA counselling between clinicians and BCS. Clinicians found that cancer center administration and clinic flow were barriers to PA counselling, perceived lack of available resources and time constraints. In order to facilitate PA counselling, clinicians wanted resources that were patient-focused and available on
The moderating role of message content in the formation of employee voice

Research on employee voice has highlighted the different nature of promotive and prohibitive voice. However, only few studies have explicitly analysed the implications of this distinction for showing voice. Therefore, to enhance our knowledge regarding the formation of employee voice, our article focuses on the moderating role of the message content. In a scenario-based study, we show that employees’ decision to speak up might differ depending on what the message is about. In addition, we found evidence that some effects might be the same for both promotive and prohibitive voice, indicating that the distinction between both types of message content might be more complex than research currently assumes. The findings underline the need for more comparative research on the different natures of promotive and prohibitive voice.
Pentagon profile as image representation for human action interpretation task

The emergence of various vision-based applications has led researchers to do research on human action recognition. Good feature extraction technique is one of the important factors in making an efficient action recognition system. In this work, we propose a technique which we called ‘pentagon profile’ to represent the image for the human action interpretation task. This profile is generated by connecting the points detected at the human head, hand and feet of a human silhouette image. These points when connected form a unique shape with five-sided polygons that prompt the name pentagon profile. Initial finding shows that this feature extraction technique gives promising result to represent the human activity especially in standing and squatting posture.
Modular structures on trace class operators and applications to Landau levels

The energy levels, generally known as the Landau levels, which characterize the motion of an electron in a constant magnetic field, are those of the one-dimensional harmonic oscillator, with each level being infinitely degenerate. We show in this paper how the associated von Neumann algebra of observables displays a modular structure in the sense of the Tomita–Takesaki theory, with the algebra and its commutant referring to the two orientations of the magnetic field. A Kubo–Martin–Schwinger state can be built which, in fact, is the Gibbs state for an ensemble of harmonic oscillators. Mathematically, the modular structure is shown to arise as the natural modular structure associated with the Hilbert space of all Hilbert–Schmidt operators.
The Performance Analysis of Coded Cache in Wireless Fading Channel

The rapid growth of data volume and the accompanying congestion problems over the wireless networks have been critical issues to content providers. A novel technique, termed as coded cache, is proposed to relieve the burden. Through creating coded-multicasting opportunities, the coded-cache scheme can provide extra performance gain over the conventional push technique that simply pre-stores contents at local caches during the network idle period. But existing works on the coded caching scheme assumed the availability of an error-free shared channel accessible by each user. This paper considers the more realistic scenario where each user may experience different link quality. In this case, the system performance would be restricted by the user with the worst channel condition. And the corresponding resource allocation schemes aimed at breaking this obstacles are developed. Specifically, we employ the coded caching scheme in time division and frequency division transmission mode and formulate the sub-optimal problems. Power and bandwidth are allocated respectively to maximum the system throughput. The simulation results show that the throughput of the technique in wireless scenario will be limited and would decrease as the number of users becomes sufficiently large.
Early Atherosclerotic Changes in the Patients with Idiopathic Epilepsy: Egyptian Preliminary Study

Background: Patients with epilepsy are at higher risk for atherosclerosis which may be due to epilepsy or antiepileptic drugs. The frequency of atherosclerosis in patients with epilepsy was not previously studied in Egypt. Objective of this study: This study aimed to detect the frequency of subclinical atherosclerosis and some vascular risk factors in patients with idiopathic epilepsy and to correlate it to clinical and laboratory data. Patients and methods: Ninety patients with idiopathic epilepsy and 30 ages, sex matched healthy controls subjected to neurological examination, extra cranial carotid duplex, lipid profile, uric acid and CRP levels. Results: The level of high density lipoprotein cholesterol was significantly lower in all patients with epilepsy and those treated with enzyme inducer antiepileptic drugs than the control subjects. Level of serum uric acid was statistically significantly higher in all patients with epilepsy including the untreated patients and those treated with non-enzyme inducer and poly antiepileptic drugs than control subjects. The Common Carotid Artery Intima Media Thickness (CCA IMT) was significantly higher in all patients with epilepsy including untreated and treated patients with enzyme inducer or non-inducer than control. There was a significant positive correlation between the CCA IMT and duration of illness as well as duration of the antiepileptic drugs. Conclusion: Frequency of subclinical atherosclerosis in the patients with idiopathic epilepsy was 63.33%. The epilepsy itself could result in subclinical atherosclerotic changes in the patients with epilepsy, which could be exacerbated by the antiepileptic drugs, particularly the enzyme inducer drugs.
Reciprocal Relationships Between Workplace Childcare Initiatives and Collective Turnover Rates of Men and Women

Work-family practice research has largely been focused on individual outcomes, despite their theorized importance for organizational performance. Additionally, studies of the effectiveness of work-family practices are dominated by cross-sectional designs that are unable to rule out additional causal arguments for observed relationships. Finally, childcare initiatives that help employees better address family demands have received little research attention relative to other work-family practices, and these studies have produced mixed results. Grounded in context-emergent turnover theory, the present study assesses the relationship between establishment childcare initiatives and collective turnover rates of men and women in 24,888 observations of German establishments between 2002 and 2012. Findings indicate childcare initiatives are associated with lower female collective turnover rates in following years and that higher female collective turnover rates are also associated with a higher likelihood of adopting a childcare initiative in subsequent years. These results provide support for the argument that childcare initiatives can improve collective turnover rates of women and are not adopted only by already-high-performing organizations.
Narrative Structure and Evaluative Language of Personal Narratives Shared by Urban Aboriginal Children in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Labovian narrative theory is used to explore the personal narrative performance of five-year-old urban aboriginal children. Fifty-two participants with the same socioeconomic status (half aboriginal, half non-aboriginal) were recruited from 11 preschools in metropolitan Taipei, Taiwan. Narratives were collected by interviewing individual children about past experiences. Interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese, tape-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. With ethnicity as the independent variable, the results indicated the following: (1) in structure elements, urban aboriginal children tended to use more evaluations and non-aboriginal children offered more complicating actions. (2) Urban aboriginal children outperformed their counterparts regarding structural level (approximately half in the leapfrogging level and one-third in the chronological level). (3) Regarding evaluative features, urban aboriginal children used significantly more intention terms, sensory terms, reported speech, and negations, and non-aboriginal children used more obligation terms. The discussion and implication are provided in relation to cultural differences.
Exact histogram specification

While in the continuous case, statistical models of histogram equalization/specification would yield exact results, their discrete counterparts fail. This is due to the fact that the cumulative distribution functions one deals with are not exactly invertible. Otherwise stated, exact histogram specification for discrete images is an ill-posed problem. Invertible cumulative distribution functions are obtained by translating the problem in a K-dimensional space and further inducing a strict ordering among image pixels. The proposed ordering refines the natural one. Experimental results and statistical models of the induced ordering are presented and several applications are discussed: image enhancement, normalization, watermarking, etc.
Impact of Spent Mushroom Substrates on the Fate of Pesticides in Soil, and Their Use for Preventing and/or Controlling Soil and Water Contamination: A Review

Intensive crop production involves a high consumption of pesticides. This is a cause of major environmental concern because the presence of pesticides in water is becoming increasingly common. Physicochemical methods based on soil modification with organic residues have been developed to enhance the immobilization and/or degradation of pesticides in agricultural soils, which may control both the diffuse and the point pollution of soils and waters. This review summarizes the influence of spent mushroom substrate (SMS) on the environmental fate of pesticides when both are simultaneously applied in agriculture. The processes of adsorption, leaching and dissipation of these compounds in SMS-amended soils were evaluated at laboratory and field scale. Relationships were established between the experimental parameters obtained and the properties of the soils, the SMS, and the pesticides in order to determine the effect that the application of SMS in agricultural soils has on the environmental impact of pesticides. Accordingly, this review highlights the use of SMS as a strategy for the prevention and/or control of soil and water contamination by pesticides to strike a balance between agricultural development and the use of these compounds.
PhishEye: Live Monitoring of Sandboxed Phishing Kits

Phishing is a form of online identity theft that deceives unaware users into disclosing their confidential information. While significant effort has been devoted to the mitigation of phishing attacks, much less is known about the entire life-cycle of these attacks in the wild, which constitutes, however, a main step toward devising comprehensive anti-phishing techniques. In this paper, we present a novel approach to sandbox live phishing kits that completely protects the privacy of victims. By using this technique, we perform a comprehensive real-world assessment of phishing attacks, their mechanisms, and the behavior of the criminals, their victims, and the security community involved in the process -- based on data collected over a period of five months. Our infrastructure allowed us to draw the first comprehensive picture of a phishing attack, from the time in which the attacker installs and tests the phishing pages on a compromised host, until the last interaction with real victims and with security researchers. Our study presents accurate measurements of the duration and effectiveness of this popular threat, and discusses many new and interesting aspects we observed by monitoring hundreds of phishing campaigns.
MATHEMATICAL CONNECTION OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL STUDENTS TO SOLVE MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS

This study aims to determine the mathematical connection ability of elementary school students in solving mathematical problems. This research uses the qualitative approach with descriptive method. We used observation, interview, and test to collect data. This study shows that 6.67% of the samples scored between 60 and 69 in the fair category. A total of 98 students or 81.67% scored between 45 and 59 who belonged to the below average category, and 14 students or 11.67% scored between 0 and 44 which were classified as a poor category. This result proves that the mathematical connection ability of elementary school students in solving mathematics problems is still low.
How much do visual cues help listeners in perceiving accented speech?

Abstract It has been documented that lipreading facilitates the understanding of difficult speech, such as noisy speech and time-compressed speech. However, relatively little work has addressed the role of visual information in perceiving accented speech, another type of difficult speech. In this study, we specifically focus on accented word recognition. One hundred forty-two native English speakers made lexical decision judgments on English words or nonwords produced by speakers with Mandarin Chinese accents. The stimuli were presented as either as videos that were of a relatively far speaker or as videos in which we zoomed in on the speaker’s head. Consistent with studies of degraded speech, listeners were more accurate at recognizing accented words when they saw lip movements from the closer apparent distance. The effect of apparent distance tended to be larger under nonoptimal conditions: when stimuli were nonwords than words, and when stimuli were produced by a speaker who had a relatively strong accent. However, we did not find any influence of listeners’ prior experience with Chinese accented speech, suggesting that cross-talker generalization is limited. The current study provides practical suggestions for effective communication between native and nonnative speakers: visual information is useful, and it is more useful in some circumstances than others.
Two competitive nucleation mechanisms of calcium carbonate biomineralization in response to surface functionality in low calcium ion concentration solution

Four self-assembled monolayer surfaces terminated with –COOH, –OH, –NH2 and –CH3 functional groups are used to direct the biomineralization processes of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in low Ca2+ concentration, and the mechanism of nucleation and initial crystallization within 12 h was further explored. On −COOH surface, nucleation occurs mainly via ion aggregation mechanism while prenucleation ions clusters may be also involved. On −OH and −NH2 surfaces, however, nucleation forms via calcium carbonate clusters, which aggregate in solution and then are adsorbed onto surfaces following with nucleation of amorphous calcium carbonate (ACC). Furthermore, strongly negative-charged −COOH surface facilitates the direct formation of calcites, and the −OH and −NH2 surfaces determine the formation of vaterites with preferred crystalline orientations. Neither ACC nor crystalline CaCO3 is observed on −CH3 surface. Our findings present a valuable model to understand the CaCO3 biomineralization pathway in natural system where functional groups composition plays a determining role during calcium carbonate crystallization.
X-Ray Emission from Supernova Remnants Observed in the ASCA Galactic Plane Survey

X-ray images and spectra of 5 cataloged supernova remnants (SNRs: G12.0 0.1, G346.6 0.2, G348.5+0.1, G348.7+0.3, and G355.6 0.0) observed in the ASCA galactic plane survey are presented. The sizes of X-ray emission from G12.0 0.1, G348.5+0.1, G348.7+0.3, and G355.6 0.0 are comparable to their radio structures, while that of G346.6 0.2 is smaller. The X-ray spectra of all the SNRs were heavily absorbed by interstellar matter with NH > 10 cm . The spectrum of G355.6 0.0 exhibited emission lines, indicating that the X-ray emission has a thin thermal plasma origin, and was well represented by a two-temperature thin thermal emission model. On the other hand, no clear emission-line features were found in the spectra of the others, and the spectra could be represented by either a thin thermal emission model or a power-law model.