Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gesturing with an injured brain: How gesture helps children with early brain injury learn linguistic constructions*

ABSTRACT Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech? We explored this question, comparing eleven children with PL – matched to thirty TD children on expressive vocabulary – in the second year of life. Children with PL showed similarities to TD children for simple but not complex sentence types. Children with PL produced simple sentences across gesture and speech several months before producing them entirely in speech, exhibiting parallel delays in both gesture + speech and speech-alone. However, unlike TD children, children with PL produced complex sentence types first in speech-alone. Overall, the gesture–speech system appears to be a robust feature of language learning for simple – but not complex – sentence constructions, acting as a harbinger of change in language development even when that language is developing in an injured brain.
A Unique Mutation in a MYB Gene Cosegregates with the Nectarine Phenotype in Peach

Nectarines play a key role in peach industry; the fuzzless skin has implications for consumer acceptance. The peach/nectarine (G/g) trait was described as monogenic and previously mapped on chromosome 5. Here, the position of the G locus was delimited within a 1.1 cM interval (635 kb) based on linkage analysis of an F2 progeny from the cross ‘Contender’ (C, peach) x ‘Ambra’ (A, nectarine). Careful inspection of the genes annotated in the corresponding genomic sequence (Peach v1.0), coupled with variant discovery, led to the identification of MYB gene PpeMYB25 as a candidate for trichome formation on fruit skin. Analysis of genomic re-sequencing data from five peach/nectarine accessions pointed to the insertion of a LTR retroelement in exon 3 of the PpeMYB25 gene as the cause of the recessive glabrous phenotype. A functional marker (indelG) developed on the LTR insertion cosegregated with the trait in the CxA F2 progeny and was validated on a broad panel of genotypes, including all known putative donors of the nectarine trait. This marker was shown to efficiently discriminate between peach and nectarine plants, indicating that a unique mutational event gave rise to the nectarine trait and providing a useful diagnostic tool for early seedling selection in peach breeding programs.
Resilience in young children at risk : A systematic literature review on the studies conducted to date and their outcomes

Children living in risk environments can experience traumatic events that could affect their future life. Providing these children with the necessary strategies to cope with adversity and to develop in an optimal way is needed in order to avoid trauma or being damaged for the rest of their lives. Because of this reason, a systematic literature review was performed with the aim to examine how resilience is defined and implemented in studies focusing on young children at risk. The search was done through five electronic databases and conducted during the spring semester of 2016. During the research process, inclusion and exclusion criteria were taken into account and different search words were used for each database. According to the inclusion/exclusion criteria a title/abstract screening was performed. Thereafter, for the articles which were not excluded a full text review screening was conducted, which led to the inclusion of 14 articles in total. Articles were analysed using a data extraction tool (protocol). All the articles were about resilience, aimed at children between 0 and 12 years old. Eight out of the fourteen were studies that evaluated the resilience degree in young children, while seven were aimed at developing resilience with specially designed intervention programmes. A range of definitions of the term resilience were found, showing that resilience can be understood as a process or as ability. On this basis, studies focused on resilience were found to be mainly of two kinds: related to observation or intervention, using different methodologies and tools to measure or develop resilience in children. The outcomes found were in line with previous research, showing the great importance of supportive relationships, developing within a certain environment and having a positive self-perception as facts that can influence the development of resilience.
Effective Image Restorations Using a Novel Spatial Adaptive Prior

Bayesian or Maximum a posteriori (MAP) approaches can effectively overcome the ill-posed problems of image restoration or deconvolution through incorporating a priori image information. Many restoration methods, such as nonquadratic prior Bayesian restoration and total variation regularization, have been proposed with edge-preserving and noise-removing properties. However, these methods are often inefficient in restoring continuous variation region and suppressing block artifacts. To handle this, this paper proposes a Bayesian restoration approach with a novel spatial adaptive (SA) prior. Through selectively and adaptively incorporating the nonlocal image information into the SA prior model, the proposed method effectively suppress the negative disturbance from irrelevant neighbor pixels, and utilizes the positive regularization from the relevant ones. A two-step restoration algorithm for the proposed approach is also given. Comparative experimentation and analysis demonstrate that, bearing high-quality edge-preserving and noise-removing properties, the proposed restoration also has good deblocking property.
Has family involvement migrated into higher education? An investigation of how administrative staff document the phenomenon in students’ university experiences in Cyprus

Abstract Families have been getting more and more involved in their children’s education. This paper presents findings of a study investigating family involvement in their members’ undergraduate studies attending a state (non-fee-paying) and a private (fee-paying) university in Cyprus. The data presented in the paper were collected via online logs completed by administrative personnel in the two universities documenting incidents of family involvement. The data analysis demonstrates how similarly the phenomenon manifests in both universities and suggests that where the two universities differ is more in the intensity of the various modes of family involvement. It also projects students’ desires and encouragement of their family’s involvement and their families’ intervention to protect or guide them. The findings of the study are discussed in view of cultural and societal norms and changes about parenthood and the relationship between families and their university age members in a marketized higher education context.
Ten years of research on group size and helping Psychological Bulletin Vol 89

An apparatus for the preparation and distribution of individual dosage units of pharmaceutical material including a portable housing means provided with a plurality of distribution trays removably mounted therein. Each of the trays include aligned rows of container-receiving recesses adapted to receive unit dose containers of pharmaceutical materials. Further, the trays include slot means disposed adjacent the container-receiving recesses for removably receiving identifying cards for each patient to whom the pharmaceuticals will be delivered. The trays are constructed such that the forward and rearward ends as well as the bottom of the container-receiving recesses and the slot means cooperate to effect a locking action to prevent upsetting of individual containers from the recesses and yet provide clearance for the identity cards so as not to interfere with removal of any selected tray from the housing.
Actional Legitimation: No Crisis Necessary

This article articulates the fundamental nature of "legitimacy" to public relations research and sets forth actional legitimation as a productive new area for public relations studies. After tracing the development of the idea of "corporate legitimacy," this research distinguishes between institutional and actional legitimacy. Although institutional legitimacy has formed a basis for studies of crisis communication, image, values advocacy, and issue management, actional legitimacy studies allow for the study of more day-to-day public relations activities in which publics have a more immediate impact on corporate policy. The article concludes that actively studying strategies of legitimation for specific corporate policies would produce useful scholarship that builds on extant legitimacy literature.
The Role of Defense Mechanisms of Israeli Society in Relationship to the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict: From “1948 Repression” to Artistic Sublimation

Although many researchers have examined the concept of defense mechanisms, almost none have done so from a societal and cultural point of view. The author investigated the following research questions: (1) Which defense mechanisms are used in Israeli society within the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? What changes, if any, have occurred in these defenses over the years? (2) What are the reasons for the use of these defenses? What are the consequences of the use? (3) How can a transition(s) from the use of a lower-level defense mechanism(s) to a higher-level one(s) occur? What is the role of the arts in this transition(s)? The author reviewed the concept of defense mechanism as coined in 1894 by Sigmund Freud and then developed by later researchers and clinicians. The author also reviewed the ways defense mechanisms are perceived and processed within the realm of expressive therapies. The research paradigm was qualitative and the major investigative method consisted of semistructured interviews of six professionals involved in Israeli–Palestinian relations. The author found that a slow, positive transition has occurred in use of the defenses, namely, a progression from mainly psychotic and early forms of immature defenses such as denial, distortion, and splitting to the use of higherlevel expressions of immature forms of defenses, as well as various levels of intermediate defenses, such as projection, repression, rationalization, and isolation. The author suggested practical steps to continue the perceived advancement on the developmental scale of the defenses toward more adaptive and empathic relations between Israeli society and the Palestinians. These steps include creating a more objective media, developing changes within the educational system, generating more symmetric encounters and personal contact between Israelis and Palestinians, while using artistic language in order to increase empathy.
General equilibrium real and nominal interest rates q

We derive the general equilibrium short-term real and nominal interest rates in a monetary economy affected by technological and monetary shocks and where the price level dynamics is endogenous. Assuming fairly general processes for technology and money supply, we show that an inherent feature of our equilibrium is that any real variable dynamics, in particular that of the short-term real interest rate, is driven by both monetary and real factors. This money non-neutrality is generic, as it does not stem from any friction such as price stickiness, or from a particular utility function. Non-neutrality obtains because the ex ante cost of real money holdings is random due to inflation uncertainty. We then analyze in depth a specialized version of this economy in which the state variables follow square root processes, and the representative investor has a log separable utility function. The short-term nominal rate dynamics we obtain encompasses most of the dynamics present in the literature, from Vasicek and CIR to recent quadratic and, more generally, non-linear interest rate models. Moreover, our results pave the way to several new nominal term structures. 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: E31; G12; O42
Segregating YKU80 and TLC1 Alleles Underlying Natural Variation in Telomere Properties in Wild Yeast

In yeast, as in humans, telomere length varies among individuals and is controlled by multiple loci. In a quest to define the extent of variation in telomere length, we screened 112 wild-type Saccharomyces sensu stricto isolates. We found extensive telomere length variation in S. paradoxus isolates. This phenotype correlated with their geographic origin: European strains were observed to have extremely short telomeres (<150 bp), whereas American isolates had telomeres approximately three times as long (>400 bp). Insertions of a URA3 gene near telomeres allowed accurate analysis of individual telomere lengths and telomere position effect (TPE). Crossing the American and European strains resulted in F1 spores with a continuum of telomere lengths consistent with what would be predicted if many quantitative trait loci (QTLs) were involved in length maintenance. Variation in TPE is similarly quantitative but only weakly correlated with telomere length. Genotyping F1 segregants indicated several QTLs associated with telomere length and silencing variation. These QTLs include likely candidate genes but also map to regions where there are no known genes involved in telomeric properties. We detected transgressive segregation for both phenotypes. We validated by reciprocal hemizygosity that YKU80 and TLC1 are telomere-length QTLs in the two S. paradoxus subpopulations. Furthermore, we propose that sequence divergence within the Ku heterodimer generates negative epistasis within one of the allelic combinations (American-YKU70 and European-YKU80) resulting in very short telomeres.
Deep MERLIN 5 GHz radio imaging of supernova remnants in the M82 starburst

The results of an extremely deep, 8-d long observation of the central kpc of the nearby starburst galaxy M82 using Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN) at 5 GHz are presented. The 17 mu Jy beam(-1) rms noise level in the naturally weighted image makes it the most sensitive high-resolution radio image of M82 made to date. Over 50 discrete sources are detected, the majority of which are supernova remnants, but with 13 identified as H II regions. Sizes, flux densities and radio brightnesses are given for all of the detected sources, which are all well resolved with a majority showing shell or partial shell structures. Those sources within the sample which are supernova remnants have diameters ranging from 0.3 to 6.7 pc, with a mean size of 2.9 pc. From a comparison with previous MERLIN 5-GHz observations made in 1992 July, which gives a 9.75-yr timeline, it has been possible to measure the expansion velocities of 10 of the more compact sources, eight of which have not been measured before. These derived expansion velocities range between 2200 and 10 500 km s(-1).
The Whys of Social Exclusion: Insights from Behavioral Economics

All over the world, people are prevented from participating fully in society through mechanisms that go beyond the structural and institutional barriers that rational choice theory identifies (—poverty, exclusion by law or force, taste-based or statistical discrimination, and externalities from social networks differentiated by socioeconomic status). This paper discusses four additional mechanisms that can be explained by bounded rationality: (a) implicit discrimination, (b) self-stereotyping and self-censorship, (c) rules of thumb adapted to disadvantaged environments that are dysfunctional in more privileged settings, and (d) “adaptive preferences,” in which an excluded group comes to view its exclusion as natural. Institutions, if they are stable, come to have cognitive foundations---concepts, categories, social identities, and worldviews---through which people mediate their perceptions of themselves and the world around them. Abolishing or reforming a discriminatory institution may have little effect on the social categories it created; groups previously discriminated against by law may remain excluded through custom and habits of the mind. Recognizing new forces of social exclusion, behavioral economics identifies ways to offset them. Some interventions have had very consequential impacts.
Pupil diameter covaries with BOLD activity in human locus coeruleus

The locus coeruleus‐noradrenergic (LC–NA) neuromodulatory system has been implicated in a broad array of cognitive processes, yet scope for investigating this system's function in humans is currently limited by an absence of reliable non‐invasive measures of LC activity. Although pupil diameter has been employed as a proxy measure of LC activity in numerous studies, empirical evidence for a relationship between the two is lacking. In the present study, we sought to rigorously probe the relationship between pupil diameter and BOLD activity localized to the human LC. Simultaneous pupillometry and fMRI revealed a relationship between continuous pupil diameter and BOLD activity in a dorsal pontine cluster overlapping with the LC, as localized via neuromelanin‐sensitive structural imaging and an LC atlas. This relationship was present both at rest and during performance of a two‐stimulus oddball task, with and without spatial smoothing of the fMRI data, and survived retrospective image correction for physiological noise. Furthermore, the spatial extent of this pupil/LC relationship guided a volume‐of‐interest analysis in which we provide the first demonstration in humans of a fundamental characteristic of animal LC activity: phasic modulation by oddball stimulus relevance. Taken together, these findings highlight the potential for utilizing pupil diameter to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the role of the LC–NA system in human cognition. Hum Brain Mapp 35:4140–4154, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Unpacking the effects of repression: the evolution of Islamist repertoires of contention in Egypt after the fall of President Morsi

Abstract The military coup against president Morsi in July 2013 sparked the largest wave of Islamist mobilization in Egypt’s modern history. As the ousted president’s supporters took to the street in what became known as the ‘anti-coup’ movement, they were met with fierce repression. This article retraces the contentious dynamics in the summer of 2013 in a nested research design and with a focus on contentious repertoires. Drawing on data for over 2400 protest events and debunking the myth of a swift defeat of the anti-coup protests, we show how repression, besides affecting protest levels, markedly changed the quality of contention. Most notably, three transformative events involving massive repressive violence impacted on protest spaces, tactics and timing: rather than binary notions of escalation vs. demobilization, adaptive mechanisms of decentralization, diversification and substitution dominated the anti-coup movement’s reaction to repression. Centralized mass protests evolved into smaller, more flexible, and highly decentralized forms that were better fit to skirt the regime’s repression efforts. Our findings have important implications for the theorization of the protest–repression-nexus. They prompt scholars to conceive of repression and backlash as multi-layered phenomena and study their effects in a disaggregate framework.
Comment: Frameworks for Theory and Research on Positive Emotions

Contributions to this special section on positive emotions are summarized and integrated within a framework for organizing theory and research on particular emotions. Emotions are conceptualized as evolved strategies for coping with crises and opportunities, elicited by situational and appraisal antecedents–with phenomenological, physiological, expressive, behavioral, and emotivational goal components. Within this framework, theories are compared, inconsistencies and gaps in knowledge are identified, and issues in emotion theory are discussed.
The Loss of Endothelium‐Dependent Vascular Relaxation in Hypertension

We investigated endothelium-dependent relaxation in rat aortae, using three models of experimental hypertension: deoxycorticosterone and salt; one-kidney, one clip renovascular hypertension; and coarctation. Isolated aortae were contracted with phenylephrine, and relaxation was subsequently induced with acetylcholine or calcium ionophore A23187. Blood vessels denuded of endothelium did not relax in response to acetylcholine or A23187. Blood vessels from animals with high blood pressure had decreased relaxation responses to acetylcholine and A23187, and also to the endothelium-independent vasodilator sodium nitroprusside. Unlike acetylcholine and A23187, however, nitroprusside completely relaxed the blood vessels from the hypertensive animals, though the sensitivity to nitroprusside was much lower in these vessels. Subsequent reversal of hypertension caused a return of endothelium-dependent relaxation. Loss of endothelium-dependent relaxation occurs readily in the aortae with the development of hypertension; this phenomenon appears to be related to elevated pressure.
Perceptually-Motivated All-Pole Modeling

A new speech analysis-synthesis approach that is based on a perceptually-motivated all-pole (PMAP) modeling is described. The main idea is to directly estimate the perceptually relevant pole locations using an auditory excitation pattern-matching method. The all-pole model is synthesized using the perceptual poles and produces improved spectral fitting. We show that the prediction residual obtained from the PMAP analysis has lower perceptual loudness relative to that of the conventional LP.
Failure and delay in initial treatment contact after first onset of mental disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication.

CONTEXT An understudied crucial step in the help-seeking process is making prompt initial contact with a treatment provider after first onset of a mental disorder. OBJECTIVE To provide data on patterns and predictors of failure and delay in making initial treatment contact after first onset of a mental disorder in the United States from the recently completed National Comorbidity Survey Replication. DESIGN AND SETTING Nationally representative face-to-face household survey carried out between February 2001 and April 2003. PARTICIPANTS A total of 9282 respondents aged 18 years and older. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Lifetime DSM-IV disorders were assessed with the World Mental Health (WMH) Survey Initiative version of the World Health Organization Composite International Diagnostic Interview (WMH-CIDI), a fully structured interview designed to be administered by trained lay interviewers. Information about age of first professional treatment contact for each lifetime DSM-IV/WMH-CIDI disorder assessed in the survey was collected and compared with age at onset of the disorder to study typical duration of delay. RESULTS Cumulative lifetime probability curves show that the vast majority of people with lifetime disorders eventually make treatment contact, although more so for mood (88.1%-94.2%) disorders than for anxiety (27.3%-95.3%), impulse control (33.9%-51.8%), or substance (52.7%-76.9%) disorders. Delay among those who eventually make treatment contact ranges from 6 to 8 years for mood disorders and 9 to 23 years for anxiety disorders. Failure to make initial treatment contact and delay among those who eventually make treatment contact are both associated with early age of onset, being in an older cohort, and a number of socio-demographic characteristics (male, married, poorly educated, racial/ethnic minority). CONCLUSIONS Failure to make prompt initial treatment contact is a pervasive aspect of unmet need for mental health care in the United States. Interventions to speed initial treatment contact are likely to reduce the burdens and hazards of untreated mental disorder.