Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Psychological Connotations of Harmonic Musical Intervals

The twelve harmonic intervals possible within an octave and reproduced octave in both a high register and low register (geometric mean respectively: 1,510 and 185 Hz) over a three-octave range were judged by 43 university students using a semantic differential. The semantic differential scale was made up of 30 bi-polar adjective rating scales chosen from descriptions of musical interval expressiveness developed by music theorists. Factor analysis of the students' responses grouped the scales along three factors: emotional evaluation, activity and potency. The first two factors proved to be important in interval discrimination and to have the same trend; the latter was less important and resulted in neutral scores. Analysis made with ANOVA revealed a significant Register x Interval interaction for the thirds, the perfect fourth, the sixths and the minor seventh. For these, a high register presentation tended to polarise the bichord perception positively, while with a low register presentation the bichords tended to be perceived as neutral or moderately negative. For intervals with a clear harmonic connotation of consonance or dissonance (octave, fifth, seconds, augmented fourth and major seventh), however, profiles were univocal. The influence of register on the students' semantic differentiation of the intervals was significant: low register bichords were evaluated more negatively emotionally in comparison to high register bichords. Dissonant bichords were clearly perceived as more negative, unstable and tense than consonant ones which were evaluated within a neutral zone. Musical expertise was not a significant factor in the evaluation of the intervals. Mode proved to be significant on seven scales with a weak effect. Gender proved to influence interval evaluation in that females responded with a greater polarisation of scores and greater perception of a sense of activity and tension.
An assessment of the campus climate for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender persons as perceived by the faculty, staff and administration at Texas A&M University

An Assessment of the Campus Climate for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Persons as Perceived by the Faculty, Staff and Administration at Texas A&M University. (August 2004) Kerry Wayne Noack, B.G. S. , West Texas State University; M.A., West Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. D. Stanley Carpenter The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the current campus climate for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons at Texas A&M University as perceived by the faculty, professional staff, and administration at the institution. Specifically, the study looked at differences in perceptions and behaviors based on university position, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, age, and interaction with members of the sexual orientation minority. The population for the survey consisted of 5,863 individuals at Texas A&M University, including 513 administrators, 1,992 faculty members, and 3,358 professional staff members. Based on the work of Krejcie and Morgan, a random sample of each of the three employment categories was taken, which resulted in a sample of 1,020 individuals. The survey instrument used was the Assessment of Campus Climate for Underrepresented Groups, developed by Susan R. Rankin, Ph.D. A selected group of
Evaluation of the Promotion of Through-Life Management in Public Private Partnerships for Infrastructure

One justification of public private partnerships (PPP) is the alleged benefit they offer in terms of through-life management (TLM). Aiming at an evaluation of this claim, the dominant reasoning connecting PPPs and TLM is first defined: In creating a single point of responsibility and a long temporal involvement, the PPP model provides an effective incentive to implement TLM. This reasoning is first evaluated through prior large scale studies and through two case studies undertaken by the authors. No substantial evidence of TLM benefits is found. To identify the causes for this gap between intention and achievement, a critical review of the PPP literature supported by insights from management and organization theory is undertaken. Four problems in the reasoning are found to explain the gap: fragmentation is factually prevailing; not all parties in PPPs intend to have a long term commitment to the project; there may be competing incentives for some parties; and the effort to achieve the change and learning necessary for TLM may be missing. It is concluded that for the TLM benefits to be achieved, the PPP model has to be redesigned to secure incentivisation towards TLM and to incorporate TLM mechanisms at the level of the production system.
Prospective identification of HEV‐B enteroviruses during the 2005 outbreak

Enteroviruses (EVs) represent the main etiological agents of epidemics of viral meningitis and especially the serotypes related to the human enterovirus B species. Genetic typing by sequencing a PCR‐amplified portion of the genome has proved to be useful for identifying EVs and is more rapid than standard seroneutralization tests. However, prospective genotyping has not been reported in routine practice within a clinical diagnostic laboratory. A genetic typing assay using two sets of primers was developed for the amplification and sequencing of the VP1 coding sequence of the HEV‐B serotypes. Identification was carried out by sequence comparisons with EV sequences in GenBank using the BLAST search tool and confirmed by phylogenetic analysis. This method was used to identify prospectively the 48 enteroviruses isolated in patients with either enterovirus‐proved meningitis (n = 41) or other clinical manifestations (n = 7) admitted to the University Hospital of Clermont‐Ferrand (France) in 2005. The assay was also used to type retrospectively EVs isolated in cerebrospinal fluid specimens of 25 patients admitted to the Trousseau Paediatric Hospital in Paris (France) between February and August 2005. In both prospective and retrospective investigations of meningitis, echovirus 30 (E30) was the most frequent serotype, followed in decreasing order by E18, E13, coxsackievirus B5, B3, E6, E4, E7, E11, E33, and coxsackievirus A9. In patients with other manifestations, coxsackievirus B3, B5, and E3 were each identified twice, and E2 once. In E30 infected patients, nine different lineages were demonstrated by phylogenetic analysis. Genetic typing allowed the prospective, effective and rapid identification of all EV isolates involved in the 2005 outbreak. Molecular typing in combination with phylogenetic analysis will be a reliable means to confirm the emergence of new EV variants, and is of interest of both individual patients and public health. J. Med. Virol. 78:1624–1634, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Effects of Spring Imidacloprid Application for White Grub Control on Parasitism of Japanese beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) by Tiphia vernalis (Hymenoptera: Tiphiidae)

Abstract Imidacloprid, a relatively long residual neonicotinoid soil insecticide, is often applied to lawns and golf courses in spring for preventive control of root-feeding white grubs. We evaluated effects of such applications on spring parasitism of the overwintered third-instar Japanese beetle, Popillia japonica Newman, by Tiphia vernalis Rohwer, an introduced solitary ectoparasitoid. Natural rates of parasitism on a golf course rough were significantly lower in plots treated with full or one-half label rates of imidacloprid in early May compared with untreated turf. Parasitism also was reduced when female T. vernalis were exposed to imidacloprid residues on turf cores in the laboratory. Such exposures did not affect wasp mortality, longevity, survival, or developmental period of Tiphia larvae feeding on hosts in treated turf. They did, however, reduce wasps’ ability to parasitize hosts in nontreated soil for at least 1−2 wk postexposure. In Y-trail choice tests, wasps that previously had been exposed to treated turf failed to respond normally to host frass trails in the soil. Female wasps did not avoid imidacloprid residues, imidacloprid-treated host frass, or host grubs that had previously been exposed to treated soil. This study indicates that applying imidacloprid in early spring can interfere with biological control by T. vernalis, whereas postponing preventive grub treatments until June or July, after the wasps’ flight period, will help to conserve T. vernalis populations.
Strategic Alliances, Mergers and Acquisitions : The Influence of Culture on Succesful Cooperation

Preface, Cary L. Cooper Culture, Strategic Alliances and Mergers and Acquisitions: An Introduction, Elise Meijer, Geert Duysters and Jan Ulijn 1. Strategic Alliances and Culture in a Globalizing World, Rajesh Kumar and T.K Das 2. Why do International Alliances Fail? Some Insights from Culture and Human Social Biology, Gert Jan Hofstede 3. Creating a Supportive Culture for Corporate Entrepreneurship: Balancing Creativity and Discipline for the Development of Radical Innovation by Inter-firm Cooperation, Bob Walrave, Victor Gilsing and Michiel de Jager 4. Culture and its Perception in Strategic Alliances, Does it Affect the Performance? An Exploratory Study into Dutch-German Ventures, Jan Ulijn, Geert Duysters and Jean-Marie Fevre 5. Cultural Differences and Homogeneity in Strategic Alliances: The Case of Trimo Trebnje (Slovenia) and Trimo VSK (Russia), Metka Tekav, Vlado Dimovski, Darja Peljhan and Miha Aekerlavaj 6. Strategic Importance of Organisational Culture in the Context of Organisational Growth through Acquisitions: The Case of the Helios Group, Nada Zupan and Robert KaA'e 7. Cross-border Marriages: Dutch-Japanese and Dutch-American Combinations, Frits Grotenhuis 8. Managing Potential Conflicts in a European Banking Alliance in ICT: A Study of Intro- and Mutual Perception Combined for a Better Cultural Fit, Jan Eppink, Jan Ulijn en Beatrice van der Heijden 9. Portrait of an Odd-eyed Cat: Cultural Crossing as a Trademark for a Dutch-Thai Strategic Alliance, Nantawan Noi Kwanjai and Friso den Hertog 10. Resistance to the Transfer of Management Knowledge in International Ventures: Steps Towards a Pathologic Interpretation, Gerard Fink and Nigel J. Holden
The syndrome of burnout among Iranian university professors teaching TEFL

This study aimed at finding out whether the role of a teacher in a classroom influences the level of burnout s/he may experience. The teacher's role was investigated in the light of Goffman’s Footing theory, according to which the role is classified into three categories of animator, author, and principal. Goffman (1981) believed that an animator is a person who exactly repeats the ideas expressed by the others; an author paraphrases the statement, and the principal is a person who explains her/his original opinions. A total of 30 university professors teaching TEFL at BA and MA levels were chosen and filled Maslach’s Burnout Inventory to measure their level of burnout in terms of three subscales of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal achievement. In addition, a metaphor checklist was given to their students who were asked to select among 21 metaphors, the ones representing animator, author, and principal roles that appropriately described the role of each of the 30 professors. The findings indicated that burnout was lower in the professors who adopted the principal role and higher in those who took on the animator and author roles respectively. The results offer pedagogical implications for the university context.
Attentional biases toward body images in males at high risk of muscle dysmorphia

Objective Although research on muscle dysmorphia (MD), a body dysmorphic disorder subtype, has recently increased, the causes and mechanisms underlying this disorder remain unclear. Results from studies examining disorders associated with body image suggest the involvement of self-schema in biasing attention toward specific body information. The present study examined whether individuals at higher risk of MD also display attentional biases toward specific types of body images. Methods The validated Chinese version of the Muscle Appearance Satisfaction Scale was used to distinguish men at higher and lower risk of MD. Sixty-five adult Chinese men at higher (HRMD, n = 33) and lower risk of MD (LRMD, n = 32) performed a visual probe task. Initially, an image of a bodybuilder with either larger or smaller musculature was presented on one side of a central point, with a neutral image of a car exterior presented on the other side along the horizontal plane for 2,000 ms. The paired images were removed, and a visual target (a dot) was displayed in the location of one of the previously shown images. Participants were asked to indicate the location of the target, and their eye movements were recorded during the entire visual presentation. Participant reaction time and three eye movement measurements (gaze direction, first saccade latency, and first fixation duration) were recorded for use in determining attentional bias. Results The HRMD group revealed biases in orienting and maintaining their attention on images of bodybuilders with larger musculatures. Participants in this group consequently had a shorter reaction time in identifying the target that appeared at the location in which an image of a bodybuilder with a larger musculature had been previously displayed. They also directed their initial gaze more frequently, had shorter saccade latency, and had longer first fixation duration on images of bodybuilders with larger musculatures (all p < .0001). In comparison, the LRMD group had longer reaction times, slower attention orientation toward body images, and shorter fixation duration for images of bodybuilders with larger musculatures (all p < .0001), indicating weaker or mixed responses. Discussion Adult Chinese men at higher risk of MD displayed biases in orienting and maintaining their visual attention toward images of bodybuilders with larger musculatures, and these biases facilitated their information processing. These results suggest that development of MD may be due in part to attentional biases associated with established negative self-schema of specific body information. These findings provide insight into understanding and identifying the cognitive characteristics of MD in an Asian population.
Overview of random forest methodology and practical guidance with emphasis on computational biology and bioinformatics

The random forest (RF) algorithm by Leo Breiman has become a standard data analysis tool in bioinformatics. It has shown excellent performance in settings where the number of variables is much larger than the number of observations, can cope with complex interaction structures as well as highly correlated variables and return measures of variable importance. This paper synthesizes 10 years of RF development with emphasis on applications to bioinformatics and computational biology. Special attention is paid to practical aspects such as the selection of parameters, available RF implementations, and important pitfalls and biases of RF and its variable importance measures (VIMs). The paper surveys recent developments of the methodology relevant to bioinformatics as well as some representative examples of RF applications in this context and possible directions for future research. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Sensitivity Analysis for Principal Stratum Direct Effects, with an Application to a Study of Physical Activity and Coronary Heart Disease

Summary In many studies, the aim is to learn about the direct exposure effect, that is, the effect not mediated through an intermediate variable. For example, in circulation disease studies it may be of interest to assess whether a suitable level of physical activity can prevent disease, even if it fails to prevent obesity. It is well known that stratification on the intermediate may introduce a so‐called posttreatment selection bias. To handle this problem, we use the framework of principal stratification ( Frangakis and Rubin, 2002 , Biometrics58, 21–29) to define a causally relevant estimand—the principal stratum direct effect (PSDE). The PSDE is not identified in our setting. We propose a method of sensitivity analysis that yields a range of plausible values for the causal estimand. We compare our work to similar methods proposed in the literature for handling the related problem of “truncation by death. ”
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Assessing measurement invariance of a health-related quality-of-life questionnaire in radiotherapy patients

Objective If the assumption of measurement invariance is not tested, we cannot be sure whether differences observed are due to true differences in health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL), or are measurement artifacts. We aim to investigate this assumption in a sample of heterogeneous cancer patients, focusing on whether age, sex, previous treatment for cancer, and information regarding treatment preferences result in biased HRQoL scores. Methods 155 cancer patients who were about to begin their first session of radiotherapy were included. HRQoL was measured using the EORTC QLQ-C30. Structural equation modeling was applied to assess whether there was a violation of the assumption of invariance. Results A satisfactory single construct (Functioning HRQoL) measurement model was found and two violations of invariance were identified. Irrespective of patients’ Functioning HRQoL, older patients reported worse physical functioning and patients who had received treatment prior to radiotherapy reported worse emotional functioning than we would otherwise expect. Conclusions In the present study, accounting for measurement bias lead to a substantial improvement in the overall fit of the model. By ignoring the bias, we would have concluded that the model fit was unsatisfactory. The findings underline the importance of investigating measurement invariance in scales designed for heterogeneous samples.
Model-based Adversarial Imitation Learning

Generative adversarial learning is a popular new approach to training generative models which has been proven successful for other related problems as well. The general idea is to maintain an oracle $D$ that discriminates between the expert's data distribution and that of the generative model $G$. The generative model is trained to capture the expert's distribution by maximizing the probability of $D$ misclassifying the data it generates. Overall, the system is \emph{differentiable} end-to-end and is trained using basic backpropagation. This type of learning was successfully applied to the problem of policy imitation in a model-free setup. However, a model-free approach does not allow the system to be differentiable, which requires the use of high-variance gradient estimations. In this paper we introduce the Model based Adversarial Imitation Learning (MAIL) algorithm. A model-based approach for the problem of adversarial imitation learning. We show how to use a forward model to make the system fully differentiable, which enables us to train policies using the (stochastic) gradient of $D$. Moreover, our approach requires relatively few environment interactions, and fewer hyper-parameters to tune. We test our method on the MuJoCo physics simulator and report initial results that surpass the current state-of-the-art.
Assessing the Effects of Symmetry on Motif Discovery and Modeling

Background Identifying the DNA binding sites for transcription factors is a key task in modeling the gene regulatory network of a cell. Predicting DNA binding sites computationally suffers from high false positives and false negatives due to various contributing factors, including the inaccurate models for transcription factor specificity. One source of inaccuracy in the specificity models is the assumption of asymmetry for symmetric models. Methodology/Principal Findings Using simulation studies, so that the correct binding site model is known and various parameters of the process can be systematically controlled, we test different motif finding algorithms on both symmetric and asymmetric binding site data. We show that if the true binding site is asymmetric the results are unambiguous and the asymmetric model is clearly superior to the symmetric model. But if the true binding specificity is symmetric commonly used methods can infer, incorrectly, that the motif is asymmetric. The resulting inaccurate motifs lead to lower sensitivity and specificity than would the correct, symmetric models. We also show how the correct model can be obtained by the use of appropriate measures of statistical significance. Conclusions/Significance This study demonstrates that the most commonly used motif-finding approaches usually model symmetric motifs incorrectly, which leads to higher than necessary false prediction errors. It also demonstrates how alternative motif-finding methods can correct the problem, providing more accurate motif models and reducing the errors. Furthermore, it provides criteria for determining whether a symmetric or asymmetric model is the most appropriate for any experimental dataset.
Cholinergic innervation of mouse forebrain structures

Using choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) immunocytochemistry and acetylcholinesterase (AChE) histochemistry, we investigated regional and laminar differences in cholinergic innervation in the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, and thalamus of mice. In mice, unlike rats, the patterns of ChAT‐immunostained and AChE‐positive fibers are virtually identical in the cortex and are organized in a trilaminar pattern with cholinergic processes prominent in layers I and IV and within the lower portion of layer V and upper segment of layer VI. ChAT‐immunoreactive cells were not seen in cortex. In the amygdala, the basolateral nucleus showed the highest density of cholinergic processes. In the hippocampus, a thin, dense band of ChAT‐labeled processes was present in the inner segment of the molecular layer of the dentate gyrus and within the stratum oriens of CA1‐3, adjacent to the basal aspect of pyramidal cells. Within the thalamus, anteroventral, mediodorsal (lateral portion), intralaminar, and reticular nuclei showed high densities of cholinergic processes. The results of this study provide the basis for examining the effects of transgenes and age on forebrain cholinergic systems.
Sodomy, Slaughter, Sunday Shopping and Seatbelts

This report analyses the cohesion of British parliamentary parties over a range of `free' votes - votes on which the party managers gave no instructions - between 1979 and 1996. British parties are usually highly cohesive, and this is often attributed to strict party management by the party `whips', who are said to bully MPs into line. But this report shows that high levels of party discipline exist even when the whips are `off'. Even on moral issues, which are said to split the parties, it is more usual to see the vast majority of one main party opposing the vast majority of the other main party.
Evolving a new theory of project success

A lot has been written over the years about software project failure. You’d think by now there was nothing new to say on the topic. But I have recently read a study that sheds important new light on failure. I’d like to share it with you. You already know what’s old about this topic. Popular-press articles about spectacular failed projects. Hand-wringing articles about how software projects are always over budget, behind schedule, and don’t work. Books about projects that fail, including Ed Yourdon’s Death March, and my own Software Runaways. The articles and books may or may not be sympathetic to the software project personnel (most authors see software practitioners as “bumbling”). But the prevalent theme in most literature is usually some sort of variation on “ain’t it awful. ” Software project failure is frequent and lamentable, these writings say. So it may surprise you, as it did me, that one author found something new to say about software project failure. This is one of those “why didn’t I think of that? ” studies. The study is by a newcomer to software literature. Kurt R. Lin-