Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Top-Down Processes in Interpersonal Reality Monitoring Assessments

We examined to what extent, and how, the judgment framework within which assessments of reality monitoring (RM) criteria are made affects the efficacy of these assessments in predicting veracity. In Experiment 1, trained participants assessed the presence of RM criteria in truthful and false life stories. Participants either: (a) knew the real purpose of RM and assessed the criteria in order to determine the veracity of the stories (forensic-judgmental context), (b) were misled to believe that RM is a tool for the prediction of literary attractiveness and assessed the criteria to determine the perceived attractiveness of the stories (literature-judgmental context); or (c) were told nothing about the purpose of RM (notjudgmental context). Results showed that criteria assessments were positively affected in predicting the veracity of stories in the forensic-judgmental context group. In Experiment 2, trained participants assessed the criteria for the same truthful and false life stories. Two-thirds of the participants knew the real purpose of RM as a lie-detection tool. However, they were misled to believe either that all stories were truthful (biased-for-truth) or that all stories were false (biased-for-lie). The remaining participants were told nothing about the purpose of RM (control group). Results showed that biased-for-truth participants perceived the stories as richer in perceptual, contextual, and emotional details, as compared with the control group. Taken together, the results show that judgment frame has an effect on assessment of RM criteria. Interpersonal RM as a cognitive process will be discussed.
Detection of Babesia microti and Borrelia burgdorferi in Host-Seeking Ixodes scapularis (Acari: Ixodidae) in Monmouth County, New Jersey

ABSTRACT The etiological agents that cause human babesiosis (Babesia microti) and Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi) share a common tick vector (Ixodes scapularis Say) and rodent reservoir (Peromyscus leucopus), but because the geographical distribution of babesiosis is more restricted than Lyme disease, it was not considered a nationally notifiable disease until 2011. Although recent studies have shown dramatic increases in the number of cases of babesiosis and expansion of its range, little is known about infection and coinfection prevalence of these pathogens in the primary tick vector. Of the 478 I. scapularis nymphs collected within six Monmouth County, NJ, municipalities between 2004 and 2006, 4.0 and 10.0% were infected with B. microti and B. burgdorferi, respectively, while 2.9% were coinfected. Analysis of the 610 I. scapularis adults collected during the same period yielded an infection prevalence of 8.2% for B. microti and 45.2% for B. burgdorferi, while 6.2% were coinfected. The potential public health importance of these findings is discussed.
Ascorbic Protects Testicular Oxidative Stress and Spermatozoa Deformationsin Male Swiss Mice Exposedto Lead Acetate

Lead is the known environmental contaminant adversely affecting the male reproductive system in human and experimental animals. The cytotoxic effects of lead on male reproductive system involve the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and oxidative damage in tissue. The higher quantities of ROS in testicular tissue detrimentally affected developing germ cells so as to produce verities of morphological abnormal sperm and finally reduced sperm count. The present study shows that lead exposure reduce testes weight and increase lipid peroxidation in the testes of mice in comparison to control. The sperm counts were significantly reduced in number. Importantly, lead treated mice show deformations in sperm morphology and testicular injuries. Supplementation of vitamin C daily to lead treated mice increase testes weight and partially protects testis from oxidative stress. In addition, vitamin C causes an increase in sperms count and significantly lowers the morphologically deformed sperms population. We conclude that taking daily consumption of vitamin C could be useful in lowering oxidative stress and sperm deformations in male mice exposed to lead.
Feature-Weighted Linear Stacking

Ensemble methods, such as stacking, are designed to boost predictive accuracy by blending the predictions of multiple machine learning models. Recent work has shown that the use of meta-features, additional inputs describing each example in a dataset, can boost the performance of ensemble methods, but the greatest reported gains have come from nonlinear procedures requiring significant tuning and training time. Here, we present a linear technique, Feature-Weighted Linear Stacking (FWLS), that incorporates meta-features for improved accuracy while retaining the well-known virtues of linear regression regarding speed, stability, and interpretability. FWLS combines model predictions linearly using coefficients that are themselves linear functions of meta-features. This technique was a key facet of the solution of the second place team in the recently concluded Netflix Prize competition. Significant increases in accuracy over standard linear stacking are demonstrated on the Netflix Prize collaborative filtering dataset.
High Efficient Nanocatalyst Synthesis Using Semi-Reflux Chemical Reduction System with Temperature Regulation in Micro DMFC

Shin-Mei Gong, Yi-Shiuan Wu, Tsung-Kuang Yeh, Chuen-Hung Tsai, and Fan-Gang Tseng 2, 3 Department of Engineering and System Science, Natio n l Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan Institute of NanoEngineering and MicroSystems, Nati onal Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan Division of Mechanics, Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan a9003010@yahoo.com. tw Abstract: In this paper, we successfully fabricated high ca talytic activity Pt supported on carbon nanotubes ( CNTs) with temperature regulation in the semi-reflux chem ical reduction system (SRCRS) demonstrated in our p revious study [1]. Compared to traditional reflux system re ducing at high temperature of 160 °C [9], the SRCRS can effectively save more than 60% reduction time at lo wer temperature of 130 °C. Besides, the electrochemical results also showed that the mass activity and electrochemi cal surface area (ESA) of Pt catalysts can dramatic ally be enhanced by 58% and 63%, respectively.
A new single phase to three phase converter with active input current shaping for low cost AC motor drives

A single-phase-to-three-phase converter for a low-cost AC motor drive is proposed. The converter employs only six switches and incorporates a front-end half-bridge active rectifier structure that provides the DC link with an active input current shaping feature, which results in sinusoidal input current at close to unity power factor. The front-end rectifier in the converter permits bidirectional power flow and provides for excellent regulation against fluctuations in source voltage, facilitating regenerative braking of the AC motor drive. A control strategy that maintains a near-unity power factor over the full operating range and is easy to implement is described. Suitable design guides for the selection of filter components are presented. Simulation and experimental results that verify the developed theoretical models are also presented. <<ETX>>
Changes in Weight Loss, Health Behaviors, and Intentions among 400 Participants Who Dropped out from an Insurance-Sponsored, Community-Based Weight Management Program

The majority of weight management research is based on data from randomized controlled studies conducted in clinical settings. As these findings are translated into community-based settings, additional research is needed to understand patterns of lifestyle change and dropout. The purpose of this study was to examine reasons for and consequences associated with dropout (or removal) from an insurance-funded weight management program. Using a mixed methods approach with objectively measured changes in body weight and attendance along with quantitative and qualitative survey data, patterns of intention and behavior change were explored. The results from a sample of 400 respondents support the idea that there are both positive and negative consequences of program participation. Overall, 1 in 5 respondents lost a clinically significant amount of weight during the program (>5% of baseline body weight) and 1 in 3 experienced a positive consequence, while only 6% expressed a negative outcome of participation. Additionally, nearly 90% of all of the consequences that emerged from the data were positive. Attitude change was a major theme, including positive health intentions, perceived success, learning skills, and new appreciation of exercise.
Relationships between psychological capital, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment in the Saudi oil and petrochemical industries

ABSTRACT During the past decade, Saudi Arabia experienced a significant social, economic, and organizational change. The rapid economic growth created a need for seasoned management professionals and necessitated the development of human capital. Psychological capital, a newly developed construct by academics and practitioners, is defined as the extent to which an individual operates in a positive psychological state, and this state is characterized by high self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resiliency. By measuring the positive psychological constructs, an organization can learn about employees’ positive psychological states and how training and support can promote positive psychological states. Improving the positive psychological capital can lead to better organizational commitment, favorable organizational citizenship behaviors, lower employee absenteeism, and higher job satisfaction. This quantitative study examined the relationship among psychological capital, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment through a sample of managers in the Saudi Arabian oil and petrochemical industries.
A Berry–Esseen theorem for sample quantiles under weak dependence

This paper proves a Berry--Esseen theorem for sample quantiles of strongly-mixing random variables under a polynomial mixing rate. The rate of normal approximation is shown to be $O(n^{-1/2})$ as $n\to\infty$, where $n$ denotes the sample size. This result is in sharp contrast to the case of the sample mean of strongly-mixing random variables where the rate $O(n^{-1/2})$ is not known even under an exponential strong mixing rate. The main result of the paper has applications in finance and econometrics as financial time series data often are heavy-tailed and quantile based methods play an important role in various problems in finance, including hedging and risk management.
Human Mammary Epithelial Cells The Glucocorticoid Receptor Mediates a Survival Signal in Updated

Complex autocrine and paracrine signaling pathways control the multiple cycles of epithelial cell proliferation and involution characteristic of the human mammary gland. Activation of these pathways can lead to cell division, cell cycle arrest, apoptosis, or survival; their aberrant regulation often contributes to malignant transformation. In this report, we show that glucocorticoid signals a potent survival pathway in the immortalized human mammary epithelial cell line MCF10A. Withdrawal of glucocorticoid from defined media triggers apoptosis, despite the presence of epidermal growth factor and insulin. Apoptosis is accelerated by ectopic expression of c-Myc and blocked by overexpression of Bcl2. Although MCF10A cells can undergo apoptosis after CD95/Fas receptor activation, cell death caused by glucocorticoid withdrawal is independent of CD95/ Fas receptor signaling. The mechanism through which glucocorticoid inhibits apoptosis is also independent of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase activity and its downstream target Akt, thus establishing the existence of a novel epithelial cell survival pathway mediated by glucocorticoids.
Estructuras familiares complejas : la formación de familias múltiples en España

This article analyses the social factors that promote the formation of complex family structures -with several family nucleus living in the same household- in Spanish society. Although it could be thought that these complex family structures are associated to the household structure typical of traditional peasant communities, it is true that they also exist in the modern urban households. On the one hand, the analysis made in this research shows that the most important aspects of the current family complexity are not associated as much to the traditional model of stem rural family as to organizitional forms of household solidarity that could be better explained by the typically urban problem of the lack of economic ressources. On the other hand, the interpretation of the Spanish active population survey (EPA)'s figures poses some important criticisms of formalism of the usual family typologies. It also poses the need of recognizing the variety of the social conditions that are behind the structural identity of one same family form
Using Frame Semantics for Knowledge Extraction from Twitter

Knowledge bases have the potential to advance artificial intelligence, but often suffer from recall problems, i.e., lack of knowledge of new entities and relations. On the contrary, social media such as Twitter provide abundance of data, in a timely manner: information spreads at an incredible pace and is posted long before it makes it into more commonly used resources for knowledge extraction. In this paper we address the question whether we can exploit social media to extract new facts, which may at first seem like finding needles in haystacks. We collect tweets about 60 entities in Freebase and compare four methods to extract binary relation candidates, based on syntactic and semantic parsing and simple mechanism for factuality scoring. The extracted facts are manually evaluated in terms of their correctness and relevance for search. We show that moving from bottom-up syntactic or semantic dependency parsing formalisms to top-down frame-semantic processing improves the robustness of knowledge extraction, producing more intelligible fact candidates of better quality. In order to evaluate the quality of frame semantic parsing on Twitter intrinsically, we make a multiply frame-annotated dataset of tweets publicly available.
Association of Increased Plasma Cardiotrophin-1 With Inappropriate Left Ventricular Mass in Essential Hypertension

Inappropriate left ventricular mass is present when the value of left ventricular mass exceeds individual needs to compensate hemodynamic load imposed by increased blood pressure. The goal of this study was to investigate whether plasma concentration of cardiotrophin-1, a cytokine that induces exaggerated hypertrophy in cardiomyocytes with hypertensive phenotype, is related to inappropriate left ventricular mass in patients with essential hypertension. The study was performed in 118 patients with never-treated hypertension and without prevalent cardiac disease. The left ventricular mass prediction from stroke work (systolic blood pressure×Doppler stroke volume), sex, and height (in meters2.7) was derived. An observed left ventricular mass/predicted left ventricular mass value >128% defined inappropriate left ventricular mass. Plasma cardiotrophin-1 was measured by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The studies were repeated in a group of 45 patients after 1 year of antihypertensive treatment. At baseline 67 and 51 patients presented with appropriate and inappropriate left ventricular mass, respectively. Plasma cardiotrophin-1 was higher (P<0.001) in patients with inappropriate mass than in patients with appropriate mass and normotensive controls. A direct correlation was found between cardiotrophin-1 and observed left ventricular mass/predicted left ventricular mass ratio (r=0.330, P<0.001) in all hypertensive patients. After treatment, plasma cardiotrophin-1 decreased and increased in patients in which inappropriate left ventricular mass regressed and persisted, respectively, despite a similar reduction of blood pressure in the 2 subgroups of patients. Albeit descriptive in nature, these results suggest the hypothesis that an excess of cardiotrophin-1 may contribute to inappropriate left ventricular growth in hypertensive patients.
Improvements of Image-Steganalysis Using Boosted Combinatorial Classifiers and Gaussian High Pass Filtering

Powerful universal steganalyzers were proposed in the literature during the past few years. In addition some studies have been conducted on improvements of current steganalysis results using information fusion techniques, merging available feature vectors, etc. This paper presents two independent ideas, which can be used together, to obtain higher accuracy in detecting stego images. First, we propose the use of boosted fusion methods to aggregate outputs of multiple steganalyzers. Second, we investigate how passing high frequencies through filtering can enhance the results of steganalysis techniques. In this work, it is shown that, through different tests over the state-of-the-art steganography algorithms, an increase in detection accuracy is achieved by using the proposed new ideas.
Sensitivity analysis on heterogeneity of driving behavior for evacuation studies and its impacts on traffic safety

The driving behavior of travelers has been found to be different in case of emergency conditions compared to normal traffic conditions. In this paper, we show how this different driving behavior, as well as the heterogeneity among drivers, has an impact on traffic safety. We do so by performing a sensitivity analysis on the model parameters representing the different (heterogeneous) driving behavior and investigating the impact of these variations on traffic safety. The analysis is conducted applying an evacuation simulation framework using S-Paramics. The results show that reductions in mean time headway and minimum gap substantially increase the number of potential safety conflicts. Also, it is found that variation in driving behavior plays a smaller, yet still important, role in traffic safety.
Department of Economics and Finance College of Business and Economics University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand European Market Portfolio Diversifcation Strategies across the Gfc European Market Portfolio Diversifcation Strategies across the Gfc

This paper features an analysis of the effectiveness of a range of portfolio diversification strategies as applied to a set of daily arithmetically compounded returns on a set of ten market indices representing the major European markets for a nine year period from the beginning of 2005 to the end of 2013. The sample period, which incorporates the periods of both the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and subsequent European Debt Crisis (EDC), is challenging one for the application of portfolio investment strategies. The analysis is undertaken via the examination of multiple investment strategies and a variety of hold-out periods and back-tests. We commence by using four two year estimation periods and subsequent one year investment hold out period, to analyse a naive 1/N diversification strategy, and to contrast its effectiveness with Markowitz mean variance analysis with positive weights. Markowitz optimisation is then compared with various down-side investment opimisation strategies. We begin by comparing Markowitz with CVaR, and then proceed to evaluate the relative effectiveness of Markowitz with various draw-down strategies, utilising a series of backtests. Our results suggest that none of the more sophisticated optimisation strategies appear to dominate naive diversification.
Assessment of Sexual Assault Among Women in Assendabo Town, Oromiya Region, South West Ethiopia

BACKGROUND: Violence against women is increasingly being recognized as important human rights, development and health issue however it is difficult to know its magnitude in Ethiopia. The objective of this study is therefore to assess the magnitude of sexual assault among women in Assendabo town. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of 323 women 10 years and above. Data was collected by trained female interviewers using structured questionnaire and entered into computer, tabulation and summarization was done using SPSS. RESULTS: Twenty-six (8.0%) of the respondents were lifetime sexual assault victims and 5 (1.5%) of the respondents were victims of sexual assault in the last one-year prior to data collection. Of lifetime sexual assault victims, majority 19 (73.1%) were victims of rape and five (19.2%) of the victims had encountered sexual assault more than once with mean age at first sexual assault was 15 year. Unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion and STD were the major problems reported as consequences of the assault. Thirty-three (10.2%) of the respondents and 21 (80.8%) of the victims prefer to keep quite about the event due to fear of associated social stigma. Most of the respondents, 282 (87.3%), knew the act of rape is punishable by law and 146 (45.2%) respondents believed that penal code of Ethiopia on rape that states maximum of 10 years imprisonment for the act of rape is inadequate. CONCLUSION: sexual assault is an important health and social problem-affecting women. Hence there is a need for more concerted efforts to be made in creating awareness among women to prevent the crime and encourage reporting among victims. Moreover medical care and psychological support should be strengthened to treat consequences of sexual assault. Ethiop J Health Sci . Vol. 14, No. 1 January 2004
Persistence and plasticity in the human memory system: An empirical investigation of the overwriting hypothesis

The human memory system must resolve a critical tension, ensuring that knowledge endures over time (persistence), whilst simultaneously retaining a capacity for updating when knowledge is outdated or erroneous (plasticity). In this thesis, I examine the provocative idea that memory traces can be overwritten with new information, especially during transient periods of retrieval-induced plasticity that occur when a trace undergoes reconsolidation. A systematic review of human reconsolidation studies finds that the evidentiary support for this claim is remarkably tenuous. Furthermore, the theory fails to survive several strong empirical tests. In Experiments 1-7, I do not replicate a previous finding that is widely cited as a convincing demonstration of human reconsolidation. In Experiments 8-10, I revisit the ‘destructive updating’ account of the classic ‘misinformation effect’ in the context of reconsolidation theory. These experiments show that the effect can be eliminated when an appropriate recognition test is used, demonstrating that event traces are not irrecoverably lost, and therefore cannot have been overwritten during reconsolidation. In Experiment 11, I examine whether prior retrieval will help or hinder the correction of naturally occurring semantic misconceptions. Contrary to reconsolidation theory, I find that knowledge updating is not contingent on memory retrieval, nor does it result in the overwriting of prior knowledge. Finally, in the context of media ‘breaking news’ reports (Experiment 12), I find that the provision of an explicit retraction message, coupled with an alternative account with high causal coverage, is insufficient to eliminate reliance on false information. Finally, I contend that the widespread proliferation of ad hoc hypotheses, and the absence of systematic direct replication, has caused the field of reconsolidation to descend into a theoretical quagmire. I make several recommendations based on the principles of open science that may help to restore mechanisms of self-correction and foster genuine theoretical progress.