Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-assured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war

A nuclear war between Russia and the United States, even after the arsenal reductions planned under New START, could produce a nuclear winter. Hence, an attack by either side could be suicidal, resulting in self-assured destruction. Even a “small” nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each country detonating 50 Hiroshima-size atom bombs—only about 0.03 percent of the global nuclear arsenal’s explosive power—as air bursts in urban areas, could produce so much smoke that temperatures would fall below those of the Little Ice Age of the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, shortening the growing season around the world and threatening the global food supply. Furthermore, there would be massive ozone depletion, allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach Earth’s surface. Recent studies predict that agricultural production in parts of the United States and China would decline by about 20 percent for four years, and by 10 percent for a decade. The environmental threat posed by even a small number of nuclear weapons must be considered in nuclear policy deliberations. Military planners now treat the environmental effects as collateral damage, and treaties currently consider only the number of weapons needed to assure destruction of opposing forces. Instead, treaties must call for further reductions in weapons so that the collateral effects do not threaten the continued survival of the bulk of humanity. Proliferation cannot be treated as a regional problem. A regional conflict has the potential to cause mass starvation worldwide through environmental effects.
Organizational learning of higher education institutions: the case of Estonia

Purpose This paper aims to measure the organizational learning in two of Estonia’s Higher Education Institutions (HEI) and identify connections between the organizational learning and various characteristics of HEI, such as ownership form and market participation rate. Design/methodology/approach Watkins and Marsick’s learning organization questionnaire, the Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ), as one of the most popular organizational learning measurement instruments, was taken to measure the organizational learning of HEIs. Employees from a total of two Estonian HEIs, which differ in several characteristics, completed the Watkins and Marsick’s questionnaire. To identify the dependence of organizational learning on two observed HEIs’ characteristics, the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis method was used. The analysis was performed at the DLOQ dimensions level. Findings The average organizational learning rate of the two universities under study was over average (3.72 on six-point Likert scale) which allows arguing that both observed institutions are learning organizations. The organizational learning rate based on samples of employees from two HEI-s depends on the institution`s market participation on the 90 per cent level in the first dimension, 95 per cent in the second dimension and 90 per cent in the sixth dimension. Correlation between the HEI ownership form and any of the DLOQ dimensions is weak. Research limitations/implications The study is based on two universities. The sample size is insufficient; therefore, the results cannot be generalized to HEIs as a whole. Originality/value The relationship between higher education institutions’ organizational learning and higher education institutions’ characteristics has not been investigated before. The results of this paper allow a better focus on different aspects of organizational learning in HEIs’ development and relate to their specific development needs.
Sexually Objectifying Environments

In this study, we investigated the relations between sexually objectifying restaurant environments (SOREs) and anxiety and disordered eating in a sample of 252 waitresses working in restaurants located in the United States. Supporting our hypotheses, results indicated that higher levels of SOREs were positively correlated with waitresses’ anxiety and disordered eating. Our findings also supported a theorized four-chain mediation model in which higher levels of SOREs were related to both anxiety and disordered eating directly and indirectly via, in serial: less organizational power, less personal power and control, and more rumination. In addition, SOREs and a lack of organizational power had direct, unique links to rumination. Our findings highlight the importance of both contextual and intrapersonal factors in understanding waitresses’ mental health problems. These findings underscore the need to implement both system-level and individual-level interventions to combat the existence of SOREs and the negative effects these environments may have on women who work in the industry. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub. com/page/pwq/suppl/index
Intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and children’s academic achievement: does the children’s gender matter?

Abstract This study evaluated how gender is related to children’s intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and academic achievement and whether there are gender differences in how intelligence beliefs and goal orientations are related to academic achievement. The participants, 362 seventh grade students (55.8% girls; Mage = 13.20, SD = .57 years), completed measures regarding their intelligence beliefs and goal orientations at the beginning of the second semester and the grades were collected at the end of the semester. Girls reported higher scores on incremental belief, mastery goal and higher achievement but lower levels of performance avoidance compared to boys. The relations between intelligence beliefs and academic achievement were fully mediated by both performance goals. Further, there were no gender differences in the associations among intelligence beliefs, goal orientations and achievement. The findings reveal that goal orientations are a mechanism that might explain why intelligence beliefs are linked with academic achievement in early adolescence.
Effects of Model Choice and Forest Structure on Inventory-Based Estimations of Puerto Rican Forest Biomass

Total aboveground live tree biomass in Puerto Rican lower montane wet, subtropical wet, subtropical moist and subtropical dry forests was estimated using data from two forest inventories and published regression equations. Multiple potentially-applicable published biomass models existed for some forested life zones, and their estimates tended to diverge with increasing tree diameter at breast height. Inventoried forests showed structural characteristics typical of secondary tropical forests and stand suc- cessional trends of increasing stem density from initial reversion to young closed forest, followed by a decrease in stem density and gradual increase in basal area and biomass as the stands developed. Stems with DBH < 10 cm contributed 9.9-50.9% of total aboveground biomass. When present, 50-90+ cm DBH trees greatly increased aboveground biomass values on individual plots, but these effects subsided when averaged over the forested landscape. Inherent variability in large-tree form combined with equations that extrapolate beyond the range of sampled trees impedes accurate aboveground biomass estimation for larger trees. Application of equations developed in areas that most closely match potential study sites should improve overall estimation accuracy of all forest stands, however, locally developed biomass equations are lacking for subtropical dry and perhaps subtropical moist forest life zones in Puerto Rico.
Supersymmetric D-branes and calibrations on general N = 1 backgrounds

We study the conditions to have supersymmetric D-branes on general N = 1 backgrounds with Ramond-Ramond fluxes. These conditions can be written in terms of the two pure spinors associated to the SU(3) × SU(3) structure on TM ⊕ T ? M , and can be split into two parts each involving a different pure spinor. The first involves the integrable pure spinor and requires the D-brane to wrap a generalised complex submanifold with respect to the generalised complex structure associated to it. The second contains the non-integrable pure spinor and is related to the stability of the brane. The two conditions can be rephrased as a generalised calibration condition for the brane. The results preserve the generalised mirror symmetry relating the type IIA and IIB backgrounds considered, giving further evidence for this duality.
A model of the wavelength dependence of solar irradiance variations

Thevariationofthesolarirradianceoverthesolarcy- cle has a strong wavelength dependence, being larger at shorter wavelengths. Here we present simple models of the spectral de- pendence of irradiance variations between solar activity maxi- mum and minimum. We nd that the observations (which con- centrate on the UV) cannot be reproduced by a change in effec- tive temperature of the Sun (or of parts of its surface) alone. We can,however,reproducethedatawitheithera2-componentora 3-component model, of which one component is the quiet Sun, another is a facular component, and the third (in the case of the 3-componentmodel)representsthetemperaturestraticationof sunspots. The facular component is found to be very close to the facular models F or P of Fontenla et al. (1993). The suc- cess of these models supports the assumption underlying many studies of total solar irradiance variations that these are caused mainly by magnetic elds at the solar surface. Our investigation also allows an improved estimate of the relative contribution of the various layers in the solar photosphere and of the different wavelength regions to the total irradiance variations.
Meeting the Vitamin A Requirement: The Efficacy and Importance of β-Carotene in Animal Species

Vitamin A is essential for life in all vertebrate animals. Vitamin A requirement can be met from dietary preformed vitamin A or provitamin A carotenoids, the most important of which is β-carotene. The metabolism of β-carotene, including its intestinal absorption, accumulation in tissues, and conversion to vitamin A, varies widely across animal species and determines the role that β-carotene plays in meeting vitamin A requirement. This review begins with a brief discussion of vitamin A, with an emphasis on species differences in metabolism. A more detailed discussion of β-carotene follows, with a focus on factors impacting bioavailability and its conversion to vitamin A. Finally, the literature on how animals utilize β-carotene is reviewed individually for several species and classes of animals. We conclude that β-carotene conversion to vitamin A is variable and dependent on a number of factors, which are important to consider in the formulation and assessment of diets. Omnivores and herbivores are more efficient at converting β-carotene to vitamin A than carnivores. Absorption and accumulation of β-carotene in tissues vary with species and are poorly understood. More comparative and mechanistic studies are required in this area to improve the understanding of β-carotene metabolism.
TEACHING GEOMETRICAL REASONING: LEARNING FROM EXPERT TEACHERS FROM CHINA AND JAPAN

International comparative research in mathematics education has found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that teachers are a key influence on pupil learning. Given that the development of pupils’ capability in geometrical reasoning continues to be an issue of considerable international concern, this paper reports an analysis of lower secondary school lesson suggestions offered by expert teachers from China and Japan (countries selected because they represent some interesting similarities and contrasts). The analysis indicates some striking similarities between suggested lessons, but some noteworthy differences. Both these may be related to the educational context in which the lesson suggestions are presented.
Tree-Structured CRF Models for Interactive Image Labeling

We propose structured prediction models for image labeling that explicitly take into account dependencies among image labels. In our tree-structured models, image labels are nodes, and edges encode dependency relations. To allow for more complex dependencies, we combine labels in a single node and use mixtures of trees. Our models are more expressive than independent predictors, and lead to more accurate label predictions. The gain becomes more significant in an interactive scenario where a user provides the value of some of the image labels at test time. Such an interactive scenario offers an interesting tradeoff between label accuracy and manual labeling effort. The structured models are used to decide which labels should be set by the user, and transfer the user input to more accurate predictions on other image labels. We also apply our models to attribute-based image classification, where attribute predictions of a test image are mapped to class probabilities by means of a given attribute-class mapping. Experimental results on three publicly available benchmark datasets show that in all scenarios our structured models lead to more accurate predictions, and leverage user input much more effectively than state-of-the-art independent models.
Open Access Research Article Identification of Galectin-7 as a Potential Biomarker for Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma by Proteomic Analysis

article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons At-tribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the most common malignancies. Early diagnosis is critical for guiding the therapeutic management of ESCC. It is imperative to find more effective biomarkers of ESCC. Methods: To identify novel biomarkers for esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC), specimens from 10 patients with ESCC were subjected to a comparative proteomic analysis. The proteomic patterns of ESCC samples and normal esophageal epithelial tissues (NEETs) were compared using two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. And differentially expressed proteins were identified using MALDI-TOF-MS/MS. For further identification of protein in selected spot, western blotting and immunohistochemistry were employed. Results: Twelve proteins were up-regulated and fifteen proteins were down-regulated in the ESCC samples compared with the NEET samples. Up-regulation of galectin-7 was further confirmed by western blotting and immunohistochemistry. Furthermore, immunohistochemical staining of galectin-7 was performed on a tissue microarray containing ESCC samples (n = 50) and NEET samples (n = 10). The expression levels of galectin-7 were markedly higher in the ESCC samples than in the NEET samples (P = 0.012). In addition, tissue microarray analysis also showed that the expression level of galectin-7 was related to the differentiation of ESCC. Conclusions: The present proteomics analysis revealed that galectin-7 was highly expressed in ESCC tissues. The alteration in the expression of galectin-7 was confirmed using a tissue microarray. These findings suggest that galectin-7 could be used as a potential biomarker for ESCC. Background Esophageal carcinoma is one of the most malignant gas-trointestinal cancers and is ranked the 6th leading cause of cancer death worldwide [1]. Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is the predominant histological sub-type of esophageal carcinoma in Asia [2]. The overall 5-year survival rate of ESCC is less than 10% [3]. One of the primary reasons for this high mortality rate is that ESCC is often not detected until it has invaded surrounding organs and is therefore at an advanced stage. Surgery is inappropriate in 40-60% of patients due to unresectable
An evaluation of corpus-driven measures of medical concept similarity for information retrieval

Measures of semantic similarity between medical concepts are central to a number of techniques in medical informatics, including query expansion in medical information retrieval. Previous work has mainly considered thesaurus-based path measures of semantic similarity and has not compared different corpus-driven approaches in depth. We evaluate the effectiveness of eight common corpus-driven measures in capturing semantic relatedness and compare these against human judged concept pairs assessed by medical professionals. Our results show that certain corpus-driven measures correlate strongly (approx 0.8) with human judgements. An important finding is that performance was significantly affected by the choice of corpus used in priming the measure, i.e., used as evidence from which corpus-driven similarities are drawn. This paper provides guidelines for the implementation of semantic similarity measures for medical informatics and concludes with implications for medical information retrieval.
The Cognitive-Computational Story

Computationalism is not a new program, but rather the product of the mechanist views in the 17 century, which has been under attack by philosophers and others every since. However, recently new attacks were launched from adherents of dynamical systems within cognitive science suggesting that the computationalist program fails in explaining mind because computation necessarily neglects the real-time, embodied, real-world constraints with which cognitive systems intrinsically cope. As a consequence, many researchers turned their attention away from computationalist models. Yet, an increasing number of researchers are not willing to give up what has been in nuce a quite successful approach. Rather they are motivated to reconsider the very notion of computation as well as the whole enterprise of computing and computational modeling. To get an idea of where this “new computationalism” might be heading, I will sketch very briefly the “old paradigm” and some of its historical roots, paying tribute to two of the most influential computationalists: Leibniz and Turing. I will then offer but a glance at some of the shortcomings for which computationalism has been criticized, interspersed with issues that a successor notion of computation will have to address.
The convergence of an asynchronous cooperative algorithm for distributed power control in cellular systems

A new version of the cooperative algorithm is proposed for transmitter power control in mobile cellular systems. It is a distributed algorithm based on the assumption that limited control data communication between neighboring base stations are allowed. Its convergence under asynchronous operation is proved. Numerical results show that it has a higher convergence rate and smaller dynamic range requirement than other algorithms.
An irradiation effect in Nova DN Gem 1912 and the significance of the period gap for classical novae

ABSTRA C T Continuous CCD photometry of the classical nova DN Gem during 52 nights in the years 1992‐1998 reveals a modulation with a period of 0.127844 d. The semi-amplitude is about 0.03 mag. The stability of the variation suggests that it is the orbital period of the binary system. This interpretation makes DN Gem the fourth nova inside the cataclysmic variable (CV) period gap, as defined by Diaz & Bruch, and it bolsters the idea that there is no period gap for classical novae. However, the number of known nova periods is still too small to establish this idea statistically. We eliminate several possible mechanisms for the variation, and propose that the modulation is driven by an irradiation effect. We find that model light curves of an irradiated secondary star fit the data well. The inclination angle of the system is restricted by this model to 10 8& i & 658. We also refine a previous estimate of the distance to the binary system, and find da 1:6 ^ 0: 6k pc:
Capturing Urban Dynamics with Scarce Check-In Data

The authors describe their analysis of three months' worth of collected human-physical environment interactions (Foursquare check-in) data for a medium-sized city in Greece. Their analysis shows that although the data generated by the citizens is scarce (on average, fewer than 10 users checked in at any time during the day), they could use it to build a good model of the city's dynamics. The authors discuss how this information can be used to guide visitors in the city or to provide innovative services for the city's inhabitants using the cloud.
The Narrow-Line Region of Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 Galaxies

This work studies the optical emission-line properties and physical conditions of the narrow-line region (NLR) of seven narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1's) for which high signal-to-noise ratio spectroscopic observations were available. The resolution is 340 km s-1 (at Hα) over the wavelength interval 3700-9500 Å, enabling us to separate the broad and narrow components of the permitted emission lines. Our results show that the flux carried out by the narrow component of Hβ is, on average, 50% of the total line flux. As a result, the [O III] λ5007/Hβ ratio emitted in the NLR varies from 1 to 5, instead of the universally adopted value of 10. This has strong implications for the required spectral energy distribution that ionizes the NLR gas. Photoionization models that consider a NLR composed of a combination of matter-bounded and ionization-bounded clouds are successful at explaining the low [O III] λ5007/Hβ ratio and the weakness of low-ionization lines of NLS1's. Variation of the relative proportion of these two type of clouds nicely reproduces the dispersion of narrow-line ratios found among the NLS1 sample. Assuming similar physical model parameters of both NLS1's and the normal Seyfert 1 galaxy NGC 5548, we show that the observed differences of emission-line ratios between these two groups of galaxies can be explained, to a first approximation, in terms of the shape of the input ionizing continuum. Narrow emission-line ratios of NLS1's are better reproduced by a steep power-law continuum in the EUV-soft X-ray region, with spectral index α ~ -2. Flatter spectral indices (α ~ -1.5) match the observed line ratios of NGC 5548 but are unable to provide a good match to the NLS1 ratios. This result is consistent with ROSAT observations of NLS1's, which show that these objects are characterized by steeper power-law indices than those of Seyfert 1 galaxies with strong broad optical lines.
The effect of the opponents’ serve on the offensive actions of Greek setters in volleyball games

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of the reception of the opponents’ serve on the offensive actions and strategy of the A1 National Division setters and, by extension, of their team. The subject of the study consisted in Greek volleyball teams of A1 Men’s National Division. Thirty-six videotaped matches from the period 1998-1999 were observed (3 for each team). In order to collect data, a method of indirect observation through Vicas analysis system was used. The following parameters were evaluated: a) team b) service reception, c) type of set, d) tempo of set, e) set’s area, f) setter’s set effectiveness, g) type of attack h) line-up of opponent’s block, and i) attack’s effectiveness. Cross-tabular statistical analysis showed that the quality of the reception of the opponents’ serve formed the offensive strategy of the Greek setters of A1 National Division, though it did not affect the effectiveness of their sets to the attackers and the attacking strategy of the team. However, it should be pointed out that, one could not draw reliable conclusions with respect to the team’s attacking strategy and effectiveness, from simply studying the reception of the opponents’ serve.