Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modern prejudice and strength of conjunction error: Overestimating proportions of minority employees

Purpose Modern prejudice was examined as a potential predictor of overestimating proportions of minority employees in gender-typed occupations. Strength of conjunction error was considered as an indicator of distorted perceptions of these proportions. Furthermore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the association between modern prejudice and strength of conjunction error was weaker for gender-untypical than for gender-typical targets. Design/methodology/approach Modern prejudice was considered as a predictor of overestimations of black female employees in Study 1 (n=183) and black female older employees in Study 2 (n=409). Data were collected using internet-mediated questionnaires. Findings In Study 1, modern racism, but not modern sexism, was associated with greater strength of conjunction error when respondents were presented with gender-typical targets. In Study 2, using a sample scoring higher on modern prejudice than in Study 1, modern racism, but not modern sexism and modern ageism, was associated with greater strength of conjunction error, irrespective of target occupation. Furthermore, there was an unexpected association between lower sexism and greater strength of conjunction error for gender-typical targets, but not for gender-untypical targets. Research limitations/implications The findings lend support to the ethnic-prominence hypothesis in that modern racism, but not modern sexism or modern ageism, was associated with greater strength of conjunction error. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that target non-prototypicality can dilute the effect of modern prejudice on strength of conjunction error. Originality/value This is one of the rare studies examining attitudes and conjunction error in a work-relevant context, thereby bridging the gap between social cognition and applied psychology.
Speech probability distribution

It is demonstrated that the distribution of speech samples is well described by Laplacian distribution (LD). The widely known speech distributions, i.e., LD, Gaussian distribution (GD), generalized GD, and gamma distribution, are tested as four hypotheses, and it is proved that speech samples during voice activity intervals are Laplacian random variables. A decorrelation transformation is then applied to speech samples to approximate their multivariate distribution. To do this, speech is decomposed using an adaptive Karhunen-Loeve transform or a discrete cosine transform. Then, the distributions of speech components in decorrelated domains are investigated. Experimental evaluations prove that the statistics of speech signals are like a multivariate LD. All marginal distributions of speech are accurately described by LD in decorrelated domains. While the energies of speech components are time-varying, their distribution shape remains Laplacian.
Role of lipopolysaccharide in colonization of the mouse intestine by Salmonella typhimurium studied by in situ hybridization

An avirulent, streptomycin-resistant Salmonella typhimurium strain, SL5319, and its lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-deficient mutant strain, SL5325, differ in their ability to colonize the large intestines of streptomycin-treated mice. When fed to mice independently, the strains colonize equally well, but when fed together, the LPS-deficient mutant is outcompeted by the wild-type strain during establishment in the gut (J.J. Nevola, B.A.D. Stocker, D.C. Laux, and P.S. Cohen, Infect. Immun. 50:152-159, 1985). In the present study, the spatial distribution in the intestinal mucosal layer of the two strains was visualized by specific hybridization to bacterial rRNA in histological sections of mouse colon and cecum. The first day after infection, 9.8% of the smooth SL5319 cells observed in mucus were found to be associated with the mouse epithelial cells, but three days after infection, the corresponding fraction of adhering bacteria was reduced to 2.1%. The LPS-deficient S. typhimurium strain was confined to the part of the mucosal layer closest to the colonic lumen and was not observed to adhere to the epithelium either at day 1 or 3 after infection. Quantitative determinations of the distance from the S. typhimurium cells to the epithelial wall confirmed that the average distance for the rough S. typhimurium SL5325 was much larger than for its smooth counterpart, S. typhimurium SL5319. Quantification of the hybridization signal from bacteria isolated from the cecal mucus revealed that the two strains had the same ribosome concentration, indicating that they have the same potential for growth in the intestinal environment. On the basis of these observations, we suggest that the better colonization ability of the strain carrying wild-type LPS is due to the better abilities to penetrate the intestinal mucosal layer and to subsequently bind to the epithelial cells in vivo.
Modulation of functional connectivity during the resting state and the motor task

Quite a few studies in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have tested that, even in a resting state, motor cortices constitute a network. It has never been investigated how the network modulates from the resting state to the motor task state. In this report, by a newly developed approach taking into account n‐to‐1 connectivity using 1‐to‐1 connectivity measures instead of conventional pairwise connectivity, we show the existence of a large organized functional connectivity network related to motor function in the resting brain with fMRI. More importantly, we found that such a network can be modulated from a conscious resting state to planning, initiation, coordination, guidance, and termination of voluntary movement state, exhibited by significant changes of functional connectivity of some brain regions in different brain activity. Moreover, a quantitative description of such a functional modulation has also been presented. Hum. Brain Mapp. 22:65–73, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
To What Extent Is a Highly Successful Men’s NCAA Division II Cross Country Coach Humanistic? A Case Study

The purpose of this case study was to investigate the coaching philosophy of a highly successful men’s United States National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) division II cross country coach and determine to what extent his stated philosophy and actual coaching methods were humanistic. For the past 13 seasons, the participant coach’s men’s cross country team has finished either first or second at the NCAA division II national championships. In-depth semistructured qualitative interviews of the participant coach and three of his athletes were conducted in addition to eight overt naturalistic training session observations. All data were triangulated to generate themes to determine if the stated coaching philosophy and actual methods were congruent with the humanistic philosophy. The findings indicated that the coach was for the most part humanistic in regards to individualization, but was not humanistic in relation to open communication and collaborative decision-making with athletes, or a process-ori.
Flight-motor-driven respiratory airflow increases tracheal oxygen to nearly atmospheric level in blowflies (Calliphora vicina)

ABSTRACT It is widely accepted that an efficient oxygen supply and removal of CO2 in small flying insects are sufficiently performed by diffusion with open spiracles. This paper shows that in the tethered flying blowfly, gas exchange occurs by autoventilation and unidirectional airflow. The air is inspired through the mesothoracic spiracles (Sp1) during the downstroke of the wings and is expired through the metathoracic spiracles (Sp2) during the upstroke. This directed airflow through the thoracic tracheal system was documented by pre-atrial pressure measurements at the Sp1 and Sp2, revealing a sub-atmospheric mean pressure at the Sp1 and an over-atmospheric mean pressure at the Sp2. In the mesothoracic air sacs, the mean pressure is sub-atmospheric, conditioned by the only slightly open spiracles. In a split flow-through chamber experiment, the CO2 released through the Sp2 confirmed this unidirectional respiratory gas flow, implicating an inner tracheal valve. In the thoracic tracheal system, the PO2 during flight exceeds the high resting PO2 by 1–2 kPa, reaching nearly atmospheric values. In the abdominal large air sacs, the PO2 drops during flight, probably due to the accumulation of CO2. Periodic heartbeat reversals continue during flight, with a higher period frequency than at rest, supporting the transport of CO2 via the haemolymph towards the metathoracic tracheae and abdominal air sacs. Highlighted Article: Blowflies increase their tracheal oxygen concentration during flight above the resting level by a unidirectional autoventilatory airflow.
Understanding the impact of video quality on user engagement

As the distribution of the video over the Internet becomes main- stream and its consumption moves from the computer to the TV screen, user expectation for high quality is constantly increasing. In this context, it is crucial for content providers to understand if and how video quality affects user engagement and how to best invest their resources to optimize video quality. This paper is a first step towards addressing these questions. We use a unique dataset that spans different content types, including short video on demand (VoD), long VoD, and live content from popular video con- tent providers. Using client-side instrumentation, we measure quality metrics such as the join time, buffering ratio, average bitrate, rendering quality, and rate of buffering events. We quantify user engagement both at a per-video (or view) level and a per-user (or viewer) level. In particular, we find that the percentage of time spent in buffering (buffering ratio) has the largest impact on the user engagement across all types of content. However, the magnitude of this impact depends on the content type, with live content being the most impacted. For example, a 1% increase in buffering ratio can reduce user engagement by more than three minutes for a 90-minute live video event. We also see that the average bitrate plays a significantly more important role in the case of live content than VoD content.
Compressive sensing for ultrasound RF echoes using a-Stable Distributions

This paper introduces a novel framework for compressive sensing of biomedical ultrasonic signals based on modelling data with stable distributions. We propose an approach to ℓp norm minimisation that employs the iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) algorithm but in which the parameter p is judiciously chosen by relating it to the characteristic exponent of the underlying alpha-stable distributed data. Our results show that the proposed algorithm, which we prefer to call S±S-IRLS, outperforms previously proposed ℓ1 minimisation algorithms, such as basis pursuit or orthogonal matching pursuit, both visually and in terms of PSNR.
A word distributed representation based framework for large-scale short text classification

With the development of internet, there are billions of short texts generated each day. However, the accuracy of large scale short text classification is poor due to the data sparseness. Traditional methods used to use external dataset to enrich the representation of document and solve the data sparsity problem. But external dataset which matches the specific short texts is hard to find. In this paper, we propose a framework to solve the data sparsity problem without using external dataset. Our framework deal with large scale short text by making the most of semantic similarity of words which learned from the training short texts. First, we learn word distributed representation and measure the word semantic similarity from the training short texts. Then, we propose a method which enrich the document representation by using the word semantic similarity information. At last, we build classifiers based on the enriched representation. We evaluate our framework on both the benchmark dataset(Standford Sentiment Treebank) and the large scale Chinese news title dataset which collected by ourselves. For the benchmark dataset, using our framework can improve 3% classification accuracy. The result we tested on the large scale Chinese news title dataset shows that our framework achieve better result with the increase of the training set size.
Public Management and Organizational Performance: The Case of Law Enforcement Agencies

Investigating the impact of management on performance in public organizations is a key challenge for public administration. To that end, we apply to a national sample of law enforcement agencies a recently developed formal model of public management. The model frames a set of specific expectations about the management-performance relationship. The study estimates the impacts of both internally- and externally-oriented managerial activities on a salient metric of law enforcement outcomes. In results supportive of the model, the findings indicate that active internal management contributes to higher arrest rates and helps police departments to be less bound by previous performance. The analysis also indicates that departments' externally-oriented activities of networking and community policing improve arrest rates and assist managers in mitigating the impact of environmental constraints on results.
Coupled-layer neighbor embedding for surveillance face hallucination

As the face image captured by a surveillance camera is typically very low-resolution (LR), blurred and noisy, traditional neighbor embedding method considers only one manifold (the LR image manifold) and fails very often to reliably estimate the intention geometrical structure. In this paper, we introduce the notion of neighbor embedding from the LR image manifold and the high-resolution (HR) one simultaneously and propose a novel neighbor embedding model, termed the coupled-layer neighbor embedding (CLNE), for surveillance face hallucination. CLNE differs substantially from other neighbor embedding models in that the former has two layers: the LR layer and the the HR layer. The LR layer in this model is the local geometrical structure of the LR patch manifold, which is characterized by the reconstruction weights; the HR layer in this model is a set of HR training patches that guide the K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) searching and geometrically constrain the reconstruction weights. By this coupled constraint paradigm between the adaptation of the LR layer and the HR one, CLNE can achieve a more robust neighbor embedding through the significant degradation process. Indeed, the experimental results confirm that our method outperforms the related state-of-the-art methods by having better objective values as well as better visual results.
, David Ventricular Myocytes From the Canine Heart in Epicardial and Endocardialto I Effects of the Renin-Angiotensin System on the Current

The Ca -independent portion of transient outward K 1 current (Ito) exhibits a transmural gradient in ventricle. To investigate control mechanisms for this gradient, we studied canine epicardial and endocardial ventricular myocytes with use of the whole-cell patch-clamp technique. I to was larger in amplitude, had a more negative voltage threshold for activation, and had a more negative midpoint of inactivation in epicardium. Recovery from inactivation was . 10-fold slower in endocardium. Incubation of epicardial myocytes with angiotensin II for 2 to 52 hours altered I to to resemble unincubated endocardium and reduced the amplitude of the phase 1 notch of the action potential. In contrast, incubation of endocardial myocytes with losartan for 2 to 52 hours altered I to to resemble unincubated epicardium and induced a phase 1 notch in the action potential. With RNase protection assays, we determined that incubations with angiotensin II or losartan did not alter mRNA levels for either Kv4.3 or Kv1.4; thus, a change in the a subunit forI to is unlikely to be responsible. To test whether posttranslational modification produced the effects of angiotensin II, we coexpressed Kv4.3 and the angiotensin II type 1a receptor in Xenopusoocytes. Incubation with angiotensin II increased the time constant for recovery from inactivation of the expressed current by 2-fold with an incubation time constant of 3.7 hours. No effect on activation or inactivation voltage dependence was observed. These results demonstrate that the properties of I to in endocardium and epicardium are plastic and likely under the tonic-differing influence of the reninangiotensin system. (Circ Res. 2000;86:1062-1068.)
A Statistical Prediction Model Based on Sparse Representations for Single Image Super-Resolution

We address single image super-resolution using a statistical prediction model based on sparse representations of low- and high-resolution image patches. The suggested model allows us to avoid any invariance assumption, which is a common practice in sparsity-based approaches treating this task. Prediction of high resolution patches is obtained via MMSE estimation and the resulting scheme has the useful interpretation of a feedforward neural network. To further enhance performance, we suggest data clustering and cascading several levels of the basic algorithm. We suggest a training scheme for the resulting network and demonstrate the capabilities of our algorithm, showing its advantages over existing methods based on a low- and high-resolution dictionary pair, in terms of computational complexity, numerical criteria, and visual appearance. The suggested approach offers a desirable compromise between low computational complexity and reconstruction quality, when comparing it with state-of-the-art methods for single image super-resolution.
tDCS and Robotics on Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation: Effect Modification by Stroke Duration and Type of Stroke

Objective. The aim of this exploratory pilot study is to test the effects of bilateral tDCS combined with upper extremity robot-assisted therapy (RAT) on stroke survivors. Methods. We enrolled 23 subjects who were allocated to 2 groups: RAT + real tDCS and RAT + sham-tDCS. Each patient underwent 10 sessions (5 sessions/week) over two weeks. Outcome measures were collected before and after treatment: (i) Fugl-Meyer Assessment-Upper Extremity (FMA-UE), (ii) Box and Block Test (BBT), and (iii) Motor Activity Log (MAL). Results. Both groups reported a significant improvement in FMA-UE score after treatment (p < 0.01). No significant between-groups differences were found in motor function. However, when the analysis was adjusted for stroke type and duration, a significant interaction effect (p < 0.05) was detected, showing that stroke duration (acute versus chronic) and type (cortical versus subcortical) modify the effect of tDCS and robotics on motor function. Patients with chronic and subcortical stroke benefited more from the treatments than patients with acute and cortical stroke, who presented very small changes. Conclusion. The additional use of bilateral tDCS to RAT seems to have a significant beneficial effect depending on the duration and type of stroke. These results should be verified by additional confirmatory studies.
Faith, spirituality and social work education : deliberating guru-led and Hindu-inspired faith movements

This thesis presents a reflection on a series of published papers which attempt to explore, in the systematic way, the interface between guru-led and Hindu-inspired faith movements, Indic spirituality and social work through conceptual and empirical considerations. The context of guru-led and Hindu-inspired faith movements, and their spirituality, has been explored through a meta-analysis, followed by qualitative studies of five contemporary guru-led movements and their distinctive styles of seva or social service – “mission”-isation; syncretism, lived religion and organised charity; millenarianism, post-apocalyptic vision and social service; humanity, divinity and service; and austerity, nationalism and service. This is followed by a study of followers/adherents who participate in social services of these guru-led and Hindu-inspired faith-movements and beneficiaries, through five fairly large datasets. The first dataset is on adherents of these movements and what motivates them to join, serve and gain. The second dataset is on followers of a particular new movement and how they derive their sense of well-being from the same. The third dataset is on beneficiaries of social initiatives of these movements and organisations. The fourth dataset is beneficiaries of a particular spiritual programme of the Art of Living Foundation called the Sudarshan Kriya. The fifth dataset is on a similar spiritual programme for adolescents and how it positively influences them. Theoretically it can be said that the adherents and beneficiaries together form a habitus of these movements. I finally discuss, through two published works in social work journals, as to how a specific spiritual technique of a guru movement and spirituality in general is perceived as having critical bearings for the social work discipline in the contemporary Indian and South Asian contexts. The structure of the thesis illustrates the progressive nature of the research and demonstrates how the component parts come together to form a cumulative and coherent case. The collection of works argues the following contentions, to make critical contributions to the domain knowledge of guru-led movements, faith, spirituality and social work. Guru-led and Hindu-inspired faith movements use social service as a legitimising trope. Guru-led and Hindu-inspired faith movements have implicit and explicit spiritual techniques, which accompany the social service/work package. Followers and beneficiaries of these movements gain materially and spiritually, which keeps them motivated to be aligned. This in turn contributes to the fellowship of guru-led movements. For the social work discipline, the phenomenon of guru-led movements is an important aspect to be paid attention to. Their social service engagements call for a need for working in or with guru-led movements as a part of social work practice horizon. With this focus, in the published works, implications for the discipline of social work are drawn out and made explicit. The power of a cumulative study using a range of empirical tools is shown.
Analysis of a Subset Selection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks in Time-Varying Fading Channels

One of the main challenges facing wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is the limited power resources available at small sensor nodes. It is therefore desired to reduce the power consumption of sensors while keeping the distortion between the source and its estimate at the fusion centre (FC) below a specific threshold. In this paper, we analyze a subset selection strategy to reduce the average transmission power of the WSN. We consider a two-hop network and assume the channels between the source and the relay sensors to be time-varying fading channels, modeled as Gilbert-Elliott channels. We show that when these channels are known at the FC, a subset of sensors can be selected by the FC to minimize transmit power while satisfying the distortion criterion. Through analysis, we derive the probability distribution of the size of this subset. We also consider practical aspects of implementing the proposed scheme, including channel estimation at relays. Through simulations, we compare the performance of the proposed scheme with schemes appearing in the literature. Simulation results confirm that for a certain range of end-to-end bit-error rates (BERs), the proposed scheme succeeds to achieve a superior power reduction compared to other schemes.