Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lay perceptions of mental toughness: Understanding conceptual similarities and differences between lay and sporting contexts

Abstract: The predominant focus on sporting populations has limited our conceptual understanding of mental toughness in lay contexts. On the basis of its wider benefits beyond sports, we sought to understand the central and peripheral attributes of mental toughness from a layperson’s perspective. To this end, we employed a prototype analysis which consisted of two studies. In Study 1, a list of attributes of mental toughness was generated. In Study 2, these attributes were ranked for their centrality to mental toughness. Study 1 was an open-format questionnaire, where 138 laypeople generated a final list of 75 attributes of mental toughness. The most frequently mentioned attributes were self-belief, determination, perseverance, resilience and focus, which largely supported important attributes identified by athletes in existing mental toughness literature. Study 2 surveyed 136 laypeople, who identified mental strength, overcomes obstacles, achieves/operates under pressure, determination and resilience/recovery as the most central attributes to mental toughness. Although determination and resilience aligned with existing sporting accounts of mental toughness, the remaining attributes reflect differences in perception of mental toughness between sporting and lay contexts. Examination of peripherally-rated attributes provides insights into mental toughness as an enduring form of suffering. Overall, determination and resilience emerged as frequently mentioned, as well as highly central, and, as such, represent the foundation for a universal (i.e., not context-specific) understanding of mental toughness.
The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution

PART 1: INSIGHTS FROM COMPARATIVE ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR PART 2: THE BIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTION: ANATOMY, GENETICS, AND NEUROLOGY PART 3: THE PRE-HISTORY OF LANGUAGE: WHEN AND WHY DID LANGUAGE EVOLVE? PART 4: LAUNCHING LANGUAGE: THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LINGUISTIC SPECIES PART 5: LANGUAGE CHANGE, CREATION, AND TRANSMISSION
Role of External Pallidal Segment in Primate Parkinsonism: Comparison of the Effects of 1-Methyl-4-Phenyl-1,2,3,6-Tetrahydropyridine-Induced Parkinsonism and Lesions of the External Pallidal Segment

These experiments re-examined the notion that reduced activity in the external pallidal segment (GPe) results in the abnormalities of neuronal discharge in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and the internal pallidal segment (GPi) and in the development of parkinsonian motor signs. Extracellular recording in two rhesus monkeys, which had been rendered parkinsonian by treatment with 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP), revealed that the average neuronal discharge rate decreased in GPe but increased in STN and GPi. After MPTP, neurons in all three nuclei tended to discharge in oscillatory bursts. In addition, GABA release in STN (measured with microdialysis) was reduced, indicative of reduced activity along the GPe-STN pathway. Finally, the concentration of glutamic acid dehydrogenase (GAD; measured with autoimmunoradiography) was increased in GPe and GPi, likely reflecting increased striatal input and increased activity of local axon collaterals, respectively. Surprisingly, GAD protein in STN remained unchanged, indicating that the usual assumption that GAD levels are determined primarily by the overall activity of GABAergic elements may be too simplistic. The results from the MPTP-treated animals were compared with results obtained in a second group of three animals with ibotenic acid lesions of GPe. GPe lesions resulted in increased discharge in STN and GPi, comparable with the changes seen after MPTP but did not induce oscillatory bursting and had no behavioral effects. The results indicate that a mere reduction of GPe activity does not produce parkinsonism. Other changes, such as altered discharge patterns in STN and GPi, may play an important role in the generation of parkinsonism.
Sensory and Cognitive Effects of Acute Exposure to Hydrogen Sulfide

Background Some epidemiologic studies have reported compromised cognitive and sensory performance among individuals exposed to low concentrations of hydrogen sulfide (H2S). Objectives We hypothesized a dose–response increase in symptom severity and reduction in sensory and cognitive performance in response to controlled H2S exposures. Methods In separate exposure sessions administered in random order over three consecutive weeks, 74 healthy subjects [35 females, 39 males; mean age (± SD) = 24.7 ± 4.2; mean years of education = 16.5 ± 2.4], were exposed to 0.05, 0.5, and 5 ppm H2S. During each exposure session, subjects completed ratings and tests before H2S exposure (baseline) and during the final hour of the 2-hr exposure period. Results Dose–response reduction in air quality and increases in ratings of odor intensity, irritation, and unpleasantness were observed. Total symptom severity was not significantly elevated across any exposure condition, but anxiety symptoms were significantly greater in the 5-ppm than in the 0.05-ppm condition. No dose–response effect was observed for sensory or cognitive measures. Verbal learning was compromised during each exposure condition. Conclusions Although some symptoms increased with exposure, the magnitude of these changes was relatively minor. Increased anxiety was significantly related to ratings of irritation due to odor. Whether the effect on verbal learning represents a threshold effect of H2S or an effect due to fatigue across exposure requires further investigation. These acute effects in a healthy sample cannot be directly generalized to communities where individuals have other health conditions and concomitant exposures.
Pathophysiological evaluation of subacute ruminal acidosis (SARA) by continuous ruminal pH monitoring

Abstract Evaluation of the radio‐transmission pH‐measurement system for monitoring the ruminal pH and subacute ruminal acidosis (SARA) in cattle is described. This is done in order to reveal the possible application of this system for detection and pathophysiological research of SARA by continuous ruminal pH measurement. The possibility of using this system for assessment of the ruminal pH in SARA cattle, and the presence of negative correlation between the ruminal pH and ruminal temperature in heathy and SARA cattle were determined. In addition, the 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing analysis showed that the ruminal microbial community was simpler in SARA cattle, and the bacterial numbers in SARA cattle were lower than those in healthy hay‐fed cattle. Concentrate feeding might have reduced the diversity of the ruminal microbial community. Changes in the ruminal microbial community of SARA cattle might be related to the changes in ruminal pH followed by the decrease in the number of some bacteria. Continuous monitoring of the ruminal pH using the radio‐transmission pH‐measurement system would be applied for detection and prevention of SARA in the field and pathophysiological research of SARA, including ruminal zymology and bacteriology, which have been determined previously by sampling of the ruminal fluid and measuring of ruminal pH.
The Influence of Social Comparison and Peer Group Size on Risky Decision-Making

This study explores the influence of different social reference points and different comparison group sizes on risky decision-making. Participants were presented with a scenario describing an exam, and presented with the opportunity of making a risky decision in the context of different information provided about the performance of their peers. We found that behavior was influenced, not only by comparison with peers, but also by the size of the comparison group. Specifically, the larger the reference group, the more polarized the behavior it prompted. In situations describing social loss, participants were led to make riskier decisions after comparing themselves against larger groups, while in situations describing social gain, they become more risk averse. These results indicate that decision making is influenced both by social comparison and the number of people making up the social reference group.
The challenges of establishing social learning spaces at a Johannesburg university student residence: Student views

ABSTRACT This article reports on two cycles of a Participatory Action Research (PAR) study on student experiences of the process of establishing social learning spaces in a Johannesburg university student residence. We draw on Wenger’s (2009) notion of ‘social learning spaces’ to explore the manner in which students mediate their social and institutional identity, expose power imbalances in terms of decision-making and determine influences on their learning. We argue that learning is facilitated by social engagement and suggest that the conceptualisation and implementation of social learning spaces, although a complex and protracted process, is valuable for students’ social and academic development, particularly in a residence environment. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews, analysed using content analysis, and interpreted through a Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) lens. The findings point to the complexity of establishing social learning spaces (SLS) in a student residence environment with students experiencing multiple tensions in the process, including struggles with collaborative learning, difficulties in developing agency and the challenges of traversing power relations.
Motivating students with authentic science experiences: changes in motivation for school science

Abstract Background: Students’ motivation for science declines over the early teenage years, and students often find school science difficult and irrelevant to their everyday lives. This paper asks whether creating opportunities to connect school science to authentic science can have positive effects on student motivation. Purpose: To understand how authentic science experiences can affect students’ motivation for science and students’ goals, values, beliefs and attitudes towards science. Programme description: The Medicine Hunt brought scientists and students together to find bacteria that produce secondary metabolites with antibiotic effects. Scientists received help with collecting soil samples and teachers and students took an active role in research and worked with solving an authentic problem as a part of their ordinary school science over a course of six months. Sample: About 388 students from 18 lower-secondary school classes participating in the Medicine Hunt. Students were enrolled in grade seven to nine (13–15 years old). At this stage, science is compulsory, and all students follow the same science course. The classes represented different geographical regions of Sweden. Design and methods: Students filled in motivation questionnaires before and after the Medicine Hunt. Paired t-tests were used to evaluate how students’ intrinsic motivation, goals, values, beliefs and attitudes towards science changed over the project period. Results: Students’ intrinsic motivation for school science and plans for future participation in science remained unchanged during the period they participated in the Medicine Hunt, and students’ goals, values and attitudes followed the well-documented pattern of decline. Thus, the authentic experience can arrest the well-described decline for some motivation-related factors. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the authentic experience can arrest some aspects of the decline in motivation for science in the teenage years. The paper discusses the processes around students’ motivation in relation to authentic experiences.
Modeling E-mail Networks and Inferring Leadership Using Self-Exciting Point Processes

ABSTRACT We propose various self-exciting point process models for the times when e-mails are sent between individuals in a social network. Using an expectation–maximization (EM)-type approach, we fit these models to an e-mail network dataset from West Point Military Academy and the Enron e-mail dataset. We argue that the self-exciting models adequately capture major temporal clustering features in the data and perform better than traditional stationary Poisson models. We also investigate how accounting for diurnal and weekly trends in e-mail activity improves the overall fit to the observed network data. A motivation and application for fitting these self-exciting models is to use parameter estimates to characterize important e-mail communication behaviors such as the baseline sending rates, average reply rates, and average response times. A primary goal is to use these features, estimated from the self-exciting models, to infer the underlying leadership status of users in the West Point and Enron networks. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
Grassland ecosystems in China: review of current knowledge and research advancement

Grasslands are the dominant landscape in China, accounting for 40% of the national land area. Research concerning China's grassland ecosystems can be chronologically summarized into four periods: (i) pre-1950s, preliminary research and survey of grassland vegetation and plant species by Russians, Japanese and Western Europeans, (ii) 1950–1975, exploration and survey of vegetation, soils and topography as part of natural resource inventory programmes by regional and national institutions mainly led by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, (iii) 1976–1995, establishment of field stations for long-term ecological monitoring and studies of ecosystem processes, (iv) 1996–present, comprehensive studies of community dynamics and ecosystem function integrating multi-scale and multidisciplinary approaches and experimental manipulations. Major findings of scientific significance in China's grassland ecosystem research include: (i) improved knowledge on succession and biogeochemistry of the semi-arid and temperate grassland ecosystems, (ii) elucidation of life-history strategies and diapause characteristics of the native grasshopper species as one of the key grassland pests, and (iii) development of effective management strategies for controlling rodent pests in grassland ecosystems. Opportunities exist for using the natural grasslands in northern China as a model system to test ecosystem theories that so far have proven a challenge to ecologists worldwide.
Unsupervised segmentation of synthetic aperture radar inundation imagery using the level set method

In this paper, we proposed an unsupervised algorithm to identify the flooded areas from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images based on texture information derived from the gray-level co-occurrence matrices (GLCM) texture analysis. Here, five GLCM features, namely, energy, contrast, homogeneity, correlation and entropy, are extracted from a SAR image. These features are input to an image segmentation algorithm using a level set method to identify flooded and dry areas. Experiments were conducted on the RADARSAT-2 images of severely flooded areas near Chaopraya rivers, Thailand, in 2011, for which contemporaneous ground data exists for validation. Our results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to successfully segment various flood regions and achieve improvement over existing published unsupervised algorithms.
Learning Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Four Clinicians' Perspectives

ABSTRACT This study examined the experiences of four clinicians learning emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT). Two group interviews, separated by 6 years, explored topics that included emotion, gender, model differences, personal practitioner impact, and the long-term influence of EFT training on clinical work. Emotion emerged as a major theme, with three subthemes at each phase. Phase 1 results indicated an increase in personal awareness of emotions, a positive impact on close personal relationships, and challenges for males in learning to elicit and use emotion. Phase 2 results, 6 years later, revealed that focusing on emotions remained salient and that EFT continues to influence the work of each clinician to varying degrees. Limitations, future research suggestions, and clinical implications are discussed.
Cellular Dynamical Mean Field Approach to Strongly Correlated Systems

We propose a cellular version of dynamical-mean field theory which gives a natural generalization of its original single-site construction and is formulated in different sets of variables. We show how non-orthogonality of the tight-binding basis sets enters the problem and prove that the resulting equations lead to manifestly causal self energies.
Evaluation of the association between the JAK2 46/1 haplotype and chronic myeloproliferative neoplasms in a Brazilian population

OBJECTIVE: The JAK2 46/1 haplotype has recently been described as a major contributing factor to the development of myeloproliferative neoplasm, whether positive or negative for the JAK2 V617F mutation. The G allele, identified by a single-nucleotide polymorphism known as JAK2 rs10974944, is part of the JAK2 46/1 haplotype. The aim of this study was to verify the association between the presence of the G allele and the development of BCR-ABL-negative chronic myeloproliferative neoplasms in our population. METHODS: Blood and oral mucosa swab samples were obtained from 56 patients of two local Brazilian hospitals who had previously been diagnosed with BCR-ABL-negative chronic myeloproliferative neoplasms. Blood samples from 90 local blood donors were used as controls. The presence of the G allele was assessed using a PCR-RFLP assay after extracting DNA from the samples. RESULTS: The presence of the G allele was strongly associated with the presence of BCR-ABL-negative chronic myeloproliferative neoplasms (p = 0.0001; OR = 2.674; 95% CI = 1.630−4.385) in the studied population. CONCLUSION: In agreement with previous reports, the JAK2 46/1 haplotype, represented in this study by the presence of the G allele, is an important predisposing factor in the oncogenetic development of these neoplasms in our population.
Dysregulated RasGRP1 Responds to Cytokine Receptor Input in T Cell Leukemogenesis

Understanding the signaling mechanisms that can lead to T cell leukemia may enable personalized therapies. Targeting a Ras Activator in T-ALL Aberrant Ras signaling is common in many cases of T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoma (T-ALL); however, only a small percentage of T-ALL cases involve activating mutations in Ras, which suggests that Ras activity must be enhanced by other mechanisms. In a screen of 107 pediatric T-ALL patients, Hartzell et al. found heterogeneous expression of the gene encoding the Ras activator RasGRP1 but not of genes encoding seven other Ras activators. In mouse T-ALL cell lines characterized by enhanced Rasgrp1 expression, increased Rasgrp1 abundance enhanced Ras signaling and increased proliferation of T-ALL cells transplanted into nude mice. Knockdown of Rasgrp1 reduced the proliferative potential of these cells in vitro and reduced tumor growth in recipient mice. Although the underlying reason for enhanced Rasgrp1 expression remains unclear, these findings demonstrate that activating mutations in Ras or dysregulated Rasgrp1 abundance generate distinct biochemical signatures in T-ALL and suggest that Rasgrp1 may be a fruitful stratification marker for T-ALL. Enhanced signaling by the small guanosine triphosphatase Ras is common in T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia/lymphoma (T-ALL), but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. We identified the guanine nucleotide exchange factor RasGRP1 (Rasgrp1 in mice) as a Ras activator that contributes to leukemogenesis. We found increased RasGRP1 expression in many pediatric T-ALL patients, which is not observed in rare early T cell precursor T-ALL patients with KRAS and NRAS mutations, such as K-RasG12D. Leukemia screens in wild-type mice, but not in mice expressing the mutant K-RasG12D that encodes a constitutively active Ras, yielded frequent retroviral insertions that led to increased Rasgrp1 expression. Rasgrp1 and oncogenic K-RasG12D promoted T-ALL through distinct mechanisms. In K-RasG12D T-ALLs, enhanced Ras activation had to be uncoupled from cell cycle arrest to promote cell proliferation. In mouse T-ALL cells with increased Rasgrp1 expression, we found that Rasgrp1 contributed to a previously uncharacterized cytokine receptor–activated Ras pathway that stimulated the proliferation of T-ALL cells in vivo, which was accompanied by dynamic patterns of activation of effector kinases downstream of Ras in individual T-ALLs. Reduction of Rasgrp1 abundance reduced cytokine-stimulated Ras signaling and decreased the proliferation of T-ALL in vivo. The position of RasGRP1 downstream of cytokine receptors as well as the different clinical outcomes that we observed as a function of RasGRP1 abundance make RasGRP1 an attractive future stratification marker for T-ALL.
Neurologic signs and symptoms frequently manifest in acute HIV infection

Objective: To determine the incidence, timing, and severity of neurologic findings in acute HIV infection (pre–antibody seroconversion), as well as persistence with combination antiretroviral therapy (cART). Methods: Participants identified with acute HIV were enrolled, underwent structured neurologic evaluations, immediately initiated cART, and were followed with neurologic evaluations at 4 and 12 weeks. Concurrent brain MRIs and both viral and inflammatory markers in plasma and CSF were obtained. Results: Median estimated HIV infection duration was 19 days (range 3–56) at study entry for the 139 participants evaluated. Seventy-three participants (53%) experienced one or more neurologic findings in the 12 weeks after diagnosis, with one developing a fulminant neurologic manifestation (Guillain-Barré syndrome). A total of 245 neurologic findings were noted, reflecting cognitive symptoms (33%), motor findings (34%), and neuropathy (11%). Nearly half of the neurologic findings (n = 121, 49%) occurred at diagnosis, prior to cART initiation, and most of these (n = 110, 90%) remitted concurrent with 1 month on treatment. Only 9% of neurologic findings (n = 22) persisted at 24 weeks on cART. Nearly all neurologic findings (n = 236, 96%) were categorized as mild in severity. No structural neuroimaging abnormalities were observed. Participants with neurologic findings had a higher mean plasma log10 HIV RNA at diagnosis compared to those without neurologic findings (5.9 vs 5.4; p = 0.006). Conclusions: Acute HIV infection is commonly associated with mild neurologic findings that largely remit while on treatment, and may be mediated by direct viral factors. Severe neurologic manifestations are infrequent in treated acute HIV.
An empirical analysis of convergence related particle swarm optimization

In this paper an extensive empirical analysis of recently introduced Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm with Convergence Related parameters (CR-PSO) is presented. The algorithm is tested on extended set of benchmarks and the results are compared to the PSO with time-varying acceleration coefficients (TVAC-PSO) and the standard genetic algorithm (GA).