Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does It Pay To Pray? Costly Ritual and Cooperation

Abstract Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that either through selection or a causal relationship, the performance of religious rituals is associated with higher levels of cooperation. To test this hypothesis we design field experiments to measure the in-group cooperative behavior of members of religious and secular Israeli kibbutzim, communal societies for which mutual cooperation is a matter of survival. Our results show that religious males (the primary practitioners of collective religious ritual in Orthodox Judaism) are more cooperative than religious females, secular males and secular females. Moreover, the frequency with which religious males engage in collective religious rituals predicts well their degree of cooperative behavior.
Perceived Racial Discrimination and Risk of Uterine Leiomyomata

Background: The incidence of uterine leiomyomata (fibroids, myomas) is 2–3 times higher in black women than white women. Black women also report higher levels of racial discrimination. We evaluated the hypothesis that greater exposure to racism increases myoma risk in black women. Methods: Data were derived from the Black Women’s Health Study, a prospective cohort study of US black women age 21–69 years in 1995. In 1997, women reported on “everyday” and “lifetime” experiences of racism. From 1997 through 2003, we followed 22,002 premenopausal women to assess the association between self-reported racism and risk of myomas. Incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated from Cox regression models. Results: During 107,127 person-years of follow-up, 3440 new cases of uterine myomas confirmed by ultrasound (n = 2774) or surgery (n = 666) were reported. All IRRs for “lifetime” and “everyday” experiences of racism were above 1.0. Using a summary variable that averaged the responses from 5 “everyday” racism items, multivariable IRRs comparing quartiles 2, 3, and 4 to quintile 1 (lowest) were 1.16 (95% CI = 1.04–1.29), 1.19 (1.06–1.32), and 1.27 (1.14–1.43), respectively. Multivariable IRRs comparing women who reported 1, 2, or 3 lifetime occurrences of major discrimination (ie, job, housing, or police) relative to those who reported none were 1.04 (0.96–1.13), 1.17 (1.07–1.28), and 1.24 (1.10–1.39), respectively. Results did not vary according to case definition (ultrasound vs. surgery) or health care utilization. Associations were weaker among foreign-born women and among women with higher coping skills. Conclusions: Perceived racism was associated with an increased risk of uterine myomas in US-born black women.
The Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Semi-Markov Model

There is much interest in the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Markov Model (HDP-HMM) as a natural Bayesian nonparametric extension of the traditional HMM. However, in many settings the HDP-HMM's strict Markovian constraints are undesirable, particularly if we wish to learn or encode non-geometric state durations. We can extend the HDP-HMM to capture such structure by drawing upon explicit-duration semi-Markovianity, which has been developed in the parametric setting to allow construction of highly interpretable models that admit natural prior information on state durations. In this paper we introduce the explicit-duration HDP-HSMM and develop posterior sampling algorithms for efficient inference in both the direct-assignment and weak-limit approximation settings. We demonstrate the utility of the model and our inference methods on synthetic data as well as experiments on a speaker diarization problem and an example of learning the patterns in Morse code.
Impact of U.S. Citizenship status on cancer screening among immigrant women

OBJECTIVE: We evaluated the relationship between U.S. citizenship status and the receipt of Pap smears and mammograms among immigrant women in California.DESIGN: Cross-sectional study using data from the 2001 California Health Interview Survey.PATIENTS/PARTICIPANTS: Noninstitutionalized, civilian women, aged 18 years and older living in California.MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: We analyzed data from the 2001 California Health Interview Survey and used logistic regression models to adjust for sociodemographic factors and for access and utilization of health services. After adjusting we found that U.S. citizen immigrants were significantly more likely to report receiving a Pap smear ever (adjusted prevalence ratio [aPR], 1.05; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.01 to 1.08), a recent Pap smear (aPR, 1.07; 95% CI, 1.03 to 1.11), a mammogram ever (aPR, 1.17; 95% CI, 1.12 to 1.21), and a recent mammogram (aPR, 1.38; 95% CI, 1.26 to 1.49) as compared to immigrants who are not U.S. citizens. Also associated with receiving cancer screening were income, having a usual source of care, and having health insurance. Hispanic women were more likely to receive Pap smears as compared to whites and Asians.CONCLUSIONS: Not being a U.S. citizen is a barrier to receiving cervical and breast cancer screening. Additional research is needed to explore causal factors for differences in cancer screening rates between citizens and noncitizens.
Advance Directives for Seriously Ill Hospitalized Patients: Effectiveness with the Patient Self‐Determination Act and the SUPPORT Intervention

OBJECTIVE: To assess the effectiveness of written advance directives (ADs) in the care of seriously ill, hospitalized patients. In particular, to conduct an assessment after ADs were promoted by the Patient Self‐Determination Act (PSDA) and enhanced by the effort to improve decision‐making in the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments (SUPPORT), focusing upon the impact of ADs on decision‐making about resuscitation.
Searching for autonomy: young black men, schooling and aspirations

This article examines the relationships between being young and black, and educational and career aspirations, drawing on new research evidence from two recent studies carried out in two urban locations in Northern England. The first of these studies forms part of a wider research project concerned with analysing the connections between aspects of racism, ethnicity and schooling in nine European countries recently completed in February 2011 and which included a quantitative survey of 30–40 young black (Caribbean/African) 15-year-old school pupils followed up by qualitative community-based fieldwork. The material examined here focuses on the perceptions and experiences of this specific group. The second smaller study involved multi-method research with 10 young black men in Leeds. In particular this article highlights the driving search for personal autonomy and agency on the part of young black men, which for many can and does, become manifest in strong levels of educational and career aspirations which are no different from other groups of young people. Further it identifies some of the creative strategies, for example in drawing on forms of social capital and other networks and resources to reinforce, cultivate and reaffirm aspirations and hopes, which will be of critical importance in determining the future outcomes of this group of young people.
Counter braids: a novel counter architecture for per-flow measurement

Fine-grained network measurement requires routers and switches to update large arrays of counters at very high link speed (e.g. 40 Gbps). A naive algorithm needs an infeasible amount of SRAM to store both the counters and a flow-to-counter association rule, so that arriving packets can update corresponding counters at link speed. This has made accurate per-flow measurement complex and expensive, and motivated approximate methods that detect and measure only the large flows. This paper revisits the problem of accurate per-flow measurement. We present a counter architecture, called Counter Braids, inspired by sparse random graph codes. In a nutshell, Counter Braids "compresses while counting". It solves the central problems (counter space and flow-to-counter association) of per-flow measurement by "braiding" a hierarchy of counters with random graphs. Braiding results in drastic space reduction by sharing counters among flows; and using random graphs generated on-the-fly with hash functions avoids the storage of flow-to-counter association. The Counter Braids architecture is optimal (albeit with a complex decoder) as it achieves the maximum compression rate asymptotically. For implementation, we present a low-complexity message passing decoding algorithm, which can recover flow sizes with essentially zero error. Evaluation on Internet traces demonstrates that almost all flow sizes are recovered exactly with only a few bits of counter space per flow.
Self-Organizing Cascaded Structure of Deformable Part Models for Fast Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a framework which self-organizes the cascaded object detection filters for fast object detection with maintaining high accuracy. The proposed scheme consists of root and part filter modules, which are cascaded in a self-organizing structure. The pruning of non-object regions in low resolution at the root cascade stage is critical for the object detection speed. At root stage, to prune as many non-object regions as possible, we build a root cascade structure using multiple root models. These models are obtained via bagging procedure for non-linear classification of object and non-object parts in an image. Additional speed-up is achieved by determining proper deployment order of part models. We define a discriminability measure for the part models and suggest a self-organizing scheme to generate an efficient order of part models. The proposed method is evaluated through computational experiments with the PASCAL VOC and INRIA datasets, as a result, our method achieves on average more than 2 times faster performance than the original cascade-DPM, with comparable precision scores.
Scientific Realism in the Age of String Theory

String theory currently is the only viable candidate for a unified description of all known natural forces. This article tries to demonstrate that the fundamental structural and methodological differences that set string theory apart from other physical theories have important philosophical consequences. Focussing on implications for the realism debate in philosophy of science, it is argued that both poles of that debate face new problems in the context of string theory. On the one hand, the claim of underdetermination of scientific theory by the available empirical data, which is a pivotal element of empiricism, loses much of its plausibility. On the other hand, the dissolution of any meaningful notion of an external ontological object destroys the basis for conventional versions of scientific realism. String theory seems to suggest an intermediate position akin to Structural Realism that is based on a newly emerging principle, to be called the principle of theoretical uniqueness.
Association of injury mechanism with the risk of cervical spine fractures.

OBJECTIVE A full understanding of an injury event and the mechanical forces involved should be important for predicting specific anatomical patterns of injury. Yet, information on the mechanism of injury is often overlooked as a predictor for specific anatomical injury in clinical decision-making. We measured the relationship between mechanism of injury and risk for cervical spine fracture. METHODS Our case-control study is a secondary analysis of data collected from the Canadian C-Spine Rule (CCR) study. Data were collected from 1996 to 2002 and included patients presenting to the emergency departments of 9 tertiary care centres after sustaining acute blunt trauma to the head or neck. Cases are defined as patients who were categorized in the CCR study with a clinically important cervical spine fracture. Controls had no radiologic evidence of cervical spine injury. Bivariate and multivariate unconditional logistic regression models were used. Results are presented as odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). RESULTS Among the 17,208 patients in the CCR study, 320 (2%)received a diagnosis of a cervical spine fracture. Axial loads, falls, diving incidents and nontraffic motorized vehicle collisions (e.g., collisions involving snowmobiles or all-terrain vehicles) were injury mechanisms that were significantly related to a higher risk of fracture. For motor vehicle collisions, the risk of cervical spine injury increased with the posted speed, being involved in a head-on collision or a rollover, or not wearing a seat belt (p < 0.05). The occurrence of cervical spine fracture was negligible in simple rear-end collisions (1 in 3694 cases; OR 0.015, 95% CI 0.002-0.104]). CONCLUSION Our study quantitatively demonstrates the relationship between specific mechanisms of injury and the risk of a cervical spine fracture. A full understanding of the injury mechanism would assist providers of emergency health care in assessing risk for injury in trauma patients.
The Semantic Gap: An Exploration of User and Computer Perspectives in Earth Observation Images

Research on the semantic gap has considered differences between user and computer image interpretations and proposed methods to bridge it. These methods have been verified by comparing results to reference data or by measuring the degree of user acceptance. Although these methods result in a narrower semantic gap between computers and users, the resulting model for a specific user and search goal may still not be satisfactory to other users. Through an image annotation task with users, we find that this discrepancy is caused by the subjective biases present in the bridging methods, which we refer to as the “linguistic semantic gap. ” Based on our findings, efforts to bridge the semantic gap should include different user perspectives to compensate the individual subjective biases, by increasing the diversity of data sets used in the domain. Moreover, models derived from proposed bridging methods could be stored and further used by other systems.
On the Hölder Continuity of Solutions of a Certain System Related to Maxwell's Equations

We study the system curl (a(x) curl u )=0 , divu = 0 with a bounded measurable coefficient a(x). The main result of this paper is the Holder continuity of weak solutions of the system above. As an application, we prove the Cα regularity of weak solutions of the Maxwell's equations in a quasi-stationary electromagnetic field.
Continuous localization using evidence grids

Evidence grids provide a uniform representation for fusing temporally and spatially distinct sensor readings. However, the use of evidence grids requires that the robot be localized within its environment. Odometry errors typically accumulate over time, making localization estimates degrade, and introducing significant errors into evidence grids as they are built. We have addressed this problem by developing a method for "continuous localization", in which the robot corrects its localization estimates incrementally and on the fly. Assuming the mobile robot has a map of its environment represented as an evidence grid, localization is achieved by building a series of "local perception grids" based on localized sensor readings and the current odometry, and then registering the local and global grids. The registration produces an offset which is used to correct the odometry. Results are given on the effectiveness of this method, and quantify the improvement of continuous localization over dead reckoning. We also compare different techniques for matching evidence grids and for searching registration offsets.
Beam Sharpening of Delay/Doppler Altimeter Data Through Chirp Zeta Transform

The main goal of a satellite radar altimeter is to measure the height of the reflecting surface scanned by the passage of the instrument overhead. A delay/Doppler altimeter reduces the along-track footprint size by exploiting the coherence of the emitted pulses to synthetize a narrower antenna. Doppler beam formation is then a straightforward procedure that implies application of the discrete Fourier transform to time-domain bursts. Speckle and thermal noise on Doppler echoes are usually reduced using multilooking, i.e., summing incoherent contributions coming from different bursts. The summation of Doppler beams requires precise pointing toward output sample locations, particularly when highly variable topography is effective. However, the procedure of steering after beam sharpening needs a step of interpolation. In this paper, a Doppler beam sharpening and direction toward the sample position are presented which make use of the Chirp Zeta Transform to join the two operations together. This method must be compared with the existing ones to show that a little can be sacrificed to precision for computational gain. To support the discussion, experimental results will be compared with a precise-and so of reference-direct 2-D correlation algorithm over puntiform targets and more complex scenarios.
Transformation Challenges in the South African Workplace: A Conversation With Melissa Steyn of iNCUDISA

DIVERSITY COMMUNICATION AND training are recent phenomena in South African workplaces (Owomoyela, 1996). The demise of apartheid, new political dispensation, and reentry onto the world stage have all contributed to creating an opportunity for diversity. Accelerated corporate interest in this field may be linked to government pressure, globalization, and the much vaunted “global economy,” in which public and private sector industries compete for business in a global market (Human, 2005; Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1998; Visser & Sunter, 2002). Still, diversity work is fraught with pitfalls. To gain deeper insight into the sometimes controversial and passionate subject of diversity practices in South Africa, I interviewed Melissa Steyn, director of Intercultural and Diversity Studies of Southern Africa (iNCUDISA), based at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She is also a UCT professor and author of seminal works on “Whiteness” (Steyn, 2001) and “White talk” (Steyn, 2005). This October 2006 interview focused on “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of existing diversity practices, as well as on future imperatives.
A continuum of adaptive creative behaviors

Abstract: The most common definitions of creativity—the production of something new or rare or that of divergent thinking—do not bridge the gap between childhood and adulthood. A developmental continuum is proposed to span the creativity of childhood to the creativity found in adults. The range of adaptive behaviors along this continuum are related by the common element of discontinuity, but differ in adaptation, purpose, novelty, value, speed, and structure. Seven levels are proposed: Learning something new; universal novelty; making connections that are rare compared to peers; developing talents; developing heuristics; producing information; creating by extending a field; and creating by revolutionizing a field. The last two levels are characteristic of mature creators. How educators currently deal with creativity, different developmental trajectories that relate to child‐rearing and schooling practices, a call for supporting creativity as a goal for education, and a brief discussion of the issues of li.
Forecasting Foreign Exchange Rates Using Recurrent Neural Networks

This article proposes the use of recurrent neural networks in order to forecast foreign exchange rates. Artificial neural networks have proven to be efficient and profitable in fore casting financial time series. In particular, recurrent networks in which activity patterns pass through the network more than once before they generate an output pattern can learn ex tremely complex temporal sequences. Three recurrent architectures are compared in terms of prediction accuracy of futures forecast for Deutsche mark currency. A trading strategy is then devised and optimized. The profitability of the trading strategy taking into account trans action costs is shown for the different architectures. The methods described here which have obtained promising results in real time trading are applicable to other markets.
An Allosteric Mechanism for Switching between Parallel Tracks in Mammalian Sulfur Metabolism

Methionine (Met) is an essential amino acid that is needed for the synthesis of S-adenosylmethionine (AdoMet), the major biological methylating agent. Methionine used for AdoMet synthesis can be replenished via remethylation of homocysteine. Alternatively, homocysteine can be converted to cysteine via the transsulfuration pathway. Aberrations in methionine metabolism are associated with a number of complex diseases, including cancer, anemia, and neurodegenerative diseases. The concentration of methionine in blood and in organs is tightly regulated. Liver plays a key role in buffering blood methionine levels, and an interesting feature of its metabolism is that parallel tracks exist for the synthesis and utilization of AdoMet. To elucidate the molecular mechanism that controls metabolic fluxes in liver methionine metabolism, we have studied the dependencies of AdoMet concentration and methionine consumption rate on methionine concentration in native murine hepatocytes at physiologically relevant concentrations (40–400 µM). We find that both [AdoMet] and methionine consumption rates do not change gradually with an increase in [Met] but rise sharply (∼10-fold) in the narrow Met interval from 50 to 100 µM. Analysis of our experimental data using a mathematical model reveals that the sharp increase in [AdoMet] and the methionine consumption rate observed within the trigger zone are associated with metabolic switching from methionine conservation to disposal, regulated allosterically by switching between parallel pathways. This regulatory switch is triggered by [Met] and provides a mechanism for stabilization of methionine levels in blood over wide variations in dietary methionine intake.
The Effects of Full-Time Domestic Workers on Married Women's Economic Activity Status in Hong Kong, 1981–2001

In this article, logistic regression models were used to assess the effects of live-in domestic workers on married women's economic activity status. One percent random samples of the Hong Kong census and by-census data from the period 1981–2001 were used, and domestic workers are conceptualized as substitutes for wives’ domestic labour. Hypotheses are tested, which alternatively conceptualize domestic workers as substitutions for wives’ domestic labour, and as having symbolic functions for the family household and for the wives’ gender role. The presence of live-in domestic workers significantly increases the odds of mothers (but not non-mothers) being economically active. The effects of domestic workers on the odds of whether married women work vary over time and differ according to household income and wives’ educational attainment. Findings lend support to the symbolic functions of domestic workers and to the role of lifestyle preferences in women's employment. Further research using time budget, qualitative and attitudinal data are required in order to further understand the functions of domestic workers in the social reproduction of family and gender roles.