Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
‘I’ve lost the plot’: an everyday story of legal aid lawyers

This paper examines the impact on a specific group of solicitors in the United Kingdom of recent changes in the delivery of legal services. These changes are seen as a form of the New Public Management (NPM), and the paper explores the proposition that NPM is producing a public sector characterized by high output but low morale, through an analysis of qualitative data from a group of ‘political’ legal aid practitioners. The data is seen to support the high-output/low-morale thesis, and the paper argues that one effect therefore of legal aid reform may be to damage the ‘political’ lawyer’s project of empowering the client and countering social injustice.
Contracting Out the Last-Mile of Service Delivery: Subsidized Food Distribution in Indonesia

Outsourcing government service provision to private firms can improve efficiency and reduce rents, but there are risks that non-contractible quality will decline and that reform could be blocked by vested interests exactly where potential gains are greatest. We examine these issues by conducting a randomized field experiment in 572 Indonesian localities in which a procurement process was introduced that allowed citizens to bid to take over the implementation of a subsidized rice distribution program. This led 17 percent of treated locations to switch distributors. Introducing the possibility of outsourcing led to a 4.6 percent reduction in the markup paid by households. Quality did not suffer and, if anything, households reported the quality of the rice improved. Bidding committees may have avoided quality problems by choosing bidders who had relevant experience as traders, even if they proposed slightly higher prices. Mandating higher levels of competition by encouraging additional bidders further reduced prices. We document offsetting effects of having high rents at baseline: when the initial price charged was high and when baseline satisfaction levels were low, entry was higher and committees were more likely to replace the status quo distributor; but, incumbents measured to be more dishonest on an experimental measure of cheating were also more likely to block the outsourcing process. We find no effect on price or quality of providing information about program functioning without the opportunity to privatize, implying that the observed effect was not solely due to increased transparency. On net, the results suggest that contracting out has the potential to improve performance, though the magnitude of the effects may be partially muted due to push back from powerful elites.
Five Independents Variables Affecting Bullying: Neighborhood, Family, School, Gender-Age and Mass Media

It is probably true to say that bullying is the psychosocial phenomenon which has attracted the most attention in academic circles over the last ten years. It affects approximately three to five percent of adolescents from twelve to eighteen years of age worldwide to a serious degree and up to twenty percent of this population to a lesser degree. The long and short term effects of bullying are considered to be extremely damaging. The importance of this phenomenon is that it may give rise to low self-esteem, anomie, depression, isolation, psychosomatic symptoms, failure at school and in extreme cases, it may result in suicide and future incidences of bullying in the workplace and within the home. As the number and the seriousness of incidents increases, many parents worry that the problem is spiralling out of control. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of publications on bullying, with an emphasis on how, when and where it occurs, but not on the factors which cause it. This meta-analysis studies the influence of five social environmental variables: neighborhood, family, school, gender-age and the mass media, considered on both an individual and interactional level, as their effects are often augmented when two or more variables are examined together. The concept “bullying” encompasses both individual and collective aggression and individual and collective victimization.
Construction of an Instrument to Evaluate Nurses' Decision Making in Relation to the Use of Restraint in Acute Care Psychiatry

Use of physical restraint in acute care psychiatry has been, and continues to be, a controversial issue. For this reason, a study was conducted in 1996 that examined nurses' decision making related to the use of physical restraint with aggressive psychiatric patients. An instrument, the Moylan Assessment of Progressive Aggression Tool (MAPAT), was developed for this purpose. Information relating to this instrument has not been previously published. It is currently in use in an ongoing research study by the author. A description of the process of the development of the MAPAT is provided here, along with the validity and reliability of the instrument, and implications for potential use in research, training, and education.
Representing Crisis: The Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation and the Project of Development in Post‐Rana Nepal

Erik Eckholm in a 1976 treatise linked population growth to contemporary upland deforestation and soil erosion which are presumed to cause downstream flooding and silting. Since the 1980s Eckholms theory has come under intense criticism on empirical theoretical and ideological grounds. There is a widespread belief that an ecological crisis of unprecedented proportion is taking place in Nepals Himalayan region. An historiography of Eckholms theory is presented with regard to Nepals environmental crisis during the post-World War II period. That historiography reveals that representations of and discourses on the nature and extent of environmental degradation have been an important dimension of the modernization basic needs and neoliberal aid regimes which shaped the post-World War II development project in Nepal. The notion of aid regime refers to a given constellation of donors sectoral emphases aggregate assistance and composition of assistance. Within specific historical and institutional constellations some conclusions have seemed more logical than others and certain interventions have become more legitimate. The production of environmental interventions is intimately connected to the production of environmental knowledge both of which are intricately linked with power relations. The facts about environmental deterioration have become subordinate to the broader debates upon the politics of resource use and sustainable development.
Heritage agency in a transnational California community: Latino parents and bilingual education

Latino immigrant parents were interviewed in a transnational urban community in California after passage of a law intended to abolish bilingual education (BE). Approximately half had English learner children in bilingual classes; the others in English-only classes. Guided by a macrocultural psychological interpretive framework, the study used a concurrent nested mixed methods design to examine the influences of material and social conditions in shaping parents' agency for their children's heritage preservation. It was found that local community resistance to mainstream assimilation played a significant role in agency formation and that depth and quality of experience with BE and Latino-dense schools influenced the perception of BE as a viable means for heritage agency fulfilment. International policy implications are discussed.
The relationship between men's facial masculinity and women's judgments of value as a potential romantic partner

Research suggests that women make judgments about a man’s value as a potential romantic partner based on cues associated with facial masculinity. Such studies have often relied on electronically-manipulated facial images that may not fully capture natural stimuli. The present study used un-manipulated stimuli to examine the relationships between facial masculinity, attractiveness, and partner value and it also employed a more complex assessment of partner value than in earlier studies. Our findings indicated that women judged men with high facial masculinity to have had more previous romantic partners and to take longer to fall in love. These un-manipulated male stimuli were also rated as more desirable short-term and long-term partners compared to men with low facial masculinity. The differences between our findings and those from prior research are discussed in terms of the implications for attraction research.
Being an effective custodian of communication theory: An examination of theory construction, methodological streamlining, and special population use between constitutive rhetoric, attribution theory, & the third person effect

The area of media effects research is important to understanding how one interacts with and is affected by the different forms of media in society. Since this age is called the information age, one is almost always in constant contact with some form of media, whether receiving or transmitting information. As the area of media effects research grows, it is important to reconsider accepted theory and methodology in the hopes of improving on previous research to provide a deeper and more meaningful understanding of society through media. The Third Person Effect, as explained by Davison (1983), is a very good example of this idea. This present study examines the metaconcepts, theoretical terms, and methodological concerns surrounding the third person effect, which have been identified through the previous 26 years of study. To do this, the theoretical terms, metaconcepts, and methodology used to test the perceptual and behavioral hypotheses outlined in the third person effect are examined, and alternatives are offered and tested. Attribution theory, coupled with the constitutive rhetorical processes of othering and interpellation, are examined as more useable theoretical underpinnings for the perceptual hypothesis, and attribution theory is examined in conjunction with the sports communication understanding of fandom and the identification of such. Methodologically, the perceptual and behavioral hypotheses are tested first through a pilot test using a focus group to garner qualitative data for analysis and then to help create quantitative scales for a preand post-test experiment. With an N of 40 for the pilot test and 237 for the preand post-test experiment, eight research questions were assessed. The overall results show that attribution coupled with constitutive rhetoric serves as a more explanative theoretical
Planning for Temporally Extended Goals as Propositional Satisfiability

Planning for temporally extended goals (TEGs) expressed as formulae of Linear-time Temporal Logic (LTL) is a proper generalization of classical planning, not only allowing to specify properties of a goal state but of the whole plan execution. Additionally, LTL formulae can be used to represent domain-specific control knowledge to speed up planning. In this paper we extend SATbased planning for LTL goals (akin to bounded LTL model-checking in verification) to partially ordered plans, thus significantly increasing planning efficiency compared to purely sequential SAT planning. We consider a very relaxed notion of partial ordering and show how planning for LTL goals (without the next-time operator) can be translated into a SAT problem and solved very efficiently. The results extend the practical applicability of SATbased planning to a wider class of planning problems. In addition, they could be applied to solving problems in bounded LTL model-checking more efficiently.
Neural activity related to the processing of increasing monetary reward in smokers and nonsmokers

This study investigated the processing of increasing monetary reward in nonsmoking and smoking subjects. The choice of the subject populations has been motivated by the observation of differences between nonsmokers and smokers in response to rewarding stimuli in a previous study. Subjects performed a pattern recognition task with delayed response, while rCBF was measured with [\mathrm{H}^{15}_{2}O] PET. Correct responses to the task were reinforced with three different amounts of monetary reward. The subjects received the sum of the rewards at the end of the experiment. The results show that a cortico‐subcortical loop, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal cortex, the cingulate gyrus and the thalamus is involved in processing increasing monetary reward. Furthermore, the striatal response differentiates nonsmokers from smokers. Thus, we found significant correlations between rCBF increases in striatum and increasing monetary reward and between striatal rCBF increases and mood in nonsmokers, but not in smokers. Moreover, no significant mood changes among the different monetary rewards could be observed in smokers. We infer that the response of the striatum to reward is related to changes in subjective feelings. The differences between smokers and nonsmokers confirm our previous conclusions that the association between blood flow, performance, mood and amount of reward is more direct in nonsmokers.
The Relation of Morphological Awareness and Syntactic Awareness to Adults’ Reading Comprehension

The authors’ goal was to examine the structural relationships among vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension in English-speaking adults. Structural equation analysis of data collected from 151 participants revealed that morphological awareness affected reading comprehension directly. Syntactic awareness predicted reading comprehension not only directly but also indirectly via vocabulary knowledge. Vocabulary knowledge made an independent contribution to reading comprehension above and beyond those of morphologic awareness and syntactic awareness.
Image Deblurring with Blurred / Noisy Image Pairs

Photos taken under dim lighting conditions by a handheld camera are usually either too noisy or too blurry. In our project, we implement an image deblurring method that takes advantage of a pair of blurred/noisy images. We first utilize the image pair to estimate the blur kernel using a regularized linear least-squares method. With this kernel, we apply Richardson-Lucy deconvolution to the residual image (blurred image minus denoised image) to reduce ringing artifacts of the standard RL algorithm. To further reduce the ringing artifacts, we use a gain-controlled RL deconvolution method. This method first calculates the gain map of the image from Gaussian pyramids and then uses the map to suppress the contrast in smooth area, which efficiently reduces ringing but also causes loss of the detail. At last a detail layer is extracted from residual RL result through an adaptive high pass filter and added to the gain-controlled RL result to make up the detail loss. We also examine another deblurring method that only takes a single blurred image as input. We first use Fergus’ algorithm to do the blind kernel estimation. Then we implement the joint bilateral RL method to obtain the deblurred image as well as to add more and more details progressively. The results are comparable to the first method, and both methods improve the deblurring performance in the sense that the ringing artifacts are significantly suppressed compared with the standard RL algorithm.
Association of Cytochrome-17 (MspA1) Gene Polymorphism with Risk of Gall Bladder Stones and Cancer in North India.

BACKGROUND Cholelithiasis is associated in 54%-98% of patients with carcinoma of the gallbladder, and a high incidence among females suggests a role of female hormones in the etiology of the disease. Cytochrome P450C17α (CYP-17) is a key enzyme involved in estrogen metabolism and polymorphisms in CYP-17 are associated with altered serum levels of estrogens. Thus, we investigated whether the CYP-17 MspA1 gene polymorphism might impact on risk of gall bladder cancers or gallstones, as well as to determine if this gene polymorphism might be linked with estrogen serum levels and lipid profile among the North Indian gall bladder cancer or gallstone patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS CYP-17 gene polymorphisms (MspA1) were genotyped with PCR-RFLP in cancer patients (n=96), stone patients (n=102), cancer+stone patients (n=52) and age/sex matched control subjects (n=256). Lipid profile was estimated using a commercial kit and serum estrogen was measured using ELISA. RESULTS The majority of the patients in all groups were females. The lipid profile and estrogen level were significantly higher among the study as compared to control groups. The frequency of mutant allele A2 of CYP17 MspA1 gene polymorphism was higher among cancer (OR=5.13, 95% CI+3.10-8.51, p=0.0001), stone (OR=5.69, 95%CI=3.46-9.37, p=0.0001) and cancer+stone (OR=3.54, 95%CI=1.90-6.60, p=0.0001) when compared with the control group. However there was no significant association between genotypes of CYP17 MspA1 gene polymorphism and circulating serum level of estrogen and lipid profile. CONCLUSIONS A higher frequency of mutant genotype A1A2 as well as mutant allele A2 of CYP-17 gene polymorphism is significantly associated with risk of gallbladder cancer and stones. Elevated levels of estrogen and an altered lipid profile can be used as predictors ofgall bladder stones and cancer in post menopausal females in India.
Nutritional status of cancer patients admitted for chemotherapy at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute.

INTRODUCTION Malnutrition is common among cancer patients. This study aimed to determine the overall prevalence of malnutrition among patients undergoing chemotherapy and to determine the predictors of malnutrition among cancer patients. METHODS A cross-sectional study was conducted on 88 cancer patients admitted for chemotherapy at the National Kidney and Transplant Institute, Philippines, from October to November 2009. Subjective Global Assessment (SGA), anthropometric data and demographic variables were obtained. Descriptive statistics, ANOVA and logistic regression analysis were performed between the outcome and variables. RESULTS A total of 88 cancer patients were included in the study. The mean age of the patients was 55.7 +/- 14.8 years. The mean duration of illness was 9.7 +/- 8.7 months and the mean body mass index (BMI) was 22.9 kg/m2. The mean Karnofsky performance status was 79.3. 29.55 percent of the patients had breast cancer as the aetiology of their illness. 38 patients (43.2 percent) had SGA B and four (4.5 percent) had SGA C, giving a total malnutrition prevalence of 47.7 percent. The patients were statistically different with regard to their cancer stage (p is less than 0.001), weight (p is 0.01), BMI (p is 0.004), haemoglobin level (p is 0.001) and performance status by Karnofsky score (p is less than 0.001), as evaluated by ANOVA. Logistic regression analysis showed that cancer stage and Karnofsky performance score were predictors of malnutrition. CONCLUSION About 47.7 percent of cancer patients suffer from malnutrition, as classified by SGA. Only cancer stage and Karnofsky performance status scoring were predictive of malnutrition in this select group of patients.
Assessment of neovascularization within carotid plaques in patients with ischemic stroke.

AIM To assess neovascularization within human carotid atherosclerotic soft plaques in patients with ischemic stroke. METHODS Eighty-one patients with ischemic stroke and 95 patients without stroke who had soft atherosclerotic plaques in the internal carotid artery were studied. The thickest soft plaque in each patient was examined using contrast-enhanced ultrasound. Time-intensity curves were collected from 5 s to 3 min after contrast injection. The neovascularization within the plaques in the internal carotid artery was evaluated using the ACQ software built into the scanner by 2 of the experienced investigators who were blinded to the clinical history of the patients. RESULTS Ischemic stroke was present in 7 of 33 patients (21%) with grade I plaque, in 14 of 51 patients (28%) with grade II plaque, in 26 of 43 patients (61%) with grade III plaque, and in 34 of 49 patients (69%) with grade IV plaque (P < 0.001 comparing grade IV plaque with grade I plaque and with grade II plaque and P = 0.001 comparing grade III plaque with grade I plaque and with grade II plaque). Analysis of the time intensity curves revealed that patients with ischemic stroke had a significantly higher intensity of enhancement (IE) than those without ischemic stroke (P < 0.01). The wash-in time (WT) of plaque was significantly shorter in stroke patients (P < 0.05). The sensitivity and specificity for IE in the plaque were 82% and 80%, respectively, and for WT were 68% and 74%, respectively. There was no significant difference in the peak intensity or time to peak between the 2 groups. CONCLUSION This study shows that the higher the grade of plaque enhancement, the higher the risk of ischemic stroke. The data suggest that the presence of neovascularization is a marker for unstable plaque.
Exposure to Dissent and Recall of Information

Recent work on minority influence has led to a debate about whether majorities and minorities exercise different forms of influence. Nemeth (1986) has argued that consistent minorities induce different cognitive processes than do consistent majorities, with a resulting impact on the quality of the judgments rendered. Two experiments test this theory. In Experiment 1, Ss heard 3 tape-recorded lists of words and learned that either a minority or a majority differed in the category "first noticed. " This feedback occurred either once or over 3 trials. When exposure was once, recall was not affected by the source; when it was consistent, Ss exposed to the minority view recalled more words than those exposed to the majority view. In Experiment 2, Ss were exposed to a minority view that was either consistent over time or inconsistent over time. Ss exposed to a consistent minority had better recall than control Ss. Exposure to an inconsistent minority did not improve recall. The results offer support for the Nemeth (1986) formulation.
Deep Sedation With Propofol in Patients With Rett Syndrome

Herein we present the largest retrospective case-control series of deep sedation in patients with Rett syndrome, including discussion of the unique aspects of Rett syndrome that make these patients at high risk for sedation. Twenty-one patients with Rett syndrome and 21 control patients who received propofol for deep sedation to facilitate lumbar puncture were compared. Patients with Rett syndrome required significantly less propofol than control patients when standardized for weight and the duration of the procedure (P = .004). Seven of the 21 patients with Rett syndrome compared with none of the control patients experienced a serious adverse event, most of which were due to prolonged apnea (P = .004). All adverse events were transient, and all patients returned to their baseline after the procedure was completed. Sedation of patients with Rett syndrome is associated with a relatively high rate of complications and should not be done without appropriate personnel available who recognize the risks of sedating this unique population. (J Child Neurol 2006;21:857—860; DOI 10.2310/7010.2006.00051).
STATUS ATTAINMENT IN AMERICA: THE ROLES OF LOCUS OF CONTROL AND SELF-ESTEEM IN EDUCATIONAL AND OCCUPATIONAL OUTCOMES

A wide range of theoretical and empirical treatments link parental background to educational and occupational outcomes for children . Comparatively few studies have examined these effects in concert with the related social psychological dynamics of self - esteem and locus of control . Our multivariate examination of 1,927 respondents shows that net of traditionally employed regressors such as parental education and occupation , self-esteem and locus of control materially affect respondents' educational and occupational attainments . The article concludes with a discussion of the importance of self-esteem and locus of control as social psychological facilitants to status attainment and identifies directions for future research .