Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The association between transition pattern of marital conflict resolution styles and marital quality trajectory during the early years of Chinese marriage

Based on three annual waves of data obtained from 194 Chinese couples during the first few years of marriage, this study examined how couples’ marital conflict resolution styles might change over time and also the association between such patterns of changes and the developmental trajectories of marital quality. Using latent transition analysis, at each of the three waves, we consistently identified four groups of couples based on the various types of strategies they employed when resolving marital conflicts: Cooperative Couples, Avoidant Couples, Aggressive Couples, and Aggressive Wife-Avoidant Husband Couples, and then we further classified couples into five groups based on their conflict resolution style transition patterns across the three waves: Steadily Constructive Pattern Group, More Constructive Pattern Group, Unpredictable Pattern Group, More Destructive Pattern Group, and Steadily Destructive Pattern Group. Lastly, utilizing the dyadic growth curve model, we linked the conflict resolution profiles identified at the first wave to both the initial levels of and the change rates of marital quality across waves and also linked the further identified conflict resolution style transition pattern groups to the change rates of marital quality across waves.
Lake size and fish diversity determine resource use and trophic position of a top predator in high-latitude lakes

Prey preference of top predators and energy flow across habitat boundaries are of fundamental importance for structure and function of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, as they may have strong effects on production, species diversity, and food-web stability. In lakes, littoral and pelagic food-web compartments are typically coupled and controlled by generalist fish top predators. However, the extent and determinants of such coupling remains a topical area of ecological research and is largely unknown in oligotrophic high-latitude lakes. We analyzed food-web structure and resource use by a generalist top predator, the Arctic charr Salvelinus alpinus (L.), in 17 oligotrophic subarctic lakes covering a marked gradient in size (0.5–1084 km2) and fish species richness (2–13 species). We expected top predators to shift from littoral to pelagic energy sources with increasing lake size, as the availability of pelagic prey resources and the competition for littoral prey are both likely to be higher in large lakes with multispecies fish communities. We also expected top predators to occupy a higher trophic position in lakes with greater fish species richness due to potential substitution of intermediate consumers (prey fish) and increased piscivory by top predators. Based on stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses, the mean reliance of Arctic charr on littoral energy sources showed a significant negative relationship with lake surface area, whereas the mean trophic position of Arctic charr, reflecting the lake food-chain length, increased with fish species richness. These results were supported by stomach contents data demonstrating a shift of Arctic charr from an invertebrate-dominated diet to piscivory on pelagic fish. Our study highlights that, because they determine the main energy source (littoral vs. pelagic) and the trophic position of generalist top predators, ecosystem size and fish diversity are particularly important factors influencing function and structure of food webs in high-latitude lakes.
Visual perception of Chinese orthography : from characters to sentences

There are different aims in this thesis. The primary aim is to investigate visual perception in Chinese orthography, from its fundamentally distinct unit, characters, to sentence reading. The first aim of the thesis is to investigate how a single Chinese character is processed in many ways. We have looked into an effect called orthographic satiation/decomposition (Cheng & Wu, 1994). It refers to the feeling of uncertainty about the composition of some characters when staring at a character for too long. Lee (2007) extended Cheng and Wu’s study (1996), and the results have showed that orthographic satiation occurred faster in females than males. We replicated Lee’s study (Experiment 1) (Chapter 3), and have found that: (1) there was no significant difference between male and female and (2) a radical that can stand alone as a single character makes characters in which it occurs resistant to satiation. Following orthographic satiation, in Chapter 4, we explored the preference for eye/hemisphere visual pathways in Chinese characters (Experiment 2 & 3) and words (Experiment 4). In English, researchers have reported a contralateral preference when four-letter words were presented very quickly using a haploscope (Obregón & Shillcock, 2012) . It raises the question of whether presenting Chinese characters and words will show similar results considering the complexity and the special characteristics of Chinese orthography. We presented Chinese characters and words to participants using a haploscope. Our results showed that: (1) the contralateral visual pathway was preferred in perceiving right-left structured Chinese characters and two-character words, (2) when a semantic radical is projected to the LH, participants are able to recognise the semantic component better, (3) neighbourhood size (NS) (Tsai, Lee, Lin, Tzeng & Hung, 2006) affects how participants recognise words, and(4) males do better than females recognising characters but not words.
Similarity of Tactual and Visual Picture Recognition with Limited Field of View

Subjects attempted to recognize simple line drawings of common objects using either touch or vision. In the touch condition, subjects explored raised line drawings using the distal pad of the index finger or the distal pads both of the index and of the middle fingers. In the visual condition, a computer-driven display was used to simulate tactual exploration. By moving an electronic pen over a digitizing tablet, the subject could explore a line drawing stored in memory; on the display screen a portion of the drawing appeared to move behind a stationary aperture, in concert with the movement of the pen. This aperture was varied in width, thus simulating the use of one or two fingers. In terms of average recognition accuracy and average response latency, recognition performance was virtually the same in the one-finger touch condition and the simulated one-finger vision condition. Visual recognition performance improved considerably when the visual field size was doubled (simulating two fingers), but tactual performance showed little improvement, suggesting that the effective tactual field of view for this task is approximately equal to one finger pad. This latter result agrees with other reports in the literature indicating that integration of two-dimensional pattern information extending over multiple fingers on the same hand is quite poor. The near equivalence of tactual picture perception and narrow-field vision suggests that the difficulties of tactual picture recognition must be largely due to the narrowness of the effective field of view.
Wild-Type and Non-Wild-Type Mycobacterium tuberculosis MIC Distributions for the Novel Fluoroquinolone Antofloxacin Compared with Those for Ofloxacin, Levofloxacin, and Moxifloxacin

ABSTRACT Antofloxacin (AFX) is a novel fluoroquinolone that has been approved in China for the treatment of infections caused by a variety of bacterial species. We investigated whether it could be repurposed for the treatment of tuberculosis by studying its in vitro activity. We determined the wild-type and non-wild-type MIC ranges for AFX as well as ofloxacin (OFX), levofloxacin (LFX), and moxifloxacin (MFX), using the microplate alamarBlue assay, of 126 clinical Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains from Beijing, China, of which 48 were OFX resistant on the basis of drug susceptibility testing on Löwenstein-Jensen medium. The MIC distributions were correlated with mutations in the quinolone resistance-determining regions of gyrA (Rv0006) and gyrB (Rv0005). Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) data for AFX were retrieved from the literature. AFX showed lower MIC levels than OFX but higher MIC levels than LFX and MFX on the basis of the tentative epidemiological cutoff values (ECOFFs) determined in this study. All strains with non-wild-type MICs for AFX harbored known resistance mutations that also resulted in non-wild-type MICs for LFX and MFX. Moreover, our data suggested that the current critical concentration of OFX for Löwenstein-Jensen medium that was recently revised by the World Health Organization might be too high, resulting in the misclassification of phenotypically non-wild-type strains with known resistance mutations as wild type. On the basis of our exploratory PK/PD calculations, the current dose of AFX is unlikely to be optimal for the treatment of tuberculosis, but higher doses could be effective.
The Impact of Venture Capital on Firm Growth: An Empirical Investigation

The financial and non-financial involvement of venture capitalists is supposed to be positively correlated with firm performance. This paper deals with the evaluation of the impact of venture capitalists on employment growth of new founded firms. Differences between high-tech and low-tech industries as well as the impact of other investors are analyzed. The estimation results show that surviving venture-backed firms realize higher growth rates compared to surviving non-venture-backed firms. Moreover, venture capitalists are more able to push the firms to a faster and higher employment growth than other investors.
The Michelangelo Phenomenon

This paper reviews theory and research regarding the “Michelangelo phenomenon. ” The Michelangelo model suggests that close partners sculpt one another's selves, shaping one another's skills and traits and promoting versus inhibiting one another's goal pursuits. As a result of the manner in which partners perceive and behave toward one another, each person enjoys greater or lesser success at attaining his or her ideal-self goals. Affirmation of one another's ideal-self goals yields diverse benefits, both personal and relational. The Michelangelo model and supportive empirical evidence are reviewed, the phenomenon is distinguished from related interpersonal processes, and directions for future work are outlined.
One of the most cited persuasion studies but no success in replication: investigating replication using Petty, Cacioppo, and Goldman (1981) as an example

ABSTRACT Scientific progress depends on replication even though replications are generally not recognized for their research contributions. Recently many behavioral sciences have paid a great deal of attention to replications, but replications are infrequent and not generally discussed in communication science. The present study conducts a replication of Petty, Cacioppo, & Goldman, 1981 (PCG) as an example. PCG is one of the best known studies on persuasion, but the discrepancies between PCG's and similar studies’ findings have been cumulating. Our study discusses these discrepancies, which have implications for the validity of the elaboration likelihood model and for replications in communication science more generally.
Does Aging Act to Maximize or Minimize Cultural Differences in Cognitive Processing Style? Evidence from Eye Movements during Scene Perception

There is evidence to suggest that people from different cultures have different cognitive processing styles. For example, by measuring the eye movements of American and Chinese students when viewing pictures, Chua, Boland, and Nisbett (2005) found that American students fixated more on the focal object, whereas Chinese students fixated more on the background. In a subsequent object-recognition task, the Chinese students were less likely to correctly recognize old objects presented in new backgrounds than Americans did. This study used a similar scene-viewing task to investigate whether aging modulates these cultural differences in cognitive processing style. Like Chua et al., we found that young Chinese students spent longer fixating the background than did their Western counterparts. However, we failed to replicate the accompanying memory bias observed by Chua et al. Our strongest finding was that maintaining the original background facilitated memory for objects in young participants of both cultures but not for older participants. This result suggests that older adults had poorer memory for background details and/or had poorer integration of object and background.
Physical Activity and Self-Reported Cardiovascular Comorbidities in Persons with Multiple Sclerosis: Evidence from a Cross-Sectional Analysis

Background: This study examined the possibility of a linear, inverse association between physical activity and the number of self-reported cardiovascular comorbidities in persons with multiple sclerosis (MS). Methods: The sample included 561 persons with MS who completed demographic, cardiovascular comorbidity, disability status, and physical activity self-report assessments, and then wore an accelerometer for 7 days. The data were analyzed using bivariate correlation and multiple linear regression analyses. Results: Bivariate correlation analysis indicated that there were statistically significant, inverse associations between the number of self-reported cardiovascular comorbidities and objectively measured (r = –0.192, p = 0.0001) and self-reported (r = –0.151, p = 0.0001) physical activity. The first multiple linear regression indicated that objectively measured physical activity was significantly associated with the number of self-reported cardiovascular comorbidities (B = –0.003, SE B = 0.001, β = –0.128), even after controlling for confounding variables. The second multiple linear regression indicated that self-reported physical activity, too, was significantly associated with the number of self-reported cardiovascular comorbidities (B = –0.011, SE B = 0.004, β = –0.114), even after controlling for confounding variables. Conclusion: Physical activity was associated with the number of self-reported cardiovascular comorbidities, independent of disability status and other possible confounding variables, in persons with MS.
End-to-end Delay Analysis for Event-driven Wireless Sensor Network Applications

The end-to-end delay is one of the most critical and fundamental issues for wireless sensor networks. Many applications of sensor networks require an end-to-end delay guarantee for time sensitive data. However, the end-to-end delay is difficult to bound for event-driven sensor networks, where nodes generate and propagate data only when an event of interest occurs, thereby producing unpredictable traffic load. Meanwhile, the end-to-end delay is tightly banded with many other factors, e.g., energy and network capacity. In this dissertation proposal, we analyze the quantitative relation among the end-to-end delay, the probability of guaranteeing this delay, and network parameters for event-driven sensor networks. We consider two sub-delays of the end-to-end delay, i.e., detection delay and queuing delay, based on a two-phase model. This two-phase model includes an event observation phase and a data propagation phase. We use target tracking as the example of an event-driven wireless sensor network application. For the event observation phase, we present a target prediction and sleep scheduling scheme, called TPSS, to reduce the energy consumption, while satisfying the given delay constraint. Wireless sensor nodes are typically in the sleep state most of the time to prolong the network lifetime, but this will increase the detection delay. Proactive wake-up and sleep scheduling are commonly used approaches to solve this problem. The purpose of TPSS is to select the nodes to be sleep-scheduled and reduce their wake-up time as much as possible, so as to enhance the energy efficiency as well as satisfy the given detection delay constraint. First, we design a target prediction method based on kinematics rules and theory of probability. Then based on the prediction results, we design a novel sleep scheduling mechanism that reduces the number of awakened nodes and schedules their sleep patterns in an integrated manner for enhancing energy efficiency. We analyze the detection delay and the detection probability under TPSS, and conduct simulation-based experimental studies. Our simulation results show that TPSS achieves a better tradeoff between energy efficiency and tracking performance than existing works. For the data propagation phase, we leverage queuing theory, and analyze the delay from the point of view of network capacity. In a many-to-one data gathering network, the throughput of a node can be estimated based on its distance from the sink node. Thus, the expected waiting time of a packet in the queue, i.e., the queuing delay, can be estimated by approximating all the nodes that …
Reducing class imbalance during active learning for named entity annotation

In lots of natural language processing tasks, the classes to be dealt with often occur heavily imbalanced in the underlying data set and classifiers trained on such skewed data tend to exhibit poor performance for low-frequency classes. We introduce and compare different approaches to reduce class imbalance by design within the context of active learning (AL). Our goal is to compile more balanced data sets up front during annotation time when AL is used as a strategy to acquire training material. We situate our approach in the context of named entity recognition. Our experiments reveal that we can indeed reduce class imbalance and increase the performance of classifiers on minority classes while preserving a good overall performance in terms of macro F-score.
Crime contemplation and self-control: A test of Situational Action Theory’s hypothesis about their interaction in crime causation

Situational Action Theory (SAT) is an important theoretical development with relatively broad empirical content, reflected in highly specific hypotheses about crime causation. It offers an alternative concept of self-control to that of the General Theory of Crime and predicts that the effect of self-control on crime depends on crime contemplation. Crime contemplation is the tendency to consider crime as an action alternative. This paper is a test of SAT using data on 1304 juveniles from four Latin American cities with relatively high crime rates and impunity levels. It therefore contributes to cross-national testing. Both ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression techniques are applied. Three different ways to test interactions in non-linear models are used. Findings support the hypothesis. Results and limitations are discussed.
Design Challenges and Opportunities for Eco-Feedback in the Home

Domestic energy conservation is critical to reducing energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions. Personal visualization has a role to play in the design of appropriate feedback for encouraging more effective home energy use, but the unique nature of residential energy informatics introduces new design issues. This article reviews current approaches and discusses unaddressed challenges related to better conceptual models, context, enhanced communicative scope, and functional aesthetics. Based on a proposed theoretical framework, the author identifies important gaps in the current design space of residential energy visualizations related to richer data models, a broader concept of context, an enhanced communicative scope, and a better ecological fit in the home.
Body Temperature Regulation in Hot Environments

Organisms in hot environments will not be able to passively dissipate metabolically generated heat. Instead, they have to revert to evaporative cooling, a process that is energetically expensive and promotes excessive water loss. To alleviate these costs, birds in captivity let their body temperature increase, thereby entering a state of hyperthermia. Here we explore the use of hyperthermia in wild birds captured during the hot and dry season in central Nigeria. We found pronounced hyperthermia in several species with the highest body temperatures close to predicted lethal levels. Furthermore, birds let their body temperature increase in direct relation to ambient temperatures, increasing body temperature by 0.22°C for each degree of increased ambient temperature. Thus to offset the costs of thermoregulation in ambient temperatures above the upper critical temperature, birds are willing to let their body temperatures increase by up to 5°C above normal temperatures. This flexibility in body temperature may be an important mechanism for birds to adjust to predicted increasing ambient temperatures in the future.
Customized tour recommendations in urban areas

The ever-increasing urbanization coupled with the unprecedented capacity to collect and process large amounts of data have helped to create the vision of intelligent urban environments. One key aspect of such environments is that they allow people to effectively navigate through their city. While GPS technology and route-planning services have undoubtedly helped towards this direction, there is room for improvement in intelligent urban navigation. This vision can be fostered by the proliferation of location-based social networks, such as Foursquare or Path, which record the physical presence of users in different venues through check-ins. This information can then be used to enhance intelligent urban navigation, by generating customized path recommendations for users. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recommending customized tours in urban settings. These tours are generated so that they consider (a) the different types of venues that the user wants to visit, as well as the order in which the user wants to visit them, (b) limitations on the time to be spent or distance to be covered, and (c) the merit of visiting the included venues. We capture these requirements in a generic definition that we refer to as the TourRec problem. We then introduce two instances of the TourRec problem, study their complexity, and propose efficient algorithmic solutions. Our experiments on real data collected from Foursquare demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms and the practical utility of the reported recommendations.
The Impact of the Institutional and Regulatory Environment on Shareholder Voting

We document that certain features of the institutional and regulatory environment governing shareholder voting can affect the co- location of shares’ voting and cash- flow rights. We show that “routine” management proposals, for which brokers can vote shares held in “street name” if investors fail to vote, receive more votes favorable to management than “nonroutine” proposals. Some proposals may pass because of a routine classification. Moreover, negative recommendations from the leading shareholder-voting advisory service are associated with fewer votes cast favorable to management. We also find voting results are related to ownership structure, the use of proxy solicitors, and other firm characteristics.