Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decisions to donate bone marrow: The role of attitudes and subjective norms across cultures

Abstract This paper reports the results of a field investigation of the determinants of decisions to donate bone marrow. Predictions are made on the basis of a modification of the theory of reasoned action wherein attitudes are operational-ized in separate affective and evaluative components. Boundary conditions of the theory of reasoned action are further explored by examining the effects of culture (Hong Kong Chinese, N= 190; American Chinese, N = 107; black Americans, N = 124; and white Americans N = 122) on decisions to donate for each of four targets: Immediate Family Members (TFM), Close Relatives (CR), Ethnic Strangers (ES), and Total Strangers (TS). For this life or death decision, the willingness to give is hypothesized to vary as a function of the so-called fitness value of the recipients (i.e., their capacity to contribute to the donor's inclusive fitness), as modified by cultural differences between group- versus independent-based cultures. Among other results, the following gradient was found in attitudes, subjective norms, and intentions for Chinese: IFM > CR > ES > TS; for Americans the pattern was IFM = CR > ES = TS. American Chinese showed stronger attitudes and felt norms, but not intentions, to give to close relatives than did Hong Kong Chinese, reflecting differential in-group/out-group pressures. Black and White Americans showed stronger attitudes, subjective norms, and intentions to donate to strangers than did Chinese.
The effect of attitude dissimulation on attitude accessibility.

In two experiments, we examined the effect of attitude dissimulation and truthful attitude expression on attitude accessibility, which is the ease with which an attitude is retrieved from memory. In the first experiment, 161 subjects lied about their attitudes toward some attitude objects and expressed their true attitudes toward other attitude objects. Next, as our measure of attitude accessibility, subjects were asked to express quickly and accurately their true attitudes toward (a) the objects that they had lied about, (b) the objects that they had evaluated truthfully, and (c) other objects that they had not evaluated at all. Results indicated that both attitude dissimulation and truthful attitude expression caused attitudes to become more accessible (i.e., more quickly recalled) than if the attitudes had not been previously expressed. In the second experiment, we tested the hypothesis that attitude dissimulation increases attitude accessibility only when the dissimulation causes conscious recall of one's true attitude. Results supported this hypothesis. The implications of these results for predicting the effect of lying on attitude-behavior relations is highlighted.
Parental attitudes towards pocket money, trait competitiveness and occupational stress

Several hundred German parents completed a questionnaire to assess their attitudes towards pocket money and economic socialisation. In addition trait competitiveness and occupational stress were measured. Demographic variables were less predictive of competitiveness compared to psychological/attitudinal factors. The more competitive oriented parents displayed a distinct monetary attitude profile: they were less liberal, more structured and budget‐oriented. They used money significantly more as a reinforcer for educational purposes, e.g. educational or scholarly success, and as an instrument to teach autonomy. Subjectively perceived occupational stress was determined by diverse socio‐demographic variables, although the stress‐demographic relationship was moderated by gender. Older fathers and men from a poor social‐economic background (as children) tended to show greater job‐related stress. Conversely, mothers from “superior” SES, with more siblings, and fewer children of their own, reported more occupational stress.
Annotation Compatibility Working Group Report

This report explores the question of compatibility between annotation projects including translating annotation formalisms to each other or to common forms. Compatibility issues are crucial for systems that use the results of multiple annotation projects. We hope that this report will begin a concerted effort in the field to track the compatibility of annotation schemes for part of speech tagging, time annotation, treebanking, role labeling and other phenomena.
The Flora Family: A Case of the Dynamically Dispersed Collisional Swarm?

Abstract Asteroid families are believed to originate by catastrophic disruptions of large asteroids. They are nowadays identified as clusters in the proper orbital elements space. The proper elements are analytically defined as constants of motion of a suitably simplified dynamical system. Indeed, they are generally nearly constant on a 10 7 –10 8 -year time scale. Over longer time intervals, however, they may significantly change, reflecting the accumulation of the tiny nonperiodic evolutions provided by chaos and nonconservative forces. The most important effects leading to a change of the proper orbital elements are (i) the chaotic diffusion in narrow mean motion resonances, (ii) the Yarkovsky nongravitational force, and (iii) the gravitational impulses received at close approaches with large asteroids. A natural question then arises: How are the size and shape of an asteroid family modified due to evolution of the proper orbital elements of its members over the family age? In this paper, we concentrate on the dynamical dispersion of the proper eccentricity and inclination, which occurs due to (i), but with the help of (ii) and (iii). We choose the Flora family as a model case because it is unusually dispersed in eccentricity and inclination and, being located in the inner main belt, is intersected by a large number of effective mean motion resonances with Mars and Jupiter. Our results suggest that the Flora family dynamically disperses on a few 10 8 -year time scale and that its age may be significantly less than 10 9 years. We discuss the possibility that the parent bodies of the Flora family and of the ordinary L chondrite meteorites are the same object. In a broader sense, this work suggests that the common belief that the present asteroid families are simple images of their primordial dynamical structure should be revised.
Career Development Among First-Year College Students

The present study investigates the career development of college student persistence decisions through the theoretical lens of social cognitive career theory (SCCT). Specifically, the authors sought to understand the potential role of college self-efficacy in first-year student persistence and academic success at a medium size university. Using a final sample of 401 undergraduates, regression analyses suggested that increased levels of college self-efficacy at the first semester’s end were associated with greater odds of persisting into the Spring semester and of being academically successful, after controlling for gender, ethnicity, first-generation status, high school grade point average (GPA), and initial level of college self-efficacy. Results suggest that college self-efficacy may be an important cognitive variable in college students’ persistence decisions and their academic success, which offers additional information about their early career development and is valuable for career counselors to consider. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.
Cooperative Multiple-Access in Fading Relay Channels

Virtual antenna arrays can be constructed via relaying even in the case that there is insufficient physical space or other resources for multiple antennae on wireless nodes. When there is a multiple access scenario, relaying offers a variety of ways to establish communication between source and destination nodes. We will compare a scheme based on space division multiple access to previously studied time division based ones. We observe that space division improves especially the ergodic capacity.
Prior expectation and the interpretation of natural language quantifiers

Abstract The interpretation of natural language quantifiers depends, in part, on one's prior expectations about what the proportion being described might be. This hypothesis is tested empirically, by comparing the interpretation of 10 different quantifier expressions in three contexts which contained proportions about which subjects' expectations were reliably different (Experiment 1). It is further argued that quantifiers perform many functions which cannot be observed by considering only the proportion(s) denoted by a quantifier. The experimental evidence presented shows that quantifiers can provide information about what the user of the quantifier had expected before “knowing the facts” (Experiment 2). It is also clear that when writers produce a quantifier, they can reveal their assumptions about the prior expectations held by their readers (Experiment 2).
Inverse Associations of Human Leukocyte Antigen and Malaria Parasite Types in Two West African Populations

ABSTRACT Differences in allelic associations between populations continue to cause difficulties in the mapping and identification of susceptibility genes for complex polygenic diseases. Although well recognized, the basis of such interpopulation differences is poorly understood. We present an example of an inverse allelic association of an immune response genotype to an infectious disease in two neighboring West African populations. In this case, both the key environmental contributor, i.e., the malaria parasite, and a major biological mechanism are well defined. We show that this surprising result fits well with the predictions of a mathematical model describing the population genetics and dynamics of this interaction.
Academic and Life Goals: Insights from Adolescent Writers

In order to understand factors that encourage or discourage adolescents' participation in school writing classes and influence their motivation to become skilled writers, we interviewed high school students about their writing experiences, goals, and processes and analyzed their statements for patterns of goal pursuit. Nineteen students of varying achievement levels and classroom placements (8 boys and 11 girls, 6 African American and 13 European American) who had been previously interviewed in fifth and sixth grades were interviewed again in the tenth grade. Goals arising from developmental and personal life issues were central to these adolescent writers, whose writing motivation was heavily influenced by the extent to which they perceived they were encouraged to write authentic personal texts whose messages were respected by caring teachers. The low achieving and alienated students whose writing motivation had declined from earlier years did not now believe they received respect for their ideas, but that their teacher was interested only in their texts' basic organization and display of proper grammatical conventions. Methods for teaching writing that enlist and honor the personal goals of adolescents and support their motivation to write are described.
Youth Violence in Context

Youth violence garners considerable attention in the media as well as in public policy debates. In spite of this interest and attention to youth violence, stereotypes fueled by misperceptions about the epidemiology of youth violence often drive these discussions. Urban minority youth, especially males, are typically presented as the “dark stranger” responsible for much of this violence. Criminal justice and juvenile justice data tend to reinforce this perspective. In this article, the authors call into question the extent to which violent juvenile offending can be characterized as an urban minority male problem. A multisite sample of middle school students was used to examine the distribution of violent offending by sex, race/ethnicity, and community of residence.
[Cerebral venous thrombosis: study of fifteen cases and review of literature].

OBJECTIVE To analyze a series of 15 patients with cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) who had follow-ups at the neurology service of Santa Casa de Belo Horizonte Hospital from April, 2007 to December, 2008. These results were compared with data in literature. METHODS Cases were evaluated by retrospective study of the epidemiologic characteristics, signs and symptoms, risk factors and prognosis of 15 patients with cerebral venous thrombosis. RESULTS Diagnoses were reached through magnetic resonance imaging of the brain in 14 cases and through an angiography in one. The main risk factors identified were use of birth control pills (40%) and history of family member with deep venous thrombosis. Thrombophilia was found in two patients (13%). The veins more affected were the transverse sinus (73%) followed by the upper sagital sinus (53%). Four patients had strokes and five had only headaches as isolated symptoms. Twelve patients were treated with heparin and oral anticoagulant. CONCLUSION Treatment with heparin in the acute phase followed by an oral anticoagulant was shown as safe and efficient to prevent worsening of the disease, recurrence and for quick improvement of neurological symptoms of all treated patients. CVT is one of the possible diagnoses of secondary headache even in patients with no signs and symptoms.
Utilizing spectro-temporal correlations for an improved speech presence probability based noise power estimation

For the enhancement of speech degraded by noise, accurate estimation of the noise power spectral density (PSD) is indispensable, especially if only a single microphone signal is available. Fast and accurate tracking of the noise PSD is particularly challenging in highly non-stationary noise types, since the distinction between speech and noise components becomes more difficult. Short-time discrete Fourier transform (STFT) based noise PSD estimation algorithms which employ estimates of the speech presence probability (SPP) with fixed priors have been shown to yield good tracking performance even in adverse noise conditions. In this paper, we compare two methods to incorporate spectro-temporal correlations to improve the tracking performance. The first method smoothes the noisy observation over time and frequency before computing the SPP, while the second is based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) of the speech presence and absence states. We show that the proposed modifications lead to improved noise PSD estimators which are less sensitive to spectral outliers of the noise and track changes in the noise PSD more quickly than the reference method. Further, when employed in a common speech enhancement setup, the proposed estimators achieve an increased noise reduction while keeping speech distortions at a comparable level.
Computational analysis of the endothelial cell morphology due to distinct flow patterns

Endothelial cells (ECs) play a significant role in modulating arterial functions [1,2]. ECs are the interface between vessel wall and blood flow, and perform tasks such as the regulation of permeability and the sensing of fluid forces acting on the vessels’ walls. ECs have shown contrasting effects between laminar shear flow with a definite direction the “disturbed” shear seen at arterial branch points. Evidences suggest that wall shear stress (WSS) is capable of (1) changing the morphology and orientation of ECs via a cytoskeleton filaments remodeling and (2) stimulating the ECs to produce several chemical factors. ECs subjected to a laminar flow and high WSS tend to elongate and align in the direction of flow and expression of genes that may protect ECs from inflammation and the development of atherosclerotic plaques. In areas of low and oscillatory WSS, ECs lack organization of the cytoskeleton, intercellular junctional proteins and a unique pattern of ECs gene expression predisposing these arterial regions to atherosclerotic lesion. Despite increasing efforts in the experimental characterization of the ECs remodeling, the computational approach has not gained such an attention. In this work we study the morphological change of ECs within a realistic hemodynamic environment. For such an aim, we adopted a remodeling model for the ECs based on the reorientation of individual cytoskeleton filaments to describe the EC cell shape due to different flow features. A wide amount of flow features is obtained from CFD simulations of 46 patient specific geometries of carotid bifurcation (Fig. 1) [5], allowing the study of the relationship between near-wall fluid features and ECs morphology consistently with experimental observations found in literature [3]. The impact of different variables such as the oscillatory shear index (OSI), the time average wall shear stresses (TAWSS) and fluctuations of the mean wall shear stress orientation on ECs shape is explored.
Open Access Research Article Identification of Functional Tfap2a and Sp1 Binding Sites in New Tfap2a-modulated Genes

article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons At-tribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Different approaches have been developed to dissect the interplay between transcription factors (TFs) and their cis-acting sequences on DNA in order to identify TF target genes. Here we used a combination of computational and experimental approaches to identify novel direct targets of TFAP2A, a key TF for a variety of physiological and pathological cellular processes. Gene expression profiles of HeLa cells either silenced for TFAP2A by RNA interference or not were previously compared and a set of differentially expressed genes was revealed. Results: The regulatory regions of 494 TFAP2A-modulated genes were analyzed for the presence of TFAP2A binding sites, employing the canonical TFAP2A Positional Weight Matrix (PWM) reported in Jaspar http://jaspar.genereg. net/. 264 genes containing at least 2 high score TFAP2A binding sites were identified, showing a central role in "Cellular Movement" and "Cellular Development". In an attempt to identify TFs that could cooperate with TFAP2A, a statistically significant enrichment for SP1 binding sites was found for TFAP2A-activated but not repressed genes. The direct binding of TFAP2A or SP1 to a random subset of TFAP2A-modulated genes was demonstrated by Chromatin ImmunoPrecipitation (ChIP) assay and the TFAP2A-driven regulation of DCBLD2/ESDN/CLCP1 gene studied in details. Conclusions: We proved that our computational approaches applied to microarray selected genes are valid tools to identify functional TF binding sites in gene regulatory regions as confirmed by experimental validations. In addition, we demonstrated a fine-tuned regulation of DCBLD2/ESDN transcription by TFAP2A. Background The coordination of various complex biological functions as well as the response to environmental and developmental stimuli are governed by biochemical processes that regulate gene activity. Transcription is the initial step of gene expression and it involves a multitude of transcription factors (TFs), their corresponding cis-acting elements on DNA, additional co-factors and the influence of chromatin structure [1]. Functional TF binding sites (TFBSs) can be identified in the genome by computational approaches or experimentally by Chromatin ImmunoPrecipitation and hybridization on a genomic microarray (ChIP on Chip) [2] or by high-throughput selection procedures (SELEX) in which pools of random DNA sequences are mixed with a TF and those that are preferentially bound are recovered and sequenced [3,4].
CSF biomarkers for mild cognitive impairment

A correct clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) early in the course of the disease is of importance to initiate symptomatic treatment with acetylcholine esterase inhibitors, and will be even more important when disease‐arresting drugs, such as β‐sheet breakers or γ‐secretase inhibitors, will reach the clinic. However, there is no clinical method to determine if a patient with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has incipient AD, i.e. will progress to AD with dementia, or have a benign form of MCI without progression. Thus, there is a great clinical need for diagnostic biomarkers to identify incipient AD in MCI cases. Three cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers; total‐tau (T‐τ), phospho‐tau (P‐τ) and the 42 amino acid form of β‐amyloid (Aβ42) have been evaluated in numerous scientific papers. These CSF markers have high sensitivity to differentiate early and incipient AD from normal ageing, depression, alcohol dementia and Parkinson's disease, but lower specificity against other dementias, such as frontotemporal and Lewy body dementia. However, if the CSF biomarkers are used in the right clinical context, i.e. together with the cumulative information from the clinical examination, standard laboratory tests and brain‐imaging techniques [single photon emission tomography (SPECT) and magnetic resonance tomography (MRT) scans], they may have a role in the clinical evaluation of MCI cases.
Rapid communication: Sex differences in artificial grammar learning: Evidence for different strategies in men and women

In this article we report an experiment that investigated differences in classification performance of women and men in artificial grammar learning (AGL). Women's and men's responses correspond to a large extent. Consistent differences, however, were found in a variable that codes overlaps between training and test items in terms of string fragments. The results are best explained by the assumption that women and men apply different cognitive strategies at test.
Shared representations in language processing and verbal short-term memory : The case of grammatical gender

Abstract The general idea of language-based accounts of short-term memory is that retention of linguistic materials is based on representations within the language processing system. In the present sentence recall study, we address the question whether the assumption of shared representations holds for morphosyntactic information (here: grammatical gender in German). Three experiments using a modified version of Potter and Lombardi’s (1990) intrusion paradigm tested whether the presentation of nouns similar in meaning to a noun included in a sentence led to more intrusions in sentence recall if the related nouns had the same grammatical gender as compared to a different gender. Indeed, morphosyntactic constraints resulted in weaker (or even no) intrusion effects for gender incongruent as compared to gender congruent intruders. This effect was observed independently of the degree to which phonological information was available during recall and independently of a determiner mismatch between the noun in the sentence and the incongruent intruder.
Esmolol Promotes Electroencephalographic Burst Suppression During Propofol/Alfentanil Anesthesia

This study examined the effects of an esmolol infusion on the electroencephalogram during propofol/alfentanil IV anesthesia. After informed consent, 20 patients were randomly assigned into four groups on the basis of two target alfentanil concentrations (alfentanil 50 or 150 ng/mL) and of a saline or esmolol infusion. Bispectral index (BIS), burst suppression ratio (SR), and physiologic variables were continuously monitored. A 30-min blinded infusion of saline or esmolol was started after establishing a stable baseline and followed by a washout period. The electroencephalogram was significantly suppressed by esmolol (BIS, 37 ± 6 to 22 ± 6, 40% decrease [mean ± sd]; SR, 5 ± 7 to 67 ± 23, 13.4-fold increase) compared with baseline in the small-dose alfentanil groups. Discontinuation of esmolol reversed the response. BIS and SR were unaffected by placebo infusion. Twelve-minute to 16-min hysteresis between esmolol administration and the onset of half-maximal cortical suppression was observed. Physiologic variables and serum propofol and alfentanil concentrations were not significantly altered by esmolol. Although the mechanism remains unclear, significant cortical depression and the onset of burst suppression during a stable, computer-controlled propofol/alfentanil anesthetic was associated with esmolol infusion.