Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Embodiment in psychotherapy – A necessary complement to the canon of common factors?

An ongoing debate in psychotherapy research is addressing whether nonspecific "com- mon" factors or specific factors (techniques) should be considered as the essential ingre- dients of therapeutic change. This controversy is currently unresolved; the debates inad- vertently showed that so far a third aspect of almost all psychotherapies was neglected in academic psychotherapy research – the role of the body and of nonverbal behavior in the session. The current taxonomy of core constructs of psychotherapy thus appears biased by not covering the embodiment of psychotherapy. In recent decades, embodiment has become an influential concept in psychology and cognitive sciences. It denotes an increas- ing awareness of the reciprocity of mind and body ("bi-directionality"), with the mind not only affecting the body but also vice versa. Embodied cognition comes to the fore in Theory of Mind, sensorimotor coupling, and nonverbal behavior. In addition, the embodi- ment of the mind constitutes a basis of social interaction and communication, as became evident in research on nonverbal synchrony, social contagion and mimicry. Thus, embodi- ment has a wide range of implications for psychotherapy. Psychomotor dysfunctions are often closely associated with affective and psychotic symptoms, leading to altered timing in the processing of stimuli and to disordered appraisals of the environment e.g. in psy- chosis. Problems of social exchange and social cognition may be viewed as disordered embodied communication, which opens up novel treatment strategies for psychotherapy and body-oriented interventions. But also in cognitive and psychodynamic psychotherapy, which are targeted not on the body but on mental and emotional processes, the nonver- bal level tacitly plays an important role in establishing the therapeutic alliance and thereby promoting therapeutic outcome. In this article we therefore wish to discuss the importance of embodiment for psychotherapeutic interaction.
Frightened by an Old Scarecrow: The Remarkable Resilience of Demand Characteristics

More than 50 years ago, the idea of demand characteristics was introduced by Martin Orne in a widely cited American Psychologist article. Through the 1960s and the mid-1970s, numerous studies were conducted investigating the role of demand characteristics in a variety of research areas. Demand characteristics faded from researchers’ attention in the late 1970s, relegated to brief descriptions in research methods textbooks. The present article traces the origins of and battles fought over demand characteristics during its heyday. Evidence is provided that suggests demand characteristics experienced a rebirth in the 1980s and it remains a widely referenced idea up to today. Demand characteristics reflect perennial concerns about the difficulties of and limitations to doing research with humans, concerns that often surface in the periodic crises that confront psychology. The types of problems that animated the crisis of confidence associated with demand characteristics in the 1970s form one dimension of the current replication crisis. Reinterpretation of this current replication crisis and a new direction for experimental research with human subjects are derived from this review of demand characteristics.
Semidefinite Relaxations and Lagrangian Duality with Application to Combinatorial Optimization

We show that it is fruitful to dualize the integrality constraints in a combinatorial optimization problem. First, this reproduces the known SDP relaxations of the max-cut and max-stable problems. Then we apply the approach to general combinatorial problems. We show that the resulting duality gap is smaller than with the classical Lagrangian relaxation; we also show that linear constraints need a special treatment.
Effect of simvastatin on renal function in autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease.

BACKGROUND In animal models, HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors were able to improve renal function and endothelium-dependent vascular reactivity. In various experimental renal diseases, including autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD), HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors improved the rate of decline in renal function. We studied the effect of simvastatin on ADPKD patients. METHODS In a double-blind cross-over study, 10 normocholesterolaemic ADPKD patients were treated in random order for 4 weeks with 40 mg simvastatin or placebo daily. After each treatment period, we investigated the effect of simvastatin on renal blood flow and endothelium-dependent vascular reactivity. These periods were separated by a 4-week wash-out period. RESULTS After treatment with simvastatin, glomerular filtration rate (GFR) significantly increased from 124+/-4 ml/min to 132+/-6 ml/min (P<0.05). Simultaneously, effective renal plasma flow (ERPF) increased significantly from 494+/-30 ml/min to 619+/-67 ml/min after simvastatin treatment (P<0.05). These renal effects were accompanied by a significantly enhanced vasodilator response to acetylcholine in the forearm after simvastatin treatment. Total serum cholesterol levels were significantly reduced after treatment with simvastatin, from 4.24+/-0.32 to 3.17+/-0.22 mmol/l (P<0.001). CONCLUSION We concluded that simvastatin treatment can ameliorate renal function in ADPKD patients, by increasing renal plasma flow, possibly via improvement of endothelial function. Long-term clinical trials with HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors are needed to confirm these results and to establish a chronic inhibiting effect of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors on the progression towards end-stage renal disease in ADPKD patients.
Trust, but Verify! Better Entity Linking through Automatic Verification

We introduce automatic verification as a post-processing step for entity linking (EL). The proposed method trusts EL system results collectively, by assuming entity mentions are mostly linked correctly, in order to create a semantic profile of the given text using geospatial and temporal information, as well as fine-grained entity types. This profile is then used to automatically verify each linked mention individually, i.e., to predict whether it has been linked correctly or not. Verification allows leveraging a rich set of global and pairwise features that would be prohibitively expensive for EL systems employing global inference. Evaluation shows consistent improvements across datasets and systems. In particular, when applied to state-of-the-art systems, our method yields an absolute improvement in linking performance of up to 1.7 F1 on AIDA/CoNLL’03 and up to 2.4 F1 on the English TAC KBP 2015 TEDL dataset.
Deep FisherNet for Object Classification

Despite the great success of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for the image classification task on datasets like Cifar and ImageNet, CNN's representation power is still somewhat limited in dealing with object images that have large variation in size and clutter, where Fisher Vector (FV) has shown to be an effective encoding strategy. FV encodes an image by aggregating local descriptors with a universal generative Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). FV however has limited learning capability and its parameters are mostly fixed after constructing the codebook. To combine together the best of the two worlds, we propose in this paper a neural network structure with FV layer being part of an end-to-end trainable system that is differentiable; we name our network FisherNet that is learnable using backpropagation. Our proposed FisherNet combines convolutional neural network training and Fisher Vector encoding in a single end-to-end structure. We observe a clear advantage of FisherNet over plain CNN and standard FV in terms of both classification accuracy and computational efficiency on the challenging PASCAL VOC object classification task.
Rate of Gas Phase Association of Hydroxyl Radical and Nitrogen Dioxide

Honing in on HONO2 Modeling air pollution requires knowledge of all the interrelated reactions occurring in the atmosphere. Among the most significant is the formation of nitric acid (HONO2) from OH and NO2 radicals. One sticking point in the study of this reaction has been the uncertainty in how often radicals link through an O-O rather than an O-N bond. Mollner et al. (p. 646) measured the partitioning coefficient, as well as the overall consumption rate of the radicals, with an array of highly sensitive spectroscopic techniques in the laboratory. The measurements yielded a well-defined rate constant for nitric acid formation, which was applied to the prediction of ozone levels in atmospheric simulations of the Los Angeles basin. Laboratory measurements of a critical atmospheric rate constant should improve predictions of tropospheric ozone formation. The reaction of OH and NO2 to form gaseous nitric acid (HONO2) is among the most influential in atmospheric chemistry. Despite its importance, the rate coefficient remains poorly determined under tropospheric conditions because of difficulties in making laboratory rate measurements in air at 760 torr and uncertainties about a secondary channel producing peroxynitrous acid (HOONO). We combined two sensitive laser spectroscopy techniques to measure the overall rate of both channels and the partitioning between them at 25°C and 760 torr. The result is a significantly more precise value of the rate constant for the HONO2 formation channel, 9.2 (±0.4) × 10−12 cm3 molecule−1 s−1 (1 SD) at 760 torr of air, which lies toward the lower end of the previously established range. We demonstrate the impact of the revised value on photochemical model predictions of ozone concentrations in the Los Angeles airshed.
Advising Shareholders in Takeovers

This paper studies the advisory role of the board of directors in takeovers. I develop a model in which the takeover premium and the ability of the target board to resist the takeover are endogenous. The analysis relates the influence of the board on target shareholders and the reaction of the market to its recommendations to various characteristics of the acquirer and the target. I also show that the expected target shareholder value can decrease with the expertise of the board and it is maximized when the board is biased against the takeover. Generally, uninformative and ignored recommendations are not necessarily evidence that the target board has no influence on the outcome of the takeover. Perhaps surprisingly, under the optimal board structure, target shareholders ignore the recommendations of the board, which are never informative in equilibrium.
Summary of biological information regarding differences between Pacific cod in the eastern Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands September 2008

Executive summary The NPFMC is considering action that would treat the eastern Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands separately for the purposes of Pacific cod management. This report is intended to summarize existing biological information on Pacific cod that may be useful in evaluating this action. The following conclusions may be useful and are described in greater detail in the report: 1) There is highly significant genetic isolation by distance in the Pacific cod stocks of North America (i.e. genetic differences among individuals increase with geographic distance; Fig. 1-2). This result, as well as several different genetic comparisons among regional groupings, suggest that Pacific cod stocks in the Aleutian Islands archipelago are distinct from those along the contiguous Alaska Peninsula. 2) In 2005, length at age was significantly higher in the AI than in the EBS for both female and male cod (Table 2-1, Figs. 2-2 & 2-3). This difference is present at all ages. 3) Commercial trawls in the AI catch bigger female and male cod than do trawls in the EBS (Figs. 3-1, 3-2 & 3-3). From 2004 to 2006, the mode for cod in the EBS occurred at 65-70 cm, while the mode for females in the AI occurred at 80-85 cm. Fish smaller than 50 cm were evident in EBS trawls, but were rare in the AI. 4) Estimates of age composition suggest that commercial trawls in the AI also catch older fish (Fig. 4-1). In particular, cod older than age 8 are largely absent from EBS trawls, while 8-11 year old fish were common in AI trawls. Age estimates were obtained by applying the growth models used in (2) above to the size composition in (3) above. 5) Length-weight relationships did not differ between the AI and EBS in 2005 (Figs. 5-1 & 5-2). 6) Length-specific gonad weight, a proxy for reproductive potential, was equal between the EBS and AI in 2005 (Fig. 6-1A). Length-specific fecundity (Fig. 6-1B) and egg size were significantly different between the EBS and AI in 2005, but the differences were small and may not be biologically relevant. 7) The fatty acid composition of egg polar lipids differed between the EBS and AI (Figs. 7-1 &7-2). Similar differences in other fish species have been used as an indicator of genetic differentiation and stock structure. 8) Cod appear to spawn in several locations in the AI and throughout the EBS (Fig. 8-1). 9) Tagged …
American Journal of Epidemiology Original Contribution Measles-mumps-rubella Vaccination and Asthma-like Disease in Early Childhood

The authors evaluated the association between receipt of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and asthma-like disease in early childhood in a Danish nationwide cohort study (N ¼ 871,234). Two outcomes were included: hospitalizations with asthma diagnoses and use of anti-asthma medications (for a subset of the cohort only). Poisson regression was used to estimate rate ratios according to vaccination status. MMR-vaccinated children were less often hospitalized with an asthma diagnosis (rate ratio (RR) ¼ 0.75, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.73, 0.78) and used fewer courses of anti-asthma medication (RR ¼ 0.92, 95% CI: 0.91, 0.92) than unvaccinated children. This ''protective'' effect of MMR vaccine was more pronounced for hospitalizations with severe asthma diagnoses (status asthmaticus: RR ¼ 0.63, 95% CI: 0.49, 0.82) and use of medication that was highly specific for asthma (long-acting b2-agonist inhalant: RR ¼ 0.68, 95% CI: 0.63, 0.73). MMR vaccine was not negatively associated with anti-asthma medications often used for wheezing illnesses in early childhood (systemic b2-agonist: RR ¼ 1.02, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.02). These results are compatible not with an increased risk of asthma following MMR vaccination but rather with the hypothesis that MMR vaccination is associated with a reduced risk of asthma-like disease in young children. The ''hygiene hypothesis'' suggests that early childhood exposure to microbial agents protects against atopic disease through an immunomaturing effect (1, 2). In this context, common childhood vaccines are of obvious interest, and a number of hypotheses linking childhood vaccines and atopy have been proposed (3). One suggestion is that vaccines indirectly increase the risk of atopy by preventing ''benefi-cial'' infections in early childhood (4). Another suggestion is that vaccines themselves have direct atopy-promoting effects—for example, by increasing immunoglobulin E levels (5) or by unbalancing the immune system (6). The majority of analytical studies have not been able to confirm an adverse effect of childhood vaccination on atopic disease, and some have even indicated a protective effect of vaccines (7, 8). However, large, well-controlled prospective studies are few, and given the importance of national vaccination programs and the possibility of vaccine safety scares (9), further research into the association between vaccines and atopic diseases is needed. We evaluated the hypothesis of an increased risk of asthma-like disease after measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination in Denmark in a nationwide historically prospective cohort study. We evaluated both the association between MMR vaccination and hospitalizations with asthma diagnoses in early childhood and the association between MMR …
Generalized sensitivities and optimal experimental design

Abstract We consider the problem of estimating amodeling parameter θ using a weighted least squares criterion for given data y by introducing an abstract framework involving generalized measurement procedures characterized by probability measures. We take an optimal design perspective, the general premise (illustrated via examples) being that in any data collected, the information content with respect to estimating θ may vary considerably from one time measurement to another, and in this regard some measurements may be much more informative than others. We propose mathematical tools which can be used to collect data in an almost optimal way, by specifying the duration and distribution of time sampling in the measurements to be taken, consequently improving the accuracy (i.e., reducing the uncertainty in estimates) of the parameters to be estimated. We recall the concepts of traditional and generalized sensitivity functions and use these to develop a strategy to determine the “optimal” final time T for an experiment; this is based on the time evolution of the sensitivity functions and of the condition number of the Fisher information matrix. We illustrate the role of the sensitivity functions as tools in optimal design of experiments, in particular in finding “best” sampling distributions. Numerical examples are presented throughout to motivate and illustrate the ideas.
Are Changing School Needs Reflected in Principal Job Ads?

The roles of the school principal continue to evolve due to shifting demands as well as ever-changing organizational needs. As new leadership skill sets emerge, we might expect school systems to respond by actively seeking different credentials, experiences, and dispositions of their principal candidates. This study of 279 principal job advertisements from 7 states showed little reconceptualization of building-level leaders’ roles and responsibilities. The number of job advertisements that merely noted traditional, management-oriented responsibilities dwarfed those position announcements that mentioned more future-oriented job roles. Potential implications of the ubiquitous similarity of principal job advertisements include failure to adequately match candidates with organizational needs and an inability to sufficiently adapt to changing societal contexts.
Prevalence of Helicobacter pylori Infection in Peptic Ulcer Patients of Highly Endemic Kashmir Valley

Objective This study aimed to find out prevalence of Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) in peptic ulcer disease (PUD) which is highly endemic disease in Kashmir. Method This study consisted of 50 PUD patients and 30 asymptomatic volunteers. Peptic ulcer was diagnosed by endoscopic examination and H. pylori was detected by histology (using Giemsa stain), one minute endoscopy room test (OMERT) and modified Gram's staining. Positive results from OMERT plus histology were considered as the “gold standard” for the presence of H. pylori. Results Out of 50 patients, 46 had duodenal ulcer (DU), 2 had benign gastric ulcer (GU) and 2 had both DU and GU. The sensitivity and specificity of OMERT were 94% and 96.70%, histology 97.90% and 96.90% and Gram's staining 91.30% and 85.30%, respectively, as compared to our gold standards. H. pylori was present in 76.09% of DU, 50% of GU, whereas patients with duodenitis, channel ulcers, chronic active DU and those with multiple ulcers were 100% H. pylori positive. H. pylori was present in 10 (33.33%) of healthy volunteers. Conclusion A significant association between H. pylori infection and PUD was found in this study. However, there seem to be other causative factors as well which contribute for this highly endemic disease.
A constructive law of large numbers with application to countable Markov chains

Let X1,X2, . be a sequence of identically distributed, pairwise independent random variables with distribution P. Let the expected value be μ < ∞. Let S n = ∑i=1 Xi. It is well-known that S n/n converges to μ almost surely. We show that this convergence is effective in (P,μ). In particular, if P,μ are computable then the convergence is effective. On the other hand, if the convergence is effective in P then μ is computable from P. The effectiveness of convergence is detached in the sense that nothing can be inferred about the speed of convergence in the law of large numbers from the speed of convergence in computing P and μ. This theorem can be used to show an effective renewal theorem, which then can be used to prove an effective ergodic theorem for countable Markov chains. The last result is a special case of effective ergodic theorems proven by Avigad-Gerhardy-Towsner and Galatolo-Hoyrup-Rojas, but we hope that the direct constructivization of the probability-theory proofs is still useful.
Youth, activism, and social movements

Sociology Compass. 2017;11:e12465. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12465 wileyo Abstract There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research.