Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Should we be aiming to engage drivers more with others on-road? Driving moral disengagement and self-reported driving aggression

Aggressive driving behaviours may be associated with greater crash risk in situations where drivers engage in riskier types of behaviours such as following too closely. It also appears that many drivers who do not normally regard themselves as angry or aggressive report engaging in aggressive driving acts. Qualitative studies have suggested that drivers explain these behaviours with reference to justified retaliation or beliefs that such acts ‘teach’ other drivers a ‘lesson’ or to exercise better driving manners or etiquette. Drivers may also argue that their behaviour does not have a negative impact on others. Such descriptions of motives bear a strong resemblance to the psychological mechanisms of moral disengagement. Moral disengagement is where individuals detach themselves from their usual self-regulatory processes or morality in order to behave in ways that run counter to their normal moral standards. Moral disengagement offers a potential explanation of how apparently ‘good’ or moral people commit ‘bad’ or immoral behaviours. Categories of moral disengagement are: cognitively misinterpreting the behaviour (e.g euphemistic labelling); disconnecting with the target (e.g. attributing blame to the target); and distorting or denying the impact of the behaviour. An on-line survey with a convenience sample of general drivers (N = 294) was used to explore the potential utility of moral disengagement in explaining self-reported driving aggression over and above the explanatory power provided by constructs that are normally associated with self-reported on-road aggression. Hierarchical regression analysis was used with measures of trait anger, driving anger (DAS), moral disengagement, and driving moral disengagement (an adaptation of the measure of moral disengagement for the driving context). Results revealed that the independent variables together explained 37% of the variation in self-reported driving aggression (as measured by the Driving Anger Expression scale, DAX). Driving moral disengagement was a significant predictor of driving aggression (p < .001) after accounting for the contribution of age, gender, driving anger, and moral disengagement. Moreover, inspection of the beta weights suggested that driving moral disengagement (beta = .57) was the strongest predictor for this sample, accounting for 20% of the unique variance in driving aggression (sr2 = .20). The pattern of results suggests drivers with higher tendencies to morally disengage in the driving context may respond to others more aggressively on-road. Moreover, driving moral disengagement appeared to add to our understanding of why some angry drivers do not respond aggressively on-road while others do. Seeking to prevent drivers from activating moral disengagement while driving may be worthy of exploration as a way of reducing non-violent, yet potentially still risky, forms of driving aggression.
Exploring members of the UK Armed Forces experience of recovery after treatment for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder

Background and Aims: The barriers to accessing mental health services for UK members of the Armed Forces (MAF) and veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), have been well documented (Iversen, Van & Hughes, 2011; Murphy, Hunt, Luzon & Greenburg, 2013). However less is known about their recovery following treatment and this study sought to explore veterans’ perspectives on what they felt had aided or impeded their recovery. Methodology: Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with nine male veterans who had recently completed treatment for PTSD at Combat Stress. The interview transcripts were analysed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Results: Four master themes emerged from this analysis and are discussed within a narrative account: “Relief of receiving a PTSD diagnosis”, “From layman’s knowledge to the technical ins and outs”, “Recovery: A changing relationship with self, the world and others” and “The road to more recovery and less suffering”. Implications and conclusion: Most participants reported the concept of recovery felt inappropriate and preferred to consider their life post-treatment as a continual journey of coping with their PTSD. Nearly all participants found their diagnosis of PTSD useful, as it gave them a long sought for answer as to why they had been struggling and offered hope for treatment. All veterans identified meeting other veterans as integral to their coping with their problems, along with psychological techniques they learned to help manage their symptoms. The proactive approach taken by many participants suggests hegemonic masculinities could be a resource for coping even if they may make initially seeking help more challenging. This research echoes other literature by arguing for the complex nature of PTSD in veterans, due to stigma surrounding mental health difficulties within the armed forces and society as well as the identity shifts they have to navigate from MAF to veteran status.
The aging baboon: Comparative demography in a non-human primate

Why do closely related primate genera vary in longevity, and what does this teach us about human aging? Life tables of female baboons (Papio hamadryas) in two wild populations of East Africa and in a large captive population in San Antonio, Texas, provide striking similarities and contrasts to human mortality patterns. For captive baboons at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, we estimate the doubling time of adult mortality rate as 4.8 years. Wild females in free-living populations in Tanzania and in Kenya showed doubling times of 3.5 and 3.8 years, respectively. Although these values are considerably faster than the estimates of 7–8 years for humans, these primates share a demographic feature of human aging: within each taxon populations primarily vary in the level of Gompertz mortality intercept (frailty) and vary little in the demographic rate of aging. Environmental and genetic factors within taxa appear to affect the level of frailty underlying senescence. In contrast, primate taxa are differentiated by rates of demographic aging, even if they cannot be characterized by species-specific lifespan.
Energy efficient disaggregated servers for future data centers

With the dawn of cloud computing, data centers' power consumption has received increased attention. In this paper we evaluate the energy efficiency potential of exploiting the concept of Disaggregated Server (DS) design in data centers for efficient resource provisioning. A DS, is a new approach for future racks where servers are disaggregated and resources, such as processors, memory and IO ports are arranged in resource pools constructing processing pools, memory pools and IO pools. We developed a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for energy minimization of the virtual machine (VM) placement problem in data centres implementing DS approach. The results show that the average power savings are up to 49% for the different VM types considered.
Retinoblastoma protein promotes oxidative phosphorylation through upregulation of glycolytic genes in oncogene-induced senescent cells

Metabolism is closely linked with cellular state and biological processes, but the mechanisms controlling metabolic properties in different contexts remain unclear. Cellular senescence is an irreversible growth arrest induced by various stresses, which exhibits active secretory and metabolic phenotypes. Here, we show that retinoblastoma protein (RB) plays a critical role in promoting the metabolic flow by activating both glycolysis and mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) in cells that have undergone oncogene‐induced senescence (OIS). A combination of real‐time metabolic monitoring, and metabolome and gene expression analyses showed that OIS‐induced fibroblasts developed an accelerated metabolic flow. The loss of RB downregulated a series of glycolytic genes and simultaneously reduced metabolites produced from the glycolytic pathway, indicating that RB upregulates glycolytic genes in OIS cells. Importantly, both mitochondrial OXPHOS and glycolytic activities were abolished in RB‐depleted or downstream glycolytic enzyme‐depleted OIS cells, suggesting that RB‐mediated glycolytic activation induces a metabolic flux into the OXPHOS pathway. Collectively, our findings reveal that RB essentially functions in metabolic remodeling and the maintenance of the active energy production in OIS cells.
VHDL based Hardware Architecture of a High Performance Image Edge Detection Algorithm

article presents the software and hardware implementation of a low cost and high performance image edge detection algorithm. This algorithm will be used as part of a complete vision based driver assistance system. The main challenge consists in realizing a real-time implementation of edge detection algorithm that contributes in increasing the performance of the whole system. The software implementation of the developed algorithm using MATLAB tool is discussed in this paper, as well as the hardware architecture developed using VHDL language. Test results for both implementations were presented and compared to other edge detection operators. Computational time and other features comparison have shown the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
The Impact of Student-Based Instruction on Improving IBT TOEFL Scores of Iranian Students

Student-based instruction is a form of collaborative education that students play an active role in learning the process. Student’s activity is in group forms. The teacher is presenting in class just to answer students’ questions. The paradigm and pattern shifting away from teaching to an emphasis on learning have persuaded power to be changed and moved from the teacher to the student. Being a qualitative research paper, it is an attempt to investigate the impact of student-based instruction on improving IBT scores of Iranian students. The participants of this study will include two groups of male and female students each consisting of 15, all of whom are enrolling in TOEFL classes in Kish English Institute in Tehran. The participants will be assigned to control (N=15) and experimental (N=15) groups. The participants in the experimental and control groups exposed to the same content, but a different instructional method. The participants are 30 students in Advance level in one class, male and female, aged 25-35 years old. SPSS and Independent T-test are used to measure hypothesis of research and to analyze data, respectively. According to the results of this investigation, student-based instruction significantly affects IBT TOEFL scores of students.
Why would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The OPERA Hypothesis

Mounting evidence suggests that musical training benefits the neural encoding of speech. This paper offers a hypothesis specifying why such benefits occur. The “OPERA” hypothesis proposes that such benefits are driven by adaptive plasticity in speech-processing networks, and that this plasticity occurs when five conditions are met. These are: (1) Overlap: there is anatomical overlap in the brain networks that process an acoustic feature used in both music and speech (e.g., waveform periodicity, amplitude envelope), (2) Precision: music places higher demands on these shared networks than does speech, in terms of the precision of processing, (3) Emotion: the musical activities that engage this network elicit strong positive emotion, (4) Repetition: the musical activities that engage this network are frequently repeated, and (5) Attention: the musical activities that engage this network are associated with focused attention. According to the OPERA hypothesis, when these conditions are met neural plasticity drives the networks in question to function with higher precision than needed for ordinary speech communication. Yet since speech shares these networks with music, speech processing benefits. The OPERA hypothesis is used to account for the observed superior subcortical encoding of speech in musically trained individuals, and to suggest mechanisms by which musical training might improve linguistic reading abilities.
Attracting Graduates to Sales Positions and the Role of Recruiter Knowledge: A Reexamination

The recruiter plays a critical role in the success of recruiting students for sales positions. Yet there is ample evidence to suggest that recruiters do a poor job of meeting student information needs during the interview. In 1992, Weilbaker and Merritt conducted a study that addressed this issue. They found significant differences between student and recruiter importance ratings for more than half of the 44 job attributes the study considered. Today, because of the increasingly strategic nature of the sales position, effective recruiting and selection has become an even higher organizational priority than it has been in the past. Therefore, the purpose of our study is to replicate the Weilbaker and Merritt (1992) study and to compare our results with their results. Specifically, this research (1) determines which job, company, and recruiter attributes are important to students today and whether these attributes are different from those reported ten years ago; (2) determines whether there are significant differences in the attribute importance ratings based on student demographics and whether these have changed in the past ten years; and (3) determines whether or not recruiters have accurate perceptions of what is important to students and whether the recruiters are more accurate today than they were ten years ago.
Study on important factors affecting the extraction of momordica charantia using pressurized boiling system

Momordica charantia is one edible plant that belongs to Cucurbitaceae family. It is commonly known as bitter gourd, bitter melon, karela depending on location. In this study, the pressurized boiling system was set up and optimum operating conditions was studied. Comparative analysis with the conventional methods was also studied. The methods included Soxhlet extraction, boiling and using pressurized boiler to extract the plant. It was found that the highest yield was achieved when using pressurized boiler to extract momordica charantia. Therefore, it is one of effective way to extract the fruit in order to improve the extraction yield.
Projective Drawings of Mothers and Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence: A Mixed Methods Analysis

Abstract The Kinetic Family Drawing (KFD) and the Draw-A-Person: Screening Procedure for Emotional Disturbance (DAP:SPED) are intended to facilitate therapeutic discussion and assess emotional disturbance; however, little research exists on their use with victims of trauma or for identifying posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This study examined drawings by 43 mothers who experienced intimate partner violence and 56 children who witnessed violence between parents. Quantitative analysis of drawings showed no differences between participants with and without PTSD. A grounded theory approach to analysis of the KFD identified themes that differentiated the groups. Our results conflict with previous research on the DAP:SPED as an effective screening tool, and confirms research indicating that qualitative interpretation of drawings is a useful tool with trauma-exposed clients.
An integrated approach based on psychoeducational, lifestyle and nutritional interventions for the treatment of metabolic and general health disturbances in patients with psychiatric disorders

I (IL-6) is a cytokine characterized by its pleiotropic actions. It regulates many cellular functions (e.g. inflammation, survival, proliferation) on a vast array of cells in many organ systems. IL-6 signals via two distinct types of cellular receptors; IL-6 receptor α subunit (IL-6R), and glycoprotein 130 (gp130). Upon IL-6 binding, the IL-6/IL-6R complex associates with gp130 which leads to activation of numerous downstream pathways to modulate cellular functions. While the expression of IL-6R is limited to certain immune cells, gp130 is expressed on almost all cells of the body. This leads to the notion that IL-6 acts on a broad range of non-IL-6R expressing cell types via an alternate signalling mode. In this regard, IL-6 signals via 2 distinct modes;
An analytical model for the history of cosmic star formation

We use simple analytic reasoning to identify physical processes that drive the evolution of the cosmic star formation rate, ρ * , in cold dark matter universes. Based on our analysis, we formulate a model to characterize the redshift dependence of ρ * and compare it with results obtained from a set of hydrodynamic simulations that include star formation and feedback. We find that the cosmic star formation rate is described by two regimes. At early times, densities are sufficiently high and cooling times sufficiently short that abundant quantities of star-forming gas are present in all dark matter haloes that can cool by atomic processes. Consequently, ρ * generically rises exponentially as z decreases, independent of the details of the physical model for star formation, but dependent on the normalization and shape of the cosmological power spectrum. This part of the evolution is dominated by gravitationally driven growth of the halo mass function. At low redshifts, densities decline as the universe expands to the point that cooling is inhibited, limiting the amount of star-forming gas available. We find that in this regime the star formation rate scales approximately as ρ * H(z) 4 / 3 , in proportion to the cooling rate within haloes. We demonstrate that the existence of these two regimes leads to a peak in the star formation rate at an intermediate redshift z = z p e a k . We discuss how the location of this peak depends on our model parameters, and show that the peak cannot occur above a limiting redshift of z 8.7. For the star formation efficiency adopted in our numerical simulations, z p e a k 5-6, with half of all stars forming at redshifts larger than z ≃ 2.2. We derive analytic expressions for the full star formation history and show that they match our simulation results to better than ≃10 per cent. Using various approximations, we reduce the expressions to a simple analytic fitting function for ρ * that can be used to compute global cosmological quantities that are directly related to the star formation history. As examples, we consider the integrated stellar density, the supernova and gamma-ray burst rates observable on Earth, the metal enrichment history of the Universe, and the density of compact objects. We also briefly discuss the expected dependence of the star formation history on cosmological parameters and the physics of the gas.
Does pay-for-performance benefit patients with multiple chronic conditions? Evidence from a universal coverage health care system.

INTRODUCTION Numerous studies have examined the impact of pay-for-performance (P4P) programmes, yet little is known regarding their effects on continuity of care (COC) and the role of multiple chronic conditions (MCCs). This study aimed to examine the effects of a P4P programme for diabetes care on health care provision, COC and health care outcomes in diabetic patients with and without comorbid hypertension. METHODS This study utilized a large-scale natural experiment with a 4-year follow-up period under a compulsory universal health insurance programme in Taiwan. The intervention groups consisted of patients with diabetes who were enrolled in the P4P programme in 2005. The comparison groups were selected via propensity score matching with patients who were seen by the same group of physicians. A difference-in-differences analysis was conducted using generalized estimating equation models to examine the effects of the P4P programme. RESULTS Significant impacts were observed after the implementation of the P4P programme for diabetic patients with and without hypertension. The programme increased the number of necessary examinations/tests and improved the COC between patients and their physicians. The programme significantly reduced the likelihood of diabetes-related hospital admissions and emergency department visits [odds ratio (OR): 0.71; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.63-0.80 for diabetic patients with hypertension; OR: 0.74; 95% CI: 0.64-0.86 for patients without hypertension]. However, the effects of the P4P programme diminished to some extent in the second year after its implementation. CONCLUSION This study suggests that a financial incentive programme may improve the provision of necessary health care, COC and health care outcomes for diabetic patients both with and without comorbid hypertension. Health authorities could develop policies to increase participation in P4P programmes and encourage continued improvement in health care outcomes.
QT interval dispersion in chronic heart failure and left ventricular hypertrophy: relation to autonomic nervous system and Holter tape abnormalities.

OBJECTIVE--To study QT dispersion in left ventricular hypertrophy and chronic heart failure and to determine the relation to ventricular arrhythmias. SETTING--Investigational laboratory of a tertiary referral centre. STUDY DESIGN--Patients with left ventricular hypertrophy and normal systolic function (n = 14) and patients with chronic heart failure (n = 18) were matched with controls (n = 17). The QT dispersion was examined in relation to abnormalities in resting mechanical and autonomic function and to the findings of 24 hour Holter monitoring. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES--QT dispersion is the difference between the maximum and the minimum QT values from the 12 lead electrocardiogram. Mean(SD) QT dispersion from the 10 lead electrocardiogram was also examined once the 12 lead minimum and maximum values had been removed. The QT distribution is the curve describing the distance from the mean for all QT intervals (ms). RESULTS--All measures of QT dispersion were increased significantly in left ventricular hypertrophy and tended to increase in those with heart failure. The QT distribution was abnormal in both heart failure and left ventricular hypertrophy. There was no relation between the degree of change in QT dispersion and the incidence of ventricular arrhythmia on 24 hour Holter monitoring. Also there was no relation between QT dispersion and autonomic or mechanical abnormalities. The QT dispersion was related to QRS duration. CONCLUSION--Though QT dispersion and distribution are abnormal in left ventricular hypertrophy these findings do not support the hypothesis that QT dispersion reflects arrhythmic risk in either hypertrophy or heart failure.
Nematic Liquid Crystal Display With Submillisecond Grayscale Response Time

A nematic display with three electrodes and double fringing fields is proposed. Both top and bottom substrates have pixel and common electrodes to generate complementary fringing fields for achieving high transmittance. This mode exhibits submillisecond gray-to-gray response time and high contrast ratio. The effect of pixel misalignment on transmittance is discussed.