Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exposure to Counterattitudinal News Coverage and the Timing of Voting Decisions

This article investigates the effects of counterattitudinal news coverage on the timing of voting decisions. It is hypothesized that especially citizens with uncertain prior attitudes delay their voting decisions when they are exposed to cross-cutting news coverage. Two studies provide evidence for this hypothesis, using panel data that are combined with an extensive content analysis of news media. There is also some evidence that counterattitudinal coverage accelerates voting decisions when people hold their campaign attitudes with high attitude certainty.
The Communication Styles Inventory (CSI)

In this study, a six-dimensional model of communication styles is proposed and operationalized using the Communication Styles Inventory (CSI). The CSI distinguishes between six domain-level communicative behavior scales, Expressiveness, Preciseness, Verbal Aggressiveness, Questioningness, Emotionality, and Impression Manipulativeness, each consisting of four facet-level scales. Based on factor and item analyses, the CSI is shown to be an adequate instrument, with all reliabilities of the domain-level scales surpassing the . 80 level. Consistent with the behavioral view espoused in this study, the CSI scales showed medium to high levels of convergent validity with lexical communication marker scales and behavior-oriented communication scales and discriminant validity with nonbehavioral intrapersonal cognitions and feelings vis-à-vis communication. In addition, personality, as operationalized using the HEXACO Personality Inventory—Revised (HEXACO-PI-R) and Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R), was found to have medium to strong associations with communication styles, supporting the integration of the trait and communication styles perspectives.
The Effects of Digital Media on Political Knowledge and Participation in Election Campaigns

While the majority of previous research suggests there are positive relationships between digital media use and political participation and knowledge, most studies have relied on cross-sectional surveys and have thus not been able to firmly establish the chain of causality. Also, there is little research investigating use of different forms of digital media and their relative effects on political participation and knowledge. This study examines (a) the effects of digital media use on political participation and knowledge and (b) whether different forms of digital media use affect people differently. Drawing on two representative panel surveys, the study demonstrates that there are only weak effects of digital media use on political learning, but that the use of some digital media forms has appreciable effects on political participation.
Specification and refinement of probabilistic processes

A formalism for specifying probabilistic transition systems, which constitute a basic semantic model for description and analysis of, e.g. reliability aspects of concurrent and distributed systems, is presented. The formalism itself is based on transition systems. Roughly a specification has the form of a transition system in which transitions are labeled by sets of allowed probabilities. A satisfaction relation between processes and specifications that generalizes probabilistic bisimulation equivalence is defined. It is shown that it is analogous to the extension from processes to modal transition systems given by K. Larsen and B. Thomsen (1988). Another weaker criterion views a specification as defining a set of probabilistic processes; refinement is then simply containment between sets of processes. A complete method for verifying containment between specifications, which extends methods for deciding containment between specifications, which extends methods for deciding containment between finite automata or tree acceptors, is presented. <<ETX>>
Ingroup Versus Outgroup Conflict in the Context of Violent Video Game Play

Previous research has demonstrated a positive influence of cooperative video game play on participants’ cooperative strategies (tit-for-tat behaviors) in a modified Prisoner’s Dilemma task (Ewoldsen et al., 2012). The current study tested whether these positive effects are applicable to ingroup and outgroup conflict. Eighty participants were assigned to play a violent video game cooperatively or competitively with a confederate posing as an outgroup or ingroup member. The main findings corroborate previous research on the beneficial effects of cooperative game play and suggest playing cooperatively can increase helping behavior. Furthermore, cooperation with an outgroup member can actually reduce aggression. Implications of findings for future research are discussed.
Effects of Veracity, Modality, and Sanctioning on Credibility Assessment During Mediated and Unmediated Interviews

An experiment examined how veracity, modality, and experimenter sanctioning of deception influenced credibility assessments made by professionals who conducted interviews face-to-face (FtF) or by video conference (VC). Participants (N = 243) completed a trivia game with a confederate who encouraged cheating. Some lies were sanctioned by the experimenter and others were unsanctioned. The professional interviewers educed a high number of confessions in the sanctioned (58%) and unsanctioned (79%) lie conditions. Overall accuracy of the interviewers ranged from 45% to 67%. Interviewers were more accurate when judging veracity FtF than in VC. Those in the deceptive VC conditions (especially sanctioned liars) were rated by interviewers as more dominant, involved, relaxed, and active than those in the FtF condition, revealing that modality affected deceivers’ demeanor.
The role of CSR in clinical governance and its influence on knowledge sharing

Purpose – The cumulative cart of data piling through the empirical journey around hospitals in Vietnam provides the clue on whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) influences clinical governance, which in turn catalyzes team processes and knowledge sharing. This paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach – Structural equation modeling (SEM) approach served as an analyst for 341 responses returned from self‐administered structured questionnaires sent to 504 hospital members in the middle‐management position.Findings – A model of clinical governance and knowledge sharing evolved along the process of hypothesis testing. Ethical CSR was found to nourish clinical governance in the healthcare service organizations.Originality/value – The research findings shed light on the CSR‐based model of knowledge sharing which underscores the role of ethical CSR initiatives in the activation of chain effects from clinical governance through team processes to knowledge sharing.
Left to Their Own Devices

I n her work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, literary scholar, Christina Sharpe, describes disturbing scenes of anti-Black violence and death and poses questions of how we live in a world that demands our death. These questions take on additional urgency as Sharpe considers their significance for Black “urban youth,” who have been condemned, abandoned, and “left to their own devices. ” Thinking with Sharpe, a central question of this article is: how do Black youth, who have often been abandoned, or “left to their own devices” (both metaphorically and quite literally), deploy various technological, digital, or virtual devices in order to not only “live in a world that demands their death,” but also to foster greater freedom, meaning, and cultural fulfillment in life? A second question also animates the article: how might the interplay between Black religions and/as technologies open greater possibilities for intervention in the anti-Black violence and death that often characterizes the lives of Black youth? Thus, this article focuses on the religio-cultural and socio-political uses of technolog(ies), in response to experiences of vulnerability to anti-Black violence and death, among Black youth coming of age in the hyper-mediated new millennium. The article is also concerned with how Black cultural production, emerging social media, and other new technologies, facilitate the cultivation of reimagined Black identities, communities, and spiritual practices that re-present Black youth to themselves and the broader publics in which they live.
Causas das uveítes em serviço terciário em São Paulo, Brasil

PURPOSE: To analyze retrospectively the diagnosis of patients being followed up at the Uveitis Service of Hospital das Clinicas, University of Sao Paulo Medical School, during a 6-month period, from February to August, 2002. METHODS: 262 patients, who attended the Uveitis Service during that period, had their charts reviewed and their diagnoses confirmed during the appointment. The following data were analyzed: age, gender, anatomic and etiological diagnoses, disease activity and ocular complications. RESULTS: Patients' mean age was 41 years, 60% being female and 40% male. Distribution according to anatomic diagnosis was: anterior 20%, intermediate 4.5%, posterior 39.7 % and diffuse 31.3 %. Uveitis etiology was determined in 80% of the cases, and the most common causes were toxoplasmosis 22%, Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome 13% and Behcet's disease 10%. Infectious causes were present in 79% of posterior uveitis, whereas non-infectious systemic diseases were observed in 61% of anterior and 73% of diffuse uveitis. Uncommon diagnoses were observed such as HTLV-I/II related-uveitis, antiphospholipid syndrome and autoimmune retinopathy. Concerning disease activity, 15% were active and 85% were inactive. The most frequent ocular complications were cataract (42%) and glaucoma (13%). CONCLUSIONS: Epidemiological studies may demonstrate different patterns of uveitis of etiology; nevertheless they also reflect the particular characteristics of each center (tertiary, diagnosis criteria, special interests). The present study demonstrates in our midst the importance of endogenous uveitis such as Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome and Behcet's disease, as well as of infectious uveitis such as toxoplasmosis and toxocariasis.
MRI artifact cancellation due to rigid motion in the imaging plane

A post-processing technique has been developed to suppress the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) artifact arising from object planar rigid motion. In two-dimensional Fourier transform (2-DFT) MRI, rotational and translational motions of the target during magnetic resonance magnetic resonance (MR) scan respectively impose nonuniform sampling and a phase error an the collected MRI signal. The artifact correction method introduced considers the following three conditions: (1) for planar rigid motion with known parameters, a reconstruction algorithm based on bilinear interpolation and the super-position method is employed to remove the MRI artifact, (2) for planar rigid motion with known rotation angle and unknown translational motion (including an unknown rotation center), first, a super-position bilinear interpolation algorithm is used to eliminate artifact due to rotation about the center of the imaging plane, following which a phase correction algorithm is applied to reduce the remaining phase error of the MRI signal, and (3) to estimate unknown parameters of a rigid motion, a minimum energy method is proposed which utilizes the fact that planar rigid motion increases the measured energy of an ideal MR image outside the boundary of the imaging object; by using this property all unknown parameters of a typical rigid motion are accurately estimated in the presence of noise. To confirm the feasibility of employing the proposed method in a clinical setting, the technique was used to reduce unknown rigid motion artifact arising from the head movements of two volunteers.
Temperature dependence of nanosecond laser pulse thresholds of melanosome and microsphere microcavitation

Abstract. Melanosome microcavitation is the threshold-level retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) damage mechanism for nanosecond (ns) pulse exposures in the visible and near-infrared (NIR). Thresholds for microcavitation of isolated bovine RPE melanosomes were determined as a function of temperature (20 to 85°C) using single ns laser pulses at 532 and 1064 nm. Melanosomes were irradiated using a 1064-nm Q-switched Nd:YAG (doubled for 532-nm irradiation). For comparison to melanosome data, a similar temperature (20 to 65°C) dependence study was also performed for 532 nm, ns pulse exposures of black polystyrene microbeads. Results indicated a decrease in the microcavitation average radiant exposure threshold with increasing sample temperature for both 532- and 1064-nm single pulse exposures of melanosomes and microbeads. Threshold data and extrapolated nucleation temperatures were used to estimate melanosome absorption coefficients in the visible and NIR, and microbead absorption coefficients in the visible, indicating that melanin is a better absorber of visible light than black polystyrene. The NIR melanosome absorption coefficients ranged from 3713 cm−1 at 800 nm to 222 cm−1 at 1319 nm. These data represent the first temperature-dependent melanosome microcavitation study in the NIR and provide additional information for understanding melanosome microcavitation threshold dependence on wavelength and ambient temperature.
Effect of Turkish music that premature infants are made to listen during care on stress, oxygen saturation level and length of hospital stay

Research was planned as an experimental study in order to determine the effect of Turkish music performance applied during care in the neonatal intensive care unit on stress indicators, oxygen saturation, peak heart rate, respiration value and length of hospital stay. It was an experimental study (experimental n: 30; control n: 30). Preterm infants were made to listen Turkish music for 30 minutes every day. Stress indicators, oxygen saturation, peak heart rate and respiration values observed prior to the care and during 30-minute Turkish music session were registered in the Patient Follow-up Form. No significant decrease was observed in the lengths of hospital stay, oxygen saturation levels and stress levels of babies in the experiment and control groups. It was also seen that peak heart rates and respiration values did not vary. As a conclusion, it was determined that Turkish music which preterm babies staying in the neonatal intensive care unit were made to listen did not affect peak heart rates and respiration values statistically significantly and they were normal. It was also seen that stress indicators were not affected.
A Machine Learning Approach to Visual Perception of Forest Trails for Mobile Robots

We study the problem of perceiving forest or mountain trails from a single monocular image acquired from the viewpoint of a robot traveling on the trail itself. Previous literature focused on trail segmentation, and used low-level features such as image saliency or appearance contrast; we propose a different approach based on a deep neural network used as a supervised image classifier. By operating on the whole image at once, our system outputs the main direction of the trail compared to the viewing direction. Qualitative and quantitative results computed on a large real-world dataset (which we provide for download) show that our approach outperforms alternatives, and yields an accuracy comparable to the accuracy of humans that are tested on the same image classification task. Preliminary results on using this information for quadrotor control in unseen trails are reported. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first letter that describes an approach to perceive forest trials, which is demonstrated on a quadrotor micro aerial vehicle.
Adaptive predictive multiplicative autoregressive model for medical image compression

An adaptive predictive multiplicative autoregressive (APMAR) method is proposed for lossless medical image coding. The adaptive predictor is used for improving the prediction accuracy of encoded image blocks in our proposed method. Each block is first adaptively predicted by one of the seven predictors of the JPEG lossless mode and a local mean predictor. It is clear that the prediction accuracy of an adaptive predictor is better than that of a fixed predictor. Then the residual values are processed by the multiplicative autoregressive (MAR) model with Huffman coding. Comparisons with other methods [MAR, space-varying MAR (SMAR) and adaptive JPEG (AJPEG) models] on a series of test images show that our method is suitable for reversible medical image compression.
Separating melanin from hemodynamics in nevi using multimode hyperspectral dermoscopy and spatial frequency domain spectroscopy

Abstract. Changes in the pattern and distribution of both melanocytes (pigment producing) and vasculature (hemoglobin containing) are important in distinguishing melanocytic proliferations. The ability to accurately measure melanin distribution at different depths and to distinguish it from hemoglobin is clearly important when assessing pigmented lesions (benign versus malignant). We have developed a multimode hyperspectral dermoscope (SkinSpect™) able to more accurately image both melanin and hemoglobin distribution in skin. SkinSpect uses both hyperspectral and polarization-sensitive measurements. SkinSpect’s higher accuracy has been obtained by correcting for the effect of melanin absorption on hemoglobin absorption in measurements of melanocytic nevi. In vivo human skin pigmented nevi (N=20) were evaluated with the SkinSpect, and measured melanin and hemoglobin concentrations were compared with spatial frequency domain spectroscopy (SFDS) measurements. We confirm that both systems show low correlation of hemoglobin concentrations with regions containing different melanin concentrations (R=0.13 for SFDS, R=0.07 for SkinSpect).
TAT-Modified Gold Nanoparticle Carrier with Enhanced Anticancer Activity and Size Effect on Overcoming Multidrug Resistance.

Highly efficient targeted delivery is crucial for successful anticancer chemotherapy. In this study, we developed a drug delivery system ANS-TAT-AuNP that loads anticancer molecule 2-(9-anthracenylmethylene)-hydrazinecarbothioamide (ANS) via conjugation with cell-penetrating peptide TAT modified AuNPs. The in vitro study showed that the IC50 value of ANS-TAT-AuNPs3.8 nm reduced by 11.28- (24 h) and 12.64-fold (48 h) after incubation with liver hepatocellular carcinoma HepG2 cells compared to that of free ANS, suggesting that TAT modified AuNPs could enhance the antiproliferative activity of ANS. Also, ANS-TAT-AuNPs showed a size effect on overcoming multidrug resistance (MDR). The potential of ANS-TAT-AuNPs in overcoming MDR was assessed with MCF-7/ADR drug-resistant cell line, the drug resistance index (DRI) of which was extremely high (>190). The DRI of ANS-TAT-AuNPs22.1 nm decreased dramatically to 1.48 (24 h) and 2.20 (48 h), while that of ANS-TAT-AuNPs3.8 nm decreased to 7.64 (24 h) and 7.77 (48 h), indicating that ANS-TAT-AuNPs22.1 nm could treat extremely resistant MCF-7/ADR cancer cells as drug sensitive ones. The data suggest that the larger AuNPs had more profound effect on overcoming MDR, which could effectively prevent drug efflux due to their size being much larger than that of the p-glycoprotein channel (9-25 Å).
Permutation testing made practical for functional magnetic resonance image analysis

We describe an efficient algorithm for the step-down permutation test, applied to the analysis of functional magnetic resonance images. The algorithm's time bound is nearly linear, making it feasible as an interactive tool. Results of the permutation test algorithm applied to data from a cognitive activation paradigm are compared with those of a standard parametric test corrected for multiple comparisons. The permutation test identifies more weakly activated voxels than the parametric test, always activates a superset of the voxels activated by this parametric method, almost always yields significance levels greater than or equal to those produced by the parametric method, and tends to enlarge activated clusters rather than adding isolated voxels. Our implementation of the permutation test is freely available as part of a widely distributed software package for analysis of functional brain images.
‘Circumcision pain’ unlikely to cause autism

Claims by Frisch and Simonsen that ‘circumcision pain’ increases risk of autism spectrum disorder are flawed. They dredged Danish medical records of 342,877 boys aged 0–10 years looking for an adverse effect of circumcision. Marginal significance was apparent for autism spectrum disorder at age 0–4 years for 28 Muslim boys circumcised before the age of 2 years. Since HR was 1.54 (95% CI, 1.03–2.31), the circumcision effect involved approximately 10 boys. In 0–4-year-old circumcised nonMuslim boys they noted six autism spectrum disorder diagnoses and three hyperkinetic disorder diagnoses. Of 337 Muslim boys aged 0–10 years with autism spectrum disorder, only 10.9% were ‘circumcised’, 89.1% being ‘intact’, which is improbable and undermines their findings. The authors cite a survey that found pain was high in 4% of infants during six weeks post-circumcision. Since the Danish study was about pain why didn’t Frisch and Simonsen examine other painful conditions? Urinary tract infections are associated with excruciating pain, are common and very much higher in uncircumcised male infants and boys. If the authors’ pain hypothesis were correct, then autism spectrum disorder should be associated with urinary tract infections and therefore being uncircumcised. Anaesthetics are neurotoxic to the developing brain. Systemic use in children aged under 3 years is associated with later cognitive impairment. Could unnecessary general anaesthesia, not pain, have contributed to autism spectrum disorder? They cite a study correlating autism spectrum disorder and circumcision prevalence post-1995, but fail to state that this was actually a study of paracetamol usage, circumcisions being merely a proxy. That ‘hypothesis generating exploratory analysis’ was prompted by the difference in paracetamol metabolism in immature brains that might produce neuronal damage in susceptible infants. Most likely, both autism spectrum disorder diagnosis and early circumcision reflect parental conscientiousness. Declarations Competing interests: None declared
From degeneration to infection/inflammation, and from individual-centered to ecologic approaches to investigation of evolving patterns of diseases occurrences in populations

Variation in attributes of CHD cases over time suggests a temporal change in the source sub-population of cases. It is proposed that an early 20th century expansion of a CHD-prone sub-population, characterized by high-serum cholesterol phenotype and high case-fatality - and which contributed with most of the CHD cases and deaths during the 1960s - may have followed the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. The extinction of those birth-cohorts would have resulted in a relative increase in cases coming from a second source sub-population, characterized by insulin resistance and chronic expression of low grade inflammation markers, comparatively less vulnerable to acutely die from CHD. This re-interpretation of the CHD trend, and the abandonment of the idea of degeneration for inflammation/infection calls for a change in epidemiology. Besides exposures (diet, infection.), temporal variations in proportional representations of inherited and acquired phenotypes associated with individual resistance/vulnerability, would be important determinants of evolving patterns of diseases occurrences in populations.