Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Desminopathy in Chile, first cases reported

respiratory involvement, and only one patient had cardiomyopathy. CK levels were normal to mildly elevated. Muscle MRI (n = 6) and muscle biopsy (n = 6) findings were compatible with a titinopathy. The patients with homozygous mutations did not show significant clinical differences compared to the compound heterozygous patients. Previously, muscular dystrophies caused by mutations in the extreme C-terminus of TTN – autosomal dominant tibial muscular dystrophy (TMD) and autosomal recessive LGMD2J – had been primarily described in Finland. The Serbian TTN founder mutation explains a sizable portion of distal myopathy patients in this region and may represent the most common single cause of distal myopathies in the Serbian population.
Predicting Advertising Appeal from Receiver's Psychological Traits and Ad Design Features

This paper studies an approach for predicting an individual's perception of the advertising appeal of ad design. Although previous research has shown that people perceive an ad as more appealing when its design matches their psychological traits, the matching required the help of psychology experts, relying on their implicit knowledge. To exclude such dependence, we examined how the psychological traits affect perceived advertising appeal by conducting a questionnaire survey. Analyzing the survey results, we confirmed that psychological traits have significant moderating effects on both visual and linguistic features of an ad design in terms of how an individual perceives advertising appeal. We also confirmed that the moderating effects as well as main effects of visual and linguistic features have significant predictive utility for perceived appeal. The model in which the both effects are incorporated predicted the most appealing ad for each person more accurately than did a human without psychology expertise (accuracy lift: mean - 1.35, max - 2.48). While further study is necessary on whether the studied approach can serve as a substitute for psychology experts, we consider the present study took the first step toward realizing this goal.
A Ferromagnetic Resonance Study of Iron Complexes as Biologically Synthesized in Magnetic Bacteria

In order to analyze the magnetic behaviors of iron complexes biologically synthesized in magnetic bacteria MS-1, we performed FMR (Ferromagnetic Resonance) measurements for each fraction of the cell. We observed FMR spectra from the ferric iron (Fe3+) compounds distributed in each fraction of the MS-1 cell. In particular, the MS fraction yielded an anisotropic FMR signal, whereas other fractions were simple FMR spectra of Gaussian type. Upon counting the numbers of spins in various cell fractions, we compared them with the iron population as determined by the 1.10-phenanthroline method. We found a good correlation between the number of spins and the iron population in several cell fractions. We concluded that the cell fractions other than those fractions containing magnetite, consist mostly of ferric irons rather than ferrous irons.
Three-dimensional Hydrodynamic Simulations of Supernova Ejecta with a Central Energy Source

We present the results of three-dimensional special relativistic hydrodynamic simulations of supernova ejecta with a powerful central energy source. We assume a spherical supernova ejecta freely expanding with the initial kinetic energy of 1051 erg. We performed two simulations with different total injected energies of 1051 and 1052 erg to see how the total injected energy affects the subsequent evolution of the supernova ejecta. When the injected energy greatly exceeds the initial kinetic energy of the supernova ejecta, the hot bubble produced by the additional energy injection overwhelms and penetrates the whole supernova ejecta, resulting in a clumpy density structure. For smaller injected energies, on the other hand, the energy deposition stops before the hot bubble breakout occurs, leaving the outer envelope well stratified. This qualitative difference may indicate that central-engine-powered supernovae could be observed as two different populations, such as supernovae with and without broad-line spectral features, depending on the amount of total injected energy with respect to the initial kinetic energy.
Discipline Strategies: Influence on Gender and Academic Level of Students: A Case of Rachuonyo North Sub-County, Homabay County, Kenya.

This paper purposed to establish if there was a significant influence of discipline strategies on student academic performance based on the gender and academic level of students in Homabay County, Kenya. Over the years, students in Rachuonyo North Sub County have continued to perform poorly in Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (K.C.S.E). The objective of this study is to determine the influence of discipline strategies on academic performance by gender and academic level. The research design used was causal comparative. The researcher used simple random sampling to select 23 schools. Purposive sampling was used to identify students at different academic levels who had received any of the three discipline strategies that is suspension, manual labour, and sending students home to call their parent. The quantitative data was analyzed using paired sample t-test and repeated measures ANOVA at . 05 level of significance. The study findings indicated that girls performed poorly after discipline strategies had been used on them. However, there was no significant difference in the academic performance of boys after the discipline strategies. It emerged that these discipline strategies influenced students’ academic performance differently depending on the academic level of the student with the form two and four students registering a decline and the form three students showing a slight improvement. The study recommends discipline strategies other than the three used in the study for girls. Further research is required to determine the influence of these discipline strategies in other counties.
Pre-Print Draft: Marketing Theory (forthcoming, 2014) Rethinking Religion in the Context of Ethnicity and Wellbeing

Identifying the ‘religion-ethnicity-wellbeing’ nexus as an understudied topic in marketing and consumer behavior research, we propose three main trajectories for future research: Firstly, given the politics of religions, there is a need for studying societies that suffer from and are affected by religio-ethnic tensions and also different types of risks that threaten people’s wellbeing in such contexts. Secondly, future research should investigate how and why markets may generate and mediate religio-ethnic prejudices and antagonism that put society’s wellbeing at risk. Thirdly, with the upsurge of transcultural alternative religiosities/spiritualities, researchers should examine how through the processes of religious hybridization and hybrid consumption people change their existing consumption patterns and how alternative religiosities/spiritualities influence their sense of wellbeing, particularly in contexts where religious shifts are resisted.
Monaural and Binaural Speech Reception Thresholds in Normal Children and Those at Risk for Central Auditory Processing Disorders

Children with central auditory processing disorders (CAPD) have a normal pure-tone audiogram, however, they have difficulty understanding speech in the presence of background noise. The present study examined binaural hearing in normal children and those with possible CAPD. Each subject was administered the SCAN or SCAN-A, screening tests for CAPD, to determine whether they were at risk for CAPD. Participants were then subjected to several monaural and binaural speech tasks, in quiet and noise. Spondee words were utilized in each task, under headphone and soundfield conditions.
Locus of control, feeling of happiness and self-esteem: interrelation analysis

Recent interest in positive psychology is reflected in a plenty of studies conducted on its basic constructs in interrelation with personality features, social rules, business and technology development. It is recognized that the relationship between self-esteem, happiness, locus of control is complex: internal LOC is contributing to happiness, but it is not directly related to it; self-esteem is a powerful and important psychological factor in mental health and well-being; the feelings of being worthy and empowered are associated with significant achievements and high self-esteem; strong and appropriate self-esteem (when the discrepancy between “ideal” and “real” self is balanced) is correlated with more internal LOC (when the individual tends to believe that personal achievements depend on possessed features, vigor and persistence). Despite the special attention paid to happiness, locus of control and self-esteem, independently, theoretical and empirical equivocations within each literature foreclose many obvious predictions about the nature of their empirical distinction. In terms of theoretical framework, no model has achieved consensus as an ultimate theoretical background for any of the mentioned constructs. The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating role of self-esteem, exploring the relationships between self-esteem and happiness, self-esteem and locus of control (LOC). It hypothesizes that self-esteem may be interpreted as a predictor of happiness and mediator in locus of control establishment. A plenty of various empirical studies results have been analysed in order to collect data for this theoretical study and some of the analysed results can be considered as arguable or incoherent
Concealed Ownership of Contractors, Manipulation of Tenders and the Allocation of Public Procurement Contracts

This study provides evidence of a strong link between two channels facilitating rentextraction in public procurement: between concealing the ultimate ownership of contractors and manipulation of the anticipated value of tenders. Using data on more than 15 300 tenders awarded to joint-stock companies in the Czech Republic during 2005 - 2010, the study shows that tender value manipulation has been incentivized by the 2006 procurement reform, which established several discontinuities in the anticipated value of tenders. After the reform, manipulation increased much more for tenders awarded to contractors with anonymous owners as opposed to traceable owners. Contractors in manipulated tenders needed to underbid fewer firms in order to win procurements and their winning bids for comparable contracts were, on average, higher than before reform. The results imply disrupted optimality of contractor choice and reduced efficiency of procurement. The results are strongest for contracts on services and construction works, which traditionally conceal rentextraction more easily.
Universal envelopes of discontinuous functions

This thesis is a contribution to computable analysis in the tradition of Grzegorczyk, Lacombe, and Weihrauch. The main theorem of computable analysis asserts that any computable function is continuous. The solution operators for many interesting problems encountered in practice turn out to be discontinuous, however. It hence is a natural question how much partial information may be obtained on the solutions of a problem with discontinuous solution operator in a continuous or computable way. We formalise this idea by introducing the notion of continuous envelopes of discontinuous functions. The envelopes of a given function can be partially ordered in a natural way according to the amount of information they encode. We show that for any function between computably admissible represented spaces this partial order has a greatest element, which we call the universal envelope. We develop some basic techniques for the calculation of a suitable representation of the universal envelope in practice. We apply the ideas we have developed to the problem of locating the fixed point set of a continuous self-map of the unit ball in finite-dimensional Euclidean space, and the problem of locating the fixed point set of a nonexpansive self-map of the unit ball in infinite-dimensional separable real Hilbert space.
MQTTg: An Android Implementation

The Internet of Things (IoT) age is upon us. As we look to build larger networks with more devices connected to the Internet, the need for lightweight protocols that minimize the use of both energy and computation gain popularity. One such protocol is Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT). Since its introduction in 1999, it has slowly increased in use cases and gained a huge spike in popularity since it was used in the popular messaging application Facebook Messenger. In our previous works, we focused on adding geolocation to MQTT, to help modernize the protocol into the IoT age. In this paper, we build off our previous work on MQTTg and build an IoT Android Application that can pull geolocation information from the Operating System. We then use the geolocation data to create geofences to help further tailor the use cases of MQTTg.
Market-Supporting Institutions , Institutional Complementarities and Economic Growth : New Evidence on the Nonlinear Relationship

Recent existing literature overwhelmingly focuses on direct effects of “cluster” institutions on growth largely ignoring the indirect or indexing role of institutions and the interaction effects between different dimensions of institutional matrix in influencing long-run growth process. One contention suggests different domains of institutions are inter-related in equilibrium whole, with any changes in one domain may influence the rest of domains—the so-called “institutional complementarity hypothesis”. This study aims to empirically examine this hypothesis based on the sample of 93 developed, emerging market and developing countries over 1980-2010 periods using novel threshold regression framework. Using Rodrik’s (2000, 2005) conceptualization to unbundle market-supporting institutions (MSI) into market-creating (MCI), market-regulating (MREGI), market-stabilizing (MSTABI) and market-legitimizing (MLEGI) institutions, this paper investigates whether countries belong to regime with high MCI quality have efficiently transformed Solow-Mankiw-Romer-Weil (Solow-MRW) growth determinants, MREGI, MSTABI, and MLEGI into higher growth compare with low quality MCI regime. The finding reveals that countries obtaining MCI quality above an estimated optimum threshold value (i.e. high-MCI regime) can transform Solow-MRW growth determinants and MREGI into higher growth than those falls below (i.e. low-MCI group). It finds weak support for MSTABI and no support for MLEGI that they each matter differently in lowand high-MCI regime. These findings are invariant to extensive robust tests. One important policy implication is that poor countries can have high productivity gains from factor inputs and efficient functioning of regulatory institutions from sufficient improvement in the quality of MCI.
The Brightest Point in Accretion Disk and Black Hole Spin: Implication to the Image of Black Hole M87*

We propose the simple new method for extracting the value of the black hole spin from the direct high-resolution image of black hole by using a thin accretion disk model. In this model, the observed dark region on the first image of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87, obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope, is a silhouette of the black hole event horizon. The outline of this silhouette is the equator of the event horizon sphere. The dark silhouette of the black hole event horizon is placed within the expected position of the black hole shadow, which is not revealed on the first image. We calculated numerically the relation between the observed position of the black hole silhouette and the brightest point in the thin accretion disk, depending on the black hole spin. From this relation, we derive the spin of the supermassive black hole M87*, a = 0.75 ± 0.15 .
The Equity Premium and the Baby Boom

This paper explores the quantitative impact of the Baby Boom on stock and bond returns. It constructs a neoclassical growth model with overlapping generations, in which agents make a portfolio decision over risky capital and safe bonds in zero net supply. The model has exogenous technology and population shocks that are calibrated to match long run data for the US. With agents allowed to borrow freely by shorting bonds, the model fails to match the historical equity premium by a large margin and generates only small asset market effects over a simulated Baby Boom. When agents are constrained in their ability to borrow, the model comes close to matching the historical equity premium and suggests that there will be a sharp rise in the equity premium when the Baby Boomers retire, driven by a large decline in bond returns as Baby Boomers seek to hold the riskless asset in retirement
The Application of Metabolomic Profiling to the Effects of Physical Activity

Physical activity and exercise are potent lifestyle interventions for the reduction of several psychosomatic risks, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and mild-to-moderate depression. The current review describes the studies which have utilised a metabolomics/ metabolite profiling approach in combination with exercise in the period between 1999-2014 in predominantly healthy subjects (N:64) and in a smaller subset of patient cohorts (N:10) between 2011-2014. A broad range of intervention types were used in both healthy and patient cohorts with varying exercise regimes with or without supplement use. Effects on purine metabolism, which have been known for over 40 years, were by far the most well-cited and persistent finding. Other reported effects included observations of: glucocorticoid and androgen metabolism, glycolysis and Krebs cycle, gluconeogenesis, fatty acid metabolism, fatty acid oxidation and pantothenic acid, amino acid oxidation, tryptophan metabolism and effects on microbiome metabolites. The discussion section draws observations from the very disparate studies together and links them to the general aspects of human metabolism.
Efficient IMEX Runge-Kutta methods for nonhydrostatic dynamics

We analyze the stability and accuracy (up to third order) of a new family of implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta (IMEX RK) methods. This analysis expedites development of methods with various balances in the number of explicit stages and implicit solves. We emphasize deriving methods with large stability regions for horizontally explicit vertically implicit (HEVI) partitionings of nonhydrostatic atmosphere models. The IMKG2 and IMKG3 families of IMEX RK methods are formulated within this framework. The HOMME-NH model with a HEVI partitioning is used for testing the accuracy and stability of various IMKG2-3 methods. The efficiency of several IMKG2-3 methods is demonstrated in HOMME-NH and compared to other IMEX RK methods in the literature.
Adding mass to the shoe does not affect ball velocity in a soccer penalty kick

The aim of this study was to identify the optimum shoe mass that maximizes ball velocity in a soccer instep penalty kick. Two players performed 20–30 maximum-effort penalty kicks while wearing football shoes with lead weights attached to the base of the shoe (total mass: 0.26 – 0.81 kg). The kicks were recorded by a video camera at 100 Hz and a biomechanical analysis was conducted to obtain measures of ball projection velocity and kinematics of the kicking leg. We found that ball velocity was insensitive to shoe mass (at least for the range of shoe mass tested). An important contributing factor to the observed relationship was that the velocity of the kicking foot at ball impact decreased as the mass of the shoe increased. Our result indicates that players should not change their shoes before taking a penalty kick.
House Price Bubbles in China

This paper uses a vector of macroeconomic and monetary policy fundamental variables to investigate the existence of speculative bubbles on national residential house market in China over the period from Mar.1998 to Feb.2013. In the past few years, except the quantitative easing policy was implemented in USA, many monetary policy instruments also have been used on the asset markets in China, such as expansionary of monetary supply and lower benchmark interest rate and lending rate. These led to the hyperinflation happened in China and property price increased dramatically after 2009. Because of the booming in the real estate industry, we are interested in whether there is a housing bubble existing in the market. Three sets of bubble attributes are examined, including unit root test and co-integration procedures, we find no evidence of rational bubbles in the national housing market. The tests for duration dependence in the negative returns on house prices suggest that China housing market is not affected by rational bubbles. Overall, this essay proposes monetary policy and macroeconomic variables are important factors for the increasing of housing prices. It is also necessary for monetarists to consider about the impact of interest rates on housing prices.
Modeling in the Classroom: What Approaches are Effective to Improve Students' Writing?

Effective writing is a learned skill, required to advance many forms of learning both in classroom contexts, and in job and career contexts. Previous research (Graham & Perin, 2007) has identified many strategies that promote improvements in students’ writing through a meta-analysis of research studies and previous meta-analyses. Other authors and researchers identify approaches to effective teaching (DeRiddler, 2002; Englemann, Becker, Carmine, & Gersten, 1988; McLaughlin, Gregory, Weber, & Stookey, 2005; Rosenshine, 1997; Stahl & Nagy, 2006; Waldrep, 2005). This study uses 10 of the 11 high impact writing strategies identified by previous writing research, as well as more general approaches to effective instruction, to examine the gain scores in three forms of writing by 81 students in Grades 3 to 6 classes to determine the combined effects of high impact approaches to writing on students’ ability to write definitions (concept clarification), compare, and write in argumentative formats. Keywords : writing strategies; effective instruction
Quadratic differentials in spherical CR geometry

This paper deals with the notion of quadratic differential in spherical CR geometry (or more generally on strictly pseudoconvex CR manifolds). We get to this notion by studying a splitting of Rumin complex and discuss its first features such as trajectories and length. We also define several differential operators on quadratic differentials that lead to analogue of half-translation structures on spherical CR manifolds. Finally, we work on known examples of quasiconformal maps in the Heisenberg group with extremal properties and explicit how quadratic differentials are involved in those. In addition, on our way to quadratic differentials, we define a differential complex on strictly pseudoconvex CR manifolds with a finite dimensional cohomology space. It leads to a new CR invariant that we compute for compact manifolds endowed with a CR action of the circle.