Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DEVELOPING A COMPREHENSIVE MODEL OF PERSONALITY, BELIEFS, AND RELIGIOSITY TO EXPLAIN UNDERAGE DRINKING IN COLLEGE STUDENTS

OF DISSERTATION DEVELOPING A COMPREHENSIVE MODEL OF PERSONALITY, BELIEFS, AND RELIGIOSITY TO EXPLAIN UNDERAGE DRINKING IN COLLEGE STUDENTS Researchers have demonstrated that college students with strong religious beliefs unsupported by religious behaviors report greater involvement in underage drinking, drug use, and risky sex than students with concordant high or concordant low religious beliefs and behaviors. Recent research also suggests personality traits, belief systems, and environments may be influencing this group’s risky behaviors; however, further research is needed to identify factors contributing to these students’ life choices (including the decision to not support their religious beliefs with specific religious behaviors). This study reports on tests of a psychosocial mediational model, connecting personality traits, religious beliefs, religious behaviors, and underage drinking. Using Structural Equation Modeling and a sample of 411 underage college students, we tested whether the association between five impulsive personality traits and underage drinking was mediated by the discordance of religious beliefs and behaviors. We also tested whether the same predictive effects could be observed using three broader personality trait domains. Although students with discordant religious beliefs and behaviors drank more than their concordant religious peers, we did not find support for the proposed mediational models. Exploratory follow-up analyses offered support for an alternative direction; underage drinking mediated the relationship between eight out of nine personality variables and the discordance of religious beliefs and behaviors. Findings indicated students with strong religious beliefs unsupported by religious behaviors reported higher levels of impulsive traits and perceived invincibility and lower levels of Conscientiousness and Agreeableness than their peers high in both religious beliefs and behaviors; this effect operated indirectly through underage drinking. Implications for directional risk models and points of intervention are discussed.
Molecular Detection of Vertebrates in Stream Water: A Demonstration Using Rocky Mountain Tailed Frogs and Idaho Giant Salamanders

Stream ecosystems harbor many secretive and imperiled species, and studies of vertebrates in these systems face the challenges of relatively low detection rates and high costs. Environmental DNA (eDNA) has recently been confirmed as a sensitive and efficient tool for documenting aquatic vertebrates in wetlands and in a large river and canal system. However, it was unclear whether this tool could be used to detect low-density vertebrates in fast-moving streams where shed cells may travel rapidly away from their source. To evaluate the potential utility of eDNA techniques in stream systems, we designed targeted primers to amplify a short, species-specific DNA fragment for two secretive stream amphibian species in the northwestern region of the United States (Rocky Mountain tailed frogs, Ascaphus montanus, and Idaho giant salamanders, Dicamptodon aterrimus). We tested three DNA extraction and five PCR protocols to determine whether we could detect eDNA of these species in filtered water samples from five streams with varying densities of these species in central Idaho, USA. We successfully amplified and sequenced the targeted DNA regions for both species from stream water filter samples. We detected Idaho giant salamanders in all samples and Rocky Mountain tailed frogs in four of five streams and found some indication that these species are more difficult to detect using eDNA in early spring than in early fall. While the sensitivity of this method across taxa remains to be determined, the use of eDNA could revolutionize surveys for rare and invasive stream species. With this study, the utility of eDNA techniques for detecting aquatic vertebrates has been demonstrated across the majority of freshwater systems, setting the stage for an innovative transformation in approaches for aquatic research.
Being Successful and Being Thin: The Effects of Thin-Ideal Social Media Images With High Socioeconomic Status on Women's Body Image and Eating Behaviour

Social media has outpaced traditional media to be the most popular sociocultural channel to transmit thin-ideal images, an established trigger for body image concerns and disordered eating in women. With an experimental design, the present research first demonstrated that exposure to thin images on social media threatened women's body image and increased their unhealthy food consumption (Study 1). However, given that thin images posted on social media are usually from wealthier people, the present research hypothesised that it may not be the body shape but the perceived socioeconomic status (SES) of images that indeed have negative effects on women. By manipulating the perceived SES of thin images and incorporating a baseline control group (Study 2), the present research provided causal evidence for the hypothesis by indicating that viewing thin images with parallel-perceived SES could significantly buffer undesirable thin-ideal effects on self-objectification and food intake. Therefore, future research needs to pay more attention to the role of SES in the thin media images literature.
Context-aware replacement operations for data cleaning

Data cleaning focuses on the identification and removal of consistency constraint violations. Existing approaches only perform statistical repair operations, i.e. inserting average or default values. This results in consistent data, but these data have no similarity with the given inconsistent data anymore. The use of an ontology-based approach allows for the detection of semantically related context-aware correction suggestions. We define metrics that can be used to calculate the similarity of such correction suggestions. We introduce measures to identify semantic distances of concepts in ontologies. This ontology enables the detection of context-aware correction suggestions and the calculation of their similarity to the invalid tuple. These suggestions can be presented to end users in data cleaning environments. We introduce this approach in a cancer registry that collects data about cancer cases. We show how the proposed approach can support domain experts in the registry in data cleaning.
FAULT CLASSIFICATION FOR SELF-CHECKING CIRCUITS IMPLEMENTED IN FPGA

This paper focuses on a fault classification problem for concurrent error detection circuits based on error detecting codes. The proposed fault classification differs from the common classification, where the faults are divided into two groups – the testable faults and the untestable faults. The faults are divided into four groups in our approach, by their impact to fault secure and self-testing properties. Our fault simulation software has been used to evaluate the proposed fault classification on real benchmarks. The benchmarks were implemented in a FPGA, and stuck-at-1 and stuck-at-0 fault model has been considered.
Platelet factors stimulate fibroblasts and smooth muscle cells quiescent in plasma serum to proliferate

Whole blood serum is widely recognized as essential for the growth of diploid cells in culture. Dermal fibroblasts and arterial smooth muscle cells fail to proliferate in culture in the presence of serum derived from platelet-poor plasma. Platelet-poor plasma serum is capable of maintaining monkey arterial smooth muscle cells quiescent in culture at either low (1.5 X 10(3)) or high (2.0 X 10(4)) population densities. The proportion of cells traversing the cell cycle under these conditions was approximately 3 percent. Equal numbers of quiescent smooth muscle cells initiated DNA synthesis and cell division when treated with whole blood serum or with an equivalent quantity of platelet-poor plasma serum supplemented with a factor(s) derived from a supernate obtained after exposure of human platelets to purified thrombin in vitro. Exposure of quiescent cells to 5 percent whole blood serum or 5 percent platelet-poor plasma serum plus 5 μg/ml of crude platelet factor(s) preparations for 1 h stimulated as many cells to initiate DNA synthesis as did exposure for 24 hr, and was independent of the cell densities used in these experiments. Thus, one of the principal mitogens for fibroblasts and for arterial smooth muscle cells in culture present in all blood sera thus far examined appears to be derived from platelets. The system of diploid fibroblasts or smooth muscle cells grown in serum lacking platelet factor(s) permits one to use cells quiescent in the presence of optimal levels of serum and of the low molecular weight components of the defined medium for the study of growth control in culture. This system also permits the study of smooth muscle proliferation as it may relate to the proliferative response observed in atherogenesis in vivo.
Testing Parameter Constancy When the Regressor May Have a Near Unit Root

This paper considers testing a long run stable relationship among variables in the presence of a near unit root. Since each variable may have a unit root or near unit root, the the conventional asymptotic theory such as Andrews (1993, Econometrica) is not applicable. As an alternative, we propose modi ed xed regressor bootstrap. Fixed regressor bootstrap is originally proposed by Hansen (2000, Journal of Econometrics), and it assumes strict exogeneity. We modify the test so that it is applicable in the presence of endogeneity and serrial correlation in the cointegration equation error. In empirical study, we test the present value model and the expectations hypothesis. For the present value model, we detect change in the relationship in the early 1970s. For the expectations hypothesis, we fail to detect a change in the late 1970s when the Fed changed the operating procedure for the relatively short yields. Keywords: Parameter instability; Bootstrap; Cointegration; Near unit root JEL Classi cation: C22 I am grateful to Graham Elliott for his advice. I also thank Elena Pesavento and Guido Kuersteiner for helpful comments yCorresponding auther: Masako Miyanishi, Dept of Economics, University of Georgia, Athens GA 30602 U.S.A. , Phone: 1(706)542-3689, E-mail: masako@terry.uga. edu
Typical and atypical hierarchical routing protocols for WSNs : A review

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as the most preferable network for many applications which require pervasive computing. All such applications and environments need energy efficient routing. This has led to the evolution of hierarchical routing which has attracted many professionals towards this field for research and development. Hierarchical routing is energy-efficient and useful in several situations. It can be basically categorized in two types. First one is typical hierarchical routing protocols and second one is atypical hierarchical routing protocols. However, there are no such significant differences between both of them because atypical protocols are just a subset of typical hierarchical routing protocols. There are various survey papers which focus on typical routing protocols and very few papers which cover especially atypical routing protocols. There is no such paper which covers both categories collectively which can ease users to compare them for the best suitability. This survey aims to fulfill the same requirement and covers some renowned protocols from both categories.
CIP2A Promotes Proliferation of Spermatogonial Progenitor Cells and Spermatogenesis in Mice

Protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) is a critical regulator of protein serine/threonine phosphorylation. However, the physiological and developmental roles of different PP2A complexes are very poorly understood. Here, we show that a newly characterized PP2A inhibitory protein CIP2A is co-expressed with ki-67 and with self-renewal protein PLZF in the spermatogonial progenitor cell (SPC) population in the testis. CIP2A and PLZF expression was shown also to correlate Ki-67 expression in human testicular spermatogonia. Functionally, CIP2A mutant mouse testes exhibited smaller number of PLZF-positive SPCs and reduced sperm counts. Moreover, seminiferous tubuli cells isolated from CIP2A mutant mice showed reduced expression of Plzf and other renewal genes Oct-4 and Nanog at mRNA level. However, PLZF-deficient testes did not show altered CIP2A expression. Importantly, spermatogonia-specific restoration of CIP2A expression rescued PLZF expression and sperm production defects observed in CIP2A mutant mice. Taken together, these results reveal first physiological function for an emerging human oncoprotein CIP2A, and provide insights into maintenance of PLZF-positive progenitors. Moreover, demonstration that CIP2A expression can be systematically inhibited without severe consequences to normal mouse development and viability may have clinical relevance regarding targeting of oncogenic CIP2A for future cancer therapies.
Murder in the Arboretum: Comparing Character Models to Personality Models

Interactive Narrative often involves dialogue with virtual dramatic characters. In this paper we compare two kinds of models of character style: one based on models derived from the Big Five theory personality, and the other derived from a corpus-based method applied to characters and films from the IMSDb archive. We apply these models to character utterances for a pilot narrative-based outdoor augmented reality game called Murder in the Arboretum. We use an objective quantitative metric to estimate the quality of a character model, with the aim of predicting model quality without perceptual experiments. We show that corpus-based character models derived from individual characters are often more detailed and specific than personality based models, but that there is a strong correlation between personality judgments of original character dialogue and personality judgments of utterances generated for Murder in the Arboretum that use the derived character models.
Methods that remove batch effects while retaining group differences may lead to exaggerated confidence in downstream analyses

Abstract Removal of, or adjustment for, batch effects or center differences is generally required when such effects are present in data. In particular, when preparing microarray gene expression data from multiple cohorts, array platforms, or batches for later analyses, batch effects can have confounding effects, inducing spurious differences between study groups. Many methods and tools exist for removing batch effects from data. However, when study groups are not evenly distributed across batches, actual group differences may induce apparent batch differences, in which case batch adjustments may bias, usually deflate, group differences. Some tools therefore have the option of preserving the difference between study groups, e.g. using a two-way ANOVA model to simultaneously estimate both group and batch effects. Unfortunately, this approach may systematically induce incorrect group differences in downstream analyses when groups are distributed between the batches in an unbalanced manner. The scientific community seems to be largely unaware of how this approach may lead to false discoveries.
Online Scheduling of Equal-Length Jobs: Randomization and Restarts Help

The input of the studied scheduling problem is a set of jobs with equal processing times, where each job is specified by its release time and deadline. The goal is to determine a single-processor, non-preemptive schedule that maximizes the number of completed jobs. In the online version, each job arrives at its release time.
Immobilization in Surface-Tethered Lipid Vesicles as a New Tool for Single Biomolecule Spectroscopy

Single-molecule fluorescence studies of functional biomolecule dynamics rely on the ability to provide biologically relevant experimental conditions. Long measurement times on single molecules require their immobilization, which might modify their dynamics through interactions with the trapping medium, e.g., a glass surface or a polymer gel. In an effort to overcome this problem we have devised a new immobilization technique, based on the confinement of single biomolecules inside 100 nm surface-tethered lipid vesicles. The number of molecules in each vesicle can be accurately determined from fluorescence time traces; under our experimental conditions the number distribution of encapsulated molecules obeys a Poisson distribution with an average occupancy of 0.65 molecules per vesicle. It is further shown that the distribution of fluorescence polarization values of trapped molecules can serve as a sensitive probe for their freedom of motion and thus for the environment they sample inside the liposomes. Pola.
A tool for enhanced search of multilingual digital libraries of e-journals

This paper outlines the main features of Bibliša, a tool that offers various possibilities of enhancing queries submitted to large collections of TMX documents generated from aligned parallel articles residing in multilingual digital libraries of e-journals. The queries initiated by a simple or multiword keyword, in Serbian or English, can be expanded by Bibliša, both semantically and morphologically, using different supporting monolingual and multilingual resources, such as wordnets and electronic dictionaries. The tool operates within a complex system composed of several modules including a web application, which makes it readily accessible on the web. Its functionality has been tested on a collection of 44 TMX documents generated from articles published bilingually by the journal INFOtecha, yielding encouraging results. Further enhancements of the tool are underway, with the aim of transforming it from a powerful full-text and metadata search tool, to a useful translator's aid, which could be of assistance both in reviewing terminology used in context and in refining the multilingual resources used within the system.
On the usefulness of fuzzy SVMs and the extraction of fuzzy rules from SVMs

In this paper we reason about the usefulness of two recent trends in fuzzy methods in machine learning. That is, we discuss both fuzzy support vector machines (FSVMs) and the extraction of fuzzy rules from SVMs. First, we show that an FSVM is identical to a special type of SVM. Second, we categorize and analyze existing approaches to obtain fuzzy rules from SVMs. Finally, we question both trends and conclude with more promising alternatives.
Lysophosphatidic Acid Enhances Stromal Cell-Directed Angiogenesis

Ischemic diseases such as peripheral vascular disease (PVD) affect more than 15% of the general population and in severe cases result in ulcers, necrosis, and limb loss. While the therapeutic delivery of growth factors to promote angiogenesis has been widely investigated, large-scale implementation is limited by strategies to effectively deliver costly recombinant proteins. Multipotent adipose-derived stromal cells (ASC) and progenitor cells from other tissue compartments secrete bioactive concentrations of angiogenic molecules, making cell-based strategies for in situ delivery of angiogenic cytokines an exciting alternative to the use of recombinant proteins. Here, we show that the phospholipid lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) synergistically improves the proangiogenic effects of ASC in ischemia. We found that LPA upregulates angiogenic growth factor production by ASC under two- and three-dimensional in vitro models of serum deprivation and hypoxia (SD/H), and that these factors significantly enhance endothelial cell migration. The concurrent delivery of LPA and ASC in fibrin gels significantly improves vascularization in a murine critical hindlimb ischemia model compared to LPA or ASC alone, thus exhibiting the translational potential of this method. Furthermore, these results are achieved using an inexpensive lipid molecule, which is orders-of-magnitude less costly than recombinant growth factors that are under investigation for similar use. Our results demonstrate a novel strategy for enhancing cell-based strategies for therapeutic angiogenesis, with significant applications for treating ischemic diseases.
“We really protested”: The Influence of Sociopolitical Beliefs, Political Self-efficacy, and Campus Racial Climate on Civic Engagement among Black College Students attending Predominantly White Institutions

Abstract:The current study examined sociopolitical worldviews (just world beliefs, racial stigma consciousness), political self-efficacy, and campus racial climate as influences on civic engagement behaviors among Black college students (N = 322) attending selective predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Findings highlight varied patterns across college men and women. Endorsing just world beliefs related to more civic engagement over time, and this relationship was stronger for more politically efficacious Black men. Among Black women, perceiving negative campus racial climate (racial tension and mistrust) promoted civic engagement, especially among those higher in political efficacy. Results highlight the importance of considering individual and contextual-level factors in studying Black college students’ civic engagement. The authors discuss ways to provide support for students given the current sociopolitical climates on many college campuses.
Multiprocessor SoC software design flows

Typical design flows supporting the software development for multiprocessor systems are based on a board support package and high-level programming interfaces. These software design flows fail to support critical design activities, such as design space exploration or software synthesis. One can observe, however, that design flows based on a formal model of computation can overcome these limitations. In this article, we analyze the major challenges in multiprocessor software development and present a taxonomy of software design flows based on this analysis. Afterwards, we focus on design flows based on the Kahn process network (KPN) model of computation and elaborate on corresponding design automation techniques. We argue that the productivity of software developers and the quality of designs could be considerably increased by making use of these techniques.
System Life Expectancy and the Maintenance Effort: Exploring Their Equilibration

Aging information systems are expensive to maintain and most are eventually retired and replaced. But what determines (in the choices made by managers) whether and when a system reaches end-of-life? What shapes managers' judgements about a system's remaining life expectancy and do these judgments influence the maintenance effort itself? System maintenance and prospective replacement are examined here in new terms, positing that managers "equilibrate" (balance) their allocation of maintenance effort with their expectations of a system's remaining life. Drawing from data on 758 systems among 54 organizations, support is found for an exploratory structural equation model in which the relationship between maintenance effort and remaining life expectancy is newly explained. A "portfolio effect," reflecting a system's familial complexity, is also found to be directly and positively related to the maintenance effort. A further finding is that a system's size is directly and positively associated with its remaining life expectancy. Notwithstanding normative research suggesting the contrary, larger systems may tend to be longer-lived than smaller systems. Practically, the suggestion is made that better documented and monitored portfolios, together with regular, periodic performance assessments, can lead to better management of systems' life cycles.