Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Religion and Interracial Romance: The Effects of Religious Affiliation, Public and Devotional Practices, and Biblical Literalism

Objective This study examines how religious affiliations, salience, beliefs, and practices influence engagement in interracial dating or romance. Methods Bivariate and multivariate analyses are employed using data from the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey (N = 1,268). Logistic regression models are estimated in order to determine how certain dimensions of religious life predict whether one has engaged in interracial dating or romance, net of sociodemographic and ideological controls. Results Relative to evangelicals, mainline Protestants are less likely to have engaged in interracial romance. Those who frequently attend church and affirm biblical literalism are less likely to have dated across race, but those who engage in devotional practices such as prayer and sacred text reading are more likely to have interracialy dated. Conclusion The relationship between religion and interracial romance is more complex than previously thought. Future studies should both acknowledge and account for this complexity in their analyses.
The conceptualisation and measurement of combat readiness for peace-support operations – an exploratory study

The aim of this study was to conceptualise combat readiness and to construct a normative measurement instrument for use within the context of peace-support operations. The Peace-Support Operations Questionnaire (PSOQ) was developed comprising of three types of items, namely an associated component, a disassociated component, and certain generic items applicable to both components. The sample comprised 461 soldiers of the South African National Defence Force. A second-order factor analysis on the 15 sub-scores of the first-order factor analysis yielded two factors. These factors were interpreted as Military Climate and Discipline. The two factors were subjected to an item analysis and yielded reliability coefficients of 0,987 and 0,791. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Balancing information exposure in social networks

Social media has brought a revolution on how people are consuming news. Beyond the undoubtedly large number of advantages brought by social-media platforms, a point of criticism has been the creation of echo chambers and filter bubbles, caused by social homophily and algorithmic personalization. In this paper we address the problem of balancing the information exposure in a social network. We assume that two opposing campaigns (or viewpoints) are present in the network, and that network nodes have different preferences towards these campaigns. Our goal is to find two sets of nodes to employ in the respective campaigns, so that the overall information exposure for the two campaigns is balanced. We formally define the problem, characterize its hardness, develop approximation algorithms, and present experimental evaluation results. Our model is inspired by the literature on influence maximization, but we offer significant novelties. First, balance of information exposure is modeled by a symmetric difference function, which is neither monotone nor submodular, and thus, not amenable to existing approaches. Second, while previous papers consider a setting with selfish agents and provide bounds on best response strategies (i.e., move of the last player), we consider a setting with a centralized agent and provide bounds for a global objective function.
Trade credit, international reserves and sovereign debt

We present a unified model of sovereign debt, trade credit and international reserves. Our model shows that access to short-term trade credit and gross international reserves critically affect the outcome of sovereign debt renegotiations. Whereas competitive banks do optimally lend for the accumulation of borrowed reserves that strengthen the bargaining position of borrowers, they also have incentives to restrict the supply of short-term trade credit during renegotiations. We first show that they effectively do so and then derive propositions that : I) establish the size of sovereign debt haircuts as a function of economic fundamentals and preferences ; II) predict that defaults occur during recessions rather than booms, contrary to reputation based models ; III) provide a rationale for holding costly borrowed reserves and, IV) show that the stock of borrowed international reserves tends to increase when global interest rates are low.
Spatially segregated transcription and translation in cells of the endomembrane-containing bacterium Gemmata obscuriglobus

Significance Eukaryotic (plant and animal) cells possess a nuclear membrane that separates the two stages of gene expression (transcription and translation), whereas prokaryotic (bacteria and archaea) cells lack the nuclear membrane barrier to colocated transcription and translation. However, cells of the bacterium Gemmata obscuriglobus possess extensive intracellular membranes, resulting in superficially eukaryote-like cellular complexity. We have found that a substantial amount of G. obscuriglobus translation is uncoupled from transcription, broadening our understanding of the spatial organization of bacterial gene expression, which currently is based entirely on a handful of model species. This broader understanding provides a useful background for consideration of the evolutionary development of eukaryotic cellular complexity and how it led to decoupled processes of gene expression in eukaryotes. The dogma of coupled transcription and translation in bacteria has been challenged by recent reports of spatial segregation of these processes within the relatively simple cellular organization of the model organisms Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis. The bacterial species Gemmata obscuriglobus possesses an extensive endomembrane system. The membranes generate a very convoluted intracellular architecture in which some of the cell’s ribosomes appear to have less direct access to the cell’s nucleoid(s) than others. This observation prompted us to test the hypothesis that a substantial proportion of G. obscuriglobus translation may be spatially segregated from transcription. Using immunofluorescence and immunoelectron microscopy, we showed that translating ribosomes are localized throughout the cell, with a quantitatively greater proportion found in regions distal to nucleoid(s). Our results extend information about the phylogenetic and morphological diversity of bacteria in which the spatial organization of transcription and translation has been studied. These findings also suggest that endomembranes may provide an obstacle to colocated transcription and translation, a role for endomembranes that has not been reported previously for a prokaryotic organism. Our studies of G. obscuriglobus may provide a useful background for consideration of the evolutionary development of eukaryotic cellular complexity and how it led to decoupled processes of gene expression in eukaryotes.
Implementing secure network-assisted D2D framework in live 3GPP LTE deployment

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication constitutes an emerging network paradigm that promises to unlock decisive capacity gains without the need for expensive cellular resources. However, while deployment of this promising enabler technology in 5G-grade mobile networks is currently underway, the complete understanding of feasible use cases and their respective limitations has not yet been provided in literature. Today, employing D2D connectivity both in human-to-human and machine-to-machine scenarios, the attention of research community focuses on security, privacy, and trust. Inspired by this increasing demand, we provide in this paper a comprehensive summary on our live trial of secure cellular-assisted D2D communication technology within the full-featured 3GPP LTE network deployment. Correspondingly, we describe a novel D2D framework capable of delivering secure direct connectivity even if the managing cellular link is temporarily not available (unreliable), so that communicating devices could continue to exchange confidential data in their private coalitions. To this end, our prototype implementation characterizes the practical capabilities of secure D2D communication in dynamic, urban environments suffering from intermittent 3GPP LTE connectivity.
Oocyst Shedding by Cats Fed Isolated Bradyzoites and Comparison of Infectivity of Bradyzoites of the VEG Strain Toxoplasma gondii to Cats and Mice

Infectivity of bradyzoites of the VEG strain of Toxoplasma gondii was compared in cats and mice. For this, tissue cysts were separated from brains of infected mice using a Percoll gradient, and bradyzoites were released by incubation in acidic pepsin solution. After filtration through a 3-µm filter, bradyzoites were counted and diluted 10-fold in RPMI tissue culture medium. Dilutions estimated to have 1, 10, 100, and 1,000 bradyzoites were fed to cats and inoculated into mice, orally or subcutaneously (s.c.). Three experiments were performed. In experiment 1, 2 of 2 cats fed 1,000 bradyzoites, 1 of 2 cats fed 100 bradyzoites, 1 of 4 cats fed 10 bradyzoites, and 1 of 4 cats fed 1 bradyzoite shed millions of oocysts; 1,000 bradyzoites were infective to all 4 inoculated mice s.c. but not to 4 mice inoculated orally, and 100 bradyzoites were infective to 2 of 4 mice injected s.c. but not to 4 mice inoculated orally. All 16 mice (8 oral, 8 s.c.) injected with 1 or 10 bradyzoites were negative for T. gondii. In experiment 2, 1 of 4 cats fed 10 counted bradyzoites shed oocysts; the same inocula were not infective to 4 mice injected s.c. In experiment 3, 3 of 4 cats fed 1,000 bradyzoites shed oocysts and the inocula were infective to 10 of 10 mice s.c. and 4 of 10 mice orally; 4 of 4 cats fed 100 bradyzoites shed oocysts and the inocula were infective to 6 of 10 mice s.c. and 0 of 10 mice orally; 10 bradyzoites were not infective to cats and mice. Results indicate that bradyzoites are more infective to cats than to mice, and cats can shed millions of oocysts after ingesting just a few bradyzoites.
Genome-wide analysis of synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms in Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex organisms: resolution of genetic relationships among closely related microbial strains.

Several human pathogens (e.g., Bacillus anthracis, Yersinia pestis, Bordetella pertussis, Plasmodium falciparum, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis) have very restricted unselected allelic variation in structural genes, which hinders study of the genetic relationships among strains and strain-trait correlations. To address this problem in a representative pathogen, 432 M. tuberculosis complex strains from global sources were genotyped on the basis of 230 synonymous (silent) single nucleotide polymorphisms (sSNPs) identified by comparison of four genome sequences. Eight major clusters of related genotypes were identified in M. tuberculosis sensu stricto, including a single cluster representing organisms responsible for several large outbreaks in the United States and Asia. All M. tuberculosis sensu stricto isolates of previously unknown phylogenetic position could be rapidly and unambiguously assigned to one of the eight major clusters, thus providing a facile strategy for identifying organisms that are clonally related by descent. Common clones of M. tuberculosis sensu stricto and M. bovis are distinct, deeply branching genotypic complexes whose extant members did not emerge directly from one another in the recent past. sSNP genotyping rapidly delineates relationships among closely related strains of pathogenic microbes and allows construction of genetic frameworks for examining the distribution of biomedically relevant traits such as virulence, transmissibility, and host range.
Nonabelian gauge field and dual description of fuzzy sphere

In matrix models, higher dimensional D-branes are obtained by imposing a noncommutative relation to coordinates of lower dimensional D-branes. On the other hand, a dual description of this noncommutative space is provided by higher dimensional D-branes with gauge fields. Fuzzy spheres can appear as a configuration of lower dimensional D-branes in a constant R-R field strength background. In this paper, we consider a dual description of higher dimensional fuzzy spheres by introducing nonabelian gauge fields on higher dimensional spherical D-branes. By using the Born-Infeld action, we show that a fuzzy 2k-sphere and spherical D2k-branes with a nonabelian gauge field whose Chern character is nontrivial are the same objects when n is large. We discuss a relationship between the noncommutative geometry and nonabelian gauge fields. Nonabelian gauge fields are represented by noncommutative matrices including the coordinate dependence. A similarity to the quantum Hall system is also studied.
The Poggendorff Illusion with Subjective Contours

Gregory (1972) has claimed that the Poggendorff misalignment effect occurs when the collinear obliques are separated by subjective rather than real contours. He used two figures to demonstrate this variant of the illusion. Two experiments to test the claim are reported. The first showed that apparent misalignment in one of the two original figures is no greater than that with two obliques alone (the oblique line effect), but misalignment in the other is greater than with two oblique lines and than with a control without subjective contours. The second experiment showed that apparent misalignment in the second figure was less than in two control figures without subjective contours. Since this reduced effect was probably due to the nature of the intersection between the oblique and a semi-circular element, the role of subjective contours remains unsettled.
Pragmatic markers and discourse coherence relations in English and Catalan oral narrative

This article explores the role that markers play in the pragmatic discourse structure of Catalan and English oral narratives. It is argued that their meaning is directly related to the sort of coherence relation that they establish with preceding and following propositions and discourse segments, centring the discussion on four discourse structures/components: ideational, rhetorical, sequential and inferential. The aim is to show the textual form-pragmatic function relationship by means of specific lexical units placed at specific parts of the narrative. The hypothesis held in this article is that pragmatic markers help in the organization of narrative segments and that their semanticopragmatic traits make them appropriate for their use in specific segments.
Simplified Analysis of the Electric Power Losses for On-Shore Wind Farms Considering Weibull Distribution Parameters

Electric power losses are constantly present during the service life of wind farms and must be considered in the calculation of the income arising from selling the produced electricity. It is typical to estimate the electrical losses in the design stage as those occurring when the wind farm operates at rated power, nevertheless, it is necessary to determine a method for checking if the actual losses meet the design requirements during the operation period. In this paper, we prove that the electric losses at rated power should not be considered as a reference level and a simple methodology will be developed to analyse and foresee the actual losses in a set period as a function of the wind resource in such period, defined according to the Weibull distribution, and the characteristics of the wind farm electrical infrastructure. This methodology facilitates a simple way, to determine in the design phase and to check during operation, the actual electricity losses.
Cortical signature of patients with HBV-related cirrhosis without overt hepatic encephalopathy: a morphometric analysis

Previous studies have shown that patients with hepatitis B virus-related cirrhosis (HBV-RC) without overt hepatic encephalopathy (OHE) are associated with a varying degree of cognitive dysfunction. Several resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have been conducted to explore the neural correlates of such cognitive deficits, whereas little effort has been made to investigate the cortical integrity in cirrhotic patients without OHE. Here, using cortical thickness, surface area and local gyrification index (lGI), this study performed a comprehensive analysis on the cortical morphometry of patients with HBV-RC without OHE (HBV-RC-NOHE) vs. matched healthy controls. Compared with healthy controls, we found significantly increased cortical thickness in the bilateral lingual and parahippocampal gyrus, right posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, peri-calcarine sulcus and fusiform gyrus in patient with HBV-RC-NOHE, which may closely relate to be the low-grade brain edema. Cortical gyrification analysis showed significantly increased lGI in the left superior and inferior parietal cortex as well as lateral occipital cortex, which was speculated to be associated with disruptions in white matter connectivity and sub-optimal intra-cortical organization. In addition, the mean cortical thickness/lGI of the regions with structural abnormalities was shown to be negatively correlated with psychometric hepatic encephalopathy score (PHES) of the patients with HBV-RC-NOHE. These morphological changes may serve as potential markers for the preclinical diagnosis and progression of HBV-RC-NOHE.
Sketching Sampled Data Streams

Sampling is used as a universal method to reduce the running time of computations -- the computation is performed on a much smaller sample and then the result is scaled to compensate for the difference in size. Sketches are a popular approximation method for data streams and they proved to be useful for estimating frequency moments and aggregates over joins. A possibility to further improve the time performance of sketches is to compute the sketch over a sample of the stream rather than the entire data stream.In this paper we analyze the behavior of the sketch estimator when computed over a sample of the stream, not the entire data stream, for the size of join and the self-join size problems. Our analysis is developed for a generic sampling process. We instantiate the results of the analysis for all three major types of sampling -- Bernoulli sampling which is used for load shedding, sampling with replacement which is used to generate i.i. d. samples from a distribution, and sampling without replacement which is used by online aggregation engines -- and compare these particular results with the results of the basic sketch estimator. Our experimental results show that the accuracy of the sketch computed over a small sample of the data is, in general, close to the accuracy of the sketch estimator computed over the entire data even when the sample size is only $10\%$ or less of the dataset size. This is equivalent to a speed-up factor of at least $10$ when updating the sketch.
Diversity Strategies and Business Logic

Firms have many reasons to employ ethnic minorities or refrain from employing them. Management scholars focusing on workplace diversity have made several attempts to describe these reasons, but a theoretically grounded framework is still missing. This article outlines a novel approach to this topic based on resource dependence theory. We propose a typology of diversity strategies defined by the kind of critical resources that ethnic minorities provide to organizations. Focusing on business logic, the typology offers many applications for future research on antecedents and consequences of the strategies, a diverse competence pool, and power relations. We suggest resource dependence theory as a fruitful explanatory approach to diversity and describe practical implications for different actors.
On automatic text segmentation

Automatic text segmentation, which is the task of breaking a text into topically-consistent segments, is a fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing, Document Classification and Information Retrieval. Text segmentation can significantly improve the performance of various text mining algorithms, by splitting heterogeneous documents into homogeneous fragments and thus facilitating subsequent processing. Applications range from screening of radio communication transcripts to document summarization, from automatic document classification to information visualization, from automatic filtering to security policy enforcement - all rely on, or can largely benefit from, automatic document segmentation. In this article, a novel approach for automatic text and data stream segmentation is presented and studied. The proposed automatic segmentation algorithm takes advantage of feature extraction and unusual behaviour detection algorithms developed in [4, 5]. It is entirely unsupervised and flexible to allow segmentation at different scales, such as short paragraphs and large sections. We also briefly review the most popular and important algorithms for automatic text segmentation and present detailed comparisons of our approach with several of those state-of-the-art algorithms.
Stakeholder Perspectives on Chronic Wasting Disease Risk and Management on the Canadian Prairies

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is an infectious disease caused by a prion that results in neurodegeneration and death in cervids. This study uses Q methodology to characterize stakeholder perspectives about CWD risk and management on the Canadian prairies, and to understand the potential for CWD management using an adaptive governance framework. Workshops and individual interviews were conducted with 16 stakeholders in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Problem definitions framed CWD as a technical problem calling for technical solutions. All perspectives on solutions focused on the importance of education and the idea that management should fit within a national management strategy. A unique Aboriginal perspective also emerged and warrants further exploration. Results also indicated that although stakeholders wish to be involved with CWD management, they trust and expect government leadership, and are disinterested in adaptive governance. Challenges for stakeholder involvement in Canadian CWD management include a lack of sufficient leadership and general ambivalence.
Childhood Psychological and Physical Abuse: Psychopathology, Dissociation, and Axis I Diagnosis

ABSTRACT The present study compared (1) college students who reported childhood physical and psychological abuse (combined; N = 35) with (2) students who reported psychological abuse alone (psychological; N = 30), and with (3) students who reported no history of childhood abuse (no abuse; N = 35). Combined abuse and psychological abuse participants were more likely to receive an Axis I diagnosis on a structured interview and to report more dissociative experiences than were no abuse participants. In addition, a structured interview for dissociative disorders was the single measure that differentiated psychologically abused participants from participants reporting combined abuse and no abuse. However, the most psychological impairment was evident in the combined abuse group. Relative to participants who reported no abuse history, combined abuse participants reported more dissociative symptoms on a structured interview and more symptoms of general psycho-pathology, depression, and state and trait anger on self-report measures.