Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mortality salience and religion: divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non-religious

Religious and non-religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non-religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, allegedly written by a radical Muslim student. Results indicated that the non-religious reliably showed the conventional cultural worldview defense by devaluating the content of the message and decreasing support for the civil rights of anti-Western individuals when death was salient. No such effect was found for the religious. Religious and non-religious participants did not differ in self-esteem levels or in death-thought accessibility. These results suggest that a religious stance among believers plays a defensive role against the awareness of death. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Large-Scale Assessment Participation and Reporting Issues: Implications for Local Decisions

Schools and districts are implementing with increasing frequency educational accountability systems that require data on student performance. The student performance data are to be reported and used in various ways, such as to provide input for evaluations of teachers and to make school funding decisions. These accountability systems use data from largescale assessments administered to large numbers of students, not data obtained from individualized assessments such as those collected during determination of eligibility for special education services or during re-evaluations. When large-scale assessment systems are implemented, several is-
Assessing Academic Support: The Effects of Tutoring on Student Learning Outcomes

This article describes the developments in the assessment journey of a tutoring academic support program in a community college. The goal of our study was to determine if the Learning Center was doing what it said it was doing and what it could do to improve its services. Traditionally, the center had been evaluated on such accomplishments as serving a growing number of students. In this study, the Learning Center made a significant shift to assessment in terms of student learning outcomes. This initial process was not without reversals and constraints, as the center reexamined its goals and searched for measures of student learning. While the results confirmed the center was meeting its student learning outcomes, the data and process also stimulated many questions.
Redefining the Scl-70 indirect immunofluorescence pattern: autoantibodies to DNA topoisomerase I yield a specific compound immunofluorescence pattern

Objectives. To report on a novel IIF pattern specifically associated with antibodies to DNA topo I. Methods. A novel compound IF pattern, designated Scl-70 pattern, was characterized in routine ANA-HEp-2 IIF screening. Within the last 3 years, all serum samples presenting the Scl-70 pattern at the ANA-HEp2 IIF screening were tested for anti-topo I reactivity. Conversely, 16 serum samples with known anti-topo I reactivity and affinity-purified anti-topo I antibody preparations were tested for the Scl-70 pattern. Results. The Scl-70 pattern comprised the staining of five cellular regions: nucleus, nucleolus and cytoplasm in interphase cells; nucleolar organizing region (NOR) and chromosomes in mitotic cells. All 81 serum samples selected as Scl-70 pattern reacted with topo I. All 16 anti-topo I samples and antibody preparations reproduced the Scl-70 pattern. This compound IF pattern was consistently observed in different commercial HEp-2 cell slides and in home-made slides with HEp-2 cells and human fibroblasts fixed with alternative protocols. Double IIF experiments demonstrated the co-localization of topo I and human upstream binding factor at the NOR. Conclusions. The Scl-70 pattern belongs to the group of compound IF patterns that hold strong association with the respective autoantibody specificities, such as that observed with centromere protein F (CENP-F) and nuclear mitotic apparatus-1 (NuMA-1) protein. The identification of the Scl-70 pattern at routine ANA-HEp-2 IIF screening may lead to implementation of specific tests for the identification of anti-topo I antibodies. In addition, the Scl-70 pattern outlines cellular domains other than those previously reported for topo I, which is of interest for further understanding the roles of this enzyme in cell biology.
Concurrent Planning: A Retrospective Study of the Continuities and Discontinuities of Care, and Their Impact on the Development of Infants and Young Children Placed for Adoption by the Coram Concurrent Planning Project

This study by Jenny Kenrick looks at the impact on children of the intensive contact with birth parents that is an integral part of concurrent planning (CP) placements. While there is an assumption of the benefits of continuity and of a reduction in numbers of placements for infants, there can also be discontinuities caused by the frequency of contact sessions and separations from carers. CP carers of 27 children who were later adopted and of one who was rehabilitated to birth parents reflected retrospectively on the experience of contact for the infants. For these children, concurrent planning achieved early placements — the majority by five months of age — that led to permanency. Any discontinuities at the time seemed to be compensated for in the long term by the attachments to their CP carers. Some recommendations to reduce the effects of the discontinuities are considered in relation to particular stages in the emotional development of the infants.
REGULATION AND CONTROL OF SUBJECTIVITY AND PRIVATE LIFE IN THE CONTEXT OF ARMED CONFLICT IN COLOMBIA1

A qualitative study was carried out in four municipalities in four different conflict zones in Colombia. Intrafamilial violence and gender violence are studied through the testimonies of the people interviewed. The impact was analysed in terms of the exercise of control over the civilian population by paramilitaries in relation to subjectivity, the family, social networks and the prevailing moral order. In effect, the strengthening of barriers between traditional gender identities has enabled a de-structuring of traditional masculinity through moral co-optation, the reinforcement of traditional feminine identity and the objectification of the sexuality of young women, at the same time as they are manipulated sexually and emotionally. In general, strong legitimation of the model of the armed fighter as a paradigm of masculinity is found in children. In addition, the de-structuring of the family and its manipulation as a means of influence over civil society is one of the strategies employed for the installation of a regime of terror that fractures social networks. It does this through the erosion of confidence and the legitimation and mystification of the power of an actor whose mediation in inter-family and micro-social conflicts has been legitimated, instrumentalizing and scaling up traditional violence, taking advantage of the power vacuum and moral weaknesses in local culture.
Post-traumatic stress disorder: new directions in pharmacotherapy

SUMMARY As many as 10% of the population experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at some time in their lives. It often runs a severe, chronic and treatment-resistant course. This article reviews the evidence base for typically recommended treatments such as cognitive–behavioural therapy (CBT), eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). It tabulates the major randomised controlled trials of SSRIs and trauma-focused CBT and reviews research on novel treatments such as ketamine, MDMA, quetiapine, propranolol and prazosin.
Combining coregularization and consensus-based self-training for multilingual text categorization

We investigate the problem of learning document classifiers in a multilingual setting, from collections where labels are only partially available. We address this problem in the framework of multiview learning, where different languages correspond to different views of the same document, combined with semi-supervised learning in order to benefit from unlabeled documents. We rely on two techniques, coregularization and consensus-based self-training, that combine multiview and semi-supervised learning in different ways. Our approach trains different monolingual classifiers on each of the views, such that the classifiers' decisions over a set of unlabeled examples are in agreement as much as possible, and iteratively labels new examples from another unlabeled training set based on a consensus across language-specific classifiers. We derive a boosting-based training algorithm for this task, and analyze the impact of the number of views on the semi-supervised learning results on a multilingual extension of the Reuters RCV1/RCV2 corpus using five different languages. Our experiments show that coregularization and consensus-based self-training are complementary and that their combination is especially effective in the interesting and very common situation where there are few views (languages) and few labeled documents available.
Congruence between mother and handicapped child's view of the child's sense of adjustment

Abstract The responses of 22 physically handicapped children to selected items of the Piers‐Harris Self Concept Scale for Children were compared with their mothers’ responses to equivalent items of the Personality Inventory for Children. The direction of the responses, whether children were more or less positive in self‐evaluation than mothers perceived them to. be, was analyzed with respect to sex of child, type of school attended, and diagnosis of handicap (cerebral palsy or spina bifida). Only diagnosis of handicap was significantly related to the tendency for children to be either less or more positive in response to the items than their mothers, with cerebral palsy children more positive and spina bifida children consistently less positive in direction. Possible explanations are considered, with particular reference to the children's views regarding peer relationships.
Comparison of the Gigabit Ethernet full-duplex repeater, CSMA/CD, and 1000/100-Mbps switched Ethernet

The full-duplex repeater (FDR) has previously been proposed as an alternative to half-duplex operation using CSMA/CD for controlling shared access to Gigabit Ethernet. In this paper, the basic FDR architecture is described and two extensions for traffic control are introduced. Using simulation methods, the performance of the Gigabit FDR is studied under different topologies and population sizes for a range of offered load. It is shown that the FDR provides a dramatic performance improvement over CSMA/CD (using both BEB and BLAM arbitration) at high load. The Gigabit FDR is also compared with switched Ethernet in the context of medical image retrieval. It is shown that for medical image retrieval, the performance of the Gigabit FDR is much better than 100/100 or 1000/100-Mbps switched Ethernet, and equivalent to 1000/1000-Mbps switched Ethernet for low levels of non-image background traffic.
Change of Body Composition and Adipokines and Their Relationship with Insulin Resistance across Pubertal Development in Obese and Nonobese Chinese Children: The BCAMS Study

A transient increase in insulin resistance (IR) is a component of puberty. We investigated the impact of body composition and adipokines on IR during puberty in Chinese children. This study included 3223 schoolchildren aged 6–18 years. IR was calculated using homeostasis model assessment (HOMA-IR). We revealed that body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference increased gradually during puberty in both genders, while fat-mass percentage (FAT%) increased steadily only in girls. Change of leptin showed striking sexual dimorphisms: in girls leptin increased steadily during puberty, whereas in boys, after a transient rise at the beginning of puberty, leptin declined by Tanner staging even in those overweight or obese. Inversely, adiponectin level decreased significantly during puberty. In both genders, HOMA-IR started to increase at the beginning of puberty, peaked in the middle, and revised at late puberty in overweight/obesity boys while it stayed high till the end of puberty in girls and normal weight boys. Multivariate regression analysis revealed that leptin presented a stronger indicator of HOMA-IR than anthropometric measures during puberty. Our results demonstrated that gender-specific FAT% and leptin changed with pubertal development. Leptin emerged as a stronger predictor of IR than traditional anthropometric indices, suggesting a prominent role in the development of pubertal IR.
The Proprotein Convertase Subtilisin/Kexin Type 9-resistant R410S Low Density Lipoprotein Receptor Mutation

Familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) is characterized by severely elevated low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Herein, we identified an FH patient presenting novel compound heterozygote mutations R410S and G592E of the LDL receptor (LDLR). The patient responded modestly to maximum rosuvastatin plus ezetimibe therapy, even in combination with a PCSK9 monoclonal antibody injection. Using cell biology and molecular dynamics simulations, we aimed to define the underlying mechanism(s) by which these LDLR mutations affect LDL metabolism and lead to hypercholesterolemia. Our data showed that the LDLR-G592E is a class 2b mutant, because it mostly failed to exit the endoplasmic reticulum and was degraded. Even though LDLR-R410S and LDLR-WT were similar in levels of cell surface and total receptor and bound equally well to LDL or extracellular PCSK9, the LDLR-R410S was resistant to exogenous PCSK9-mediated degradation in endosomes/lysosomes and showed reduced LDL internalization and degradation relative to LDLR-WT. Evidence is provided for a tighter association of LDL with LDLR-R410S at acidic pH, a reduced LDL delivery to late endosomes/lysosomes, and an increased release in the medium of the bound/internalized LDL, as compared with LDLR-WT. These data suggested that LDLR-R410S recycles loaded with its LDL-cargo. Our findings demonstrate that LDLR-R410S represents an LDLR loss-of-function through a novel class 8 FH-causing mechanism, thereby rationalizing the observed phenotype.
Cross Sectional Survey of Influenza Antibodies before and during the 2009 Pandemic in Shenzhen, China

Much information is available for the 2009 H1N1 influenza immunity response, but little is known about the antibody change in seasonal influenza before and during the novel influenza A pandemic. In this study, we conducted a cross-sectional serological survey of 4 types of major seasonal influenza in March and September 2009 on a full range of age groups, to investigate seasonal influenza immunity response before and during the outbreak of the sH1N1 influenza in Shenzhen – the largest migration city in China. We found that the 0–5 age group had an increased antibody level for all types of seasonal influenza during the pandemic compared to the pre-outbreak level, in contrast with almost all other age groups, in which the antibody level decreased. Also, distinct from the antibodies of A/H3N2, B/Yamagata and B/Victoria that decreased significantly during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the antibody of A/H1N1 showed no statistical difference from the pre-outbreak level. The results suggest that the antibodies against the 2009 sH1N1 cross-reacted with seasonal H1N1. Moreover, the 0–5 age group was under attack by both seasonal and 2009 H1N1 influenza during the pandemic, hence vaccination merely against a new strain of flu might not be enough to protect the youngest group.
The Search for Meaning after Pregnancy Loss: An Autoethnography

The focus of this autoethnography is the often hidden and marginalized experience of pregnancy loss. Through an exploration of “the search for meaning” in the aftermath of three different losses over a period of 9 years, I seek to problematize Western discourses which, influenced by Enlightenment ideals, adhere to linear notions of progress. Such discourses can be argued to sustain an imperative to create positive meaning from traumatic life experience, to gain beneficial insight from suffering, and ultimately to triumph over adversity. In articulating a messier and more ambiguous story, the difficulties of living through and voicing experience, which fails to conform to such a framework, is highlighted.
Statistical Transmit Antenna Subset Selection for Limited Feedback MIMO Systems

In this paper, we investigate statistical transmit antenna subset selection to improve the capacity of wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with linear receivers. In order to reduce feedback overhead, we allocate equal power and equal rate to all selected transmit antennas. The equal data rate is determined by the minimum post-detection signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and adjusted every channel instance. To reduce feedback overhead further and channel estimation burden for all transmit antennas every channel instance, the antenna selection is based on the long-term statistics of spatially correlated MIMO fading channels. In particular, we first derive an analytical closed-form expression for the expectation of the lower bound on the capacity using the smallest eigenvalue distribution of a Wishart matrix. Then, we propose a transmit antenna subset selection criterion of maximizing this average lower-bound capacity. Numerical results show that the proposed selection scheme improves the performance with small feedback overhead
Cardiorespiratory-based sleep staging in subjects with obstructive sleep apnea

A cardiorespiratory-based automatic sleep staging system for subjects with sleep-disordered breathing is described. A simplified three-state system is used: Wakefulness (W), rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (R), and non-REM sleep (S). The system scores the sleep stages in standard 30-s epochs. A number of features associated with the epoch RR-intervals, an inductance plethysmography estimate of rib cage respiratory effort, and an electrocardiogram-derived respiration (EDR) signal were investigated. A subject-specific quadratic discriminant classifier was trained, randomly choosing 20% of the subject's epochs (in appropriate proportions of W, S and R) as the training data. The remaining 80% of epochs were presented to the classifier for testing. An estimated classification accuracy of 79% (Cohen's /spl kappa/ value of 0.56) was achieved. When a similar subject-independent classifier was trained, using epochs from all other subjects as the training data, a drop in classification accuracy to 67% (/spl kappa/=0.32) was observed. The subjects were further broken in groups of low apnoea-hypopnea index (AHI) and high AHI and the experiments repeated. The subject-specific classifier performed better on subjects with low AHI than high AHI; the performance of the subject-independent classifier is not correlated with AHI. For comparison an electroencephalograms (EEGs)-based classifier was trained utilizing several standard EEG features. The subject-specific classifier yielded an accuracy of 87% (/spl kappa/=0.75), and an accuracy of 84% (/spl kappa/=0.68) was obtained for the subject-independent classifier, indicating that EEG features are quite robust across subjects. We conclude that the cardiorespiratory signals provide moderate sleep-staging accuracy, however, features exhibit significant subject dependence which presents potential limits to the use of these signals in a general subject-independent sleep staging system.
Communication with young children in preschool: the complex matter of a child perspective

This article discusses results obtained from a study on the contribution of the preschool teacher as a curriculum-maker in preschool. The research question addressed is ‘what is the characteristic for the curriculum offered, as it appears in one teacher's verbal communication with 1–3-year-old children? ’ The research area is motivated by the need for knowledge about the implications that a goal-oriented preschool curriculum and broad discretion for teachers might imply for activities in preschool. This study was carried out in Sweden, and the empirical data consist of videotaped observations of communication between a single teacher and a number of children aged between one and three during one morning in preschool. The results show that the teacher frequently uses questions as a means of communication, where a large number of shifts between different children and different issues are particularly characteristic. Although this contributes to a child perspective, it also implies a teacher-centred position and a fragmented way of exercising the discretion vis-à-vis the curriculum. The findings are discussed and related to curriculum theory and to early childhood perspectives.
Detecting Buildings in Historical Photographs Using Bag-of-Keypoints

The strategies for the preservation of historical documents can include their digitization, which is an effective way to make them publicly available while preventing degradation of the original sources. The Arquivo Público Mineiro (APM), the Archives of the State of Minas Gerais, has a collection of historical photographs from Brazil, and some of them have been digitized. The availability of digital copies of historical photographs makes it possible to apply Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) techniques to alleviate the huge manual effort that is put nowadays into their description and indexing. On the other side, such images are usually more challenging than modern photographs, because of the poor quality of the originals and several degradation effects.In this work, it is proposed a technique based on a bag-of-keypoints representation to identify images containing buildings in the APM photographic collection. The bag-of-keypoints is an efficient image representation technique, which has been proved robust to occlusion and variations due to pose, scale, illumination and several transformations. Experiments were performed on the images from the APM collection, to classify them between building and non-building, using bag-of-keypoints representations of those images. Results show that, despite of the poor quality of the images, the bag-of-keypoints representation is able to provide good detection rates, indicating the suitability of the proposed method for the task.