Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coping With the Stress of Transformational Change in a Government Department

Transformational organizational change is a significant life event for employees within the organization in question and can be a source of considerable stress. However, the causal pathway by which the experience of change results in stress is still unclear. The current study looks at transformational change in a government department. An openended interview methodology was used to explore why change can be stressful and how individuals employ coping responses to deal with it. Five sources of change stress were found: increased workload, uncertainty/ambiguity, interpersonal conflict, perceived unfairness, and perceived loss. Fifteen coping responses accounted for the data. These were categorized into four coping types: task-centered coping, emotion-focused coping, cognitive coping, and social support coping. Four of the five stressors were related to the use of certain coping types. A model is proposed to account for the process of coping with organizational change stressors, which is offered for quantitative validation.
Automatically Discovering Temporal Properties for Program Verification

This paper reports on our experience using a dynamic analysis tool, Terracotta, to automatically infer temporal properties, and a model checker, Java PathFinder, to check the inferred properties. To our best knowledge, this is the first experiment using a model checker to check automatically inferred properties. We introduce two key ideas to make our approach effective. First, we develop techniques for handling context information in a program’s execution traces so that some interesting properties can be discovered. Second, we infer properties in a single threaded environment and to check them in a multi-threaded one. We evaluate our approach on a prototype implementation of a UNIX-like file system, Daisy. Our techniques revealed a bug in Daisy and identi fied several interesting and subtle temporal behaviors.
Measuring impairments of functioning and health in patients with axial spondyloarthritis by using the ASAS Health Index and the Environmental Item Set: translation and cross-cultural adaptation into 15 languages

Introduction The Assessments of SpondyloArthritis international society Health Index (ASAS HI) measures functioning and health in patients with spondyloarthritis (SpA) across 17 aspects of health and 9 environmental factors (EF). The objective was to translate and adapt the original English version of the ASAS HI, including the EF Item Set, cross-culturally into 15 languages. Methods Translation and cross-cultural adaptation has been carried out following the forward–backward procedure. In the cognitive debriefing, 10 patients/country across a broad spectrum of sociodemographic background, were included. Results The ASAS HI and the EF Item Set were translated into Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Turkish. Some difficulties were experienced with translation of the contextual factors indicating that these concepts may be more culturally-dependent. A total of 215 patients with axial SpA across 23 countries (62.3% men, mean (SD) age 42.4 (13.9) years) participated in the field test. Cognitive debriefing showed that items of the ASAS HI and EF Item Set are clear, relevant and comprehensive. All versions were accepted with minor modifications with respect to item wording and response option. The wording of three items had to be adapted to improve clarity. As a result of cognitive debriefing, a new response option ‘not applicable’ was added to two items of the ASAS HI to improve appropriateness. Discussion This study showed that the items of the ASAS HI including the EFs were readily adaptable throughout all countries, indicating that the concepts covered were comprehensive, clear and meaningful in different cultures.
Cognitive models of music psychology and the lateralisation of musical function within the brain

Abstract In this study, a computer-based musical composition task was used to access higher order musical representations of adult nonmusicians, and patients having undergone left- or right-sided anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL). Compositions were rated according to the main features of cognitive structuralist models of pitch, tonality, rhythm, and phrase structure (musical grouping), as well as in terms of their nontonal complexity. The results showed that all participants created compositions that contained features typical of Western tonal music. The a priori music-theoretical structure of the cognitive models, however, was not reflected in the data. Laterality effects were observed for the left and right ATL patients in comparison to the adult nonmusicians. Left ATL patients showed less use of tonal features in their compositions, whilst right ATL patients placed less emphasis on phrase structure and melodic contour. The right ATL patients also showed impaired melodic discrimination in comparison to .
Improving the Measurement of Divergent Thinking Attitudes in Organizations.

Three new improved scales measuring three independent divergent thinking attitudes were developed in field research with managers and were labeled “Valuing New Ideas,” “Belief that Creativity is Not for Only a Select Few,” and “Not Feeling Too Busy for New Ideas. ” These three scales represent an improvement over three scales initially identified by Basadur and Hausdorf (1996). Two studies were done. The first was a reliability study in which higher internal consistencies and improved understanding and labeling were achieved. The second was a field experiment in which preliminary evidence of external validity of the three scales was established. The scales effectively measured the changes in these attitudes that were expected after training. Opportunities for future research are identified.
Too little, too late: Socioeconomic disparities in the experience of women living with diabetes

The purpose of this article is to examine whether or not subjective social status contributes to diabetes diagnosis and disease discovery experiences. Eighteen diabetic women participated in semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts were reviewed and coded using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Several general themes emerged from the data analysis: subjective social status shaped different experiences through (a) situations of diabetes discovery (including the circumstances and stage of diabetes at the time of diagnosis), (b) the degree to which participants considered diabetes to be manageable, (c) the extent of diabetes-related knowledge and experience before diagnosis, and (d) opportunities to gain knowledge shortly thereafter. Due to these constraints, lower subjective social status individuals had particularly adverse disease discovery experiences. The findings are consistent with the theory of constrained choices. Implications for practitioners and for future research are discussed.
Finding microarray genes using GO ontology

Bioinformatics is the science of managing, mining and interpreting information from biological sequences and structures. DNA Microarrays, also known as gene chips, provide an effective tool for monitoring and profiling gene expression patterns by measuring the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. Clustering is a popular technique for microarray data to finding groups of genes with similar functionalities based on GO Ontology. In this paper, data mining technique, clustering is used on microarray data to group genes with similar functionalities based on Go ontology. Gene Ontology is used to provide external validation for the clusters to determine if the genes in a cluster belong to a specific Biological Process, Cellular Component and Molecular Function. A functionally meaningful cluster contains many genes that are annotated to a specific GO terms. To prove that each of these new cluster sets reveal biological associations that were not apparent from clustering the original gene expression data.
The Relationship between Types of Human–Animal Interaction and Attitudes about Animals: An Exploratory Study

ABSTRACT Existing theory and research suggests that understanding the nuances of particular instantiations of human–animal relationships is important in promoting positive, mutually beneficial relationships between people and animals. One such aspect of human–animal interaction (HAI) involves species of animal involved in the relationship, and how various types of HAI may impact individuals' attitudes about animals. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore if species and/or types of animal ownership were associated with feelings of emotional attachment, commitment, and moral orientation toward animals. A sample of young adults (n = 567) from the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development completed a survey which included questions about animal ownership and attitudes about animals. Regression analyses demonstrated that the species of animal(s) a person owned significantly predicted all three dimensions of attitudes about animals. In addition, latent class analyses identified three prevalent types of animal interaction (no/few animals, small animals only, large and small animals), and multinomial logistic regression within the mixture model indicated that individuals in these subgroups significantly differed in moral orientation scores. Overall, the analyses strengthen support for the notion that species of animal involved in the interaction matters, and that relationships with various species of animals may differ qualitatively. These findings have implications for understanding the role of the relationship between types of animal ownership and attitudes about animals. Exploring the multifaceted nature of human–animal relationships is important in understanding how to optimize the person and animal characteristics that are associated with adaptive, mutually beneficial human–animal relationships.
Image and video processing on CUDA: state of the art and future directions

In the last few years a myriad of computer graphic applications have been developed using standard programming techniques, which are mainly based on multicore general-purpose processors (CPUs) architectures. Due to the rapid turning towards high definition multimedia, more and more researches have been done that need both computational resources and memory space to achieve high performance. To this end, more recently the general-purpose computing on graphic processing units (GPGPUs) architectures, which are becoming increasingly programmable and scalable, have been adopted. Since the GPUs provide a vast number of simple, data-parallel, deeply multithreaded cores and high memory bandwidths, they have been used to provide a valid support in several fields such as image and video processing research area, medical and human applications. In this paper the most recent image and video processing techniques and relevant applications are reviewed, highlighting the advantages of using CUDA in terms of efficiency.
Feature space dimension reduction in speech emotion recognition using support vector machine

We report implementations of automatic speech emotion recognition systems based on support vector machines in this paper. While common systems often extract a very large feature set per utterance for emotion classification, we conjecture that the dimension of the feature space can be greatly reduced without severe degradation of accuracy. Consequently, we systematically reduce the number of features via feature selection and principal component analysis. The evaluation is carried out on the Berlin Database of Emotional Speech, also known as EMO-DB, which consists of 10 speakers and 7 emotions. The results show that we can trim the feature set to 37 features and still maintain an accuracy of 80%. This means a reduction of more than 99% compared to the baseline system which uses more than 6,000 features.
Knowledge of Contraceptives and Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Contraceptive Practices Amongst Young People in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

In this article, we examine knowledge of contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and contraceptive practices amongst young Vietnamese people. We conducted a qualitative study on sexuality and abortion with young people in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Twelve female and 4 male young people were individually interviewed using an in-depth interview technique. We found that condoms and pills were contraceptives known by almost all young people, but their knowledge of condoms and pills was still inadequate. Fears of side effects of taking pills and rumors and beliefs regarding condoms were quite common among young people. The limitations in young people's knowledge of contraceptives and STDs were a reflection of limited sources of their knowledge. Sexual education provided by educational institutions and within families was very basic. It did not provide clear knowledge on the sensitive topics such as contraceptive methods, and other issues related to sexuality for unmarried people. From a gender perspective, there are two points to note here: While sex issues were discussed openly among unmarried men, most unmarried women felt uncomfortable or expressed difficulty when talking about these issues; and the passiveness of unmarried women in making the decision of using condoms as well as contraceptives was marked. Amongst young people, the use of contraceptives was based mainly on ineffective methods including withdrawal and periodic abstinence. Further, young people's understanding of these methods was neither clear nor adequate. For the young people who did not use any contraceptives, sexual relations occurred unexpectedly. We conclude that creating a climate in which sexual issues can be discussed openly is an important step for the improvement of sexual health for young people. This will inevitably improve knowledge and understanding of contraceptives and STDs and may lead to a safer sexual life among this group of young people.
On the relevance of language in speaker recognition

This paper will present a new database collected from a bilingual speakers set (49), in two different languages: Spanish and Catalan. Phonetically there are significative differences between both languages. Mainly, the Catalan language has eight vowels (see figure 1) and Spanish only five. Although there are only nine million people of Catalan speakers in front of four hundred million people of Spanish, both languages can be used for our purpose. The differences between both languages has let us to establish several conclusions on the relevance of language in speaker recognition. Another important question is that for bilingual speakers in conversational speech is quite common the change from one language to the other, so it is interesting to evaluate if this fact can affect a speaker recognizer.
Contrastive Analysis and Native Language Identification

Attempts to profile authors based on their characteristics, including native language, have drawn attention in recent years, via several approaches using machine learning with simple features. In this paper we investigate the potential usefulness to this task of contrastive analysis from second language acquistion research, which postulates that the (syntactic) errors in a text are influenced by an author’s native language. We explore this, first, by conducting an analysis of three syntactic error types, through hypothesis testing and machine learning; and second, through adding in these errors as features to the replication of a previous machine learning approach. This preliminary study provides some support for the use of this kind of syntactic errors as a clue to identifying the native language of an author.
From Physical Weight to Psychological Significance: The Contribution of Semantic Activations

Past research has shown that a physical experience can influence metaphorically linked psychological judgment. However, the underlying mechanisms have not been formally tested. This article examines the role of semantic activations underlying such influences, focusing on the effects of a ubiquitous physical experience--"carrying weight"--on consumers' judgment of importance. Five experiments provide converging evidence that semantic activation is the primary underlying process for the effect. Specifically, physically carrying a load is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for processing the concept of importance. The effect is fully mediated by semantic activation of related weight concepts. Moreover, processing the concept of importance does not necessarily influence the physical experience of carrying weight. An affective state such as mental stress (psychological load), however, does have a reciprocal effect on the physical experience of carrying weight, indicating that there might be different pathways between weight experience and its metaphorically linked concepts.
Generation of Rat Embryonic Germ Cells via Inhibition of TGFß and MEK Pathways

Objective Embryonic germ (EG) cells are the results of reprogramming primordial germ cells (PGC) in vitro. Studying these cells can be of benefit in determining the mechanism by which specialized cells acquire pluripotency. Therefore in the current study we have tried to derive rat EG cells with inhibition of transforming growth factor-β (TGFβ) and mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase (MEK) signaling pathways. Materials and Methods In this experimental study, rat PGCs were cultured under feeder free condition with two small molecules that inhibited the above mentioned pathways. Under this condition only two-day presence of stem cell factor (SCF) as a survival factor was applied for PGC reprogramming. Pluripotency of the resultant EG cells were further confirmed by immunofluorescent staining, directed differentiation ability to neural and cardiac cells, and their contribution to teratoma formation as well. Moreover, chromosomal stability of two different EG cells were assessed through G-banding technique. Results Formerly, derivation of rat EG cells were observed solely in the presence of glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK3β) and MEK pathway inhibitors. Due to some drawbacks of inhibiting GSK3β molecules such as increases in chromosomal aberrations, in the present study we have attempted to assess a feeder-free protocol that derives EG cells by the simultaneous suppression of TGFβ signaling and the MEK pathway. We have shown that rat EG cells could be generated in the presence of two inhibitors that suppressed the above mentioned pathways. Of note, inhibition of TGFβ instead of GSK3β significantly maintained chromosomal integrity. The resultant EG cells demonstrated the hallmarks of pluripotency in protein expression level and also showed in vivo and in vitro differentiation capacities. Conclusion Rat EG cells with higher karyotype stability establish from PGCs by inhibiting TGFβ and MEK signaling pathways.
Transcriptional Analysis of a Unique Set of Genes Involved in Schistosoma mansoni Female Reproductive Biology

Schistosomiasis affects more than 200 million people globally. The pathology of schistosome infections is due to chronic tissue inflammation and damage from immune generated granulomas surrounding parasite eggs trapped in host tissues. Schistosoma species are unique among trematode parasites because they are dioecious; females require paring with male parasites in order to attain reproductive maturity and produce viable eggs. Ex vivo cultured females lose the ability to produce viable eggs due to an involution of the vitellarium and loss of mature oocytes. In order to better understand schistosome reproductive biology we used data generated by serial analysis of gene expression (SAGE) to identify uncharacterized genes which have different transcript abundance in mature females, those that have been paired with males, and immature females obtained from unisexual infections. To characterize these genes we used bioinformatics, transcript localization, and transcriptional analysis during the regression of in vitro cultured females. Genes transcribed exclusively in mature females localize primarily in the vitellocytes and/or the ovary. Genes transcribed exclusively in females from single sex infections localize to vitellocytes and subtegumental cells. As female reproductive tissues regress, eggshell precursor proteins and genes involved in eggshell synthesis largely have decreased transcript abundance. However, some genes with elevated transcript abundance in mature adults have increased gene expression following regression indicating that the genes in this study function both in eggshell biology as well as vitellogenesis and maintenance of female reproductive tissues. In addition, we found that genes enriched in females from single sex infections have increased expression during regression in ex vivo females. By using these transcriptional analyses we can direct research to examine the areas of female biology that are both relevant to understanding the overall process of female development and worm pairing while determining novel therapeutic approaches directed at the maturation of female schistosomes.
Evaluation of the Speed-oligo Direct Mycobacterium tuberculosis Assay for Molecular Detection of Mycobacteria in Clinical Respiratory Specimens

ABSTRACT We present the first evaluation of a novel molecular assay, the Speed-oligo Direct Mycobacterium tuberculosis (SO-DMT) assay, which is based on PCR combined with a dipstick for the detection of mycobacteria and the specific identification of M. tuberculosis complex (MTC) in respiratory specimens. A blind evaluation was carried out in two stages: first, under experimental conditions on convenience samples comprising 20 negative specimens, 44 smear- and culture-positive respiratory specimens, and 11 sputa inoculated with various mycobacterium-related organisms; and second, in the routine workflow of 566 fresh respiratory specimens (4.9% acid-fast bacillus [AFB] smear positives, 7.6% MTC positives, and 1.8% nontuberculous mycobacteria [NTM] culture positives) from two Mycobacterium laboratories. SO-DMT assay showed no reactivity in any of the mycobacterium-free specimens or in those with mycobacterium-related organisms. Compared to culture, the sensitivity in the selected smear-positive specimens was 0.91 (0.92 for MTC and 0.90 for NTM), and there was no molecular detection of NTM in a tuberculosis case or vice versa. With respect to culture and clinical data, the sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values for the SO-DMT system in routine specimens were 0.76 (0.93 in smear positives [1.0 for MTC and 0.5 for NTM] and 0.56 in smear negatives [0.68 for MTC and 0.16 for NTM]), 0.99, 0.85 (1.00 in smear positives and 0.68 in smear negatives), and 0.97, respectively. Molecular misidentification of NTM cases occurred when testing 2 gastric aspirates from two children with clinically but not microbiologically confirmed lung tuberculosis. The SO-DMT assay appears to be a fast and easy alternative for detecting mycobacteria and differentiating MTC from NTM in smear-positive respiratory specimens.
Uniform Perceptual Quantization: Applications to Digital Radiography

The principle involved in the uniform quantization of perceived lightness is considered in the context of digital radiography. Its effects on the visibility of quantization noise (contouring artifacts) are investigated both analytically and experimentally. Several visual system models of perceived lightness as a function of stimulus luminance are used. These include a logarithmic model, various power function models, and cone models. The results can be extended for other digital imaging modalities.