Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dysfunctional beliefs, belief similarity, and marital distress: a comparison of models

Although often examined separately, the joint influence of belief similarity and dysfunctionality on relationship satisfaction has not been investigated, and conceptual models to guide this inquiry are lacking. The present study compared five models of how similarity and irrationality may contribute individually and jointly to marital distress. Multiple measures of those constructs were administered to 49 nonclinical married couples. A content model received support when actual similarity was considered, such that dysfunctional relationship beliefs (assessed by the Relationship Belief Inventory, Eidelson & Epstein, 1982), but not actual similarity in those beliefs, were associated with distress. Also, marriage-relevant beliefs were associated more strongly with distress than were more general irrational beliefs. When spouses' perceived belief similarity was examined, both dysfunctionality and perceived similarity predicted distress, supporting an additive model for females and an interactive model for mal.
Fast onset: an open study of the treatment of major depressive disorder with nefazodone and pindolol combination therapy

Pindolol, a β-adrenergic and presynaptic 5-HT1A antagonist, when added to specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors, potentiates the antidepressant action, leading to an earlier onset of effect. Following on from the suggestion that nefazodone, a specific serotonin reuptake inhibitor and antagonist of 5-HT2, improves 5-HT1A-mediated transmission, we used a pindolol and nefazodone combination treatment for major depressive disorder. Twenty outpatients underwent a 4-week trial. Patients were seen twice a week, and completed efficacy and safety measures including the 17-item Hamilton Depression Scale, the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale and the Clinical Global Impression scales. Results demonstrated significant improvement in all efficacy measures after one visit (2–4 days of treatment), with decreasing depression scores on all measures continuing throughout the trial. After 1 week of treatment, 15 out of 20 patients had experienced a 50% or greater reduction in their 17-item Hamilton Depression Scale scores. Remission rates were dramatic, with 40% of patients in remission after 1 week of treatment and 90% after 4 weeks. This open study of nefazodone-pindolol combination therapy suggests that this may be a new treatment option for patients with major depressive disorder; however, it needs to be replicated in a double-blind trial before conclusions regarding efficacy and safety can be made.
Total-variation and error estimates for spectral viscosity approximations

We study the behavior of spectral viscosity approximations to nonlinear scalar conservation laws. We show how the spectral viscosity method compromises between the total-variation bounded viscosity approximations - which are restricted to first-order accuracy - and the spectrally accurate, yet unstable, Fourier method. In particular, we prove that the spectral viscosity method is L[sup 1]-stable and hence total-variation bounded. Moreover, the spectral viscosity solutions are shown to be Lip[sup +]-stable, in agreement with Oleinik's E-entropy condition. This essentially nonoscillatory behavior of the spectral viscosity method implies convergence to the exact entropy solution, and we provide convergence rate estimates of both global and local types. 16 refs.
Youth Civic Participation: Do Socialising Agents Matter?

Hong Kong has become a political city since 1997 after the return of sovereignty from Britain to China, and the issue of democracy and universal suffrage is still a question. Since then, there have been constant demonstrations in the streets to struggle for social justice and true universal suffrage, participated in by thousands of Hong Kong citizens. Interestingly, there are several groups of youngsters from secondary schools and tertiary institutions taking initiatives to participate in these civic and political events. This article aims to report on a qualitative study on how these youth groups are politically socialised to be active participants in petitions and demonstrations, and looks into the role and function of the agents in the socialising process of youth participation in political incidents in Hong Kong.
Vulnerability detection and error minimization in bioassay sample mixing and droplet routing for digital microfluidic biochips

Errors may be intruded in various assay operations because of parametric and physical defects of a biochip, or through undesired external manipulation of the assay operation. In this paper, an approach for error detection and minimization for digital microfluidic biochip is described. Some pathological samples and their corresponding sequence models are chosen as standards to propose possible routing paths/graphs on a biochip. These standard sequence graphs are considered as Golden Execution Models, and any deviation from these models is detected as error. Three possible error models are proposed guided by the fluidic and parametric constraints of the droplet routing. Our aim is to detect any possible error, followed by minimization of these errors. The proposed heuristic tries to minimize (i) electrode usages, (ii) sample execution time/routing time, and (iii) error overhead in subsequent phases of droplet routing. Proposed model is executed on some recent benchmarks and experimental analysis is quite encouraging. The method results in error free routing paths for different bio-assays on account of nominal increase in execution time.
The Effect of Wealth on Individual and Household Labor Supply: Evidence from Swedish Lotteries

We study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of Swedish lottery players. We find winning a lottery prize modestly reduces labor earnings, with the reduction being immediate, persistent, and similar by age, education, and sex. A calibrated dynamic model of individual labor supply implies an average lifetime marginal propensity to earn out of unearned income of -0.11, and labor-supply elasticities in the lower range of previously reported estimates. The earnings response is stronger for winners than their spouses, which is inconsistent with unitary household labor supply models.
Will that be one mentor or two? A cross‐sectional study of women's mentoring during college

College women are positioned at the juncture of adolescence and adulthood, as well as school and work. This study sought to identify whether the structural model underlying the mentoring of college women is dyadic in nature, as it is in adolescence and school settings, or networking in nature, as it is in adulthood and workplace settings. Traditional‐aged college women in their first year (n = 146) and fourth year (n = 115) participated in a mentoring survey. First‐year college students were more likely to seek and experience mentoring in the form of a dyadic relationship with one mentor, often with a family member or a recent high‐school teacher, while fourth‐year college students were more likely to seek and experience mentoring in the form of a network of multiple mentors, which included college faculty, family and peers. Both groups of students experienced psychosocial mentoring functions and sponsorship from mentors, but fourth‐year students reported more challenge from their mentors than first‐year students did. Implications for designing developmentally appropriate mentoring initiatives that simultaneously challenge female stereotypes are discussed.
Shigella flexneri infection is dependent on villin in the mouse intestine and in primary cultures of intestinal epithelial cells

Villin is an actin‐binding protein present in intestinal and kidney brush borders. Villin has been shown to present in vitro Ca2+‐dependent bundling and severing F‐actin properties. The study of villin knock‐out mice allowed us to show that while bundling of F‐actin microfilaments is unaffected, this protein is important for the reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton elicited by various signals during both physiological and pathological conditions. Here, we studied the role of villin during infection by Shigella flexneri, the causative agent of bacillary dysentery. This bacterium induces the reorganization of the host actin cytoskeleton to penetrate into epithelial cells and spread from cell to cell. In vivo, we show that unlike newborn vil+/+ mice, which are sensitive to Shigella invasion, resulting in a destructive inflammatory response of the intestinal mucosa following intragastric inoculation, newborn vil–/– mice appear fully resistant to infection. Using primary cultures of intestinal epithelial cells derived from vil+/+ or vil –/– mice, we demonstrate that villin plays an essential role in S. flexneri entry and cell‐to‐cell dissemination. Villin expression is thus critical for Shigella infection through its ability to remodel the actin cytoskeleton.
Class Segmentation to Improve Fuzzy Prototype Construction: Visualization and Characterization of Non Homogeneous Classes

In this paper, we present a new method to construct fuzzy prototypes of heterogeneous classes, in a supervised learning context. Heterogeneous classes are classes where the coexistence of far behaviours can be observed. Our approach consists in two stages. The first one enables to discover, in an original method, the different behaviours within a class by decomposing it in subclasses. In the second stage, we construct a fuzzy prototype for each subclass by using typicality degrees. Thanks to this decomposition of a class and to this characterization of typical behaviours, we propose an intuitive summarization of a class. We illustrate the advantages of our method on both artificial and real dataset.
Teaching English as Culture: Paradigm Shifts in Postcolonial Discourse

The teaching of an `imperialist' language like English in a postcolonial era presents not only unprecedented difficulties to the teacher, it also raises disconcerting questions about the paradigms underlying the concepts of language, language teaching, and culture. This new perspective makes inadequate, on the one hand, the pedalinguistic categories of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) and ESL (English as a Second Language), and, on the other, the postcolonial critique in general of hegemonic languages. Another category needs to be recognized, to which the author gives the acronym TUE (Teaching Unbroken English). For the purposes of analysis, the author focuses on his experience teaching English in Hong Kong before and after 1997, during the end of the colonial and the beginning of the postcolonial era.
Red mason bees cannot compete with honey bees for floral resources in a cage experiment

Abstract Intensive beekeeping to mitigate crop pollination deficits and habitat loss may cause interspecific competition between bees. Studies show negative correlations between flower visitation of honey bees (Apis mellifera) and wild bees, but effects on the reproduction of wild bees were not proven. Likely reasons are that honey bees can hardly be excluded from controls and wild bee nests are generally difficult to detect in field experiments. The goal of this study was to investigate whether red mason bees (Osmia bicornis) compete with honey bees in cages in order to compare the reproduction of red mason bees under different honey bee densities. Three treatments were applied, each replicated in four cages of 18 m³ with 38 red mason bees in all treatments and 0, 100, and 300 honey bees per treatment with 10–20% being foragers. Within the cages, the flower visitation and interspecific displacements from flowers were observed. Niche breadths and resource overlaps of both bee species were calculated, and the reproduction of red mason bees was measured. Red mason bees visited fewer flowers when honey bees were present. Niche breadth of red mason bees decreased with increasing honey bee density while resource overlaps remained constant. The reproduction of red mason bees decreased in cages with honey bees. In conclusion, our experimental results show that in small and isolated flower patches, wild bees can temporarily suffer from competition with honey bees. Further research should aim to test for competition on small and isolated flower patches in real landscapes.
Interaction Map and Selection of microRNA Targets in Parkinson's Disease-Related Genes

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a complex multigenic neurodisorder frequently occurring in elderly persons. To investigate noncoding tiny microRNA mediated gene regulation, miRanda (version 1.0b) was used to predict human miRNA target sites on selected 29 genes related to PD. To verify output generated from miRanda, a similar analysis was performed only for microRNA target sites in 3′UTR using TargetScan (version 5.1). Data extracted by miRanda elucidates the mode of microRNA action based on the location of target sites in the Parkinson genes. Sites prone to action of multiple miRNAs were identified as “hot spots. ” Important properties of each miRNA including multiplicity and cooperativity appear to contribute towards a complex interplay between miRNAs and their targets. Two sets of predicted results were explored for the occurrence of target sites of 112 miRNAs expressed in midbrain. Overall, convergence of results predicted by two algorithms revealed that 48 target sites for midbrain-specific miRNA occur in close proximity in 9 genes. This study will pave a way for selection of potential miRNA candidates for Parkinson's disease-related genes for quick therapeutic applications and diagnosis.
Shade trees

Shading is an important part of computer imagery, but shaders have been based on fixed models to which all surfaces must conform. As computer imagery becomes more sophisticated, surfaces have more complex shading characteristics and thus require a less rigid shading model. This paper presents a flexible tree-structured shading model that can represent a wide range of shading characteristics. The model provides an easy means for specifying complex shading characteristics. It is also efficient because it can tailor the shading calculations to each type of surface.
Teaching styles versus learning styles in the accounting sciences in the United Kingdom and South Africa: a comparative analysis

Individuals learn in different ways, using several learning styles, but lecturers may not always present information and learning experiences that match students’ learning preferences. Mismatches between learning and teaching styles can lead to disappointment with the course of study, personal discouragement and underperformance. The learning styles of 735 undergraduate Accounting students and the teaching styles of 46 lecturers from one United Kingdom and one South African university were empirically surveyed, using the Felder‐Solomon Index of Learning Styles questionnaire to consider the students’ learning styles, and an adaptation of the questionnaire to analyse the lecturers’ teaching styles. The study compared learning and teaching styles between two universities in two different countries and then examined possible matches/mismatches between learning and teaching styles. Little mismatch was found (p‐values smaller than 0.3). Other results are discussed and recommendations are made in relation to understanding and meeting students’ learning needs and the needs of professional bodies.
Untangling Procedural and Distributive Justice

Prior studies on fairness have investigated the conditions under which either procedural or distributive justice is more important to employees. One view holds that procedural justice is more important when the outcome is group-based, and distributive justice is more important when an outcome is individual-based. The second view is that distributive justice is more important when an outcome is high or positive, and procedural justice is more important when an outcome is low or negative. This study examined of the effects of procedural and distributive justice on satisfaction with gainsharing, which involves a group-based outcome. The study was conducted with two firm, one representing a high payout conditon and one a low-and zero-bonus payment. The results suggest that level of payout is important in the determination. Implication. Implications for research had for corporate we gainsharing are discussed.
Human Involvement and Interactivity of the Next Generation’s Data Mining Tools

The basic task of the knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD) process is to extract knowledge from data such that the resulting knowledge (pattern) is useful in a given application. Obviously, only the user can determine whether the resulting knowledge satisfies this requirement. Moreover, what one user may find useful is not necessarily useful to another user. Instead of allowing an automated data mining process to iterate in a trial-and-error manner, a natural but neglected way to enhance the process is to support human involvement. To achieve the goal that the user steers and monitors the information flow without burdening him performing tasks that can be done automatically, an interface for human involvement has to be well designed and integrated in the KDD process. As additional benefits from this approach, the user better understands and trusts the resulting patterns. Visual Classification which is a recently introduced approach has shown the benefits of this new direction for decision tree classifiers.
Compensation of channel effects for support vector machines based speaker verification

In this paper, we analyze the effect of channel compensation technique on support vector machines (SVM) based speaker verification performance and compare with another well-known speaker modeling algorithm Gaussian Mixture Models with universal background model (GMM-UBM). Experiments conducted on NIST 2002 SRE shows that channel compensation considerable improves the speaker verification accuracy.
Presentation attack detection using Laplacian decomposed frequency response for visible spectrum and Near-Infra-Red iris systems

Biometrics systems are being challenged at the sensor level using artefact presentation such as printed artefacts or electronic screen attacks. In this work, we propose a novel technique to detect the artefact iris images by decomposing the images into Laplacian pyramids of various scales and obtain frequency responses in different orientations. The obtained features are classified using a support vector machine with a polynomial kernel. Further, we extend the same technique with majority voting rule to provide the decision on artefact detection for video based iris recognition in the visible spectrum. The proposed technique is evaluated on the newly created visible spectrum iris video database and also Near-Infra-Red (NIR) images. The newly constructed visible spectrum iris video database is specifically tailored to study the vulnerability of presentation attacks on visible spectrum iris recognition using videos on a smartphone. The newly constructed database is referred as `Presentation Attack Video Iris Database' (PAVID) and consists of 152 unique iris patterns obtained from two different smartphone - iPhone 5S and Nokia Lumia 1020. The proposed technique has provided an Attack Classificiation Error Rate (ACER) of 0.64% on PAVID database and 1.37% on LiveDet iris dataset validating the robustness and applicability of the proposed presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithm in real life scenarios.
An acoustic segment modeling approach to query-by-example spoken term detection

The framework of posteriorgram-based template matching has been shown to be successful for query-by-example spoken term detection (STD). This framework employs a tokenizer to convert query examples and test utterances into frame-level posteriorgrams, and applies dynamic time warping to match the query posteriorgrams with test posteriorgrams to locate possible occurrences of the query term. It is not trivial to design a reliable tokenizer due to heterogeneous test conditions and the limitation of training resources. This paper presents a study of using acoustic segment models (ASMs) as the tokenizer. ASMs can be obtained following an unsupervised iterative procedure without any training transcriptions. The STD performance of the ASM tokenizer is evaluated on Fisher Corpus with comparison to three alternative tokenizers. Experimental results show that the ASM tokenizer outperforms a conventional GMM tokenizer and a language-mismatched phoneme recognizer. In addition, the performance is significantly improved by applying unsupervised speaker normalization techniques.
Density, distribution and population structure of Opusia indica (Ocypodoidae: Camptandriidae) in a coastal mangrove creek in Pakistan

The density, distribution and population structure of Opusia indica were studied through transects method. Two transects were delimited in a mangrove area of Korangi creek (24°79′ N/67°20′ E). On each transect, three 0.25 m2 quadrats were sampled at three tidal levels on a monthly basis during low tide. A total of 1919 crabs were obtained, of which 775 were males, 945 were non-ovigerous females and 199 were ovigerous females. Density of crabs varied between 198 m−2 to 798 m−2. The density and size distribution showed significant difference from low tide level to high tide level and were positively correlated with the percent moisture, percent organic matter and sediment structure. Based on carapace width (CW) males were significantly larger than the females indicating sexual dimorphism. The monthly size frequency distribution of crabs showed recruitment of juvenile crabs (< than 4 mm) nearly throughout the year except in few months. The monthly sex ratio deviated from 1:1 throughout the year, with female bias (χ2 = 31.633, P = 0.001 and df =11). Breeding was seasonal with peaks in SW monsoon. Size at sexual maturity based on smallest ovigerous female was CW = 4.0 mm. The average number of eggs per female were 2066 ± 479 (n = 25). Positive linear relationship was observed between the size of the female crabs and the egg numbers (r2 = 0.554).
Bioaccumulation of silver nanoparticles into Daphnia magna from a freshwater algal diet and the impact of phosphate availability

Abstract This study assessed the bioavailability, toxicity, and transfer of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) in comparison with AgNO3 in two model food chain organisms: the alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and the grazing crustacean Daphnia magna. The effects of phosphate, a potential Ag+-binding ligand and a determinant of phytoplankton productivity, were evaluated. Nano Ag derived from coated AgNPs and AgNO3 was accumulated at similar concentrations into microalgae during high phosphate treatment, but AgNO3 accumulation was increased by low phosphate availability. After feeding on Ag-containing algae, D. magna equally accumulated AgNO3 and nano-derived Ag. There were significant reductions in feeding when D. magna were fed Ag-contaminated algae, with the AgNO3, low phosphate-exposed cells being ingested the least. Nutritional quality characteristics including fatty acid and trace nutrient content were similar in all algal samples, indicating that feeding reduction is specifically due to the presence of Ag, with AgNO3 being more toxic than nano Ag.
Grid Resource Allocation Based on Evolutionary Algorithm

To address this problem of bounded rationality of resource consumers, an evolutionary algorithm for grid resource allocation is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the problem of multiple users competing for a common resource is formulated as a symmetric game. Secondly, replicated dynamic mechanism is used to produce evolutionary stable point that leads to a satisfied allocation scenario. Finally, the relationships among evolutionary stable point, valuation functions and convergence time are discussed in detail. The results of experiment show that the proposed evolutionary algorithm is convergent and generates better utility results compare to traditional algorithm.