Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Individual perception of different stimuli: Implications for managers

Managerial perception is the process by which managers form an image of the stimuli they receive. According to research, perception is conditioned by the individual’s cognitive profile. But the different nature of incoming stimuli suggests that it would be interesting to study whether the cognitive profile’s influence varies in the presence of different stimuli. This paper analyses the effect of the cognitive profile on perception of differentlystructured stimuli. The results clearly show that the cognitive style, tolerance of ambiguity, and proactivity have an effect. Specifically, they condition the recognition of stimuli, particularly when the stimuli are relatively unstructured. The results also show that the cognitive variables have less influence in the interpretation stage.
COMPLEX RESONANCES IN

We consider a two-dimensional innnitely long acoustic waveguide formed by two parallel lines containing an arbitrarily shaped obstacle. The existence of trapped modes that are the eigenfunctions of the Laplace operator in the corresponding domain subject to Neumann boundary conditions was proved by Evans, Levitin & Vassiliev (1994) for obstacles symmetric about the centreline of the waveguide. In our paper we deal with the situation when the obstacle is shifted with respect to the centreline and study the resulting complex resonances. We are particularly interested in those resonances which are perturbations of (real) eigenvalues. We study how an eigenvalue becomes a complex resonance moving from the real axis into the upper half{plane as the obstacle is shifted from its original position. The shift of the eigen-value along the imaginary axis is predicted theoretically and the result is compared with numerical computations. The total number of resonances lying inside a sequence of expanding circles is also calculated numerically. 1. Introduction The existence of trapped modes in an innnitely long acoustic waveg-uide containing an obstacle of a fairly general shape symmetric about the centreline of the waveguide was proved by Evans, Levitin & Vas-siliev (1994). The trapped modes under consideration are the eigen-functions of the Laplace operator in an unbounded domain (which is the strip without the obstacle) subject to Neumann boundary conditions. The corresponding eigenvalues are embedded in the continuous spectrum. The vibration modes studied in 1] are antisymmetric with respect to the centreline and describe acoustic waves decaying at innn-ity. Further rigorous mathematical results concerning the existence or non{existence of trapped modes were obtained by Davies & Parnovski (1998). There is also a substantial bibliography devoted to the numerical study of trapped modes. For example, Evans & Linton (1991) provided
Series-parallel elastic actuation (SPEA) with intermittent mechanism for reduced motor torque and increased efficiency

Future robots will need to perform complex and versatile tasks comparable to those of humans. Due to the unavailability of suitable actuators, however, novel intelligent and agile robots are often restricted in their performances and development. The limited output torque range and low energy efficiency of current robotic actuators are the main bottlenecks. We have developed a SPEA with intermittent mechanism that addresses these problems. The SPEA is a novel compliant actuator concept that enables variable recruitment of parallel elastic elements and adaptive load cancellation. This paper describes how a SPEA lowers the motor torque and increases the energy efficiency. Experiments on the first proof of concept set-up endorse the practicability of the SPEA concept and the modeled trend of a lowered motor torque and increased energy efficiency. We expect that features of the biologically inspired SPEA with intermittent mechanism will prove exceedingly useful for robotics applications in the future.
Monitoring urbanization dynamics in the Southeast U.S. using DMSP/OLS nightlight time series

The Southeast U.S. is listed one of the fastest growing regions by the Census Bureau. The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP)'s Operational Line-scan System (OLS) nighttime light (NTL) imagery offers a good opportunity for characterizing the extent and dynamics of urban development at global and regional scales. However, their ability to characterize inter-urban variation is limited due to saturation of the data values. In this study, we propose a novel approach to extract urban areas based on Vegetation Adjusted NTL Urban Index (VANUI) which integrates the NTL and optical reflectance data. The built-up areas were detected for major metropolitan areas in the Southeast U.S. Using the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products of percent imperviousness (2001, 2006, and 2010) as reference data, accuracy assessment indicated that our approach achieved satisfactory results. Based on these results, the spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization in the U.S. Southeast region were analyzed.
Identity Processes and Quality of Emotional Autonomy: The Contribution of Two Developmental Tasks on Middle-Adolescents' Subjective Well-Being

This study examined the concurrent and predictive relationships between identity-related processes of commitment and exploration, emotional autonomy quality-related constructs of separation and detachment, and subjective well-being, measured through life satisfaction. Four hundred and sixty-one middle-adolescents (227 boys, 234 girls) completed measures of identity, emotional autonomy quality, and satisfaction within different domains. Results showed concurrent and predictive positive relations between commitment, separation and satisfaction with self, and negative relations between exploration, detachment, and satisfaction with self. Results also showed that the relation between satisfaction with self and detachment was different for adolescents who had high levels of commitment and low levels of exploration. Findings suggest a moderator role of high commitment and low exploration in the relation between detachment and self-satisfaction.
Effects of Positive Peer Reporting (PPR) on Social Acceptance and Negative Behaviors Among Peer-Rejected Preschool Children

Positive peer reporting (PPR) is a peer-mediated intervention that involves teaching and rewarding peers for providing descriptive praise during structured daily sessions. PPR has been used in residential facilities to improve social acceptance, increase prosocial behaviors, and decrease negative interactions of youth identified as peer rejected. Few studies have evaluated the use of PPR in general education classrooms with younger students. The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate the effectiveness of PPR with preschool children. PPR was implemented in Head Start classrooms in order to evaluate its effectiveness in improving social acceptance and decreasing negative behaviors of three children who were identified as being peer rejected. An ABA multiple-baseline, across-participants design with a followup probe was used to evaluate the effectiveness of PPR. For 2 of the 3 children, PPR reduced the negative behaviors in the classroom setting. One week of PPR also increased the social acceptance ratings of 1 of the 3 children with a moderate effect size. The findings suggest that PPR may be a time-efficient and promising intervention to improve peer relations in preschool settings.
Integrating Symbolic and Statistical Methods for Prepositional Phrase Attachment

This paper’ presents a novel methodology of resolving prepositional phrase attachment ambiguities. The approach consists of three phases. First, we rely on a publicly available database to classify a large corpus of prepositional attachments extracted from the Treebank parses. As a by-product, the arguments of every prepositional relation are semantically disambiguated. In the second phase, the thematic interpretation of the prepositional relations provides additional knowledge. The third phase is concerned with learning attachment decisions from word class knowledge and relation type features. The learning technique builds upon some of the most popular current statistical techniques. We have tested this methodology on (1) Wall Street Journal articles, (2) textual definitions of concepts from a dictionary and (3) an ad-hoc corpus of Web documents, used for conceptual indexing and information extraction.
The ICSTM+TUM+UP Approach to the 3rd CHIME Challenge: Single-Channel LSTM Speech Enhancement with Multi-Channel Correlation Shaping Dereverberation and LSTM Language Models

This paper presents our contribution to the 3rd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge. Our system uses Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for Single-channel Speech Enhancement (SSE). Networks are trained to predict clean speech as well as noise features from noisy speech features. In addition, the system applies two methods of dereverberation on the 6-channel recordings of the challenge. The first is the Phase-Error based Filtering (PEF) that uses time-varying phase-error filters based on estimated time-difference of arrival of the speech source and the phases of the microphone signals. The second is the Correlation Shaping (CS) that applies a reduction of the long-term correlation energy in reverberant speech. The Linear Prediction (LP) residual is processed to suppress the long-term correlation. Furthermore, the system employs a LSTM Language Model (LM) to perform N-best rescoring of recognition hypotheses. Using the proposed methods, an improved Word Error Rate (WER) of 24.38% is achieved over the real eval test set. This is around 25% relative improvement over the challenge baseline.
A Closed-Form Robust Chinese Remainder Theorem and Its Performance Analysis

Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) reconstructs an integer from its multiple remainders that is well-known not robust in the sense that a small error in a remainder may cause a large error in the reconstruction. A robust CRT has been recently proposed when all the moduli have a common factor and the robust CRT is a searching based algorithm and no closed-from is given. In this paper, a closed-form robust CRT is proposed and a necessary and sufficient condition on the remainder errors for the closed-form robust CRT to hold is obtained. Furthermore, its performance analysis is given. It is shown that the reason for the robustness is from the remainder differential process in both searching based and our proposed closed-form robust CRT algorithms, which does no exist in the traditional CRT. We also propose an improved version of the closed-form robust CRT. Finally, we compare the performances of the traditional CRT, the searching based robust CRT and our proposed closed-form robust CRT (and its improved version) algorithms in terms of both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. The results demonstrate that the proposed closed-form robust CRT (its improved version has the best performance) has the same performance but much simpler form than the searching based robust CRT.
Scholars’ open debate paper on the World Health Organization ICD-11 Gaming Disorder proposal

Concerns about problematic gaming behaviors deserve our full attention. However, we claim that it is far from clear that these problems can or should be attributed to a new disorder. The empirical basis for a Gaming Disorder proposal, such as in the new ICD-11, suffers from fundamental issues. Our main concerns are the low quality of the research base, the fact that the current operationalization leans too heavily on substance use and gambling criteria, and the lack of consensus on symptomatology and assessment of problematic gaming. The act of formalizing this disorder, even as a proposal, has negative medical, scientific, public-health, societal, and human rights fallout that should be considered. Of particular concern are moral panics around the harm of video gaming. They might result in premature application of diagnosis in the medical community and the treatment of abundant false-positive cases, especially for children and adolescents. Second, research will be locked into a confirmatory approach, rather than an exploration of the boundaries of normal versus pathological. Third, the healthy majority of gamers will be affected negatively. We expect that the premature inclusion of Gaming Disorder as a diagnosis in ICD-11 will cause significant stigma to the millions of children who play video games as a part of a normal, healthy life. At this point, suggesting formal diagnoses and categories is premature: the ICD-11 proposal for Gaming Disorder should be removed to avoid a waste of public health resources as well as to avoid causing harm to healthy video gamers around the world.
Media-based Strategies to Reduce Racial Stereotypes Activated by News Stories

This study focuses on the role of media in facilitating and inhibiting the accessibility of stereotypes primed by race-related news stories. Specifically, it examines experimentally the effects of two strategies for reducing stereotype accessibility: an audience-centered approach that explicitly instructs audiences to be critical media consumers, a goal of media literacy training; and a message-centered approach using stereo-type-disconfirming, counter-stereotypical news stories. Participants viewed either a literacy or control video before reading stereotypical or counter-stereotypical news stories about African Americans or Asian Indians. Implicit stereotypes were measured using response latencies to hostile and benevolent stereotypical words in a lexical decision task. Results suggest that a combination of audience-centered and message-centered approaches may reduce racial stereotypes activated by news stories.
Imagined identities: Preimmigrants' narratives on language and identity

This article reports on a study which investigated the language- and identity-related, predeparture concerns and expectations of prospective immigrants. Narrative interviews were conducted with 15 Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who planned to emigrate to New Zealand within months of their participation in the study. The participants' stories were told and interpreted within the exploratory space created by the intersection of three narrative dimensions (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000); that is, the personal and social experiences of participants moving backwards and forwards in time and physical space. From our socially-situated content analysis of the experiences articulated in their narratives we identified a number of thematic threads which we found to be salient. We chose five of these through which to channel our presentation of the findings: linguistic, cultural and national roots; the process of change; imagined identity changes; imagined losses and longing; emotional responses to anticipated changes. Further interpretative analysis of the findings produced five interrelated axes on which the participants, through their stories, position themselves. By examining participants' imagined experiences, our aim is to broaden the scope of research on language, identity and immigration. It allows us to make connections between life before and after migration, and thus to focus on the “journey” (Brah, 1996).
Training Emotional and Social Competences in Higher Education: The Seminar Methodology.

This article discusses the importance of emotional and social competences in higher education and presents a training model. In 1991, Ramon Llull University of Barcelona (Spain) created the Seminar methodology to tackle these challenges. A general model derived from the Emotional Intelligence concept and the general principles of this methodology are explained. As an example, a pilot programme for training emotional and social competences in an undergraduate major study is presented. Our perspective and experience from this programme may be useful in training academic professions where interpersonal and/or intrapersonal capacities are important competences to be developed. We propose rethinking the mission of the university by including the training of emotional and social competences, especially in view of the ongoing Bologna Process.
Recombinant vaccines against Leptospirosis

Leptospirosis is an important neglected infectious disease that occurs in urban environments, as well as in rural regions worldwide. Rodents, the principal reservoir hosts of pathogenic Leptospira spp. , and other infected animals shed the bacteria in their urine. During occupational or even recreational activities, humans that come into direct contact with infected animals or with a contaminated environment, particularly water, are at risk of infection. Prevention of urban leptospirosis is largely dependent on sanitation measures that are often difficult to implement, especially in developing countries. Vaccination with inactivated whole-cell preparations (bacterins) has limited efficacy due to the wide antigenic variation of the pathogen. Intensive efforts towards developing improved recombinant vaccines are ongoing. During the last decade, many reports on the evaluation of recombinant vaccines have been published. Partial success has been obtained with some surface-exposed protein antigens. The combination of protective antigens and new adjuvants or delivery systems may result in the much-needed effective vaccine.
Phase transition of electrically charged Ricci-flat black holes

We study phase transition between electrically charged Ricci-flat black holes and AdS soliton spacetime of Horowitz and Myers in five dimensions. Boundary topology for both of them is S1 × S1 × R2. We consider AdS-Reissner-Nordstrom black hole and R-charged black holes and find that phase transition of these black holes to AdS soliton spacetime depends on the relative size of two boundary circles. We also perform the stability analysis for these black holes. In order to use the AdS/CFT correspondence, we work in the grand canonical ensemble.
How can model driven development approaches improve the certification process for UAS?

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are currently flying in specific and segregated airspaces, separated from regular aircraft. Nevertheless, to be widely used in the future, UAS will need to be deployed in the same airspace as regular aircraft. However, their unmanned and automated features make this goal very difficult to certify. Indeed, it is necessary to validate the different parts of the UAS (operating system, communication system or even payload depending on their application) in order to be compliant with the whole airspace certification process. This paper deals with new model driven development approaches that are inherited from existing aerospace and aeronautical systems and that could be useful for the certification of UAS design. In this paper we demonstrate how a model driven design can improve UAS system robustness. A case study is introduced and focuses on the main advantages for UAS design environment: modularity and reusability.
RICE MORPHOLOGY DETERMINANT Encodes the Type II Formin FH5 and Regulates Rice Morphogenesis[C][W][OA]

This work provides biochemical and genetic evidence to demonstrate that a type II formin protein regulates rice morphogenesis through its influence over the formation of actin cytoskeleton and the organization of microtubules. Multicellular organisms contain a large number of formins; however, their physiological roles in plants remain poorly understood. Here, we reveal that formin homology 5 (FH5), a type II formin mutated in rice morphology determinant (rmd), plays a crucial role in determining rice (Oryza sativa) morphology. FH5/RMD encodes a formin-like protein consisting of an N-terminal phosphatase tensin (PTEN)-like domain, an FH1 domain, and an FH2 domain. The rmd mutants display a bending growth pattern in seedlings, are stunted as adult plants, and have aberrant inflorescence (panicle) and seed shape. Cytological analysis showed that rmd mutants have severe cell elongation defects and abnormal microtubule and microfilament arrays. FH5/RMD is ubiquitously expressed in rice tissues, and its protein localization to the chloroplast surface is mediated by the PTEN domain. Biochemical assays demonstrated that recombinant FH5 protein can nucleate actin polymerization from monomeric G-actin or actin/profilin complexes, cap the barbed end of actin filaments, and bundle actin filaments in vitro. Moreover, FH5 can directly bind to and bundle microtubules through its FH2 domain in vitro. Our findings suggest that the rice formin protein FH5 plays a critical role in determining plant morphology by regulating actin dynamics and proper spatial organization of microtubules and microfilaments.
Research on the application of page segmentation in information retrieval

Existing search engines index web pages as a whole and use them for information retrieval, which leads to irrelevant documents being returned to users. This paper proposes a new indexing approach for solving this problem by 1) using VIPS algorithm for page segmentation, 2) filtering out the function blocks through several heuristic rules, 3) clustering feature blocks into different sub-documents and indexing them respectively. For three user queries, the initial results retrieved from Google are compared with the search results of improved indexing system, which shows that our approach gets a higher performance in terms of precision and F-measure.
Interaction of Rickettsia felis with histone H2B facilitates the infection of a tick cell line

Haematophagous arthropods are the primary vectors in the transmission of Rickettsia, yet the molecular mechanisms mediating the rickettsial infection of arthropods remain elusive. This study utilized a biotinylated protein pull-down assay together with LC-MS/MS to identify interaction between Ixodes scapularis histone H2B and Rickettsia felis. Co-immunoprecipitation of histone with rickettsial cell lysate demonstrated the association of H2B with R. felis proteins, including outer-membrane protein B (OmpB), a major rickettsial adhesin molecule. The rickettsial infection of tick ISE6 cells was reduced by approximately 25 % via RNA-mediated H2B-depletion or enzymic treatment of histones. The interaction of H2B with the rickettsial adhesin OmpB suggests a role for H2B in mediating R. felis internalization into ISE6 cells.