Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cross-national in-group favoritism in prosocial behavior: Evidence from Latin and North America

As individuals from different nations increasingly interact with each other, research on national in-group favoritism becomes particularly vital. In a cross-national, large-scale study (N = 915) including representative samples from four Latin American nations (Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela) and the USA, we explore differences regarding nationality-based in-group favoritism. In-group favoritism is assessed through differences in prosocial behavior toward persons from the own nation as compared to persons from other nations in fully incentivized one-shot dictator games. We find strong evidence for national in-group favoritism for the overall sample, but also significant differences among national subsamples. Latin Americans show more national in-group favoritism compared to US Americans (interacting with Latin Americans). While US Americans mainly follow an equal split norm (for both in- and out-group interactions), Latin Americans do so only in in-group interactions. The magnitude of in-group favoritism increases with social distance toward the out-group.
Barriers to Implementation of Treatment Guidelines for ADHD in Adults With Substance Use Disorder

Objective: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is common among adult patients with a substance use disorder, yet often goes undetected. This is a qualitative study to explore implementation barriers to a guideline developed in Belgium for the recognition and treatment of ADHD in adult patients with substance use disorder and to gain a better understanding of the strategies to overcome these barriers. Methods: Focus groups were conducted with caregivers and patients to explore experiences with comorbid substance use disorder and ADHD. The barriers reported in these focus groups became the subject of further study in focus groups with addiction professionals (physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists) who had tried the guideline and with psychiatrists specializing in addiction but without experience with ADHD. Results: Our analysis revealed a number of barriers to the implementation of this guideline, including lack of information from the family, pressure from patients and caregivers to make an ADHD diagnosis, and the potential for abuse of ADHD medication. Furthermore, diagnostic instruments for ADHD have not been validated in people with substance use disorder. Although patients with ADHD are usually treated in an outpatient setting, patients with ADHD comorbid with substance use disorder are difficult to identify in an outpatient setting for various reasons. Finally, there is a lack of specific ADHD expertise in substance use treatment organizations. Conclusions: Despite the availability of an approved guideline for recognizing and treating adult ADHD in patients with a substance use disorder, underdiagnosis and inadequate treatment still persist. As in general substance use treatment, medication only plays a supportive role in the treatment of substance use disorder with comorbid ADHD. An integrated approach and further improvements in the competence of practitioners may help to reduce the resistance to diagnosing ADHD in substance use treatment centers. Practitioners who specialize in addiction medicine and therapists without medical education view the problem from different perspectives and therefore each group needs specific information and training. Targeted interventions need to be developed to keep these patients in treatment.
A Comparison of Transition Capacities of New EU Countries: Public Administration as a Key Influence in Democratic and Economic Change

In the network of political and public administrative actors the public administration plays a key role. Countries previously influenced by socialism or communism, that joined the European Union in the two most recent accession waves, and are now undergoing strong change, are investigated to determine whether—and to what extent—public administrations influence transition processes to more democracy and market economies. With a regression analysis it is demonstrated that a qualitatively better functioning public administration makes a positive impact on transition, its effectiveness, and sustainability. The regression analysis also offers arguments for the view that public administrations are important actors when it comes to the implementation of EU standards.
Disaggregated consumer prices and oil price pass‐through: evidence from Malaysia

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the oil price pass‐through into consumer price inflation for a developing country: Malaysia. The focus is on whether aggregate consumer prices and different consumer price components or sub‐price indexes are related in different ways to oil price in the long run and in the short run.Design/methodology/approach – The analysis adopts the Phillips curve framework augmented to include the oil price. In modeling, a proper consideration is given to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables under consideration. Moreover, the asymmetric effects of oil price changes are also examined.Findings – The paper finds evidence for a long run relation or cointegration of the oil price with only the aggregate consumer price and food price indexes. Moreover, in the short run, the oil price changes have significant bearings on the consumer price inflation, the food price inflation, the rent, fuel and power price inflation and the transportation and communic.
Spinal Transection Induces Widespread Proliferation of Cells along the Length of the Spinal Cord in a Weakly Electric Fish

The ability to regenerate spinal cord tissue after tail amputation has been well studied in several species of teleost fish. The present study examined the proliferation and survival of cells following complete spinal cord transection rather than tail amputation in the weakly electric fish Apteronotus leptorhynchus. To quantify cell proliferation along the length of the spinal cord, fish were given a single bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) injection immediately after spinal transection or sham surgery. Spinal transection significantly increased the density of BrdU+ cells along the entire length of the spinal cord at 1 day posttransection (dpt), and most newly generated cells survived up to 14 dpt. To examine longer-term survival of the newly proliferated cells, BrdU was injected for 5 days after the surgery, and fish were sacrificed at 14 or 30 dpt. Spinal transection significantly increased cell proliferation and/or survival, as indicated by an elevated density of BrdU+ cells in the spinal cords of spinally transected compared to sham-operated and intact fish. At 14 dpt, BrdU+ cells were abundant at all levels of the spinal cord. By 30 dpt, the density of BrdU+ cells had decreased at all levels of the spinal cord except at the tip of the tail. Thus, newly generated cells in the caudal-most segment of the spinal cord survived longer than those in more rostral segments. Our findings indicate that spinal cord transection stimulates widespread cellular proliferation; however, there were regional differences in the survival of the newly generated cells.
Improving Speculative Execution Performance with Coworker for Cloud Computing

MapReduce is an important programming model for large-scale parallel applications. It divides a job into several parallel tasks and completes the job by sequential phases, i.e. map phase and reduce phase. The job completion time will be delayed when a task, called straggler, consumes more time than others. The main reason that a straggler occurs is the imbalance resource distribution among computing nodes in the cloud. Speculative execution is a solution for dealing with stragglers. Duplicate tasks are launched on other nodes to process the same data as the straggler does. Any completion of these tasks implies that this task is finished and other duplicate tasks can be aborted. However, aborting tasks misspends resources. In this paper, we propose an idea of using coworkers to help a straggler. According to the processing rate of the straggler and the coworker, the amount of data parceled out from the straggler to the coworker should be determined. Different from speculative execution, coworkers finish tasks with stragglers and do not misspend computing resources. Experimental results show that coworkers can reduce the task completion time by 37% and the network traffic by 64% when comparing with speculative execution.
Disclosure policy and intraday spread patterns

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between financial analysts’ ratings of firms’ disclosure policies and the intraday pattern in spreads between specialists’ bid and ask price quotes. Design/methodology/approach - Measure of the disclosure policy is based on financial analysts’ ratings of the quality of firms’ annual reports, quarterly and other information, and investor relations activities. The bid-ask spread is the ask price minus the bid price. Time-weighted bid-ask spreads were measured over half-hour trading intervals. Generalized method of moments is used to estimate regressions of bid-ask spreads on disclosure policy ratings and controls for trading volume, price volatility, and share price. Findings - It was found that spreads are uniformly lower for firms with higher-rated disclosure policies in all half-hour trading intervals during the day. In addition, increases in spreads in the first two half-hours of trading are smaller for firms with higher-rated disclosures. Finally, our evidence suggests spreads increase more in the last half-hour of trading for firms with better disclosure policies, and subsequent tests suggest this is due to greater end-of-day liquidity trading. Research limitations/implications - These results suggest that disclosure policy is a determinant of both the level and pattern of intraday bid-ask spreads. Firms with higher-rated disclosure policies have a more liquid market for their shares, which is theoretically linked to a lower cost of capital. In addition, better disclosure mitigates the decrease in market liquidity typically observed at the open of daily trading. Practical implications - Better disclosures can help reduce market frictions. Originality/value - This paper is the first to study the relation between disclosure policy and intraday spread patterns.
Which are more correctly diagnosed: Conventional Papanicolaou smears or Thinprep samples? A comparative study of 9 years of external quality‐assurance testing

The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia Cytopathology Quality Assurance Program offers external testing in gynecologic cytology to Australasian and international laboratories. Laboratory interpretation of conventional Papanicolaou (Pap) smears is compared with interpretation of liquid‐based cervical cytologic (ThinPrep) samples.
Energy‐based dissolution simulation using SPH sampling

A novel unified particle‐based method is proposed for real‐time dissolution simulation that is fast, predictable, independent of sampling resolution, and visually plausible. The dissolution model is derived from collision theory and integrated into a smoothed particle hydrodynamics fluid solver. Dissolution occurs when a solute is submerged in solvent. Physical laws govern the local excitation of solute particles based on kinetic energy: when the local excitation energy exceeds a user‐specified threshold (activation energy), the particle will be dislodged from the solid. Solute separation during dissolution is handled using a new Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)‐based region growing method. The use of smoothed particle hydrodynamics sampling for both solute and solvent guarantees a predictable and smooth dissolution process and provides user control of the volume change during the phase transition. A mathematical relationship between the activation energy and dissolution time allows for intuitive artistic control over the global dissolution rate. We demonstrate this method using a number of practical examples, including antacid pills dissolving in water, hydraulic erosion of nonhomogeneous terrains, and melting.
#ILookLikeAnEngineer: Using Social Media Based Hashtag Activism Campaigns as a Lens to Better Understand Engineering Diversity Issues

Each year, significant investment of time and resources is made to improve diversity within engineering across a range of federal and state agencies, private/not-for-profit organizations, and foundations. In spite of decades of investments, efforts have not yielded desired returns - participation by minorities continues to lag at a time when STEM workforce requirements are increasing. In recent years a new stream of data has emerged - online social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram - that act as a key sensor of social behavior and attitudes of the public. Almost 87% of the American population now participates in some form of social media activity. Consequently, social networking sites have become powerful indicators of social action and social media data has shown significant promise for studying many issues including public health communication, political campaign, humanitarian crisis, and, activism. We argue that social media data can likewise be leveraged to better understand and improve engineering diversity. As a case study to illustrate the viability of the approach, we present findings from a campaign, #ILookLikeAnEngineer (using Twitter data - 19,354 original tweets and 29,529 retweets), aimed at increasing gender diversity in the engineering workplace. The campaign provided a continuous momentum to the overall effort to increase diversity and novel ways of connecting with relevant audience. Our analysis demonstrates that diversity initiatives related to STEM attract voices from various entities including individuals, large corporations, media outlets, and community interest groups.
An exploratory analysis of security on data transmission on relevant software engineering discussion sites

The Question and Answer (Q&A) sites are very popular nowadays for discussion on technological issues. Among the most prominent topics of these sites, posts related to security are widely visited. Security discussions may be classified broadly into two categories: application and infrastructure security. In this research, we studied several community Q&A sites to analyze the characteristics of requirements and difficulties to implement security in data transmission, one of the most dominant topics of infrastructure security. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of this kind. Our findings are expected to make it easier for the interested people to acquire knowledge about recent threats and security issues of data transmission in a methodical way and also to understand the trends of relevant technologies. We found that Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the most discussed technique over the years and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack is the primary concern for the developers.
Peptide-Specific Intercellular Transfer of MHC Class II to CD4+ T Cells Directly from the Immunological Synapse upon Cellular Dissociation1

The transfer of membrane proteins from APC to T cells was initially described in the 1970s, and subsequent work has described two mechanisms of transfer: APC-derived exosomes and direct transfer of small packets, while cells remain conjugated. Using fibroblast APC expressing a GFP-tagged I-Ek molecule with covalently attached antigenic peptide, we observed a third mechanism in live cell imaging: T cells spontaneously dissociating from APC often capture MHC:peptide complexes directly from the immunological synapse. Using two I-Ek-restricted murine TCR transgenic T cells with different peptide specificity, we show in this study that the MHC transfer is peptide specific. Using blocking Abs, we found that MHC:peptide transfer in this system requires direct TCR-MHC:peptide interactions and is augmented by costimulation through CD28-CD80 interactions. Capture of the GFP-tagged MHC:peptide complexes correlates with an activated phenotype of the T cell, elevated CD69 with down-modulated TCR. The transferred MHC:peptide molecules transferred to the T cell are associated with molecules that imply continued TCR signaling; p56lck, phosphotyrosine, and polarization of the actin cytoskeleton.
Mantled howler population of Hacienda La Pacifica, Costa Rica, between 1991 and 1998: Effects of deforestation

A survey of the mantled howler (Alouatta palliata) population on Hacienda La Pacifica, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, was done in July and August of 1998 to determine population parameters following deforestation due to major canal construction between 1990 and 1994. The survey was carried out in a manner identical to our 1991 survey and consisted of a single pass and two re‐surveys of all forested areas of the farm. As canal construction effectively increased fragmentation of the habitat, we predicted decreased population and group size over this time. Results indicated that between the 1991 and 1998 survey, group size decreased but not significantly, and there were significantly fewer adult males and adult females per group. Population size, however, remained unchanged as there was an increase in animals in the immature age classes. An increase in the infant to adult female ratio suggests a stable or even expanding population, which could represent recovery from the initial disturbance of deforestation. Thus, despite changes in the forest and land use patterns, the area now appears to support the same number of howlers as found in previous surveys. Am. J. Primatol. 56:155–163, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Speech emotion recognition using multichannel parallel convolutional recurrent neural networks based on gammatone auditory filterbank

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) using deep learning methods based on computational auditory models of human auditory system is a new way to identify emotional state. In this paper, we propose to utilize multichannel parallel convolutional recurrent neural networks (MPCRNN) to extract salient features based on Gammatone auditory filterbank from raw waveform and reveal that this method is effective for speech emotion recognition. We first divide the speech signal into segments, and then get multichannel data using Gammatone auditory filterbank, which is used as a first stage before applying MPCRNN to get the most relevant features for emotion recognition from speech. We subsequently obtain emotion state probability distribution for each speech segment. Eventually, utterance-level features are constructed from segment-level probability distributions and fed into support vector machine (SVM) to identify the emotions. According to the experimental results, speech emotion features can be effectively learned utilizing the proposed deep learning approach based on Gammatone auditory filterbank.
An Analysis of Labour Market Outcomes in the European Union Objective One Funding Area in Great Britain

Jones M. K. and Skilton L. An analysis of labour market outcomes in the European Union Objective One funding area in Great Britain, Regional Studies. This paper uses data from the Labour Force Survey (1995–2005) to examine the short-run impact of European Union Objective One funding on local labour markets in Great Britain. The evidence from a difference-in-difference analysis reveals that employment and job-related training gaps between the Objective One and non-Objective One area narrowed during the funding period. Further investigation, using a range of control groups, suggests that this cannot be attributed to Objective One status per se. However, there is substantial variation across the four funding areas: Objective One status had a positive effect on employment in South Yorkshire and on job-related training in Wales.
Fault Recovery Mechanisms in Utility Accrual Real Time Scheduling Algorithm

In this paper, we proposed two recovery solutions over the existing error-free utility accrual scheduling algorithm known as General Utility Accrual Scheduling algorithm (or GUS) (Peng Li, 2004). A robust fault recovery algorithm called Backward Recovery GUS (or BRGUS) works by adapting the time redundancy model i.e., by re-executing the affected task after its transient error period is over. The BRGUS is compared with a less complicated recovery algorithm named as Abortion Recovery GUS (or ARGUS) that simply aborts all faulty tasks. Our main objectives are (1) to maximize the total accrued utility and (2) to ensure correctness of the executed tasks on best effort basis and achieve the fault free tasks as much as possible. Our simulation results reveal that BRGUS outperforms the ARGUS algorithm with higher accrued utility and less abortion ratio, making it more suitable and efficient in adaptive real time system.
Control of PEM fuel cell system via higher order sliding mode control

Abstract: This paper presents a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) dynamic model of polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells. A non-linear controller is designed to prolong the stack life of the PEM fuel cell. A moderate deviation between hydrogen and oxygen partial pressures can cause severe membrane damage in the fuel cell. Therefore, a second-order sliding mode strategy is applied to the PEM fuel cell system. This controller is combined with a new step by step differentiators as an output-feedback controller. The differentiator estimates a successive derivative of the measured error signal up to n – 1 order after a finite time transient. Simulation procedure shows performance of the SOSM approach to control PEMFC stack pressure to provide robustness against uncertainties and disturbances.
On the Central Mechanism Underlying Ghrelin’s Chronic Pro‐Obesity Effects in Rats: New Insights from Studies Exploiting a Potent Ghrelin Receptor Antagonist

In the present study, we explore the central nervous system mechanism underlying the chronic central effects of ghrelin with respect to increasing body weight and body fat. Specifically, using a recently developed ghrelin receptor antagonist, GHS‐R1A (JMV2959), we investigate the role of GHS‐R1A in mediating the effects of ghrelin on energy balance and on hypothalamic gene expression. As expected, in adult male rats, chronic central treatment with ghrelin for 14 days, when compared to vehicle‐treated control rats, resulted in an increased body weight, lean mass and fat mass (assessed by dual X‐ray absorptiometry), dissected white fat pad weight, cumulative food intake, food efficiency, respiratory exchange ratio and a decrease of energy expenditure. Co‐administration of the ghrelin receptor antagonist JMV2959 suppressed/blocked the majority of these effects, with the notable exception of ghrelin‐induced food intake and food efficiency. The hypothesis emerging from these data, namely that GHS‐R1A mediates the chronic effects of ghrelin on fat accumulation, at least partly independent of food intake, is discussed in light of the accompanying data regarding the hypothalamic genes coding for peptides and receptors involved in energy balance regulation, which were found to have altered expression in these studies.