Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Depression and Interpersonal Problems in Adolescents: Their Relationship With Alexithymia and Coping Styles

Objective: The aim of the present research was to determine whether depression and interpersonal problems had relationships with alexithymia and coping styles in adolescents. Methods: The study population was randomly selected from all of the adolescent students in the schools of Sari in Iran; 441 adolescents (228 boys and 213 girls) were included in the study. The participants completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations, the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, and the Beck Depression Inventory. The data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics and was expressed in means, standard deviations, and Pearson correlation coefficient. Results: Alexithymia was related to depression and interpersonal problems; the adolescents who defined themselves as more alexithymic obtained higher scores in depression and interpersonal problems than the adolescents who classified themselves as less- and non-alexithymic. Furthermore, coping styles were related to depression and interpersonal problems. Regression analyses showed that both alexithymia and coping styles accounted for a unique and significant proportion of the variance in depression and interpersonal problems in adolescents. Conclusion: These findings support the positive correlation of alexithymia and maladaptive coping styles with depression and interpersonal problems.
Association Between Negative Age Stereotypes and Accelerated Cellular Aging: Evidence from Two Cohorts of Older Adults

The novel contribution of the current investigation was that the BQ exercise program may improve balance and lower limb strength and reduce fall risk and the proportion of fallers in individuals with PD. BQ participants had significantly better BBS, ABC, TUG, 6MWT, and PDQL scores and greater knee extension strength after 6 months of BQ exercise. Previous studies had reported that strengthening the muscles and improving balance can prevent falls and decrease fractures. In association with muscle strength in the lower extremities, balance is one of the major factors in fall prevention. In the current study, BQ participants and controls had significantly better BBS and TUG scores after the 6-month intervention. These results are consistent with those of a previous study. It has been shown that BQ improves balance and reduces risk of falls in elderly adults. In the current study, BQ produced greater improvement in walking endurance, ABC, and PDQL scores of individuals with PD. This randomized clinical trial provides evidence that both interventions improved balance, walking endurance, knee extension strength, and quality of life; ABC scores improved only in the BQ group. The result is consistent with those of a previous study that showed that BQ enhanced general self-efficacy for elderly adults with chronic physical illness. Greater confidence in balance seems to help reduce fall risk and improve motor performance in individuals with PD. Consequently, only a differential effect of general self-efficacy can explain the greater effect of BQ than of conventional physical therapy exercises on fall prevention. Self-efficacy seems to have an influence on action and would consequently help in developing better strategies to prevent falls. The results did not support the hypothesis that BQ would improve mobility, balance, and strength more than conventional physical therapy after the 6-month intervention, but the results support the hypothesis that falls would be reduced more in BQ participants than in controls. The results of this study showed the efficacy of implementing BQ as complementary therapy in PD with the goal of reducing fall risk and improving motor performance.
Creating a better above-the-fold experience : Predicting news article preferences

News-article preferences provide a ripe area for learning. Readers have differing, and sometimes complicated, preferences. While it is reasonable to assume that a reader’s indicated past history is correlated with future preferences, preferences are likely somewhat variable depending on, e.g., the time of day. Editorial responsibilities aside, a good algorithm would save users time by directing them to exactly what they want to read. Or perhaps an algorithm more tuned to editorial oversight could “pop the filter bubbles” by gently introducing readers to different, edifying topics.
Defective Neuromuscular Junction Organization and Postnatal Myogenesis in Mice With Severe Spinal Muscular Atrophy

A detailed pathologic analysis was performed on Smn−/−;SMN2+/+ mice as a mouse model for human type I spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). We provide new data concerning changes in the spinal cord, neuromuscular junctions and muscle cells, and in the organs of the immune system. The expression of 10 synaptic proteins was analyzed in 3-dimensionally reconstructed neuromuscular junctions by confocal microscopy. In addition to defects in postsynaptic occupancy, there was a marked reduction in calcitonin gene-related peptide and Rab3A in the presynaptic motor terminals of some, but not all, of the skeletal muscles analyzed. Defects in the organization of presynaptic nerve terminals were also detected by electron microscopy. Moreover, degenerative changes in muscle cells, defective postnatal muscle growth, and prominent muscle satellite cell apoptosis were also observed. All of these changes occurred in the absence of massive loss of spinal cord motoneurons. On the other hand, astroglia, but not microglia, increased in the ventral horn of newborn SMA mice. In skeletal muscles, the density of interstitial macrophages was significantly reduced, and monocyte chemotactic protein-1 was downregulated. These findings raise questions regarding the primary contribution of a muscle cell defect to the SMA phenotype.
Heparin and related glycosaminoglycans modulate the secretory phenotype of vascular smooth muscle cells

Previous studies have established a role for heparin-like molecules in the regulation of vascular smooth muscle cell growth and migration in vitro. We present data indicating that the secretory phenotype of cultured rat aortic smooth muscle cells can be modulated by exogenous soluble heparin, heparan sulfate, and dermatan sulfate glycosaminoglycans. In the presence of these molecules, smooth muscle cells secrete increased amounts of two noncollagenous proteins (Mr 37,000 and 39,000). This effect can be mimicked by iota carrageenan and dextran sulfate but not by hyaluronic acid, chondroitin-4-sulfate, or chondroitin-6-sulfate. The inductive effect of heparin was dose- dependent and occurred rapidly (within 1 h) with maximal induction (three- to fivefold over controls) occurring after 10-12 h of treatment. The effect was rapidly reversible (within 1 h) and was not altered in the presence of actinomycin D, suggesting regulation at a posttranscriptional level. These data indicate that the biosynthetic expression of specific smooth muscle cell proteins may be determined, at least in part, by components of the smooth muscle cell extracellular matrix.
Is action research a ‘natural’ Process for teachers?

Abstract Although action research is defined in a way with which practitioners feel comfortable, it is rarely undertaken by teachers without some external intervention such as funding, requirements for course assessment, group facilitator or university researcher. In this paper I argue that action research is not a natural process for teachers because it requires them to be systematic, collaborative and critical, characteristics which do not feature strongly in teachers' natural approaches to reflecting on and improving their practice. I propose that the inquiring teacher approach and the teacher-as-researcher movement place fewer constraints than action research on the ways in which teachers are encouraged to investigate and improve their practice. I also suggest that narrative inquiry is an approach which many teachers use naturally to explore and understand their practice.
Viewing Physique Slides: Affective Responses of Women at High and Low Drive for Thinness

Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine the affective responses of media exposure for 30 university women who were either high or low on drive for thinness (DT). Participants completed three laboratory visits where they viewed nonphysique-control, self-physique, and model-physique slides. For each visit, the participants completed pre-, immediately post-, and four hourly ecological momentary post-slide viewing assessments of positive and negative affect, and they also indicated their level of pleasure during slide viewing. It was found that the high-DT group, compared to the low-DT group, reported: (a) less pleasure while viewing the self slides, (b) higher negative affect immediately after viewing the self slides, and (c) higher negative affect one and two hours after viewing the model slides. Finally, positive affect, when collapsed across group and condition, was lowest at the one-hour post-assessment. No other differences were significant. The findings that self- and model-slides had negativ.
Evaluating Electronic Customer Relationship Management Performance: Case Studies from Persian Automotive and Computer Industry

This research paper investigates the influence of industry on electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) performance. A case study approach with two cases was applied to evaluate the influence of e-CRM on customer behavioral and attitudinal loyalty along with customer pyramid. The cases covered two industries consisting of computer and automotive industries. For investigating customer behavioral loyalty and customer pyramid companies database were computed while for examining customer attitudinal loyalty a survey was conducted. The results show that e-CRM has significantly different impacts on customer behavioral and attitudinal loyalty and customer pyramid in two industries. This research provides new approach for organizations to evaluate their e-CRM performance and compare it with other companies in order to formulate stronger policies for customer relationship management.
Genetic Programming Using the Best Individuals of Genealogies for Maintaining Population Diversity

Genetic Programming (GP) is an evolutionary optimization method for generating tree structural programs. It is important to maintain the population diversity for preventing GP search from falling into local optima. For this purpose, we propose a new method which introduces a concept of genealogy into the population. We call the method Genetic Programming using the Best Individuals of Genealogies (GPBIG). Information on genealogy is assigned to each individual, and the best-so-far individuals in respective genealogies are preserved as the genealogical elite individuals. The population is reconstituted every generation by selecting the individuals from the pool of the genealogical elite individuals. In addition, the search property shifts from global to local search gradually by extinguishing unnecessary genealogies. We examined the effectiveness of our method by comparing with the standard GP in search performance in three kinds of benchmark problems.
Expression Profiling the Temperature-Dependent Amphibian Response to Infection by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis

Amphibians are experiencing a panzootic of unprecedented proportions caused by the emergence of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd). However, all species are not equally at risk of infection, and risk is further modified by environmental variables, specifically temperature. In order to understand how, and when, hosts mount a response to Bd we analysed infection dynamics and patterns of gene expression in the model amphibian species Silurana (Xenopus) tropicalis. Mathematical modelling of infection dynamics demonstrate the existence of a temperature-dependent protective response that is largely independent of the intrinsic growth-rate of Bd. Using temporal expression-profiling by microarrays and qRT-PCR, we characterise this response in the main amphibian lymphoid tissue, the spleen. We demonstrate that clearance of Bd at the host-optimal temperature is not clearly associated with an adaptive immune response, but rather is correlated with the induction of components of host innate immunity including the expression of genes that are associated with the production of the antimicrobial skin peptide preprocareulein (PPCP) as well as inflammatory responses. We find that adaptive immunity appears to be lacking at host-optimal temperatures. This suggests that either Bd does not stimulate, or suppresses, adaptive immunity, or that trade-offs exist between innate and adaptive limbs of the amphibian immune system. At cold temperatures, S. tropicalis loses the ability to mount a PPCP-based innate response, and instead manifests a more pronounced inflammatory reaction that is characterised by the production of proteases and higher pathogen burdens. This study demonstrates the temperature-dependency of the amphibian response to infection by Bd and indicates the influence that changing climates may exert on the ectothermic host response to pathogens.
Divide and Transfer: Understanding Latent Factors for Recommendation Tasks

Traditionally, latent factor models have been the most successful techniques to build recommendation systems. While the key is to capture the user interests effectively, most research is focused on learning latent factors under cold-start and data sparsity situations. Our work brings a complementary approach to the previous studies showing that understanding the semantic aspects of latent factors could give a hint on how to transfer useful knowledge from auxiliary domain(s) to the target domain. In this work, we propose a collaborative filtering technique that can effectively utilize the user preferences and content information. In our approach, we follow a divide and transfer strategy that could derive semantically meaningful latent factors and utilize only the appropriate components for recommendations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach due to improved latent feature space in both single and cross-domain tasks. Further, we also show its robustness by performing extensive experiments under cold-start and data sparsity contexts.
1 How To Build a High-Performance Data Warehouse How to Build a High-Performance Data Warehouse

Over the last decade, the largest data warehouses have increased from 5 to 100 terabytes, according to Winter Corp., and by 2010, most of today's data warehouses will be 10 times larger, according to The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI). As data warehouses grow in size to accommodate regulatory requirements and competitive pressures, ensuring adequate database performance will be a big challenge in order to answer more ad hoc queries from more people. This article examines the various ways databases are architected to handle the rapidly increasing scalability requirements, and the best combination of approaches for achieving high performance at low cost. Obviously, there are limits to the performance of any individual processor (CPU) or individual disk. Hence, all high-performance computers include multiple CPUs and multiple disks. Similarly, a high-performance DBMS must take advantage of multiple disks and multiple CPUs. However, there are significant differences between various databases concerning how they are able to take advantage of resources. In the first section of this article (Better Performance through Parallelism: Three Common Approaches), we discuss hardware architectures and indicate which ones are more scalable. As well, we discuss the commercial DBMSs that run on each architecture. In the second section (Going Even Faster: Hardware Acceleration), we turn to proprietary hardware as an approach to providing additional scalability, and indicate why this has not worked well in the past – and why it is unlikely to do any better in the future. Lastly, the third section (Achieving Scalability through Software) discusses software techniques that can be used to enhance data warehouse performance. There are three widely used approaches for parallelizing work over additional hardware: • shared memory • shared disk • shared nothing Shared memory: In a shared-memory approach, as implemented on many symmetric multi-processor machines, all of the CPUs share a single memory and a single collection of disks. This approach is relatively easy to program: complex distributed locking and commit protocols are not needed, since the lock manager and buffer pool are both stored in the memory system where they can be easily accessed by all the processors. Unfortunately, shared-memory systems have fundamental scalability limitations, as all I/O and memory requests have to be transferred over the same bus that all of the processors share,
Comparative effectiveness of percutaneous epidural adhesiolysis for different sacrum types in patients with chronic pain due to lumbar disc herniation

Abstract For percutaneous epidural adhesiolysis (PEA) in patients with chronic low back and/or leg pain, comparative efficacy of lumbar PEA between the sacral types has not yet been investigated. This study aimed to determine the comparative efficacy of lumbar PEA between the sacral types in chronic pain with lumbosacral herniated intervertebral disc (L-HIVD). A total of 1158 chronic low back and/or leg pain patients who diagnosed with L-HIVD and underwent PEA between February 2011 and March 2015 were retrospectively examined. All enrolled patients were divided into 2 types: dome-sacral type and flat type. To avoid confounding bias, propensity score analysis was used. Numeric rating scales (NRS) and Patients’ Global Impression of Change (PGIC) were compared between the 2 types at baseline and at 3 months post-PEA. After conducting a propensity score matching analysis, 114 patients were included in each type. The mean sacral angle significantly differed between the flat-sacral and dome-sacral types (P < 0.001). A linear mixed effect model analysis showed that the adjusted NRS score at baseline was 7.58 [95% confidence interval (CI): 7.40–7.76] for the flat-sacral type and 7.47 (95% CI: 7.29–7.64) for the dome-sacral type. The adjusted NRS score after 3 months post-PEA was 4.27 (95% CI: 3.77–4.77) for the flat-sacral type and 3.71 (95% CI: 3.21–4.21) for the dome-sacral type. We detected no significant differences in NRS at baseline (P = 0.371) and after 3 months (P = 0.121) between the 2 groups. No significant differences were observed in terms of the NRS score between the 2 groups during the 3 months follow-up (omnibus P = 0.223). There were no significant differences in PGIC between flat-sacral and dome-sacral types at 3 months after the follow-up period (4.40 ± 2.17 and 4.67 ± 1.88, respectively, P = 0.431). PEA provides sufficient pain relief for chronic pain due to L-HIVD at 3 months postprocedure. The sacral type might not affect the outcome of lumbar PEA in chronic pain associated lumbar HIVD.
Precise Accelerated Torque Control for Small Inductance Brushless DC Motor

In this paper, precise accelerated torque control for a small inductance brushless dc motor (BLDCM) is achieved by electromagnetic torque control and disturbance torque suppression. First, the electromagnetic torque ripple is reduced in commutation and conduction regions. In the former region, the ripple is suppressed by overlapping commutation control and optimizing the duty ratio of the active controller. In the latter region, the unbalance ripple caused by the unbalanced three phase windings is reduced by the proposed asymmetry compensation function, and the disturbance ripple created by the back electromotive force (EMF) is compensated by feedforward control. Second, the disturbance torque has been observed and compensated through the improved disturbance torque controller whose compensation coefficient is obtained by line-to-line back EMF coefficient estimation. And, both the disturbance observation and speed measurement are all synchronized with the encoder pulse alteration. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed accelerated torque control scheme.
A Hybrid Data Mining Approach To Discover Bayesian Networks Using Evolutionary Programming

Given the explosive growth of data collected from current business environment, data mining can potentially discover new knowledge to improve managerial decision making. We propose a novel data mining approach that employs evolutionary programming to discover knowledge represented in Bayesian networks and apply the approach to marketing data. There are two different approaches to the network learning problem. The first one uses dependency analysis, while the second approach searches good network structures according to a metric. Unfortunately, the two approaches both have their own drawbacks. Thus, we propose a novel hybrid of the two approaches. With this new idea, we endeavor to improve upon our previous work, MDLEP, which uses evolutionary programming for network learning. We also introduce a new operator to further enhance the search efficiency. We conduct a number of experiments and compare the hybrid approach with MDLEP. The empirical results illustrate that the approach improves over MDLEP.
Perception and Evaluation of Polish Cultural Femininity in Poland, the United States, Finland, and the Netherlands

Culture perception was examined in the domain of gender roles. Three video clips containing an example of typically Polish gender role behavior (displaying much respect and courtesy of men toward women) were shown to female and male university undergraduates in Poland (n = 88), the United States (n = 91), Finland (n = 60), and the Netherlands (n = 60). The Polish group was more accurate than all other groups in its recognition of the time and place of video recording; they also rated these video clips as higher in typicality for their own culture. The Dutch revealed the lowest scores in evaluation and in identification with gender roles. The question was examined to what extent the cross-cultural differences could be accounted for by some relevant cultural characteristics. It was found that by using Schwartz’s country-level measures on conservatism and mastery and the Chinese Culture Connection’s human heartedness, all differences on evaluation and identification with gender roles were statistically wiped out; heartedness in particular was a powerful predictor.