Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Education and Advance Care Planning in Nursing Homes: The Impact of Ownership Type

The study examined the association between ownership type and community benefit as measured by organizational approaches to patient, family, and community education. As a case study of the broader class of educational efforts, the inquiry focused on educational efforts regarding a central patient care issue for nursing homes: the use of life-sustaining medical treatment. Results indicated that nonprofit and for-profit nursing homes were equally likely to conduct educational efforts concerning advance care planning. However, nonprofit nursing homes were more likely than for-profit nursing homes to have ongoing, rather than sporadic, discussions about advance care planning; to broaden such discussions beyond life-support wishes; and to have ethics committees to support advance care planning. Other empirical research has demonstrated ownership differences in both cost and quality of care. This study offers new evidence regarding additional ways in which nonprofit long-term care facilities may be distinguished from their for-profit counterparts.
Psychological Adjustment of Navy Mothers Experiencing Deployment

This research examined the psychological adjustment and correlates of psychological well-being of deployed Navy mothers compared with a nondeployed control group of Navy women during the same period. Participants were interviewed prior to a scheduled deployment and completed standardized questionnaires before and after the separation. Data were collected from the comparison group at similar intervals. Single deployed women reported the highest levels of depressive symptomatology. In addition, single women in the deployment condition and married women in the nondeploying comparison group reported the highest levels of anxiety. Several job-related and non-job-related variables predicted Navy mothers' self-reported psychological adjustment, which were their perceptions of social support from friends and spouses, length of military service, length of the most recent separation from families, and marital status.
Improving Neural-Network Classifiers Using Nearest Neighbor Partitioning

This paper presents a nearest neighbor partitioning method designed to improve the performance of a neural-network classifier. For neural-network classifiers, usually the number, positions, and labels of centroids are fixed in partition space before training. However, that approach limits the search for potential neural networks during optimization; the quality of a neural network classifier is based on how clear the decision boundaries are between classes. Although attempts have been made to generate floating centroids automatically, these methods still tend to generate sphere-like partitions and cannot produce flexible decision boundaries. We propose the use of nearest neighbor classification in conjunction with a neural-network classifier. Instead of being bound by sphere-like boundaries (such as the case with centroid-based methods), the flexibility of nearest neighbors increases the chance of finding potential neural networks that have arbitrarily shaped boundaries in partition space. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior performance on accuracy and average f-measure.
Post-Communist Cross-Border Migration in South-Eastern Albania: Who Leaves? Who Stays Behind?

The opening-up of Albania to the outside world in the early 1990s brought about changes that have had a dramatic effect on society. Emigration has been a major consequence of the fall of communism. An estimated 600,000 or so Albanians are believed to have left the country, many of them permanently. Useful as such a piece of information is, it falls short of the data required to understand the motivations and micro-level consequences of cross-border migration, whether temporary or of a more permanent nature. Why do Albanians leave? Who leaves—and who stays behind? Are there any identifiable trends in the propensity to move, type of movement or the reason why people leave? Several studies have addressed issues such as these, but few (if any) have had the privilege of using survey data that are based on a statistically sound sampling frame. This paper, which is based on a survey conducted in the Korçë district in south-eastern Albania in late 2002 with regional planning ends in mind, adopts the perspective of the sending country and sets out to profile the emigrant from this particular part of the country. Covering 1,315 urban and rural households, a major feature of this survey is that it covers both migrant and non-migrant households. The data are analysed with a view to identifying the correlates of migration. As such, it also serves as a starting point for further work on other aspects of emigration.
Topological Mapping and Navigation Using a Developmental Learning Approach Based on Imitation through Sensory-Motor Maps

Over the past decades, we havewitnessed amassive utilization of robots in industrial settings. The use of robotic manipulators with high precision and repeatability were fundamental for the increase of efficiency of many manufacturing processes and mass production. Due to the complete predictability of the factory environment, each robot is programmed a priori, and repeats the same set of movements for weeks or even months. In spite of the limited sensory information available, these robots can complete their tasks in an extremely efficient manner. Recent progress in computer vision, robot navigation, estimation theory, reasoning and computing have afforded engineers with the tools to build more flexible robots able to “live” in more unpredictable environments and interact with (non-technical) humans in a rich and sophisticated manner. In the long-run, this research effort will contribute to the ubiquitous presence of robots in our homes and offices to assist, entertain and work together with humans. For this to become true, there are two very challenging questions that need to be addressed. Firstly, there is the issue of complexity, as such systems are likely to be much more complex than industrial robots with regard to the number of motor and perceptual degrees of freedom and will have to operate in a highly unpredictable environment. Secondly, there is the question of programming or commanding these robots, as they will interact over extended periods of time with non-technical users, who are not expected to write sophisticated computer programs each time the robot is required to perform a new task. As some of these challenges are common to many biological social species, we will borrow inspiration from biology, developmental psychology and neuroscience in our approach. Many animals can be seen as complex and flexible systems, able to learn and adapt through a simultaneousmotor, sensorial and cognitive development. Studies in developmental psychology clearly show how human infants progressively learn how to acquire more sophisticated skills over time, through interaction with their own body, the environment and caretakers. At birth, many motor and perceptual capabilities are not yet in place and the acquisition of some skills is a pre-requisite to acquire more complex ones. It would otherwise be very difficult to handle the overwhelming flow of sensory-motor information. In this work, we adopt the approach of developmental robotics Fitzpatrick et al. (2003); Lungarella & Pfeifer (2001); Metta, Sandini, Natale, Manzotti & Panerai (2001) to build systems 28
Information Structures with Unawareness

I construct a state space model with unawareness following Aumann (1976). Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini (1998a) show that standard state space models are incapable of representing unawareness. The model circumvents the impossibility result by endowing the agent with a subjective state space that differs from the full state space when he has the unawareness problem. Information is modeled as a pair, consisting of both factual information and awareness information. The model preserves the central properties of the standard information partition model.
Humor in the Blogosphere: First Clues for a Verbal Humor Taxonomy

The importance of analyzing processes related to cognitive phenomena through Natural Language Processing techniques is acquiring a greater relevance every day. Areas such as Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis or Automatic Humor Recognition are samples about how this kind of research gradually grows. In this paper, we focused on studying the features that define a corpus of humorous data (one-liners) to assess whether they may be used as elements for building a verbal Humor taxonomy. We analyzed, through several experiments, a set of well-known features described in the literature, besides a set of new ones, to determine the importance of each. An evaluation of all features was performed by means of an automatic classification task over a collection of humorous blogs. Our results suggest that some features may represent basic information for creating the taxonomy.
Context Effects on Effort and Accuracy in Choice: An Enquiry into Adaptive Decision Making

Previous research suggests that context variables may have strong effects on choice accuracy, but little is known about consumers' awareness of context or strategic response to changes in choice context. In this study, increasing the number of dominated alternatives significantly improved choice accuracy and reduced choice effort. Unobtrusive measures show that decision makers simplified the choice sets less when there were more dominated alternatives. The findings support the importance of context; several relationships between choice process and outcomes were context specific. Decision makers may rely on relatively simple forms of feedback about the choice context as they go through the choice process, rather than systematically assessing it prior to strategy selection.
Is Visuospatial Attention Controlled by a Unitary Process Or Separate Processes?

Visuospatial attention facilitates search. Search facilitation is not instantaneous, but develops over time. Furthermore, the time necessary for the first occurrence of search facilitation varies with different processes. One line of research concerned with the orienting of visuospatial attention indicates that an involuntary process facilitates search faster when compared to a voluntary process. Another line of research concerned with the distribution of visuospatial attention has shown that a constricted focus facilitates search faster than an enlarged focus. The differences in search facilitation between these processes, however, have not been directly compared in the same study. Thus, it is unclear whether visuospatial attention is governed by a unitary process or separate processes. The results of this experiment support the separate process view, specifically an involuntary and voluntary process that is independent of the component process of the distribution of visuospatial attention.
The Effect and Action Mechanisms of Oligochitosan on Control of Stem Dry Rot of Zanthoxylum bungeanum

In this report, the effects of two oligochitosans, i.e., oligochitosan A (OCHA) and oligochitosan B (OCHB), on control of dry rot of Zanthoxylum bungeanum (Z. bungeanum) caused by Fusarium sambucinum (F. sambucinum) were evaluated. First, both oligochitosans show desirable ability to decrease the infection of F. sambucinum. Second, the oligochitosans strongly inhibit the radial colony and submerged biomass growth of F. sambucinum. Lastly, these oligochitosans are capable of increasing the activities of phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL), polyphenoloxidase (PPO) and peroxidase (POD) significantly, as well as enhancing the content of total phenolics in Z. bungeanum stems. These findings indicate that the protective effects of OCHA and OCHB on Z. bungeanum stems against dry rot may be associated with the direct fungitoxic function against pathogen and the elicitation of biochemical defensive responses in Z. bungeanum stems. The outcome of this report suggests that oligochitosans may serve as a promising natural fungicide to substitute, at least partially, for synthetic fungicides in the disease management of Z. bungeanum.
An Evolutionary Approach to Provide Flexible Decision Dialogues in Intelligent Decision Support Systems

In order to appropriately tackle the complexity of real world problems, decision makers often use special support tools. Comprising an important class of such tools, intelligent decision support systems (iDSS) are able to not only help on the decision making process, but also improve their performance through time. Very often the use of intelligent techniques in iDSS focuses only on the reasoning mechanism. However, more than in conventional systems, a flexible interface can unleash abilities not commonly afforded to the decision maker. Flexibility here is a means to facilitate the acquisition of: (i) problem information requirements and (ii) profile of computer-user interaction. This work puts it out an interaction model based on evolutionary computation that is able to provide semi-automatic parameterization of decision trees of iDSS. As a proof of concept, experiments were conducted using four benchmark databases including several distinct features and decision scenarios. Results suggest that the proposed method is indeed useful to provide good interface adaptation (i.e. flexibility). Our approach made easier the decision task as problem information requirements and interaction profile were gathered and utilized to reframe the interface.
Investigation of antiradiation and anticancer efficiency of nanodiamonds on rat erythrocytes

Given the existing insufficiency in radioprotective agents and the expansion of contacts between people interacting with ionizing radiation during treatment or in technological processes, the study of the radiobiological aspects of the application of nanodiamonds is actual. The study is aimed at detection of the anti-radiation effectiveness of ultradispersed nanodiamonds roduced by detonation synthesis during a general radiation damage of rats with a dose of 5.8 Gy. The study has been performed on the red blood cells of rats who received 1.0 ml of a suspension of nanodiamonds one time every 5 days prior to the irradiation. The suspension was diluted to C=0.01 % by distilled water or by saline to a final concentration of 0.9% NaCl. Blood sampling had been performed 30 days after irradiation. Investigation of changes in the dielectric properties and hydration of the red blood cells has been carried out by the method of microwave-dielectrometry at a frequency of 9.2 GHz. The results indicate that irradiation of rats results in an increase in the decrement of the static permittivity of the blood erythrocyte suspension by 37% with respect to those in the control group (intact rats). The degree of hydration of erythrocyte membranes in animals receiving nanodiamonds during the irradiation was found increased by 8.4%, relative to control, and decreased by 29% relative to irradiation without nanodiamons uptake. Based on the data on the dielectric permittivity and hydration changes in the patients with different types of cancer, the conclusion on radioprotective and anticancer properties of NDs has been derived.
Entity Extraction and Consolidation for Social Web Content Preservation

With the rapidly increasing pace at which Web content is evolving, particularly social media, preserving the Web and its evolution over time be- comes an important challenge. Meaningful analysis of Web content lends itself to an entity-centric view to organise Web resources according to the infor- mation objects related to them. Therefore, the crucial challenge is to extract, de- tect and correlate entities from a vast number of heterogeneous Web resources where the nature and quality of the content may vary heavily. While a wealth of information extraction tools aid this process, we believe that, the consolidation of automatically extracted data has to be treated as an equally important step in order to ensure high quality and non-ambiguity of generated data. In this paper we present an approach which is based on an iterative cycle exploiting Web da- ta for (1) targeted archiving/crawling of Web objects, (2) entity extraction, and detection, and (3) entity correlation. The long-term goal is to preserve Web con- tent over time and allow its navigation and analysis based on well-formed struc- tured RDF data about entities.
Expression and Characterization of the Flocculin Flo11/Muc1, a Saccharomyces cerevisiae Mannoprotein with Homotypic Properties of Adhesion

ABSTRACT The Flo11/Muc1 flocculin has diverse phenotypic effects. Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells of strain background Σ1278b require Flo11p to form pseudohyphae, invade agar, adhere to plastic, and develop biofilms, but they do not flocculate. We show that S. cerevisiae var. diastaticus strains, on the other hand, exhibit Flo11-dependent flocculation and biofilm formation but do not invade agar or form pseudohyphae. In order to study the nature of the Flo11p proteins produced by these two types of strains, we examined secreted Flo11p, encoded by a plasmid-borne gene, in which the glycosylphosphatidylinositol anchor sequences had been replaced by a histidine tag. A protein of approximately 196 kDa was secreted from both strains, which upon purification and concentration, aggregated into a form with a very high molecular mass. When secreted Flo11p was covalently attached to microscopic beads, it conferred the ability to specifically bind to S. cerevisiae var. diastaticus cells, which flocculate, but not to Σ1278b cells, which do not flocculate. This was true for the 196-kDa form as well as the high-molecular-weight form of Flo11p, regardless of the strain source. The coated beads bound to S. cerevisiae var. diastaticus cells expressing FLO11 and failed to bind to cells with a deletion of FLO11, demonstrating a homotypic adhesive mechanism. Flo11p was shown to be a mannoprotein. Bead-to-cell adhesion was inhibited by mannose, which also inhibits Flo11-dependent flocculation in vivo, further suggesting that this in vitro system is a useful model for the study of fungal adhesion.
Accessible Multimodal Media Center Application for Blind and Partially Sighted People

We present a multimodal media center interface designed for blind and partially sighted people. It features a zooming focus-plus-context graphical user interface coupled with speech output and haptic feedback. A multimodal combination of gestures, key input, and speech input is utilized to interact with the interface. The interface has been developed and evaluated in close cooperation with representatives from the target user groups. We discuss the results from longitudinal evaluations that took place in participants’ homes, and compare the results to other pilot and laboratory studies carried out previously with physically disabled and nondisabled users.
Discrete bilectalism: towards co-overt prestige and diglossic shift in Cyprus

Abstract This article explores the nuances in the type of diglossic society in Cyprus towards a characterization of the precise stage of diglossic progression that accurately describes the current sociolinguistic state of Greek-speaking Cyprus. The question concerns the identification of that status as diglossic, as standardwith-dialects (social dialectia), or as bidialectal. We propose that the society can be characterized as diglossic, likely moving towards diaglossia. The term co-overt prestige is also introduced here, juxtaposed both with canonical Bourdieuan overt prestige and with the concept of covert prestige (Trudgill 1972), a juxtaposition which drives the classification. This article also puts forth the notion of (discrete) bilectalism to capture the “linguality” of Greek Cypriot speakers, that is, bilectal in the local vernacular, the L variety (Cypriot Greek), and the superposed official language, the H variety (Standard Modern Greek), thereby refuting the notion of a continuum bridging the two varieties. The case is also made here that studying language acquisition and development in diglossic societies contributes to a better understanding of discrete linguistic systems in children and fully developed speakers alike.
Impact of genetic risk feedback: Perceived risk and motivation for health protective behaviours

The impact of genetic risk feedback on perceived risk and motivation to follow health recommendations was investigated to determine if intent to follow recommended screening behaviours would differ between individuals with family history-based risk estimates and individuals with genetics-based risk estimates. An analog design was used to randomly assign adults ( N = 90) to receive disease risk estimates based on a positive family history, a positive genetic test or a negative genetic test. Participants read about a genetically-linked disorder and, after receiving risk feedback, completed measures of intent to engage in certain prescribed health protective behaviours. High-risk participants (positive genetic test and family history groups) expressed greater intent to follow the recommended behaviours than low-risk participants (negative test group). There were no differences in behavioural intent, however, between the positive genetic test group and positive family history group. Thus, the results provide no evidence that genetically-based risk information is a stronger motivator of intent to engage in recommended health behaviours than is family history-based risk information.
Leadership and hierarchies in criminal groups: Scaling degrees of leader behaviour in group robbery

Purpose. The purpose of this paper was, firstly, to replicate Porter and Alison's (2001) leadership behaviour scale and, secondly, to extend this research through the use of a new sample of group robbery offenders. This will provide further support for the use of such a scale to identify potential criminal leaders and also offer insight into the dynamics and hierarchical structures among group robbery offenders. Methods. One hundred and five cases of group robbery, yielding 290 offender behaviour profiles, were coded according to each offender's level of involvement at each chronological offence stage in terms of decisions, actions and orders. A multidimensional scaling procedure examined the combinations of these, and produced a partially ordered scale of leadership behaviour with the defining aspects being initial decision making and involvement in the offence outcome. Results. The scale identified potential leaders in 103 of the 105 robbery groups, where these leaders scored higher than non-leaders on the leadership behaviour scale. Two-thirds of groups comprised a dichotomous leader/follower distinction, whilst the remaining third comprised more dispersed, linear and lieutenant hierarchies. Conclusions. These results further support the leader behaviour scale originally proposed by Porter and Alison (2001). The results also offer insight into the processes by which robberies evolve; namely, through a series of decisions of one individual who then either participates first or gives orders to his fellow group members to participate, although the former seems far more frequent.