Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inequalities in objective and subjective social wellbeing

In recent years policy makers and social scientists have acknowledged that standard macroeconomic indicators of economic performance do not adequately measure societal progress, if this concept is understood in terms of enhancements to human wellbeing. Attention has turned instead to the direct measurement of social wellbeing, a multidimensional construct that refers to the capacity of humans to live healthy, creative and fulfilling lives. In this approach, social wellbeing has objective components based in the social, economic, political and environmental conditions of individuals and households, and subjective components that are cognitive and affective evaluations of these conditions. This paper uses three waves of the Living in Queensland study to investigate how several objective measures of wellbeing are socially distributed. Analysis then moves on to examine the relationships between objective dimensions of social wellbeing and their subjective evaluations, captured by the measure of life satisfaction. The objective measures of wellbeing investigated in the paper include degree of financial hardship, access to adequate food, clothing, housing, care, health and social connections, and access to leisure time. The results indicate that objective aspects of wellbeing are distributed in ways reflecting the compounding of advantage and disadvantage, and that sociodemographic differences in subjective wellbeing (life satisfaction) can largely be accounted for by the differences in the components of objective wellbeing.
Targeting epigenetic abnormalities with histone deacetylase inhibitors

Alterations in chromosome structure play critical roles in the control of gene transcription. These “epigenetic” alterations include modification of histones and other proteins by acetylation and/or phosphorylation. Normally, these modifications are balanced finely and are highly reversible in normal tissues, but they may be imbalanced and heritable in tumor cells. Histone deacetylase inhibitors increase histone acetylation, thereby modulating the expression of a subset of genes in a coordinated fashion. Several tumor suppressor genes associated with the malignant phenotype are repressed by epigenetic mechanisms in sporadic cancers. Thus, therapy with histone deacetylase inhibitors may alter tumor phenotype to inhibit growth in such tumors.
Object make: a tool for constructing software systems from existing software components

It is a common practice to build large-scale software systems as a combination of smaller components. However, it is quite costly if software developers need to design and develop the components from scratch for each software system. It is quite desirable that they build highly generalized components that can be used in many systems. However, it is not enough to prepare many reusable components. A mechanism to combine these components into a large system in a systematic fashion is quite essential.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SECONDARY STUDENTS' BELIEFS ON MATHEMATYCAL PROBLEM SOLVYNG AND MATHEMATYCAL SELF-EFFICACY PERCEPTION AND THEIR ACHIEVEMENT IN ROUTINE AND NON-ROUNTINE PROBLEMS

The aim of the study is to determine the relationship between the students' beliefs and self-efficacy perception on problem solving and their achievement in routine and non-routine problems. In accordance with this purpose, the achievement tests including routine and non-routine problems were performed to the 63 tenth grade students studying in different schools with the help of self-efficacy perception on mathematics and the beliefs in problem solving. As a result of the study, it has been reached that there is a significant relationship in a positive way between students' beliefs in problem solving and achievement in non-routine problems but there is not a significant relationship between students' beliefs in problem solving and their achievement in routine problems. In addition ,there is not a significant relationship between students' self-efficacy perception on mathematics and their achievement in routine and non routine problems.
Family Therapy: Concepts, Process, and Practice

Family Therapy offers a critical evaluation of the major schools of family therapy, provides an integrative model for the practice of marital and family therapy, and demonstrates how this model can be used in everyday practice with a range of common child-focused and adult-focused problems. It also provides a thorough, up-to-date review of research on the effectiveness of family therapy and outlines implications for evidence-based practice.
Pride as moral motive: moral pride and prosocial behaviour / El orgullo como motivación moral: orgullo moral y conducta prosocial

Abstract Moral pride, namely the pride generated by morally positive behaviour, can foster prosocial behaviour. To demonstrate this, two quasi-experimental studies were conducted with nine- to 11-year-old children. Study 1 analysed the effect of the pride felt after engaging in prosocial behaviour, in four classrooms from two different schools (N = 94). Study 2 analysed the effect of the pride generated by the evocation of a past example of one’s own prosocial behaviour, in four classrooms from another school (N = 77). The hypothesis was supported in Study 1 but not in Study 2. Interesting correlations were found between dispositional moral pride (measured using a scale designed ad hoc) and other relevant variables in the moral field: intention to engage in prosocial behaviour, habitual prosocial behaviour and dispositional empathy. In general, these studies attest to the importance of moral pride, both dispositional and that felt in a specific situation, in moral life.
Error Bounds, Quadratic Growth, and Linear Convergence of Proximal Methods

The proximal gradient algorithm for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a nonsmooth convex function often converges linearly even without strong convexity. One common reason is that a multiple of the step length at each iteration may linearly bound the "error" -- the distance to the solution set. We explain the observed linear convergence intuitively by proving the equivalence of such an error bound to a natural quadratic growth condition. Our approach generalizes to linear convergence analysis for proximal methods (of Gauss-Newton type) for minimizing compositions of nonsmooth functions with smooth mappings. We observe incidentally that short step-lengths in the algorithm indicate near-stationarity, suggesting a reliable termination criterion.
Evaluation of the network structure of electrical transmission networks

Growing uncertainties due to the promotion of renewable energies and the increase of cross-border trading enhance the number of scenarios of use for electrical transmission networks. This might cause unreasonable decisions regarding the upgrading of power grids as a result of widely accepted planning principles applied to the planning process for electrical transmission networks. In order to quantify the impact of these planning decisions, key figures to evaluate the network structure of electrical transmission networks are needed. These key figures must be able to quantify the differences between transmission networks with slightly changed network structures. In this paper, key figures that fulfill these requirements and take into account the growing uncertainties are derived and a method is described to calculate these key figures. Exemplary examinations show that the derived key figures can make a useful contribution to the planning process for electrical transmission networks.
Coordination Mechanisms in Geographically Distributed Software Development

Despite technological advances in software engineering and collaboration tools, coordination in large-scale, geographically distributed software development continues to be problematic. Traditional theories suggest that collaborators coordinate by programming their tasks and by communicating with each other, but recent research also suggests that they coordinate implicitly through team cognition. However, there is very little empirical evidence on how the use of these various coordination mechanisms affects coordination effectiveness in the context of distributed work. This study investigates coordination in large-scale software development in a major telecommunications firm where the developers are geographically dispersed. Our findings indicate that shared knowledge of team members and use of software configuration management tools are associated with greater coordination effectiveness, while other coordination mechanisms including shared knowledge of the task, general communication, telephone communication and other software tools are not. Further, the use of software configuration management tools has the greatest positive impact on coordination, and developers use the tools not only for task programming but also for communicating about their work. We discuss the implications of our findings for coordination in large-scale, geographically distributed software development.
Patterns of Evolution in the Practice of Distributed Software Development in Wholly Owned Subsidiaries: A Preliminary Capability Model

In this paper, we describe a preliminary capability model that captures patterns of evolution in the practice of distributed software development in internal offshoring projects. In our research we seek to understand how the practices of organizations involved in the internal offshoring of software development evolve over time, from a software engineering perspective, and from the point of view of the subsidiaries. Based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we propose a capability model that encompasses the evolution of software development activities within and among several subsidiaries owned by an organization.
Environment matting and compositing

This paper introduces a new process, environment matting, which captures not just a foreground object and its traditional opacity matte from a real-world scene, but also a description of how that object refracts and reflects light, which we call an environment matte. The foreground object can then be placed in a new environment, using environment compositing, where it will refract and reflect light from that scene. Objects captured in this way exhibit not only specular but glossy and translucent effects, as well as selective attenuation and scattering of light according to wavelength. Moreover, the environment compositing process, which can be performed largely with texture mapping operations, is fast enough to run at interactive speeds on a desktop PC. We compare our results to photos of the same objects in real scenes. Applications of this work include the relighting of objects for virtual and augmented reality, more realistic 3D clip art, and interactive lighting design.
UStore: A Distributed Storage With Rich Semantics

Today's storage systems expose abstractions which are either too low-level (e.g., key-value store, raw-block store) that they require developers to re-invent the wheels, or too high-level (e.g., relational databases, Git) that they lack generality to support many classes of applications. In this work, we propose and implement a general distributed data storage system, called UStore, which has rich semantics. UStore delivers three key properties, namely immutability, sharing and security, which unify and add values to many classes of today's applications, and which also open the door for new applications. By keeping the core properties within the storage, UStore helps reduce application development efforts while offering high performance at hand. The storage embraces current hardware trends as key enablers. It is built around a data-structure similar to that of Git, a popular source code versioning system, but it also synthesizes many designs from distributed systems and databases. Our current implementation of UStore has better performance than general in-memory key-value storage systems, especially for version scan operations. We port and evaluate four applications on top of UStore: a Git-like application, a collaborative data science application, a transaction management application, and a blockchain application. We demonstrate that UStore enables faster development and the UStore-backed applications can have better performance than the existing implementations.
Projets d'aménagement et développement territorial : le cas du périmètre irrigué du Moyen Sebou au Maroc

L’action des pouvoirs publics dans les territoires ruraux du sud est la plus remarquee a travers des projets d’amenagement, masquant des processus de developpement territorial plus lents et moins visibles par des acteurs et reseaux sociaux. Nous analysons la rencontre entre un projet etatique d’irrigation, mis en œuvre dans le cadre du paradigme international de la Gestion Participative de l’Irrigation, et un territoire rural au Maroc, a travers les configurations des acteurs et les enjeux locaux de ses composantes sociales. Nos resultats montrent que le projet d’irrigation porte par les pouvoirs publics s’est progressivement ouvert a d’autres acteurs. Les associations d’irrigants faconnent des regles de gestion, et adaptent le projet technique a leur situation. L’emergence de nouveaux leaders qui se sont distingues par la suite dans le developpement local et dans la politique communale, ont occasionne une multiplication de poles de developpement territorial. Cela implique un changement de referentiel dans l’analyse de l’action publique dans les territoires ruraux au Maroc ou l’Etat n’a plus le monopole du savoir technique et ou la notabilite cherche a se repositionner, en acquerant de nouvelles competences techniques.
Predicting Media Use in Very Young Children: The Role of Demographics and Parent Attitudes

This study used a survey design (N = 168) to examine how parent and child demographics, parental media-use motives, parental subjective norms, and parental attitudes toward preschool media use (PMU) are all related to actual media exposure among children 6 months to 5 years in age. Results indicate that, in accordance with the theory of reasoned action, parents’ perceived subjective norms regarding various categories of media were significantly related to actual child consumption. Further, positive attitudes toward media were significantly related to higher rates of child consumption. Interestingly, parental worries about media were only negatively related to television consumption and unrelated to child exposure to other kinds of media.
Exercise mode and gender comparisons of energy expenditure at self-selected intensities.

The purpose of this study was to compare oxygen consumption (VO2) and energy expenditure after 20 min of self-selected submaximal exercise for four modes of exercise. Eighteen subjects (9 male and 9 female) first completed a test of VO2max during treadmill running. On separate days, subjects then completed 20 min submaximal treadmill running (TR), simulated cross-country skiing (XC), cycle ergometry (CE), and aerobic riding (AR) exercise. Total VO2 and energy expenditure were significantly higher for TR than all other modes for both males and females (43.6 +/- 10.4, 39.1 +/- 9.7, 36.1 +/- 7.6, 28.4 +/- 6.1 LO2, for TR, XC, CE, and AR, respectively, P < 0.0001). For males and females, heart rate was similar during TR and XC and lower during CE and AR (154.8 +/- 14.2, 152 +/- 13.1, 143.4 +/- 14.9, and 126.2 +/- 12.0 beats.min-1 for TR, XC, CE, and AR, respectively, P < 0.0001). Compared with females, males had significantly greater VO2 (P < 0.005) and energy expenditure (P < 0.004), while females had higher heart rates (P < 0.003). Ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) were not different between TR, XC, and CE, but were significantly lower during AR (13.4 +/- 1.3, 13.6 +/- 0.8, 13.2 +/- 0.9, and 12.6 +/- 1.0 for TR, XC, CE, and AR, respectively, P < 0.003). TR elicited the greatest VO2 and energy expenditure during self-selected exercise despite and RPE similar to XC and CE. Therefore, treadmill exercise may be the modality of choice for individuals seeking to improve cardiorespiratory endurance and expend a larger number of kjoules.
A Missing Piece of the Puzzle: The Organizational Context in Cultural Patterns of Creativity

In this article, we first review cross-cultural research, especially that concerning similarities and differences between East Asian and Western cultures, on creativity using laboratory tasks and tests. On the basis of this review, we then propose some directions for future cross-cultural research on creativity in the workplace. We emphasize the need to theorize why cultural differences make a difference in creativity and directly investigate, rather than assume, effects of contextual factors on creativity. In this regard, two literatures on creativity – cross-cultural studies using laboratory tasks and organizational studies of employee creativity – can benefit tremendously from integration. We also call for more empirical research examining effects of culture on creativity in the workplace, especially in China.
Family satisfaction with nursing facility care.

BACKGROUND We present the psychometric properties of our nursing facility family satisfaction questionnaire (NF-FSQ), and the steps used to develop this instrument. METHODS Family members from 14 nursing facilities in Pennsylvania were mailed the NF-FSQ. Factor analyses were used to test the extent to which the items in each domain represented the same underlying construct. To further report the applied psychometric properties of the instrument we used the completeness of data, score distributions, item-scale consistency and reliability of domain scores. RESULTS Of the 550 surveys mailed, 387 usable surveys were returned (70% response rate). Factor analyses show that the items were representative of the underlying factors. The percentage of family members not providing responses for each question was low, and varied from 1.0% to 3.4%. The floor and ceiling effects of the responses for each of the 20 questions were low. The item-scale internal consistency analyses determined that the correlation of items within indexes were higher than those with other indexes. Cronbach's alphas for the domains were all higher than usually recommended levels. CONCLUSIONS We believe we have produced a short, psychometrically sound family member satisfaction instrument for use in nursing homes. We also show that response rates from family members can be very high.
Enabling customer-provided resources for cloud computing: Potentials,challenges, and implementation

Recent years have witnessed cloud computing as an efficient means for providing resources as a form of utility. Driven by the strong demands, industrial pioneers have offered commercial cloud platforms, mostly datacenter-based, which are known to be powerful and effective. Yet, as the cloud customers are pure consumers, their local resources, though abundant, have been largely ignored. In this paper, We present SpotCloud, a real working system that seamlessly integrates the customers' local resources into the cloud platform, enabling them to sell, buy, and utilize these resources. We also investigate the potentials and challenges towards enabling customer-provided resources for cloud computing. Given that these local resources are highly heterogeneous and dynamic, we closely examine two critical challenges in this new context: (1) How can the customers be motivated to contribute or utilize such resources? and (2) How can high service availability be ensured out of the dynamic resources? We demonstrate a distributed market for potential sellers to flexibly and adaptively determine their resource prices through a repeated seller competition game. We also present an optimal resource provisioning algorithm that ensures service availability with minimized lease and migration costs. The evaluation results indicate it as a flexible and less expensive complement to the pure datacenter-based cloud.
Detecting electrocardiogram abnormalities with independent component analysis

In this work, we apply independent component analysis (ICA) to electrocardiographic (ECG) signals for improved detection of abnormal conditions in the heart. Unsupervised ICA neural networks can demix the components of measured ECG signals. Such components may correspond to individual heart functions, either normal or abnormal. ICA neural networks have the potential to make abnormal components more apparent, even when they are masked by normal components in the original measured signals. This is particularly important for diagnosis well in advance of the actual onset of heart attack, in which abnormaliti es in the original measured ECG signals may be diff icult to detect. This is the first known work that applies ICA to EGC signals beyond noise extraction, to the detection of abnormal heart function.
Assessment of magnitude and availability of a non‐drug reinforcer on preference for a drug reinforcer

This study examined choice of beer over an alternative, non‐drug reinforcer (food or money), under conditions where the magnitude and availability of the non‐drug reinforcer was varied. Normal volunteers participated in three sessions consisting of a computerized choice task followed by a period of relaxation and consumption of earned reinforcers. The computer task consisted of a concurrent choice schedule in which the availability of the non‐drug reinforcer was varied across ‘trials’ from random ratio 1.3 to 16 (probability of reinforcement: 75 per cent to 6 per cent). Across the three sessions the magnitude of the non‐drug reinforcer was varied (i.e. small, medium, large). The magnitude and availability of beer remained constant across trials at a random ratio 4 (probability of reinforcement: 25 per cent). Two experiments were conducted, one in which food was the alternative reinforcer (Experiment I) and one in which money was the alternative reinforcer (Experiment II). In both experiments, decreasing the response requirement for the non‐drug reinforcer within the sessions resulted in an orderly decrease in the amount of responding to obtain alcohol. In Experiment I, changes in the magnitude of the food reinforcer did not change responding for beer. In Experiment II, however, responding for beer decreased when the magnitude of the alternative monetary reinforcer was increased. Thus, changes in the magnitude of an alternative reinforcer may have differential effects on responding for a drug reinforcer, depending on the nature of the alternative reinforcer.
Activation of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Is a General Phenomenon in Infections with Human Pathogens

Background Hypoxia inducible factor (HIF)-1 is the key transcriptional factor involved in the adaptation process of cells and organisms to hypoxia. Recent findings suggest that HIF-1 plays also a crucial role in inflammatory and infectious diseases. Methodology/Principal Findings Using patient skin biopsies, cell culture and murine infection models, HIF-1 activation was determined by immunohistochemistry, immunoblotting and reporter gene assays and was linked to cellular oxygen consumption. The course of a S. aureus peritonitis was determined upon pharmacological HIF-1 inhibition. Activation of HIF-1 was detectable (i) in all ex vivo in biopsies of patients suffering from skin infections, (ii) in vitro using cell culture infection models and (iii) in vivo using murine intravenous and peritoneal S. aureus infection models. HIF-1 activation by human pathogens was induced by oxygen-dependent mechanisms. Small colony variants (SCVs) of S. aureus known to cause chronic infections did not result in cellular hypoxia nor in HIF-1 activation. Pharmaceutical inhibition of HIF-1 activation resulted in increased survival rates of mice suffering from a S. aureus peritonitis. Conclusions/Significance Activation of HIF-1 is a general phenomenon in infections with human pathogenic bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa. HIF-1-regulated pathways might be an attractive target to modulate the course of life-threatening infections.