Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INVITED ESSAY: "On the Relation Between Secular an Divine Relationships: An Emerging Attachment Perspective and a Critique of the "Depth" Approaches"

The psychology of religion has existed as a neglected subdiscipline in general psychology, but a trend toward integration is currently present, partly due to applications of well-corroborated theories from mainstream psychology. The article has two aims. First, the most influential psychodynamic "depth" approaches (those of Erikson, 1958, 1959, 1963; Freud, 1913/1919, 1927/1964a, 1939/1964b; Jones, 1991; Rizzuto, 1979, 1991) to the study of relations between secular and divine relationships are criticized. The critique encompasses theoretical, methodological, and empirical reservations, including natural science and falsifiability concerns; reservations concerning the relation to the biological sciences and the theory of evolution by natural selection; and concerns with broad stages of development, the content of mental representations, and the parsimony of the analyses. Methodological points of critique are offered for the sole use of nonoperationalizable constructs, clinical case study designs, and post hoc reconstructions of past relationships. It is suggested that the problems with the depth approaches are serious enough to warrant a different point of departure for the study of relations between secular and divine relationships. Second, for the sake of further integration of the psychology of religion with general psychology, attachment theory is proposed as an emerging alternative to the traditional depth approaches, and some of the convergences and divergences between the two are highlighted. It is argued that besides passing the test in relation to the above theoretical and methodological challenges, the emerging attachment framework retains the most important insights of the traditional depth perspectives.
Adaptive Detection in Elliptically Distributed Noise and Under-Sampled Scenario

The problem of adaptive detection of a signal of interest embedded in elliptically distributed noise with unknown scatter matrix R is addressed, in the specific case where the number of training samples T is less than the dimension M of the observations. In this under-sampled scenario, whenever R is treated as an arbitrary positive definite Hermitian matrix, one cannot resort directly to the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) since the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) of R is not well-defined, the likelihood function being unbounded. Indeed, inference of R can only be made in the subspace spanned by the observations. In this letter, we present a modification of the GLRT which takes into account the specific features of under-sampled scenarios. We come up with a test statistic that, surprisingly enough, coincides with a subspace detector of Scharf and Friedlander: the detector proceeds in the subspace orthogonal to the training samples and then compares the energy along the signal of interest to the total energy. Moreover, this detector does not depend on the density generator of the noise elliptical distribution. Numerical simulations illustrate the performance of the test and compare it with schemes based on regularized estimates of R.
Purification and Properties of an Enzyme Capable of Degrading the Sheath of Sphaerotilus natans

ABSTRACT Microorganisms which can degrade and grow on the purified sheath of a sheathed bacterium Sphaerotilus natans were collected from soil and river water. Two bacterial strains were isolated from the soil and designated strains TB and TK. Both strains are rod shaped, negatively stained by gram staining, facultatively anaerobic, and formed ellipsoidal endospores. These characteristics suggested that the isolates belong to the genus Paenibacillus, according to Ash et al. (C. Ash, F. G. Priest, and M. D. Collins, Antonie Leeuwenhoek 64:253–260, 1993). Phylogenetic analysis based on the 16S rDNA supported this possibility. Purification of the sheath-degrading enzyme was carried out from the culture broth of strain TB. The molecular weight of the enzyme was calculated to be 78,000 and 50,000 by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide electrophoresis and gel filtration chromatography, respectively. Enzyme activity was optimized at pH 6.5 to 7.0 and 30 to 40°C. The reaction was accelerated by the addition of Mg2+, Ca2+, Fe3+, and iodoacetamide, whereas it was inhibited by the addition of Cu2+, Mn2+, and dithiothreitol. The enzyme acted on the polysaccharide moiety of the sheath, producing an oligosaccharide the size of which was between the sizes of maltopentaose and maltohexaose. As the reaction proceeded, the absorbance at 235 nm of the reaction mixture increased, suggesting the generation of unsaturated sugars. Incorporation of unsaturated sugars was also suggested by the thiobarbituric acid reaction. It is possible that the enzyme is not a hydrolytic enzyme but a kind of polysaccharide eliminase which acts on the basic polysaccharide.
Medida de la Calidad: Adaptación de la Escala Servqual al Ámbito Financiero

RESUMEN La medida de conceptos abstractos, como puede ser la medida de la calidad, implica el diseño de instrumentos adecuados que contemplen la definición conceptual de lo que se quiere medir, la identificación de las dimensiones subyacentes al concepto y el desarrollo de ítems fiables y válidos para medir cada una de las dimensiones. Parasuraman et al. [1988] desarrollan una escala, la escala servqual, para la medida de la calidad del servicio desde el punto de vista de la percepción del cliente, indican que las dimensiones encontradas son generalizares a cualquier servicio y construyen una batería de ítems para medirlas. En este trabajo presentamos una discusión de este modelo de la medida de la calidad percibida por los clientes a través del análisis de dos estudios empíricos de aplicación de la escala servqual para la medida de la calidad de las entidades financieras de las comarcas de Girona. Las principales conclusiones indican que la adaptación de la escala a la medida de un servicio en un entorno concreto es mejor que la aplicación rigurosa de la versión traducida de la escala original y que la escala de las percepciones tratada de manera individual predice mejor las percepciones globales de calidad percibida por los clientes que la escala de las diferencias. Por otra parte, fruto de los resultados aportados, se propone una manera de reducir el cuestionario para facilitar, economizar y agilizar su aplicación regular a la medida de la calidad de las entidades financieras.
Creating Stepfamilies: Integrating Children Into the Study of Union Formation

As a result of the growth in out-of-wedlock childbearing and union instability, adults contemplating forming a new union are often already parents. This article examines the role of children in stepfamily formation, both coresident and not, using the 2,594 respondents in the National Survey of Families and Households who were not living with a partner in 19871 1988. We consider children of the respondent and of the partner, which allows us to examine the determinants of entering a stepfamily. We found that being a coresident father dramatically increases forming a union with a woman with children. Women's coresidential children reduce women's odds of forming unions with men who do not have children and increase them for unions with men who do.
Effects of perceived and objective neighborhood crime on walking frequency among midlife African American women in a home-based walking intervention.

BACKGROUND Crime may be a significant barrier to physical activity for urban African American women, yet few studies have examined this relationship in intervention studies. This study examines relationships among neighborhood crime incidents, perceptions of crime and safety, and adherence in a walking intervention among urban, midlife African-American women. METHODS The sample includes 148 women living in the City of Chicago. Violent crimes, disorder crimes, gun violence, and crime-related safety were examined. Adherence to walking frequency was measured as the percentage of recommended walks completed. RESULTS Controlling for demographic characteristics and treatment group, multivariate regression analyses showed walking adherence was not associated with any of the crime measures or crime-related safety (R(2) = 0.130 to 0.147). The effect of enhanced treatment did not differ by levels of objective or perceived neighborhood crime or safety. Weak to moderate bivariate correlations were observed between objective crime measures and perceived disorder crime and crime-related safety (r = 0.04 to 0.25). CONCLUSIONS Weak correlations between perceived and objective crime measures suggest they are measuring different aspects of the crime environment. Future studies should examine perceived and objective measures in other populations and settings and other neighborhood social factors which may moderate crime and safety effects on outcomes of physical activity interventions.
Transactional associations between mother–child conflict and child externalising and internalising problems

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the existing transactional associations between mother–child conflict and the child’s internalising and externalising problems. To this end, longitudinal data were used, covering ages 7–15. The sample consisted of 1,136 mothers and their children who participated in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development longitudinal study. The current analysis employs the Autoregressive Latent Trajectory (ALT) model that enables the simultaneous investigation of (1) the developmental stability, (2) the developmental change, (3) the longitudinal inter-relations, (4) the time-specific associations and (5) the directionality of the relations among the variables under examination. It was found that mother–child conflict increased across time and externalising problems decreased from childhood to adolescence, while internalising problems showed intra-individual stability. Further, mother–daughter conflict increased at a higher rate than mother–son conflict. The cross-lagged regressions suggested that the association between conflict and externalising problems is bi-directional from age 7 to age 9. However, a child effect was found from age 9 to age 15, in that the child’s externalising problems continually influenced mother–child conflict but not the other way around. In contrast, the association between internalising problems and conflict was limited to cross-sectional and overtime associations suggesting that the association between internalising problems and conflict is mostly due to the co-variation between them.
Spatial-temporal depth de-noising for Kinect based on texture edge-assisted depth classification

The emergence of Kinect facilitates the real-time and low-cost depth capture. However, the quality of its depth map is still inadequate for further applications due to holes, noises and artifacts existing within its depth information. In this paper, a Kinect depth de-noising algorithm is proposed to enhance the stability and reliability of Kinect depth map by exploiting spatial-temporal depth classification beside edges. Depth edges are realigned by extracted texture edges. Spatial and temporal depth classification is retrieved and exploited adaptively to remove the blurs around the edges. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides much sharper and clearer edges for the Kinect depth. Compared with the original depth and the depths refined by existing approaches, the spatial-temporal de-noised depth information provided by the proposed approach enhances the quality of some advanced processing e.g. 3D reconstruction prospectively.
Characterizing glottal activity from speech using Empirical Mode Decomposition

Glottal activity is an important aspect of speech production that results in voiced speech, and localizing such regions for computing various parameters of the excitation source is useful in many speech processing applications. The aim of this paper is to investigate the ability of Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and its noise assisted variants, in characterizing glottal activity from the speech signal. A pair of consecutive Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs), obtained from the decomposition is found to reflect the periodic nature of different voiced regions of the speech signal. This IMF pair is utilized to construct a signal, named the Glottal Intrinsic Mode Function (GIMF), which represents most of the voiced speech regions. To measure the capability of the GIMF in representing the glottal activity, it is applied to the tasks of Glottal Activity Detection (GAD), pitch frequency (F0) tracking and detecting pitch markers. The results ascertain the capability of EMD in localizing Glottal activity within a small subset of IMFs, and suggest the possibility of accurately extracting source-information from voiced speech with simple signal processing procedures.
A semantic-tended approach to recombination in EBMT systems

In this paper a semantic-tended approach for recombination in EBMT systems is presented. The proposed method uses the least structural information of a sentence. The shared verbs stem between the sentences is the key to find the differences of two sentences. The differences between the input sentence and the matched example sentence are minimized by substituting the translations of their different parts to produce the output. This method is implemented in an EBMT system for English-Farsi language pairs. The results of the proposed method are benchmarked with Google translator. The results are promising based on BLEU and manual evaluations.
Molecular characterization of human enteroviruses in clinical samples: Comparison between VP2, VP1, and RNA polymerase regions using RT nested PCR assays and direct sequencing of products

Three nested RT‐PCR assays were developed to permit sensitive typing of enteroviruses directly from clinical samples. These assays amplified short fragments from different genomic regions codifying for three proteins: VP2, VP1, and RNA polymerase. Given that enteroviruses have a high rate of degeneration within target codons among serotypes, the primers used consisted of mixed base and deoxyinosine residues. These techniques detected at 0.03–0.003 TCID50 of prototype Poliovirus 1 and Echovirus 30. They were used to characterize the enteroviral RNA detected in 18 CSF, stool, and throw swab samples and in 8 enterovirus isolates from patients with several syndromes. Phylogenetic analysis in each independent sequenced region grouped the enterovirus into four clusters, enabling genetic classification. A comparative study was performed among the 26 sequences obtained after direct sequencing of products with those available in the nucleotide databases. The efficiency of each assay for enterovirus identification was evaluated by both distance (Clustal) and similarity (M‐NW) indices. Comparative results obtained independently in the three regions showed the highest yield of correlation between nucleotide sequences of all prototype serotypes and the analyzed genotypes in the VP1 region (26/26, 100% Clustal; 22/26, 85% M‐NW). Conversely, the VP2 region failed to identify some of the circulating enteroviruses (17/26, 65% Clustal; 16/26, 62% M‐NW). Using the RNA polymerase region, sequences from samples and isolates were associated with prototype strains whenever these were available (20/21, 95% Clustal; 12/21, 57% M‐NW). These assays were useful for molecular identification of enterovirus directly from samples even when isolation was not possible. J. Med. Virol. 65:138–148, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Univariate polynomials: nearly optimal algorithms for factorization and rootfinding

To approximate all roots (zeros) of a univariate polynomial, we develop two effective algorithms and combine them in a single recursive process. One algorithm computes a basic well isolated zero-free annulus on the complex plane, whereas another algorithm numerically splits the input polynomial of the n-th degree into two factors balanced in the degrees and with the zero sets separated by the basic annulus. Recursive combination of the two algorithms leads to recursive computation of the complete numerical factorization of a polynomial into the product of linear factors and further to the approximation of the roots. The new rootfinder incorporates the earlier techniques of Schönhage and Kirrinnis and our old and new techniques and yields nearly optimal (up to polylogarithmic factors) arithmetic and Boolean cost estimates for the complexity of both complete factorization and rootfinding. The improvement over our previous record Boolean complexity estimates is by roughly the factor of n for complete factorization and also for the approximation of well-conditioned (well isolated) roots, whereas the same algorithm is also optimal (under both arithmetic and Boolean models of computing) for the worst case input polynomial, where the roots can be ill-conditioned, forming clusters. (The worst case bounds are supported by our previous algorithms as well.) Al our algorithms allow processor efficient acceleration to achieve solution in polygarithmic parallel time.
Using prediction to conserve energy in recognition on mobile devices

As devices are expected to be aware of their environment, the challenge becomes how to accommodate these abilities with the power constraints which plague modern mobile devices. We present a framework for an embedded approach to context recognition which reduces power consumption. This is accomplished by identifying class-sensor dependencies, and using prediction methods to identify likely future classes, thereby identifying sensors which can be temporarily turned off. Different methods for prediction, as well as integration with several classifiers is analyzed and the methods are evaluated in terms of computational load and loss in quality of context. The results indicate that the amount of energy which can be saved is dependent on two variables (the acceptable loss in quality of recognition, and the number of most likely classes which should be accounted for), and two scenario-dependent properties (predictability of the context sequences and size of the context-sensor dependency sets).
A Smart Multicoil Inductively Coupled Array for Wireless Power Transmission

This paper presents a novel resonance-based multicoil array structure to wirelessly charge or power up apparatus, like smart phones, computer mouses, smart animal research systems, or implanted medical devices. The proposed array consists of a novel multicoil inductive link, whose primary resonator is made of several identical coil elements connected in parallel and arranged in an array. Such a structure presents several key features compared to previous inductive coil arrays. The proposed approach can do the following: 1) deliver power with superior efficiency over longer separation distances; 2) naturally track the receiver position and localize transmitted power through nearby coil array elements without the need for complex control and detection circuitry; and 3) accommodate either short- or long-range power transmission applications simply by slightly modifying the receiver topology. The performance of the proposed structure is verified by measurement results. In a three-coil configuration, the prototype provides a power transfer efficiency (PTE) of 83.3% and a power delivered to the load (PDL) of 3.87 W for a separation distance below 1 cm, while in a four-coil configuration, it provides a PTE of 76% and a PDL of 115 mW for a separation distance of 4 cm.
Midlife risk factors and healthy survival in men.

CONTEXT Healthy survival has no clear phenotypic definition, and little is known about its attributes, particularly in men. OBJECTIVE To test whether midlife biological, lifestyle, and sociodemographic risk factors are associated with overall survival and exceptional survival (free of a set of major diseases and impairments). DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Prospective cohort study within the Honolulu Heart Program/Honolulu Asia Aging Study. A total of 5820 Japanese American middle-aged men (mean age, 54 [range, 45-68] years) free of morbidity and functional impairments were followed for up to 40 years (1965-2005) to assess overall and exceptional survival. Exceptional survival was defined as survival to a specified age (75, 80, 85, or 90 years) without incidence of 6 major chronic diseases and without physical and cognitive impairment. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Overall survival and exceptional survival. RESULTS Of 5820 original participants, 2451 participants (42%) survived to age 85 years and 655 participants (11%) met the criteria for exceptional survival to age 85 years. High grip strength and avoidance of overweight, hyperglycemia, hypertension, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption were associated with both overall and exceptional survival. In addition, high education and avoidance of hypertriglyceridemia were associated with exceptional survival, and lack of a marital partner was associated with mortality before age 85 years. Risk factor models based on cumulative risk factors (survival risk score) suggest that the probability of survival to oldest age is as high as 69% with no risk factors and as low as 22% with 6 or more risk factors. The probability of exceptional survival to age 85 years was 55% with no risk factors but decreased to 9% with 6 or more risk factors. CONCLUSION These data suggest that avoidance of certain risk factors in midlife is associated with the probability of a long and healthy life among men.
Research Note - When Is Versioning Optimal for Information Goods?

This paper provides insights about when versioning is an optimal strategy for information goods. Our characterization of this class of goods is that variable costs are invariant with quality, including the special case of zero variable costs. Our analysis assumes a monopoly firm that has an existing product in the market and has an opportunity to segment the market by introducing additional lower-quality versions. We derive a simple decision rule for determining the optimality of versioning based on the solution to a single-product maximization problem. Versioning is optimal when the optimal market share of the lower-quality version, offered alone, is greater than the optimal market share of the high-quality version, offered alone. A firm can profitably employ versioning for an information good if it can design the lower quality in a way that, relative to their valuations for the high-end version, high-type consumers have a lower relative valuation for the lower quality than do low-type consumers. When variable costs increase, a firm that offered only one product version need not consider adding another version. When variable costs decrease, the firm should explore adding a lower-quality version.