Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The proportion of religious residents predicts the values of nonreligious neighbors: evidence from a national sample

Sociologists have shown that neighbors hold similar values, from a combination of assimilation (the propinquity effect) and migration (homophily). However, the scope of value leveling remains uncertain. We conducted a natural experiment by using the resilience of conservative values among religious residents to evaluate the extent of leveling in the conservative values of nonreligious neighbors. We employed a Multi-level Random Coefficient Model that linked survey data on religious/value orientations from a nationally representative sample of New Zealanders (n=6217 people) with census data on the proportion of religious people living in respondent neighborhoods. Consistent with the religious value-leveling hypothesis, the conservative values of religious residents predicted levels of conservative values among nonreligious neighbors. The strength of conservative values leveling among nonreligious neighbors was found to be a linear function of the proportion of religious residents. This pattern appeared consistently across New Zealand, and held controlling for demographic variables and regional deprivation. No other value domain besides conservative values exhibited such frequency-dependent leveling effects. This study offers the first demonstration of value leveling at a national scale. It reveals that proportionally dense religious populations may affect the value orientations of nonreligious neighbors, even in a mainly secular country.
A palaeobiogeographic model for biotic diversification within Amazonia over the past three million years

Many hypotheses have been proposed to explain high species diversity in Amazonia, but few generalizations have emerged. In part, this has arisen from the scarcity of rigorous tests for mechanisms promoting speciation, and from major uncertainties about palaeogeographic events and their spatial and temporal associations with diversification. Here, we investigate the environmental history of Amazonia using a phylogenetic and biogeographic analysis of trumpeters (Aves: Psophia), which are represented by species in each of the vertebrate areas of endemism. Their relationships reveal an unforeseen ‘complete’ time-slice of Amazonian diversification over the past 3.0 Myr. We employ this temporally calibrated phylogeny to test competing palaeogeographic hypotheses. Our results are consistent with the establishment of the current Amazonian drainage system at approximately 3.0–2.0 Ma and predict the temporal pattern of major river formation over Plio-Pleistocene times. We propose a palaeobiogeographic model for the last 3.0 Myr of Amazonian history that has implications for understanding patterns of endemism, the temporal history of Amazonian diversification and mechanisms promoting speciation. The history of Psophia, in combination with new geological evidence, provides the strongest direct evidence supporting a role for river dynamics in Amazonian diversification, and the absence of such a role for glacial climate cycles and refugia.
I’m Allowing What? Disclosing the authority applications demand of users as a condition of installation

Computer operating systems, and now websites that serve as application platforms, are increasingly adopting stricter application security models; they restrict the resources applications can access to those authorized by the user. Users are asked to authorize access to these resources either when the application is installed or when previously-unauthorized resources are required. For example, Facebook requires its 400+ million users to make authorization decisions whenever an application first tries to run within a user’s account. The Android mobile phone OS requires its millions of users to make application authorization decisions when downloading new applications. While the security of these users’ systems and data increasingly rests on their ability to make these authorization decisions, there is little research to guide those designing these application authorization experiences. We performed a laboratory study to evaluate different designs for disclosing the actions and resources that an application will be authorized to perform once installed. We used a within-participants design to observe thirty-three Facebook users’ ability to absorb and search information in seventeen different disclosure designs, all of which were presented in the context of a fictional Facebook application. These designs were chosen to proxy for designs users rely upon today, from platforms including Facebook, Android, OAuth, and HealthVault. Four of these designs conveyed only a set of resources to be authorized, such as the user’s contact information or friends. The other thirteen designs paired resources with different actions that could be performed on them, such as seeing contact information, changing contact information, or adding new contact information. We find that participants overwhelmingly prefer disclosure designs that present resources visually, using icons or pictures, and can search those containing icons most quickly. Surprisingly, we find little variance in participants’ performance on our information-absorption tasks over widely varying disclosure designs. We do, however, find that participants perform better when disclosures are organized by actions, and followed by the various resources on which the actions would be authorized, than when information is grouped by the resources.
Changing education, changing assessment, changing research?

Background In medical education, assessment of medical competence and performance, important changes have taken place in the last 5 decades. These changes have affected the basic concepts in all 3 domains. Developments in education and assessment In education constructivism has provided a completely new view on how students learn best. In assessment the change from trait-orientated to competency- or role-orientated thinking has given rise to a whole range of new approaches. Certain methods of education, such as problem-based learning (PBL), and assessment, however, are often seen as almost synonymous with the underlying concepts, and one tends to forget that it is the concept that is important and that a particular method is but 1 way of using a concept. When doing this, one runs the risk of confusing means and ends, which may hamper or slow down new developments. Lessons for research A similar problem seems to occur often in research of medical education. Here too, methods – or, rather, methodologies – are confused with research questions. This may lead to an overemphasis on research that fits well known methodologies (e.g. the randomised controlled trial) and neglect of what are sometimes even more important research questions because they do not fit well known methodologies. Conclusion In this paper we advocate a return to the underlying concepts and a careful reflection of their use in various situations.
The Effect of Sugar-Free Versus Sugar-Sweetened Beverages on Satiety, Liking and Wanting: An 18 Month Randomized Double-Blind Trial in Children

Background Substituting sugar-free for sugar-sweetened beverages reduces weight gain. A possible explanation is that sugar-containing and sugar-free beverages cause the same degree of satiety. However, this has not been tested in long-term trials. Methods We randomized 203 children aged 7-11 years to receive 250 mL per day of an artificially sweetened sugar-free beverage or a similarly looking and tasting sugar-sweetened beverage. We measured satiety on a 5-point scale by questionnaire at 0, 6, 12 and 18 months. We calculated the change in satiety from before intake to 1 minute after intake and 15 minutes after intake. We then calculated the odds ratio that satiety increased by 1 point in the sugar-group versus the sugar-free group. We also investigated how much the children liked and wanted the beverages. Results 146 children or 72% completed the study. We found no statistically significant difference in satiety between the sugar-free and sugar-sweetened group; the adjusted odds ratio for a 1 point increase in satiety in the sugar group versus the sugar-free group was 0.77 at 1 minute (95% confidence interval, 0.46 to 1.29), and 1.44 at 15 minutes after intake (95% CI, 0.86 to 2.40). The sugar-group liked and wanted their beverage slightly more than the sugar-free group, adjusted odds ratio 1.63 (95% CI 1.05 to 2.54) and 1.65 (95% CI 1.07 to 2.55), respectively. Conclusions Sugar-sweetened and sugar-free beverages produced similar satiety. Therefore when children are given sugar-free instead of sugar-containing drinks they might not make up the missing calories from other sources. This may explain our previous observation that children in the sugar-free group accumulated less body fat than those in the sugar group. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00893529 http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT00893529
Extended Linkage Disequilibrium in Noncoding Regions in a Conifer, Cryptomeria japonica

We measured linkage disequilibrium in mostly noncoding regions of Cryptomeria japonica, a conifer belonging to Cupressaceae. Linkage disequilibrium was extensive and did not decay even at a distance of 100 kb. The average estimate of the population recombination rate per base pair was 1.55 × 10−5 and was <1/70 of that in the coding regions. We discuss the impact of low recombination rates in a large part of the genome on association studies.
Effects of Women's Studies Courses on Gender-Related Attitudes of Women and Men

Attitudes about feminism, gender equality, and gender differences were assessed for male and female students enrolled in three women's studies courses and four control courses at the beginning and end of an academic semester. Compared to control students, women's studies students agreed more with feminist and equality items, and disagreed more with gender difference items, at the beginning of the term. Nonetheless, belief in gender differences decreased among men, but not women, enrolled in women's studies courses. Additionally, women's studies courses produced increased feminist attitudes among women, but decreased feminist attitudes among the small sample of men in the study.
PART OF A SPECIAL ISSUE ON SEEDLING HERBIVORY Demographic consequences of chromatic leaf defence in tropical tree communities: do red young leaves increase growth and survival?

†Background Many tropical forest tree species delay greening their leaves until full expansion. This strategy is thought to provide newly flushing leaves with protection against damage by herbivores by keeping young leaves devoid of nutritive value. Because young leaves suffer the greatest predation from invertebrate herbivores, delayed greening could prevent costly tissue loss. Many species that delay greening also produce anthocyanin pigments in their new leaves, giving them a reddish tint. These anthocyanins may be fungicidal, protect leaves against UV damage or make leaves cryptic to herbivores blind to the red part of the spectrum. †Methods A comprehensive survey was undertaken of seedlings, saplings and mature trees in two diverse tropical
2D periodic structure featuring negative group velocity of bloch waves

A 2D, volumetric (i.e., non-planar), structure consisting of two dielectric layers, loaded by various metal inclusions on multiple-periodic grids and closed by two confining metal planes is introduced in view of advanced dispersion engineering related applications. Full-wave simulation has been used to demonstrate that, for axial propagation, the structure presents (i) a large electromagnetic band-gap and (ii) two modes that have anti-parallel phase and group velocities in different frequency bands where they do not interact with other modes.
Automatic Error Detection Techniques Based on Dynamic Invariants THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF

This document presents the methods used to test the suitability of some already existing automatic error detection techniques to embedded systems, and their performance when used as input for the program spectra fault detection algorithm. These error detection techniques are important for locating unstable states of the firmware of embedded systems, triggering recovery routines that will avoid a sure crash.
Rapid P300 brain-computer interface communication with a head-mounted display

Visual ERP (P300) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow for fast and reliable spelling and are intended as a muscle-independent communication channel for people with severe paralysis. However, they require the presentation of visual stimuli in the field of view of the user. A head-mounted display could allow convenient presentation of visual stimuli in situations, where mounting a conventional monitor might be difficult or not feasible (e.g., at a patient's bedside). To explore if similar accuracies can be achieved with a virtual reality (VR) headset compared to a conventional flat screen monitor, we conducted an experiment with 18 healthy participants. We also evaluated it with a person in the locked-in state (LIS) to verify that usage of the headset is possible for a severely paralyzed person. Healthy participants performed online spelling with three different display methods. In one condition a 5 × 5 letter matrix was presented on a conventional 22 inch TFT monitor. Two configurations of the VR headset were tested. In the first (glasses A), the same 5 × 5 matrix filled the field of view of the user. In the second (glasses B), single letters of the matrix filled the field of view of the user. The participant in the LIS tested the VR headset on three different occasions (glasses A condition only). For healthy participants, average online spelling accuracies were 94% (15.5 bits/min) using three flash sequences for spelling with the monitor and glasses A and 96% (16.2 bits/min) with glasses B. In one session, the participant in the LIS reached an online spelling accuracy of 100% (10 bits/min) using the glasses A condition. We also demonstrated that spelling with one flash sequence is possible with the VR headset for healthy users (mean: 32.1 bits/min, maximum reached by one user: 71.89 bits/min at 100% accuracy). We conclude that the VR headset allows for rapid P300 BCI communication in healthy users and may be a suitable display option for severely paralyzed persons.
Active Metric Learning from Relative Comparisons

This work focuses on active learning of distance metrics from relative comparison information. A relative comparison specifies, for a data point triplet $(x_i,x_j,x_k)$, that instance $x_i$ is more similar to $x_j$ than to $x_k$. Such constraints, when available, have been shown to be useful toward defining appropriate distance metrics. In real-world applications, acquiring constraints often require considerable human effort. This motivates us to study how to select and query the most useful relative comparisons to achieve effective metric learning with minimum user effort. Given an underlying class concept that is employed by the user to provide such constraints, we present an information-theoretic criterion that selects the triplet whose answer leads to the highest expected gain in information about the classes of a set of examples. Directly applying the proposed criterion requires examining $O(n^3)$ triplets with $n$ instances, which is prohibitive even for datasets of moderate size. We show that a randomized selection strategy can be used to reduce the selection pool from $O(n^3)$ to $O(n)$, allowing us to scale up to larger-size problems. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms two baseline policies.
Legged Robots That Balance

This book, by a leading authority on legged locomotion, presents exciting engineering and science, along with fascinating implications for theories of human motor control. It lays fundamental groundwork in legged locomotion, one of the least developed areas of robotics, addressing the possibility of building useful legged robots that run and balance.The book describes the study of physical machines that run and balance on just one leg, including analysis, computer simulation, and laboratory experiments. Contrary to expectations, it reveals that control of such machines is not particularly difficult. It describes how the principles of locomotion discovered with one leg can be extended to systems with several legs and reports preliminary experiments with a quadruped machine that runs using these principles.Raibert's work is unique in its emphasis on dynamics and active balance, aspects of the problem that have played a minor role in most previous work. His studies focus on the central issues of balance and dynamic control, while avoiding several problems that have dominated previous research on legged machines.Marc Raibert is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics at Carnegie-Mellon University and on the editorial board of The MIT Press journal, "Robotics Research. Legged Robots That Balance" is fifteenth in the Artificial Intelligence Series, edited by Patrick Winston and Michael Brady.
An Exchange Theory of Money and Self-Esteem in Decision Making

This article addresses the relationship between money and self-esteem, both of which human beings desire. Money is used to purchase products. It may also indicate its owner's competence. Self-esteem is the subjective evaluation of the self, and people want to maintain their good self-image. The exchange between money and self-esteem may follow 3 principles: augmentation, substitution, and competition. A superior payoff augments utility of self-esteem. Money and self-esteem partially compensate for one another when an option contains an abundance of one type of utility and lacks the other. Money and self-esteem compete against each other when decision makers have to choose between the two. Empirical evidence has shown that meaning of money, situational need for money, self-esteem boost, and ego threat influence the exchange between money and self-esteem. The theory presented in this article bridges research in psychology and findings in economics and provides an integrative perspective on understanding human decision making.
Reliability Generalization of the Neo Personality Scales

A reliability generalization of 51 samples employing one of the NEO personality scales was conducted. Reliability generalization is a meta-analytic method for examining the variability in the reliability of scores by determining which sample characteristics are related to differences in score reliability. It was found that there was a large amount of variability in the reliability of NEO scores, both between and within personality domains. The sample characteristics that are related to score reliability were dependent on NEO domain. Agreeableness scores appear to be the weakest of the domains assessed by the NEO scales in terms of reliability, particularly in clinical samples, for male-only samples, and when temporal consistency was the criterion for reliability. The reliability of Openness to Experience scores was low when the NEO-Five Factor Inventory was used. The advantages of conceptualizing reliability as a property of scores, and not tests, are discussed.
Modeling and control of color xerographic processes

The University of Michigan and Xerox's Wilson Research Center have been collaborating on problems in color management systems since 1996, supported in part by an NSF GOALI grant. The paper is divided into three sections. The first discusses the basics of xerography and areas where systems methodology can have a potential impact. The second section describes the authors' approach to the approximation of color space transformations using piecewise linear approximants and the graph intersection algorithm, with a brief review of some of the analytical and numerical results. The last section expounds on some of the benefits and difficulties of industry-university-government collaboration.
Age and Meteorological Factors in the Occurrence of Spontaneous Intracerebral Hemorrhage in a Metropolitan City

Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between meteorological factors and occurrence of spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) according to age. Materials and Methods We retrospectively analyzed the records of 735 ICH patients in a metropolitan hospital-based population. Observed and expected numbers of ICH patients were obtained at 5℃ intervals of ambient temperature and a ratio of observed to expected frequency was then calculated. Changes in ambient temperature from the day before ICH onset day were observed. The Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test was used to test differences in meteorological variables between the onset and non-onset days. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used for comparison of meteorological variables across gender and age. Results ICH was observed more frequently (observed/expected ratio ≥ 1) at lower mean, minimum, and maximum ambient temperature (p = 0.0002, 0.0003, and 0.0002, respectively). Significantly lower mean, minimum, and maximum ambient temperature, dew point temperature, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure (p = 0.0003, 0.0005, 0.0001, 0.0013, 0.0431, and 0.0453, respectively) was observed for days on which spontaneous ICH occurred. In the subgroup analysis, the ICH onset day showed significantly lower mean, minimum, and maximum ambient temperature, dew point temperature, relative humidity, and higher atmospheric pressure in the older (≥ 65 years) female group (p = 0.0093, 0.0077, 0.0165, 0.0028, 0.0055, and 0.0205, respectively). Conclusion Occurrence of spontaneous ICH is closely associated with meteorological factors and older females are more susceptible to lower ambient temperature.
The Politics of Assumption, the Assumption of Politics

This chapter briefly talks about Marxs assumption of politics. For one, there was Marxs stress in the Grundrisse about capitals tendency to create new needs for workers, on which, he noted, the contemporary power of capital rests. There is no mention of this in Capital. How could such an important source of capitals power be reconciled with the assumption that the workers necessary needs were constant? Clearly, this was a critical assumption to be removed in that book on wage-labour that Marx had promised. Well, of course, the explanation is the assumption that Marx introduced at the level of capital-in-general - the premise that the quantity of means of subsistence for workers can be treated as given for a given period in a given country.Keywords: capitals power; Grundrisse; Marxs assumption; politics; wage-labour
Driving and visuospatial performance in people with hemianopia

Practical fitness to drive was studied in 28 patients with homonymous hemianopia (HH). More specifically, visual performance during driving and neuropsychological visuospatial test performance were compared and related. Visuospatial tests were a priori classified in four visuospatial sets, and were evaluated on three measures, namely lateralisation, speed, and accuracy. Driving safety and fluency was assessed by means of a practical test-ride and scored using a structured protocol. It was concluded that HH cannot be considered a definite contraindication for holding a drivers' licence since not all patients failed the testride. The most frequent remark made by the driving expert was a lack of stability in steering. It was found that visual performance during driving was significantly related to visuospatial test performance, operationally defined as a function of typical visual HH disability. A specific combination of the lateralisation, speed and accuracy measures of the visuospatial sets explained 77% of the variance in visual performance during driving. For deciding which type of mobility rehabilitation goal is feasible in HH, our results suggested administering the Grey Scales task, the Trailmaking test, the Bells test and a Hidden Figures test.