Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Context of Risk Decisions: Does Social Capital Make a Difference?

Der traditionelle Risikoansatz in der Jugendforschung konzentrierte sich auf die Identifikation und Abwagung von Risikofaktoren in einem sogenannten Risiko-Praventions-Paradigma. Dieses Paradigma wurde nicht zuletzt wegen der mangelnden Berucksichtigung von kontextuellen und strukturellen Faktoren kritisiert. Dagegen beruht der vorliegende Artikel auf neuster empirischer Forschung, die kontextuelle und strukturelle Faktoren, insbesondere den Einfluss sozialen Kapitals, in den Vordergrund stellt. Zwei Hauptparadigmen strukturieren die Debatte uber Jugend und Risiko: der "vernunftige Mensch", der rational und normativ richtig entscheiden wurde und dabei Kosten und Nutzen ausbalanciert, und der "spielende Mensch", der selbst bei schlechten Erfolgschancen zu Aktivitat bereit ist und dessen Entscheidungen oft als irrational beschrieben werden (ADAMS 1995; KEMSHALL 2003). Der Artikel greift auf empirische Analysen aus dem Projekt "Jugendliche, Soziales Kapital und die Aushandlung von Risiken" zuruck, das in einem von dem Economic and Social Research Council finanzierten Netzwerk "Wege in die und aus der Kriminalitat fur Jugendliche" angesiedelt war. Wir argumentieren, dass das soziale Kapital die Fahigkeit der Jugendlichen, Risikoentscheidungen zu steuern, masgeblich beeinflusst. Wir schliesen mit Uberlegungen dazu, welchen sozialen Kapitals es bedarf, damit Jugendliche mit den notigen Ressourcen versorgt sind, um Risiken zu bewaltigen und informierte Risikoentscheidungen zu treffen, oder kurz: was ein erfolgreiches Risikomanagement ausmacht. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0601170
Persistence in Domestic Violence Treatment and Self-Esteem, Locus of Control, Risk of Alcoholism, Level of Abuse, and Beliefs About Abuse

ABSTRACT This study examined the relationship between the number of hours domestic batterers attended treatment and the following variables: self-esteem, locus of control, risk of alcoholism, self-reported levels of abuse, and six beliefs about domestic violence. Participants in the study were 313 male clients from one domestic violence agency in a Midwestern city. Each participant completed the Index of Self-Esteem, the Adult Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale, the MacAndrew Alcoholism Scale, the Center of Social Research Abuse Index, and the Inventory of Beliefs About Wife Beating. Results indicated that low risk for alcoholism and negative views about partner abuse are associated with persistence in treatment.
Pathway analysis of expression-related SNPs on genome-wide association study of basal cell carcinoma

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have primarily focused on the association between individual genetic markers and risk of disease. We applied a novel approach that integrates skin expression-related single-nucleotide polymorphisms (eSNPs) and pathway analysis for GWAS of basal cell carcinoma (BCC) to identify potential novel biological pathways. We evaluated the associations between 70,932 skin eSNPs and risk of BCC among 2,323 cases and 7,275 controls of European ancestry, and then assigned them to the pathways defined by KEGG, GO, and BioCarta databases. Three KEGG pathways (colorectal cancer, actin cytoskeleton, and BCC), two GO pathways (cellular component disassembly in apoptosis, and nucleus organization), and four BioCarta pathways (Ras signaling, T cell receptor signaling, natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity, and links between Pyk2 and Map Kinases) showed significant association with BCC risk with p-value<0.05 and FDR<0.2. These pathways also ranked at top in sensitivity analyses. Two positive controls in KEGG, the hedgehog pathway and the BCC pathway, showed significant association with BCC risk in both main and sensitivity analyses. Our results indicate that SNPs that are undetectable by conventional GWASs are significantly associated with BCC when tested as pathways. Biological studies of these gene groups suggest their potential roles in the etiology of BCC.
Teaching and research nexuses across faculty career stage, ability and affiliated discipline in a South Korean research university

The relationship between teaching and research is a controversial issue in higher education research. Many empirical studies have reported a near zero relationship although academics believe that teaching and research are related in diverse ways. This study focused on how the relationship differs by faculty characteristics (career stage and their academic ability), their affiliated disciplines and each measure of research publication (book, domestic journal and international journal publication), to address the gaps between empirical studies and academics’ beliefs. This study found that book and domestic journal publication is positively correlated with teaching quality, while international journal publication is negatively correlated with teaching quality. In addition, the relationship differs by faculty career stage and affiliated discipline.
Family Dynamics and Personal Strengths among Dementia Caregivers in Argentina

This study examined whether healthier family dynamics were associated with higher personal strengths of resilience, sense of coherence, and optimism among dementia caregivers in Argentina. Caregivers are usually required to assist individuals with dementia, and family members have typically fulfilled that role. Personal strengths such as resilience, sense of coherence, and optimism have been shown to protect caregivers from some of the negative experiences of providing care, though the family-related variables associated with these personal strengths are largely unknown. Hierarchical multiple regressions investigated the extent to which family dynamics variables are associated with each of the caregiver personal strengths after controlling for demographic and caregiver characteristics. A sample of 105 caregivers from Argentina completed a set of questionnaires during a neurologist visit. Family dynamics explained 32% of the variance in resilience and 39% of the variance in sense of coherence. Greater family empathy and decreased family problems were uniquely associated with higher resilience. Greater communication and decreased family problems were uniquely associated with higher sense of coherence. Optimism was not found to be significantly associated with family dynamics. These results suggest that caregiver intervention research focused on the family may help improve caregiver personal strengths in Argentina and other Latin American countries.
Represent, Aggregate, and Constrain: A Novel Architecture for Machine Reading from Noisy Sources

In order to extract event information from text, a machine reading model must learn to accurately read and interpret the ways in which that information is expressed. But it must also, as the human reader must, aggregate numerous individual value hypotheses into a single coherent global analysis, applying global constraints which reflect prior knowledge of the domain. In this work we focus on the task of extracting plane crash event information from clusters of related news articles whose labels are derived via distant supervision. Unlike previous machine reading work, we assume that while most target values will occur frequently in most clusters, they may also be missing or incorrect. We introduce a novel neural architecture to explicitly model the noisy nature of the data and to deal with these aforementioned learning issues. Our models are trained end-to-end and achieve an improvement of more than 12.1 F$_1$ over previous work, despite using far less linguistic annotation. We apply factor graph constraints to promote more coherent event analyses, with belief propagation inference formulated within the transitions of a recurrent neural network. We show this technique additionally improves maximum F$_1$ by up to 2.8 points, resulting in a relative improvement of $50\%$ over the previous state-of-the-art.
An Exploratory Study of the Meaning of Marriage for African Americans

Using specific tenets from symbolic interactionism as a frame, we asked 31 African Americans (18 women and 13 men) including students as well as nonstudents, across a variety of types of relationships and ages, what marriage meant to them. Two major themes, commitment and love, emerged from qualitative content analysis of the meaning of marriage. Other themes, including partnership/friendship, trust, family, and covenant, also emerged as themes, although less frequently. The overwhelming meanings of marriage were positive, with only a few negative instances (i.e., marriage as unnecessary and not fulfilling). Supportive qualitative data are presented for each theme. We discuss implications for the meaning of marriage for African Americans.
‘Hosting the world’

Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a case study, this paper will explore how security measures for sports mega-events have been steadily militarized with policing operations comparable to war planning. It will be argued that this is representative of the ‘new military urbanism’ in which everyday urban life is rendered as a site of ubiquitous risk leading to the increased diffusion of military tactics and doctrines in policing and policy. While the interpenetration between urbanism and militarism has often been studied against the context of the War on Terror, the paper will argue that in the case of South Africa this has primarily been accelerated by a pervasive social fear of violent crime, which has resulted in the securitization of cities, the remilitarization of policing and the intensification of a historical legacy of socio-spatial inequalities. The South African government used the World Cup to ‘rebrand’ the country's violent international image, while promising that security measures would leave a legacy of safer cities for ordinary South Africans. However, using military urbanism as a conceptual backdrop, the case studies presented in the second part of the paper argue that policing measures were primarily cosmetic and designed to allay the fears of foreign tourists and the national middle class. In practice, security measures pivoted around the enforcement of social control and urban marginalization while serving as a training ground for an increasingly repressive state security apparatus. The paper will conclude with a discussion of how the global crossover between militarism and urbanism threatens to stimulate and rehabilitate deeply entrenched authoritarian tendencies in South Africa.
Recognition of postures and Freezing of Gait in Parkinson's disease patients using Microsoft Kinect sensor

Freezing of Gait (FOG) is a disabling symptom and movement disorder, typically associated with the latter stages of Parkinson's disease. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for real-time FOG, tremor monitoring and fall detection, consisting of a 3D camera sensor based on the Microsoft Kinect architecture. The system is capable of recognizing freezing episodes (FOG) in a standstill state, tremors and fall incidents, commonly seen in Parkinson's disease patients. In case of an incident, it automatically alerts relatives and healthcare providers. The system was tested on seven simulated subjects in 12 events indicating that the design was able to detect 99% of the falling incidents, 91% of tremor and 92% of the freezing of gait episodes with an average latency of 300 milliseconds. The performance of the system can be further improved with the deployment of the recently released version of Kinect, capable of providing even higher levels of accuracy.
Towards the Use of a Team of USVs for Civilian Harbour Protection : Real Time Path Planning with Avoidance of Multiple Moving Obstacles

The security issue within civilian harbours has received an increasing interest, especially after the September 11 terrorist attack. Different kind of surveillance equipments and defense strategies are currently under investigation. In this context, the use of a team of Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) for performing patrolling surveys and intercepting possible intruders could be very useful for increasing the effectiveness of the harbor protection system while lowering the number of humans directly exposed to threats. In order to guarantee a sufficient level of reliability, all the USVs operations need to be supervised by an intelligent Swarm Management Unit (SMU), whose realization is the goal of an on-going research project carried out by the authors’ organizations. This work presents one of the recent results of the SMU project, i.e. a real-time motion planner producing USVs reference paths guaranteeing minimal-time trajectories in the presence of multiple moving obstacles.
Organizations in America : analyzing their structures and human resource practices

PART ONE: THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS STUDY Organizational Properties and Practices - Arne L Kalleberg et al Design of the National Organizations Study - Joe L Spaeth and Diane P O'Rourke American Organizations and Their Environments - Peter V Marsden, Cynthia R Cook, and David Knoke PART TWO: ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES Bureaucratic Structures for Coordination and Control - Peter V Marsden, Cynthia R Cook, and Arne L Kalleberg Formalizing the Employment Relation - Arne L Kalleberg et al Human Resource Management and Organizational Performance - Arne L Kalleberg and James W Moody PART THREE: ORGANIZATIONS' HUMAN RESOURCE PRACTICES The Staffing Process - Peter V Marsden Recruitment and Selection Methods Job Training in US Organizations - David Knoke and Arne L Kalleberg Training, Unions, and Internal Labor Markets - David Knoke and Yoshito Ishio Organizational Differences in Earnings - Arne L Kalleberg and Mark E Van Buren The Structure of Organizational Earnings Inequality - Arne L Kalleberg and Mark E Van Buren Cui Bono? Employee Benefit Packages - David Knoke PART FOUR: ORGANIZATIONS AND THE CHANGING WORKFORCE Contingent Employment in Organizations - Arne L Kalleberg and Kathryn Schmidt Organizational Patterns of Gender Segregation - Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Arne L Kalleberg, and Peter V Marsden Gender Differences in Organizational Commitment - Peter V Marsden, Arne L Kalleberg, and Cynthia R Cook Influences of Work Positions and Family Roles Conclusions and Prospects - Arne L Kalleberg et al
‘You're never too old’: beliefs about physical activity and playing sport in later life

It was evident from interviews with 15 men and women over 70 years of age that the experiences derived from being physically active and playing sport in later life are expansive, dynamic and completely imbued with multiple interpretations. Furthermore, their beliefs support the notion that the physically active body should be considered more than a physical object, as it represents a conscious, feeling, thinking and reflective self. The findings signify much is to be gained by regularly partaking in deliberate physical activity during later life although this is not always as easy as it sounds. At a personal level, changes in functional capacity and dealing with the sometimes ailing body can serve as a deterrent. From a broader perspective, the stigma associated with being older also poses a significant physical, sociological and psychological challenge, particularly during the initial phases. In conclusion, the study discusses why change must occur at a personal and societal level before a greater proportion of the older population become more physically active.
Quality Control Methods in Accelerometer Data Processing: Identifying Extreme Counts

Background Accelerometers are designed to measure plausible human activity, however extremely high count values (EHCV) have been recorded in large-scale studies. Using population data, we develop methodological principles for establishing an EHCV threshold, propose a threshold to define EHCV in the ActiGraph GT1M, determine occurrences of EHCV in a large-scale study, identify device-specific error values, and investigate the influence of varying EHCV thresholds on daily vigorous PA (VPA). Methods We estimated quantiles to analyse the distribution of all accelerometer positive count values obtained from 9005 seven-year old children participating in the UK Millennium Cohort Study. A threshold to identify EHCV was derived by differentiating the quantile function. Data were screened for device-specific error count values and EHCV, and a sensitivity analysis conducted to compare daily VPA estimates using three approaches to accounting for EHCV. Results Using our proposed threshold of ≥ 11,715 counts/minute to identify EHCV, we found that only 0.7% of all non-zero counts measured in MCS children were EHCV; in 99.7% of these children, EHCV comprised < 1% of total non-zero counts. Only 11 MCS children (0.12% of sample) returned accelerometers that contained negative counts; out of 237 such values, 211 counts were equal to −32,768 in one child. The medians of daily minutes spent in VPA obtained without excluding EHCV, and when using a higher threshold (≥19,442 counts/minute) were, respectively, 6.2% and 4.6% higher than when using our threshold (6.5 minutes; p<0.0001). Conclusions Quality control processes should be undertaken during accelerometer fieldwork and prior to analysing data to identify monitors recording error values and EHCV. The proposed threshold will improve the validity of VPA estimates in children’s studies using the ActiGraph GT1M by ensuring only plausible data are analysed. These methods can be applied to define appropriate EHCV thresholds for different accelerometer models.
Field Trials Reveal Ecotype-Specific Responses to Mycorrhizal Inoculation in Rice

The overuse of agricultural chemicals such as fertilizer and pesticides aimed at increasing crop yield results in environmental damage, particularly in the Sahelian zone where soils are fragile. Crop inoculation with beneficial soil microbes appears as a good alternative for reducing agricultural chemical needs, especially for small farmers. This, however, requires selecting optimal combinations of crop varieties and beneficial microbes tested in field conditions. In this study, we investigated the response of rice plants to inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and plant growth promoting bacteria (PGPB) under screenhouse and field conditions in two consecutive seasons in Senegal. Evaluation of single and mixed inoculations with AMF and PGPB was conducted on rice (Oryza sativa) variety Sahel 202, on sterile soil under screenhouse conditions. We observed that inoculated plants, especially plants treated with AMF, grew taller, matured earlier and had higher grain yield than the non-inoculated plants. Mixed inoculation trials with two AMF strains were then conducted under irrigated field conditions with four O. sativa varieties, two O. glaberrima varieties and two interspecific NERICA varieties, belonging to 3 ecotypes (upland, irrigated, and rainfed lowland). We observed that the upland varieties had the best responses to inoculation, especially with regards to grain yield, harvest index and spikelet fertility. These results show the potential of using AMF to improve rice production with less chemical fertilizers and present new opportunities for the genetic improvement in rice to transfer the ability of forming beneficial rice-microbe associations into high yielding varieties in order to increase further rice yield potentials.
Language identification using spectro-temporal patch features

We present a novel approach for automatic Language Identification (LID) using spectro-temporal patch features. Our approach is based on the premise that speech and spoken phenomena are characterized by typical visible patterns in timefrequency representations of the signal, and that the manner of occurrence of these patterns is language specific. To model this, we derive a randomly selected library of spectro-temporal patterns from spoken examples from a language, and derive features from the correlations of this library to spectrograms derive from the speech signal. Under our hypothesis, the relative frequency of correlation peaks must be different for different languages. We model this by learning a discriminative classifier based on these features to detect the presence of the language in a recording. The proposed approach has been tested on two different datasets: the VoxForge multilingual speech data and the LDC2005S26 corpus. Preliminary results indicate that our proposed approach can achieve an accuracy of 85-93%, and perform significantly better than a non-phonetic HMM-based classifier.
School competence in young adolescence: Links to early attachment relationships beyond concurrent self-perceived competence and representations of relationships

Predictive associations of infant attachment to mothers and fathers with later school functioning, beyond the contribution of contemporaneous representations of relationships and circumstances of caregiving, were examined in 66 young adolescents who were raised in infancy in Israeli kibbutzim with collective sleeping. The Strange Situation Procedure was used to evaluate early attachment to mother and father, the Separation Anxiety Test was used to assess contemporaneous representation of relationships, and teachers’ reports evaluated school functioning. Circumstances of caregiving included parental reports of quality of marital relations and a change from collective sleeping to home sleeping for children. Results showed that infant attachment to mother, but not to father, contributed significant additional variance to the prediction of children’s scholastic skills and emotional maturity beyond the contribution of concurrent representations of relationships and changes in circumstances of caregiving. The results support the secure base construct as an organising concept of longitudinal investigations of attachment.
Video copy detection: a comparative study

This paper presents a comparative study of methods for video copy detection. Different state-of-the-art techniques, using various kinds of descriptors and voting functions, are described: global video descriptors, based on spatial and temporal features; local descriptors based on spatial, temporal as well as spatio-temporal information. Robust voting functions is adapted to these techniques to enhance their performance and to compare them. Then, a dedicated framework for evaluating these systems is proposed. All the techniques are tested and compared within the same framework, by evaluating their robustness under single and mixed image transformations, as well as for different lengths of video segments. We discuss the performance of each approach according to the transformations and the applications considered. Local methods demonstrate their superior performance over the global ones, when detecting video copies subjected to various transformations.
Interactive Translation of Conversational Speech

As communication becomes increasingly automated and transnational, the need for rapid, computer-aided speech translation grows. The Janus-II system uses paraphrasing and interactive error correction to boost performance. Janus-II operates on spontaneous conversational human dialogue in limited domains with vocabularies of 3,000 or more words. Current experiments involve 10,000 to 40,000 word vocabularies. It now accepts English, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Korean input, which it translates into any other of these languages. Beyond translating syntactically well-formed speech or carefully structured human-to-machine speech utterances, Janus-II research has focused on the more difficult task of translating spontaneous conversational speech between humans. This naturally requires a suitable database and task domain.