Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quality of care attributions to employed versus stay‐at‐home mothers

The present study was designed to find whether evaluations of maternal competence are linked to mothers’ employment status and the quality of maternal care. Participants rated videotaped vignettes, depicting either high‐quality or low‐quality mother–infant interactions, on various dimensions of care quality. The videotaped mothers were described to one‐half of the participants as ‘stay‐at‐home mothers’ and to the other half as ‘working mothers. ’ Analysis revealed a significant main effect of type of care on maternal evaluations. ‘At‐home’ mothers were rated as providing better care than ‘working mothers. ’ Additionally, participants whose mothers worked and who experienced non‐parental care as children were more likely to report positive attitudes about daycare and maternal employment. Finally, participants with less favorable attitudes toward maternal employment showed a more pronounced negative bias in rating high‐quality working mothers.
Erythropoietin administration partially prevents adipose tissue loss in experimental cancer cachexia models

Cancer-associated cachexia is characterized, among other symptoms, by a dramatic loss of both muscle and fat. In addition, the cachectic syndrome is often associated with anemia. The object of the present investigation was to assess the effects of erythropoietin (EPO) treatment on experimental cancer cachexia models. The results clearly show that, in addition to the improvement of the hematocrit, EPO treatment promoted a partial preservation of adipose tissue while exerting negligible effects on muscle loss. Administration of EPO to tumor-bearing animals resulted in a significant increase of lipoprotein lipase (LPL) activity in adipose tissue, suggesting that the treatment favored triacylglycerol (TAG) accumulation in the adipose tissue. In vitro experiments using both adipose tissue slices and 3T3-L1 adipocytes suggests that EPO is able to increase the lipogenic rate through the activation of its specific receptor (EPOR). This metabolic pathway, in addition to TAG uptake by LPL, may contribute to the beneficial effects of EPO on fat preservation in cancer cachexia.
Rehabilitating sexual offenders: A strength-based approach

For this issue we present two reviews on differential approaches to rehabilitating sexual offenders and reducing recidivism. First, Emily Blake provides an excellent summary of Marshall, Marshall, Serran and O’Brien’s (2011) book, ‘‘Rehabilitating Sexual Offenders: A Strength-Based Approach’’ (APA, ISBN: 978-1-433-80942-2). This summary emphasises the efforts made by the authors not only to link existing theory with clinical experience of a strength-based approach, but also to evaluate the effectiveness of existing treatment programmes based on knowledge gained in this area. We then present a review by Stephanie Kewley of Hanvey, Philpot and Wilson’s (2011) book, ‘‘A Community Based Approach to the Reduction of Sexual Reoffending. Circles of Support and Accountability’’ (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, ISBN: 978-1-84905-198 9). This exceptional review provides a detailed summary of the book and its potential to appeal to a much wider audience than was originally intended. Stephanie’s review stresses the heartfelt nature of some of the book’s content and the need for programmes such as ‘Circles’ to continue despite the current climate and lack of resources that may be allocated to programmes to rehabilitate sexual offenders. On behalf of the Journal we would like to express thanks to the authors for the time, effort and consideration taken to complete the book review and we hope that their reflections on the nature and content of the texts will entice readers to purchase copies of the book.
Mini Screening of Kinase Inhibitors Affecting Period-length of Mammalian Cellular Circadian Clock

In mammalian circadian rhythms, the transcriptional-translational feedback loop (TTFL) consisting of a set of clock genes is believed to elicit the circadian clock oscillation. The TTFL model explains that the accumulation and degradation of mPER and mCRY proteins control the period-length (tau) of the circadian clock. Although recent studies revealed that the Casein Kinase Iεδ (CKIεδ) regurates the phosphorylation of mPER proteins and the circadian period-length, other kinases are also likely to contribute the phosphorylation of mPER. Here, we performed small scale screening using 84 chemical compounds known as kinase inhibitors to identify candidates possibly affecting the circadian period-length in mammalian cells. Screening by this high-throughput real-time bioluminescence monitoring system revealed that the several chemical compounds apparently lengthened the cellular circadian clock oscillation. These compounds are known as inhibitors against kinases such as Casein Kinase II (CKII), PI3-kinase (PI3K) and c-Jun N-terminal Kinase (JNK) in addition to CKIεδ. Although these kinase inhibitors may have some non-specific effects on other factors, our mini screening identified new candidates contributing to period-length control in mammalian cells.
The performance effects of headings within multiple‐choice tests

Background. It has been suggested that headings within multiple-choice tests positively affect test performance; however, there is little research to date to either support or reject this hypothesis. Aims. Do headings within multiple-choice tests facilitate test performance? Sample. The available sample for this study included employees of a large manufacturing plant in the western part of the United States (N=143). Participants ranged in age from 26 to 64 years old; the median age was 44 years old. Method. The experimental group received a multiple-choice recertification test with headings included; the control group received the same test without headings. The data were analysed by analysis of covariance. Results. A significant difference was obtained for the treatment main effect, F (1,140) =4.33 (p<.04), with a calculated effect size for headings over no headings of es=0.33. Post hoc analysis of item difficulty data suggests that headings may have the greatest effect on less difficult test items and have little effect on difficult test items. Conclusions. The findings of the present study indicate that headings within multiple-choice tests positively affect test performance. Perhaps more importantly, the findings indicate that headings may differentially impact test items of differing difficulty. Further research is recommended.
Iterative cyclic subspace tracking for blind adaptive multiuser detection in multirate CDMA systems

In this paper, the problem of subspace-based blind adaptive multiuser detection in multirate direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems adopting short (periodic) spreading codes is considered. The solution that we propose is based on the well-known formulation of the linear minimum mean-squared error and decorrelating detectors in terms of signal subspace parameters. Since in a multirate scenario the correlation properties of the observable and, hence, the signal subspace parameters are periodically time-varying, classical subspace tracking algorithms, which assume that the subspace to be tracked is time-invariant or slowly time-varying, are shown to be not useful in this situation. A new recursive cyclic subspace tracking algorithm is thus developed. This procedure, which is based on a generalization of the PASTd algorithm, is able to capture the periodical variations of the signal subspace, and thus enables subspace-based blind adaptive multiuser detection in multirate CDMA systems. The proposed algorithm has a smaller computational complexity than the recently developed cyclic recursive-least-squares procedure, and, as numerical results confirm, is capable of providing very satisfactory performance.
Density Networks with Application to Protein Modelling Statement regarding Originality of Thesis

Density networks are used as probabilistic models of discrete-valued, multi-dimensional data. These models have a neural network architecture, with the outputs corresponding to observed data and the inputs to latent variables which in uence the data. In this thesis, the use of non-Gaussian priors on the latent variables is explored. For toy data, it is seen that the use of non-Gaussian priors encourages the network to nd humaninterpretable solutions without the need for complex regularisation schemes. The model is then applied to the analysis of statistical patterns in real protein data. The data consists of amino acid sequences found in antiparallel beta sheets and beta hairpin turns. For both data sets, clear patterns are found in the data. For beta sheets, these patterns can be assigned a physical interpretation. Results are shown for the discrimination of hairpins in amino acid sequences.
State-dependent decisions in long-term fasting king penguins, Aptenodytes patagonicus, during courtship and incubation

Abstract Using an automatic identification and weighing system, we investigated changes in adult body mass in relation to reproductive behaviour during courtship and incubation in free-living king penguins. Despite stressful nutritional conditions and variability of fast length, the majority of pairs incubated successfully by accumulating large body reserves before fasting, which provided flexibility in fasting strategies. Our data indicate a low body mass during fasting below which males either delayed or stopped breeding: (1) at 12 kg, the male interruped courtship to replenish his body reserves at sea before re-engaging in courtship; and (2) when body mass dropped to 9 kg during incubation, the male deserted the egg. The behavioural decision to go to sea was not controlled by the time spent fasting, but by the amount of body reserves. In deserting males, the depletion of body reserves during incubation before relief by the females was due to a lower stored energy (−2 kg) at the onset of courtship compared with successful males. Unsuccessful males weighed only 12 kg when they started to court, and consequently had no safety margin that allowed them to wait for a delayed female. The unusual depletion of body reserves of male breeders caused only 3% of incubation attempts to fail. Compared with successful pairs, their female partners gained less body mass at sea (−40 g/day) and made a slightly longer foraging trip (+5 days). We suggest that the deserting males had risked breeding with the lowest fasting safety margin possible, rather than breeding later that year. However, the low body mass at desertion did not affect the penguins' survival or their feeding capacity, and therefore did not compromise another breeding attempt during the next season.
Robust H∞ control for tanker station-keeping with mass and inertia variation

This paper focuses on the problem of robust H∞ control for tanker station-keeping in boom and receptacle refueling with mass and inertia variation. A novel robust state feedback controller is derived for this problem by using the Lyapunov method. Linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) are adopted to establish the sufficient condition for the existence of the proposed controller; then the controller can be achieved by the variable substitution method. Effectiveness of the presented control design method is illustrated by the simulation results.
City sentinel - VAST 2011 mini challenge 1 award: “Outstanding integration of computational and visual methods”

We present City Sentinel, an in-house built visual analytic software capable of handling a large collection of textual documents by combining diverse text mining and visualization tools. We applied this tool for the Vast Challenge 2011, Mini Challenge 1 over millions of tweet messages. We demonstrate how City Sentinel aided the analyst in retrieving the hidden information from the tweet messages to analyze and locate a hypothetical epidemic outbreak.
Contrasting effect of estrogen on VEGF induction under different oxygen status and its role in murine ROP.

PURPOSE It has been reported that 17beta-estradiol (E2) may enhance the proliferation of bovine retinal vascular endothelial cells (BRECs) by increasing the expression of VEGFR-2 and VEGF. The hypothesis in the current study was that estrogen may contribute to fetal vascular development and the cessation of exposure to estrogen of premature infants on birth may have an inhibitory effect on retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). Because ROP is thought to develop under relative hypoxia after exposure to high-dose oxygen, this study was conducted to investigate how estrogen modulates hypoxia-induced VEGF in BRECs and mouse ROP. METHODS Gene expression of VEGF and hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF)-1alpha were studied in BRECs, with or without E2, under normoxia and hypoxia (1% O2). A binding assay was performed to determine whether estrogen interferes with HIF-1-mediated induction of VEGF. In a mouse ROP model, effects of E2 were evaluated by avascular area, subsequent extraretinal neovascularization, and retinal expression of the VEGF gene, by administering E2 during hyperoxia (75% O2) and/or after exposure to room air. RESULTS Hypoxia-induced VEGF mRNA in BRECs was reduced dose dependently by 1 to 100 nM E2. E2 reduced hypoxia-induced binding of HIF-1 to the VEGF promoter site and reduced the HIF-1alpha mRNA level. In mouse ROP, injection of E2 during hyperoxia increased retinal VEGF mRNA and reduced the retinal avascular area at the end of hyperoxia. E2 treatment during the normoxia that followed reduced VEGF mRNA and extraretinal neovascularization. Treatment with E2 throughout both periods significantly improved retinopathy. CONCLUSIONS Estrogen may function as a significant modulator of the level of VEGF mRNA under different oxygen conditions and could serve as a prophylactic agent for ROP.
SCHWARZ-BASED ALGORITHMS FOR COMPRESSIBLE FLOWS

We investigate in this paper the application of Schwarz-based algorithms to compressible flows. First, we study the combination of these methods with defect-correction procedures. We then study the effect on the Schwarz-based methods of replacing the explicit treatment of the boundary conditions by an implicit one. In the last part of this paper we study the combination of these methods with Newton-Krylov matrix-free methods. Numerical experiments that show the performance of our approaches are then presented.
Comment on "management of vulvovaginal lichen planus: a new approach".

We read with interest the article by Bradford and Fischer ‘‘Management of Vulvovaginal Lichen Planus: A New Approach’’ [1]. This retrospective review of the presentation and management of 131 patients with vulvovaginal lichen planus is a welcome contribution to the literature with the introduction of some novel therapeutic strategies. The concept of ‘‘adequate control’’ proposed by Bradford and Ficher is important, and given that it is a chronic relapsing, remitting condition, we believe that this should be the goal of therapy. ‘‘Adequate control’’, however, is difficult to define. Bradford and Ficher required both syptomatic control and clinical resolution of inflammatory changes but acknowledged that preceding studies use symptoms alone as a guide for therapy. It is ours and other UK physicians’ experience that improvement in clinical signs lag considerably behind symptomatic recovery [2]. It is therefore clear that a set of outcomes relevant and acceptable to both patients and clinicians needs to be agreed upon for future work in this area. Bradford and Ficher present a more aggressive therapeutic approach than other published studies. The concept of ‘‘early aggressive therapy’’ is important as it is currently not clear whether this prevents complications, particularly scarring and malignancy, both of which cause considerable morbidity. Unfortunately, however, there are still uncertainties and variation in practice when it comes to the management of vulvovaginal lichen planus. There is no evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on which to base clinical practice [3]. The existing literature consists of a number of retrospective case series with only 1 prospective cohort study [4]. In addition to the studies acknowledged by Bradford and Fischer, there are 3 other published case series that describe the treatment of mucosal lichen planus in cohorts of more than 50 patients. Simpson et al. [5] published a UK multicenter audit of management of 172 patients comparing clinical practice to a proposed standard of optimal care, as well as collecting additional data. Helgesen et al. [6] describe treatment response along with clinical features in 58 patients, and Anderson et al. [7] discuss the response to hydrocortisone suppositories of 60 patients with vaginal lichen planus. Unfortunately, however, retrospective reviews are prone to bias, and data used are only as good as the original source records. Informing future management of vulvovaginal lichen planus requires a good evidence base through welldesigned RCTs. Although this will be a challenge owing to the condition’s uncommon nature, it is not impossible, and through collaboration, we should work toward performing RCTs that will move practice forward.
Professionalism, identity and the self: the de-moralisation of teachers in English sixth form colleges

In order to understand the changing nature of professionalism we must consider how the work of teachers has changed in recent years and place this into its wider political and social context as the British State moved from a social democratic model of the State to one based on neo-liberal ideology. Although much of the literature of teacher professionalism has focused on the school sector, we should recognise that the term also applies to the education sector as a whole and consider the changing nature of work as well as the wider social construction of professional identity. The purpose of this paper is to interpret the development of professionalism in the sixth form college sector by drawing from the work of Critical Theory and Jürgen Habermas in particular. It also explores the views of teachers on how their professional identity and personal orientation to work are changing. In doing so, the paper will explore the power relationship that exists between teachers and the state bureaucracy, the interplay between practice and ethics and the re-professionalisation of teachers in an age of neo-liberalism.
When Are Predictions of Preference Self-Fulfilling? Dissertation Proposal

Preliminary rough draft. Please do not cite or quote. 1 One of the most important concerns for marketers is coping with and changing people's theories about brands or products. A notable example is the Pepsi Challenge, a campaign conducted by PepsiCo in order to make cola customers aware that Pepsi Cola beats Coca Cola in blind taste tests. Indeed, decades of blind taste tests suggest that consumers' theories or beliefs about a brand affect how that brand is experienced (e.g., Allison & Uhl 1964). Often people rate the taste of, say, their favored brand higher than a different brand, but only when the brands' identifying information is available. The belief about a brand functions like a prediction about the experience with the brand; and it appears that these predictions have a knack for coming true. Self-fulfilling predictions The notion that expectations about a brand affect how that brand is experienced concords with a rich tradition of research in social psychology that suggests that predictions (or expectations) bias people's experiences. In these studies predictions or prior expectations are self-fulfilling—people tend to experience events in a manner that fulfills their prior predictions whether due to selective perception or a desire to self-confirm tastes. Some studies manipulate predictions by endowing respondents with different expectations or simply grouping people into experimental conditions according to their pre-existing beliefs (e.g., fans of one team versus fans of a second team), and show that subsequent perception of new data is consistent with those expectations (predictions). Other studies ask people to make explicit predictions and show that subsequent perception of new data is consistent with those predictions. 1 Preference and taste will be used interchangeably in this paper. Levav 2 Manipulated expectations. The majority of studies on self-fulfilling predictions fall under this experimental paradigm. Most relevant to issues of predicting taste, Wilson demonstrate the biasing effect of expectations on affective experiences of cartoon viewing. Participants who were endowed with an expectation that a series of cartoons would be funny rated the cartoons as more amusing than controls who had not been endowed with such an expectation. Similar findings are obtained by Hoch and Ha (1986), who treat advertisements as hypotheses and show that when faced with an ambiguous product (e.g., a mesh shirt), consumers tend to engage in hypothesis-confirming processing. That is, when a product has uncertain or ambiguous benefits, consumers interpret their experience with the product in …
Feature Extraction Based Multi-Structure Manifold Embedding for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification

Hyperspectral remote sensing image is a typical high-dimensional data with a large number of redundant informantion, which will impact the classification accuracy. Feature extraction is an effective method to reduce the redundancy of hyperspectral image (HSI) and improve the classification performance. However, most feature extraction methods just consider a single structure information of HSI that will lose some valuable information. To address the drawback, we proposed an unsupervised feature extraction method termed multi-structure manifold embedding (MSME) for HSI classification. First, MSME utilizes sparse representation to obtain the sparse coefficients of HSI data. Then, it constructs a sparse graph and a sparse hypergraph with the sparse coefficients. We use the sparse graph, the sparse hypergraph, and the local linear property to represent different intrinsic structures of HSI. Finally, we construct a feature learning method with these structures to achieve an optimal projection matrix for feature extraction. MSME makes full use of the complementarity of different structures to reveal the intrinsic properties of HSI and improve the discriminating power of features for classification. Experiments on the Salinas and PaviaU data sets show that the proposed MSME algorithm achieves the best classification results than other state-of-the-art methods.