Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Responding to framed health messages: Different strokes for different (handedness) folks

Research has shown that strength of handedness – a proxy variable for the degree of interaction between the left and right brain hemispheres – predicts differences in a variety of cognitive domains. The present paper extends this work to message (or goal) framing effects in which persuasive health communications emphasise positive vs. negative outcomes. One hundred fifty-six participants read pamphlets containing statements emphasising either the gains of using or the losses of not using sunscreen. Replicating previous research, non-users of sunscreen were more affected by framed messages than users. However, we found a loss- rather than gain-framed advantage, and mixed (inconsistent)-handers seemed to drive these effects more so than strong (consistent)-handers. These results suggest that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach may be inadequate in crafting effective educational messages about health behaviours, and that theories centring around one’s regulatory focus orientation as well as new methods in laterality research may be useful in reaching the widest range of individuals.
What Explains Racial Differences in the Use of Advance Directives and Attitudes Toward Hospice Care?

Cultural beliefs and values are thought to account for differences between African Americans and whites in the use of advance directives and beliefs about hospice care, but few data clarify which beliefs and values explain these differences. Two hundred five adults aged 65 and older who received primary care in the Duke University Health System were surveyed. The survey included five scales: Hospice Beliefs and Attitudes, Preferences for Care, Spirituality, Healthcare System Distrust, and Beliefs About Dying and Advance Care Planning. African Americans were less likely than white subjects to have completed an advance directive (35.5% vs 67.4%, P<.001) and had less favorable beliefs about hospice care (Hospice Beliefs and Attitudes Scale score, P<.001). African Americans were more likely to express discomfort discussing death, want aggressive care at the end of life, have spiritual beliefs that conflict with the goals of palliative care, and distrust the healthcare system. In multivariate analyses, none of these factors alone completely explained racial differences in possession of an advance directive or beliefs about hospice care, but when all of these factors were combined, race was no longer a significant predictor of either of the two outcomes. These findings suggest that ethnicity is a marker of common cultural beliefs and values that, in combination, influence decision‐making at the end of life. This study has implications for the design of healthcare delivery models and programs that provide culturally sensitive end‐of‐life care to a growing population of ethnically diverse older adults.
Proactive instruction fetch

Fast access requirements preclude building L1 instruction caches large enough to capture the working set of server workloads. Efforts exist to mitigate limited L1 instruction cache capacity by relying on the stability and repetitiveness of the instruction stream to predict and prefetch future instruction blocks prior to their use. However, dynamic variation in cache miss sequences prevents correct and timely prediction, leaving many instruction-fetch stalls exposed, resulting in a key performance bottleneck for servers. We observe that, while the vast majority of application instruction references are amenable to prediction, even minor control-flow variations are amplified by microarchitectural components, resulting in a major source of instability and randomness that significantly limit prefetcher utility. Control-flow variation disturbs the L1 instruction cache replacement order and branch predictor state, causing the L1 instruction cache to randomly filter the instruction stream while the branch predictor and spontaneous hardware interrupts inject the stream with unpredictable noise. Based on this observation, we show that an instruction prefetcher, previously plagued by microarchitectural instability, becomes nearly perfect when modified to operate on the correct-path, retire-order instruction stream. We propose Proactive Instruction Fetch, an instruction prefetch mechanism that achieves higher than 99.5% instruction-cache hit rate, improving server throughput by 27% and nearly matching the performance of a perfect L1 instruction cache that never misses.
Supervised Kernel Principal Component Analysis by Most Expressive Feature Reordering

The presented paper is concerned with feature space derivation through feature selection. The selection is performed on results of kernel Principal Component Analysis (kPCA) of input data samples. Several criteria that drive feature selection process are introduced and their performance is assessed and compared against the reference approach, which is a combination of kPCA and most expressive feature reordering based on the Fisher linear discriminant criterion. It has been shown that some of the proposed modifications result in generating feature spaces with noticeably better (at the level of approximately 4%) class discrimination properties. Keywords—feature selection, kernel methods, pattern classification.
Sensorless Control of Induction-Motor Drive Based on Robust Kalman Filter and Adaptive Speed Estimation

This paper deals with robust estimation of rotor flux and speed for sensorless control of motion control systems with an induction motor. Instead of using sixth-order extended Kalman filters (EKFs), rotor flux is estimated by means of a fourth-order descriptor-type robust KF, which explicitly takes into account motor parameter uncertainties, whereas the speed is estimated using a recursive least squares algorithm starting from the knowledge of the rotor flux itself. It is shown that the descriptor-type structure allows for a direct translation of parameter uncertainties into variations of the coefficients appearing in the model, and this improves the degree of robustness of the estimates. Experimental findings, carried out on a closed-loop system consisting of a low-power induction-motor-load system, a proportional-integral-type controller, and the proposed estimator, are shown with the aim of verifying the goodness of the whole closed-loop control system.
Intersection-free Contouring on An Octree Grid

A method for extracting intersection-free iso-surfaces from volumetric data with an octree structure is presented. Unlike contouring techniques designed for uniform grids (such as Marching Cubes), adaptive contouring methods (such as Dual Contouring) can and do often generate inter-secting polygons. Our main contribution is a polygon generation algorithm that produces triangles enclosed in non-overlapping volumes, which guarantees an intersection-free mesh. Like other adaptive contouring methods, this new method generates crack-free and feature-preserving surfaces on both uniform and octree grids. We demonstrate the method on both scanned objects and industrial models.
P-24: a human leukemia-associated and lymphohemopoietic progenitor cell surface structure identified with monoclonal antibody

This study was directed at surface structures that are found on human lymphohemopoietic progenitor cells in normal and leukemic bone marrow. A monoclonal antibody was produced against an acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cell line of the pre-B phenotype; this antibody (BA-2) was used to demonstrate a cell surface polypeptide of approximately 24,000 mol wt that migrates similarly in both reduced and nonreduced form. This polypeptide, p24/BA-2, was shown by immune precipitation and gel electrophoresis and cell distribution studies to be different from HLA-DR and gp 100/cALLa. p24/BA-2 was present on the surface of 77% (54/70) of cases of non-T, non-B ALL; BA-2 staining was less bright or nondetectable in surface Ig+ (SIg+) chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and T ALL and nondetectable on peripheral T and B lymphocytes. Approximately 3% of bone marrow mononuclear cells were p24/BA-2+, and these cells were E rosette-, surface (SIg-), and nonphagocytic. Marrow TdT+ progenitor cells were frequently p 24/BA-2+. Results suggest that p24/BA-2 represents a surface structure present on lymphohemopoietic bone marrow progenitor cells and that most common types of ALL bear the p25/BA-2 structure.
Working on the inside: discourses, dilemmas and decisions

Directing a publicly‐funded project can present a number of challenges to researchers in reconciling their own philosophy with the expectations of their funders. This paper explores those dilemmas in the context of a four‐year project funded by the British Government to explore strategies to raise boys’ achievement. It reflects on the underlying philosophy of the project and outlines our theoretical position, arguing that some focus on performativity is justified in considering girls’ and boys’ achievements. At the same time, however, we suggest that it is possible to retain a commitment to feminist values, to engage critically with issues of masculinity and to avoid essentialist readings of gender. In arguing for a more nuanced discussion of gender, sensitive to individual school contexts, we argue that the project has allowed a contribution to policy and practice that would otherwise not have been possible.
The test–retest reliability of motor performance measures after traumatic brain injury

Physically well recovered traumatically brain injured (TBI) patients complain of impaired motor performance, which may not be apparent in conventional neurological examination. A reliable test battery measuring mild physical impairment in TBI populations would be a welcome tool for clinical practice. The aim of this study was to evaluate the test–retest reliability of static and dynamic balance, running in a figure-of-eight (agility) and rhythm co-ordination tests. Thirty-four well-recovered TBI inpatients and 36 healthy male volunteers were tested on two occasions. The change in the mean, the typical error and the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) were used as statistics of reliability for continuous measurements and Cohen's kappa coefficient for categorical variables. The best result of consecutive trials within each test showed the best reliability. In the tandem walking tests and running figure-of-eight tests, the reliability was lower in the TBI group than in the controls but still good. The repeatability of static balance and the rhythm co-ordination was moderate in both groups. A slight training effect from test to retest session was observed in most of the performance tests. Balance, rhythm co-ordination and agility tests proved to be reliable for testing TBI men, and can therefore be used in clinical setting.
Nonlinear projection digital image inpainting and restoration methods

This paper concerns with nonuniform sampling and interpolation methods combined with variational models for the solution of a generalized image inpainting problem and the restoration of digital signals. In particular, we discuss the problem of reconstructing a digital signal/image from very few, sparse, and complete information and a substantial incomplete information, which will be assumed as the result of a nonlinear distortion. As a typical and inspiring example, we illustrate the concrete problem of the color restoration of a destroyed art fresco from its few known fragments and some gray picture taken prior to the damage. Numerical implementations are included together with several examples and numerical results to illustrate the proposed method. The numerical experience suggests furthermore that a particular system of coupled Hamilton-Jacobi equations is well-posed. AMS subject classication: 35A15, 65M06, 65M32, 68U10, 70H20, 94A08, 94A14, 94A20
Assessing the Moderating Effect of the End User in Consumer Behavior: The Acceptance of Technological Implants to Increase Innate Human Capacities

Today, technological implants are being developed to increase innate human capacities, such as memory or calculation speed, and to endow us with new ones, such as the remote control of machines. This study's aim was two-fold: first, to introduce a Cognitive-Affective-Normative (CAN) model of technology acceptance to explain the intention to use this technology in the field of consumer behavior; and second, to analyze the differences in the intention to use it based on whether the intended implant recipient is oneself or one's child (i.e., the moderating effect of the end user). A multi-group analysis was performed to compare the results between the two groups: implant “for me” (Group 1) and implant “for my child” (Group 2). The model largely explains the intention to use the insideable technology for the specified groups [variance explained (R2) of over 0.70 in both cases]. The most important variables were found to be “positive emotions” and (positive) “subjective norm. ” This underscores the need to broaden the range of factors considered to be decisive in technology acceptance to include variables related to consumers' emotions. Moreover, statistically significant differences were found between the “for me” and “for my child” models for “perceived ease of use (PEU)” and “subjective norm. ” These findings confirm the moderating effect of the end user on new insideable technology acceptance.
Trends in media and communication studies: Toddlers, media consumption, and development communication

The growing field of media studies continues to attract the interest of researchers who closely watch the diffusion and usage pattern of the media. New forms of media that integrate a number of media and communication technologies into a single device (like the latest invention of smart watches) further necessitate intensive research in this field. Until recently, scholars who followed the growth and development of the media focused more on the younger generation and their media consumption patterns. This focus has now shifted to very young children, including toddlers, as their exposure to media has of late tended to change significantly. The early exposure to forms of media, whether television or the internet, has implications for the media industry. At the same time, the communication side of the media has been influencing development initiatives on several fronts.
Reducing aging on scratchpad memory using temporal- and FSM-based power management

Scratchpad memory (SPM) which is software-controlled SRAM has lower power consumption compared to cache. It is becoming widely used in CPU, GPU and embedded devices. Meanwhile, as CMOS technology continues shrinking, negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) has become a major reliability concern. Recent studies show that SRAM suffers from NBTI effect, so it is a significant issue for SPM. While most research has focused on mitigating aging on cache, little attention are focusing on SPM aging mitigation. In this paper, we propose a temporal-based power management technique to turn SPM pages into sleep modes according to its recently used history. To account for different access behaviors of different applications, we propose a dynamic threshold adjustment algorithm to adjust a predefined threshold (Pth) to turn off the idle pages dynamically. We also propose a FSM-based power management technique that combines both voltage scaling and power gating techniques to change the states of SPM pages into drowsy mode or sleep mode at runtime. The experimental results show that degradation is improved more than 7% when both techniques are used simultaneously.
Civil Service Development in China and America: A Comparative Perspective

How has reform changed Chinese and American civil service systems in light of China’s landmark reform in 1993 by contrast to the aftermath of the U.S. Civil Service Act of 1883? While there are significant differences, remarkable administrative and political similarities also emerge. Particularly salient is the role of educational systems in the civil service development of both countries. Surprisingly, this comparative analysis finds a common struggle to balance professional expertise with political accountability and control. King Kwun Tsao of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and John Abbott Worthley of Seton Hall University argue that further comparative research is essential to hone an improved understanding of China specifically as well as civil service systems generally.
A Characterization of Integral ISS for Switched and Time-Varying Systems

Most of the existing characterizations of the integral input-to-state stability (iISS) property are not valid for time-varying or switched systems in cases where converse Lyapunov theorems for stability are not available. This paper provides a characterization that is valid for switched and time-varying systems, and shows that natural extensions of some of the existing characterizations result in only sufficient but not necessary conditions. The results provided also pinpoint suitable iISS gains and relate these to supply functions and bounds on the function defining the system dynamics.
Accuracy to Estimate Rates of Decline in Glomerular Filtration Rate in Renal Transplant Patients

Background. We examined the use of the Cockroft Gault (C-G) test, Modified Diet in Renal Disease 2 (MDRD2) test, and inverse serum creatinine (&Dgr;1/Scr) to estimate rates of decline in renal transplant function using isotope glomerular filtration rate (GFR) as a reference test. Methods. Percent changes in estimated GFR (&Dgr;eGFR) were compared to simultaneous changes in isotope GFR (&Dgr;iGFR) in 72 patients. Results. The number of iGFR was 508 with a mean of 7.15±3.15 scans per patient. There was a decline in iGFR of 16.14±21.37 ml/min over the study duration of 88.9±57.6 months. &Dgr;eGFR and &Dgr;1/Scr correlated significantly with &Dgr;iGFR. Accuracy to predict &Dgr;iGFR from the eGFRs was limited to <65% concordance within 30% range from changes in iGFR. Slope analyses showed a significantly lower percent annual loss in mean iGFR of 6.03% than that of the C-G of 8.62% and MDRD2 of 8.96% (P<0.001). The within patient variability measured from the standard deviation (ml/min) of root mean square of 4.69 for iGFR was significantly higher than that for C-G and MDRD2 of 2.46 and 2.94, respectively. iGFR and eGFR at first observation correlated significantly (P<0.001) with last observation. Conclusions. iGFR is significantly more variable within patient than the other predictors, and the two estimators predict the iGFR with a high sensitivity but low specificity. This is a clinically reasonable combination. Predicted percent of annual loss in iGFR appears to be smaller than that using the two estimators.
Environmental Transformation of the State: The USA, Norway, Germany and the UK

Modern states underwent two major transformations that produced first, the liberal capitalist state and second, the welfare state. Each was accompanied by the migration of a previously confrontational movement into the core of the state. In the creation of the liberal capitalist state, the bourgeoisie could harmonize with the state's emerging interest in economic growth. In the creation of the welfare state, the organized working class could harmonize with the state's emerging interest in legitimating the political economy by curbing capitalism's instability and inequality. We show that environmental conservation could now emerge as a core state interest, growing out of these established economic and legitimation imperatives. This examination is grounded in a comparative historical study of four countries: the USA, Norway, Germany, and the UK, each of which exemplifies a particular kind of interest representation. We show why the USA was an environmental pioneer around 1970, why it was then eclipsed by Norway, and why Germany now leads in addressing environmental concerns.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging Reveals Supplementary Lesions to Frontal White Matter in Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

BACKGROUND:Idiopathic normal-pressure hydrocephalus (INPH) is associated with white matter lesions, but the extent and severity of the lesions do not cohere with symptoms or improvement after shunting, implying the presence of further, yet undisclosed, injuries to white matter in INPH. OBJECTIVE:To apply diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to explore white matter lesions in patients with INPH before and after drainage of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). METHODS:Eighteen patients and 10 controls were included. DTI was performed in a 1.5T MRI scanner before and after 3-day drainage of 400 mL of CSF. Regions of interest included corpus callosum, capsula interna, frontal and lateral periventricular white matter, and centrum semiovale. White matter integrity was quantified by assessing fractional anisotropies (FA) and apparent diffusion coefficients (ADC), comparing them between patients and controls and between patients before and after drainage. The significance level corresponded to . 05 (Bonferroni corrected). RESULTS:Decreased FA in patients was found in 3 regions (P < .002, P < .001, and P < .001) in anterior frontal white matter, whereas elevated ADC was found in genu corpus callosum (P < .001) and areas of centrum semiovale associated with the precentral gyri (P < .002). Diffusion patterns in these areas did not change after drainage. CONCLUSION:DTI reveals subtle injuries—interpreted as axonal loss and gliosis—to anterior frontal white matter where high-order motor systems between frontal cortex and basal ganglia travel, further supporting the notion that motor symptoms in INPH are caused by a chronic ischemia to the neuronal systems involved in the planning processes of movements.
Neighbouring-group composition and within-group relatedness drive extra-group paternity rate in the European badger (Meles meles)

Extra‐group paternity (EGP) occurs commonly among group‐living mammals and plays an important role in mating systems and the dynamics of sexual selection; however, socio‐ecological and genetic correlates of EGP have been underexplored. We use 23 years of demographic and genetic data from a high‐density European badger (Meles meles) population, to investigate the relationship between the rate of EGP in litters and mate availability, mate incompatibility and mate quality (heterozygosity). Relatedness between within‐group assigned mothers and candidate fathers had a negative quadratic effect on EGP, whereas the number of neighbouring‐group candidate fathers had a linear positive effect. We detected no effect of mean or maximum heterozygosity of within‐group candidate fathers on EGP. Consequently, EGP was associated primarily with mate availability, subject to within‐group genetic effects, potentially to mitigate mate incompatibility and inbreeding. In badgers, cryptic female choice, facilitated by superfecundation, superfoetation and delayed implantation, prevents males from monopolizing within‐group females. This resonates with a meta‐analysis in group‐living mammals, which proposed that higher rates of EGP occur when within‐group males cannot monopolize within‐group females. In contrast to the positive meta‐analytic association, however, we found that EGP associated negatively with the number of within‐group assigned mothers and the number of within‐group candidate fathers; potentially a strategy to counter within‐group males committing infanticide. The relationship between the rate of EGP and socio‐ecological or genetic factors can therefore be intricate, and the potential for cryptic female choice must be accounted for in comparative studies.