Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Response speed under voluntary and involuntary conditions as a function of percentage of reinforcement.

The efects of percentage of reinforcement (100 vs. 50 per cent) on the acquisition and extinction of a lever movement response were investigated when the S was free to leave the experiment whenever he wished (voluntary condition) and when he had to continue the experiment until completion (involuntary condition). During the acquisition series, the 50 per cent reinforced Ss performed faster and showed a greater increase in speed over trials than 100 per cent reinforced Ss, regardless of whether Ss were in the voluntary or involuntary condition. There were no significant effects with regard to the movement speeds during the extinction series for the involuntary condition Ss. In the voluntary condition, Ss on a 50 per cent reinforcement schedule quit the experiment sooner than those on a 100 per cent schedule. The failure of Ss in the 100 per cent involuntary condition to show a decrement in speed during the extinction series was interpreted as being due to frustration of their desire to quit.
The Impact of Climate and Energy Initiatives on Firm Value

This study explores the causal relationship between firms’ climate actions and financial performance. I examined the market reactions associated with announcements of two categories of climate and energy initiatives with the event study approach. The first category includes 20 announcements of major corporations announcing their intent to participate in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (US CAP) program. The second category includes 100 announcements of these companies’ own specific climate actions or investments. This study finds no significant relationship for the aggregate data or firms’ own climate actions or investments. However, I do find that the market reacts positively to firms’ announcements of participating in the US CAP. This result implies that collective action among corporate leaders does not only have the potential to benefit society in combating climate change, but also to directly create shareholder value.
Methodological and Conceptual Issues in the Development of Customer Service Measures for the National Recreational Reservation Service

The National Recreation Reservation Service (NRRS) customer service monitoring protocol includes methodological and conceptual issues related to opt-in and non-response bias across different reservation channels and stages of the reservation process. The limited available data show that opt-in rates and non-response bias may not be large in general, but might be quite problematic at times. The data suggest that monitoring processes should be continued and improved. The results also suggest that phone surveys are relatively bias-free and perhaps necessary for some user groups, and that quality assurance of email or internet surveys will be more difficult. Suggestions are offered to improve response bias checks and attain preferred quality standards.
Implications of Evidence‐Centered Design for Educational Testing

Evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) provides language, concepts, and knowledge representations for designing and delivering educational assessments, all organized around the evidentiary argument an assessment is meant to embody. This article describes ECD in terms of layers for analyzing domains, laying out arguments, creating schemas for operational elements such as tasks and measurement models, implementing the assessment, and carrying out the operational processes. We argue that this framework helps designers take advantage of developments from measurement, technology, cognitive psychology, and learning in the domains. Examples of ECD tools and applications are drawn from the Principled Assessment Design for Inquiry (PADI) project. Attention is given to implications for large-scale tests such as state accountability measures, with a special eye for computer-based simulation tasks.
Ultra-compact optical filters in Silicon-on-Insulator and their Applications

We present ultra-compact wavelength filters in SOI photonic wires: Mach-Zehnder lattice filters and ring resonators, as well as demultiplexers such as AWGs, and planar concave gratings. We also discuss devices for WDM communication and sensing. The circuits were fabricated with CMOS technology.
A comprehensive strategy for mammogram image classification using learning classifier systems

Mammography is a well known procedure for breast cancer detection. The traditional mammography process employs manual analysis for detection and diagnosis, which requires professional expertise. However, computerized systems that use feature based classification have been demonstrated to be proficient and reliable but there is scope for improved accuracy. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive strategy to use learning classifier systems (LCSs) for mammogram image classification. We use six types of statistical measures, three different variants of local binary pattern (LBP) technique and ten variants of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to extract statistical, texture and multiresolution features, respectively. However, the main challenge to apply an LCS in image classification tasks is the large number of extracted feature components that result in a large number of attributes in classifier conditions. Whereas, to evolve generalization in an LCS, a limited number of attributes in classifier conditions are required. We use different encoding schemes based on mapping distances against the large feature components to reduce the number of required attributes in classifier conditions while retaining the unique image characteristics. We develop a novel strategy that deploys various combinations of features and distances to investigate five different types of attributes in classifier conditions: (i) individual statistical features, (ii) individual LBP features, (iii) concatenation of statistical and LBP features, (iv) concatenation of statistical, LBP features and distances based on DWT features, and (v) concatenation of statistical features and distances based on LBP and DWT features. The obtained results indicate that using the precomputed distances in place of the original LBP and DWT features improve the classification accuracy in experiments conducted in this study.
THE LAND OF CONFUSION – CLEARING UP SOME COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS OF INTERPRETIVE RESEARCH

Qualitative research approaches are now well established in information systems research, and are given equal weight as quantitative research in research methods courses in graduate programs. Similar, the heated paradigm debate seems to largely have cooled off, with interpretivist research now being accepted as an alternative to positivism and other paradigms. However, from the authors’ experience with teaching qualitative methods and reviewing qualitative research work, we see a growing tendency among both students and more experienced researchers to view qualitative and interpretive research as synonyms. We argue that this to some extent is due to a lack of precision in how the interpretivist paradigm is introduced in method textbooks and resources, where the rhetoric is sometimes conflated so as to indicate that all research focusing on the social and contextual aspects of technology use is by default interpretivist. On this background, our mission with this paper is to highlight the key characteristics of interpretive research that distinguish this approach from ‘any qualitative study’. In this, we discuss core concepts and procedures related to interpretive data collection and analysis, including validation and generalizability. Finally, we present a set of guiding questions forming a checklist for whether the qualitative study conducted would qualify as interpretive research or not.
Information security standards: adoption drivers

Data quality dimensions for information systems security : a theoretical exposition p. 21 From XML to RDF : syntax, semantics, security, and integrity p. 41 How much should we pay for security? p. 59 Do not ship, or receive, trojan horses p. 71 Employee security perception in cultivating information security culture p. 83 A policy framework for access management in federated information sharing p. 95 A hierarchical release control policy framework p. 121 Managing uncertainty in security risk model forcasts with RAPSA/MC p. 141 The mitigation of ICT risks using EMitl tool : an empirical study p. 157 Risk communication, risk perception and information security p. 175 A holistic risk analysis method for identifying information security risks p. 185 A responsibility framework for information security p. 205 Information security governance-a re-definition p. 223 Can we tune information security management into meeting corporate governance needs? p. 237 Measurement of information security in processes and products p. 249 A protection profiles approach to risk analysis for small and medium enterprises p. 267 A UML approach in the ISMS implementation p. 285 Attack aware integrity control in databases p. 301 Characteristics and measures for mobile-masquerader detection p. 303 A distributed service registry for resource sharing among ad-hoc dynamic coalitions p. 319 A trust-based model for information integrity in open systems p. 337 Scalable access policy administration p. 355 Semantic information infrastructure protection p. 371
Drastic Fitness Loss in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 upon Serial Bottleneck Events

ABSTRACT Muller’s ratchet predicts fitness losses in small populations of asexual organisms because of the irreversible accumulation of deleterious mutations and genetic drift. This effect should be enhanced if population bottlenecks intervene and fixation of mutations is not compensated by recombination. To study whether Muller’s ratchet could operate in a retrovirus, 10 biological clones were derived from a human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) field isolate by MT-4 plaque assay. Each clone was subjected to 15 plaque-to-plaque passages. Surprisingly, genetic deterioration of viral clones was very drastic, and only 4 of the 10 initial clones were able to produce viable progeny after the serial plaque transfers. Two of the initial clones stopped forming plaques at passage 7, two others stopped at passage 13, and only four of the remaining six clones yielded infectious virus. Of these four, three displayed important fitness losses. Thus, despite virions carrying two copies of genomic RNA and the system displaying frequent recombination, HIV-1 manifested a drastic fitness loss as a result of an accentuation of Muller’s ratchet effect.
Stock price forecasting using support vector regression: Based on network behavior data

Stock market research based on network behavior data has become one of the focuses in behavioral finance. In this paper, we firstly construct a proxy variable of investors' attention based on comments data collected from the Snowball Finance, which is a popular online financial community in China. Then we analyze the lead-lag relationship between investors' attention and the stock price of all A-shares listed in both the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange, using Thermal Optimal Path (TOP) method. And we find that investors' attention and stock price have a dynamic relationship, which differs from stock to stock. In terms of quantity, only a small number of stocks have a relationship where investors' attention changes ahead of the stock price. Those two facts may account for conflicting conclusions drew by different studies. Further on, this paper establishes two support vector regression models, comparing the predictive capability of investors' attention to the selected two kinds of stocks. The results show that adding investors' attention to models can only enhance the prediction precision of the “leading stocks”, while it has little effect to the “lagging stocks”.
Nanoparticle Delivery of Mycophenolic Acid Upregulates PD‐L1 on Dendritic Cells to Prolong Murine Allograft Survival

Conventional immunosuppressive drug delivery requires high systemic drug levels to provide therapeutic benefit, but frequently results in toxic side effects. Novel drug delivery methods, such as FDA‐approved poly(lactic‐co‐glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanoparticles (NPs), are promising drug delivery platforms to reduce drug doses and minimize toxicity. Using murine models of skin transplantation, we investigated whether PLGA NPs would effectively deliver mycophenolic acid (MPA), a common clinical immunosuppressant, and avoid the toxicity of conventional drug delivery. We found that intermittent treatment with NPs encapsulated with MPA (NP‐MPA) resulted in a significant extension of allograft survival than intermittent conventional MPA treatment even though the concentration of MPA within NP‐MPA was a 1000‐fold lower than conventional drug. Importantly, recipients who were administered NP‐MPA intermittently avoided drug toxicity, whereas those treated with daily conventional drug manifested cytopenias. Dendritic cells (DCs) endocytosed NP‐MPA to upregulate programmed death ligand‐1 (PD‐L1) and displayed a decreased ability to prime alloreactive T cells. Importantly, the ability of NP‐MPA to promote allograft survival was partly PD‐L1 dependent. Collectively, this study indicates that NPs are potent drug delivery tools that extend allograft survival without drug toxicity.
Effect of cis-Unsaturated Fatty Acids, Prostaglandins, and Free Radicals on Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Activity in Vitro

Abstract Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) is known to play an important role in the pathobiology of human essential hypertension. Similarly, cis-unsaturated fatty acids, prostaglandins, and free radicals are believed to play a role in the control of blood pressure. It was observed that all the cis-unsaturated fatty acids tested can inhibit ACE activity to a significant degree. On the other hand, prostaglandins and free radicals, superoxide anion, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radical did not show significant inhibitory effects on ACE activity in vitro. But, the nitric oxide donor sodium nitroprusside showed a potent inhibitory action on ACE activity, suggesting that one of the possible mechanism(s) by which nitric oxide can bring about its anti-hypertensive action might be by modulating ACE activity in addition to its direct vasodilator action. These results indicate that there is a close interaction among ACE activity, cis-unsaturated fatty acids, and nitric oxide, which may have relevance to the pathobiology of human essential hypertension.
Draft 1 Thigmomorphogenesis : morphological , biochemical changes , and transcriptional level 1 changes in response to mechanical stress in Acacia koa

Journal: Canadian Journal of Forest Research Manuscript ID cjfr-2016-0356.R2 Manuscript Type: Article Date Submitted by the Author: 08-Dec-2016 Complete List of Authors: Ishihara, Kazue; University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering Lee, Eric; University of Hawaii at Manoa, Department of Molecular Biosciences and Bioengineering Borthakur, Dulal; University of Hawaii at Manoa
Standard chemoradiation for glioblastoma results in progressive brain volume loss

Prust et al.1 performed a study in 13 patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma (GBM) treated with standard of care (SOC): temozolomide (TMZ)–based chemoradiation (CRT) followed by post-CRT TMZ for 6–12 cycles using frequent imaging.2 Progressive brain volume loss was documented particularly in the gray matter (GM) with corresponding ventricular dilation. However, data regarding the volume of brain irradiated were not included and this volume would directly correlate with initial tumor size. Furthermore, it is unclear why patients with an image-verified complete resection were not selected to mitigate confounding residual tumor mass. There …
The Inducer rule induction workbench

This paper describes the facilities available in Inducer, a public domain rule induction workbench aimed at users who may not be computer scientists, who wish to analyze their own datasets using a range of data mining strategies or to conduct experiments with a given technique or combination of techniques across a range of datasets. Inducer has a graphical user interface which is designed to be easy to use by beginners, but also includes a range of advanced features for experienced users, including facilities to export the rules generated in several formats and other information in a form suitable for further processing by other packages. An experiment using the workbench is described.
Entrepreneurial Orientation in Marketing: An empirical study of small businesses in the Swedish fashion industry

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) can be defined as strategic processes encouraging entrepreneurial actions to support businesses in recognizing and exploiting new opportunities. Previous studies have shown that businesses with higher levels of EO, characterized through actions that are innovative, proactive and risk-affine, perform better than the ones that lack such orientation. Therefore, EO is considered to be a crucial aspect when businesses seek to gain a competitive advantage. Little has been investigated by using an approach that combines EO literature with regards to marketing activities, and therefore this study contributes to the research field by applying EO theory in marketing context. The study employs three core elements of EO as a framework to analyze small businesses’ marketing activities and related competitiveness. The study applies a qualitative approach of analysis and conducts semi-structured interviews with four small businesses owners within the Swedish fashion industry to collect data. The three sub-dimensions of EO were found to be highly related to each other, which means that all of them were encouraged with regard to the firm's marketing activities in order to enforce a competitive advantage. The results also show that businesses in the fashion industry mainly concentrate on product and market innovation, whereas administrative innovation was not encouraged in any of the cases. More specifically, introducing new concepts, experimenting with marketing activities, entering new markets, building a relationship to customers, adapting alternative distribution and supply channels were the key activities that increased a competitive advantage. An unexpected outcome was that small businesses in the Swedish fashion industry actually tend to cooperate with their competitors and form strategic alliances in order to benefit from economies of scale, share industry experiences, as well as understand and satisfy latent customer needs, and therefore overcome liability of smallness. This paper also contributes to the research field by advancing EO theory, i.e. incorporating two new strategic actions: building a relationship to customer and full control of the production process, which were not previously discussed in EO literature. Additionally, this study provides the Entrepreneurial oriented marketing model, which contributes not only for small businesses within the fashion industry, but also indulges a better understanding what issues are important when seeking to gain a competitive advantage through the use of entrepreneurial orientation in marketing activities.
Irregular dunes, sediment sorting, and river orphodynamics

This research project focuses on modelling the large-scale morphodynamics of low-slope rivers dominated by mixed sediment, such as the Dutch part of the Rhine River. Usually we simply neglect the effects of sorting and variability in dune dimensions on the large-scale morphodynamics. This paper shows that these effects are not negligible.
Statistical analysis of polarimetric SAR data using log-cumulants

Introducing knowledge of the statistical properties could improve the performance of PolSAR data applications such as speckle filtering, land-use analysis, ground cover classification. As the successful launch of the most advanced Polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) instruments including RadarSat-2, TerraSAR-X, ALOS-2, Sentinel-1, and GF3, we are faced with a vast volume of high resolution PolSAR data. To extract statistical information from the big SAR data accurately and efficiently, some simple but effective statistics are in need. It is reported that the log-cumulants are useful for PolSAR data analysis, and we can use them to design estimators for distribution parameters with low bias and variance. In this paper, log-cumulants of different statistical models are compared in a graphic manner to determine the most suitable model for different land types.
Impact of Mobile E-Mail in Corporate Environment

Mobile email is the extension of Internet email on mobile devices. It is a recent phenomenon, and has not been researched broadly yet. This paper provides a contribution to fill this gap and investigates the domestication of mobile email in Swiss companies. The research showed that mobile email is becoming an important tool, in particular for mobile workers. It enables an efficient use of short down times; it is used for communication, coordination, collaboration, and even for dealing with complex matters on the move. Due to an increased dynamism in communication, mobile email results in improved relationships with customers, co-workers and supervisors.
Retrieving relevant information of inhomogeneous magneto-dielectrics surfaces by means of free-space characterization protocols

The non-destructive characterization of inhomogeneous magneto-dielectric materials is investigated. For this purpose, a multistatic bench and a linear imaging methodology are presented and tested for three measurement protocols: monostatic, bistatic and multistatic. In addition to showing the achievable resolution in each case, it gives indications on the advantages and inconvenients of each measurement protocol. A numerical study, supported by experimental results, is performed.
Automatic speech feature classification for children with cochlear implants

Following pediatric cochlear implantation, it is important to monitor the recipient’s auditory perception skills to (a) determine appropriate therapeutic strategies, and (b) guide adjustment (mapping) of how the CI stimulation is distributed over its channels. One evaluation tool used in clinical and research settings is the OlimSpac [1], which assesses perception at the phonetic feature level by asking children to repeat stimuli that are presented aurally. Errors in the child’s repetition of an item are taken to reflect errors in their perception of the stimulus features. While normally administered by a trained clinician who must score the child’s productions, we present here results from a study involving automatic scoring of productions from 17 pediatric CI patients aged 3;0 to 6;10 years. Taken independently, the automated system was in agreement with human feature classifications over 93% of the time overall (range was 99% for vowel height to 89% for consonant voicing) for stimuli on which human judges were in unanimous agreement. Automatic scoring of utterances from young CI recipients could allow the OlimSpac and similar testing procedures to be used more frequently in a clinical setting, and even administered remotely under appropriate conditions.
Estimated 10‐year stroke risk by region and race in the United States

Black individuals younger than 75 years have more than twice the risk for stroke death than whites in the United States. Regardless of race, stroke death is approximately 50% greater in the “stroke belt” and “stroke buckle” states of the Southeastern United States. We assessed geographic and racial differences in estimated 10‐year stroke risk.