Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Social influence and social learning in young children and infants

This thesis examines the motivations underlying social influence and behaviour matching in young children. In my General Introduction, I argue that, in adults, behaviour matching is often motivated by goals to learn from and affiliate with other group members (or by a combination of these two factors). In addition to explicit forms of behaviour matching, however, adults also subconsciously assimilate their behaviour to those around them. I argue that imitation in young children may be similarly motivated by goals to learn from and affiliate with others. In other words, that imitation performs an instrumental and a social function in development. Further, I argue that young children may also subconsciously assimilate their behaviour to those around them. The following experimental chapters test aspects of these claims. Chapter 2 investigates verbal imitation. Focusing on the instrumental aspects of this ability, I test whether young children copy the perceived intentions behind speech. Results show that children correct the ungrammatical utterances of an intentional model, but copy the utterances of a non-intentional model exactly. Chapter 3 investigates social imitation. In that chapter, I test whether children increase their imitation when they have a goal to affiliate. Results show that children who have been given a goal to affiliate (through priming with social exclusion) copy the actions of a model significantly more closely than children who have been given a neutral prime. Chapter 4 investigates unintentional, or subconscious, behaviour matching and tests whether even infants assimilate their behaviour to social primes. Results show that infants primed with affiliation are significantly more likely to help an experimenter than infants primed with individuality. Taken together, these experiments demonstrate that behaviour matching is a diverse and important phenomenon in development. It occurs both intentionally and unintentionally, and enables children to learn from and affiliate with those around them.
Organizational communication: A buffer in times of job insecurity?

Using Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) theory as the theoretical framework, this study explored the effectiveness of organizational communication in attenuating the negative effects associated with job insecurity on employee attitudes, behaviors, and physical health. Data were collected from 639 employees in six different companies. As predicted by COR theory, results suggest that high job insecurity is related to lower job satisfaction, more workplace accidents, and more health complaints. However, employees who perceived higher levels of positive organizational communication practices reported fewer negative consequences of job insecurity compared with employees who reported lower levels of organizational communication. Taken together, it is suggested organizations that make a greater effort to communicate with employees may effectively buffer the potentially negative consequences of job insecurity.
Clinical Decision Support Systems

Integrating medical knowledge and advances into the clinical setting is often difficult due to the complexity of the involved algorithms and protocols. Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) assist the clinician in applying new information to patient care through the analysis of patient-specific clinical variables. Many of these systems are used to enhance diagnostic efforts and include computer-based programs such as DxplainTM that provide extensive differential diagnoses based on clinical information entered by the clinician. Other forms of clinical decision support systems, including antibiotic management programs and anticoagulation dosing calculators, seek to prevent medical errors and improve patient safety.
Non-Asymptotic Analysis of $\ell _{1}$ -Norm Support Vector Machines

Support vector machines (SVMs) with the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-penalty became a standard tool in the analysis of high-dimensional classification problems with sparsity constraints in many applications, including bioinformatics and signal processing. We give non-asymptotic results on the performance of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-SVM in identification of sparse classifiers. We show that an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-dimensional <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$s$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-sparse classification vector can be (with high probability) well approximated from only <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(s\log (N))$ </tex-math></inline-formula> Gaussian trials. We derive similar estimates also in the presence of misclassifications and for the so-called doubly regularized SVM, which combines the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>- and the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-penalty. Similar bounds were obtained earlier in the analysis of LASSO and 1-Bit compressed sensing.
Sparse Generalized Functional Linear Model for Predicting Remission Status of Depression Patients

Complex diseases such as major depression affect people over time in complicated patterns. Longitudinal data analysis is thus crucial for understanding and prognosis of such diseases and has received considerable attention in the biomedical research community. Traditional classification and regression methods have been commonly applied in a simple (controlled) clinical setting with a small number of time points. However, these methods cannot be easily extended to the more general setting for longitudinal analysis, as they are not inherently built for time-dependent data. Functional regression, in contrast, is capable of identifying the relationship between features and outcomes along with time information by assuming features and/or outcomes as random functions over time rather than independent random variables. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse generalized functional linear model for the prediction of treatment remission status of the depression participants with longitudinal features. Compared to traditional functional regression models, our model enables high-dimensional learning, smoothness of functional coefficients, longitudinal feature selection and interpretable estimation of functional coefficients. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) data set and the results show that the proposed sparse functional regression method achieves significantly higher prediction power than existing approaches.
A preliminary assessment of how zoo visitors evaluate animal welfare according to enclosure style and the expression of behavior

Abstract Visitors to zoos make judgements about animal welfare on the basis of what they see during their visit. There has been a considerable amount of research and debate surrounding the use of enclosure style and/or animal behavior to act as indicators of animal welfare. There are assumptions, supported by some studies but contradicted by others, that naturalistic enclosures and the expression of “wild behavior” inherently promote good welfare. These assumptions also appear to be used by the public to judge the welfare of zoo-housed animals. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether visitors to Paignton Zoo Environmental Park, UK, were using these assumptions to judge the welfare of zoo-housed animals. Visitors (n=42) were shown two series of photographs (n=8 in each series), one representing different primate enclosure styles and one depicting different tiger behaviors. The visitors were asked to rank the photographs in response to a series of questions (n=4 primate enclosure; n=5 tiger behavior). The public were consistent in their assessment of enclosure styles, which confirmed they held the assumption that naturalistic enclosures are good; all respondents rated the greenest enclosure highly and thought its inhabitants would have the best welfare. The interpretation of captive tiger behavior was also consistent across respondents, but this did not clearly indicate that they thought wild behavior was good. Most respondents thought that tigers in captivity and in the wild performed similar behavior. However, they did not think that expression of wild-type behavior was indicative of good welfare in captivity.
Guidelines for school and community programs to promote lifelong physical activity among young people. National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and prevention.

Regular physical activity is linked to enhanced health and to reduced risk for all-cause mortality and the development of many chronic diseases in adults. However, many U.S. adults are either sedentary of less physically active than recommended. Children and adolescents are more physically active than adults, but participation in physical activity declines in adolescence. School and community programs have the potential to help children and adolescents establish lifelong, healthy physical activity patterns. This report summarizes recommendations for encouraging physical activity among young people so that they will continue to engage in physical activity in adulthood and obtain the benefits of physical activity throughout life. These guidelines were developed by CDC in collaboration with experts from universities and from national, federal, and voluntary agencies and organizations. They are based on an in-depth review of research, theory, and current practice in physical education, exercise science, health education, and public health. The guidelines include recommendations about 10 aspects of school and community programs to promote lifelong physical activity among young people policies that promote enjoyable physical activity and social environments that encourage and enable physical activity; physical education curricula and instruction; health education curricula and instruction; extracurricular physical activity programs that meet the needs and interests of students; involvement of parents and guardians on physical activity instruction and programs for young people; personnel training; health services for children and adolescents; developmentally appropriate community sports and recreation programs that are attractive to young people; and regular evaluation of physical activity instruction, programs, and facilities.
Thin film thermoelectric cooler thermal validation and product thermal performance estimation

The shrinking transistor feature sizes have resulted broadly in two different packaging thermal challenges; cooling the total thermal design power of the microprocessor, and thermal suppression of the hot spots which have progressively higher heat fluxes through silicon generations. Solid-state thin film thermoelectric coolers offer a possible solution strategy to the hot spot problems by mitigating the thermal non-uniformity of the silicon. However, considerable challenges are present in incorporating the thermoelectric coolers into a test device and thermal characterization of the prototypes. The present work captures the experimental and thermal modeling methodology that was used to characterize the thermal-electrical behavior of the prototypes. This characterization was followed up with a validation of the prototype over a range of uniform and hot spot heating. A temperature variation of less than 1degC in Tj between the experimental and modeling results were seen. In addition, less than 3% variation in electrical current supplied to the TFTEC module was seen between the experimental and modeling results. Based on the validated thermal model, a product use-condition modeling methodology was established in which the non-uniform heating of the product in use-condition was considered. This methodology was demonstrated using a product example and the hot spot temperature suppression was estimated to be 6degC, compared to the case when no thermoelectric cooler was used. Several interesting phenomena such as creation of new hot spots around the TFTEC module region were also observed
Network Traffic Analysis, Classification, and Prediction

This paper describes a detailed study of aggregated network traffic using time series analysis techniques. The study is based on three sets of packet traces: 175 short-period WAN traces from the NLANR PMA archive (NLANR), 34 long-period WAN traces from NLANR archive (AUCKLAND), and the four Bellcore LAN and WAN traces (BC). We binned the packets with different bin sizes to produce a set of time series estimating the consumed bandwidth. We studied these series using the following time series techniques: summary statistics, time series structure, the autocorrelation function, the histogram, and the power spectral density. Using a qualitative approach, we developed a classification scheme for the traces using the results of our analyses. We believe that this classification scheme will be helpful for others studying these freely available traces. We studied the predictability of the traces by choosing representatives of the different classes and then applying a wide variety of linear time series models to them. We found considerable variation in predictability. Some network traffic is essentially white noise while other traffic can be predicted with considerable accuracy. The choice of predictive model is also relatively context-dependent, although autoregressive models tend to do well. Predictability is also affected by the bin size used. As might be expected, it is often the case that predictability increases as bin size grows. However, we also found that in many cases there is a “sweet spot”, a degree of aggregation at which predictability is maximized.
Antipsychotic utilization and expenditure trends among elderly persons.

1400 A agents, especially second-generation agents, are often used among elderly persons for behavioral symptoms of dementia and psychoses. However, recent trials involving elderly patients with dementia have raised efficacy issues regarding second-generation agents (1). In the light of these findings, this column examines national utilization and expenditure patterns for antipsychotic agents among the elderly from 1996–2004. The 1996–2004 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys (MEPS) were used to derive annual national estimates of prevalence of antipsychotic use and expenditures for antipsychotics among elderly persons in the community aged 60 years or older (2). All annual expenditures were adjusted to the 2004 dollar value by using the consumer price index. Prevalence of antipsychotic use remained stable throughout the study period: 1.25% in 1996–1998, 1.27% in 1999–2001, and 1.46% in 2002–2004. Among elderly persons using antipsychotics, the percentage of those taking a second-generation agent increased from 14.65% in 1996–1998 to 72.73% in 2002–2004 (p<.05). Overall, there was consistent increase (p<.05) in the use of secondgeneration agents: . 08 million in 1996–1998, . 33 million in 1999–2001, and . 53 million in 2002– 2004 (Figure 1). Meanwhile, the number of elderly patients taking first-generation agents decreased from . 47 million in 1996–1998 to . 22 million in 2002– 2004 (p<.05). The annual number of antipsychotic prescriptions increased from 2.59 million in 1996–1998 to 4.26 million in 2002–2004 (p<.05). Total annual antipsychotic expenditure nearly quadrupled from $126 million in 1996–1998 to $483 million in 2002– 2004 (p<.05). Annual expenditures for second-generation agents increased nearly tenfold, from $46 million in 1996–1998 to $436 million in 2002–2004 (p<.05). However, expenditures for first-generation agents remained stable, totaling $47 million annually in 2002–2004. Out-of-pocket expenditures increased nearly fourfold, from $60 million in 1996– Antipsychotic Utilization and Expenditure Trends Among Elderly Persons
Efficient vehicle driving on multi-lane roads using model predictive control under a connected vehicle environment

Anticipative control of vehicles is a potential approach for improving travel efficiency of individual vehicles, smoothing traffic flows on urban roads, alleviating impacts on the environment and elevating comforts of the users in various respects. This paper presents such a vehicle driving system in a model predictive control (MPC) framework to efficiently drive a vehicle on multi-lane roads. Anticipation enhances the driving intelligence and strengthens the vehicle's ability in taking advance action, e.g., lane change, speed adjustment, in a dynamically varying traffic environment. More elaborately, presuming a connected vehicle environment, the system receives the information form the surrounding vehicles and infrastructure instantly through V2X communication systems and, using dynamical models, predicts the future road-traffic states. Considering relevant constraints and a performance index, the system generates the optimal acceleration and executes lane change maneuver optimally if long term advantages are anticipated. Numerical simulation in realistic traffic flow conditions reveals that the vehicles with the proposed driving system improve their travel efficiency significantly.
Insulin Resistance Predicts Mortality in Nondiabetic Individuals in the U.S.

OBJECTIVE Insulin resistance is a suspected causative factor in a wide variety of diseases. We aimed to determine whether insulin resistance, estimated by the homeostasis model assessment for insulin resistance (HOMA-IR), is associated with all-cause or disease-specific mortality among nondiabetic persons in the U.S. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We determined the association between HOMA-IR and death certificate–based mortality among 5,511 nondiabetic, adult participants of the third U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1988–1994) during up to 12 years of follow-up, after adjustment for potential confounders (age, sex, BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, alcohol consumption, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, smoking status, physical activity, C-reactive protein, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, plasma total and HDL cholesterol, and triglycerides). RESULTS HOMA-IR was significantly associated with all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio 1.16 [95% CI 1.01–1.3], comparing successive quartiles of HOMA-IR in a linear model and 1.64 [1.1–2.5], comparing the top [HOMA-IR >2.8] to the bottom [HOMA-IR ≤1.4] quartile). HOMA-IR was significantly associated with all-cause mortality only in subjects with BMI <25.2 kg/m2 (the median value) but not in subjects with BMI ≥25.2 kg/m2. Subjects in the second, third, and fourth quartile of HOMA-IR appeared to have higher cardiovascular mortality than subjects in the lowest quartile of HOMA-IR. HOMA-IR was not associated with cancer-related mortality. CONCLUSIONS HOMA-IR is associated with all-cause mortality in the nondiabetic U.S. population but only among persons with normal BMI. HOMA-IR is a readily available measure that can be used in the future to predict mortality in clinical or epidemiological settings.
The influence of vascularization of transplanted processed allograft nerve on return of motor function in rats

Processed nerve allografts have become an alternative to repair segmental nerve defects, with results comparable with autografts regarding sensory recovery; however, they have failed to reproduce comparable motor recovery. The purpose of this study was to determine how revascularizaton of processed nerve allograft would affect motor recovery. Eighty‐eight rats were divided in four groups of 22 animals each. A unilateral 10‐mm sciatic nerve defect was repaired with allograft (group I), allograft wrapped with silicone conduit (group II), allograft augmented with vascular endothelial growth factor (group III), or autograft (group IV). Eight animals from each group were sacrificed at 3 days, and the remaining animals at 16 weeks. Revascularization was evaluated by measuring the graft capillary density at 3 days and 16 weeks. Measurements of ankle contracture, compound muscle action potential, tibialis anterior muscle weight and force, and nerve histomorphometry were performed at 16 weeks. All results were normalized to the contralateral side. The results of capillary density at 3 days were 0.99% ± 1.3% for group I, 0.33% ± 0.6% for group II, 0.05% ± 0.1% for group III, and 75.6% ± 45.7% for group IV. At 16 weeks, the results were 69.9% ± 22.4% for group I, 37.0% ± 16.6% for group II, 84.6% ± 46.6% for group III, and 108.3% ± 46.8% for group IV. The results of muscle force were 47.5% ± 14.4% for group I, 21.7% ± 13.5% for group II, 47.1% ± 7.9% for group III, and 54.4% ± 10.6% for group IV. The use of vascular endothelial growth factor in the fashion used in this study improved neither the nerve allograft short‐term revascularization nor the functional motor recovery after 16 weeks. Blocking allograft vascularization from surrounding tissues was detrimental for motor recovery. The processed nerve allografts used in this study showed similar functional motor recovery compared with that of the autograft. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microsurgery 36:134–143, 2016.
Effects of ultraviolet light on biogenic amines and other quality indicators of chicken meat during refrigerated storage.

Radiation from UV-C has been demonstrated as a potential surface decontamination method in addition to several advantages over regular sanitation methods. However, UV-C radiation possibly affects the physicochemical properties of meat products. To determine the optimum exposure time for bacterial reduction, 39 chicken breasts, inoculated with a pool of Salmonella spp. , were submitted to 3 levels of UV-C intensities (0.62, 1.13, and 1.95 mW/cm²) for up to 120 s. After the optimum exposure time of 90 s was determined, changes in the biogenic amines, total aerobic mesophilic bacteria, Enterobacteriaceae, lipid oxidation, pH, and instrumental color were evaluated in 84 chicken breasts that were irradiated (0.62, 1.13, and 1.95 mW/cm²) and stored at 4°C for 9 d. The groups treated with UV-C radiation exhibited an increase in tyramine, cadaverine, and putrescine contents (P < 0.05). The highest UV-C intensity (1.95 mW/cm²) promoted a decrease in the initial bacterial load, and extended the lag phase and the shelf life. The groups irradiated with 1.13 and 1.95 mW/cm² exhibited a more stable b* value than the other groups; similar trends for L*, a*, pH, and TBA reactive substance values were observed among all groups. The UV-C light was demonstrated to be an efficient alternative technology to improve the bacteriological quality of chicken meat without negatively affecting the physical and chemical parameters of chicken breast meat. Nonetheless, the increases on the biogenic amines content should be considered as an effect of the UV processing and not as an indicator of bacterial growth.
Academic Competition among Students of Color

Forty-one relatively high-achieving students of color were interviewed about the competition for grades that they felt in their high schools. Students of color are particularly interesting with regard to competition because they have sometimes been portrayed as rejecting academic achievement. The students reported competing for grades. They generally thought competition was beneficial. Students commented that they focused on grade point average to help them improve their grades and monitored the grades that other students were receiving. They made almost no comments about competition leading to learning or mastering skills. Their responses are interpreted in light of motivation research that suggests that academic competition and social comparison can lead to maladaptive motivational orientations.