Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Feel Safe and Money is Less Important! Hypnotic Suggestions of Safety Decrease Brain Responses to Monetary Rewards in a Risk Game

Abstract When a stimulus is important, the corresponding brain responses increase, especially the P300 brain response. This is true for all kinds of important stimuli, also monetary rewards. In our study, we developed a hypnotic suggestion to reduce the subjective importance of monetary rewards. As successful suggestions do not contain negations, we suggested participants to feel safe during hypnosis instead of suggesting that money is not important anymore. We predicted lower P300 amplitudes when participants feel safe during hypnosis. We tested 24 highly suggestible participants playing a risk game in 2 conditions with monetary rewards while we measured their EEG brain responses. In the safety condition, we induced a hypnotic state and suggested that participants feel safe. In the control condition, participants played the risk game without hypnosis. Here we show that participants felt significantly safer in the safety condition and showed significantly lower P300 amplitudes to monetary rewards. Risk behavior did not differ significantly between conditions. Our results are important for substance use disorders, as decreased P300 responses to substance-related stimuli are associated with less craving and better abstinence. Therefore, we conclude that suggestions to feel safe during hypnosis might work as a treatment for individuals with substance use disorders.
Exploring the process of changing psychological safety: The effect of a team-building intervention

Organizations are more effective when employees feel safe to discuss failures, which is referred to as psychological safety. This research examined the constructs that are related to changes in psychological safety, in the context of a team-building intervention. The aim of this research was to provide a broader framework of psychological safety and the change of psychological safety. Participants of the Dutch National police filled out a survey before and after a team-building intervention. In addition, several interviews were conducted. The combined results of both studies show that psychological safety is positively correlated with perceived organizational support, team cohesion, police work-efficacy. Changes in psychological safety are most positively correlated with intervention-related self-efficacy. However, there are several factors that moderate this change. The enthusiastic and open-hearted employees of an organization are most likely to enhance psychological safety among other employees.
Model independentH(z) reconstruction using the cosmic inverse distance ladder

Recent distance ladder determinations of the Hubble constant $H_0$ disagree at about the $3.5\sigma$ level with the value determined from Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) assuming a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. This discrepancy has prompted speculation that new physics might be required beyond that assumed in the $\Lambda$CDM model. In this paper, we apply the inverse distance ladder to fit a parametric form of $H(z)$ to baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) and Type Ia supernova data together with priors on the sound horizon at the end of the radiation drag epoch, $r_d$. We apply priors on $r_d$, based on inferences from either Planck or the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP), and demonstrate that these values are consistent with CMB-independent determinations of $r_d$ derived from measurements of the primordial deuterium abundance, BAO and supernova data assuming the $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. The $H(z)$ constraints that we derive are independent of detailed physics within the dark sector at low redshifts, relying only on the validity of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) metric of General Relativity. For each assumed prior on $r_d$, we find consistency with the inferred value of $H_0$ and the Planck $\Lambda$CDM value and corresponding tension with the distance ladder estimate.
THE INFLUENCE OF DIFFERENT MESSAGE PACKAGING, ON THE PERFORMANCE OF FIELD WORKERS: A CASE STUDY OF FINLAY FLOWERS KERICHO

T This study seeks to explore the influence of forms of communication on the performance of field workers in Finlay Flowers Kericho, focusing on the Communication process and quality management in flower production. The study was conducted at Finlay Flowers one of the leading producer of cut flowers in Kenya. A total of 145 respondents were selected from a population of 1,175 interacting groups comprising of middle level managers and field workers. Primary data was collected using structured questionnaires and an interview schedule and collected data was analysed using Statistical package for social sciences (SPSS). Findings revealed that all forms of communications had influence on performance of field staff with demonstrations appearing to be more influential in this regard. This is attributed to the fact that demonstration is a consultative event where the management directly involves the employees and advice on the specifications or product requirements. In conclusion, main driver of performance as revealed by the findings of the study meaningful communication process; senior management communication style, supportive work environment and line management style. Based on the findings, the study recommends that in order to improve performance, demonstration as a form of communication should be encouraged, as workers need detailed information on how to conduct their duties especially when handling the produce, also the use of interactive methods as forms of passing messages will help in improving production efficiency.
Effect of Ethnochemistry Practices on Secondary School Students’ Attitude Towards Chemistry

The main purpose of the study was to find out the effect of ethnochemistry practices on secondary school students’ attitude towards Chemistry. The design of the study was pre-test post-test control group quasi-experimental design. Two grade 11 intact classes were assigned into experimental and control groups randomly. The total sample size comprised 113 students. To assess attitude of the student towards Chemistry, a chemistry attitude questionnaire was used. An independent samples t-test at an alpha (α) = . 05 was conducted to analyze the results of the pre-test and post-test scores. There was a statistically significant difference in the post-test attitude scores for control (M=74.71, SD=13.90) and experimental (M=83.36, S=14.68) groups; t (111) = -3.22, p = 0.002. Therefore, incorporating ethnochemistry practices in teaching chemistry was found to have a positive effect on enhancing secondary school students’ attitude towards Chemistry. Keywords: Ethnochemistry, Conventional approach, Attitude
Seroprevalence of Cytomegalovirus among Women of Reproductive Age in Iran: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Human cytomegalovirus (CMV) able to cause infection for an entire lifetime. This systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to determine seroprevalence of CMV among women of reproductive age in Iran. Methods: English and Persian databases such as Web of Science (WOS), PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane Library, SID, Iran doc, Iran Medex, Magiran, and Medlib were searched (from 2008 to 2017) accurately using the keywords: Cytomegalovirus, Pregnant women or Pregnancy, Epidemiology, Prevalence and Iran. Results: Results of 15 studies with total samples of 5253 persons from 2008 to 2017 were combined and meta-analyzed. The pooled prevalence rate of IgG among women was estimated 90% (95% CI: 87–93%). The highest prevalence rate of IgG was in Tehran, Rasht, Mashhad and Yasoj, all 100% (95% CI: 100–100%), and the lowest prevalence was in Jahrom 0.62% (95% CI: 53–71%). The overall prevalence rate of IgM among women was estimated at 0.06% (95% CI: 0.03–0.13%). The highest prevalence rate of IgM was in Kerman 0.34% (95% CI: 0.29–0.39%) and Mashhad 0.25% (95% CI: 0.2–0.31%), and the lowest prevalence was in Yasoj 0% (95% CI: 0.00%–0.00%) Conclusion: The prevalence of immunity in Iran, is satisfactory. Nevertheless, to maintain and increase the level of immunity across the country, it is necessary to routinely screen the women of reproductive ages across the country.
1 MEASUREMENT COSTS AND CONTROL IN OUTSOURCING RELATIONSHIPS

Past research suggests that when an organization outsources an activity, its control over the execution of the service is reduced whilst service quality monitoring increases. Little accounting research has been documented on the links between measurement costs and control sharing in contracts entailing the provision of industrial services. We analyse 35 contracts involving 80 non-spot transactions and 749 contract terms at an iron and steel mill in Brazil. The study complements this data with information from 32 interviews. We find that the measurement costs of the contracted services are associated with the complexity of activities and the tightness of control maintenance by the contractor. Where such costs are high, legal contract enforcement and use of extra-contractual coordination mechanisms is low. Additionally, variances between the conceptually expected enforcement mix and that operating in practice is associated with service performance level.
Intelligent XML Encryption using Effective Fuzzy Classification

Abstract: In this paper we present a novel approach for securing financial XML transactions using an effective and intelligent fuzzy classification technique. Our approach defines the process of classifying XML content using a set of fuzzy variables. upon fuzzy classification phase, a unique value is assigned to a defined attribute named "ImportanceLevel". Assigned value indicates the data sensitivity for each XML tag. The framework also defines the process of securing classified financial XML message content by performing element-wise XML encryption on selected parts defined in fuzzy classification phase. Element-wise encryption is performed using symmetric encryption using AES algorithm with different key sizes. Key size of 128-bit is being used on tags classified with "Medium" importance level; a key size of 256-bit is being used on tags classified with "High" importance level. An implementation has been performed on a real-life environment using online banking system in one of the leading banks in Jordan to demonstrate its flexibility, feasibility, and efficiency. Our experimental results of the new model verified tangible enhancements in encryption efficiency, processing-time reduction, and resulting XML message sizes.
APPROXIMATING THE GENERALIZED SINGULAR VALUE EXPANSION \ast

The generalized singular value expansion (GSVE) simultaneously diagonalizes a pair of operators on Hilbert space. From a theoretical point of view, the GSVE enables a straightforward analysis of, for example, weighted least-squares problems and the method of Tikhonov regularization with seminorms. When the operators are discretized, an approximate GSVE can be computed from the generalized singular value decomposition of a pair of Galerkin matrices. Unless the discretization is carefully chosen, spurious modes can appear, but a natural condition on the discretization guarantees convergence of the approximate GSVE to the exact one. Numerical examples illustrate the pitfalls of a poor discretization and efficacy of the convergence conditions.
Assessing the degradation of grassland ecosystems based on the advanced local net production scaling method—The case of Inner Mongolia, China

The gradual degradation of grasslands on a global scale goes hand‐in‐hand with significant challenges for agriculture and animal husbandry development. Numerous relevant policies and projects have been implemented to protect and restore Chinese ecosystems, but it is still unclear to what degree grassland ecosystems can be recovered. In view of this, we constructed an advanced local net production scaling (ALNS) method by replacing the classification method by self‐organizing feature maps (SOFM) and tailoring the ideal state evaluation method in the LNS method. The ALNS method is used to analyze differences within grassland ecosystems, explore the ideal state of grassland ecosystems, and define degradation as the degree to which the actual state deviates from the ideal state, representing the degree to which grassland ecosystems can be recovered. It thereby quantifies and assesses the overall degradation of such systems in Inner Mongolia. Based on the results, more than 98.5% of the total grassland area failed to reach the ideal state, with the highest levels in the northeast with DN (degraded net primary productivity) values exceeding 200 gc/(m2·yr), followed by the midlands with DN values from 50 to 200 gc/(m2·yr) and the southwest with DN values between 0 and 150 gc/(m2·yr). The ALNS method can efficiently assess grassland ecosystem degradation and can be used to indicate the deviation degrees from ideal states, facilitating the development of protection and restoration programs for grassland ecosystems.
Effect of Energy Sources and Levels on Caecal Microbial Population , Jejunal Morphology , Gene Expression of Jejunal Transporters ( SGLT 1 , FABP ) and Performance of Broilers Under Heat Stress

The present study was conducted to evaluate the effects of energy sources and levels on microbial population, jejunal morphology, gene expression of glucose transporter (SGLT1), fatty acid binding protein (FABP) and performance in broilers under heat stress. In a completely randomized design, 600 one-day-old Cobb broiler chickens were assigned to five dietary treatments and four replicates. Chicks were fed diet based on corn as main energy source and energy level based on Cobb standard considered as control (C), corn based diet with 3% lesser energy than control (T1), corn based diet with 6% lesser energy than control (T2), corn and soybean oil based diet according to Cobb standard (T3), corn and soybean oil based diet with 3% upper energy than control (T4). Temperature was increased to 34°C for 8 hours daily from day 21 to 41 to induce heat stress. Chickens in T3 and T4 had higher Lactobacillus population and lower Escherichia coli population than C group (P<0.05). Chickens in T1 and T2 had shorter jejunal villi, deeper crypts, and lower villus height: crypt depth than those fed C, T3 and T4 diets (P<0.05). There were no significant differences among treatments for gene expression of both nutrient transporters (P>0.05). Chickens in T3 and T4 had higher weight gain compared to C, T1 and T2 (P<0.05). Feed intake in T3 was lower than C, consequently, feed conversion ratio of chicks fed T3 was better than C group (P<0.05). In conclusion, replacement a part of dietary energy source with soybean oil might improve intestinal parameters and performance of broilers under heat stress.
Data-driven machine learning models for decoding speech categorization from evoked brain responses

Objective. Categorical perception (CP) of audio is critical to understand how the human brain perceives speech sounds despite widespread variability in acoustic properties. Here, we investigated the spatiotemporal characteristics of auditory neural activity that reflects CP for speech (i.e. differentiates phonetic prototypes from ambiguous speech sounds). Approach. We recorded 64-channel electroencephalograms as listeners rapidly classified vowel sounds along an acoustic-phonetic continuum. We used support vector machine classifiers and stability selection to determine when and where in the brain CP was best decoded across space and time via source-level analysis of the event-related potentials. Main results. We found that early (120 ms) whole-brain data decoded speech categories (i.e. prototypical vs. ambiguous tokens) with 95.16% accuracy (area under the curve 95.14%; F1-score 95.00%). Separate analyses on left hemisphere (LH) and right hemisphere (RH) responses showed that LH decoding was more accurate and earlier than RH (89.03% vs. 86.45% accuracy; 140 ms vs. 200 ms). Stability (feature) selection identified 13 regions of interest (ROIs) out of 68 brain regions [including auditory cortex, supramarginal gyrus, and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG)] that showed categorical representation during stimulus encoding (0–260 ms). In contrast, 15 ROIs (including fronto-parietal regions, IFG, motor cortex) were necessary to describe later decision stages (later 300–800 ms) of categorization but these areas were highly associated with the strength of listeners’ categorical hearing (i.e. slope of behavioral identification functions). Significance. Our data-driven multivariate models demonstrate that abstract categories emerge surprisingly early (∼120 ms) in the time course of speech processing and are dominated by engagement of a relatively compact fronto-temporal-parietal brain network.
The Professionalization of Sustainability

Businesses are increasingly called on to incorporate considerations of environmental and social sustainability into strategic operations, along with the economic aspects of their operations. They are asked by customers, employees and other stakeholders to move firm practices from a focus on profitability, short-term compliance and eco-efficiency to consider the long-term social and environmental impacts of operations. They respond to demands that products and services have minimal impacts on the environment and promote social equity, and showcase sustainability reports on their websites. Firms have been encouraged to develop ecoenterprise strategies (Stead and Stead, 2000), strategic management tools that enable firms to ‘stand for sustainability’ by incorporating a ‘sustainability-centered values network’. Understandably, the development of such a sustainability-centered network necessarily depends on organizational members coming together to share and apply knowledge of sustainability grounded in their individual professional training and identification. Early research (Wilensky, 1964; Hall, 1968) focused on standard organizational forms and processes, but presaged a professionalization process in which the outcome might be a network form. This chapter considers that process in detail. This study focuses on the process of creating a shared professional identity based on sustainability, which we term the professionalization of sustainability. It considers how firm members, working together across professional disciplines, join their knowledge and values to create a new professional identity centered on sustainability. It uses a single case-study of a multidisciplinary real estate firm to evaluate how, in the cross-disciplinary setting of brownfield redevelopment, the emergent views and underlying professional values of knowledge workers, such as planners, lawyers, financial analysts and engineers, may combine to affect sustainable redevelopment outcomes. The study considers how multidisciplinary teams of brownfield professionals develop common language, professional norms, values and identities in the context of sustainability. It asks what
3D printing of polymeric optical components by two-photon polymerization

Femtosecond laser direct writing achieves high precision into micro-metric in additive manufacturing of customized-geometric structures and was used to fabricate the high quality micro optical lenses in various photoresist, including SU-8, by two-photon polymerization. The fabricates axicons could approximately create the Bessel beam, which has smaller beam diameter and extended depth of focus, so that widely employed in imaging systems. The axicons and any geometric micro-lenses of certain applications were designed and optimized using ZEMAX before the lenses being fabricated by femtosecond laser direct writing, and they serve as core components of imaging systems, microscopy, and other research fields.
SentiFlow: An Information Diffusion Process Discovery Based on Topic and Sentiment from Online Social Networks

In this digital era, people can become more interconnected as information spreads easily and quickly through online social media. The rapid growth of the social network services (SNS) increases the need for better methodologies for comprehending the semantics among the SNS users. This need motivated the proposal of a novel framework for understanding information diffusion process and the semantics of user comments, called SentiFlow. In this paper, we present a probabilistic approach to discover an information diffusion process based on an extended hidden Markov model (HMM) by analyzing the users and comments from posts on social media. A probabilistic dissemination of information among user communities is reflected after discovering topics and sentiments from the user comments. Specifically, the proposed method makes the groups of users based on their interaction on social networks using Louvain modularity from SNS logs. User comments are then analyzed to find different sentiments toward a subject such as news in social networks. Moreover, the proposed method is based on the latent Dirichlet allocation for topic discovery and the naïve Bayes classifier for sentiment analysis. Finally, an example using Facebook data demonstrates the practical value of SentiFlow in real world applications.
The escalatory Red Queen

Host–parasite systems provide convincing examples of Red Queen co-evolutionary dynamics. Yet, a key process underscored in Van Valen's theory – that arms race dynamics can result in extinction – has never been documented. One reason for this may be that most sampling designs lack the breadth needed to illuminate the rapid pace of adaptation by pathogen populations. In this study, we used a 25-year temporal sampling to decipher the demographic history of a plant pathogen: the poplar rust fungus, Melampsora larici-populina. A major adaptive event occurred in 1994 with the breakdown of R7 resistance carried by several poplar cultivars widely planted in Western Europe since 1982. The corresponding virulence rapidly spread in M. larici-populina populations and nearly reached fixation in northern France, even on susceptible hosts. Using both temporal records of virulence profiles and temporal population genetic data, our analyses revealed that (i) R7 resistance breakdown resulted in the emergence of a unique and homogeneous genetic group, the so-called cultivated population, which predominated in northern France for about 20 years, (ii) selection for Vir7 individuals brought with it multiple other virulence types via hitchhiking, resulting in an overall increase in the population-wide number of virulence types and (iii) – above all – the emergence of the cultivated population superseded the initial population which predominated at the same place before R7 resistance breakdown. Our temporal analysis illustrates how antagonistic co-evolution can lead to population extinction and replacement, hence providing direct evidence for the escalation process which is at the core of Red Queen dynamics.
Identifying and minimizing the effects of malicious behavior in SERF

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms are used in a wide range of internet applications. However the chief objective of using CF algorithms across most of these applications is to discover items that might be of interest to its users. CF algorithms work by obtaining feedback from users on the items that they browse and utilize that feedback to suggest recommendations to other users with similar tastes. CF algorithms rely heavily on input provided by humans and thus it is vital to verify that this information is appropriate. In this paper, we analyze various mechanisms by which users can enter malicious data to a CF system called SERF (System for Electronic Recommendation Filtering). We explore how bad data can be propagated through the system and can be used to manipulate the quality of recommendations. We also explore some techniques to counter the effects of bad data on the system. We report the results of our experiment with two simulated systems a reputation system that utilizes a user’s agreement and disagreement history to predict the trust that can be attributed to a user and a word weighting scheme based on word co-occurrence.