Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experiences of Drug Dependent Fathers in Relation with Their Children: A Qualitative Study

Background The effects of substance abusing on children of all ages has been considered. The major problem of these children is the inability of their parents to implement their parental tasks and duties. In Iran, addressing the issue of substance abuse has a history of several decades. Identifying the experiences of these individuals about relating to their children is important in effective therapeutic planning to help drug dependent people continue their treatment. Methods This qualitative study was conducted using phenomenological approach. Subjects were selected from among the referrals to the substance abuse treatment centers in Kerman. This study lasted for 11 months from October 2008 to August 2009 and tried to use purposive sampling to select the subjects with as much diversity as possible from the drug-dependent males who had at least one child. All those who had history of addiction less than two years were excluded. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the findings. Findings Participants were 35 opiate-dependent males. The mean age of subjects was 43.18 ± 8.25. Five themes were extracted from analyzing the interviews including emotional relations, economical problems, experiences of communicating with children, the effects of substance abuse on children, and the role of children on the quitting process. Conclusion To promote the quality of services offered to drug-dependents who have decided to quit, family therapy and psychotherapy are recommended to help addicted individuals reduce the problems they have with their children.
Enhanced Coupling of Neonatal Muscarinic Receptors in Rat Brain to Phosphoinositide Turnover

Abstract: The relationship between the density of the muscarinic receptor in developing rat cerebral cortex and its coupling to phosphoinositide turnover is examined. Tissue slices from rats of various ages were incubated with myo‐[2‐3H]inositol, and the effect of carbamoylcholine on the release of total inositol phosphates was determined. Binding of [3H]quinuclidinyl benzilate was determined in the same tissue. Although muscarinic receptor density in day‐18 embryonic cortex was only 5% of that in the adult, the maximal response of stimulated phosphoinositide turnover to carbamoylcholine (1–10 mM) was at the adult level (i.e., threefold increase). Comparison of the dependence of the turnover on carbamoylcholine concentration revealed that in neonates, the dose‐response curve was shifted to the left, giving a half‐maximal effect at concentrations approximately tenfold lower than that in the adult. In addition, the partial muscarinic agonists oxotremorine‐2 and bethanechol were both more efficacious in young rats than in adults. The differences could not be accounted for either by alterations in agonist affinity for the receptor or by the presence of “spare” muscarinic receptors. These results indicate that muscarinic receptors in fetal and newborn rat cerebral cortex are more efficiently coupled to stimulation of phosphoinositide turnover than in the adult.
Study on natural head motion in waiting state with receptionist robot SAYA that has human-like appearance

Android robots that have a human-like appearance have been developed recently. The purpose of android robots is to realize realistic communication between human and robot by implementation of human-like behaviors. Then knowledge and techniques for generating human-like natural motions and behaviors with android robot are required. In human, head and body are moved consciously or unconsciously even while waiting. Therefore it is thought that moving SAYA's head and body in waiting state like human beings improves humanity of SAYA. Thus, in this study, we tried to realize human-like head motion in waiting state with SAYA. Firstly, we measured human head motion and time-dependent three head rotation angles were obtained in waiting state by using motion capture system. We then analyzed human head motions and we proposed random walk model based on characteristics of human head motions for SAYAs motions. Then we implemented natural head motions to SAYA. Finally, we verified that head motions in waiting state affected the humanity of SAYA, and it greatly enhanced emotional impression of human by subjective experiment
Adaptive power management with fine-grained delay constraints

Power consumption of computing systems has become an important issue in industrial design areas. Dynamic power management (DPM) is an effective way to low the system power. This paper presents a new expert-based heuristic algorithm with fine-grained delay constraints (FDC-DPM), which selects the best policy from a set of well-known policies dynamically. Three rules are presented for FDC-DPM to make a choice. FDC-DPM gives a flexible way to make a good tradeoff between energy consumption and fine-grained delay constraint. Compared with the machine learning method in [2], FDC-DPM is simpler and it can achieve comparable energy savings with the same delay constraints under different workloads.
THE PRIVATIZATION OF RAILWAYS IN BRITAIN.

The privatization of British Rail (BR) will be completed by early 1997. This very complicated and controversial measure has been put into effect since the Prime Minister, John Major, won the General Election in 1992. The proposals for the industry were contained in a White Paper “New Opportunities for the Railways” published in July 1992. A Railway Bill was put before Parliament in the same year and became law as the Railways Act in November 1993. The task of privatizing the railways has been very hurried. Government has relied for assistance and advice on very large numbers of consultants who have worked under great pressure. Many of these advisers were involved in the privatization of the rest of Britain’s nationalized industries and drew on that experience. The speed of the privatization of the railways has not allowed an opportunity for buyers to take a considered view of the businesses that they have purchased or for the experience of one stage of the process to come into effect before the next stages have begun. BR was formed in 1948 when the four private railway companies, which had been under a form of public control during WWII, were nationalized. BR was vertically integrated meaning that it owned and maintained its own track and trains as well as being responsible for operations. At that time, BR also built trains, owned hotels and ships and ran a large fleet of lorries to deliver freight. In the late 1960s, a Labour government divested the lorry fleet from BR along with the responsibility for small freight consignments and vested this in another nationalized industry, the National Freight Corporation. Since the Conservative Party came to power in 1979, various ancillary parts of BR have been sold to the private sector, for example, hotels in 1982 and ships and harbours in 1984. However, the railway itself remained as a self-contained operation. Now BR has been split into almost 100 different companies. Instead of one organization operating with one Board of Directors and a single chain of command, there is now a contractual structure where relationships are determined by legal agreements. Each of the new companies depends on many others in order to provide service to the customer. The structure of the new railway is well illustrated in a diagram produced when Railtrack, the company owning the infrastructure, was floated on the Stock Exchange (Fig. 1)
A Predefined Bit-Plane Comparison Coding for Mobile Video Applications

For mobile video applications, the required storage and bandwidth of frame memory play crucial roles. Reducing the accesses and the size of frame memory can decrease area and cost, as well as power consumption. Current video-coding standards can reach high compression efficiency but demand large volumes of computations and storage requirements. Hence, it is hard for these coding standards to be embedded into an H.264 decoder. In this brief, a novel embedded lossy compression scheme is proposed. With a compression ratio at 2, it compresses a 4 × 2 size block into 32 bit with peak-signal-to-noise-ratio loss of 1.27 ~ 3.94 dB compared with H.264. A pipelined architecture is also proposed to realize both the compressor and the decompressor in 2 cycles and 1 cycle, respectively. This cost-effective solution requires a gate count of 4.9 k and power consumption of 244 μW in a 90-nm standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor process, making it very suitable for mobile video applications.
Blended, not stirred: Multi-concern visualization of large software systems

While constructing and evolving software systems, developers generate directly and indirectly a large amount of data of diverse nature, such as source code changes, bug tracking information, IDE interactions, stack traces, etc. Often these diverse data sources are processed and visualized in isolation, leading to a partial view of systems. We present a blended approach to visualize several data “ingredients” at once, to give as complete an answer as possible to the question “What happened to the system in the last few days? ”. The goal is to enable a quick and comprehensive assessment of what happened to a software system in any given time frame.
Supervised descent method based on appearance and shape for face alignment

Regression approaches have been recently shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance for face alignment. As a general optimization problem, face alignment is approximately solved by learning a series of mapping functions from local appearance to the coordinates increment of the pixels to detect. There have been extensive studies and continuous improvements have been made in recent years. However, most of the existing methods only rely on the current facial texture in every iteration. It is unreliable to only rely on local appearance information when facial landmarks are partially occluded in unconstrained scenarios. In this paper, a modified supervised descent method is proposed to settle the issue, utilizing both appearance and shape information in learning regression functions. Hence, we call it asSDM. The major contribution of our proposed method is to jointly capture shape and local appearance in cascade regression framework. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on different data sets and the experimental results on benchmark databases demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous work for facial landmark detection.
Labor Market Information and Wage Differentials by Race and Sex

This paper attempts to test whether information problems in labor markets can explain why minority or female workers are sometimes paid less than equally-qualified white male workers. In particular, the relationship between starting wages, current performance, and race and sex is studied. OLS regressions of starting wages on current performance--which is measured some time after the beginning of employment--indicate that minority workers are paid lower starting wages than white workers with the same eventual performance, among both men and women. This may reflect taste discrimination. However, if employers base starting wages on expected productivity or performance, and average performance is lower for minority workers (as it is in these data), then these estimated differentials could reflect simple statistical discrimination. A test of statistical versus taste discrimination and a test of statistical discrimination versus pure measurement error provide some evidence for both men and women that statistical discrimination is partly to blame for these differences in starting wages between minority and white workers, although the evidence is not very strong statistically. Average performance of women is if anything higher than that of men, so simple statistical discrimination cannot explain the lower starting wages that women receive. However, more complex models of statistical discrimination suggest that worse labor market information about a particular group can generate lower wages for that group. A test of the quality of labor market information suggests that employers have better information about male workers, which may explain the lower starting wages paid to women. Together, this evidence suggests that better labor market information might boost starting wages of minorities and women.
The Economics of Smoking

While the tobacco industry is among the most substantial and successful economic enterprises, tobacco consumption kills more people than any other product. Economic analysis of tobacco product markets, particularly for cigarettes, has contributed considerable insight to debates about the industry's importance and appropriate public policy roles in grappling with health consequences of tobacco. The most significant example is the rapidly expanding and increasingly sophisticated body of research on the effects of price increases on cigarette consumption. Because excise tax is a component of price, the resultant literature has been prominent in legislative debates about taxation as a tool to discourage smoking, and has contributed theory and empirical evidence to the growing interest in modeling demand for addictive products. This chapter examines the research and several equity and efficiency concerns accompanying cigarette taxation debates. It includes economic analysis of other tobacco control policies, such as advertising restrictions, prominent in tobacco control debates. Research addressing the validity of tobacco-industry arguments that its contributions to employment, tax revenues, and trade balances are vital to economic health in states and nations is also considered, as it is the industry's principal weapon in the battle against policy measures to reduce tobacco consumption.
Reciprocal Effects on Neurocognitive and Metabolic Phenotypes in Mouse Models of 16p11.2 Deletion and Duplication Syndromes

The 16p11.2 600 kb BP4-BP5 deletion and duplication syndromes have been associated with developmental delay; autism spectrum disorders; and reciprocal effects on the body mass index, head circumference and brain volumes. Here, we explored these relationships using novel engineered mouse models carrying a deletion (Del/+) or a duplication (Dup/+) of the Sult1a1-Spn region homologous to the human 16p11.2 BP4-BP5 locus. On a C57BL/6N inbred genetic background, Del/+ mice exhibited reduced weight and impaired adipogenesis, hyperactivity, repetitive behaviors, and recognition memory deficits. In contrast, Dup/+ mice showed largely opposite phenotypes. On a F1 C57BL/6N × C3B hybrid genetic background, we also observed alterations in social interaction in the Del/+ and the Dup/+ animals, with other robust phenotypes affecting recognition memory and weight. To explore the dosage effect of the 16p11.2 genes on metabolism, Del/+ and Dup/+ models were challenged with high fat and high sugar diet, which revealed opposite energy imbalance. Transcriptomic analysis revealed that the majority of the genes located in the Sult1a1-Spn region were sensitive to dosage with a major effect on several pathways associated with neurocognitive and metabolic phenotypes. Whereas the behavioral consequence of the 16p11 region genetic dosage was similar in mice and humans with activity and memory alterations, the metabolic defects were opposite: adult Del/+ mice are lean in comparison to the human obese phenotype and the Dup/+ mice are overweight in comparison to the human underweight phenotype. Together, these data indicate that the dosage imbalance at the 16p11.2 locus perturbs the expression of modifiers outside the CNV that can modulate the penetrance, expressivity and direction of effects in both humans and mice.
Bats and Academics: How Do Scientists Perceive Their Object of Study?

Bats are associated with conflicting perceptions among humans, ranging from affection to disgust. If these attitudes can be associated with various factors among the general public (e.g. social norms, lack of knowledge), it is also important to understand the attitude of scientists who study bats. Such reflexive information on the researchers community itself could indeed help designing adequate mixed communication tools aimed at protecting bats and their ecosystems, as well as humans living in their vicinity that could be exposed to their pathogens. Thus, we conducted an online survey targeting researchers who spend a part of their research activity studying bats. Our aim was to determine (1) how they perceive their object of study, (2) how they perceive the representation of bats in the media and by the general population, (3) how they protect themselves against pathogen infections during their research practices, and (4) their perceptions of the causes underlying the decline in bat populations worldwide. From the 587 completed responses (response rate of 28%) having a worldwide distribution, the heterogeneity of the scientists’ perception of their own object of study was highlighted. In the majority of cases, this depended on the type of research they conducted (i.e. laboratory versus field studies) as well as their research speciality. Our study revealed a high level of personal protection equipment being utilised against pathogens during scientific practices, although the role bats play as reservoirs for a number of emerging pathogens remains poorly known. Our results also disclosed the unanimity among specialists in attributing a direct role for humans in the global decline of bat populations, mainly via environmental change, deforestation, and agriculture intensification. Overall, the present study suggests the need for better communication regarding bats and their biology, their role within the scientific community, as well as in the general public population. As a consequence, increased knowledge regarding scientists’ perceptions of bats should improve the role scientists play in influencing the perception of bats by the general public.
Productivity Spillovers, Terms of Trade, and the 'Home Market Effect'

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of international spillovers related to productivity gains, changes in market size, or government spending. We introduce trade costs and endogenous varieties in a two-country general-equilibrium model with monopolistic competition, drawing a distinction between productivity gains that enhance manufacturing efficiency, and gains that lower the cost of firms' entry and product differentiation. Our model suggests that countries with lower manufacturing costs have higher GDP but supply a smaller number of goods at a lower international price. Countries with lower entry and differentiation costs also have higher GDP, but supply a larger array of goods at improved terms of trade. The sign of the international welfare spillovers depends on terms of trade, but also on consumers' taste for variety. Higher domestic demand has macroeconomic implications that are similar to those of a reduction in firms' entry costs.
The Irreconcilable Inconsistencies of Neoclassical Macroeconomics: A False Paradigm

Introduction Part 1: Methodology of the Neoclassical Macro Model 1. The Demand Side of the Neoclassical Model 2. The Neoclassical Model with a Supply Side 3. Comparative Statics and Equilibrium 4. Money in the Neoclassical Model Part 2: Paradigm Lost: The Basic Neoclassical Model 5. The Classical False Dichotomy Model 6. Logically Consistent Money-Neutral Models 7. The "Complete" Model with a Wealth Effect Part 3: A Critique of Self-Adjusting Full Employment 8. Neutrality and Full Employment 9. Expectations and Full Employment 10. Full Employment and Multi-Commodity Production 11. Full Employment and Disequilibrium Part 4: The "Open" Economy: Presentation and Critique 12. Introduction to "Open Economies" 13. The Neoclassical Open Economy 14. Reassessing Monetary and Fiscal Policy Part 5: Paradigm Regained: Reclaiming Policy 15. Neoclassical Inflation: The Keystone of Reactionary Macro Policy 16. Decommissioning Policy Tools 17. The Critique Summarized
Key Concepts in Governance

I. What is Governance? II. The Concepts Accountability Bureaucracy Capacity Center-local relations Collaborative governance Collective action problem Communitarianism Co-ordination Corporatism Decentralization Dialogic policy-making Differentiated polity Enabling state Environmental governance Evidence-based policy Global governance Globalization Good governance Governance Indicators Hierarchy Implementation Incrementalism Institutionalism Interdependence Local governance Managing networks Market Marketization Metagovernance Multi-level governance Network New public management Participatory democracy Pluralism Policy cycle Policy network Public-private partnerships Rational choice theory Regionalism Regulation Regulation theory Representative democracy Rule of law Social capital Social constructivism Social inclusion Sovereignty State Systems theory Transnationalism
Anti-synchronization of Wang-Chen chaotic systems via sliding mode control

Chaos synchronization is a phenomenon that occurs when a chaotic system drives another chaotic system. If a certain chaotic system is called the master system and another chaotic system is called the slave system, then anti-synchronization is said to occur when the state vectors of the master and slave systems have the same amplitude but opposite signs. This paper derives an important result for the anti-synchronization of identical chaotic systems using sliding mode control. This main result has been established using Lyapunov stability theory. In robust control systems, the sliding mode control (SMC) is often preferred in view of its inherent advantages such as easy realization, fast response, good transient performance and also insensitivity to parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. As an application of this general result, this paper solves the anti-synchronization problem for identical Wang-Chen chaotic systems (2012) via sliding mode control. Numerical simulations using MATLAB have been presented in detail to validate the sliding controller design for achieving anti-synchronization of identical Wang-Chen chaotic systems.
Commitment and Responsibility: Modeling and Teaching Professionalism Pervasively

In this paper, the author focuses on what she does in her first year, year-long Civil Procedure class to set students on their paths to becoming “Good Lawyers. ” Although the author has been teaching law for two decades, it is only in the last few years that she has consciously integrated the modeling and teaching of the skills and values of professionalism into her classes. The author explores what law teachers can do to enable their students to develop their own visions of professionalism — visions hopefully compatible with the highest aspirations of the legal profession.
Heuristic Approaches to Minimize Tour Duration for the TSP with Multiple Time Windows

We present heuristics to handle practical travelling salesman problems with multiple time windows per node, where the optimization goal is minimal tour duration, which is the time spent outside the depot node. We propose a dynamic programming approach which combines state labels by encoding intervals to handle the larger state space needed for this objective function. Our implementation is able to solve many practical instances in real-time and is used for heuristic search of near-optimal solutions for hard instances. In addition, we outline a hybrid genetic algorithm we implemented to cope with hard or unknown instances. Experimental evaluation proves the efficiency and suitability for practical use of our algorithms and even leads to improved upper bounds for yet unsolved instances from the literature.