Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On decision rules and information processing strategies for choices among multiattribute alternatives

— It is suggested that a decision in a complex situation can be described as a sequential process in which different decision rules and information processing strategies can be used at different points in time. Examples of possible decision rules are presented in an approximate order of complexity. Two ways for processing the information in a decision situation, viz., breadth-first or depth-first strategies, are discussed and suggestions are made about their relationship to particular decision rules. Finally, it is proposed that the order of application of particular rules in a decision process is guided by a tendency to minimize cognitive effort.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, F. R. S

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Professor of Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy and Natural Philosophy at Göttingen University, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1793. At his death, on 24 February 1799, he left numerous writings of scientific and general nature, as well as many letters and, most important of all, copious personal notes. It is for these that he is mainly remembered. They include reflections on practically all the topics which were of special concern in the Age of Enlightenment. Due to their diversity it is not easy to obtain a comprehensive overview of his ideas and opinions, especially as they are often contained or developed in articles on assorted matters. Many of his themes lost their topicality, though by no means their relevance to Lichtenberg’s prime concern, to understand the world and in particular the human mind, in order to achieve realistic improvements. He jotted down his notes from 1764 until he died, in what he called his ‘waste books’, a term he borrowed from English tradesmen (1). Many of his notes are pointed, witty and unusually candid. Thus they allow remarkable insights into the trends of the last decades of the eighteenth century. They also demonstrate the importance of the Royal Society in establishing Göttingen as the leading scientific university in Germany and spreading English philosophical, literary and cultural influence.
Worked example effects in individual and group work settings

This study compared the effects of worked example and problem‐solving approaches in individual or group work settings on learning to solve geometry problems. One hundred and one seventh graders from Indonesia were randomly allocated to four experimental groups using a 2 (problem‐solving vs. worked examples) × 2 (individual vs. group study) design. Performance measures on numeric and reasoning abilities using both similar and transfer tasks were collected. The results indicated a significant superiority of the worked example approach in both the individual and group work settings. Supporting data revealed that students could understand the material more easily using worked examples than when solving problems. The experiment provided evidence that the advantage of using worked examples over solving problems extends to a group work context.
Antitakeover provisions Evidence from the Nordic countries and performance –

We construct a dual framework for Nordic and U.S. corporate governance for explaining differences in the roles of antitakeover provisions. In the Nordic model shareholders adopt these provisions to protect their long run economic benefits. These benefits are gained on the one hand through controlling managers and on the other by assisting them in running business. In the U.S. model, managers set these provisions to protect themselves. We examine the influence of antitakeover provisions on valuation, stock return and operating performance using data from an extensive sample of publicly listed Nordic companies during the time period of 1999-2004 (similar to Gompers et al., 2003 in the U.S.). We collected data from nine most commonly used provisions. The results suggest that antitakeover provisions have a negative impact on valuation, no effect on stock return and a positive influence on operating performance. While analysing the influence of each the single most important provision dummy contributing to the negative valuation is dual-class stock but the discount decreases over the years. The positive influence of antitakeover provisions on operating performance supports our Nordic model, which also explains earlier results with European data by Bauer et al. (2004) and Beiner et al. (2006), but which contradicts with the U.S. results by Gompers et al. (2003) and Cremers et al. (2005). Our results indicate that companies with several takeover protection provisions are valued lower, especially in the case of those having two classes of shares than other companies. These results suggest that neither speculators nor competing management teams find such companies interesting investment targets, thus lowering the valuation level of these companies.
Mutagenesis and TILLING to Dissect Gene Function in Plants

Mutagenesis can be random or targeted and occur by nature or artificially by humans. However, the bulk of mutagenesis employed in plants are random and caused by physical agents such as x-ray and gamma-ray or chemicals such as ethyl-methane sulfonate (EMS). Researchers are interested in first identifying these mutations and/or polymorphisms in the genome followed by investigating their effects in the plant function as well as their application in crop improvement. The high-throughput technique called TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesion IN Genomes) has been already established and become popular for identifying candidate mutant individuals harboring mutations in the gene of interest. TILLING is a non-transgenic and reverse genetics method of identifying a single nucleotide changes. The procedure of TILLING comprises traditional mutagenesis using optimum type and concentration of mutagen, development of a non-chimeric population, DNA extraction and pooling, mutation detection as well as validation of results. In general, TILLING has proved to be robust in identifying useful mutant lines in diverse economically important crops of the world. The main goal of the current mini-review is to show the significance role played by mutagenesis and TILLING in the discovery of DNA lesions which are to be used in the improvement of crops for the trait of interest.
Tinnitus Patients Suffering from Anxiety and Depression: A Review.

OBJECTIVES To review literature on the link between depression and anxiety in patients suffering from tinnitus. METHOD A systematic review of published English-language literature was performed using PubMed, Ovid, and Cochrane databases. RESULTS Of the 56 eligible abstracts 15 were chosen to be included in the review. All articles showed an association of depression and anxiety in tinnitus patients. CONCLUSIONS Because of the strong association between tinnitus, depression, and anxiety- all tinnitus patients should be screened for psychiatric disorders. Treatment for these complex conditions should involve a multidisciplinary team with cognitive behavioral therapy and possible pharmacological therapy.
First molecular phylogenetic insights into the evolution of free-tailed bats in the subfamily Molossinae (Molossidae, Chiroptera)

Abstract Previous understanding of the relationships among genera of bats in the family Molossidae was based largely on phenetic analyses of morphological data. Relationships among the genera of this family have not been tested with molecular data and, thus, the objective of this study was to construct a phylogeny of representative members of free-tailed bats using DNA sequence data from 1 mitochondrial locus (Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide dehydrogenase subunit 1 [ND1]) and 3 nuclear loci (dentin matrix protein 1 exon 6 [DMP1], beta fibrinogen intron 7 [&bgr;FIB], and recombination activating gene 2 [RAG2]) for members of the subfamily Molossinae and outgroups from the families Vespertilionidae and Natalidae. Data for each gene were analyzed separately using maximum-likelihood and Bayesian methods and also analyzed in a single combined analysis of a total of 3,216 base pairs. Divergence times were estimated from the combined data set using BEAST analysis. Few intergeneric relationships were significantly supported by mitochondrial data; however, monophyly of most genera was supported. Nuclear results supported a Chaerephon–Mops clade; a New World clade consisting of Eumops, Molossus, Promops, Molossops (including Neoplatymops), Cynomops, and Nyctinomops; and a basal divergence for Cheiromeles. Divergence analysis suggested a Paleocene origin for the family and a split between molossids in the Old World and New World around 29 million years ago. Generally, relationships recovered in our analyses reflected biogeographic proximity of species and did not support the hypotheses of relationship proposed by morphological data.
Argatroban anticoagulation in patients with heparin-induced thrombocytopenia.

BACKGROUND Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT) is an intensely prothrombotic syndrome managed by discontinuation of heparin therapy and substitution of an alternative inhibitor of thrombin. We describe our experience with argatroban, a direct thrombin inhibitor, in patients with HIT or HIT with thrombosis (HITTS). METHODS In this multicenter, nonrandomized prospective study, 418 patients with HIT were administered intravenous argatroban, 2 micro g/kg per minute, adjusted to maintain the activated partial thromboplastin time at 1.5 to 3 times the baseline value for a mean of 5 to 7 days. Comparisons were made with a historical control cohort (n = 185). The prospectively defined, primary efficacy end point was a composite of all-cause death, all-cause amputation, or new thrombosis in 37 days. Other end points included the components of the composite, death due to thrombosis, increased platelet count, and bleeding. RESULTS In the HIT arm, the composite end point was significantly reduced in argatroban-treated patients vs controls (28.0% vs 38.8%; P =.04). In the HITTS arm, the composite end point occurred in 41.5% of argatroban-treated patients vs 56.5% of controls (P =.07). By time-to-event analysis of the composite end point, argatroban therapy was significantly better than historical control therapy in HIT (P =.02) and HITTS (P =.008). Argatroban therapy also significantly reduced new thrombosis in HIT and HITTS and death due to thrombosis in HITTS. There were no significant between-group differences in all-cause death or amputation. Platelet counts recovered more rapidly in argatroban-treated patients than in controls. Bleeding rates were similar between groups. CONCLUSION Argatroban therapy, compared with historical control, improves outcomes, particularly new thrombosis and death due to thrombosis, in patients with heparin-induced thrombocytopenia.
The Action Turn: toward a transformational social science

We offer an epistemological basis for action research, in order to increase the validity, the practical significance, and the transformational potential of social science. We start by outlining some of the paradigmatic issues which underlie action research, arguing for a “turn to action” which will complement the linguistic turn in the social sciences. Four key dimensions of an action science are discussed: the primacy of the practical, the centrality of participation, the requirement for experiential grounding, and the importance of normative, analogical theory. Three broad strategies for action research are suggested: first-person research/practice addresses the ability of a person to foster an inquiring approach to his or her own life; second-person research/practice engages a face-to-face group in collaborative inquiry; third-person research/practice asks how we can establish inquiring communities which reach beyond the immediate group to engage with whole organizations, communities and countries. The article argues that a transformational science needs to integrate first- second- and third-person voices in ways that increase the validity of the knowledge we use in our moment-to-moment living, that increase the effectiveness of our actions in real-time, and that remain open to unexpected transformation when our taken-for-granted assumptions, strategies, and habits are appropriately challenged. Illustrative references to studies that begin to speak to these questions are offered.
Stylised procedural animation

This thesis develops a stylised procedural paradigm for computer graphics animation. Cartoon effects animations - stylised representations of natural phenomena - have presented a long-standing, difficult challenge to computer animators. We propose a framework for achieving the intricacy of effects motion with minimal animator intervention.Our approach is to construct cartoon effects by simulating the hand-drawing process through synthetic, computational means. We create a system which emulates the stylish appearance, movements of cartoon effects in both 2D and 3D environments. Our computational models achieve this by capturing the essential characteristics common to all cartoon effects: structure modelling, dynamic controlling and stylised rendering.To validate our framework, we have implemented a cartoon effects system for a range of effects including water effects, fire, smoke, rain and snow. Each effect model has its own static structure such as how the different parts are related temporarily. The flexibility of our approach is suggested most evidently by the high-level controls on shape, colour, timing and rendering on the effects. Like their hand-drawn counterparts, they move consistently while retaining the hand-crafted look.Since the movements of cartoon effects are animated procedurally, their detailed motions need not be keyframed. This thesis therefore demonstrates a powerful approach to computer animation in which the animator plays the role of a high level controller, rather than the more conventional hand-drawing slave. Our work not only achieves cartoon effects animation of un-precedented complexity, but it also provides an interesting experimental domain for related research disciplines toward more creative and expressive image synthesis in animation.
BIOMASS ESTIMATION USING VERTICAL FOREST STRUCTURE FROM SAR TOMOGRAGHY: A CASE STUDY IN CANADIAN BOREAL FOREST.

A major goal of current research is to address temporal climatic variations that are related to CO2 emissions. A significant portion of these emissions are due to forest destruction and the resulting conversion of biomass to CO2. As 30% of the earth's landmass is forest-covered, it is important to understand the biomass content with better estimates than are currently available. This research has addressed the determination of forest biomass in a Northern Alberta forest site, using novel techniques known as POLInSAR (Polarimetry Interferometry SAR) to study the 3D vegetated structure of forests through using an L-Band single-pass airborne system. Results of this study indicate strong relation between vertical structure and above ground biomass. In this paper we show the preliminary results of the work including the resulting tomographic expression of the test forest area.
Pediatric rhabdomyosarcomas and nonrhabdomyosarcoma soft tissue sarcoma

Tumors arising from the soft tissues are uncommon in children, accounting for about 6% of all childhood malignancies. More than half (53%) of these originate from the striated muscles and are called rhabdomyosarcomas (RMS) the remaining are nonrhabdomyosarcoma soft tissue sarcomas (NRSTS). Almost two-thirds of RMS cases are diagnosed in children <6 years of age. They can arise at varied locations like the head and neck region, genitourinary tract, extremities, trunk and retroperitoneum. Pathologically RMS is now classified as superior, intermediate and poor outcome histologies. For stratification of treatment and also comparison of results the RMS are now staged both by the clinical grouping and the TNM staging systems. The ultimate outcome depends on the site, extent of disease and histology. Currently, approximately 70% of the patients survive for 5 years or more and are probably cured. This is credited to the use of multi-modal, risk-adapted therapy, refinements in tumor grouping and better supportive care which has emerged out of cooperative studies like Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study (IRS) and the International Society of Pediatric Oncology studies (SIOP). The treatment involves chemotherapy, radiotherapy and organ/function preserving surgery. The gold standard chemotherapy is still vincristine, actinomycin D and cyclophosphamide (VAC) regime with high doses of intensity bone marrow rescue with colony stimulating factors. The NRSTS are rare and of heterogenous histologies and so it has been difficult to arrive at a treatment strategy for these. What is definitely understood is that these are usually immature and poorly differentiated tumors that respond poorly to chemotherapy and so surgical resection forms the mainstay of treatment with adjuvant radiotherapy and chemotherapy to prevent local recurrences. In all likelihood, the molecular analysis of RMS will further refine current classification schemes and knowledge of genetic features of the tumors will significantly improve the ability of investigators to identify patients at lower or higher risk of treatment failures, thus paving the way for advances in risk-based therapy.
A proportional-delay DiffServ-enabled Web server: admission control and dynamic adaptation

We consider a Web server that can provide differentiated services to clients with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. The Web server can provide N/spl ges/1 classes of proportional-delay differentiated services (PDDS) to heterogeneous clients. An operator can specify fixed performance spacings between classes, namely, r/sub i,i+1/>1, for i=1,. , N-1. Requests in class i+1 are guaranteed to have an average waiting time which is 1/r/sub i,i+1/ of the average waiting time of class i requests. With PDDS, we can provide consistent performance spacings over a wide range of system loading and this simplifies many pricing issues. In addition, each client can specify a maximum average waiting time requirement to be guaranteed by the PDDS-enabled Web server. We show that, in general, the problem of assigning clients to service classes in order to optimize system efficacy is NP-complete. We propose two efficient admission control algorithms so that a Web server can provide the QoS guarantees and, at the same time, classify each client to its "lowest" admissible class, resulting in lowest usage cost for the admitted client. We also consider how to perform end-point dynamic adaptation such that admitted clients can submit requests at a lower class and further reduce their usage costs without violating their QoS requirements. We propose two dynamic adaptation algorithms: one is server-based and the other is client-based. The client-based adaptation is distributed and is based on a noncooperative game technique. We carry out experiments to illustrate the effectiveness of these algorithms under different utility functions and traffic arrival patterns (e.g., Poisson, MMPP, and Pareto). We report extensive experimental results to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
Compensating for sub-pixel shift in motion estimation

In block-based sub-pixel motion estimation, most methods are based on a comparison of the target block to a number of sub-pixel shifted versions of a reference block. This means that the two blocks, reference and target, are not treated equally, as one is takes as-is, while the other suffers sub-pixel shifting, which invariably results in loss of information and degradation. In this paper we propose a method for sub-pixel motion estimation that treat reference and target block identically, and calculates sub-pixel motion via a third block, constructed on the spot, from which the reference and target blocks may be approximated by appropriate sub-pixel shifts. Tests on a number of test sequences show that the proposed method performs much better than standard sub-pixel motion estimation.
Development of an Umami Taste Sensitivity Test and Its Clinical Use

There is a close relationship between perception of umami, which has become recognized as the fifth taste, and the human physical condition. We have developed a clinical test for umami taste sensitivity using a filter paper disc with a range of six monosodium glutamate (MSG) concentrations. We recruited 28 patients with taste disorders (45–78 years) and 184 controls with no taste disorders (102 young [18–25 years] and 82 older [65–89 years] participants). Filter paper discs (5 mm dia.) were soaked in aqueous MSG solutions (1, 5, 10, 50, 100 and 200 mM), then placed on three oral sites innervated by different taste nerves. The lowest concentration participants correctly identified was defined as the recognition threshold (RT) for MSG. This test showed good reproducibility for inter- and intra-observer variability. We concluded that: (1) The RT of healthy controls differed at measurement sites innervated by different taste nerves; that is, the RT of the anterior tongue was higher than that of either the posterior tongue or the soft palate in both young and older individuals. (2) No significant difference in RT was found between young adults and older individuals at any measurement site. (3) The RT of patients with taste disorders was higher before treatment than that of the healthy controls at any measurement site. (4) The RT after treatment in these patients improved to the same level as that of the healthy controls. (5) The cutoff values of RT, showing the highest diagnostic accuracy (true positives + true negatives), were 200 mM MSG for AT and 50 mM MSG for PT and SP. The diagnostic accuracy at these cutoff values was 0.92, 0.87 and 0.86 for AT, PT and SP, respectively. Consequently, this umami taste sensitivity test is useful for discriminating between normal and abnormal umami taste sensations.
Combined In Vivo Depletion of Glycoprotein VI and C-Type Lectin-Like Receptor 2 Severely Compromises Hemostasis and Abrogates Arterial Thrombosis in Mice

Objective—Platelet inhibition is a major strategy to prevent acute ischemic cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events, which may, however, be associated with an increased bleeding risk. The (hem)immunoreceptor tyrosine activation motif–bearing platelet receptors, glycoprotein VI (GPVI) and C-type lectin-like receptor 2 (CLEC-2), might be promising antithrombotic targets because they can be depleted from circulating platelets by antibody treatment, leading to sustained antithrombotic protection, but only moderately increased bleeding times in mice. Approach and Results—We investigated whether both (hem)immunoreceptor tyrosine activation motif–bearing receptors can be targeted simultaneously and what the in vivo consequences of such a combined therapeutic GPVI/CLEC-2 deficiency are. We demonstrate that isolated targeting of either GPVI or CLEC-2 in vivo does not affect expression or function of the respective other receptor. Moreover, simultaneous treatment with both antibodies resulted in the sustained loss of both GPVI and CLEC-2, while leaving other activation pathways intact. However, GPVI/CLEC-2–depleted mice displayed a dramatic hemostatic defect and profound impairment of arterial thrombus formation. Furthermore, a strongly diminished hemostatic response could also be reproduced in mice genetically lacking GPVI and CLEC-2. Conclusions—These results demonstrate that GPVI and CLEC-2 can be simultaneously downregulated in platelets in vivo and reveal an unexpected functional redundancy of the 2 receptors in hemostasis and thrombosis. These findings may have important implications of the potential use of anti-GPVI and anti–CLEC-2–based agents in the prevention of thrombotic diseases.