Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Epistemic and Ontic Theories of Explanation and Confirmation

This paper reviews some recent work on issues connecting the theories of scientific explanation and confirmation. Beginning with Harman and Hempel and continuing with Salmon, Miller, Pennock and Ruben, I consider different explications of the explanatory relation that could be used in an Inference to the Best Explanation (I.B.E.) confirmation theory. Causal theories of explanation are currently the most promising and I discuss the strengths of an I.B. E. theory based upon an objective "ontic" view of explanation like Salmon's over an "epistemic" causal view such as Miller's. Finally I show how a causal theorist can address two purported weaknesses of the causal approaches that arise from Humean and Sellarsian arguments.
Graph- and surface-level sentence chunking

The computing cost of many NLP tasks increases faster than linearly with the length of the representation of a sentence. For parsing the representation is tokens, while for operations on syntax and semantics it will be more complex. In this paper we propose a new task of sentence chunking: splitting sentence representations into coherent substructures. Its aim is to make further processing of long sentences more tractable. We investigate this idea experimentally using the Dependency Minimal Recursion Semantics (DMRS) representation.
A transaction-based Framework for Business Models in Electronic Commerce

Although considerable research has been conducted into the definition and classification of business models (BM) over the past decade, not much research has focused on the characteristics of transactions with distinct phases in these BMs. Both transaction cost economics and consumer behavior research highlight the relevance of transaction phases. We develop a seven factor framework that differentiates between the information phase, the agreement phase, and the fulfillment phase. The factors are derived from the analysis of ecommerce transactions and include the transaction partners, the information and trust they need, the type of flows between the partners, the revenue generation, and the cost for premature termination of the transaction. We apply the framework to a theoretically driven BM classification and illustrate the framework with two cases of the Australian tourism industry. Our analysis reveals that transaction phases determine how mature a BM is and therefore how advanced the transfer of business transaction from traditional to online environment is. According to our results, the number of transaction phases supported online is an indicator for customer satisfaction and the success of the BM.
Children’s risk‐taking behaviour: implications for early childhood policy and practice

The safety of children as they learn and develop is of prime concern for parents, teachers and legislators alike. Legislation governing the provision of early childhood services provides guidelines and procedures for reducing the likelihood of children being exposed to injuries and unsafe environments. Such strategies, however, only take account of aspects of the physical environment that can be manipulated to ensure the safety of children and do not consider those aspects of the individual child’s behaviour that may contribute to unintentional injury. One such factor is children’s risk‐taking behaviour. The paper presents a critical review of current risk‐taking literature. Components of risk taking, including sensation seeking and optimism bias, and contributory factors such as gender, temperament, and parent socialization practices are examined in light of the current legislative and accountability documents relating to the provision of early childhood services in the Australian state of New South Wales. The aim is to explore the role that these factors play in reducing children’s exposure to risk and to identify directions for future research.
A meta model for representing arbitrary meta model hierarchies

"The only constant is change" is an often contemplated sentence in literature which refers to the re-occurring need for adaption of existing information systems -- especially of that category which handles models. Here, applying a change often means to re-generate and deploy a complete chain of tools ranging from repositories over modeling environments to frameworks that use models to produce some output (e.g. code generators). Using an orthogonal classification as Atkinson and Kühne [3] suggested could resolve this issue. Therefore, we developed a meta model that can be used for representing arbitrary meta model hierarchies and can thus be used as a Linguistic Meta Model within the orthogonal classification. One of its features is its support for advanced meta modeling paradigms such as (Extended) Powertypes, Clabjects and Deep Instantiation.
The Relationship of Race, Class, and Gender with Mathematics Achievement for Fifth-, Eighth-, and Eleventh-Grade Students in Pennsylvania Schools.

Abstract This integrative study of student socioeconomic status (SES), race, and gender focused on mathematics achievement derived from the Pennsylvania Educational Quality Assessment Program for the years 1981 through 1984. Analyses were conducted at the 5th, 8th and 11th grade levels. Replicable achievement differences in mathematics were observed across grade levels for student SES and race, but not for gender. White students were found to score higher than black students and achievement varied directly with student SES level. The only replicable interaction to emerge was a relatively weak but persistent SES by race effect that occurred for all analyses involving students attending low SES schools. This was a function of the fact that, although achievement increased across student SES level for both white and black students the increment tended to be slightly larger for white students. Supplementary analyses of mathematics achievement incorporating school SES, student SES, and race were also performed.
Gene expression in the mouse eye: an online resource for genetics using 103 strains of mice

Purpose Individual differences in patterns of gene expression account for much of the diversity of ocular phenotypes and variation in disease risk. We examined the causes of expression differences, and in their linkage to sequence variants, functional differences, and ocular pathophysiology. Methods mRNAs from young adult eyes were hybridized to oligomer microarrays (Affymetrix M430v2). Data were embedded in GeneNetwork with millions of single nucleotide polymorphisms, custom array annotation, and information on complementary cellular, functional, and behavioral traits. The data include male and female samples from 28 common strains, 68 BXD recombinant inbred lines, as well as several mutants and knockouts. Results We provide a fully integrated resource to map, graph, analyze, and test causes and correlations of differences in gene expression in the eye. Covariance in mRNA expression can be used to infer gene function, extract signatures for different cells or tissues, to define molecular networks, and to map quantitative trait loci that produce expression differences. These data can also be used to connect disease phenotypes with sequence variants. We demonstrate that variation in rhodopsin expression efficiently predicts candidate genes for eight uncloned retinal diseases, including WDR17 for the human RP29 locus. Conclusions The high level of strain variation in gene expression is a powerful tool that can be used to explore and test molecular networks underlying variation in structure, function, and disease susceptibility. The integration of these data into GeneNetwork provides users with a workbench to test linkages between sequence differences and eye structure and function.
L'Initiative riz au Mali : une réponse politique à l'insécurité alimentaire ?

Cet article revient sur un programme d’appui a la culture du riz, l’Initiative riz, lance au Mali en 2008, dans le contexte d’une crise alimentaire liee au rencherissement du cout des cereales. Ce programme temoigne de la place particuliere accordee au riz dans les orientations des politiques agricoles, tant de la part de l’Etat malien que des bailleurs de fonds. Il reflete egalement la dimension sociopolitique du riz, dans la mesure ou cette denree alimentaire est peu consommee par ceux qui souffrent de la faim, du fait de son cout prohibitif. A la fin de la campagne agricole 2008-2009, cette question du prix du riz s’est trouvee au cœur d’une polemique sur les responsabilites respectives de l’Etat, des commercants et des producteurs. Pour mieux la comprendre, nous proposons un retour sur l’histoire de leurs rapports et sur celle de la riziculture au Mali.
Persistence of Arcobacter butzleri CCUG 30484 on plastic, stainless steel and glass surfaces

The persistence of A. butzleri CCUG 30484 on various surfaces under 32% and 64% relative humidity suspended in physiological saline or nutrient broth to simulate relatively clean or soiled conditions was studied using various isolation techniques. Our study revealed that A. butzleri CCUG 30484 cells were able to survive for a considerable period of time, even after the droplet of suspending medium has been visibly dried. An extended survival on polypropylene coupons at both humidity levels was observed, particularly at soiled conditions.
Schoolwide Collaboration to Prevent and Address Reading Difficulties: Opportunities for School Psychologists and Speech-Language Pathologists

With the increase in schoolwide practices to improve reading instruction for all students and provide supplemental interventions for struggling readers, the need for collaboration among education professionals has become increasingly important. This article focuses on the expanding opportunities for collaboration between school psychologists and speech-language pathologists in schoolwide models such as Response to Intervention. Examples of collaboration and an approach for expanding collaborative efforts are offered for school psychologist and speech-language pathologist practitioners working in schools using schoolwide models of reading instruction.
UHF Propagation in Caves and Subterranean Galleries

An experimental study is described on the natural propagation of UHF band radio waves in straight subterranean galleries. An extensive measurement project took place in five underground localities and, based on the experimental data, an empirical model of radio wave transmission was derived. The model was calibrated according to the measurement data and compared with the theoretical waveguide approach to propagation prediction. The presented results can be used for the practical planning of wireless communications in speleology applications and as an experimental basis for further theoretical works
The Camberwell Collaborative Depression Study III. Depression and Adversity in the Relatives of Depressed Probands

The relationship between life events and depressive disorder was assessed in 83 families ascertained through depressed probands. Contrary to expectation and to previous suggestions, we found no inverse relationship between the presence of familial loading and reactivity to stress. Thus the relatives of probands whose onset of depression followed life events or chronic difficulties had slightly higher lifetime rates of depression than the relatives of probands whose onset was not associated with adversity. There was only a weak and non-significant relationship between recent life events and current disorder among relatives, and no apparent tendency for life-event-associated depression to ‘breed true’ within families. Comparison with a community sample showed that the first-degree relatives of depressives had significantly elevated rates both of current depression and of recent threatening life events. This finding still held when proband-associated life events were discounted, suggesting that both liability to depression and propensity to experience life events are familial.
On Optimal System Design for Feedback Control over Noisy Channels

We study a closed-loop multivariable control system with sensor feedback transmitted over a discrete noisy channel. For this problem, we propose a joint design of the state measurement quantization, protection against channel errors, and control. The proposed algorithm leads to a practically feasible design of time-varying non-uniform encoding and control. Numerical results demonstrate the performance obtained by employing the proposed iterative optimization algorithm.
Terror Management and Stereotyping: Why Do People Stereotype When Mortality Is Salient?

Three studies examine two routes by which mortality threats may lead to stereotyping. Mortality salience may activate both a comprehension goal and an enhancement goal. Enhancement goals are likely to be more active in situations where intergroup competition or conflict is salient. If this is not the case, then a comprehension goal will predominate. In line with a why-determines-how logic, when mortality salience activates a comprehension goal, both positive and negative stereotyping occur. In contrast, the activation of an enhancement goal only increases negative stereotyping.
[Therapy of infections caused by dematiaceous fungi].

Since dematiaceous fungi belong to the group of rare infectious agents causing mycoses, therapeutic recommendations are mainly deduced from observations of single cases. In cases of eumycetoma or focal phaeohyphomycoses of the central nervous system (e.g. caused by Cladophialophora bantiana or Exophiala dermatitidis) and in certain cases of chromoblastomycoses, the resection in toto is the therapy of choice, which may be accompanied by antimycotic medication. As antimycotic therapy ex juvantibus in case of phaeohy-phomycoses, a simultaneous application of itraconazole and 5-fluorocytosine is presently most promising. The success depends on an adequate duration of therapy.
Role of Occupational Stress on Job Satisfaction

This research was conducted to investigate the relationship between occupational stress and job satisfaction among teachers. The determinants of occupational stress that have been investigated under this study include role ambiguity, role overload, and work-family conflict. The sample consists of a teacher from Malacca. 386 teachers were invited to participate in the questionnaire survey. A cross sectional study was used to examine the relationship between occupational stress and job satisfaction. Descriptive analysis, Pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis were employed to analyse the data. According to the result, the level of role ambiguity and role overload was high. However, there was a moderate level of work-family conflict. The findings also revealed that there is a significant relationship between occupational stress and job satisfaction. Only role ambiguity has significant relationship with job satisfaction. The result also shows that role ambiguity and role overload were predictor of job satisfaction. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015. v6n2s1p81
Participation in the performance appraisal process and employee reactions: A meta-analytic review of field investigations.

The relationship between participation in the performance appraisal process and various employee reactions was explored through the meta-analysis of 27 studies containing 32 individual samples. The overall relationship (ρ) between participation and employee reactions, corrected for unreliability, was.61. Various conceptualizations and operationalizations of participation and employee reactions also were discussed and analyzed. Overall, appraisal participation was most strongly related to satisfaction, and value-expressive participation (i.e., participation for the sake of having one's voice heard) had a stronger relationship with most of the reaction criteria than did instrumental participation (i.e., participation for the purpose of influencing the end result). The results are discussed within the framework of organizational justice.
A safety-oriented platform for Web applications

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of the Tahoma Web browsing system. Key to Tahoma is the browser operating system (BOS), a new trusted software layer on which Web browsers execute. The benefits of this architecture are threefold. First, the BOS runs the client-side component of each Web application (e.g., on-line banking, Web mail) in its own virtual machine. This provides strong isolation between Web services and the user's local resources. Second, Tahoma lets Web publishers limit the scope of their Web applications by specifying which URLs and other resources their browsers are allowed to access. This limits the harm that can be caused by a compromised browser. Third, Tahoma treats Web applications as first-class objects that users explicitly install and manage, giving them explicit knowledge about and control over downloaded content and code. We have implemented a prototype of Tahoma using Linux and the Xen virtual machine monitor. Our security evaluation shows that Tahoma can prevent or contain 87% of the vulnerabilities that have been identified in the widely used Mozilla browser. In addition, our measurements of latency, throughput, and responsiveness demonstrate that users need not sacrifice performance for the benefits of stronger isolation and safety
The Campbell Collaboration’s Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Online Training Videos

Systematic reviews and meta-analysis are techniques for synthesizing primary empirical studies to produce a summary of effects. To facilitate this goal, the Campbell Collaboration (C2) supports reviews within the disciplines of crime and justice, education, international development, and social welfare. At the annual Campbell Colloquium, experts on systematic review and meta-analysis provide introductory and advanced methodological training to researchers and practitioners. The C2 has filmed the training sessions and offers access to these videos, free of charge, on their website. The purpose of this article is to provide some background on the C2 and to introduce the presentations available on their website.
S100A4, a Mediator of Metastasis*

The transition from benign tumor growth to malignancy is manifested by the ability of tumor cells to traverse tissue barriers and invade surrounding tissues. The traversal of basement membrane barriers is thought to be the critical event in the initiation of themetastatic cascade and, as described by the three-step hypothesis of metastasis, involves attachment to the extracellular matrix, local proteolysis, and subsequentmigration (1). In recent years, a number of specific genes have been identified, the expressions of which correlate with tumorigenesis and/or metastatic potential. S100A4 is a member of the S100 family of calcium-binding proteins that is directly involved in tumor metastasis. This report reviews the animal and cellular studies implicating S100A4 in the establishment of the metastatic phenotype and examines the biochemical properties of S100A4 that are relevant to its role as a metastasis factor.
Evidence that abscisic acid promotes degradation of SNF1-related protein kinase (SnRK) 1 in wheat and activation of a putative calcium-dependent SnRK2

Sucrose nonfermenting-1 (SNF1)-related protein kinases (SnRKs) form a major family of signalling proteins in plants and have been associated with metabolic regulation and stress responses. They comprise three subfamilies: SnRK1, SnRK2, and SnRK3. SnRK1 plays a major role in the regulation of carbon metabolism and energy status, while SnRKs 2 and 3 have been implicated in stress and abscisic acid (ABA)-mediated signalling pathways. The burgeoning and divergence of this family of protein kinases in plants may have occurred to enable cross-talk between metabolic and stress signalling, and ABA-response-element-binding proteins (AREBPs), a family of transcription factors, have been shown to be substrates for members of all three subfamilies. In this study, levels of SnRK1 protein were shown to decline dramatically in wheat roots in response to ABA treatment, although the amount of phosphorylated (active) SnRK1 remained constant. Multiple SnRK2-type protein kinases were detectable in the root extracts and showed differential responses to ABA treatment. They included a 42 kDa protein that appeared to reduce in response to 3 h of ABA treatment but to recover after longer treatment. There was a clear increase in phosphorylation of this SnRK2 in response to the ABA treatment. Fractions containing this 42 kDa SnRK2 were shown to phosphorylate synthetic peptides with amino acid sequences based on those of conserved phosphorylation sites in AREBPs. The activity increased 8-fold with the addition of calcium chloride, indicating that it is calcium-dependent. The activity assigned to the 42 kDa SnRK2 also phosphorylated a heterologously expressed wheat AREBP.
Inequalities in the Impact of National Reimbursement of Smoking Cessation Pharmacotherapy and the Influence of Injunctive Norms: An Explorative Study

In 2011, the Dutch government reimbursed smoking cessation pharmacotherapy with behavioral therapy for quitting smokers. We investigate whether inequalities in the use of pharmacotherapy change and, if not, whether this is due to a relatively positive injunctive norm in lower socioeconomic status (SES) groups. A total of 75,415 participants aged ≥15 years from the Dutch Continuous Survey of Smoking Habits, 2009–2012, were considered with the following measures: SES (education/income), injunctive norm (mostly acceptable/neutral/mostly unacceptable), period (2011/all other years), and pharmacotherapy use (yes/no). The proportion of low SES smokers compared with high SES smokers making quit attempts with pharmacotherapy did not differ significantly. The injunctive norm of low SES smokers differed significantly from high SES smokers and nonsmokers of all SES levels. Low income smokers with mostly acceptable injunctive norms were significantly less likely to make quit attempts using pharmacotherapy than those with a neutral or less accepting injunctive norm. The significantly lower use of pharmacotherapy in quit attempts in low income smokers with a positive injunctive norm toward smoking may partly underlie the lack of uptake of reimbursed pharmacotherapy in low SES smokers.
Interaction of PKN with α-Actinin*

PKN is a fatty acid- and Rho-activated serine/threonine protein kinase, having a catalytic domain homologous to protein kinase C family. To identify components of the PKN-signaling pathway such as substrates and regulatory proteins of PKN, the yeast two-hybrid strategy was employed. Using the N-terminal region of PKN as a bait, cDNAs encoding actin cross-linking protein α-actinin, which lacked the N-terminal actin-binding domain, were isolated from human brain cDNA library. The responsible region for interaction between PKN and α-actinin was determined by in vitro binding analysis using the various truncated mutants of these proteins. The N-terminal region of PKN outside the RhoA-binding domain was sufficiently shown to associate with α-actinin. PKN bound to the third spectrin-like repeats of both skeletal and non-skeletal muscle type α-actinin. PKN also bound to the region containing EF-hand-like motifs of non-skeletal muscle type α-actinin in a Ca2+-sensitive manner and bound to that of skeletal muscle type α-actinin in a Ca2+-insensitive manner. α-Actinin was co-immunoprecipitated with PKN from the lysate of COS7 cells transfected with both expression constructs for PKN and α-actinin lacking the actin-binding domain. In vitro translated full-length α-actinin containing the actin-binding site hardly bound to PKN, but the addition of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate, which is implicated in actin reorganization, stimulated the binding activity of the full-length α-actinin with PKN. We therefore propose that PKN is linked to the cytoskeletal network via a direct association between PKN and α-actinin.