Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implicit and Explicit Influences on Spontaneous and Deliberate Food Choices

Within the consumer research literature, there is a long standing tradition that focuses on deliberative and volitional aspects of consumer behavior. It is assumed that consumers are aware of their attitudes, which drive their behaviors through the mediation of behavioral intentions. Recently however, studies have shown that attitudes might be activated automatically and drive behavior without conscious awareness. Dijksterhuis, Smith, van Baaren, and Wigboldus (2005) even make the claim that the majority of shopping choices are unconsciously driven, influenced by automatically activated attitudes. The domain of food choices is particularly akin to this observation, when consumers claim they bought a chocolate snack displayed near the cashier “against their will”. Shiv and Fedhorikin (1999; 2002) unraveled the interplay between unconscious and more controlled processes involved in food choices. In this article, we build and add to this line of study by highlighting the influence of the implicit (i.e. below awareness) attitudes and preferences on consumer behaviors involving control and deliberation compared to those more spontaneous and impulsive.
The role of sound and audible safety in special needs care

Soundscape research applicable to residential facilities for people with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) is scarce. The aim of this study is to determine the role of sound for persons with PIMD, because we expect it provides insight into role of audition. We hypothesize that sound is important in developing a sense of a safe place: when the sonic environment does not provide positive indicators of safety, individuals within this environment will not feel safe. Feelings of unsafety and insecurity are likely to play a major role in the onset of problem behavior and thus reduce the quality of life for people with PIMD. To test the validity of this claim, we organized focus groups for PIMD professionals, where we examined whether their latent knowledge corresponded to our theoretical framework. In total 34 professionals attended. Results showed a strong consistency between the knowledge and experience of the professionals and our theoretical framework, indicating that, for people with PIMD, the auditory environment is crucial in determining the answer to the questions "Am I in a safe place? " and "What is happening here? ". In addition we conclude that the (re)introduction of positive indicators of safety and soundmarks associated with daily structure, in the environment of people with PIMD, are likely to improve their quality of life.
Nitric oxide synthase gene therapy rapidly reduces adhesion molecule expression and inflammatory cell infiltration in carotid arteries of cholesterol-fed rabbits.

BACKGROUND Hypercholesterolemia reduces nitric oxide bioavailability, manifested by reduced endothelium-dependent vascular relaxation, and also induces vascular adhesion molecule expression and inflammatory cell infiltration. We have previously shown that gene therapy with NO synthase in hypercholesterolemic rabbits substantially reverses the deficit in vascular relaxation. In the present study, we show that NO synthase gene therapy rapidly and substantially reduces vascular adhesion molecule expression, lipid deposition, and inflammatory cell infiltration. METHODS AND RESULTS Thirty male New Zealand White rabbits were maintained on a 1% cholesterol diet for 11 to 13 weeks, then underwent carotid artery gene transfer with Ad.nNOS or Ad.betaGal (recombinant adenoviruses expressing neuronal NO synthase or beta-galactosidase, respectively), or received medium alone in a sham procedure. Arteries were harvested at 1 and 3 days after gene transfer, and the following parameters were determined by immunohistochemical and image-analysis techniques: intercellular adhesion molecule-1, vascular cell adhesion molecule-1, lipid deposition by oil red O staining, lymphocyte infiltration (CD43-positive cells), and monocyte infiltration (RAM-11-positive cells). In Ad.nNOS-treated arteries, all markers were significantly decreased relative to Ad. betaGal or sham-treated arteries within 3 days after gene transfer. Ad.nNOS had a particularly striking impact on monocyte infiltration; as early as 24 hours after gene transfer, Ad.nNOS-treated arteries had >3-fold fewer monocytes than Ad.betaGal- or sham-treated arteries. CONCLUSIONS NO synthase gene therapy rapidly ameliorates several markers of atherosclerosis in the cholesterol-fed rabbit.
Socio-economic analysis of processing Pachyrhizus erosus (L.) Urb. tubers into gari in Benin.

Pachyrhizus erosus is a legume plant that produces tubers rich in nutrients (protein, iron, zinc, etc.) that are used in various kinds of food processing. The objective of this study was to analyse producers’ and processors’ perception regarding processing P. erosus tubers into gari in on-farm conditions and its financial profitability. Kendall’s concordance test was used to classify perceptions, and cost analysis was used to analyse the profitability of the product. The results showed that the mixed gari with 50% P. erosus was highly appreciated because of its greater fermentation ability than cassava gari. The price at which processors broke even was FCFA 340 (~ $ 0.57) per kilogram and the sensitivity analysis revealed that when the yield of P. erosus -based gari increased by 30%, processors made a profit of 25% of the investment cost. So, processing of P. erosus is beneficial for the processors and consumers appreciate it more than cassava gari. The Benin Government needs to promote this crop in order to feed its population. © 2015 International Formulae Group. All rights reserved. Keywords: Roots and tubers, technical performance, malnutrition, Benin, population, food quality
On the performance of asynchronous ad-hoc networks using interference alignment with renewal process

The performance of ad-hoc networks is greatly affected by interference, particularly interference from nearby nodes. Based on stochastic geometry, this work studies a form of multiple-input-multiple-output (interference alignment (IA) that eliminates interference from transmitters within a range and treats the remaining interference as a shot noise process. Adapting to the bursty nature of ad-hoc network traffic, the authors introduce a novel distributed ad-hoc network with renewal process, whereby cooperation between interferer and receiver is implemented in one-way process, which results from the difficulties for the node to change the beamforming or receiving matrix whereas communicating with a proposed transmitter. In addition, this scheme takes advantage of IA, leaving the desired signal with higher degree of freedom (DoF) compared with the partially zero-forcing method. Outage probability and transmission capacity are derived with and without Rayleigh fading. Simulation results show the effect of IA in ad-hoc network, including the incremental in the DoF of the desired signal as time goes by. Monte Carlo simulations are implemented and show that IA outperforms successive interference cancellation by at least 10 dB in terms of the signal-to-interference ratio with large path-loss exponent.
Comparative study on VQ with simple GA and ordain GA

In the present research we study the codebook generation problem of vector quantization, using two different techniques of Genetic Algorithm (GA). We compared the Simple GA (SGA) method and Ordain GA (OGA) method in vector quantization. SGA with roulette and tournament selection with elitist approach is used in the experiments. The OGA is based on the pair wise nearest neighbour method (PNN). Both these approaches were fine tuned by the inclusion of GLA. The two methods are campared with respect to quality of compressed image, rate of distortion and time cost. While using OGA we got better value of PSNR (34:6) with less distorted image as compared to the SGA with (29:7) PSNR value. Although in OGA the time performance is inferior, it is 3 times slower.
Perspectives in motion: the case of metaphorical temporal statements in Spanish

abstract Interpreting temporal statements involves adopting alternative frames of reference. Previous work has shown that people draw on time-moving or ego-moving perspectives to interpret statements such as Next Wednesday´s meeting has been moved forward two days. The expression move forward in English can be translated into Spanish as mover hacia adelante or adelantar. Corpus data show that when these expressions are used metaphorically to describe time, the former is typically used to describe events parting from the ego (ego-moving perspective) while the latter is typically used to describe events moving towards the ego (time-moving perspective). We provide empirical evidence that different frames of reference are elicited depending on the specific metaphorical expression in Spanish (Corpus Analysis, Experiments 1 and 2), to the extent that the use of these linguistic forms in temporal sentences affects subsequent spatial reasoning (Experiment 3). We conclude that Spanish has some metaphorical expressions that are not neutral regarding the ego-/time-moving perspectives, and that their use affects how people draw on spatial motion schemas when thinking about time and space.
Exact Post-Selection Inference for Sequential Regression Procedures

ABSTRACT We propose new inference tools for forward stepwise regression, least angle regression, and the lasso. Assuming a Gaussian model for the observation vector y, we first describe a general scheme to perform valid inference after any selection event that can be characterized as y falling into a polyhedral set. This framework allows us to derive conditional (post-selection) hypothesis tests at any step of forward stepwise or least angle regression, or any step along the lasso regularization path, because, as it turns out, selection events for these procedures can be expressed as polyhedral constraints on y. The p-values associated with these tests are exactly uniform under the null distribution, in finite samples, yielding exact Type I error control. The tests can also be inverted to produce confidence intervals for appropriate underlying regression parameters. The R package selectiveInference, freely available on the CRAN repository, implements the new inference tools described in this article. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.
VALUATION OF INFINITE MATURITY STOCK LOANS WITH GEOMETRIC LÉVY MODEL IN A RISK-NEUTRAL FRAMEWORK

This paper deals with the pricing problem of infinite maturity stock loan where the underlying stock price follows the geometric Lévy model for incorporating more empirical features in a risk-neutral framework. Since the way of dividends distribution has a great influence on pricing, we aim at deriving the closed-form solutions and optimal strategy of the pricing problem subject to three specified ways of dividend distribution by variational inequalities approach. The relationships among the parameters, such as loan sizes, interest rates and service fees, are also discussed. Numerical examples are included to illustrate the results. MSC(2000): Primary 60G40, 91B70, 91B24, 60H10, 49L20.
Scalable Spreadsheets for Interactive Data Analysis

Interactive responses and natural, intuitive controls are important for data analysis. We are building ABC, a scal-able spreadsheet for data analysis that combines exploration , grouping, and aggregation. We focus on interactive responses in place of long delays, and intuitive, direct-manipulation operations in place of complex queries. ABC allows analysts to interactively explore the data at varying granularities of detail using a spreadsheet. Hypotheses that arise during the exploration can be checked by dynamically computing aggregates on interactively chosen groups of data items. In this paper we describe our vision for ABC. We give examples that illustrate the need for interactivity in query processing and query formulation, the advantages of dynamic group formulation, and the usefulness of exploration in discovering hypotheses about data that can then be veriied by aggregation. We brieey discuss the systems issues involved in building ABC, and mention our progress so far.
Retrieval by Relevance Terminological Logics

Information Retrieval (IR) is presented as the task of retrieving the documents that are relevant to a given query. In the context of a Terminological Logic (TL) based approach to IR, this amounts to embodying a notion of relevance in the logical implication relation of the chosen TL. Among the many possible readings of the term “relevance”, the one captured by relevance logic, and in particular by first-order tautological entailment, can be viewed as a promising source of inspiration, to the end of incorporating a logic-based form of relevance in the inference mechanism of TLs. The aim of this paper is to present a Relevant Terminological Logic, while maintaining the desired “relevance” flavour of relevance logics, which could be considered as a base towards a suitable document description logic for IR purposes.
A receding horizon Kalman FIR filter for discrete time-invariant systems

A receding horizon Kalman FIR filter is presented that combines the Kalman filter and the receding horizon strategy when the horizon initial state is assumed to be unknown. The suggested filter is a FIR filter form which has many good inherent properties. It can always be defined irrespective of singularity problems caused by unknown information about the horizon initial state. The suggested filter can be represented in either an iterative form or a standard FIR form. It is also shown that the suggested filter possesses the unbiasedness property and the remarkable deadbeat property irrespective of any horizon initial condition. The validity of the suggested filter is illustrated by numerical examples.
The impact of on-site educational outreach on recreational users’ perceptions of aquatic invasive species and their management

Abstract Aquatic invasive species (AIS) present a great challenge to ecosystems around the globe, and controlling AIS becomes increasingly difficult when the potential vectors are related to recreational activities. An approach combining education and outreach efforts to control AIS may be the best course of action. A survey was designed to measure public perceptions, knowledge of, and attitudes towards AIS, as well as public support for various management actions. Surveys were administered during the summer of 2013 at two boat launches where one launch had active outreach the previous summer and one that did not. A total of 400 surveys were completed with a response rate of 89%. There was support for most proposed management options, and respondents understood the urgency of managing AIS. There was a difference between the launches in how people responded, highlighting that educational programming may need to be tailored for specific recreational uses and recreational settings.
&agr;4&bgr;2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor partial agonists with low intrinsic efficacy have antidepressant-like properties

Previous studies have suggested that treatment with antagonists or partial agonists of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors containing the &bgr;2-subunit (&bgr;2* nAChRs) results in antidepressant-like effects. In this study, we tested three novel compounds with different affinity and functional efficacy at &agr;4&bgr;2* nAChRs, which were synthesized as part of nAChR discovery projects at Pfizer, in the tail-suspension, forced-swim, and novelty-suppressed feeding tests of antidepressant efficacy. All compounds tested reduced immobility in the forced-swim test and one of the compounds also reduced immobility in the tail-suspension test. All the compounds appeared to affect food intake on their own, with two compounds reducing feeding significantly in the home cage, precluding a clear interpretation of the results in the novelty-suppressed feeding test. None of the compounds altered locomotor activity at the doses and time points used here. Therefore, a subset of these compounds has pharmacological and behavioral properties that demonstrate the potential of nicotinic compounds as a treatment of mood disorders. Further development of nicotinic-based antidepressants should focus on increasing nAChR subtype selectivity to obtain consistent antidepressant properties with an acceptable side-effect profile.
Power allocation based on finite-horizon optimization for vehicle-to-roadside communications

In this paper, we study the power allocation strategy in a drive-thru scenario, where an access point (AP) is installed along the highway to provide Internet services to vehicles within its coverage range. We consider single-hop vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications for a vehicle that aims to upload data within the coverage range of the AP, where the bandwidth allocated to it is time-varying, and the size of the data is known upon it enters the area. The data bits received over a time slot are correctly received if the instantaneous channel capacity rt is greater than or equal to a threshold Rt, and corrupted otherwise. The vehicle has to pay an amount for data transmission according to the power consumption at each time slot whether the data bits are correctly received or not. The target is to complete the transmission of the traffic demand volume with the minimal cost. First, we consider the optimal power allocation strategy with a single AP and random vehicular traffic arrivals. We formulate it as a finite-horizon sequential power allocation problem. Then we solve the problem using dynamic programming and find the optimal power allocation strategy. The proof of the existing of the optimal value of the cost-to-go function is given after. Simulation results show that our proposed strategy achieves less cost than another heuristic strategy. The impacts of different traffic demand volumes, traffic densities, and outage probabilities on total cost are also analyzed.
Generating Strategies from Transient Test Graphs ⋆

Model based test generation for reactive systems reduces in some cases to generation of a strategy for a reachability game played on a test graph. The test graph is a finite approximation of the model. We consider an important subclass of test graphs, called transient test graphs, where the distinguished goal vertex of the graph can be reached from all vertices in the graph. Transience arises from the practical requirement that all tests must end in a distinguished goal vertex. We prove that a strategy that minimizes the expected costs of reaching the goal vertex exists if and only if the graph is transient, and we show how to find such a strategy by solving a linear program. We discuss how the problem arises in the context of model based testing of reactive systems with the SpecExplorer tool that has been developed at Microsoft Research.
Seqins - A Sequencing Tool for Educational Resources

The teaching-learning process is increasingly focused on the combination of the paradigms “learning by viewing” and “learning by doing. ” In this context, educational resources, either expository or evaluative, play a pivotal role. Both types of resources are interdependent and their sequencing would create a richer educational experience to the end user. However, there is a lack of tools that support sequencing essentially due to the fact that existing specifications are complex. The Seqins is a sequencing tool of digital resources that has a fairly simple sequencing model. The tool communicates through the IMS LTI specification with a plethora of e-learning systems such as learning management systems, repositories, authoring and evaluation systems. In order to validate Seqins we integrate it in an e-learning Ensemble framework instance for the computer programming learning.
Model-Assisted Analysis of Spatial and Temporal Variations in Fruit Temperature and Transpiration Highlighting the Role of Fruit Development

Fruit physiology is strongly affected by both fruit temperature and water losses through transpiration. Fruit temperature and its transpiration vary with environmental factors and fruit characteristics. In line with previous studies, measurements of physical and thermal fruit properties were found to significantly vary between fruit tissues and maturity stages. To study the impact of these variations on fruit temperature and transpiration, a modelling approach was used. A physical model was developed to predict the spatial and temporal variations of fruit temperature and transpiration according to the spatial and temporal variations of environmental factors and thermal and physical fruit properties. Model predictions compared well to temperature measurements on mango fruits, making it possible to accurately simulate the daily temperature variations of the sunny and shaded sides of fruits. Model simulations indicated that fruit development induced an increase in both the temperature gradient within the fruit and fruit water losses, mainly due to fruit expansion. However, the evolution of fruit characteristics has only a very slight impact on the average temperature and the transpiration per surface unit. The importance of temperature and transpiration gradients highlighted in this study made it necessary to take spatial and temporal variations of environmental factors and fruit characteristics into account to model fruit physiology.
Sicca symptoms, and lacrimal and salivary flow in Albanian patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

BACKGROUND Rheumatoid arthritis affects primarily the synovial joints, but is often accompanied by extra-articular manifestations, including lacrimal and salivary gland involvement. The aim of the present study was to estimate the prevalence of ocular and oral sicca symptoms and reduced lacrimal and salivary flow in rheumatoid arthritis and the relation between sicca symptoms and objective measures of lacrimal and salivary flow. METHODS We examined 88 consecutive hospitalized patients with rheumatoid arthritis and 88 age- and gender-matched healthy controls. The examination included the standardized questionnaire for keratoconjunctivitis sicca and xerostomia which forms part of the European criteria for Sjögren's syndrome, the Schirmer's I test and measurement of unstimulated whole salivary flow rate. RESULTS A significantly higher proportion of patients (40.9%) reported ocular sicca symptoms than healthy matched controls (8.0%). Further, a significantly higher proportion of patients (44.3%) reported oral sicca symptoms compared to controls (13.6%). 48.9% of the patients had low Schirmer I score, compared to 20.5% of controls. Reduced salivary flow was found in 27.3% of patients, compared to 9.1% of controls. The differences in lacrimal and salivary flow between patient and control group were statistically significant. The minimum prevalence of secondary Sjögren's syndrome was 14.8%. Weak association was observed between sicca symptoms and the objective measures of lacrimal and salivary flow in patients, and no association was detected in control subjects. CONCLUSIONS Sicca symptoms and reduced lacrimal and salivary flow were common manifestations in rheumatoid arthritis and should be given adequate consideration during management of patients with rheumatoid arthritis.