Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Statistical portraits of American business elites: a review essay

Since the early twentieth century, scholars have conducted statistical studies of groups of business leaders. These have often been extensive undertakings, calling for the collection of large quantities of information about business executives through the use of surveys, personal interviews, dictionaries, obituaries and biographies. The scholars who have carried out these studies have come from a range of disciplines, including sociology, history and economics. The questions they have asked have varied over time. Some have sought to uncover common characteristics among the executives themselves. Others have studied groups of businessmen in order to learn about society (especially the extent of social mobility), or about particular industries and the people who ran them. While the variety of approaches has led some to conclude that these studies present no coherent picture, this article shows an underlying pattern in these efforts and suggests a framework for future study.
Explaining time trends in public opinion: Attitudes towards immigration and immigrants

Why does public opinion change over time? Much debate on this question centers on whether it is caused by the replacement of people or by individuals changing how they think. Theoretical approaches to this question have emphasized the importance of birth cohort succession, generational differences, and changing macro-economic conditions. In this article, we consider the extent to which these processes can account for changing attitudes towards immigration and immigrants. We use a new approach to the study of time trends in public opinion to analyze over 20 years of data on attitudes in Canada. This approach uses multi-level analysis to split attitudinal change into its cohort and period components. We find that most attitude change is the result of changing macro-economic conditions. In contrast, birth cohort succession has little effect. While there is modest evidence of generational differences in attitudes, these differences do not comprise a major part of the overall trend.
Effects of scopolamine on immediate postural changes in heart rate and R—R variance in humans

To examine the anticholinergic effects of scopolamine, postural tests were performed in nine healthy male volunteers after they received intravenous infusions of 0.2mg of scopolamine, 0.4 mg of glycopyrrolate, or placebo on separate days under double‐blind randomized conditions. Compared to the placebo and glycopyrrolate conditions, scopolamine produced a significantly exaggerated HR response to standing from supine posture. Scopolamine also produced a significant increase in R‐R variance during supine deep breathing and standing conditions as compared to glycopyrrolate and placebo conditions. At the same time, scopolamine also produced a significant dry mouth. These findings suggest that the effects of scopolamine in low doses on the above cardiac variables are vagomimetic.
The biodiversity and ecology of Antarctic lakes: models for evolution

Antarctic lakes are characterised by simplified, truncated food webs. The lakes range from freshwater to hypersaline with a continuum of physical and chemical conditions that offer a natural laboratory in which to study evolution. Molecular studies on Antarctic lake communities are still in their infancy, but there is clear evidence from some taxonomic groups, for example the Cyanobacteria, that there is endemicity. Moreover, many of the bacteria have considerable potential as sources of novel biochemicals such as low temperature enzymes and anti-freeze proteins. Among the eukaryotic organisms survival strategies have evolved, among which dependence on mixotrophy in phytoflagellates and some ciliates is common. There is also some evidence of evolution of new species of flagellate in the marine derived saline lakes of the Vestfold Hills. Recent work on viruses in polar lakes demonstrates high abundance and high rates of infection, implying that they may play an important role in genetic exchange in these extreme environments.
EDITORIAL: CURRENT AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS OF SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Socio-ecological psychology “investigates how mind and behavior are shaped in part by their natural and social habitats (social ecology), and how natural and social habitats are in turn shaped partly by mind and behavior” (Oishi, 2014, p. 582). Just as the main goal of cultural psychology is to illuminate how individuals and culture make each other up (Shweder, 1991), the main goal of this approach is to illuminate how individuals and social ecologies define each other. Unlike the complex and often abstract concepts of culture, social ecology includes concrete environments such as physical (e.g., climate, terrain, pathogen), economic (e.g., recession, boom, inequality), political (e.g., dictatorship, democracy, political instability), and interpersonal environments (e.g., small ingroup, transient social networks), among others (see Fig. 1). In the present issue, we invited five articles that represent a socio-ecological approach in five distinct areas of psychology: clinical/abnormal psychology (Oka, 2014), evolutionary social psychology (Murray, 2014), perception (Gross & Proffitt, 2014), personality (Zimmermann & Neyer, 2014), and developmental psychology (Mizokawa & Komiya, 2014). As detailed in Oishi and Graham (2010), there are many precedents to socio-ecological psychology. Kurt Lewin’s (1939) field theory was truly socio-ecological, as it explored the physical as well as interpersonal environments as key ingredients of psychology. However, Lewin also emphasized the importance of construe (subjective perception of the objective environments), which has become more dominant in the later generation of contextsensitive psychology (Dweck, 2006; Wilson, 2011). Likewise, Roger Barker (1968) pioneered ecological psychology, in which he advocated documenting individuals’ behaviors in his/her natural contexts in detail. In the 1970s, James Gibson (1979) in perception, Ulrich Neisser (1976) in cognitive psychology, and Urie Bronfenbrenner (1977) in developmental psychology promoted an ecological approach to perception, cognition, and developmental psychology (see Oishi & Graham, 2010, for the historical review). Gibson’s idea of affordance and its latest development is nicely summarized by Gross and Proffitt (2014), whereas Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory of human development is still alive in developmental psychology, as summarized by Mizokawa and Komiya (2014). In clinical psychology, James Kelly (1971) and others pioneered a community-based approach. Although these were powerful forces in their respective areas,
Class, neoliberal global capital, education and resistance

The paper bases itself in the tradition of transformative activism stressing the need to develop a just society. Outlining the contemporary context of neoliberal capitalism it seeks to understand the educational developments in the larger context of the labour-capital conflict with certain specific examples from Britain. It highlights the obscene and widening economic, social and educational inequalities both within states and globally; the detheorisation of education and the regulating of critical thought and activists through the ideological and repressive state apparatuses; and the limitation and regulation of democracy and democratic accountability at national and local educational levels. The author argues that there are possibilities of bringing about change in the education system and this can be undertaken by the critical educators and intellectuals. Education being a product of social relations and an instrument of reproduction therefore becomes an important site of struggle and change. As the conclusion Dave Hill outlines the ‘arenas’ located at diverse sites where the struggle to bring about change can be undertaken such as through a broader movement for economic and social justice, local action outside the classroom and within the education and media apparatuses.
Spherical harmonic domain noise reduction using an MVDR beamformer and DOA-based second-order statistics estimation

Most beamformers used for noise reduction rely on the accurate estimation of the second-order statistics of the noise, and in some cases, of the desired signal. Speech presence probability (SPP) based statistics estimators seek to update the estimates only when speech is absent/present, however, when used with a fixed a priori SPP, they cannot distinguish between a coherent desired source and coherent noise sources. We propose to distinguish between desired and noise sources by estimating the second-order statistics with a direction of arrival dependent a priori SPP, which we then use to compute the weights of a spherical harmonic domain minimum variance distortionless response filter.
Chart Generation Using Production Systems

Productions systems, traditionally mainly used for developing expert systems, can also be employed for implementing chart generators. Focusing on bottom-up chart generation, we describe how the notions of chart algorithms relate to the knowledge base and Rete network of production systems. We draw on experience gained in two research projects on natural language generation (NLG), one involving surface realization, the other involving both a content determination task (referring expression generation) and surface realization. The projects centered around the idea of ‘overgeneration’, i.e. of generating large numbers of output candidates which served as input to a ranking component. The purpose of this paper is to extend the range of implementation options available to the NLG practitioner by detailing the specific advantages and disadvantages of using production systems for NLG.
Teacher Professional Development Focusing on Pedagogical Content Knowledge

Because pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) includes teachers’ understanding of how students learn, or fail to learn, specific subject matter, the development of PCK is an important goal to focus on in professional development programs. The research literature clearly indicates the complex nature of PCK as a form of teachers’ professional knowledge that is highly topic, person, and situation specific. This implies that professional development programs aimed at the development of teachers’ PCK cannot be limited to supplying teachers with input, such as examples of expert teaching of subject matter. Instead, such programs should be closely aligned to teachers’ professional practice and, in addition to providing teachers with specific input, should include opportunities to enact certain instructional strategies and to reflect, individually and collectively, on their experiences.
Growing Spatially Embedded Social Networks for Activity-Travel Analysis Based on Artificial Transportation Systems

Social activity-travel has gained more and more attention as it is a growing percentage of the whole travel. To study its generation mechanism and behavioral characteristics, social network data are usually essential. However, due to individual privacy, it is rather difficult for traditional methods such as questionnaires to collect abundant reliable data. Therefore, we propose a novel method to grow realistic social networks based on artificial transportation systems (ATS). By incorporating the activity-travel simulation provided by ATS and a new agent-based model for social interaction, the method takes into account human mobility to generate spatially embedded social networks. Human mobility shapes and impacts social networks dynamically but is usually ignored by related studies. A case study based on computational experiments is carried out to verify the method. The results indicate that the method can generate social networks with similar topological and spatial characteristics to real social networks.
Jitter regulation for multiple streams

For widely used interactive communication, it is essential that traffic is kept as smooth as possible; the smoothness of the traffic is typically captured by its delay jitter, that is, the difference between the maximal and minimal end-to-end delays. The task of minimizing the jitter is done by jitter regulators that use a limited-size buffer in order to shape the traffic. In many real-life situations regulators must handle multiple streams simultaneously and provide low jitter on each of them separately. Moreover, communication links have limited capacity, and these may pose further restrictions on the choices made by the regulator. This article investigates the problem of minimizing jitter in such an environment, using a fixed-size buffer. We show that the offline version of the problem can be solved in polynomial time, by introducing an efficient offline algorithm that finds a release schedule with optimal jitter. When regulating M streams in the online setting, we take a competitive analysis point of view and note that, in the upcapacitated case, previous results in Mansour and Patt-Shamir [2001] can be extended to an online algorithm that uses a buffer of size 2ṡMṡB and obtains the optimal jitter possible with a buffer of size B (and an offline algorithm). The question arises whether such a resource augmentation is essential. We answer this question in the affirmative, by proving a lower bound that is tight up to a factor of 2, thus showing that jitter regulation does not scale well as the number of streams increases unless the buffer is sized-up proportionally.
Compact gauge K vortices

We investigate a version of the Abelian Higgs model with a non-standard kinetic term (K-field theory) in (2+1) dimensions. The existence of vortex-type solutions with compact support (topological compactons) is established by a combination of analytical and numerical methods. This result demonstrates that the concept of compact solitons in K-field theories can be extended to higher dimensions.
Gender, human capital, and opportunity identification in Mexico

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how gender affects the number and innovativeness of business opportunities identified by future entrepreneurs in Mexico.Design/methodology/approach – Comparing social feminist theory and human capital theory, this study examines the effect that human capital has on opportunity identification among men and women in Mexico. The authors specifically examine the role of specific and general human capital in the opportunity identification process. A survey instrument was applied to 174 MBA students at a university in Northeastern Mexico.Findings – This study shows the significant effect of specific human capital: people with greater prior knowledge of customer needs or problems tended to identify more opportunities; however, the probability of identifying opportunities with innovation increased when individuals had been exposed to different industries through prior work and entrepreneurial experience. Gender differences were not significant for either the nu.
Effect of posterior sub-tenon triamcinolone in macular edema due to non-ischemic vein occlusions.

PURPOSE To study the efficacy and safety of Posterior Sub-Tenon Triamcinolone acetonide (PSTT) in the treatment of macular edema in retinal vein occlusions. The efficacy is studied by anatomical and visual improvements. BACKGROUND Macular edema is the most common cause of visual loss in retinal vein occlusions. Many treatments have been advocated including laser, PSTT etc. The most recent trend is the usage of intravitreal Anti-VEGF (Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor) agents and steroids. Intravitreal injections have more complications. METHODS This study was a prospective interventional case series. 24 eyes of 24 patients (13 male and 11 female) with recent onset non-ischemic RVO (Retinal Vein Occlusion) underwent Posterior Sub-Tenon Triamcinolone (PSTT). Of the 24 eyes treated, 18 eyes were of BRVO (Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion) and 6 were CRVO (Central Retinal Vein Occlusion). All the eyes received 40 mg of Triamcinolone Acetonide (TA) in 1ml through posterior sub-tenon route. All the eyes were examined at baseline and after four weeks of being injected with TA. Changes in the best corrected visual acuity {letters of ETDRS (Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study) chart} and Central Macular Thickness (CMT) were studied. A gain of more than 5 letters was considered as effective. The eyes were examined for raised IOP (Intra-Ocular Pressure) and other complications. RESULTS Out of the 24 eyes 19 (79%) showed an improvement of more than 5 letters after a month of treatment. All the patients exhibited a certain degree of decrease in CMT. The mean BCVA increased from 30.08±10.16 to 40.21±8.93 (p<0.05). The mean CMT decreased from 575.08±131.55 to 282.08±163.99 (p<0.05). Out of them 3 eyes developed raised IOP of more than >21mmHg, which was controlled with medication. There were no other complications observed in any of the patients. CONCLUSION PSTT is an effective modality of treatment with minimal complications for macular edema associated with Non-Ischemic RVO with minimal complications. In view of the more severe complications associated with intravitreal injections, PSTT can be used as the first line of treatment before contemplating intravitreal injections. Multicenter randomised trials with longer periods of follow-up are needed to evaluate the long term safety and efficacy of this treatment. Furthermore, comparative studies are required to compare it with intravitreal Anti-VEGF or TA.
Separating A and W effects: Pointing to targets on computer displays

We address two main issues: the distinction between time-constrained and spatially constrained tasks, and the separable A and W effects on movement time (MT) in spatially- constrained tasks. We consider MT and 3-D kinematic data from human adults pointing to targets in human-computer interaction. These are better fit by Welford's (1968) two- part model, than Fitts' (1954; Fitts & Peterson 1964) ID model. We identify theoretical and practical implications.
On multiuser perspectives in passive stereographic virtual environments

The use of stereographic systems is spreading out in modern society, from the revolution of cinematography to its adoption in high‐tech products such as portable gaming devices or photo cameras. However, the fruition of immersive stereographic systems by more than one person at a time is still a research issue. In more detail, the class of passive stereo systems presents technological limitations of displaying correct multiuser perspectives. In fact, the stereo image projected onto the screen is usually rendered according to a unique point of view (PoV). Nevertheless, in multiuser systems, the selection of an appropriate PoV can minimize both optical discomfort and perspective distortion. This paper aims to evaluate which among existing PoV calculation methods provides the best performances in terms of projection realism, optical comfort and overall system usability in multiuser passive stereo systems. The performances have been evaluated in three different “distance” scenarios to take into account also the effects of binocular disparity in the PoV calculation. To accomplish this objective, we administered a questionnaire to nine couple subjects, evaluating each of the investigated PoV calculation methods for each of the three distance scenarios. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Urban theory since A Theory of Good City Form (1981) – a progress review

Kevin Lynch's magnum opus A Theory of Good City Form (1981) is well known as a normative theory of the city. The intersection of human purposeful activity and city form is a principal feature. However, little attention is given in the literature to a small appendix in the book, A Theory of Good City Form (1981), in which the theories that explain the form and function of the city are classified and reviewed. The brief review insightfully reveals embedded values that are implicit in urban theory. We use a similar classification to review the progress of urban theory since Lynch's brief assessment noting the city's complexity can only be effectively explained through multiple historical and theoretical, value‐laden perspectives. The values are the bridge between human purpose and city form, between substance – the city – and procedure – decision making about the city, that is between urban theory and planning (procedural) theory. Finally, the review is concluded with the implications of urban theory, informed by A Theory of Good City Form, for urban morphological design theory as well as planning (procedural) theory.
Development of the LYVE‐1 gene with an acidic‐amino‐acid‐rich (AAAR) domain in evolution is associated with acquisition of lymph nodes and efficient adaptive immunity

CRSBP‐1 (mammalian LYVE‐1) is a membrane glycoprotein highly expressed in lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs). It has multiple ligands, including hyaluronic acid (HA) and growth factors/cytokines (e.g., PDGF‐BB and VEGF‐A) containing CRS motifs (clusters of basic amino‐acid residues). The ligand binding activities are mediated by Link module and acidic‐amino‐acid‐rich (AAAR) domains, respectively. These CRSBP‐1/LYVE‐1 ligands have been shown to induce opening of lymphatic intercellular junctions in LEC monolayers and in lymphatic vessels in wild‐type mice. We hypothesize that CRSBP‐1/LYVE‐1 ligands, particularly CRS‐containing growth factors/cytokines, are secreted by immune and cancer cells for lymphatic entry during adaptive immune responses and lymphatic metastasis. We have looked into the origin of the Link module and AAAR domain of LYVE‐1 in evolution and its association with the development of lymph nodes and efficient adaptive immunity. Lymph nodes represent the only major recent innovation of the adaptive immune systems in evolution particularly to mammals and bird. Here we demonstrate that the development of the LYVE‐1 gene with the AAAR domain in evolution is associated with acquisition of lymph nodes and adaptive immunity. LYVE‐1 from other species, which have no lymph nodes, lack the AAAR domain and efficient adaptive immunity. Synthetic CRSBP‐1 ligands PDGF and VEGF peptides, which contain the CRS motifs of PDGF‐BB and VEGF‐A, respectively, specifically bind to CRSBP‐1 but do not interact with either PDGFβR or VEGFR2. These peptides function as adjuvants by enhancing adaptive immunity of pseudorabies virus (PRV) vaccine in pigs. These results support the notion that LYVE‐1 is involved in adaptive immunity in mammals.
Park visitors' understandings, values and beliefs related to their experience at Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, USA

Midway Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park provides visitors with a unique opportunity to experience rare geothermal features, extreme environments and associated micro-organisms. These associated organisms are considered one of the world's most valuable resources for biotechnology innovations. In this study, the authors investigated the development of park visitors' knowledge, values and beliefs during their visit to the Midway Geyser Basin. The study draws on prior work in the areas of museum and informal education, public understanding of science and cognitive psychology. A total of 191 visitors were interviewed before and after their experience in the geyser basin. Results of the studyinclude an in-depth description of the personal, social and physical contexts of the visitors' experience in the geyser basin. The results are interpreted in terms of park visitors' knowledge systems, how theexperience stimulates personal understanding, knowledge construction and value development among groups of visitors. Conclusions provide a unique perspective on the role of typical park visitors' prior knowledge, on the social construction of knowledge during the park experience and on the development of complex value structures related to unique biological resources. Conceptually, the results indicate the value of using a theory of knowledge systems to help us to better understand learning in informalsettings. Practical implications of the study include a number of cognitive 'anchors' or 'bridges' that can facilitate further learning by park visitors about these unique environments and associated biologicalresources.