Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transgenerational Transmission of Stress Pathology

Abstract. The impact of the environment early in life on long-term outcomes is well known. Stressful experiences during pre- and postnatal development can modulate the genetic programming of specific brain circuits underlying emotional and cognitive aspects of behavioral adaptation to stressful experiences later in life. Furthermore, there is documented evidence for gene-environment interactions in the context of early-life stress. Identical gene variants can be associated with different phenotypes depending on environmental factors. DNA methylation, an enzymatically-catalyzed modification of the DNA, is the mechanism through which phenotypes are regulated. The dynamics and plasticity of epigenetic mechanisms can have short-term, long-term, or transgenerational consequences. In epigenetic research, rodent models have targeted several behavioral and emotional phenotypes. These models have contributed significantly to our understanding of the environmental regulation of the developmental brain in early life.
A Gold Standard Corpus of Early Modern German

This paper describes an annotated gold standard sample corpus of Early Modern German containing over 50,000 tokens of text manually annotated with POS tags, lemmas, and normalised spelling variants. The corpus is the first resource of its kind for this variant of German, and represents an ideal test bed for evaluating and adapting existing NLP tools on historical data. We describe the corpus format, annotation levels, and challenges, providing an example of the requirements and needs of smaller humanities-based corpus projects.
The Causes of Peace and Conditions of War

What makes wars end ("the causes of peace") and what keeps wars from ending ("the conditions of war") has been much less studied than what makes wars start ("the causes of war") and what keeps wars from starting ("the con ditions of peace"). Past inattention to war termination prob lems is variously explained by political scientists' concern with war avoidance, strategists' concern with victory and deter rence, and pervasive doubts that thermonuclear war can be kept from running its full course. Protracted, large-scale, non- atomic asymmetrical war—limited for the major power par ticipant but unlimited for the local, post-colonial minor power —and apocalyptic thermonuclear exchange are the two types of war which mainly concern students of war termination. Although there is brief reference to forces making the par ticipants in thermonuclear war strenuously seek early termina tion, if only to save their cities, the main emphasis is on war termination in large-scale, limited war. The problem is dis cussed chiefly from the point of view of a major power seeking to take a "turn toward peace," eschewing victory but unwilling to accept defeat. Factors favoring termination are discussed in terms of the world political pressures for peace, constraints keeping the two sides from using fully the coercive force avail able, competing high-priority domestic policy objectives, the translation of battlefield results into more realistic expecta tions and moderated war objectives, the continuous calculus of sacrifices still to be made and gains still to be realized, and the problem of making peace proposals which are both understood and acceptable.
An Overview on Primary Progressive Aphasia and Its Variants

We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropschychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: (1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), (2) semantic dementia (SD), (3) logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). PNFA is characterized by labored speech, agrammatism in production, and/or comprehension. In some cases the syndrome begins with isolated deficits in speech. SD patients typically present with loss of word and object meaning and surface dyslexia. LPA patients have word-finding difficulties, syntactically simple but accurate language output and impaired sentence comprehension. The neuropsychological data demonstrated that SD patients show the most characteristic pattern of impairment, while PNFA and LPA overlap within many cognitive domains. The neuroimaging analysis showed left perisylvian region involvement. A comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging and pathological approach is necessary to identify the clinical and pathogenetic features of different PPA variants.
Body Weight and Gender: Academic Choice and Performance

This study examines the relationship between body weight and academic choice and performance, focusing on gender differences and using survey data from students at the University of Salerno in Italy.Our findings indicate a significant negative relationship between body weight and academic performance,particularly for female students.In our examination of BMI and field of study (i.e.,science vs.the humanities),our results indicate that overweight/obese females are less likely than those of average weight to pursue scientific studies, and hence, more remunerative careers.The asymmetry of the findings between males and females suggests that during late adolescence physicality plays different roles according to gender.
Time of arrival predictability horizons for public bus routes

Automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems such as those installed on public bus services produce a large amount of route specific GPS data. Many cities, Dublin Ireland being among the newest, are using this data to display time of arrival (TOA) predictions on smart screens at every bus stop on their transportation network. This paper analyses the TOA predictability of buses travelling on Dublin Bus's longest and most frequented route 46A. We propose a pattern-based route time prediction system that uses a nearest neighbour approach to combine sub-tracks of historical GPS probe data to produce prediction of time of arrival. We show experimentally that there is an optimal number of neighbours k which changes as a function of the distance travelled. We also show that long term predictions are very uncertain and we make the recommendation that these predictions be conveyed to a user as an upper/lower bound pair. We show that meaningful predictions only emerge when the bus is within 6km from its predicted bus stop.
A practical methodology for early buffer and wire resource allocation

The dominating contribution of interconnect to system performance has made it critical to plan for buffer and wiring resources in the layout. Both buffers and wires must be considered, since wire routes determine buffer requirements and buffer locations constrain wire routes. In contrast to recent buffer block planning approaches, our design methodology distributes buffer sites throughout the layout. A tile graph is used to abstract the buffer planning problem while also addressing wire planning. We present a four-stage heuristic called RABID for resource allocation and experimentally verify its effectiveness.
Electronic cigarette: users profile, utilization, satisfaction and perceived efficacy.

AIMS To assess the profile, utilization patterns, satisfaction and perceived effects among users of electronic cigarettes ('e-cigarettes'). DESIGN AND SETTING Internet survey in English and French in 2010. MEASUREMENTS Online questionnaire. PARTICIPANTS Visitors of websites and online discussion forums dedicated to e-cigarettes and to smoking cessation. FINDINGS There were 3587 participants (70% former tobacco smokers, 61% men, mean age 41 years). The median duration of electronic cigarette use was 3 months, users drew 120 puffs/day and used five refills/day. Almost all (97%) used e-cigarettes containing nicotine. Daily users spent $33 per month on these products. Most (96%) said the e-cigarette helped them to quit smoking or reduce their smoking (92%). Reasons for using the e-cigarette included the perception that it was less toxic than tobacco (84%), to deal with craving for tobacco (79%) and withdrawal symptoms (67%), to quit smoking or avoid relapsing (77%), because it was cheaper than smoking (57%) and to deal with situations where smoking was prohibited (39%). Most ex-smokers (79%) feared they might relapse to smoking if they stopped using the e-cigarette. Users of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes reported better relief of withdrawal and a greater effect on smoking cessation than those using non-nicotine e-cigarettes. CONCLUSIONS E-cigarettes were used much as people would use nicotine replacement medications: by former smokers to avoid relapse or as an aid to cut down or quit smoking. Further research should evaluate the safety and efficacy of e-cigarettes for administration of nicotine and other substances, and for quitting and relapse prevention.
MATERNAL CONTROL IN MOTHER-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS AND THE EFFECTS ON CHILDREN'S SOCIAL DOMINANCE STRATEGIES

By Emily Carroll Williams, M.A. Washington State University May 2010 Chair: Jared A. Lisonbee The current study examined maternal controlling behaviors in mother-child relationships and the associations with children’s social dominance in child-peer interactions. Participants in the current study were drawn from a larger, 2 cohort study of early childhood social development in the Pullman, WA/Moscow, ID area. The 57 children (31 boys, 53 mos.) in this study participated in both a mother-child laboratory assessment and a child-peer playgroup assessment in which maternal control behaviors and child dominance were assessed. Observers coded maternal control and global relationship quality in the lab setting. Other coders rated child dominance and child coercion in the playgroup. Higher levels of maternal control were expected to predict more child dominance and coercion in the playgroup. The results indicated that maternal relationship negativity, but not control behaviors, predicted greater child coercion. The interaction between maternal controlling behaviors and negative relationship quality did not significantly predict either child coercion or child dominance. Discussion includes measurement considerations and ideas for future research.
Examining Factors Predicting Students' Digital Competence

The purpose of this study was to examine factors predicting lower secondary school students’ digital competence and to explore differences between students when it comes to digital competence. Results from a digital competence test and survey in lower secondary school will be presented. It is important to learn more about and investigate what characterizes students’ digital competence. A sample of 852 ninth-grade Norwegian students from 38 schools participated in the study. The students answered a 26 item multiple-choice digital competence test and a self-report questionnaire about family background, motivation, and previous grades. Structural equation modeling was used to test a model of the hypothesised relationship between family background, mastery orientation, previous achievements, and digital competence. The results indicate variation in digital competence among the ninth-graders. Further, analyses showed that students’ conditions at home, i.e., language integration and cultural capital, together with mastery orientation and academic achievements predict students digital competence. This study indicates that that there is evidence of digital diversity between lower secondary students. It does not seem like the development of digital competence among the students happens automatically. Students’ family background and school performance are the most important factors. Therefore, as this study shows, it is necessary to further investigate how schools can identify students’ level of competence and to develop plans and actions for how schools can help to try to equalize differences.
Improving Health Literacy: A Web Application for Evaluating Text-to-Speech Engines

The Internet is increasingly used as a medium for gathering and exchanging health information exchange. Healthcare professionals and organizations need to consider barriers that may exist within their patient-oriented Web applications. One approach to making the Web more accessible for those with lower health literacy may be to supplement textual content with audio annotation using text-to-speech engines, allowing for the creation of a virtual surrogate reader. One challenge is that with numerous text-to-speech engines on the market, objective measures of quality are difficult to obtain. To facilitate comparisons of text-to-speech engines, we developed an open-source Web application that measures user reaction times, subjective quality ratings, and accuracy in completing tasks across different audio files created by text-to-speech engines. Our research endeavor was successful in building and piloting this Web application; significant differences were found for subjective ratings of quality across three text-to-speech engines priced at different levels. However, no significant differences were found with reaction times or accuracy between these text-to-speech engines. Future avenues of research include exploring more complex tasks, usability issues related to implementing text-to-speech features, and applied health promotion and education opportunities among vulnerable populations.
B Cell Receptor Signal Transduction in the GC Is Short-Circuited by High Phosphatase Activity

So Selective The key elements for long-lived antibody-mediated immunity—memory B cells and plasmablasts—are generated in germinal centers, where B cells expressing high-affinity antigen receptors are selected for survival and proliferation in a process called affinity maturation. Unexpectedly, Khalil et al. (p. 1178, published online 3 May; see the Perspective by Bannard and Cyster) found that, in contrast to naïve B cells and B cells outside the germinal center, proximal signaling events are impaired downstream of the antigen receptor in mouse germinal center B cells. Restricted B cell signaling in the areas responsible for immune memory cell production promotes affinity maturation. Germinal centers (GCs) generate memory B and plasma cells, which are essential for long-lived humoral immunity. GC B cells with high-affinity B cell receptors (BCRs) are selectively expanded. To enable this selection, BCRs of such cells are thought to signal differently from those with lower affinity. We show that, surprisingly, most proliferating GC B cells did not demonstrate active BCR signaling. Rather, spontaneous and induced signaling was limited by increased phosphatase activity. Accordingly, both SH2 domain–containing phosphatase-1 (SHP-1) and SH2 domain–containing inositol 5 phosphatase were hyperphosphorylated in GC cells and remained colocalized with BCRs after ligation. Furthermore, SHP-1 was required for GC maintenance. Intriguingly, GC B cells in the cell-cycle G2 period regained responsiveness to BCR stimulation. These data have implications for how higher-affinity B cells are selected in the GC.
Controlling Service Work

In order to understand the control of service work, most service literature has focused on its production while treating the customer as secondary. The consumption literature emphasizes the customer's role but lacks empirical evidence for its claims. Using an ethnographic study of an `exclusive' department store, this article aims to reduce the gap between these two bodies of literature by investigating how employees, management and customers control service work. The findings suggest that the maintenance of class difference combined with competing expectations of managers, employees and customers makes the management of service work highly ambiguous and reveals a continuing instability between managerial practices of control and consumer culture.
Case Report: The Development of a Highly Constrained Health Level 7 Implementation Guide to Facilitate Electronic Laboratory Reporting to Ambulatory Electronic Health Record Systems

Electronic laboratory interfaces can significantly increase the value of ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) systems by providing laboratory result data automatically and in a computable form. However, many ambulatory EHRs cannot implement electronic laboratory interfaces despite the existence of messaging standards, such as Health Level 7, version 2 (HL7). Among several barriers to implementing laboratory interfaces is the extensive optionality within the HL7 message standard. This paper describes the rationale for and development of an HL7 implementation guide that seeks to eliminate most of the optionality inherent in HL7, but retain the information content required for reporting outpatient laboratory results. A work group of heterogeneous stakeholders developed the implementation guide based on a set of design principles that emphasized parsimony, practical requirements, and near-term adoption. The resulting implementation guide contains 93% fewer optional data elements than HL7. This guide was successfully implemented by 15 organizations during an initial testing phase and has been approved by the HL7 standards body as an implementation guide for outpatient laboratory reporting. Further testing is required to determine whether widespread adoption of the implementation guide by laboratories and EHR systems can facilitate the implementation of electronic laboratory interfaces.
Iris recognition based on a novel multiresolution analysis framework

In this paper, we proposed an efficient multiresolution decomposition framework for iris texture feature extraction, which has superior directionality and localized frequency partition. It consists of an improved circular symmetric filter bank followed by a directional filter bank. In our iris recognition system, we adopt a novel non-polar coordinate normalization strategy as iris preprocessing method. It preserves and enhances the geometric structure of an original iris image and is suitable for multiscale geometric analysis. We design the multiresolution analysis framework according to the texture distribution of normalized iris images, and partition them into multi-scale and multi-directional subbands. Then, we employ the normalized energy components as elements of the feature vector and use support vector machine (SVM) to classify the features. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve high classification accuracy with fewer features.
Usability Evaluation Methods for Gesture-Based Games: A Systematic Review

Background Gestural interaction systems are increasingly being used, mainly in games, expanding the idea of entertainment and providing experiences with the purpose of promoting better physical and/or mental health. Therefore, it is necessary to establish mechanisms for evaluating the usability of these interfaces, which make gestures the basis of interaction, to achieve a balance between functionality and ease of use. Objective This study aims to present the results of a systematic review focused on usability evaluation methods for gesture-based games, considering devices with motion-sensing capability. We considered the usability methods used, the common interface issues, and the strategies adopted to build good gesture-based games. Methods The research was centered on four electronic databases: IEEE, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Springer, and Science Direct from September 4 to 21, 2015. Within 1427 studies evaluated, 10 matched the eligibility criteria. As a requirement, we considered studies about gesture-based games, Kinect and/or Wii as devices, and the use of a usability method to evaluate the user interface. Results In the 10 studies found, there was no standardization in the methods because they considered diverse analysis variables. Heterogeneously, authors used different instruments to evaluate gesture-based interfaces and no default approach was proposed. Questionnaires were the most used instruments (70%, 7/10), followed by interviews (30%, 3/10), and observation and video recording (20%, 2/10). Moreover, 60% (6/10) of the studies used gesture-based serious games to evaluate the performance of elderly participants in rehabilitation tasks. This highlights the need for creating an evaluation protocol for older adults to provide a user-friendly interface according to the user’s age and limitations. Conclusions Through this study, we conclude this field is in need of a usability evaluation method for serious games, especially games for older adults, and that the definition of a methodology and a test protocol may offer the user more comfort, welfare, and confidence.
Non-Perturbative Evaluation of the Effective Potential of λϕ4 Theory at Finite Temperature in the Super-Daisy Approximation

We calculate the effective potential of ). 4>4 theory at finite temperature in the super-daisy approximation, after expressing its derivative with respect to the mass square in terms of the full propagator. This expression becomes a self-consistent equation for the derivative of the effective potential. We find the phase transition is first order in this approximation. We compare our result with those of previous studies.
Creating CHOIS: A Recovery-Oriented PROMIS-Based Measure for Mental Health Screening and Outcomes

The National Institutes of Health Patient Reported Outcomes Medical Information System (PROMIS) measures a few important domains of mental health, but does not yet measure some other important psychiatric symptoms, nor does it include recovery factors and strengths such as social connectedness, self-esteem, and coping ability. The CHOIS is a recovery-oriented PROMIS-based instrument designed to supplement traditional PROMIS administration by attempting to fill in these gaps in mental health assessment. It was cre ated for settings that do not primarily focus on mental health issues such as primary care, non-psychiatric hospitals, and substance abuse services. It adds specific symptoms of mental disorders based on DSM-IV-TR, positive recovery factors that were drawn from focus groups of people with mental illnesses, andresponse inconsistency indicators. We first implemented the measure across 13 Alcohol and Drug Services programs as a screening measure and outcomes tool, and measured internal consistency of the scales among a wide variety of participants. Among the 3,712 people who completed the measure, the internal consistency of the scales was as follows: Depression . 93, Anxiety . 89, Anger . 87, Psychosis . 79, Cognition . 71, and Recovery Factors . 90. All of the scales were significantly correlated with functional limitations and wanting help for mental health issues. The CHOIS could become an important tool for allowing valid and comprehensive immediate use of the still-developing PROMIS in a variety of settings as a mental health screening and outcomes instrument. It works seamlessly as a supplement to the entire PROMIS outcomes system that measures other important health constructs, and creates a more recovery-oriented focus for healthcare systems, even in non-psychiatric settings.
The tie that divides: Cross‐national evidence of the primacy of partyism

Using evidence from Great Britain, the United States, Belgium and Spain, it is demonstrated in this article that in integrated and divided nations alike, citizens are more strongly attached to political parties than to the social groups that the parties represent. In all four nations, partisans discriminate against their opponents to a degree that exceeds discrimination against members of religious, linguistic, ethnic or regional out-groups. This pattern holds even when social cleavages are intense and the basis for prolonged political conflict. Partisan animus is conditioned by ideological proximity; partisans are more distrusting of parties furthest from them in the ideological space. The effects of partisanship on trust are eroded when partisan and social ties collide. In closing, the article considers the reasons that give rise to the strength of ‘partyism’ in modern democracies.