Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Psychometric characteristics of the parsimonious Chinese version of the Smoking Self-Efficacy Survey (CSSES-20).

BACKGROUND Cigarette smoking is a health-risk behavior of global proportions. Self-efficacy plays an important role in both smoking acquisition and smoking resistance. Reliability and validity of an instrument is fundamental to research results, particularly in its simplified form on a different population. The purpose of this study was to conduct psychometric testing on the parsimonious Chinese version of the Smoking Self-efficacy Survey (CSSES-20). METHODS The randomized cluster sample was drawn from 61 middle schools in Taipei City, Taiwan. Following a pilot test of the CSSES-20, the CSSES was administered to 571 adolescents. Construct validity was tested by the exploratory factor procedures and the contrasted group approach. Pearson correlation coefficients were used to examine the criterion validity and test-retest reliability for the stability of the scale. Cronbach's alpha coefficients were used to determine the internal consistency of the scale. RESULTS The exploratory factor analysis yields three components, "opportunity to smoke,""emotional stress," and "influence of friends," accounting for 80.4% of the total variances. The criterion validity was also supported by the study results. The contrasted group approaches affirmed the construct validity of the CSSES-20. Stability of scales was supported by test-retest reliability. Cronbach's alphas for 3 subscales ranged from . 90 to . 93. CONCLUSIONS A concise instrument can alleviate response burden for adolescent study participants and increase their recruitment and retention rates. The CSSES-20 demonstrated satisfactory construct validity, criterion validity, stability, and internal consistency reliability. These findings can be used to provide school teachers and nurses with information about the relationship between self-efficacy to resist smoking and adolescent smoking behavior.
Modular Species and Prime Ideals for the Ring of Monomial Representations of a Finite Group

The ring of monomial representations of a finite group has been investigated by Dress (1971) and Boltje (1990), among others. It is of interest in connection with induction theorems in representation theory. Its species have recently been determined by Boltje. In this article, we will analyze the block distribution of species. As an application, we will determine the prime ideals of the ring of monomial representations. The results here constitute a slightly modified version of part of the first author's Diplomarbeit (Fotsing, 2003), written under the direction of the second author.
Two New Loci, PLEIADE and HYADE, Implicate Organ-Specific Regulation of Cytokinesis in Arabidopsis1

In screens for regulators of root morphogenesis in Arabidopsis we isolated six new recessive mutants with irregular cell expansion. Complementation analyses placed the mutations in two loci, PLEIADE (PLE) andHYADE (HYA). Phenotypic analyses revealed multinucleated cells, cell wall stubs, and synchronized cell divisions in incompletely separated cells that are all characteristics of defective cytokinesis. These defects were pronounced in roots and undetectable in aerial organs. In addition, fertility and germination were not affected by the mutations. Thus, the alleles that we have isolated of PLE and HYA suggest that the genes may encode organ-specific components needed primarily during root development. Analysis of microtubule arrays during cell cycle inple and hya roots indicates that the presence of several synchronized nuclei influences the position of preprophase band, mitotic spindles, and phragmoplasts. The enhanced and synergistic phenotype ofPLE/ple.hya/hyaseedlings and double mutants point to a role of PLE andHYA in the same process. These mutants provide tools to elucidate the regulation of nuclear cytoskeletal interactions during cell division and cytokinesis.
Localization of age-related macular degeneration-associated ARMS2 in cytosol, not mitochondria.

PURPOSE To analyze the relationship between ARMS2 and HTRA1 in the association with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in an independent case-control dataset and to investigate the subcellular localization of the ARMS2 protein in an in vitro system. METHODS Two SNPs in ARMS2 and HTRA1 were genotyped in 685 cases and 269 controls by a genotyping assay. Allelic association was tested by a chi(2) test. A likelihood ratio test (LRT) of full versus reduced models was used to analyze the interaction between ARMS2 and smoking and HTRA1 and smoking, after adjustment for CFH and age. Immunofluorescence and immunoblot were applied to localize ARMS2 in retinal epithelial ARPE-19 cells and COS7 cell transfected by ARMS2 constructs. RESULTS Both significantly associated SNP rs10490924 and rs11200638 (P < 0.0001) are in strong linkage disequilibrium (LD; D' = 0.97, r(2) = 0.93) that generates virtually identical association test and odds ratios. In separate logistic regression models, the interaction effect for both smoking with ARMS2 and with HTRA1 was not statistically significant. Immunofluorescence and immunoblot show that both endogenous and exogenous ARMS2 are mainly distributed in the cytosol, not the mitochondria. Compared with the wild-type, ARMS2 A69S is more likely to be associated with the cytoskeleton in COS7 cells. CONCLUSIONS The significant associations in ARMS2 and HTRA1 are with polymorphisms in strong LD that confer virtually identical risks, preventing differentiation at the statistical level. ARMS2 was mainly distributed in the cytosol, not in the mitochondrial outer membrane as previously reported, suggesting that ARMS2 may not confer risk to AMD through the mitochondrial pathway.
Porcentaje de artículos altamente citados: una medida comparable del impacto de revistas entre campos científicos

Currently the two most used bibliometric indicators for evaluating scholarly journals are the impact factor and the h-index. However, both indicators vary heavily depending on the scientific field, restricting comparability. In addition, the impact factor is not robust in dealing with articles with a large number of citations, while the h-index is dependent on the size of the journal. These limitations, when comparing journals of different sizes and fields, make it necessary to look to other journal impact factors that can be comparable between scientific fields, that are independent of the journal size, and that are also robust in the presence of items with a high number of citations. An alternative index is based on the percentage of highly cited articles in a journal. This paper empirically compares such an index with the impact factor and the h-index by using different time windows and levels of citation that can determine when a document can be considered as highly cited compared to others of the same year and discipline. The main outcome of this comparison suggests that the best index for obtaining data distributions that are comparable between scientific fields is by taking the 20% citation percentile over a three-year time frame for considering citations.
A Generative Approach to Psychological and Educational Measurement.

Response generative modeling (RGM) is an approach to psychological measurement which involves a “grammar” capable of assigning a psychometric description to every item in a universe of items and is also capable of generating all the items in that universe. The purpose of this chapter is to: 1) elaborate on the rationale behind RGM; 2) review its roots and how it relates to current thinking on validity; and 3) assess its feasibility in a wide variety of domains. The chapter concludes with a brief review of possible theoretical approaches to a psychologically sound approach to test construction and modelling.
Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging of brain development in premature and mature newborns

Definition in the living premature infant of the anatomical and temporal characteristics of development of critical brain structures is crucial for insight into the time of greatest vulnerability of such brain structures. We used three‐dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (3D MRI) and image‐processing algorithms to quantitate total brain volume and total volumes of cerebral gray matter (GM), unmyelinated white matter (WM), myelinated WM, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in 78 premature and mature newborns (postconceptional age, 29–41 weeks). Total brain tissue volume was shown to increase linearly at a rate of 22 ml/wk. Total GM showed a linear increase in relative intracranial volume of approxi mately 1.4% or 15 ml in absolute volume per week. The pronounced increase in total GM reflected primarily a fourfold increase in cortical GM. Unmyelinated WM was found to be the most prominent brain tissue class in the preterm infant younger than 36 weeks of postconceptional age. Although minimal myelinated WM was present in the preterm infant at 29 weeks, between 35 and 41 weeks an abrupt fivefold increase in absolute volume of myelinated WM was documented. Extracerebral and intraventricular CSF was readily quantitated by this technique and found to change minimally. The application of 3D MRI and tissue segmentation to the study of human infant brain from 29 to 41 weeks of postconceptional age has provided new insights into cerebral cortical development and myelination and has for the first time provided means of quantitative assessment in vivo of early human brain development.
English Feminism, 1780-1980

CHRONOLOGY INTRODUCTION 1. Feminism and the Rights of Women Socia change and sexual difference in the late eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft and the origins of modern Feminism Feminism and the Woman question 2. Feminism and the Women Question in the early Nineteenth Century Men in feminism: William Thompson and the Unitarian radicals The tragic tale of Caroline Norton Harriet Martineau and the slow development of feminist consciousness Feminism, Evangelicalism, and 'Women's sphere' 3. Mid-Victorian Feminism The Langham Place circle and the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft Feminism, liberalism, and the problem of sexual oppression Feminist campaigns and feminist strategies Nation and empire in Victorian feminism 4. The New Woman and the Militant Feminism and the new woman Feminism, the labour movement, and working-class women Militancy Feminism and imperialism 5. Feminism and the Woman Citizen in the Inter-War Years The legacy of War A feminist programme Training women for citizenship Feminist questions and party politics From politics to culture: feminist theory in the 1920s and 1930s Feminism and internationalism 6. The Post-War World The impact of war Feminist organizations and the feminist agenda The woman question in the 1950s and 1960s AFTERWORD: FROM FEMINISM TO FEMINISMS NOTES SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX
Talking Helps: Evolving Communicating Agents for the Predator-Prey Pursuit Problem

We analyze a general model of multi-agent communication in which all agents communicate simultaneously to a message board. A genetic algorithm is used to evolve multi-agent languages for the predator agents in a version of the predator-prey pursuit problem. We show that the resulting behavior of the communicating multi-agent system is equivalent to that of a Mealy finite state machine whose states are determined by the agents' usage of the evolved language. Simulations show that the evolution of a communication language improves the performance of the predators. Increasing the language size (and thus increasing the number of possible states in the Mealy machine) improves the performance even further. Furthermore, the evolved communicating predators perform significantly better than all previous work on similar prey. We introduce a method for incrementally increasing the language size, which results in an effective coarse-to-fine search that significantly reduces the evolution time required to find a solution. We present some observations on the effects of language size, experimental setup, and prey difficulty on the evolved Mealy machines. In particular, we observe that the start state is often revisited, and incrementally increasing the language size results in smaller Mealy machines. Finally, a simple rule is derived that provides a pessimistic estimate on the minimum language size that should be used for any multi-agent problem.
Alcances y límites del análisis de redes sociales en la actualidad: una reflexión sobre tres deseables extensiones

El analisis de redes sociales (ARS) ha experimentado un crecimiento incesante en los ultimos anos, generando expectativas de consolidacion que exceden nuestra capacidad reflexiva. En este articulo he abordado dos tipos de limitaciones devenidas de distintas etapas de cualquier proceso investigativo. Por un lado hago referencia a perspectivas epistemologicas que implican ciertas limitaciones al momento de pensar la investigacion sobre redes sociales. Por el otro, tengo en cuenta algunas imposibilidades surgidas del desarrollo practico del software y de los dispositivos y heuristicas de calculo usados. En particular, destaco aqui las cuestiones relacionadas con la ausencia de una perspectiva temporal en ARS, con el uso de la intuicion naturalista en la representacion de las redes y con la suposicion de la aleatoriedad relacional como la norma tipica en las redes que de forma empirica existen.
Kinship, Emigration, and Trade Partnership among the Lebanese of West Africa

Opening Paragraph This article describes the kinship structure of some Lebanese communities in West Africa, and the resemblances they bear to the communities from which they originated in Lebanon. It also shows the extent to which kinship ties promote emigration, and the kind of trade partnership normally practised by kinsmen. Two communities are considered: the Greek Orthodox community in Ouagadougou (Upper Volta), and the Shi'ite Muslim community in Magburaka (Sierra Leone). Résumé PARENTÉ, ÉMIGRATION ET ASSOCIATION COMMERCIALE CHEZ LES LIBANAIS DE L'AFRIQUE DE L'OUEST Les rapports de parenté sont si efficaces pour favoriser l'émigration chez les Libanais que la structure de la parenté qui caractérise les communautés au Liban apparaît dans celles qui émigrent en Afrique de l'Ouest. Dans des conditions favorables, une communauté d'émigrants constitue une parenté parmi les lignages présents dans la communauté de parents dont elle dérive. Ceci s'applique à la fois aux communautés d'émigrants chrétiens et musulmans. Elles diffèrent selon les relations, vis-à-vis des émigrants, dont chaque communauté est le garant. Des membres de la famille nucléaire sont également impliqués, mais les deux communautés diffèrent dans leur façon de garantir d'autrés alliés. Les garants musulmans donnent la priorité aux relations de consanguinité, les chrétiens aux relations d'affinité. Sur huit personnes garanties en dehors de la famille nucléaire, sept sont liées par le lignage à leurs répondants Shi'ite. Sur neuf chrétiens, un seul est lié par le lignage à son répondant, les autres étant des affins. La difference peut au moins en partie être attribuée à des lois de succession différentes et à la mesure dans laquelle chaque communauté a adopté les institutions de l'Ouest africain. En Afrique, le répondant et son protégé entrent en association. Une association basée sur le commerce contient la source de tensions futures. Des parents se trouvent done en compétition à la fois dans leur vie sociale et leur vie d'hommes d'affaires, alors que la coopération s'impose à eux comme une forme d'idéal. Dès lors, une attitude ambivalente caractérise les relations entre les Libanais apparentés vivant en Afrique. L'auteur a l'impression que les querelles entre les Libanais apparentés sont plus fréquentes à l'étranger qu'au Liban. C'est que les agents responsables de l'application des normes culturelles, qui évitent les querelles au Liban, sont absents en Afrique.
Achieving middleware customization in a configuration-based development environment: experience with the Aster prototype

Middleware configurations provide a means to make accessible a wide range of applications on a (possibly large) distributed heterogeneous platform. However, as new application areas appear, middleware configurations will have to evolve to accommodate those new applications' needs. This paper discusses the implementation of the Aster development environment that realizes automatic configuration of middleware which are customized to the applications' needs from the standpoint of provided non-functional properties (e.g., fault-tolerance, security). The environment relies on two main tools. The first tool retrieves the software constituting the middleware that meets application requirements, by means of software specification matching. The second tool implements the interfacing of the application's software components with the customized middleware. Interfacing is discussed in the framework of the CORBA environment, hence addressing construction of customized middleware on top of an ORB, possibly using common object services specified by the OMG.
Requirements prioritisation: an experiment on exhaustive pair-wise comparisons versus planning game partitioning

The process of selecting the right set of requirements for a product release is highly dependent on how well we succeed in prioritising the requirements candidates. There are different techniques available for requirements prioritisation, some more elaborate than others. In order to compare different techniques, a controlled experiment was conducted with the objective of understanding differences regarding time consumption, ease of use, and accuracy. The requirements prioritisation techniques compared in the experiment are the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and a variation of the planning game (PG), isolated from extreme programming. The subjects were 15 Ph.D. students and one professor, who prioritised mobile phone features using both methods. It was found that the straightforward and intuitive PG was less time consuming, and considered by the subjects as easier to use, and more accurate than AHP (Less)
Context-aware MapReduce for Geo-distributed Big Data

MapReduce is an effective distributed programming model used in cloud computing for large-scale data analysis applications. Hadoop, the most known and used open-source implementation of the MapReduce model, assumes that every node in a cluster has the same computing capacity and that data are local to tasks. However, in many real big data applications where data may be located in many datacenters distributed over the planet these assumptions do not hold any longer, thus affecting Hadoop performance. This paper addresses this point, by proposing a hierarchical MapReduce programming model where a toplevel scheduling system is aware of the underlying computing contexts heterogeneity. The main idea of the approach is to improve the job processing time by partitioning and redistributing the workload among geo-distributed workers: this is done by adequately monitoring the bottom-level computing and networking context.
Gender bias in health research: implications for women's health in Kerala (India) and Sri Lanka

Indian state of Kerala, and Sri Lanka have a special place in global health discourses, although there has been a relatively little systematic analysis of women's health in these societies. Moreover, there are a number of dimensions of women's health that have been underappreciated by public health researchers and development experts due to systematic gender biases in health research. This article seeks to provide a more complete picture of women's health in Kerala and Sri Lanka by explicitly addressing three key gender biases: inattention to health issues that particularly affect women, incomplete approaches to understanding the health of women and insufficient attention paid to the interactions between gender and other social stratification, such as class, ethnicity or caste.
Imaging of the Building Contours with Through the Wall UWB Radar System

Any actual information about a building interior can be very useful before entering a dangerous area. It can be used to plan strategies in many rescue and security applications. The paper deals with imaging of the inner and outer building contours from the outside using through the wall UWB radar. The whole processing chain for obtaining the contours of a scanned building is explained. The image processing method of highlighting the building walls using Hough transform with assumed knowledge of the direction of walls is presented. The algorithm was tested on real measurement data acquired from a M-sequence UWB radar system.
Architecture and VLSI realization of a high-speed programmable decoder for LDPC convolutional codes

In this paper, we present a novel high-speed dual-core programmable decoder architecture for LDPC convolutional codes and their tail-biting versions. This architecture uses a modified Min-Sum algorithm and enables the decoding of a multitude of codes with different node degree distributions, rates and block lengths. We show how the parallelization concepts are derived using the properties of the bipartite graphs underlying the codes. Moreover, the hardware elements composing the architecture will be presented and analyzed in detail. The programmability of the decoder is also considered. Finally, we present the synthesis results for a prototype ASIC which is capable of achieving high decoding throughput still with very high flexibility, relatively low power consumption and small area.
Entscheidungsprozess zur Familiengründung in Partnerschaften

Zusammenfassung Obwohl der Ubergang in die Elternschaft als Ergebnis einer sozialen Interaktion und damit als Ergebnis eines Entscheidungsprozesses zwischen zwei Individuen im Kontext einer Partnerschaft verstanden werden kann, existieren bisher kaum gesicherte Forschungserkenntnisse auf der Paarebene. Dieses betrifft erstens die relative Bedeutsamkeit der Kinderwunschebzw. Dispositionen beider Partner fur die generative Entscheidung, zweitens die wechselseitige Beeinflussung beider Partner im Entscheidungsprozess und drittens die Relevanz der biographischen Kontexte beider Partner fur die eigene Disposition sowie fur die des Partners. Im Folgenden wird ein nicht-lineares simultanes Probit-Modell vorgestellt, mit dem die relativen Effekte im innerpartnerschaftlichen Entscheidungsprozess zur Familiengrundung geschatzt werden konnen. Als Datengrundlage dient das Bamberger Ehepaar-Panel. Die Ergebnisse des Modells zeigen einen gleichwertigen Einfluss der Dispositionen beider Partner auf die Entscheidung, jedoch ungleiche Gewichte der Partner im Interaktions- bzw.Annaherungsprozess. Schlagworte: Entscheidungsprozess, Familiengrundung, nicht-lineares simultanes Probit-Modell ----- The decision-making process within relationships prior to starting a family Abstract The transition to parenthood can be viewed as the result of social interaction. It signifies the outcome of a decision-making process of two individuals in a relationship. Nevertheless, little research has, so far, looked into how the interpersonal couple level influences the decision. What needs to be considered here is, firstly, the relative importance of both partners’ desire to have a child, or the partners’ disposition towards reproduction. Secondly, the reciprocal influence ,of both partners on each other within the decision-making process, and thirdly the relevance of both partners’ biographical background with regard to their respective decisions and disposition must be assessed. In this article, a nonlinear simultaneous probit model is introduced, with the help of which the relative effects of the decisionmaking process within the relationship can be estimated. The analysis is based on the “Bamberg Married Couples Panel”. The results of the model show an equal influence of both partners’ dispositions on the decision itself. However, they also demonstrate different levels of influence of the partners within the process of interaction and convergence. Keywords: decision-making process, starting a family, nonlinear simultaneous probit model