Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Media Dialogue: Perceiving and Addressing Community Problems

Scholars have long debated the role of media and discussion in encouraging tolerance and engagement in politics and community. Theories range from the dismissal of effects to the assertion of powerful influences, and from claims of "media malaise" to the promise of "virtuous circles. " Of course, results from research exploring these issues vary by context and methods of study. Yet most past research is plagued by at least 1 of 2 methodological weaknesses: the difficulty of assessing causality in cross-sectional survey designs and/or of attributing the observed effects to information gains rather than to the deliberative process itself. Acknowledging these weaknesses, we rely on data from a quasi-experimental study examining a media dialogue effort. In this study, randomly selected public television members and partners were recruited into various forms of "real world" exposure and discussion about the documentary film Two Towns of Jasper. This documentary highlights the divisions in Jasper, Texas following the racial killing of James Byrd, Jr., who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck by 3 White men. Controlling for a wide range of preexisting differences, including past political discussion and participation, we compared individuals who had different experiences of the intervention. Results reveal that media consumption was positively related with willingness to discuss the issue of race and participate politically around this issue. Above and beyond media consumption, participation in a heterogeneous citizen's forum that discussed the documentary contributed to awareness of racism, as well as increased willingness to further discuss and participate on this issue. This article highlights the importance of citizen dialogue in combination with media consumption for engagement, and suggests an alterative to forums such as citizen juries, study circles, and deliberative polls.
US Economic Sanctions: Their Impact on Trade, Jobs, and Wages

Economic sanctions have resurfaced at the center of public policy debate. After a brief lull following the politically disastrous grain embargo and pipeline sanctions in the early 1980s, sanctions are once again the weapon of choice to enforce a myriad of US foreign policy goals, from countering terrorism to battling drug trafficking. A recent National Association of Manufacturers (1997) study lists over 30 countries hit by new US sanctions during the period 1993-1996. Many of these actions were unilateral, reducing their impact in an increasingly globalized economy that has many alternative suppliers and markets. High-publicity initiatives, such as the Helms-Burton Act and the Iran/Libya Sanctions Act, which threaten to punish third-country corporations that conduct business in Cuba, Iran, and Libya, also raise the possibility that frustrated OECD governments (such as Canada and France) will retaliate against US companies.
Extraction and Analysis of Chinese Microblog Topics from Sina

Nowadays Micro-blog as a widely used medium platform, its diverse features meet the people's information, interpersonal information and other aspects of the new requirements. There are many research articles which explore and study the Micro-blogs, especially the English micro-blogging, i.e., twitter. However, Chinese micro-blog service starts rather late and a few research is about its data and characteristics. In this paper we present our observations on tweets and users from Sina by crawling 14 topics and their 74,662 tweets. We study the properties of mirco-blogs grouped by topics, including the number of users and micro-blogs, the number of actual active users, the topic evolution in a certain interval. We find that not the more users indicate the higher level of attention degree of a tweet. It depends on the relationship between the number of users and the number of tweets. In addition, we conclude that the active period of most micro-blog topics is about a month and the out-dated topics will be replaced by the upcoming and related new topics.
CD4+ T cells that enter the draining lymph nodes after antigen injection participate in the primary response and become central–memory cells

We explored the relationship between the time of naive CD4+ T cell exposure to antigen in the primary immune response and the quality of the memory cells produced. Naive CD4+ T cells that migrated into the skin-draining lymph nodes after subcutaneous antigen injection accounted for about half of the antigen-specific population present at the peak of clonal expansion. These late-arriving T cells divided less and more retained the central–memory marker CD62L than the T cells that resided in the draining lymph nodes at the time of antigen injection. The fewer cell divisions were related to competition with resident T cells that expanded earlier in the response and a reduction in the number of dendritic cells displaying peptide–major histocompatibility complex (MHC) II complexes at later times after antigen injection. The progeny of late-arriving T cells possessed the phenotype of central–memory cells, and proliferated more extensively during the secondary response than the progeny of the resident T cells. The results suggest that late arrival into lymph nodes and exposure to antigen-presenting cells displaying lower numbers of peptide–MHC II complexes in the presence of competing T cells ensures that some antigen-specific CD4+ T cells divide less in the primary response and become central–memory cells.
Random early marking for Internet congestion control

We present an optimization approach to rate based flow control. The initial context of this approach was as a rate based flow control in ATM networks. We describe techniques that enable us to implement this flow control in an explicit congestion notification capable TCP/IP network. These techniques require only minimal changes to existing TCP host behaviour, and RED active queue management routers. We call the collection of techniques random early marking (REM). We present the results of a simulation study that looks at the dynamic behaviour of REM and compares it to that of TCP-ECN with RED and DropTail queue management.
The fallacy of the null-hypothesis significance test.

The theory of probability and statistical inference is various things to various people. To the mathematician, it is an intricate formal calculus, to be explored and developed with little professional concern for any empirical significance that might attach to the terms and propositions involved. To the philosopher, it is an embarrassing mystery whose justification and conceptual clarification have remained stubbornly refractory to philosophical insight. (A famous philosophical epigram has it that induction [a special case of statistical inference] is the glory of science and the scandal of philosophy.) To the experimental scientist, however, statistical inference is a research instrument, a processing device by which unwieldy masses of raw data may be refined into a product more suitable for assimilation into the corpus of science, and in this lies both strength and weakness. It is strength in that, as an ultimate consumer of statistical methods, the experimentalist is in position to demand that the techniques made available to him conform to his actual needs. But it is also weakness in that, in his need for the tools constructed by a highly technical formal discipline, the experimentalist, who has specialized along other lines, seldom feels competent to extend criticisms or even comments; he is much more likely to make unquestioning application of procedures learned more or less by rote from persons assumed to be more knowledgeable of statistics than he. There is, of course, nothing surprising
PARALLEL EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS: A REVIEW

Dept. of Applied Informatics,University of Macedonia,Egnatias 156, Thessaloniki, Greece GR-540 06Email: adamidis@uom.grAbstractDuring recent years the area of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) in general and the field of ParallelEvolutionary Algorithms (PEA) in particular has matured up to a point, where the application to acomplex real-world problem in some applied science is now potentially feasible and to the benefit of bothfields. The availability of faster and cheaper parallel computers makes it possible to apply EAs to largepopulations and very complex populations. This paper presents a review of current implementationtechniques for EAs on parallel hardware.
A 9-DoF Wheelchair-Mounted Robotic Arm System: Design, Control, Brain-Computer Interfacing, and Testing

A wheelchair-mounted robotic arm (WMRA) system was designed and built to meet the needs of mobility-impaired persons with limitations of upper extremities, and to exceed the capabilities of current devices of this type. The control of this 9-DoF system expands on the conventional control methods and combines the 7-DoF robotic arm control with the 2-DoF power wheelchair control. The 3-degrees of redundancy are optimized to effectively perform activities of daily living (ADLs) and combine wheelchair mobility and arm manipulation to overcome singularities, joint limits and some workspace limitations. The control system is designed for teleoperated or autonomous coordinated Cartesian control, and it offers expandability for future research. Several interchangeable user interfaces were implemented in the design, including a Brain Computer Interface (BCI). That BCI system was modified and integrated to the control of the WMRA system for users who are totally paralyzed or “locked-in” and cannot use conventional augmentative technologies, all of which require some measure of muscle control. Testing and data collection were performed on human subjects, and the design, various optimized control methods and test results are presented in this paper. According to the 2006 US Census Bureau report (US Census Bureau, 2002), about 51.2 million Americans (18.1 percent of the US population) had some level of disability and 32.5 million of them (11.5 percent) had a severe disability. About 10.7 million Americans older than 6 years of age needed personal assistance with one or more activities of daily living (ADL). This work focuses on people who have limited or no upper extremity mobility due to spinal cord injury or dysfunction, or genetic predispositions, or people who are “lockedin” (e.g., by end-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, brainstem stroke, or severe polyneuropathy). Robotic aides used in these applications may vary from advanced limb orthosis to robotic arms (Reswick, 1990). A wheelchair mounted robotic arm can enhance the manipulation capabilities of individuals with disabilities that are using power wheelchairs, and reduce dependence on human aides. 3
Model Averaging for Improving Inference from Causal Diagrams

Model selection is an integral, yet contentious, component of epidemiologic research. Unfortunately, there remains no consensus on how to identify a single, best model among multiple candidate models. Researchers may be prone to selecting the model that best supports their a priori, preferred result; a phenomenon referred to as “wish bias”. Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), based on background causal and substantive knowledge, are a useful tool for specifying a subset of adjustment variables to obtain a causal effect estimate. In many cases, however, a DAG will support multiple, sufficient or minimally-sufficient adjustment sets. Even though all of these may theoretically produce unbiased effect estimates they may, in practice, yield somewhat distinct values, and the need to select between these models once again makes the research enterprise vulnerable to wish bias. In this work, we suggest combining adjustment sets with model averaging techniques to obtain causal estimates based on multiple, theoretically-unbiased models. We use three techniques for averaging the results among multiple candidate models: information criteria weighting, inverse variance weighting, and bootstrapping. We illustrate these approaches with an example from the Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition (PIN) study. We show that each averaging technique returns similar, model averaged causal estimates. An a priori strategy of model averaging provides a means of integrating uncertainty in selection among candidate, causal models, while also avoiding the temptation to report the most attractive estimate from a suite of equally valid alternatives.
Rare beneficial mutations can halt Muller's ratchet

The vast majority of mutations are deleterious, and are eliminated by purifying selection. Yet in finite asexual populations, purifying selection cannot completely prevent the accumulation of deleterious mutations due to Muller's ratchet: once lost by stochastic drift, the most-fit class of genotypes is lost forever. If deleterious mutations are weakly selected, Muller's ratchet turns into a mutational "meltdown" leading to a rapid degradation of population fitness. Evidently, the long term stability of an asexual population requires an influx of beneficial mutations that continuously compensate for the accumulation of the weakly deleterious ones. Here we propose that the stable evolutionary state of a population in a static environment is a dynamic mutation-selection balance, where accumulation of deleterious mutations is on average offset by the influx of beneficial mutations. We argue that this state exists for any population size N and mutation rate $U$. Assuming that beneficial and deleterious mutations have the same fitness effect s, we calculate the fraction of beneficial mutations, \epsilon, that maintains the balanced state. We find that a surprisingly low \epsilon suffices to maintain stability, even in small populations in the face of high mutation rates and weak selection. This may explain the maintenance of mitochondria and other asexual genomes, and has implications for the expected statistics of genetic diversity in these populations.
Learning from the best : improving learning through effective teacher policies

An education system is only as good as its teachers. Both developed and developing countries have increasingly become concerned with increasing the effectiveness of their teachers. Successful education systems achieve the eight SABER-Teacher teacher policy goals in different ways, but they all produce superior student and teacher performance. The World Bank has studied top-performing systems. These systems are particularly effective at attracting the best individuals to the teaching profession and preparing them exceptionally. Once teachers enter the profession, the system grants them ample discretion to decide how to best achieve superior student performance and focuses on supporting them rather than trying to steer them in any particular direction. Finland provides a good example of this type of system. These systems also place considerable trust in teachers. Such systems are built on the notion that excellent teaching is not the responsibility of a single instructor, but rather, of the profession as a whole. Thus, they institute mechanisms that foster collaboration and encourage teachers to hold their peers accountable for the quality of their work. Shanghai, China, offers a good example of this type of system. These systems exert tight control over teachers' daily work in the classroom. They provide teachers with detailed guidelines, closely monitor the execution of these guidelines, and use multiple incentives to reward outstanding teaching. At the same time, accountability mechanisms tackle poor teacher effort and performance.
Is a large-scale field operational test the missing link for commercial success and deployment of co-operative systems?

CVIS, Safespot and COOPERS — the three IPs on co-operative services and integrated systems in Europe's Framework Programme 6 — have successfully accomplished significant progress in terms of sounding-out what is technologically feasible and valued by selected European drivers. In a next step, EC has successfully called for large-scale FOTs on co-operative services. However, the concept of a large-scale field operational test on co-operative services is not only a new project-type within European telematics research and deployment but is itself an instrument for setting the scene and lobbying for specific stakeholders' interests. The resulting concept-space for field operational tests is however not yet entirely clear. The purpose of this paper is to draw a landscape of what is out there in terms of competing concepts for field operational tests in order to make large-scale FOTs on co-operative services an attractive work environment for the best key individuals — who are currently rather shying away or on inner retreats. This is highly important and claimed to be the key question on marketing co-operative services in the years to come. We first describe the situation in Europe from a strategic gap analysis — the perspective of Geoffrey Moore's concept of “inside the tornado” or in more general terms from a diffusion-of-innovation-theory point of view. We then discuss different stakeholder groups' emerging strategies to shape and influence the concept of field operational tests for co-operative services and systems. Given the limited space we present six rather different concepts on how a field operational test obviously is seen. From a discussion of these different approaches we prepare the ground for condensing the perspective on what is helpful or more helpful for cooperative systems from a take-up and deployment perspective. We elaborate on a first SWOT analysis of the given European status quo.
Vasoactive Intestinal Polypeptide Mediates Circadian Rhythms in Mammalian Olfactory Bulb and Olfaction

Accumulating evidence suggests that the olfactory bulbs (OBs) function as an independent circadian system regulating daily rhythms in olfactory performance. However, the cells and signals in the olfactory system that generate and coordinate these circadian rhythms are unknown. Using real-time imaging of gene expression, we found that the isolated olfactory epithelium and OB, but not the piriform cortex, express similar, sustained circadian rhythms in PERIOD2 (PER2). In vivo, PER2 expression in the OB of mice is circadian, approximately doubling with a peak around subjective dusk. Furthermore, mice exhibit circadian rhythms in odor detection performance with a peak at approximately subjective dusk. We also found that circadian rhythms in gene expression and odor detection performance require vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) or its receptor VPAC2R. VIP is expressed, in a circadian manner, in interneurons in the external plexiform and periglomerular layers, whereas VPAC2R is expressed in mitral and external tufted cells in the OB. Together, these results indicate that VIP signaling modulates the output from the OB to maintain circadian rhythms in the mammalian olfactory system.
Quality of Marriage of University Students in Relation to Sources of Financial Support and Demographic Characteristics.

Quality of marriage of students at a midwestern university is assessed in relation to sources of financial support and certain demographic characteristics. Self-report measures indicated overall quality of marriage to be high. Statistical measures found quality of marriage to be significantly higher if both spouses were enrolled simultaneously and if couples did not depend on loans as a source of income. Quality of marriage was significantly lower if the wife only was enrolled or if the couple depended on her earnings as a major source of income.
IN-BAND WIRELESS BACKHAUL USING SDR FOR RURAL CELLULAR SYSTEMS

This paper describes an SDR-based wireless backhaul system for a cellular radio access network. Backhaul is the data connection between base stations in the field and the operator's switch or network. In-band backhaul is a wireless data link that uses the cellular spectrum already licensed by the operator, as opposed to licensed microwave or unlicensed spectrum. The innovative feature of the Vanu in-band backhaul system is using SDR to support both cellular service to mobiles and backhaul communications simultaneously on shared processor, radio and antenna resources. No additional hardware is needed at most sites for the backhaul beyond that already installed for the cellular base station. We use an IDEN radio access network as a concrete example, and present results from proof of concept field trials of the backhaul system.
Configurable Politics and Asymmetric Integration: Health e-Infrastructures in India

Information Infrastructures typically evolve in an incremental fashion, through partly planned and unplanned processes. A significant mechanism of growth is when previously unconnected systems are integrated, facilitating the transition from networking to inter-networking. Conversely, failure to integrate systems contributes to the lack of evolution of the infrastructure. Integration seems crucial for evolving infrastructures; however, there is little consensus on what it entails, as can be seen when different connotations of ‘integration” are unpacked. In contrast to the dominant view of integration as a largely technical concern, our focus is on how political and institutional interests are embedded in efforts to achieve integration. More specifically, we explore strategies for institutional integration that take into account uneven distribution of political influence. The paper builds on empirical material from our ongoing (2001 – 2008) involvement with the problem of fragmented information systems in the health care sector in India. The case is seen from the perspective of one small actor offering free, open-source software that is already being used in several other developing countries. Choosing to focus on a small actor highlights the asymmetric power relations among the actors; our actor has no other option than to seek to align with bigger and more influential actors. We analyse the strategies, the configurable politics, and the outcomes of the distinct configurations that emerge from this form of asymmetric integration.
Packet size optimization for multi hop CDMA wireless sensor networks with nearest neighbors based routing

Power conservation is one of the most important issues in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, where nodes are likely to rely on limited battery power. In this paper we evaluate multi-hop based data transmission performance of a static CDMA wireless sensor network (WSN), where the positions of nodes are random. Data generated from the source node is received by the sink via multi hop, where an intermediate node in the route selects the nearest node within a sector angle, considered as search angle, towards the direction of the destination as the next hop. Optimization of transmitted data packet in present WSN is considered using the objective function, resource utilization, which has importance in case of delay sensitive WSN. From this frame work, the optimal packet sizes under various network parameters are estimated.
Community change and species richness reductions in rapidly advancing tree lines

Climate change is causing shifts in the range of species worldwide. In high‐altitude areas forests are often observed to be shifting their upper limits to higher altitudes in response to warming temperatures. Although this phenomenon is well described, the possible consequences of this for the wider forest community have not been fully considered. In this study, we used epiphytic macro‐lichens to investigate the impacts of tree line advance on associated organisms. We hypothesized that the rate of forest advance should influence the species richness and composition of associated communities.
Gender Politics in Brazil and Chile: The Role of Parties in National and Local Policymaking

List of Tables Glossary List of Brazilian States Acknowledgements Introduction Gendered and Gendering Parties PART 1: BRAZIL Porous Parties, Permeable State The Workers' Party, Gender and Feminism O Modo Petista : Local Level Gender Policy PART 2: CHILE In Their Place: The Political Uses of Women Between Ideologies: The National Women's Ministry Decentralization Deficits: Delivering Policy at the Local Level Comparisons and Conclusions Notes and References Index