Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The rules of violence: a perspective from youth living in South African townships

Levels of violence and violent crime amongst young people in South Africa are extraordinarily high and, on the surface at least, evidence of lawlessness and a moral crisis. Responding to historian Eric Hobsbawm's 1969 assertion that in order to assuage increasing lawlessness, there is a need to identify the social uses and rules governing violence, this paper explores the settings, forms and experiences of violence amongst a group of 37 post-Apartheid black youth living in an impoverished township in Cape Town. It discusses five apparent rules of violence that emerged from an analysis of youths' accounts of violence that include using violence to defend dignity, the importance of social positions in using violence, violence as means of social sanction in the absence of institutional action, the rules of revenge and valuing the threat of violence over violence itself. The paper offers Swartz's nascent theory of moral capital as an extension of Hobsbawm's theory. It argues that the presence of rules in the midst of violent behaviour does not just mean that lawlessness in society is not increasing – a deficit view. Instead, moral capital argues that young people's use of rules to govern violence may be viewed as a social asset that demonstrates their somewhat rational decision-making despite adverse contexts.
Voter Responses to Negative Political Ads

b Political advertising has been accused of the selling of candidates like soap, the creation of candidate images which bear no relation to reality and the destruction of the political system by emphasizing personalities over issues. ' Now critics of political advertising have found additional fuel for their arguments in the so-called "negative" advertising of the recent campaigns. The present research seeks to examine voters' perceptions of negative political advertising and to investigate the potential impact of the advertising on various subsets of the electorate. Although the term "negative political advertising" and its synonyms have made their way into politicians' tactical plans, and consequently into both news and editorial sections of the media, the concept itself has seldom been defined. In their research on "direct reference" political advertising, Surlin and Gordon2 operationalized the genre as advertising which attacks the other candidate personally, the issues for which the other candidate stands, or the party of the other candidate. One objective of this study is to provide voters a role in defining the concept.
Effects of Perception of Job Stress and Stress Coping Style on Mental Health of Firefighters

Purpose: This study was conducted to identify factors which influence mental health of firefighters. Methods: Participants in this study were firefighters from D city who were doing activities like extinguishing fire or rescuing sufferer at fire or accident scenes. A survey was conducted from September 14 to 24, 2010. Research tools were perception of job stress, problems-focused coping, seeking social support, emotion-focused coping, and wishful thinking coping which are sub-domain of coping stress, and SCL-90-R. Data were analyzed using SPSS/WIN 14.0, and included t-test, one-way ANOVA, and Scheffe back-testing. Pearson's correlation coefficient and stepwise multiple regression were also conducted to identify factors influencing mental health. Results: Mental health was positively correlated with perception of job stress, emotion-focused coping, and wishful thinking coping. Effective variables were perception of job stress (β=.38, p<.001), emotion-focused coping (β=.28, p<.001), and problemfocused coping (β=-.15, p = .012). These variables explained 26% of the variance in mental health. Conclusion: The results suggest that improvements in problem-focused coping and decreases in perception of job stress and emotion-focused coping are important in promoting the mental health of firefighters.
Salicylic acid and reactive oxygen species interplay in the transcriptional control of defense genes expression

It is well established that salicylic acid (SA) plays a critical role in the transcriptional reprograming that occurs during the plant defense response against biotic and abiotic stress. In the course of the defense response, the transcription of different sets of defense genes is controlled in a spatio-temporal manner via SA-mediated mechanisms. Interestingly, different lines of evidence indicate that SA interplays with reactive oxygen species (ROS) and glutathione (GSH) in stressed plants. In this review we focus on the evidence that links SA, ROS, and GSH signals to the transcriptional control of defense genes. We discuss how redox modifications of regulators and co-regulators involved in SA-mediated transcriptional responses control the temporal patterns of gene expression in response to stress. Finally, we examine how these redox sensors are coordinated with the dynamics of cellular redox changes occurring in the defense response to biotic and abiotic stress.
Problem Gambling and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract There is evidence to suggest that a considerable subset of problem gamblers have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), with characteristic features of impulsivity and difficulty sustaining attention. The two disorders, problem gambling and ADHD, interact on various levels; for instance, gambling impulses are poorly controlled and ADHD symptoms such as chronic boredom, depression and low self-esteem are relieved by the stimulus and reward of gambling. This article outlines some of the clinical issues encountered in this population and uses case studies to illustrate common ways in which these clients present. Suggestions are made with regard to identification and assessment and it touches on interventions, including medication, therapy and the use of strategies to improve functioning and reduce impulsivity.
The Nature of Love

Much as been written about Harry Harlow’s controversial use of rhesus macaques as experimental subjects in his research on mother-infant bonds. On August 31, 1958, Harlow presented the results of his work in his presidential address at the Sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington, D. C. This talk was later published as a paper in the American Psychologist. This chapter is an excerpt from that paper and presents a fascinating perspective into Harlow’s views on human-macaque relations, animal sentience and ‘the nature of love’.
Redox Dysregulation Affects the Ventral But Not Dorsal Hippocampus: Impairment of Parvalbumin Neurons, Gamma Oscillations, and Related Behaviors

Elevated oxidative stress and alteration in antioxidant systems, including glutathione (GSH) decrease, are observed in schizophrenia. Genetic and functional data indicate that impaired GSH synthesis represents a susceptibility factor for the disorder. Here, we show that a genetically compromised GSH synthesis affects the morphological and functional integrity of hippocampal parvalbumin-immunoreactive (PV-IR) interneurons, known to be affected in schizophrenia. A GSH deficit causes a selective decrease of PV-IR interneurons in CA3 and dendate gyrus (DG) of the ventral but not dorsal hippocampus and a concomitant reduction of β/γ oscillations. Impairment of PV-IR interneurons emerges at the end of adolescence/early adulthood as oxidative stress increases or cumulates selectively in CA3 and DG of the ventral hippocampus. Such redox dysregulation alters stress and emotion-related behaviors but leaves spatial abilities intact, indicating functional disruption of the ventral but not dorsal hippocampus. Thus, a GSH deficit affects PV-IR interneuron's integrity and neuronal synchrony in a region- and time-specific manner, leading to behavioral phenotypes related to psychiatric disorders.
What I've Learned about Effective Reading Instruction

The District Role in Instructional Improvement Phi Delta Kappan September 2001 83: 78-84, What I've Learned about Effective Reading Instruction: From a Decade of Studying Exemplary Elementary Classroom Teachers Phi Delta Kappan. What I've learned about effective reading instruction from a decade of studying exemplary elementary teachers. Phi Beta Kappan, 83(10), 740-747. Burkins, J., & Croft, M. (2010). Preventing misguided reading: New strategies for guided reading teachers. Davies, A. (2007). Making classroom assessment work (2nd ed.).
Dynamic Resource Pricing and Scalable Cooperation for Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile cloud computing is a new paradigm to improve the quality of mobile services, which has drawn considerable attentions in both industrial and academic fields. In this paper, we consider the resource management and sharing problems for radio and computing resources to support mobile applications in mobile cloud computing. In such an environment, service providers can cooperate to form coalition to share their idle resources with each other. We propose a coalition game model based on two-sided matching theory. The coalition game model efficiently reflects the scalable cooperation among the service providers for sharing their idle resources. As a result, the resources can be better utilized and the quality of service for users can be improved. The simulation results indicate that our scheme can optimize the resource utilization and significantly improve the quality of service of the users.
Ideal Teacher Behaviors

Differences in students’ academic self-efficacy and motivation were examined in predicting preferred teacher traits. Undergraduates (261) completed the Teaching Behavior Checklist, Academic Self-Concept scale, and Academic Motivation scale. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that academic self-efficacy and extrinsic motivation explained 5–23% of incremental variance in the ideal traits of “caring” and “professional. ” Students who lacked self-efficacy clearly valued the “caring” trait in an ideal teacher. Extrinsically motivated students strongly endorsed the importance of an ideal teacher being “caring” (encouraging and compassionate) and “professional” (knowledgeable and confident). Implications for instructors include rewarding extrinsically motivated student by recognizing their performance and mentoring students who lack self-efficacy.
Low Level Ionic Current Sensing Micro-Tip

Many of the existing fingerprint biometric sensors have limitations with regard to liveness detection. At Brunel University research is being pursued with a view to developing novel fingerprint sensor based on micro/nano technology. In this paper, we report work in progress of a micro sensor capable of detecting ionic activity of sweat pores on a finger ridge. The multi-physics modeling software (COMSOL) was used to create an electrical model of the sensor and its response to charge coupling in conducting liquid was simulated. The experimental results obtained under various operating conditions agreed well with the simulation results.
Improving Negative Emotion Recognition in Young Offenders Reduces Subsequent Crime

Background Children with antisocial behaviour show deficits in the perception of emotional expressions in others that may contribute to the development and persistence of antisocial and aggressive behaviour. Current treatments for antisocial youngsters are limited in effectiveness. It has been argued that more attention should be devoted to interventions that target neuropsychological correlates of antisocial behaviour. This study examined the effect of emotion recognition training on criminal behaviour. Methods Emotion recognition and crime levels were studied in 50 juvenile offenders. Whilst all young offenders received their statutory interventions as the study was conducted, a subgroup of twenty-four offenders also took part in a facial affect training aimed at improving emotion recognition. Offenders in the training and control groups were matched for age, SES, IQ and lifetime crime level. All offenders were tested twice for emotion recognition performance, and recent crime data were collected after the testing had been completed. Results Before the training there were no differences between the groups in emotion recognition, with both groups displaying poor fear, sadness and anger recognition. After the training fear, sadness and anger recognition improved significantly in juvenile offenders in the training group. Although crime rates dropped in all offenders in the 6 months following emotion testing, only the group of offenders who had received the emotion training showed a significant reduction in the severity of the crimes they committed. Conclusions The study indicates that emotion recognition can be relatively easily improved in youths who engage in serious antisocial and criminal behavior. The results suggest that improved emotion recognition has the potential to reduce the severity of reoffending.
Migration to Rural Areas by HIV Patients Impact on HIV-Related Healthcare Use

Abstract Objective: To evaluate the impact of patient migration on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-related healthcare use in a rural setting. Design: Data were collected on all patients seeking medical care related to HIV infection at The University of Iowa HIV/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) clinic. Information was collected related to patient care, stage of illness, prior and current residence, and clinic and hospital use. Setting: An outpatient clinic in a university hospital offering primary and consultative medical care for persons with HIV infection. Patients: All patients scheduled into clinic reported a previous positive HIV serologic test. Results: Forty-five percent (81 of 181) of patients reported moving to Iowa, yet no more than 11% (n = 20) moved out of the state during the same period of observation. Of patients meeting the centers for Disease control criteria for AIDS, 24% were diagnosed prior to moving to Iowa (18 of 74). Twenty-seven percent of AIDS-related inpatient days of hospitalization and 19% of AIDS-related outpatient clinic visits were used by persons diagnosed in another state. Lifetime charges totalled for eight patients ranged from $24,873 to $232,556, with a mean of $109,934. Conclusions: A substantial portion of HIV related healthcare in our rural area was used by individuals who had migrated to or back to Iowa. Further understanding of the reasons for and the extent of HIV patient migration to rural areas is needed.
Epidemiological study to investigate potential interaction between physical and psychosocial factors at work that may increase the risk of symptoms of musculoskeletal disorder of the neck and upper limb

Objectives: To investigate potential interactions between physical and psychosocial risk factors in the workplace that may be associated with symptoms of musculoskeletal disorder of the neck and upper limb. Methods: 891 of 1514 manual handlers, delivery drivers, technicians, customer services computer operators, and general office staff reported on physical and psychosocial working conditions and symptoms of neck and upper limb disorders using a self administered questionnaire (59% return rate). Of the 869 valid questionnaire respondents, 564 workers were classified in to one of four exposure groups: high physical and high psychosocial, high physical and low psychosocial, low physical and high psychosocial, and low physical and low psychosocial. Low physical and low psychosocial was used as an internal reference group. The exposure criteria were derived from the existing epidemiological literature and models for physical and psychosocial work factors. The frequency and amplitude of lifting and the duration spent sitting while experiencing vibration were used as physical exposure criteria. Ordinal values of mental demands, job control, and social support with managers and coworkers were used as psychosocial exposure criteria. Results: In the multivariate analyses, the highest and significant increase in risk was found in the high physical and high psychosocial exposure group for symptoms of hand or wrist and upper limb disorders after adjusting for years at the job, age, and sex. A potential interaction effect was found for the symptoms of the hand or wrist and upper limb disorders but not for the neck symptoms. Conclusion: This study showed that workers highly exposed to both physical and psychosocial workplace risk factors were more likely to report symptoms of musculoskeletal disorders than workers highly exposed to one or the other. The results suggest an interaction between physical and psychosocial risk factors in the workplace that increased the risk of reporting symptoms in the upper limbs. Psychosocial risk factors at work were more important when exposure to physical risk factors at work were high than when physical exposure was low. Ergonomic intervention strategies that aim to minimise the risks of work related musculoskeletal disorders of the upper limb should not only focus on physical work factors but also psychosocial work factors.
LearNext: learning to predict tourists movements

In this paper, we tackle the problem of predicting the "next" geographical position of a tourist given her history (i.e., the prediction is done accordingly to the tourist's current trail) by means of supervised learning techniques, namely Gradient Boosted Regression Trees and Ranking SVM. The learning is done on the basis of an object space represented by a 68 dimension feature vector, specifically designed for tourism related data. Furthermore, we propose a thorough comparison of several methods that are considered state-of-the-art in touristic recommender and trail prediction systems as well as a strong popularity baseline. Experiments show that the methods we propose outperform important competitors and baselines thus providing strong evidence of the performance of our solutions.
Motion similarity measure between video sequences using multivariate time series modeling

The analysis and interpretation of video contents is an important component of modern vision applications such as surveillance, motion synthesis and web-based user interfaces. A requirement shared by these very different applications is the ability to learn statistical models of appearance and motion from a collection of videos, and then use them for recognizing actions or persons in a new video. Measuring the similarity and dissimilarity between video sequences is crucial in any video sequences analysis and decision-making process. Furthermore, many data analysis processes effectively deal with moving objects and need to compute the similarity between trajectories. In this paper, we propose a similarity measure for multivariate time series using the Euclidean distance based on Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models. The proposed approach allows us to identify and recognize actions of persons in video sequences. The performance of our methodology is tested on a real dataset.
OpenMP Programming on Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors: An Early Performance Comparison

The demand for more and more compute power is growing rapidly in many fields of research. Accelerators, like GPUs, are one way to fulfill these requirements, but they often require a laborious rewrite of the application using special programming paradigms like CUDA or OpenCL. The Intel R © Xeon Phi TM coprocessor is based on the Intel R © Many Integrated Core Architecture and can be programmed with standard techniques like OpenMP, POSIX threads, or MPI. It will provide high performance and low power consumption without the immediate need to rewrite an application. In this work, we focus on OpenMP*-style programming and evaluate the overhead of a selected subset of the language extensions for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors as well as the overhead of some selected standardized OpenMP constructs. With the help of simple benchmarks and a sparse CG kernel as it is used in many PDE solvers we assess if the architecture can run standard applications efficiently. We apply the Roofline model to investigate the utilization of the architecture. Furthermore, we compare the performance of a Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor system with the performance reached on a large SMP production system.
Multiple activation mechanisms of store‐operated TRPC channels in smooth muscle cells

Store‐operated channels (SOCs) are plasma membrane Ca2+‐permeable cation channels which are activated by agents that deplete intracellular Ca2+ stores. In smooth muscle SOCs are involved in contraction, gene expression, cell growth and proliferation. Single channel recording has demonstrated that SOCs with different biophysical properties are expressed in smooth muscle indicating diverse molecular identities. Moreover it is apparent that several gating mechanisms including calmodulin, protein kinase C and lysophospholipids are involved in SOC activation. Evidence is accumulating that TRPC proteins are important components of SOCs in smooth muscle. More recently Orai and STIM proteins have been proposed to underlie the well‐described calcium‐release‐activated current (ICRAC) in non‐excitable cells but at present there is little information on the role of Orai and STIM proteins in smooth muscle. In addition it is likely that different TRPC subunits coassemble as heterotetrameric structures to form smooth muscle SOCs. In this brief review we summarize the diverse properties and gating mechanisms of SOCs in smooth muscle. We propose that the heterogeneity of the properties of these conductances in smooth muscle results from the formation of heterotetrameric TRPC structures in different smooth muscle preparations.
Community Wildfire Events as a Source of Social Conflict.

The literature notes that natural disasters, including wildfires, that damage human settlements often have the short-term effect of "bringing people together. " Less recognized is the fact that such events can also generate social conflict at the local level. This study examines the specific sources of such social conflict during and after community wildfire events. Examining qualitative data generated from six case studies of wildfires in the American West, we suggest that integrating the theories of Weber, Giddens, and Habermas with community interaction theory provides a context for understanding such conflict. Rationalized forms of interaction and problem solving imposed by extra-local organizations during and after wildfire events are often resisted by local actors who are also inhibited from acting due to local capacity limitations. Thus, conflict occurs when social relations are disembedded by non-local entities, and there is a perceived loss of local agency. Language: en
Exercise Provides Direct Biphasic Cardioprotection via Manganese Superoxide Dismutase Activation

Epidemiologic investigations have shown that exercise reduces morbidity and mortality from coronary artery disease. In this study, using a rat model, we attempted to determine whether exercise can reduce ischemic injury to the heart and elucidate a mechanism for the cardioprotective effect of exercise. Results showed that exercise significantly reduced the magnitude of a myocardial infarction in biphasic manner. The time course for cardioprotection resembled that of the change in manganese superoxide dismutase (Mn-SOD) activity. The administration of the antisense oligodeoxyribonucleotide to Mn-SOD abolished the expected decrease in infarct size. We showed that the level of tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) and interleukin 1β (IL-1β) increased after exercise. The simultaneous administration of the neutralizing antibodies to the cytokines abolished the exercise-induced cardioprotection and the activation of Mn-SOD. Furthermore, TNF-α can mimic the biphasic pattern of cardioprotection and activation of Mn-SOD. An antioxidant completely abolished cardioprotection and the activation of Mn-SOD by exercise or the injection of TNF-α as well as exercise-induced increase in TNF-α and IL-1β. The production of reactive oxygen species and endogenous TNF-α and IL-1β induced by exercise leads to the activation of Mn-SOD, which plays major roles in the acquisition of biphasic cardioprotection against ischemia/reperfusion injury in rats.