Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using ‘sport in the community schemes’ to tackle crime and drug use among young people: some policy issues and problems

This article seeks, first, to offer some critical comments on the policy issues and problems surrounding the use of sporting schemes as vehicles of social policy in which the intention is to reduce levels of crime, delinquency and drug ‘abuse’ among young people; second, to examine a point of fundamental importance in policy terms: do such schemes work? In this regard, it is claimed that relatively few of such schemes - which are largely premised upon a one-sided perception of sport - have built in processes for monitoring and evaluating their impact on levels of crime or drug use among young people. It is also argued that these methodological weaknesses are exacerbated by the absence of any clearly articulated theoretical rationale for these schemes, which means that, even where success for them is claimed, it is unclear what specific aspects of the schemes account for that claimed success.
An Experimental Study of Persuasive Social Communication

Political discussion is often seen as a potential shortcut to enlightened voting. If uninformed individuals receive useful information from their discussion partners, then they can make quality decisions at the ballot box without incurring the costs of becoming informed. Discussion partners, however, have biases and these biases are reflected in what they say about candidates. If individuals accept messages from sources with different preferences, they could end up supporting candidates who benefit their discussion partners instead of themselves. This article argues that egos will often accept messages from individuals with an incentive to mislead. Instead of evaluating the messenger, individuals evaluate the messages. When the messages are all in accord, individuals support the candidate suggested by the messages even if the messengers are all biased. This article presents the results of a group-based experiment in which ego networks were exogenously determined by the researcher. In the experiment, egos tend to vote for their party's candidate, but they defect with greater frequency when they receive messages from members of a different party. This willingness to listen to the other side has detrimental effects for the quality of their decisions.
Effective experimental validation of miRNA targets using an improved linker reporter assay

Summary miRNAs are small, non-coding RNAs that play critical roles in various cellular processes. Although there are several algorithms that can predict the potential candidate genes that are regulated by a miRNA, these algorithms require further experimental validation in order to demonstrate genuine targets of miRNAs. Moreover, most algorithms predict hundreds to thousands of putative target genes for each miRNA, and it is difficult to validate all candidates using the whole 3′-untranslated region (UTR) reporter assay. We report a fast, simple and efficient experimental approach to screening miRNA candidate targets using a 3′-UTR linker assay. Critically, the linker has only a short miRNA regulatory element sequence of approximately 22 base pairs in length and can provide a benefit for screening strong miRNA candidates for further validation using the whole 3′-UTR sequence. Our technique will provide a simplified platform for the high-throughput screening of miRNA target gene validation.
Using intervention mapping to develop a family-based childhood weight management programme

Objectives To develop, implement and evaluate a family-based childhood weight management programme. Methods Programme development utilized Bartholomew's Intervention Mapping framework. This six step structured approach provides planners with a framework that links determinants of health behaviours with performance objectives and strategies to be incorporated into programme design. Using this process a needs analysis and literature review were undertaken, a steering group formed, six focus groups (with a total of n = 47 pupils) were completed and six interviews took place with parents. The determinants were combined with relevant theories to develop the programme. Y W8? is a 12 week course for families with children aged 8-13 years designed to assist with weight management. Participants’ height, weight and physical activity levels along with self-esteem scores for children are recorded pre- and post-intervention and at three, six and 12 month follow-up. This paper documents post-course results at 12 weeks. Results Preliminary results showed children (mean pre-BMI = 28.48 (+4.44), mean post-BMI = 27.48 (+4.45; P = <0.001) and parents (mean pre-BMI = 30.77 (+6.21), mean post-BMI = 30.41 (+6.17; P = 0.017) decreased their BMI over the 12 weeks. These results compare favourably with similar programmes in the UK. Conclusions Intervention mapping was a useful approach for developing a theory based intervention. Results suggest Y W8? improves the body mass index (BMI) of children and parents at 12 weeks. Further work, including a randomized controlled trial (RCT), will confirm this, investigate the longer-term effectiveness and determine how the effects are mediated by psychological processes.
Power Efficient Code Converters Using Adiabatic Array Logic

Adiabatic logic brings about a great deal of power minimization in digital circuits. An application of the same is presented here by proposing a new design of some code converters-BCD to Excess-3, Binary to Gray and Gray to Binary, using the Adiabatic Array Logic. The proposed circuits show lesser power dissipation than the conventional static CMOS logic style and Two Phase Clocked Adiabatic Logic (2PASCL). The simulation is carried out in NI-Multisim software at 0.18&mu;m, 1.8V CMOS standard process technology over a frequency range of 200-800MHz.
Differences in white matter fiber tract development present from 6 to 24 months in infants with autism.

OBJECTIVE Evidence from prospective studies of high-risk infants suggests that early symptoms of autism usually emerge late in the first or early in the second year of life after a period of relatively typical development. The authors prospectively examined white matter fiber tract organization from 6 to 24 months in high-risk infants who developed autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) by 24 months. METHOD The participants were 92 high-risk infant siblings from an ongoing imaging study of autism. All participants had diffusion tensor imaging at 6 months and behavioral assessments at 24 months; a majority contributed additional imaging data at 12 and/or 24 months. At 24 months, 28 infants met criteria for ASDs and 64 infants did not. Microstructural properties of white matter fiber tracts reported to be associated with ASDs or related behaviors were characterized by fractional anisotropy and radial and axial diffusivity. RESULTS The fractional anisotropy trajectories for 12 of 15 fiber tracts differed significantly between the infants who developed ASDs and those who did not. Development for most fiber tracts in the infants with ASDs was characterized by higher fractional anisotropy values at 6 months followed by slower change over time relative to infants without ASDs. Thus, by 24 months of age, those with ASDs had lower values. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that aberrant development of white matter pathways may precede the manifestation of autistic symptoms in the first year of life. Longitudinal data are critical to characterizing the dynamic age-related brain and behavior changes underlying this neurodevelopmental disorder.
Authoritarianism, dominance, and need for achievement

This study, using measures of authoritarianism and dominance, investigated Ray's (1980. 1982, 1984) hypothesis that authoritarians are achievement motivated. Respondents were 103 external undergraduate students (53 males, 50 females; mean age = 35·32 yr, SD = 9 72) at an Australian college. Results showed pro-authority behaviour to be significantly associated with achievement motivation for males and females and authoritarian attitudes to be associated with achievement motivation for males only. Both dominance and directiveness (Ray. 1976) were significantly associated with achievement motivation for both sexes. Results of a principal components analysis showed directiveness and dominance to load on the same component supporting an earlier supposition that directiveness is primarily a measure of dominance. Finally, achievement-motivated females scored high on a measure of self-esteem. This latter finding is discussed in terms of traditional socialization practices.
Non-Linear Weighting Function for Non-Stationary Signal Denoising

We propose in this paper a new strategy for non-stationary signals denoising based on designing a time-varying filter adapted to the signal short term spectral characteristics. The basic idea leading us to use a new parametric nonlinear weighting of the measured signal short term spectral amplitude (STSA) is exposed. The overall system consists in combining the estimated STSA and the complex exponential of the noisy phase. The proposed technique results in a significant reduction of the noise for a variety of non-stationary signals including speech signals
Rivastigmine and Parkinson dementia complex

Patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease dementia (PDD) have a movement disorder, but it can be difficult to determine whether the functional impairment, which is critical in making the assessment of whether a patient has achieved the threshold for a diagnosis of dementia, is due to the dementia or the underlying Parkinson’s disease. Although the cognitive impairment found in nondemented patients with Parkinson’s disease is very dysexecutive in nature, the DSM IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association IV) diagnosis of PDD has memory impairment as the defining characteristic of PDD. Severe deficits in cortical, cholinergic, excitatory, neuromodulatory input mean that memory impairment is not always due to encoding and retrieval strategy deficits, but it may also be amnesic without being related to concomitant Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Patients with PDD have a high mortality, especially when they develop hallucinations and/or are admitted to nursing homes. Of interest is the reduction in mortality that was more marked in the subgroup with visual hallucinations at baseline. The increased mortality in PD may be due to autonomic failure, evidenced by the reductions in heart rate variability in these patients. This reduction is greater in patients with hallucinations. Rivastigmine is a dual inhibitor of brain acetyl- and butyrylcholinesterases that has been evaluated in the symptomatic treatment of patients with mild-to-moderate dementia associated with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease. Although there is a need for more studies using pragmatic measures, such as time to residential care facility and both patient and carer quality of life assessments, rivastigmine appears to improve cognition and activities of daily living in patients with PDD, resulting in a clinically meaningful benefit in a large number of cases.
Programmed Cell Death Progresses Differentially in Epidermal and Mesophyll Cells of Lily Petals

In the petals of some species of flowers, programmed cell death (PCD) begins earlier in mesophyll cells than in epidermal cells. However, PCD progression in each cell type has not been characterized in detail. We separately constructed a time course of biochemical signs and expression patterns of PCD-associated genes in epidermal and mesophyll cells in Lilium cv. Yelloween petals. Before visible signs of senescence could be observed, we found signs of PCD, including DNA degradation and decreased protein content in mesophyll cells only. In these cells, the total proteinase activity increased on the day after anthesis. Within 3 days after anthesis, the protein content decreased by 61.8%, and 22.8% of mesophyll cells was lost. A second peak of proteinase activity was observed on day 6, and the number of mesophyll cells decreased again from days 4 to 7. These biochemical and morphological results suggest that PCD progressed in steps during flower life in the mesophyll cells. PCD began in epidermal cells on day 5, in temporal synchrony with the time course of visible senescence. In the mesophyll cells, the KDEL-tailed cysteine proteinase (LoCYP) and S1/P1 nuclease (LoNUC) genes were upregulated before petal wilting, earlier than in epidermal cells. In contrast, relative to that in the mesophyll cells, the expression of the SAG12 cysteine proteinase homolog (LoSAG12) drastically increased in epidermal cells in the final stage of senescence. These results suggest that multiple PCD-associated genes differentially contribute to the time lag of PCD progression between epidermal and mesophyll cells of lily petals.
Widening Participation, Equalising Opportunity? Higher Education's Mission Impossible

Current government policy of increasing participation in higher education is justified on the grounds of individual benefit, the national economic interest and, most significantly, as part of a moral agenda of promoting equality of opportunity. This article examines a range of empirical findings in the light of ideas about equality and, in particular, the concept of ‘equality of opportunity’, and what these entail. It concludes that widening participation in higher education, at least as envisaged in current policy, cannot compensate for social and educational disadvantage, and is not only ineffectual in promoting equality of opportunity, but carries serious disbenefits.
Systematic comparison of BIC-based speaker segmentation systems

Unsupervised speaker change detection is addressed in this paper. Three speaker segmentation systems are examined. The first system investigates the AudioSpectrumCentroid and the AudioWaveformEnvelope features, implements a dynamic fusion scheme, and applies the Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC). The second system consists of three modules. In the first module, a second-order statistic-measure is extracted; the Euclidean distance and the T2 Hotelling statistic are applied sequentially in the second module; and BIC is utilized in the third module. The third system, first uses a metric-based approach, in order to detect potential speaker change points, and then the BIC criterion is applied to validate the previously detected change points. Experiments are carried out on a dataset, which is created by concatenating speakers from the TIMIT database. A systematic performance comparison among the three systems is carried out by means of one-way ANOVA method and post hoc Tukey's method.
Research on talent demand and countermeasures in three-zone based on AHP

Talent is related to the fundamental problems of three-zone construction and development in Weifang City. This article selects the AHP method, and constructs dynamic capability evaluation index system of three-zone human resource planning, which helps diagnose their human resource planning dynamic capabilities, and finds out the key factors affecting the ability, thus science formulation and implementation human resource planning, realize the human resources and other effective resource allocation, to enhance the competitiveness of Weifang city.
Fine-Tuning Infinity Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) have received special attention in the last decade due to their outstanding results in number of applications, such as face and human motion recognition, and collaborative filtering, among others. However, one of the main concerns about RBMs is related to the number of hidden units, which is application-dependent. Infinite RBM (iRBM) was proposed as an alternative to the regular RBM, where the number of units in the hidden layer grows as long as it is necessary, dropping out the need for selecting a proper number of hidden units. However, a less sensitive regularization parameter is introduced as well. This paper proposes to fine-tune iRBM hyper-parameters by means of meta-heuristic techniques such as Particle Swarm Optimization, Bat Algorithm, Cuckoo Search, and the Firefly Algorithm. The proposed approach is validated in the context of binary image reconstruction over two well-known datasets. Furthermore, the experimental results compare the robustness of the iRBM against the RBM and Ordered RBM (oRBM) using two different learning algorithms, showing the suitability in using meta-heuristics for hyper-parameter fine-tuning in RBM-based models.
Private Coded Caching

Recent work by Maddah-Ali and Niesen (2014) introduced coded caching which demonstrated the benefits of joint design of storage and transmission policies in content delivery networks. They studied a setup where a server communicates with a set of users, each equipped with a local cache, over a shared error-free link and proposed an order-optimal caching and delivery scheme. In this paper, we introduce the problem of private coded caching where we impose the additional constraint that no user learns any information about the contents of the files it did not request from what is stored in its cache and the server transmissions. We propose a feasible scheme for this setting and demonstrate its order-optimality by deriving information-theoretic lower bounds.
New approximate solutions per unit of time for periodically checked systems with different lifetime distributions

Systems with different lifetime distributions, associated with increasing, decreasing, constant, and bathtub-shaped hazard rates, are examined in this paper. It is assumed that a failure is only detected if systems are inspected. New approximate solutions for the inspection period and for the expected duration of hidden faults are presented, on the basis of the assumption that only periodic and perfect inspections are carried out. By minimizing total expected cost per unit of time, on the basis of numerical results and a range of comparisons, the conclusion is drawn that these new approximate solutions are extremely useful and simple to put into practice.
Side-effects of oral misoprostol in the third stage of labour--a randomised placebo-controlled trial.

BACKGROUND Misoprostol, an inexpensive, stable, orally active prostaglandin analogue, has been suggested for use in the prevention of postpartum haemorrhage. Potential side-effects, however, need to be quantified. OBJECTIVE To compare the rate of postpartum shivering and pyrexia following oral misoprostol 600 micrograms and placebo. DESIGN A double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Women in labour were randomly allocated to receive either misoprostol 600 micrograms orally or placebo after delivery. Conventional oxytocics were given immediately if blood loss was thought to be more than usual. Side-effects were recorded. Postpartum blood loss in the first hour was measured by collection in a special flat plastic bedpan. SETTING The labour ward of an academic hospital in Johannesburg, with 7,000 deliveries per annum. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Shivering and pyrexia. RESULTS The groups were well matched. Misoprostol use was associated with more shivering (44% versus 11%, relative risk (RR) 4.03, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.85-5.70), pyrexia > or = 37.8 degrees C (38% v. 6%, RR 6.23, CI 3.89-9.97), 1-hour systolic blood pressure > or = 140 mmHg (33% v. 25%, RR 1.32, CI 1.03-1.70), and diastolic blood pressure > or = 90 mmHg (10.5% v. 3.0%, RR 3.44, CI 1.67-7.11). There were no other significant differences. The study was not designed to be large enough to assess a difference in blood loss > or = 1,000 ml (9% v. 9.7%, RR 0.93, CI 0.56-1.53). Possible effects on blood loss may have been obscured by the lesser use of additional oxytocics in the misoprostol group (14% v. 18%, RR 0.78, CI 0.54-1.13). CONCLUSIONS This study has shown the association of postpartum oral misoprostol 600 micrograms with shivering, pyrexia and hypertension. The increased blood pressure, as for the trend towards increased abdominal pain, may be secondary to the uterotonic effect of misoprostol. Large randomised trials are needed to assess the effectiveness of misoprostol in the prevention of postpartum haemorrhage, against which the disadvantages demonstrated here can be weighed.
Light element abundance inhomogeneities in globular clusters: probing star formation and evolution in the early Milky Way

Abundance patterns of the elements C, N, and O are sensitive probes of stellar nucleosynthesis processes and, in addition, O abundances are an important input for stellar age determinations. Understanding the nature of the observed distribution of these elements is key to constraining protogalactic star formation history. Patterns deduced from low-resolution spectroscopy of the CN, CH, NH, and CO molecules for low-mass stars in their core-hydrogen or first shell-hydrogen burning phases in the oldest ensembles known, the Galactic globular star clusters, are reviewed. New results for faint stars in NGC 104 (47 Tuc, C0021-723) reveal that the bimodal, anticorrelated pattern of CN and CH strengths found among luminous evolved stars is also present in stars nearing the end of their main-sequence lifetimes. In the absence of known mechanisms to mix newly synthesized elements from the interior to the observable surface layers of such unevolved stars, those particular inhomogeneities imply that the original mater.
Design considerations for clustering localization technique in an indoor wireless network

Indoor positioning technique, also known as localization is an application that can benefit from the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) infrastructure and WLAN enabled devices. This paper discusses implementation of an indoor wireless localization network by using the existing WLAN infrastructure based on a novel clustering technique. Design criteria and parameters involved to form a cluster group has been defined and presented. The preliminary results from this study indicates the proposed clustering technique able to perform indoor localization, whereby total of 17 cluster groups have been generated from the 82 anchor points in an indoor area. Several proposal enhancements also presented in order to enhance the accuracy and improve the selection criteria of the clustering method.
Managers Doing Leadership: The Extra-Ordinarization of the Mundane

Based on a case study of managers in a large, international knowledge-intensive company this article suggests a rethinking of leadership, taking the mundane, almost trivial, aspects of what managers/leaders actually do seriously. In the study, the managers interviewed emphasized the importance of listening and informal chatting. Managers listening to subordinates are assumed to have various positive effects, e.g. people feel more respected, visible and less anonymous, and included in teamwork. Rather than certain acts being significant in themselves, it is their being done by managers that gives them a special, emotional value beyond their everyday significance. Leadership is conceptualized as the extra-ordinarization of the mundane.