Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How Large is the Bias is Self-Reported Disability?

A pervasive concern with the use of self-reported health and disability measures in behavioral models is that they are biased and endogenous. A commonly suggested explanation is that survey respondents exaggerate the severity of health problems and incidence of disabilities in order to rationalize labor force non-participation, application for disability benefits and/or receipt of those benefits. This paper re-examines this issue using a self-reported indicator of disability status from the Health and Retirement Survey. Using a bivariate probit model we test and are unable to reject the hypothesis that the self-reported disability measure is an exogenous explanatory variable in a model of individual's decision to apply for DI benefits or Social Security Administration's decision to award benefits. We further study a subsample of individuals who applied for Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income benefits from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for whom we can also observe SSA's award/deny decision. For this subsample we test and are unable to reject the hypothesis that self-reported disability is health and socio-economic characteristics similar to the information used by the SSA in making its award decisions. The unbiasedness restriction implies that these two variables have the same conditional probability distributions. Thus, our results indicate that disability applicant do not exaggerate their disability status at least in anonymous surveys such as the HRS. Indeed, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that disability applicants are aware of the criteria and decision rules that SSA uses in making awards and act as if they were applying these same criteria and rules when reporting their own disability status.
Detection of Functional Modes in Protein Dynamics

Proteins frequently accomplish their biological function by collective atomic motions. Yet the identification of collective motions related to a specific protein function from, e.g., a molecular dynamics trajectory is often non-trivial. Here, we propose a novel technique termed “functional mode analysis” that aims to detect the collective motion that is directly related to a particular protein function. Based on an ensemble of structures, together with an arbitrary “functional quantity” that quantifies the functional state of the protein, the technique detects the collective motion that is maximally correlated to the functional quantity. The functional quantity could, e.g., correspond to a geometric, electrostatic, or chemical observable, or any other variable that is relevant to the function of the protein. In addition, the motion that displays the largest likelihood to induce a substantial change in the functional quantity is estimated from the given protein ensemble. Two different correlation measures are applied: first, the Pearson correlation coefficient that measures linear correlation only; and second, the mutual information that can assess any kind of interdependence. Detecting the maximally correlated motion allows one to derive a model for the functional state in terms of a single collective coordinate. The new approach is illustrated using a number of biomolecules, including a polyalanine-helix, T4 lysozyme, Trp-cage, and leucine-binding protein.
Le développement de la gestion durable des ressources humaines : un éclairage par les outils de pilotage des performances

Human resources management (HRM) is nowadays moving towards the sustainable development concept integration into the companies’ practices. This contributes to the corporate social responsibility development. However what is the real meaning of human resources sustainable management (HRSM)? What are the practices which support the HRSM policies? How to implement those practices and for which goals? An analysis of the transition from the HRM concept to the HRSM one is being proposed. It is based on recent corporate governance changes and relies also on the performance concept.
LPCQP: Lightweight Private Circular Query Protocol with Divided POI-table and Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption for Privacy-Preserving k-NN Search

: With the recent growth of mobile communication, the location-based k -nearest neighbor ( k -NN) search is getting much attention. While the k -NN search provides beneﬁcial information about points of interest (POIs) near users, users’ locations could be revealed to the server. Lien et al. have recently proposed a highly-accurate privacy-preserving k -NN search protocol with the additive homomorphism. However, it requires a heavy computation load due to the unnecessary multiplication on the server in the encryption domain. In this paper, we propose a lightweight private circular query protocol (LPCQP) with divided POI-table and the somewhat homomorphic encryption for privacy-preserving k -NN search. Our proposed scheme removes unnecessary POI information for the request user by dividing and aggregating a POI-table, and this reduces both the computational and the communication costs. In addition, we use both additive and multiplicative homomorphisms to perform the above process in the encryption domain. We evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme and show that our scheme reduces both the computational and the communication costs while maintaining high security and high accuracy.
Reduction of the Extent of Ischemic Myocardial Injury by Neutrophil Depletion in the Dog

Accumulation of polymorphonuclear neutrophils during the acute inflammatory response may exacerbate tissue injury through the release of activated oxygen products or proteolytic enzymes or both. To assess the role of neutrophils in acute myocardial infarction, circulating neutrophil levels in dogs were reduced by 77 ± 2% (mean ± SEM) by administering rabbit antiserum to dog neutrophils. Acute myocardial infarction was induced in open-chest anesthetized dogs by 90 minutes of left circumflex coronary artery occlusion followed by 6 hours of reperfusion. Dogs treated with neutrophil antiserum (n = 8) developed myocardial infarcts that were an average of 43% smaller' than infarcts in dogs treated with nonimmune rabbit serum (n = 7) (27.0 ± 4.5% vs 47.1% ± 7.5% of the area at risk, p < 0.05). In a salinetreated control group (n = 8), infarct size was 48.0 ± 4.7% of the area at risk, a value not significantly different from that of the nonimmune serum group but significantly greater than that in the neutrophil antiserum dogs (p < 0.05). There were no major hemodynamic differences between groups. Histopathologic examination revealed that infarcted myocardium from dogs given saline or treated with nonimmune serum had a substantial neutrophilic infiltrate, which was virtually absent in infarcted tissue from dogs treated with neutrophil, antiserum. These observations suggest that neutrophil accumulation in response to myocardial ischemia may be responsible for a substantial portion of the irreversible myocardial' injury resulting from temporary coronary artery occlusion.
The Effect of Combined Sensory and Semantic Components on Audio–Visual Speech Perception in Older Adults

Previous studies have found that perception in older people benefits from multisensory over unisensory information. As normal speech recognition is affected by both the auditory input and the visual lip movements of the speaker, we investigated the efficiency of audio and visual integration in an older population by manipulating the relative reliability of the auditory and visual information in speech. We also investigated the role of the semantic context of the sentence to assess whether audio–visual integration is affected by top-down semantic processing. We presented participants with audio–visual sentences in which the visual component was either blurred or not blurred. We found that there was a greater cost in recall performance for semantically meaningless speech in the audio–visual ‘blur’ compared to audio–visual ‘no blur’ condition and this effect was specific to the older group. Our findings have implications for understanding how aging affects efficient multisensory integration for the perception of speech and suggests that multisensory inputs may benefit speech perception in older adults when the semantic content of the speech is unpredictable.
Breast Cancer and Current Therapeutic Approaches: From Radiation to Photodynamic Therapy

Breast cancer is one of the oldest known forms of cancer in humans and it has been mentioned in almost every period of human history. Since the time of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, there has been no cure but only treatment for this disease. In the 18th century, different theories about the origin of breast cancer were developed. During this period, an important link between breast cancer and the lymph nodes was established. The assumption that cancer was a localized disease led to the rise of the surgical approach in breast cancer treatment. Since the work of William Halstead (1882), radical mastectomy (removal of breast tissue, lymph nodes and chest tissue) remained the standard for almost 100 years (Leopold, 1999; Olson, 2002). With the advance in science, novel therapeutic and diagnostic opportunities came into use in breast cancer treatment. Introduction of radiation at the beginning of the 20th century enabled tumour size to be reduced before surgery. Another major breakthrough came with the use of chemotherapy in the 1940s. Their combination with surgery offers another powerful treatment modality. The discovery by Beatson in 1895 that removal of the ovaries results (in some cases) in reduction of breast tumours led to the later elucidation of oestrogen`s role in breast cancer growth (Forrest, 1982). Research in pharmaceutical approaches to breast cancer/oestrogen management ended in the development of aromatase inhibitors (AIs) and selective oestrogen receptor modifiers. An important step came in 1998, when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved trastuzumab for the treatment of HER2 positive metastatic breast cancer. Treatment with trastuzumab has a major impact on the survival of a subset of patients with resistant and hard to treat breast tumours (Shepard et al., 2008). With the introduction of mammography, early detection of breast cancer was made possible. Mammography screening combined with more precise therapy was shown to reduce breast cancer mortality between 24.9 and 38.3% (Berry et al., 2005). Several other detection methods including magnetic resonance, ultrasound and 3D digital mammography have been developed and are now used in the fight against breast cancer (Gilbert, 2008; Hellerhoff, 2010).
Finding Winner Alignments with Multiple Scoring Matrices ∗

How to align two given sequences properly is a fundamental problem in bioinformatics. In the sequence alignment problem, the most essential thing that directly affects the resulting alignment is the scoring matrix. There are a variety of scoring matrices used for alignment, and each of them has its own purpose in biosequence alignment. It seems unlikely that an alignment is optimal for each scoring matrix. But, there may be one that meets the most matrices with acceptable scores. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for finding the winner alignment when multiple scoring matrices are applied. We then discuss the variants of the comparing function. By simply reordering the steps in the comparing function, we could obtain another winner alignment under different criterion. Our algorithm solves the problem in O (kmn) time where k is the number of scoring matrices involved, and m and n are the lengths of the two input sequences. A more efficient algorithm with O(k(|Σ|+ 1)2 + mn) time can find the winner alignment under the summing scheme, where |Σ| denotes the alphabet size of the input sequences.
Stepwise Maturation of Apicobasal Polarity of the Neuroepithelium Is Essential for Vertebrate Neurulation

During vertebrate neurulation, extensive cell movements transform the flat neural plate into the neural tube. This dynamic morphogenesis requires the tissue to bear a certain amount of plasticity to accommodate shape and position changes of individual cells as well as intercellular cohesiveness to maintain tissue integrity and architecture. For most of the neural plate–neural tube transition, cells are polarized along the apicobasal axis. The establishment and maintenance of this polarity requires many polarity proteins that mediate cell–cell adhesion either directly or indirectly. Intercellular adhesion reduces tissue plasticity and enhances tissue integrity. However, it remains unclear how apicobasal polarity is regulated to meet the opposing needs for tissue plasticity and tissue integrity during neurulation. Here, we show that N-Cad/ZO-1 complex-initiated apicobasal polarity is stabilized by the late-onsetting Lin7c/Nok complex after the extensive morphogenetic cell movements in neurulation. Loss of either N-Cad or Lin7c disrupts neural tube formation. Furthermore, precocious overexpression of Lin7c induces multiaxial mirror symmetry in zebrafish neurulation. Our data suggest that stepwise maturation of apicobasal polarity plays an essential role in vertebrate neurulation.
Processos de Aprendizagem Organizacional no Desenvolvimento de Competências em Instituições de Ensino Superior para a Oferta de Cursos Superiores de Tecnologia [CSTS]

The aim of this article is to analyze the organizational learning processes that led to the development of the necessary competences for higher education institutions to begin offering Higher Technological Courses. The range of this study is limited to Curitiba in Parana State, and its assumption is that organizational learning is the way for institutions to obtain the necessary competences to make their strategies practical. The nature of this research is exploratory, using a qualitative approach, and the method used is the multiple case study in a longitudinal time perspective. The results of this multiple-case study showed that the development of the competences required profound changes in the articulation of resources in both institutions that were analyzed, in addition to the institutionalization of new knowledge. Based on the data found in each case, it was possible to conduct a transversal analysis, which made it possible to certify that some competences can be built and others extinguished, shaping the dynamic character of the competences and the learning process. Thus, it was possible to corroborate the analysis model that was used (Patriotta, 2003) and suggest advances for it.
A pariah profession? Some student perceptions of accounting and accountancy

ABSTRACT Accountancy is firmly established as an important profession and as a major employment destination for graduates in the UK. There is, however, some ambivalence regarding the image of the accountancy profession as well as the status of accounting as an academic discipline. This paper reports on small-scale surveys of the perceptions of groups of accounting and non-accounting students which suggested that negative stereotypes of accountants which were prevalent during the 1960s have survived beyond the Thatcherite revolution. The surveys undertaken indicated that within the two groups there was an apparent co-existence of high status and low esteem in their perceptions of accounting and accountancy. The authors follow this with a brief discussion of a range of historical and sociological factors which may have contributed to this contradictory condition. The transformation of accounting pedagogic practice, through the incorporation of critical approaches to knowledge, is seen as a necessary prerequ.
Older Driver Safety: A Report from the Older Drivers Project

Older driver safety is a growing public health concern for which interventions are currently being sought. Statistics show that older drivers suffer a disproportionately high rate of motor vehicle fatalities compared with other adult drivers. This disproportion is due to two factors: an increased crash rate per vehicle mile driven and an increased risk of fatality in the event of a crash.
Sovereignty and the Western Sahara

The Western Sahara conflict, now in its 35th year, is a conflict that challenges concepts of territorial sovereignty and self-determination and of the alleged linkage between them. It is also a manifestation of the struggle for regional hegemony between Algeria and Morocco and, by extension, a struggle by both regional powers to capture the attention and support of Europe and the United States. Amidst these major concerns, the interests of the Western Saharans themselves are being increasingly ignored, a situation that raises further questions about popular legitimisation of sovereignty in the contemporary world order.
Tonal implications of dyadic harmony

An experiment is presented in which the tonal attraction between context dyads and following probe tones was measured using listeners’ subjective ratings of ‘resolution’ and/or ‘pull’. The data were analysed with respect to three core variables identified within the stimuli: (1) interval cycles; (2) whether the context dyad was consonant or dissonant; and (3) the presence of possible tonic pitches. Only the interval cycle variable consistently and significantly accounted for the listeners’ responses. (An interval cycle is the minimum number of additive iterations of an interval that are required for the original pitch classes to be restated.) The experiment and the issue of tonal attraction are discussed within the context of the interval cycle proximity hypothesis.
Second-order consensus algorithm with input constraints for swarm robots formation control

In this paper, a second-order consensus algorithm with input constraints was introduced. The condition of the algorithm for reaching consensus was given. Via Lyapnov stability criterion, the stability of the algorithm was proved. Based on this algorithm, a new control algorithm for swarm robots formation control was also proposed. Finally, from the simulation results of the above algorithms, it can be found that the algorithms with input constraints showed a better consensus performance than the algorithm without input constraints.
Involvement of the Amygdala and Its Connected Structures in Formation and Expression of Inhibitory Avoidance Memory: Issues and Implications

The inhibitory avoidance task contains both classical and operant conditioning components and is extensively used for studying the neural bases for formation and expression of emotion memory. While the amygdala is proposed to have a unique position for encoding, storing and retrieving memory in Pavlovian fear conditioning, extant data from manipulative studies on the inhibitory avoidance task showed that other brain regions by subserving various roles in processing different properties of the task are also involved in formation and expression memory of this task. Memory formation in this task requires the amygdala, hippocampal formation, bed nucleus of stria terminalis, nucleus accumbens, medial prefrontal cortex, as well as other cortical and subcortical regions. Expression of recent memory in this task relies on, among others, the amygdala, hippocampus and nucleus accumbens, but expression of remote memory in this task relies on cortical regions. Neural correlates for this task have been recently detected in the amygdala and hippocampus. These findings suggest that the memory operation in an inhibitory avoidance task entails a neural circuit distributing beyond the amygdala and undergoing a temporally dynamic change after acquisition.
Audre Lorde's (Nonessentialist) Lesbian Eros

Audre horde reopened the question of the position of the erotic with respect to both knowledge and power in her 1983 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. ” This is not a new question in the philosophical literature; it is a very old one. What is different about Audre Lorde's examination of Eros is that she starts with a decidedly lesbian conception of Eros, in marked contrast to other Western philosophers’ work.
Komplementaritäten in der Unternehmenspolitik von Schweizer Betrieben

Als Folge von Veranderungen im Unternehmensumfeld haben sogenannte innovative arbeitsorganisatorische und personalpolitische Instrumente, wie z.B. Gruppenarbeit oder ergebnisabhangige Entlohnung, in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten eine enorme Verbreitung erfahren. Die vorliegende Studie erarbeitet zunachst theoretisch die Hypothese, dass verschiedene arbeitsorganisatorische und personalpolitische Instrumente sich gegenseitig verstarken und somit ein koharentes HRM-System respektive ein sogenanntes High-Performance Work System (HPWS, dt. Hochleistungssystem) bilden konnen. Konkret implizieren verschiedene Theorien eine komplementare, also synergistische, Beziehung zwischen einer dezentralen Verteilung von Aufgaben und Entscheidungsrechten einerseits und betrieblicher Weiterbildung, Anreizentlohnung und langfristigen Beschaftigungsverhaltnissen andererseits. Damit wird eine ganzheitliche ("holistische") Perspektive des strategischen Human Resource Management (HRM, dt. Personalpolitik) eingenommen. Anschliessend untersucht die vorliegende Studie die aufgestellte Hypothese empirisch unter Verwendung neuester reprasentativer Daten uber ca. 2'500 Firmen in der Schweiz. Dabei werden okonometrische Schatzungen einer Produktionsfunktion vorgenommen. Die Schatzergebnisse zeigen statistisch signifikante Komplementaritaten zwischen einer innovativen Arbeitsorganisation und personalpolitischen Instrumenten. Daruber hinaus erhoht ein High-Performance Work System, bestehend aus sich gegenseitig verstarkenden Instrumenten, den Unternehmenserfolg signifikant. Diese Ergebnisse prasentieren sich als robust gegenuber moglichen Verzerrungen, wie unbeobachtbaren zeitkonstanten Firmencharakteristika oder dem Problem umgekehrter Kausalitat.
Optomap ultrawide field imaging identifies additional retinal abnormalities in patients with diabetic retinopathy

Purpose To compare diabetic retinopathy (DR) severity grading between Optomap ultrawide field scanning laser ophthalmoscope (UWFSLO) 200° images and an Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) seven-standard field view. Methods Optomap UWFSLO images (total: 266) were retrospectively selected for evidence of DR from a database of eye clinic attendees. The Optomap UWFSLO images were graded for DR severity by two masked assessors. An ETDRS seven-field mask was overlaid on the Optomap UWFSLO images, and the DR grade was assessed for the region inside the mask. Any interassessor discrepancies were adjudicated by a senior retinal specialist. Kappa agreement levels were used for statistical analysis. Results Fifty images (19%) (P<0.001) were assigned a higher DR level in the Optomap UWFSLO view compared to the ETDRS seven-field view, which resulted in 40 images (15%) (P<0.001) receiving a higher DR severity grade. DR severity grades in the ETDRS seven-field view compared with the Optomap UWFSLO view were identical in 85% (226) of the images and within one severity level in 100% (266) of the images. Agreement between the two views was substantial: unweighted κ was 0.74±0.04 (95% confidence interval: 0.67–0.81) and weighted κ was 0.80±0.03 (95% confidence interval: 0.74–0.86). Conclusion Compared to the ETDRS seven-field view, a significant minority of patients are diagnosed with more severe DR when using the Optomap UWFSLO view. The clinical significance of additional peripheral lesions requires evaluation in future prospective studies using large cohorts.