Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Credit Rating System in C2C E-Commerce: Verification and Improvement of Existent Systems with Game Theory

China C2C e-Commerce has developed at high speed during recent years. Whether the credit rating systems of C2C e-Commerce is rational or not directly influences its development as the systems is a key way for risk-averse. This paper analyzes the C2C users’ fraud behavior with repeated game theory, checks the validity of existent C2C e-Commerce credit rating systems, especially the new one applied in Baidu “Youa” C2C e-Commerce platform. Finally some strategies that can be adopted to improve the systems are pointed out.
"It Takes a Village" for African American Male Scholar-Athletes

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore the influences of mentors on African American male scholar-athlete success. Participants (N=27) consisted of high achieving African American male student-athletes from four academically rigorous American universities. Participants competed primarily in revenue-generating sports (i.e., men's basketball and football) and were interviewed to obtain a deeper understanding of the role various mentors play in relation to their academic success. By utilizing a phenomenological approach, three major themes emerged: My Parents Always Had High Expectations, I Have Healthy Relationships With My Professors, and No Support From Coaches. Mentorship theories and relevant literature are examined through the African American family influences on sport mobility (Oliver, 1980; Harris, 1994), faculty interaction with African American male student-athletes (Harrison, Comeaux & Plecha, 2006; Comeaux, & Harrison, 2007) and coaching role strain (Edwards, 1973; Coakley, 1994) and interpreted with the findings. Recommendations for faculty, student affairs professionals, athletic administrators and other stake-holders are suggested.
Somewhere over the Rainbow: Improving Violence Risk Management in Institutional Settings

Tackling violence in prisons and forensic institutions is a key role for mental health professionals. Major strides have been made in the last twenty years in the evaluation and management of individual risk factors. However, the understanding of situational—or institutional—risk factors is less well developed. This special section considers PRISM. PRISM is a set of structured professional guidelines for assessing and managing the risk of violence in institutions. In contrast to better known forms of structured judgment approaches the focus of concern is the functioning of the institution, not the individual patient or prisoner. In this introductory paper we describe the development of PRISM, its conceptual and empirical base, and demonstrate and propose a range of applications for the approach. We argue that PRISM can have value in a range of important practical tasks, but also, PRISM can be used to enhance our theoretical understanding of the risk processes that underpin institutional violence.
Modulation by magnesium of the affinity of NMDA receptors for glycine in murine hippocampal neurones.

1. The effects of the divalent cation Mg2+ on NMDA currents recorded from cultured fetal mouse and acutely isolated neonatal rat hippocampal neurones were studied using the whole‐cell patch‐clamp technique. 2. Current‐voltage relations were measured in the presence or absence of applied Mg2+ and added glycine. NMDA‐evoked currents were studied in the absence or in a low concentration (0.2 mM) of applied Ca2+ in order to minimize Ca(2+)‐dependent inactivation of the responses. Mg2+ unexpectedly enhanced NMDA‐activated currents at positive membrane potentials. At negative membrane potentials Mg2+ caused a previously characterized voltage‐dependent block of inward NMDA‐activated currents. 3. The potentiation by Mg2+ of outward currents activated by NMDA was concentration dependent (EC50, approximately 3 mM; Hill coefficient, approximately 2). Mg2+ also reduced the desensitization of the NMDA receptor. The maximal enhancement of steady‐state NMDA‐activated currents was 2.7‐fold and at 6 mM the time constant of desensitization was doubled. 4. Comparisons of concentration‐response curves for glycine and 7‐chloro‐kynurenic acid demonstrated that Mg2+ significantly increased the affinity of the NMDA receptor for glycine. The EC50 for glycine was 380 nM in the absence of Mg2+ and 163 nM in 3 mM Mg2+. Mg2+ had little effect on the forward rate of the glycine response but halved the off‐rate (2.34 to 1.15 s‐1) and thus similarly reduced the apparent dissociation constant. 5. There was a good correlation between the concentration of extracellular Ca2+ and a reduction in the time constant of the glycine‐sensitive component of NMDA receptor desensitization. Ca2+ could enhance these NMDA‐activated currents briefly following exposure to high concentrations of Ca2+. These results are consistent with a Ca(2+)‐dependent enhancement of the affinity of the NMDA receptor for glycine. 6. Mg2+ can enhance NMDA‐mediated currents and reduce desensitization of this receptor by allosterically interacting with the glycine binding site. This interaction may be a key physiological mechanism through which modulation of the NMDA receptor is achieved.
Faith on the Wane: A Documentary Analysis of Shifting Worldviews in Canadian Textbooks

In this documentary study, the author postures school textbooks as barometers of corporate faith and prevailing worldview. He has carefully traced the shift toward secularization in 150 years of publication by Canadian school systems. The movement begins with the gradual reduction of Christianity to moral veneer (1867–1930) and then gathers steam in an accelerated banishment of all things Christian. Recent movements, however, suggest a renewed search for meaning in the larger society which affords Christian schools rich opportunities for the teaching of faith and Christian values. Of the three movements in this documentary study, the first and third represent the author's revision and expansion of sections from two earlier works—“Shifting Perspectives: Early British Columbia Textbooks from 1872 to 1925” (1986) and “The World Portrayed in Texts: An Analysis of the Content of Elementary School Textbooks” (1991).
A Nation Dividing? Some Questions of Interpretation

Dorling and Rees's (2003) analysis of intercensal social polarisation is welcome in many respects and I suspect I am not alone in admiring the technical skill involved in such work, not to mention the speed with which the paper was produced! The purpose of this comment is to suggest that this paper should be the starting point for a debate about polarisation, for several reasons.
Peripherin Is a Subunit of Peripheral Nerve Neurofilaments: Implications for Differential Vulnerability of CNS and Peripheral Nervous System Axons

Peripherin, a neuronal intermediate filament protein implicated in neurodegenerative disease, coexists with the neurofilament triplet proteins [neurofilament light (NFL), medium (NFM), and heavy (NFH) chain] but has an unknown function. The earlier peak expression of peripherin than the triplet during brain development and its ability to form homopolymers, unlike the triplet, which are obligate heteropolymers, have supported a widely held view that peripherin and neurofilament triplets form separate filament systems. However, here, we demonstrate that, despite a postnatal decline in expression, peripherin is as abundant as the triplet in the adult PNS and exists in a relatively fixed stoichiometry with these subunits. Peripherin exhibits a distribution pattern identical to those of triplet proteins in sciatic axons and colocalizes with NFL on single neurofilaments by immunogold electron microscopy. Peripherin also coassembles into a single network of filaments containing NFL, NFM, and NFH with and without α-internexin in quadruple- or quintuple-transfected SW13vim(−) cells. Genetically deleting NFL in mice dramatically reduces peripherin content in sciatic axons. Moreover, peripherin mutations has been shown to disrupt the neurofilament network in transfected SW13vim(−) cells. These data show that peripherin and the neurofilament proteins are functionally interdependent. The results strongly support the view that, rather than forming an independent structure, peripherin is a subunit of neurofilaments in the adult PNS. Our findings provide a basis for its close relationship with neurofilaments in PNS diseases associated with neurofilament accumulation.
Wound-Induced Proteinase Inhibitor in Plant Leaves: A Possible Defense Mechanism against Insects

Wounding of the leaves of potato or tomato plants by adult Colorado potato beetles, or their larvae, induces a rapid accumulation of a proteinase inhibitor throughout the plants' tissues that are exposed to air. This effect of insect damage can be simulated by mechanically wounding the leaves. The transport of a factor out of damaged leaves takes place rapidly after the wound is inflicted and the levels of proteinase inhibitor, in both damaged and adjacent leaves, rises strikingly within a few hours. The rapid accumulation of a powerful inhibitor of major intestinal proteinases of animals in response to wounding of the leaves is probably a defense mechanism.
Community Epistemic Capacity

Despite US policy documents which recommend that in areas of environmental risk, interaction between scientific experts and the public move beyond the so-called “Decide, Announce, and Defend model,” many current public involvement policies still do not guarantee meaningful public participation. In response to this problem, various attempts have been made to define what counts as sufficient or meaningful participation and free informed consent from those affected. Though defining “meaningfulness” is a complex task, this paper explores one under-examined dimension that concerns the relationship between consent and the idea that citizens should be sufficiently informed: epistemic capacity. This paper will look at some of the work on meaningful participation and consent, give a definition of epistemic capacity, and argue that only a community with sufficient epistemic capacity can have the understanding and competence to give informed enough consent and thus participate meaningfully.
Probabilistic topic modeling for genomic data interpretation

Recently, the concept of a species containing both core and distributed genes, known as the supra- or pangenome theory, has been introduced. In this paper, we aim to develop a new method that is able to analyze the genome-level composition of DNA sequences, in order to characterize a set of common genomic features shared by the same species and tell their functional roles. To achieve this end, we firstly apply a composition-based approach to break down DNA sequences into sub-reads called the ‘N-mer’ and represent the sequences by N-mer frequencies. Then, we introduce the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to study the genome-level statistic patterns (a.k.a. latent topics) of the ‘N-mer’ features. Each estimated latent topic represents a certain component of the whole genome. With the help of the BioJava toolkit, we access to the gene region information of reference sequences from the NCBI database. We use our data mining framework to investigate two areas: 1) do strains within species share similar core and distributed topics? and 2) do genes with similar functional roles contain similar latent topics? After studying the mutual information between latent topics and gene regions, we provide examples of each, where the BioCyc database is used to correlate pathway and reaction information to the genes. The examples demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method.
Analyzing Association Mapping in Pedigree‐Based GWAS Using a Penalized Multitrait Mixed Model

Genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) have led to the identification of many genetic variants associated with complex diseases in the past 10 years. Penalization methods, with significant numerical and statistical advantages, have been extensively adopted in analyzing GWAS. This study has been partly motivated by the analysis of Genetic Analysis Workshop (GAW) 18 data, which have two notable characteristics. First, the subjects are from a small number of pedigrees and hence related. Second, for each subject, multiple correlated traits have been measured. Most of the existing penalization methods assume independence between subjects and traits and can be suboptimal. There are a few methods in the literature based on mixed modeling that can accommodate correlations. However, they cannot fully accommodate the two types of correlations while conducting effective marker selection. In this study, we develop a penalized multitrait mixed modeling approach. It accommodates the two different types of correlations and includes several existing methods as special cases. Effective penalization is adopted for marker selection. Simulation demonstrates its satisfactory performance. The GAW 18 data are analyzed using the proposed method.
Scaling of morphogen gradients by an expansion-repression integral feedback control

Despite substantial size variations, proportions of the developing body plan are maintained with a remarkable precision. Little is known about the mechanisms that ensure this adaptation (scaling) of pattern with size. Most models of patterning by morphogen gradients do not support scaling. In contrast, we show that scaling arises naturally in a general feedback topology, in which the range of the morphogen gradient increases with the abundance of some diffusible molecule, whose production, in turn, is repressed by morphogen signaling. We term this mechanism “expansion–repression” and show that it can function within a wide range of biological scenarios. The expansion-repression scaling mechanism is analogous to an integral-feedback controller, a key concept in engineering that is likely to be instrumental also in maintaining biological homeostasis.
Improving Right Whale recognition by fine-tuning alignment and using wide localization network

Right Whales can be recognized by the callosities pattern on their heads. They are an endangered species with an estimated 450 whales remaining. Marine biologists regularly perform manual recognition of the whales while monitoring the population but the process is slow and time consuming. Deep learning methods achieved state-of-the-art results on several visual recognition tasks. However, training deep learning models on this task is very difficult because the number of training images is low. We propose a wide localization network which can be used to localize the region of interest in image. Once the region of interest is localized, a deep learning model can be used to classify the whales. The solution we describe in this paper achieves an accuracy score of 78.7% and ranks as one of the best 3 solutions on this dataset.
A simplified semantics for modal logic

1. Until recently, philosophers could object to modal logic on the grounds that there were no known semantics for the many modal calculuses. To be sure, there were some isolated interpretations for individual systems, but there was no general theory which would apply to the many different systems, and which would give an account, from a semantical point of view, of the relations between them. With the work of Kripke, Hintikka, Kanger, Lemmon, and others, that has, of course, changed. Kripke's semantics for modal logic begins with the idea of a model structure, (G, K, R), where K is a nonempty set (intuitively, of possible worlds), R is a relation on K (a relation of relative possibility or alternativeness), and GeK. Truth-functional propositions are evaluated with respect to possible worlds (members of K) in the usual ways, and propositions of the sort, necessarily B, are said to be true in a world H in K if and only if B is true in every world, H, in K such that HRH. A formula is valid if it is true in G for every appropriate model structure, (G, K, R). By stipulating different properties for R (e.g. reflexivity, reflexivity and transitivity, etc.) different model structures are defined which validate different classes of formulas corresponding to the different modal calculuses. Thus, e.g., all and only formulas provable in S4 are valid in all model structures in which R is both reflexive and transitive. With some minor modifications this account can be generalized to provide semantics for most all the standard systems of modal logic. (Cf. [11] and [12].) Similar moves are made by Hintikka in [8] and Kanger [9]. Lemmon develops analogous devices in his algebraic semantics for the systems in [13] and [14]. Nevertheless, while the mathematical problem of developing an adequate semantical theory of the modalities may have been solved in this way, philosophers critical of modal logic might still object that since these accounts depend on a notion of a possible world, which is an obscure as the original concepts of possibility and necessity, no real clarification of these modalities has been achieved by these interpretations. Moreover, these critics might also object to the introduction of the relations, R, between
Gender Inclusivity or ‘Grammar Rules OK’? Linguistic Prescriptivism vs Linguistic Discrimination in the Classroom

This paper explores the potential conflict classroom teachers face in their dual roles as ‘guardians of grammar’ and as ‘agents of social language reform’ with reference to third person singular generic pronouns in English. We investigate to what extent teachers (primary, secondary and tertiary) experience tensions between these roles in relation to their own and students’ use of generic pronouns, and if they do, how they resolve the issue. Drawing upon survey and interview data from Australian classroom teachers we find substantial adoption of gender-inclusive alternatives to generic he with a clear preference for and tolerance of singular they in their own and their students’ writing. Remnants of social gender and the use of generic he and generic she are found for the antecedents real estate agent and teacher respectively. Younger teachers are by and large unaware of grammatical prescriptivism arguments while all teachers have awareness of the need to address and reform linguistic discrimination. Female educators lead the way as ‘agents of change’ and intervene in students’ writing to promote the avoidance of gender-exclusive generic he.
Outdoor, Indoor, and Personal Exposure to VOCs in Children

We measured volatile organic compound (VOC) exposures in multiple locations for a diverse population of children who attended two inner-city schools in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Fifteen common VOCs were measured at four locations: outdoors (O), indoors at school (S), indoors at home (H), and in personal samples (P). Concentrations of most VOCs followed the general pattern O ≈ S < P ≤ H across the measured microenvironments. The S and O environments had the smallest and H the largest influence on personal exposure to most compounds. A time-weighted model of P exposure using all measured microenvironments and time–activity data provided little additional explanatory power beyond that provided by using the H measurement alone. Although H and P concentrations of most VOCs measured in this study were similar to or lower than levels measured in recent personal monitoring studies of adults and children in the United States, p-dichlorobenzene was the notable exception to this pattern, with upper-bound exposures more than 100 times greater than those found in other studies of children. Median and upper-bound H and P exposures were well above health benchmarks for several compounds, so outdoor measurements likely underestimate long-term health risks from children’s exposure to these compounds.
Total Cholesterol Level for Assessing Pancreatic Insufficiency Due to Chronic Pancreatitis

Background/Aims To determine the nutritional markers important for assessing the degree of pancreatic insufficiency due to chronic pancreatitis in routine clinical practice. Methods A total of 137 patients with chronic pancreatitis were followed up for more than 1 year. They were divided into two groups: a pancreatic diabetes mellitus (DM) group, consisting of 47 patients undergoing medical treatment for DM of pancreatic origin, and a nonpancreatic DM group, consisting of 90 other patients (including 86 patients without DM). Serum albumin, prealbumin, total cholesterol, cholinesterase, magnesium, and hemoglobin were compared between the two groups. Results The total cholesterol was significantly lower in the pancreatic than the nonpancreatic DM group (164 mg/dL vs 183 mg/dL, respectively; p=0.0028). Cholinesterase was significantly lower in the former group (263 U/L vs 291 U/L, respectively; p=0.016). Among the 37 patients with nonalcoholic pancreatitis, there was no difference in the cholinesterase levels between the pancreatic and nonpancreatic (296 U/L vs 304 U/L, respectively; p=0.752) DM groups, although cholesterol levels remained lower in the former (165 mg/dL vs 187 mg/dL, respectively; p=0.052). Conclusions Cholinesterase levels are possibly affected by concomitant alcoholic liver injury. The total cholesterol level should be considered when assessing pancreatic insufficiency due to chronic pancreatitis.
Credit Spread Option Pricing by Dynamic Copulas

This paper extends the dynamic copula model for bivariate option pricing in Goorbergh et al (2004) to price credit spread options. We use GARCH-t model to describe the marginal distributions for corporate bonds and treasury, and combine them with dynamic Gaussian copula to obtain the joint distribution. As an application we use this model to price credit spread options written on American corporate bonds. Unlike other approaches for credit spread option pricing, this model is based on the two components of the spread rather than the spread itself, and the dependence structure is time-varying.
Preparing Preservice Teachers to Meet the Needs of Hmong Refugee Students

The United States is home to more than two million refugees since 1975, with over half arriving as children. Refugees are semi-voluntary immigrants fleeing persecution in their home countries and seeking a country willing to resettle them (McBrien, 2005). They may have experienced war, separation from or loss of family, and loss of home and basic needs. One example is the Hmong who fled their home country of Laos beginning in the 1970s due to their alliance with the United States in the Vietnam War. They continued to enter the United States through 2004 when the last Hmong refugee camp in Thailand closed; currently over 200,000 Hmong live in the United States. How can we prepare preservice teachers to meet the needs of Hmong refugee students they may face in their future classrooms? Sleeter and Grant’s (2009) multicultural social justice approach offers a theoretical framework to guide teacher educators in their preparation of preservice teachers to welcome and provide appropriate learning opportunities for their Hmong refugee students. They recommend that teachers include different cultures in the curriculum, such as Hmong refugee culture as well as Hmong students’ experiences and perspectives,