Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reducing Overt and Relational Aggression Among Young Children

ABSTRACT This paper presents the results of an independent two-year evaluation of the I Can Problem Solve (ICPS) universal prevention program, implemented in kindergarten and first grade classrooms in a racially and ethnically diverse urban school district. Matched pairs of schools were assigned to Instruction (i.e., treatment) or Control status. Teachers assessed students' behaviors at pre and post implementation using two different rating scales. Overall, we found support for the effectiveness of ICPS in increasing prosocial behaviors and in reducing aggressive behaviors. The mean change scores of both scales showed a significant additive effect, with children (n = 96) receiving two years of ICPS instruction showing greater improvement than both children receiving one year of ICPS instruction (n = 106) as well as the two-year Control students (n = 24). The authors were selected by the school district to evaluate ICPS, and are not affiliated with the program.
Parallel generation of base relation snapshots for materialized view maintenance in data warehouse environment

Data warehouses are used in many applications that depend on distributed systems. A data warehouse supports information processing by providing a single platform of integrated, historical data for doing analysis. Data warehouses provide the facility for integration in a world of unintegrated application systems. The contents of a data warehouse are evolved in an evolutionary, step-at-a-time fashion. A data warehouse organizes and stores the data needed for informational, analytical processing over a long historical time perspective. Data warehouses keep a materialized view (such as historical data), and user queries are processed using this view. The view has to be maintained to reflect the updates done against the base relations stored at the various distributed data sources. Detecting and extracting modifications from information sources is an integral part of a data warehouse. For unsophisticated sources, in practice it is often necessary to infer modifications by periodically comparing snapshots and backup copies of data from the source. This study considers the materialized view and its maintenance. Various implementation and performance evaluation of the differential snapshot algorithms have been compared for evaluation of suitable alternatives.
fairGhosts — Ant colony controlled ghosts for Ms. Pac-Man

A previously proposed ACO game agent controller for steering the ghosts in the computer game Ms. Pac-Man has been improved by reengineering and extending the original controller with an adapted ACO algorithm. The number of free parameters is reduced by 30% and their values are optimized using a genetic algorithm. The proposed new ACO controller, named “fairGhosts”, is tested against other available game agent controllers within the existing Ms. Pac-Man simulator framework. This controller reaches a performance comparable to the upper third of all proposed controllers. In certain cases, it beats even the best controllers. Our “fairGhost” algorithm, its implementation and functionality are discussed.
Neuropsychological performance and mild cognitive impairment subtypes in patients reporting cognitive problems attending a memory outpatient clinic

Summary Background: Early detection of dementia is becoming more and more important due to new pharmacological treatment options. The objectives of this study were to characterize the neuropsychological performance of patients reporting cognitive impairment, and to establish the frequency of MCI subtypes in an outpatient memory clinic cohort. Patients who came to the memory outpatient clinic for assessment were included in the study consecutively. Methods: One hundred and twenty patients were eligible for the study. The patients underwent a clinical examination and completed a battery of standard cognitive tests. The patients scored, on average, within the normal range of cognitive testing. However, up to 30 % of the patients showed impaired performance in single cognitive tests. Results: Measurements of delayed recall, executive function, semantic verbal fluency and sustained attention showed the highest impairment rates. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) was found in 83 of the 120 patients; 4 were classified as amnestic single-domain MCI, 26 as amnestic multiple-domain MCI, 18 as non-amnestic single-domain MCI and 35 with non-amnestic multiple-domain MCI. Conclusion: Our study gives information on the neurocognitive profile and frequency of MCI subtypes in patients reporting cognitive impairment in the setting of a memory clinic.
Spinal cord injury and the joy of work

Work, which plays such a prominent part in the narrative of human life, is central to a person's happiness (or unhappiness). Because this is so, the fact that spinal cord injury (SCI) tends to take a person out of the workforce (sometimes permanently) is recognized as a central part of post-injury loss. This paper draws on the insights of the virtue tradition and the discipline of positive psychology, to explore the notion of happiness (well-being) and its relationship to the vocations of people with SCI. In particular, it describes the virtues that can contribute to a person's capacity to obtain and sustain employment. This includes virtues relating to dependency and independency, as well as the role of hope, optimism and the like. It concludes with a brief discussion of the contribution that people with SCI can make to the culture of the workplace.
A Great Confusion in Theater Management

illiam Shakespeare was an exceptional leader. Not only did he create a vast body of artistic composition, but he also coordinated the work product of countless others in the creation of stage performances of those compositions. And he did so successfully. But to dissect Shakespeare’s contributions to the world of theater from a managerial perspective is to comprehend more acutely that the myriad of hats the Bard donned—the broad spectrum of duties and responsibilities he embraced—is considerably more voluminous than simply those of writer, director, actor, and producer. The latter of these terms is the singularly most confusing. It implies an array of fundamentals varying almost as greatly as the individuals who attempt its definition. There is little doubt that the term “producer” has been reserved for the person in charge, but even then, this was the person in charge by virtue of financial control and not necessarily artistic aptitude. And financial acumen is most certainly not the only necessary ingredient in the operation of a successful theatrical endeavor. The issue that looms largest for those who attempt to manage a theater, and particularly for those who train and educate others to manage a theater, is whether management is simply the effective coordination of resources, or if it includes the almost ineffable visionary leadership. Shakespeare most decid-
Socioeconomic variations in perceived barriers to recreation participation among would‐be participants

Abstract The effects of fifteen barriers to participation were examined among people who expressed a desire for but were unable to participate in a new recreational activity. Work commitments, overcrowding of facilities, and lack of partners were the three main barriers. The effects of barriers were not perceived uniformly across the sample but varied between subgroups defined according to socioeconomic variables: the people most likely to be affected by barriers to participation included the poor, the elderly, and single parents. The extent to which recreation practitioners can and should respond to these kinds of research findings is discussed, and several ways in which the effects of barriers to participation might be modified or alleviated are evaluated.
The contested redefinition of a sustainable countryside: revisiting Frouws' Rurality Discourses

This article gives an overview of the present day discourses on the sustainable development of Dutch agriculture. It aims to advance rural sociology by illustrating how these sustainability discourses actually contain completely opposing views of the future of the countryside. A qualitative analysis of interviews done with innovators in the agricultural sector indicates that the different discourses on the sustainable development of agriculture are a natural continuation of the different views of rurality previously identified by Jaap Frouws (1998). The redefinition of Dutch agriculture and the Dutch countryside is still contested; each discourse has its own vision on the sustainable development of the sector and the surrounding space. We conclude, therefore, that sustainable development has not functioned as an unifying concept to help different parties overcome their differences and work on win-win solutions. The sustainability agenda seems to have intensified an already slumbering difference of interests and perspectives, with the utilitarian, the agri-ruralist and the hedonist discourse each incorporating their own sustainability perspective. The hedonist and utilitarian discourses in particular aspire to sustainable agriculture on different scales and with opposing arguments. In a many respects they are polar opposites, and this has consequences for the possibility of bringing together stakeholders working towards sustainable agriculture.
Modelling Data-Centric Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor networks differ from traditional net- works in several ways: sensor networks have severe en- ergy constraints, redundant low-rate data, and many-to-one flows. The end-to-end routing schemes that have been pro- posed in the literature for mobile ad-hoc networks are not appropriate under these settings. Data-centric technologies are needed that perform in-network aggregation of data to yield energy-efficient dissemination. In this paper we model data-centric routing and compare its performance with tra- ditional end-to-end routing schemes. We examine the im- pact of source-destination placement and communication network density on the energy costs, delay, and robustness of data aggregation. We show that data-centric routing offers significant performance gains across a wide range of opera- tional scenarios.
UV-induced DNA damage and repair: a review

Increases in ultraviolet radiation at the Earth’s surface due to the depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer have recently fuelled interest in the mechanisms of various effects it might have on organisms. DNA is certainly one of the key targets for UV-induced damage in a variety of organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. UV radiation induces two of the most abundant mutagenic and cytotoxic DNA lesions such as cyclobutane-pyrimidine dimers (CPDs) and 6-4 photoproducts (6-4PPs) and their Dewar valence isomers. However, cells have developed a number of repair or tolerance mechanisms to counteract the DNA damage caused by UV or any other stressors. Photoreactivation with the help of the enzyme photolyase is one of the most important and frequently occurring repair mechanisms in a variety of organisms. Excision repair, which can be distinguished into base excision repair (BER) and nucleotide excision repair (NER), also plays an important role in DNA repair in several organisms with the help of a number of glycosylases and polymerases, respectively. In addition, mechanisms such as mutagenic repair or dimer bypass, recombinational repair, cell-cycle checkpoints, apoptosis and certain alternative repair pathways are also operative in various organisms. This review deals with UV-induced DNA damage and the associated repair mechanisms as well as methods of detecting DNA damage and its future perspectives.
Technological learning environments and organizational practices – cross-sectoral evidence from Britain

This study explores the co-occurrence of technological and organizational learning processes by analysing the adoption and use of four types of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices, rewarding, problem-solving, top-down management and decentralization, in the 1990s, across different technological learning environments. Using a sample of British workplaces, we show that the level of use of diverse HRM practices, aimed at creating different learning incentives, is persistently heterogeneous across technological learning environments, suggesting that HRM forms an essential part of the technological learning structure of firms.
Influence of early life stress on later hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis functioning and its covariation with mental health symptoms: A study of the allostatic process from childhood into adolescence

Abstract The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis is a primary mechanism in the allostatic process through which early life stress (ELS) contributes to disease. Studies of the influence of ELS on children's HPA axis functioning have yielded inconsistent findings. To address this issue, the present study considers multiple types of ELS (maternal depression, paternal depression, and family expressed anger), mental health symptoms, and two components of HPA functioning (traitlike and epoch-specific activity) in a long-term prospective community study of 357 children. ELS was assessed during the infancy and preschool periods; mental health symptoms and cortisol were assessed at child ages 9, 11, 13, and 15 years. A three-level hierarchical linear model addressed questions regarding the influences of ELS on HPA functioning and its covariation with mental health symptoms. ELS influenced traitlike cortisol level and slope, with both hyper- and hypoarousal evident depending on type of ELS. Further, type(s) of ELS influenced covariation of epoch-specific HPA functioning and mental health symptoms, with a tighter coupling of HPA alterations with symptom severity among children exposed previously to ELS. Results highlight the importance of examining multiple types of ELS and dynamic HPA functioning in order to capture the allostatic process unfolding across the transition into adolescence.
Psychosocial factors and the pain experience of osteoarthritis patients: new findings and new directions

Purpose of reviewThe present paper reviews recent psychosocial research in the area of osteoarthritis pain. First, the review highlights studies of psychosocial factors that can influence osteoarthritis pain. Next, research testing the efficacy of psychosocial treatments for osteoarthritis pain is summarized. Recent findingsRecent studies suggest that asking osteoarthritis patients to recall pain experiences may not be as accurate as having them keep daily pain records. New studies also support the notion that fatigue and increased weight are linked to higher osteoarthritis pain. Osteoarthritis patients who report higher levels of depression are more prone to report increased osteoarthritis pain. New studies also indicate that social factors such as ethnic background, ability to communicate pain to others, and participation in social activities can influence osteoarthritis pain and disability. Cognitions about pain (i.e. pain catastrophizing, acceptance, self-efficacy for pain) also have been found to relate to pain in patients with osteoarthritis. Recent, randomized controlled studies suggest that psychosocial interventions (i.e. self-management programs, exercise) can decrease osteoarthritis pain and disability. SummarySeveral psychosocial variables have been suggested as influencing osteoarthritis pain and disability. There is evidence that psychosocial interventions may decrease osteoarthritis pain and disability.
Microenvironment and Immunology Resuscitating Cancer Immunosurveillance : Selective Stimulation of DLL 1-Notch Signaling in T cells Rescues T-cell Function and Inhibits Tumor Growth

Deficiencies in immune function that accumulate during cancer immunoediting lead to a progressive escape from host immunosurveillance. Therapies that correct or overcome these defects could have a powerful impact on cancer management, but current knowledge of the types and mechanisms of immune escape is still incomplete. Here, we report a novel mechanism of escape from T-cell immunity that is caused by reduction in levels of the Delta family Notch ligands DLL1 and DLL4 in hematopoietic microenvironments. An important mediator of this effect was an elevation in the levels of circulating VEGF. Selective activation of the DLL1-Notch signaling pathway in bone marrow precursors enhanced T-cell activation and inhibited tumor growth. Conversely, tumor growth led to inhibition of Delta family ligand signaling through Notch in the hematopoietic environment, resulting in suppressed T-cell function. Overall, our findings uncover a novel mechanism of tumoral immune escape and suggest that a soluble multivalent form of DLL1may offer a generalized therapeutic intervention to stimulate T-cell immunity and suppress tumor growth. Cancer Res; 71(19); 6122–31. 2011 AACR.
Speed of information processing and attention in early Alzheimer's dementia

The speed of information processing was examined in a group of patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in a group of healthy, age‐and educationally matched controls. Subjects were tested on auditory simple‐reaction time (RT), visual choice‐RT, and combined simple‐ and choice‐RT tasks. The choice‐RT task required elementary linguistic or visuoperceptual matching of successively presented stimuli. AD patients had normal simple RTs but had delayed RTs on the matching tasks, suggesting a slower rate of processing for the component mental operations of the matching tasks. Estimates of the attentional demands or costs of these mental operations—stimulus encoding, decision making, and response selection—were obtained by combining the matching task with the simple‐RT task (probe‐RT). AD patients again showed a significant slowing in choice‐RT, although they exhibited normal accuracy or performance outcome. AD patients also showed increased attentional cost for letter encoding (as reflected in.
A prospective study of psychosocial correlates of physical activity for ethnic minority women

Abstract The purpose of this study was to identify comlates of physical activity for sedentary. ethnic minority women and determine if these comlatcs were modified by an intervention. One hundred twenty-five women panicipated in a randomized. controlled trial of a walking program. The intervention was designed to alter social learning-based correlates through telephone counseling and mailings. Walking and correlates were assessed at baseline, 8-week post-test. and 5-month follow-up. Both intervention and control groups increased walking and decreased in respons of perceived barriers, self-efficacy. and enjoyment from baseline to post-test. and baseline to follow-up. Social support increased over time, with intervention participants reporting greater increases. Change in self-efficacy from baseline to follow-up was associated with increases in walking. The results provide some evidence that self-efficacy correlated with walking for participants. but 3 of 4 correlates were not positively influenced by the i.
Emotional Verbal Fluency: A New Task on Emotion and Executive Function Interaction

The present study introduces “Emotional Verbal Fluency” as a novel (partially computerized) task, which is aimed to investigate the interaction between emotionally loaded words and executive functions. Verbal fluency tasks are thought to measure executive functions but the interaction with emotional aspects is hardly investigated. In the current study, a group of healthy subjects (n = 21, mean age 25 years, 76% females) were asked to generate items that are either part of a semantic category (e.g., plants, toys, vehicles; standard semantic verbal fluency) or can trigger the emotions joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. The results of the task revealed no differences between performance on semantic and emotional categories, suggesting a comparable task difficulty for healthy subjects. Hence, these first results on the comparison between semantic and emotional verbal fluency seem to highlight that both might be suitable for examining executive functioning. However, an interaction was found between the category type and repetition (first vs. second sequence of the same category) with larger performance decrease for semantic in comparison to emotional categories. Best performance overall was found for the emotional category “joy” suggesting a positivity bias in healthy subjects. To conclude, emotional verbal fluency is a promising approach to investigate emotional components in an executive task, which may stimulate further research, especially in psychiatric patients who suffer from emotional as well as cognitive deficits.
The Analysis and Prediction of the 8 – 9 May 2007 Oklahoma Tornadic Mesoscale Convective System by Assimilating WSR-88 D and CASA Radar Data Using 3 DVAR

The Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS) model is employed to perform high-resolution numerical simulations of a mesoscale convective system and associated cyclonic line-end vortex (LEV) that spawned several tornadoes in central Oklahoma on 8–9 May 2007. The simulation uses a 1000 km 3 1000 km domain with 2-km horizontal grid spacing. The ARPS three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) is used to assimilate a variety of data types. All experiments assimilate routine surface and upperair observations as well as wind profiler and Oklahoma Mesonet data over a 1-h assimilation window. A subset of experiments assimilates radar data. Cloud and hydrometeor fields as well as in-cloud temperature are adjusted based on radar reflectivity data through the ARPS complex cloud analysis procedure. Radar data are assimilated from the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) network as well as from the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative and Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) network of four X-band Doppler radars. Three-hour forecasts are launched at the end of the assimilation window. The structure and evolution of the forecast MCS and LEV are markedly better throughout the forecast period in experiments in which radar data are assimilated. The assimilation of CASA radar data in addition to WSR-88D data increases the structural detail of the modeled squall line and MCS at the end of the assimilation window, which appears to yield a slightly better forecast track of the LEV.
Facilitating sustainable agriculture: integrating indigenous knowledge in current agricultural knowledge and information systems

There is a disparate comparison of non-adoption of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs) and blaming farmers, their farms and methods of conventional farming practices in the most cases. Some of the trends like the recognition of the importance of farmer's ITK (Indigenous Technical Knowledge), farmer's participation, the emergence of non-government organizations (NGOs) within the agricultural knowledge and information system, and synergy processes among all determinants of agricultural knowledge and information system, are the main topics in facilitating sustainable agriculture. The challenge for the current agricultural knowledge and information systems toward sustainability is to find better ways to learn about indigenous institutions and practices and where necessary adapt modern techniques (i.e., "sustainability sound practices") to the local practices. As such, this study aimed at reviewing three case studies concerning integration of indigenous knowledge in the agricultural knowledge and information systems to represent indigenous knowledge outcomes on the effectiveness of different projects and extracting solutions for incorporating indigenous knowledge in current agricultural knowledge and information systems toward sustainability. In the all case studies, indigenous knowledge provided problem-solving strategies for local communities and helps shape local solutions to revitalizing farming system and environment. Also, in this paper integration and co- management of indigenous and non- indigenous knowledge subsystems has been addressed. Finally, recommendations for integrating indigenous knowledge in the current agricultural knowledge and information systems toward sustainability have been proposed.