Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toddlers’ Understanding of Ownership: Implications for Self‐Concept Development

Knowledge of self-continuity is proposed as essential to self understanding. However, little research has addressed the development of the extended self in very young children. This study explored ownership understanding as evidence for knowledge of the interpersonal extended self. Toddlers, age 18 months to 28 months, identified items as belonging to themselves or another, and participated in the classic mirror self- recognition task. Mothers completed the Self Development Questionnaire. Results show that the children have a basic understanding of ownership, and that this understanding differentiated children who provided self-descriptions and evaluations from children who did not. Mirror self-recognition was unrelated to ownership understanding or self-descriptions and evaluations. These results suggest that the extended self emerges earlier in development than previously claimed. Implications for integrated self-concept development are discussed.
Discovering anatomical patterns with pathological meaning by clustering of visual primitives in structural brain MRI

Computational anatomy is a subdiscipline of the anatomy that studies macroscopic details of the human body structure using a set of automatic techniques. Different reference systems have been developed for brain mapping and morphometry in functional and structural studies. Several models integrate particular anatomical regions to highlight pathological patterns in structural brain MRI, a really challenging task due to the complexity, variability, and nonlinearity of the human brain anatomy. In this paper, we present a strategy that aims to find anatomical regions with pathological meaning by using a probabilistic analysis. Our method starts by extracting visual primitives from brain MRI that are partitioned into small patches and which are then softly clustered, forming different regions not necessarily connected. Each of these regions is described by a co- occurrence histogram of visual features, upon which a probabilistic semantic analysis is used to find the underlying structure of the information, i.e., separated regions by their low level similarity. The proposed approach was tested with the OASIS data set which includes 69 Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients and 65 healthy subjects (NC).
Irregular NoC simulation framework: IrNIRGAM

IrNIRGAM is a discrete event cycle accurate simulator written in SystemC and C++ for Network-on-Chip performance simulation. IrNIRGAM supports regular as well as irregular topology framework with source and table based routing. In general, the topology represents the most important characteristic of NoC architectures. It defines how router nodes are physically interconnected and has a predominant influence on network performance and implementation costs. The direct network architecture where each IP Core is directly connected to a dedicated router is assumed for IrNIRGAM. In IrNIRGAM, input buffered routers can have multiple virtual channels (VCs) and uses wormhole switching for flow control. The packets are split into an arbitrary number of flits (flow control units) and forwarded through the network in a pipelined fashion. A Round-Robin scheme for switch arbitration is used in the router nodes to provide fair bandwidth allocation while effectively preventing scheduling anomalies like starvation.
The Changing Significance of Ethnic and Class Resources in Immigrant Businesses: The Case of Korean Immigrant Businesses in Chicago 1

Contemporary Korean immigrant businesses depart from the traditional patterns of immigrant businesses in two important respects. First, minority areas such as black neighborhoods are more important market places for Korean merchants than their own Korean community. Second, though ethnic solidarity and mutual cooperation among Koreans are still viable in Korean immigrant businesses, class interests and class resources are increasingly important as the basis of Korean immigrant businesses. Therefore, collective approaches to business on the basis of ascriptive ties such as extended kinship or regional ties became irrelevant for the recent Korean immigrants. Instead individualistic approaches become more significant. In order to account for the role of ethnicity and class in contemporary Korean immigrant businesses, this study attempts to assess the relative contribution of ethnic and class resources to Korean immigrant businesses and to examine how the relative significance of ethnic and class resources changes over the course of business development. Empirical results tend to support the arguments that while ethnic resources (i.e., financial resources, information or business advice one can gather from family members, friends or rotating credit associations) are important at the initial stage of business, they become irrelevant or insufficient at the advanced stage, and that class resources (i.e., individual human capital) become more important to determine the success level of business at the advanced stage of business development.
Leader-Following Consensus of Discrete-Time Multiagent Systems With Encoding–Decoding

The leader-following consensus of general linear discrete-time multiagent systems with a limited communication data rate and a directed fixed topology is investigated. The consensus protocol is designed for each agent, which is given in terms of states of its encoder and decoders with time-varying quantization levels. A rigorous analysis for the consensus convergence is provided. A finite lower bound of the communication data rate between each pair of adjacent agents is obtained to ensure consensus. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the validity of the results obtained.
Strategies for Dealing with Conflicts in Value Positions between Home and School: Influences on Ethnic Minority Students’ Development of Motives and Identity

A theoretical model is presented in which participation in the school community is viewed as a multifaceted activity. In this model, culture is conceptualized as traditions of practice and as a societal field. The school practice and the role of the family and their differences in value positions about school life are interpreted as a central factor for children’s involvement and participation in school practice and for the type of conflict they may face. The type of conflict and the individual’s strategy for dealing with it influence the children’s development of motives and identity. Discrepancies and conflicts between Turkish-Danish students’ motives and their parents’ value positions about school life are analysed to see how this influences young persons’ feelings of well-being and development of motives and competencies. The analyses draw on (a) interviews with Turkish-Danish youth about their school life, friends, subject matter learning, family and future plans, and (b) interviews with parents about their conception of their children’s school life and future.
The scandal of poor medical research

We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons What should we think about a doctor who uses the wrong treatment, either wilfully or through ignorance, or who uses the right treatment wrongly (such as by giving the wrong dose of a drug)? Most people would agree that such behaviour was unprofessional, arguably unethical, and certainly unacceptable. What, then, should we think about researchers who use the wrong techniques (either wilfully or in ignorance), use the right techniques wrongly, misinterpret their results, report their results selectively, cite the literature selectively, and draw unjustified conclusions? We should be appalled. Yet numerous studies of the medical literature, in both general and specialist journals, have shown that all of the above phenomena are common.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 This is surely a scandal. When I tell friends outside medicine that many papers published in medical journals are misleading because of methodological weaknesses they are rightly shocked. Huge sums of money are spent annually on research that is seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative samples, small samples, incorrect methods …
Benefits of Cognitive–Behavioural Therapy for Children and Youth with Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: Re-Examination of the Evidence

The aim of the present paper was to critically examine evidence about the benefits of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) for pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) from controlled and single group studies, including its benefits relative to medication are critically reviewed. Selected studies were categorized by study type and by risk of bias classification. Standardized mean differences (Hedges’ g or Cohen d) and, where appropriate, weighted mean difference (WMD) were calculated. All five comparison and 14 one-group studies showed a significant benefit for CBT within a wide range (ES = .78 to 4.38). Low risk of bias studies produced the lower adjusted effect sizes. The best available estimate of CBT efficacy relative to no treatment is about 1 standardized mean difference, equivalent to a treatment effect of 8 points on the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale. This represents a reduction in the risk of continuing to have OCD post-treatment of about 37% (95% CI 14% to 54%). Evidence from 3 studies indicates that the efficacy of CBT and medication do not differ significantly. CBT combined with medication is significantly more efficacious than non-active controls or medication alone but not relative to CBT alone. CBT should be regarded as a first line equivalent to anti-OCD medication with the potential to lead to better outcomes when combined with medication than medication alone can provide. Additional studies are needed to further clarify CBT's benefits and to investigate how it can be made more available as a treatment option for children and youth who suffer from OCD.
Squibs: When the Whole Is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts: How Composition Affects PMI Values in Distributional Semantic Vectors

Distributional semantic models, deriving vector-based word representations from patterns of word usage in corpora, have many useful applications (Turney and Pantel 2010). Recently, there has been interest in compositional distributional models, which derive vectors for phrases from representations of their constituent words (Mitchell and Lapata 2010). Often, the values of distributional vectors are pointwise mutual information (PMI) scores obtained from raw co-occurrence counts. In this article we study the relation between the PMI dimensions of a phrase vector and its components in order to gain insights into which operations an adequate composition model should perform. We show mathematically that the difference between the PMI dimension of a phrase vector and the sum of PMIs in the corresponding dimensions of the phrase's parts is an independently interpretable value, namely, a quantification of the impact of the context associated with the relevant dimension on the phrase's internal cohesion, as also measured by PMI. We then explore this quantity empirically, through an analysis of adjective–noun composition.
The impact of management operations on the virtualized datacenter

Virtualization has the potential to dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership of datacenters and increase the flexibility of deployments for general-purpose workloads. If present trends continue, the datacenter of the future will be largely virtualized. The base platform in such a datacenter will consist of physical hosts that run hypervisors, and workloads will run within virtual machines on these platforms. From a system management perspective, the virtualized environment enables a number of new workflows in the datacenter. These workflows involve operations on the physical hosts themselves, such as upgrading the hypervisor, as well as operations on the virtual machines, such as reconfiguration or reverting from snapshots. While traditional datacenter design has focused on the cost vs. capability tradeoffs for the end-user applications running in the datacenter, we argue that the management workload from these workflows must be factored into the design of the virtualized datacenter. In this paper, we examine data from real-world virtualized deployments to characterize common management workflows and assess their impact on resource usage in the datacenter. We show that while many end-user applications are fairly light on I/O requirements, the management workload has considerable network and disk I/O requirements. We show that the management workload scales with the increasing compute power in the datacenter. Finally, we discuss the implications of this management workload for the datacenter.
Relationship of Death Anxiety Scale Factors to Subjective States

The purpose of the present research was to determine the relationships between the factors of Templer's Death Anxiety Scale and a number of measures of subjective state. Previous research had demonstrated that the Death Anxiety Scale correlates more highly with subjective state measures, especially anxiety and depression, than with other variables. The present research sought to provide a more refined perspective. The most salient finding was that in a general population, Factor I was essentially unrelated to anxiety and depression in contrast to the positive correlations provided by Factors II, III, and IV. Factor I, whose items directly assess an uncomplicated fear of death and dying, was conceptualized as fear of death. The other factors, whose items pertain to obsessional thinking regarding death and its ramifications, were collectively conceptualized as death anxiety.
Definition of the immunogenic forms of modified human LDL recognized by human autoantibodies and by rabbit hyperimmune antibodies Published, JLR Papers in Press, July 16, 2004. DOI 10.1194/jlr.M400095-JLR200

Humans and laboratory animals recognize human modified LDL as immunogenic. Immune complexes (ICs) isolated from human sera contain malondialdehyde-modified LDL (MDA-LDL) and N ε(carboxymethyl)lysine-modified LDL (CML-LDL) as well as antibodies reacting with MDA-LDL, copper-oxidized LDL (OxLDL), CML-LDL, and advanced glycosylation end product (AGE)-modified LDL. OxLDL and AGE-LDL antibodies isolated from human sera recognize the same LDL modifications and do not react with modified non-LDL proteins. Rabbit antibodies have different reactivity patterns: MDA-LDL antibodies react strongly with MDA-LDL and MDA-BSA but weakly with OxLDL; OxLDL antibodies react strongly with OxLDL and weakly with MDA-LDL; CML-LDL antibodies react with CML-LDL > CML-BSA > AGE-LDL > OxLDL; AGE-LDL antibodies react strongly with AGE-LDL, react weakly with OxLDL, and do not react with CML-LDL. Thus, human and rabbit antibodies seem to recognize different epitopes. Capture assays carried out with all rabbit antibodies showed binding of apolipoprotein B-rich lipoproteins isolated from ICs, suggesting that laboratory-generated epitopes are expressed by in vivo-modified LDL, although they are not necessarily recognized by the human immune system. Thus, the definition of immunogenic forms of modified LDL eliciting human autoimmune responses requires the isolation and characterization of autoantibodies and modified LDL from human samples, whereas rabbit antibodies can be used to detect in vivo-modified human LDL.
Nerve Terminal Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors Initiate Quantal GABA Release from Perisomatic Interneurons by Activating Axonal T-Type (Cav3) Ca2+ Channels and Ca2+ Release from Stores

Release of conventional neurotransmitters is mainly controlled by calcium (Ca2+) influx via high-voltage-activated (HVA), Cav2, channels (“N-, P/Q-, or R-types”) that are opened by action potentials. Regulation of transmission by subthreshold depolarizations does occur, but there is little evidence that low-voltage-activated, Cav3 (“T-type”), channels take part. GABA release from cortical perisomatic-targeting interneurons affects numerous physiological processes, and yet its underlying control mechanisms are not fully understood. We investigated whether T-type Ca2+ channels are involved in regulating GABA transmission from these cells in rat hippocampal CA1 using a combination of whole-cell voltage-clamp, multiple-fluorescence confocal microscopy, dual-immunolabeling electron-microscopy, and optogenetic methods. We show that Cav3.1, T-type Ca2+ channels can be activated by α3β4 nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) that are located on the synaptic regions of the GABAergic perisomatic-targeting interneuronal axons, including the parvalbumin-expressing cells. Asynchronous, quantal GABA release can be triggered by Ca2+ influx through presynaptic T-type Ca2+ channels, augmented by Ca2+ from internal stores, following focal microiontophoretic activation of the α3β4 nAChRs. The resulting GABA release can inhibit pyramidal cells. The T-type Ca2+ channel-dependent mechanism is not dependent on, or accompanied by, HVA channel Ca2+ influx, and is insensitive to agonists of cannabinoid, μ-opioid, or GABAB receptors. It may therefore operate in parallel with the normal HVA-dependent processes. The results reveal new aspects of the regulation of GABA transmission and contribute to a deeper understanding of ACh and nicotine actions in CNS.
Back to the “States” Victim and Abuser States in Borderline Personality Disorder

Chronic and complex posttraumatic stress involving terrorization and betrayal by a caretaker can result in a particular kind of psychic organization that is structured largely by underlying, alternating victim/masochistic and abuser/rageful states. When we move our view of experience “back” to its underpinning in states, we can see how the oscillation between these states is a continual reenactment of the traumatic violation of the relational boundary. While “borderline” persons are capable of conscious awareness of their dramatically differing behaviors, the meaning of the behavior is disavowed. These unlinked, but switching states are decontextualized. Inasmuch as context provides meaning, the acted-out parts remain encapsulated as unowned experience. Diagnostic formulation in terms of these dissociated states supplies a needed cohesiveness for the criteria given in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM—IV) and adds specificity to the “borderline” defenses as spelled out by Kernberg. These shifting victim/masochistic and abuser/rageful self-states can be observed and talked about and are accessible to experience. Themes of behaviors that are typically enacted have to do with boundary violations, destructive entitlement, betrayal, and mirroring the earlier experience, particularly of traumatic betrayals of attachment, of these survivors.
What speaking rates do non-native listeners prefer?

In this study we report on an experiment in which two groups of ESL participants (native Mandarin listeners and a mixed group of speakers of other languages) used a 9-point scale ranging from 'too slow' to 'too fast' to assess the appropriateness of the speech rate of narratives read by native English speakers and Mandarin learners of English. The narratives were played to listeners at their unmodified rates and at three computer-manipulated rates: all passages were adjusted to the Mean Mandarin rate, the Mean English rate, and a Reduced Rate, 10 per cent slower than the Mean Mandarin rate. In general, the modifications did not result in improvements in the ratings. However, the listeners did tend to assign better ratings to accelerated (compared with natural rate) productions from the slowest Mandarin speakers. Regression analyses projected that the Mandarin-speaking listeners would prefer the same 'ideal' rate for Mandarin-accented speech that they did for native English speech, while the other ESL learners would prefer Mandarin-accented English to be spoken at a rate slower than native English speech but faster than the Mandarin speakers' natural rate. This result may reflect a difference in processing costs for familiar and unfamiliar accents. Taken together with the results of other studies, these findings suggest that the admonition to second language learners to 'slow down' is unlikely to be a broadly beneficial strategy.
The role of S‐acylation in protein trafficking

Protein S‐acylation, also known as palmitoylation, consists of the addition of a lipid molecule to one or more cysteine residues through a thioester bond. This modification, which is widespread in eukaryotes, is thought to affect over 12% of the human proteome. S‐acylation allows the reversible association of peripheral proteins with membranes or, in the case of integral membrane proteins, modulates their behavior within the plane of the membrane. This review focuses on the consequences of protein S‐acylation on intracellular trafficking and membrane association. We summarize relevant information that illustrates how lipid modification of proteins plays an important role in dictating precise intracellular movements within cells by regulating membrane‐cytosol exchange, through membrane microdomain segregation, or by modifying the flux of the proteins by means of vesicular or diffusional transport systems. Finally, we highlight some of the key open questions and major challenges in the field.
Breast-feeding Protects against Arsenic Exposure in Bangladeshi Infants

Background Chronic arsenic exposure causes a wide range of health effects, but little is known about critical windows of exposure. Arsenic readily crosses the placenta, but the few available data on postnatal exposure to arsenic via breast milk are not conclusive. Aim Our goal was to assess the arsenic exposure through breast milk in Bangladeshi infants, living in an area with high prevalence of arsenic-rich tube-well water. Methods We analyzed metabolites of inorganic arsenic in breast milk and infant urine at 3 months of age and compared them with detailed information on breast-feeding practices and maternal arsenic exposure, as measured by concentrations in blood, urine, and saliva. Results Arsenic concentrations in breast-milk samples were low (median, 1 μg/kg; range, 0.25–19 μg/kg), despite high arsenic exposures via drinking water (10–1,100 μg/L in urine and 2–40 μg/L in red blood cells). Accordingly, the arsenic concentrations in urine of infants whose mothers reported exclusive breast-feeding were low (median, 1.1 μg/L; range, 0.3–29 μg/L), whereas concentrations for those whose mothers reported partial breast-feeding ranged from 0.4 to 1,520 μg/L (median 1.9 μg/L). The major part of arsenic in milk was inorganic. Still, the infants had a high fraction (median, 87%) of the dimethylated arsenic metabolite in urine. Arsenic in breast milk was associated with arsenic in maternal blood, urine, and saliva. Conclusion Very little arsenic is excreted in breast milk, even in women with high exposure from drinking water. Thus, exclusive breast-feeding protects the infant from exposure to arsenic.
Technical and vocational education: a comparison between initiatives in Britain and abroad

Summary The paper examines technical and vocational education and training for 14‐18‐year‐olds in four European countries (Denmark, France, Sweden and West Germany), the USA and Japan. The aim of the paper is to compare the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) with other systems of vocational education and training (VET) and to examine similarities and differences between them. TVEI was launched in September 1983 by the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), in collaboration with the DES, DE and the Welsh Office, in response to a government initiative of November 1982. Its aim is to provide a four year course, commencing at 14 years, of full‐time general, technical and vocational education, including appropriate work experience. Courses would lead to nationally recognised qualifications. Within this framework young people would be encouraged to develop broadly based occupational skills (From a letter from Lord Young to Directors of Education, dated 28 January 1983, quoted in Appendix A of the.