Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Donor Behavior and Voluntary Support for Higher Education Institutions.

Income from private giving has always been of great importance to American colleges and universities. Through the rest of this century, however, maintaining and expanding these resources will approach crucial significance. In short, voluntary support has both a timeless and a timeliness dimension. Unlike appropriations and allocations from government and income from many other sources, voluntary support for colleges and universities takes on relatively unrestricted spending forms. Whereas the spending of governmental monies and other resources generally are prescribed or at least closely regulated, much voluntary support may be expended almost without constraint. The result is that endowment and related funds often are the major sources of institutional discretionary funds by which innovations may be introduced, risks may be taken, and investments in the future may be made. Voluntary support frequently provides the margin of excellence, the element of vitality, that separates one institution from another and allows institutions to escape from the routinized sameness of fully regulated organizations. In addition to the timeless importance of voluntary support, there is also a timeliness dimension. The present pervasive decline in resources available to institutions of higher education, caused by the ubiquitous budget cuts on campus, has raised the importance of voluntary support to a critical level. Voluntary support is becoming the only source of real discretionary money and in many cases is assum-
Public perceptions of white collar crime seriousness: A survey of an Australian sample

During the past decade or so a number of studies in the United States and Canada have offered a challenge to the commonly held belief that the public is indifferent or somewhat ambivalent to white collar criminality. The present research replicated the Rossi et. al., survey in 1972 of the seriousness of 140 offenses to test if similar results were possible in Australia. The results presented here show that the public do perceive these offenses as being serious, and the degree of seriousness depends on the impact of harm particular types of offenses have on victims.
A constructive algorithm for binary neural networks: the oil-spot algorithm

This paper presents a constructive training algorithm for supervised neural networks. The algorithm relies on a topological approach, based on the representation of the mapping of interest onto the binary hypercube of the input space. It dynamically constructs a two-layer neural network by involving successively binary examples. A convenient treatment of real-valued data is possible by means of a suitable real-to-binary codification. In the case of target functions that have efficient halfspace union representations, simulations show the constructed networks result optimized in terms of number of neurons.
Between Complacency and Paternalism

Consumer culture researchers need to acknowledge theoretical problems that can arise when ethical assumptions inform social scientific claims. To identify the origins of these problems, the sociologist Andrew Abbott has developed a framework to illustrate how social scientific claims are continually mapped and remapped onto rival moral perspectives. These perspectives are defined by the relative emphasis that they place on freedom and determinism, agency and structure. When consumer culture researchers attempt to diagnose or influence people’s political and consumer choices, they emphasize either one side of these dichotomies or the other. This article adapts Abbott’s framework to show how these differing emphases lead to different conclusions about the techniques that educators, social scientists, activists, marketers, and policy-makers should use to improve people’s political and consumer choices.
Breast Reduction in the Irradiated Breast: Evidence for the Role of Breast Reduction at the Time of Lumpectomy

Abstract: Given the high incidence of breast cancer in our society, it is common to encounter patients with macromastia who desire breast reduction after breast‐conserving therapy by lumpectomy and radiation. We hypothesize that radiation leads to a significant increase in postoperative complications after breast reduction. All patients with a history of unilateral breast lumpectomy and radiation who subsequently underwent bilateral breast reduction by a single surgeon from 2004 to 2008 were retrospectively reviewed. Outcomes including cellulitis, wound breakdown, seroma, and need for repeat operations were compared between the radiated and nonradiated breast. The Fisher’s exact test was used for statistical analysis. Twelve patients (mean age, 57 years) underwent bilateral breast reduction a mean of 86 months after unilateral lumpectomy and radiation. The nonradiated breasts had no complications postoperatively. The radiated breasts had a significant increase in complications with a total of five breasts (42%, p < 0.04) having postoperative complications including cellulitis in two breasts, seroma requiring drainage in five breasts, two cases of fat necrosis, and one case of wound dehiscence. This resulted in two admissions for intravenous antibiotics and two repeat operative procedures. Additionally, three patients had significant breast asymmetry or contour deformities after reduction requiring operative revisions. Breast reduction after radiation leads to a significant increase in complications. Given this data, patients with macromastia undergoing breast conservation therapy for cancer should be considered for reduction at the time of lumpectomy and prior to radiation.
Can schools save indigenous languages? Policy and practice on four continents

This book is among the more recent additions to the literature on the question of how to save threatened languages (Fishman, 2000; Hinton & Hale, 2001; Reyhner, Cantoni, Clair, & Parsons Yazzie, 1999). Nancy Hornberger extends the discussion to focus on the role of schools in the process of indigenous language revitalization with examples of policies and practice from four continents. The contributors are a group of scholars well respected for their extensive research experience in language revitalization. Ever mindful of the political, economic and social forces that continue to reduce the numbers of indigenous languages in the world, these authors stand united in the view that language revitalization remains a worthwhile and necessary undertaking, as much for the sake of preserving cultural identities as for the languages themselves. The volume consists of nine chapters, beginning with Hornberger’s introduction that draws out the issues relating to the presence of indigenous languages in schools and to the role of the schools themselves. The main content is divided into two sections. Part I covers examples of language revitalization efforts in Norway, Latin America, New Zealand and Mexico. The next four chapters in Part II provide a commentary on these studies, as well as further insights from an international perspective. In Chapter 2, Vuokko Hirvonen reports on Sámi schools in the Nordic countries, with focus on the Sámi Administration Area in Norway where most Sámi people live. Following a period of Norwegianization in the nineteenth century, the Sámi lost their language rights, but educational reforms from 1959 onwards led to the development and eventual adoption of a Sámi curriculum in the 1990s. A table detailing the number of Sámi schools and respective enrolments for 2004/2005 shows the extent of this achievement. Hirvonen describes three types of Sámi schools, Sámi speaking, Sámi and Norwegian-speaking and Norwegian speaking, of which the first provides the strongest model of bilingual education and best supports the maintenance of Sami cultural identity. However, in some schools, Sámi is as yet offered only as an optional subject, and Hirvonen is further concerned that the specific-cultural objectives of the Sámi reforms are not always met. A pertinent issue is embedded in the title of the chapter: ‘Out on the fells, I feel like a Sami’. This statement suggests that Sami schools may function more effectively in the rural areas because it is more natural to speak Sami there than in an urban environment, where fitting in requires greater use of Norwegian. Despite the obvious gains for Sámi, Hirvonen reminds the reader that the language remains under threat in the wider societal context, and in order to ensure its survival, calls for ongoing co-operation between municipal authorities, Sámi community leaders and the schools.
StructurANTion: A Theoretical Framework For Integrating Human and IS Research and Development

This paper seeks to provide an under-pinning theoretical framework for, not only understanding how humanchines (the duality of human and machine artefacts, or the humanchine actor) and their networks come into being, persist and change, but for envisioning and developing them. This will be accomplished by exploring the idea of integrating structuration theory (ST) and actor network theory (ANT). The result is a hybrid theory with which to understand and ultimately underpin research and interventions in the world that encompasses humanchine change (integrations of human and technology) within organisational network ecologies. This hybrid framework is given the working title of the hybrid neologism ‘StructurANTion’.
Anti‐Ischemic Effects of Angiotensin‐Converting Enzyme Inhibitors: A Future Therapeutic Perspective

Summary: The renin‐angiotensin system and angiotensin‐converting enzyme (ACE) are increasingly being implicated in the pathogenesis of coronary artery disease and its sequelae and the potential of ACE inhibitors to protect the heart is a topic that has emerged recently as a matter for scientific discussion. Experimental and clinical studies have shown the beneficial effects of ACE inhibitors on the metabolism, function and structure of healthy and damaged hearts and these data support the concept of both primary and secondary cardioprotection with this class of drugs. Animal studies have demonstrated the potential beneficial effects of ACE inhibition at a variety of sites, including improvement of endothelial function, inhibition of platelet aggregation, prevention of atherosclerotic lesions and inhibition of myointimal proliferation, extending the concept to a more general definition of cardiovascular protection with ACE inhibitors involving both the heart and the vessels. ACE inhibitors prevent stimulation of smooth muscle cell angiotensin‐II (A‐II) receptors, thereby blocking both contractile and proliferative actions of A‐II. In addition, ACE inhibition of kininase inhibits the breakdown of bradykinin, a direct stimulant of nitric oxide release from the intact endothelial cell. Thus, at the cellular level ACE inhibition shifts the balance of ongoing mechanisms in favour of those promoting vasodilatory, anti‐aggregatory, antithrombotic and antiproliferative effects. Although these data have not all been validated in human studies, the reduction of ischemic events in studies of ACE inhibition in left ventricular dysfunction (LVD) and, more recently, also in patients without LVD, cannot be explained solely by improved hemodynamics, and it is possible that actions on the endothelium, the atherosclerotic process and platelets are at least in part responsible. So, the available data underlie the potential benefits of ACE inhibition in the field of ischemic heart disease and atherosclerosis; the results of ongoing studies in humans looking more directly at the influence of ACE inhibitors in this setting are awaited with interest.
Virtual RC Damping of LCL-Filtered Voltage Source Converters With Extended Selective Harmonic Compensation

Active damping and harmonic compensation are two common challenges faced by LCL-filtered voltage source converters. To manage them holistically, this paper begins by proposing a virtual RC damper in parallel with the passive filter capacitor. The virtual damper is actively inserted by feeding back the passive capacitor current through a high-pass filter, which indirectly, furnishes two superior features. They are the mitigation of phase lag experienced by a conventional damper and the avoidance of instability caused by the negative resistance inserted unintentionally. Moreover, with the virtual RC damper, the frequency region, within which the harmonic compensation is effective, can be extended beyond the gain crossover frequency. This is of interest to some high-performance applications, but has presently not been achieved by existing schemes. Performance of the proposed scheme has been tested in the laboratory with results obtained for demonstrating stability and harmonic compensation.
The burden of benevolent sexism: how it contributes to the maintenance of gender inequalities

This study (N = 235) examines the responses of male and female participants to information about the alleged endorsement of either hostile or benevolent sexist beliefs by a sample of either men or women. We predicted that people endorsing benevolent sexist statements would be less likely to be perceived as sexist than those endorsing hostile sexist views, and examined the judgmental process through which people fail to recognize benevolent sexism as a form of prejudice. We argue that benevolent sexists do not match the mental prototype of sexist perpetrators, because they are seen as likeable. Our results confirm that because benevolent sexists are evaluated more positively than hostile sexists, they are less likely to be seen as sexists. This judgmental process occurs relatively independently of emotional responses to hostile vs. benevolent sexism. These results are discussed in terms of their relevance to the maintenance of gender inequalities. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Improving Experimental Designs through Adaptive Treatment Allocation

In this paper, I discuss the use of adaptive treatment allocation based on the interim results of an experiment. I draw from the literature on multi-armed bandit algorithms and provide identification and consistency conditions for the estimation of treatment effects in adaptive experiments. I go on to consider how this might be used by social scientists and develop a method to generate a sequence of treatment assignment probabilities which will converge to an optimal treatment allocation in terms of asymptotic efficiency. This adaptive allocation method provides an estimator that is consistent and more efficient than static assignment. Methods are also assessed which optimize an outcome of interest (such as voting). ∗Replication code available by request. All code written in R and Python and available on request from the author. †New York University Department of Politics, 19 W. 4th St. Second Floor, New York, NY, 10012. Email: drewd@nyu.edu Web: http://drewdimmery.com
Modeling a-priori likelihoods for angry user turns with hidden Markov models

Current studies dealing with the detection of angry users in automated telephone-based speech applications take acoustic and sometimes linguistic information into account in order to classify the emotional state of the caller in single user turns. Angry user turns, however, don’t appear from nowhere and the likelihood of observing another angry turn rises substantially when anger has already been observed previously in the discourse. In this contribution we examine the context of angry user turns in two different telephone corpora. We then introduce Hidden Markov Models (HMM) as classifiers modeling the temporal aspects of anger across single turns. As additional information source, the HMMs improve our acoustic classifier serving as baseline substantially. Performance gains of 1-4 % can be reported by performing late fusion of the acoustic classifier and the HMMs.
La «school readiness» e la sua misura: uno strumento di rilevazione per la scuola dell’infanzia

School Readiness and its Measurement: An Assessment Tool for Kindergarten Many international studies have focused on school readiness. It has, therefore, become urgent to evaluate the empirical evidence around this topic. It is a complex subject, initiating a wide debate and a variety of contributions. Studies have created a deeper vision of the concept and broadened the areas that need to be researched. Moreover, the environmental conditions contributing to the development of readiness have been analyzed in combination with the possible strategies to enhance it. This contribution carries out a critical analysis of these studies. This essay is particularly focused on the aspects of the measurement of readiness and offers a review of the main tests adopted internationally to measure it. It, finally, proposes an original tool to measure cognitive readiness, suitable for Italian schools, outlining its psychometric characteristics, based on a sample of 445 children. Such a test highlights the difficulties that significant percentages of children aged between 4 and 5 have; It also allows for the evaluation of the effects of the enhancement of readiness, in order to establish the most effective ones, based on the EBE perspective.
Service level agreement aware resource management

Next Generation Grids aim at attracting commercial users to employ Grid environments for their business critical compute jobs. These customers demand for contractually fixed service quality levels, ensuring the availability of results in time In this context, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a powerful instrument for defining a comprehensive requirement profile. Numerous research projects worldwide already focus on integrating SLA technology in Grid middleware components like broker services. However, solely focusing on Grid middleware services is not sufficient. Services at Grid middleware may accept compute jobs from customers, but they have to realize them by means of local resource management systems (RMS). Current RMS offer best-effort service only, thus they are also limiting the service quality level the Grid middleware service is able to provide. In this thesis the architecture and operation of an SLA-aware resource management system is described, which allows Grid middleware components to negotiate on SLAs. The system uses its internal mechanisms of application-transparent fault tolerance to ensure the terms of these SLAs even in case of resource outages. The main parts of this work focus on scheduling aspects and strategies for ensuring SLA compliance, respectively design aspects on implementation. Scheduling strategies significantly determine the level of fault tolerance that the system is able to provide. After presenting requirements of Grid middleware components on service qualities and a description of operation phases of an SLA-aware resource management system, intra-cluster scheduling strategies are described. Here, the system solely uses its own resources and mechanisms for coping with resource outages. For further increasing the level of fault tolerance, strategies for cross-border migration are presented. Beside a migration to other cluster systems in the same administrative domain, the system uses also Grid resources as migration targets. For ensuring the successful restart, mechanisms for describing the compatibility profile of a checkpointed job are presented. The concept of the SLA-aware resource management system has been implemented in the scope of the EC-funded project HPC4U. We will describe design aspects of this realization and show results from system deployments at use-case customers.
Passive UHF RFID in Paper Industry: Challenges, Benefits and the Application Environment

Radio frequency identification (RFID) systems for the paper industry is an emerging research topic due to the need for an automated identification system for the paper industry which would carry on the identification codes of paper and board reels throughout their life cycle. This paper discusses the application of passive ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID systems to the paper industry. Challenges, benefits, and the application environment of using passive UHF RFID systems in the paper industry are presented and discussed. The major challenges are development of globally operable tag antenna designs and integration of reader units and reader antennas to paper handling machinery. To confront and solve these challenges, this paper presents novel tag antenna designs for paper and board reel identification and proposes solutions for reader and reader antenna integration to paper handling machinery. In addition, the identification locations within the paper reel supply chain and the effects of RFID systems to supply chain visibility are presented and discussed. In addition, test results of using passive UHF RFID systems in the paper industry environment are presented.
When two vowels go walking in Bantu: A comparative analysis of vowel hiatus resolution in chiNambya and chiZezuru

Abstract Vowel hiatus is inadmissible in many languages. ChiNambya and chiZezuru rely on coalescence, glide epenthesis, elision, glide formation and secondary articulation to resolve vowel hiatus. This article presents a comparative analysis of three hiatus-avoidance methods, namely, glide formation, secondary articulation and vowel elision in chiNambya and chiZezuru, using Optimality Theory (hereafter OT). These repair strategies operate within nominals and occur in a phonologically conditioned complementary distribution. Two interlinguistic differences are noticeable: (i) when the first vowel (henceforth V1) is /i/ and is preceded by a consonant, chiZezuru deletes V1 regardless of the quality of the preceding consonant because it does not allow palatalised consonants. In contrast, chiNambya, which allows some palatalised consonants, employs secondary articulation with all other consonants except when the preceding consonant is palatal; where V1 is deleted; and (ii) when V1 is /u/ and is preceded by a labial consonant and followed by a labial vowel, chiZezuru employs secondary articulation while chiNambya which does not allow labialised labial consonants followed by labial vowels, employs elision. These interlinguistic differences allow for an OT analysis where a factorial typology accounts for the differences.
A 330MHz 11 bit 26.4mW CMOS low-hold-pedestal fully differential track-and-hold circuit

A new technique for realizing a very-high-speed low-power low-voltage CMOS fully differential track-and-hold circuit with low hold pedestal is presented. To achieve high sampling linearity the circuit utilizes linearized input switch. The fully differential design relaxes the trade-off between sampling speed and the sampling precision. The circuit design of major building blocks is described in detailed. A prototype circuit in a 0.35- mu m CMOS process is integrated and experimental results are presented.
Causes, effects and treatment of long‐term benzodiazepine use: A review of psychological perspectives

Psychological mechanisms underlying addictive behaviour are described with particular reference to the role of learning and cognition in long‐term benzodiazepine use. The effects of long‐term tranquillizer use on cognitive functioning are then discussed, and it is suggested that the long‐term use of benzodiazepines is associated with impairment in two areas of cognitive functioning; visual‐spatial ability and the ability to sustain attention on a repetitive task under time pressure. Psychological approaches to the management of long‐term benzodiazepine users have focused on tailoring cognitive and behavioural therapeutic techniques to the needs of tranquillizer‐dependent patients. A follow‐up study of patients treated for benzodiazepine dependence is described. It is argued that a gradual withdrawal regimen alone is inadequate for permanent withdrawal for many patients, and that psychological adjuncts should be included in treatment to provide patients with alternative coping strategies.