Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The List of Threatening Experiences: the reliability and validity of a brief life events questionnaire

During the 23 years since the original work of Holmes & Rahe, research into stressful life events on human subjects has tended towards the development of longer and more complex inventories. The List of Threatening Experiences (LTE) of Brugha et al., by virtue of its brevity, overcomes difficulties of clinical application. In a study of 50 psychiatric patients and informants, the questionnaire version of the list (LTE‐Q) was shown to have high test‐retest reliability, and good agreement with informant information. Concurrent validity, based on the criterion of independently rated adversity derived from a semistructured life events interview, making use of the Life Events and Difficulties Scales (LEDS) method developed by Brown & Harris, showed both high specificity and sensitivity. The LTE‐Q is particularly recommended for use in psychiatric, psychological and social studies in which other intervening variables such as social support, coping, and cognitive variables are of interest, and resources do not allow for the use of extensive interview measures of stress.
Revisiting comparable corpora in connected space

Bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora is generally addressed through two monolingual distributional spaces of context vectors connected through a (partial) bilingual lexicon. We sketch here an abstract view of the task where these two spaces are embedded into one common bilingual space, and the two comparable corpora are merged into one bilingual corpus. We show how this paradigm accounts for a variety of models proposed so far, and where a set of topics addressed so far take place in this framework: degree of comparability, ambiguity in the bilingual lexicon, where parallel corpora stand with respect to this view, e.g., to replace the bilingual lexicon. A first experiment, using comparable corpora built from parallel corpora, illustrates one way to put this framework into practice. We also outline how this paradigm suggests directions for future investigations. We finally discuss the current limitations of the model and directions to solve them.
Livelihood Vulnerability and Migration Decision-Making Nexus : Case Studies from Rural Households in Nigeria

This study examines the processes of migration decision-making and the livelihood vulnerability that rural farm households face in Nigeria. It focuses on the socio-economic and environmental factors such as how vulnerability at the household level interacts with the decision to migrate some members of the households to other destination using secondary data sources and the concept of household assets characteristics in explaining the link between livelihood vulnerability and migration decisions among rural households in Nigeria. The study argued that household assets mediate between the vulnerability that households experience and their decision to embark on migration as an alternative livelihood strategy and contrary to some findings, the study submitted that migration as a livelihood strategy of households is mainly used as an ex-ante risk management strategy-accumulation of assets rather than as an ex-post coping strategy to deal with stress or shocks confronting households.
Nystagmus in Infancy and Childhood: Characteristics and Evidence for Treatment

Purpose To discuss the common characteristics of infants and children with nystagmus and review treatments and their evidence. Methods The NEI-sponsored classification of eye movement abnormalities and strabismus and a PubMed search for papers from 1995 through 2005 on interventions for Infantile Nystagmus Syndrome (INS) are reviewed. Results The review of treatments revealed 18 papers on surgical or pharmacological interventions and six papers describing other interventions. There is only one randomized controlled trial, with all the other studies being uncontrolled trials/case series. Conclusions Previous science and studies on interventions for nystagmus in infancy and childhood have laid an important foundation for future work in this field, which should include a randomized clinical trial.
A new EC–PC threshold estimation method for in vivo neural spike detection

This paper models in vivo neural signals and noise for extracellular spike detection. Although the recorded data approximately follow Gaussian distribution, they clearly deviate from white Gaussian noise due to neuronal synchronization and sparse distribution of spike energy. Our study predicts the coexistence of two components embedded in neural data dynamics, one in the exponential form (noise) and the other in the power form (neural spikes). The prediction of the two components has been confirmed in experiments of in vivo sequences recorded from the hippocampus, cortex surface, and spinal cord; both acute and long-term recordings; and sleep and awake states. These two components are further used as references for threshold estimation. Different from the conventional wisdom of setting a threshold at 3×RMS, the estimated threshold exhibits a significant variation. When our algorithm was tested on synthesized sequences with a different signal to noise ratio and on/off firing dynamics, inferred threshold statistics track the benchmarks well. We envision that this work may be applied to a wide range of experiments as a front-end data analysis tool.
The Public Service Motivated Volunteer: Devoting Time or Effort?

Non-profit organizations, corporate volunteer programs, and government workplace schemes are asking volunteers for their time and effort. But, with the changes in how people volunteer, such as episodic, micro, and cyber volunteering, those managing volunteers need to understand whether they should focus on encouraging volunteers to donate more time or effort. Using public service motivation to measure volunteer’s propensity to engage in volunteering, we compare three outcomes: time spent volunteering, frequency of volunteering, and volunteering intensity. In a sample of 411 volunteers, we find public service motivation is associated with more time spent volunteering, increased frequency, and higher levels of volunteering intensity. However, volunteering intensity explains the most variance. These findings suggest that how the individual perceives they exert volunteering intensity may be useful among public service motivated volunteers.
Reshaping the Early Careers by Business Graduates through Internship Experiences

The purposiveness of this research paper is to examine business graduates’ pre-employment decisions regarding to pursue a satisfied and successful career after going through internship training. Subjects were the students who have undergone an internship program and data was analyzed by using SPSS software. A five point Likert Scale has been used to examine the relation of dependent variable (PC fit) an independent variables (job attributes, PO fit and PJ fit). The internees perceived pay, benefits and promotion as related to future growth opportunities and job location, peers’ relationship, favorability for firm’s image and job duties as major factors and key criterion to pursue a satisfied and successful career . The results also indicate that person job (PJ) fit contribute more than person organization (PO) fit towards person career (PC) fit.To facilitate the students, the university coordinators can organize a face to face meeting of students and firms assisting them to get awareness of internees’ selection criterion to increase the opportunities to be selected their interested firms. Offering internship programs and trainings also allows to employers the opportunity of exploring full time fresh graduates pool and employment potential for recruitment. This research shows significance of transitional career choices among business graduates. Further it authorizes the stimulating factors directly and indirectly influencing students’ career selections and therefore how organizations can make better these conditions for future recruitment.
Public and Private Organizations: How Different or Similar are They

In spite of a growing body of research attempting to draw distinctions between public and private organizations over the years, it remains a disputable issue yet to be settled by organizational theorists and scholars alike. No conclusive understanding regarding the similarities and differences has been availed, and the scholarly discussions between these two types of organizations predominantly ended up finding out differences rather than similarities. Given the background, this paper attempts to ascertain the similarities and differences between public and private organizations based on the application and relevance of some important organizational concepts drawing on literature review as well as researchers’ application of reflexivity in investigating the issues. The concepts that have been used and analyzed include goals, goods and services, resource ownership, structure, culture, leadership and managership, decision making. This analysis indicates that despite manifestation of diverse variations between public and private organizations, in some cases/aspects they do share common attributes. For example, it is assumed that bureaucracy is the most dominant feature in public organizations, but such model is also being followed by many big private organizations. On the other hand, private managerial practices and structural components are also being adopted by public organizations. Further empirical research or case study could be conducted/developed using the concepts used in this analysis concerning the similarities and differences between these two types of organizations in order to grapple a concrete understanding about organization as a whole. At the same time, it is also suggested to minimize the gaps between public and private organizations by sharing the best practices of each other for greater developmental requirements.
Variations in the Social Impact of Oral Conditions Among Older Adults in South Australia, Ontario, and North Carolina

Previous studies among older adults have demonstrated that oral disease frequently leads to dysfunction, discomfort, and disability. This study aimed to assess variations in the social impact of oral conditions among six strata of people aged 65 years and older: residents of metropolitan Adelaide and rural Mt Gambier, South Australia; residents of metropolitan Toronto-North York and non-metropolitan Simcoe-Sudbury counties, Ontario, Canada; and blacks and whites in the Piedmont region of North Carolina (NC), United States. Subjects were participants in three oral epidemiological studies of random samples of the elderly populations in the six strata. Some 1,642 participants completed a 49-item Oral Health Impact Profile (OHIP) questionnaire which asked about impacts caused by problems with the teeth, mouth, or dentures during the previous 12 months. The percentage of dentate people reporting impacts fairly often or very often was greatest among NC blacks for 41 of the OHIP items. Two summary variables of social impact were used as dependent variables in bivariate and multivariate least-squares regression analyses. Among dentate people, mean levels of social impact were greatest for NC blacks and lowest for NC whites, while people from South Australia and Ontario had intermediate levels of social impact (P < 0.01). Missing teeth, retained root fragments, root-surface decay, periodontal pockets, and problem-motivated dental visits were associated with higher levels of social impact (P < 0.05), although there persisted a two-fold difference in social impact across the six strata after adjustment for those factors. Among edentulous people, there was no statistically significant variation in social impact among strata. The findings suggest that there are social and cultural factors influencing oral health and its social impact, and that those factors differ most between dentate blacks and whites in NC.
Explaining intermediation costs of Islamic banks in OIC countries

This chapter empirically examines the financial intermediation costs as represented by net financing margins in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation Islamic banking sector during the period 2005 to 2011 by focusing on the roles played by various bank-specific, macroeconomic-specific and institutional-governance factors. The results indicate that risk aversion, bank size and inflation are robustly related to the margins. Some evidence supporting the significance of credit risk and gross domestic product growth in explaining the margin is also documented. Interestingly, the overhead costs, market concentration and institutional-governance factors have no significant impact on the intermediation costs of Islamic banks. Our results demonstrate important policy implications in narrowing the intermediation costs of Islamic banks, namely, enhancement of risk management instruments, scale efficiency, innovation in Islamic banking products and macroeconomic stability.
Multi-Resolution Prediction Model Based on Community Relevance for Missing Links Prediction

The existing research demonstrates that the link prediction algorithm which based on community similarity has better prediction performance than that of other node similarity-based methods, and it is more suitable for predicting the probability of the missing links between node-pairs with far distance. However, the disadvantage of these community similarity-based methods is the resolution of prediction accuracy is very low, which resulting in the existence probability of the missing links between node-pairs within a community or between a specific pair of communities is the same. In addition, the link prediction algorithms which based on multi-resolution community division can calculate the existence probability of missing links under different resolutions, but the relevance between communities had not taken into account, which makes it difficult to predict the existence probability of target links if the number of interconnections between communities is small. Combining the advantages of these two algorithms, we propose a more realistic link prediction model which based on a novel quasi-local community relevance index under multi-resolution community division. The performance of our algorithms is demonstrated by comparing with other well-known methods on two kinds of networks in different scales. The experiment results indicate that our approaches are very competitive.
A Central Role for Bid in Granzyme B-induced Apoptosis*

Granzyme B, a protease released from cytotoxic lymphocytes, has been proposed to induce target cell death by cleaving and activating the pro-apoptotic Bcl-2 family member Bid. It has also been proposed that granzyme B can induce target cell death by activating caspases directly, by cleaving caspase substrates, and/or by cleaving several non-caspase substrates. The relative importance of Bid in granzyme B-induced cell death has therefore remained unclear. Here we report that cells isolated from various tissues of Bid-deficient mice were resistant to granzyme B-induced cell death. Consistent with the proposed role of Bid in regulating mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization, cytochrome c remained in the mitochondria of Bid-deficient cells treated with granzyme B. Unlike wild type cells, Bid-deficient cells survived and were then able to proliferate normally, demonstrating the critical role for Bid in mediating granzyme B-induced apoptosis.
Hardware Implementation of Wireless Communications Algorithms: A Practical Approach

Wireless communication algorithms are implemented using a wide spectrum of building blocks such as: source coding; channel coding; modulation; multiplexing in time, frequency and code domains; channel estimation; time and frequency domain synchronization and equalization; pre-distortion; transmit and receive diversity; combat and take advantage of fading and multi-path channels; intermediate frequency (IF) processing in software defined radio, etc.
Transcription Factors and Their Roles in Signal Transduction in Plants under Abiotic Stresses

Abstract: In agricultural production, abiotic stresses are known as the main disturbance leading to negative impacts on crop performance. Research on elucidating plant defense mechanisms against the stresses at molecular level has been addressed for years in order to identify the major contributors in boosting the plant tolerance ability. From literature, numerous genes from different species, and from both functional and regulatory gene categories, have been suggested to be on the list of potential candidates for genetic engineering. Noticeably, enhancement of plant stress tolerance by manipulating expression of Transcription Factors (TFs) encoding genes has emerged as a popular approach since most of them are early stress-responsive genes and control the expression of a set of downstream target genes. Consequently, there is a higher chance to generate novel cultivars with better tolerance to either single or multiple stresses. Perhaps, the difficult task when deploying this approach is selecting appropriate gene(s) for manipulation. In this review, on the basis of the current findings from molecular and post-genomic studies, our interest is to highlight the current understanding of the roles of TFs in signal transduction and mediating plant responses towards abiotic stressors. Furthermore, interactions among TFs within the stress-responsive network will be discussed. The last section will be reserved for discussing the potential applications of TFs for stress tolerance improvement in plants.
B2B-marketing communication strategies in CEE

For Austrian (B2B) companies, the increasing prosperity and rapid development of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries appear to offer rather attractive locations to achieve the goal of becoming competitive market participants. Companies in the process of internationalization need a precise indication of critical success factors and trends concerning Marketing and Sales Management in CEE. Numerous Austrian companies are already successfully operating in CEE countries; many other Austrian companies, especially SMEs, are actually on their way to expanding their business into these promising regions. Cumulating the experience of successful companies already active in CEE countries and discovering critical success factors are the overall aims of a Barometer Study started in 2007 by the department of Global Sales Management at the Upper Austrian University of Applied Sciences in Steyr. The longitudinal study covers important aspects before and during the process of internationalization, including typical patterns of information retrieval and analysis, decisive factors for the selection of target markets, implementation of marketing communications, relationship management with local partners and motivational aspects of sales staff in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Romania. In this contribution, three research questions with a focus on B2B-Marketing communication strategies of Austrian businesses’ sales staff in CEE, contrasting findings from 2007 and 2013 and representing a view from before and after the financial crisis are discussed. This paper will investigate further the organization of marketing communication as well as discuss adaption versus standardization strategies. In addition, communication measures and parts of the marketing mix perceived to be successful by Austrian companies will be expounded.
Shedding of Coxiella burnetii in milk by Nigerian dairy and dual purposes cows.

Fresh milk from dairy cows kept at semi-intensive husbandry in governmental and institutional farms and dual purpose Fulani nomadic husbandry around Zaria, Nigeria were screened for Coxiella burnetii using the mouse inoculation test. Of the 20 herds from both management systems tested, 16(80.0%) contained dairy cows shedding C. burnetii in their milk. Of a total of 169 cows tested, 41(24.3%) were shedders. Eighteen (22.0%) of 82 cows kept under semi-intensive and 23(26.4%) of 87 cows kept under Fulani nomadic systems were shedding C. burnetii. The difference in frequency of shedding C. burnetii between both system was not statistically significant (P greater than 0.05, X2). Of the 88 dairy cows serologically tested for C. burnetii agglutinins by the capillary agglutination test (C.A.T), 48(54.5%) were sero-positive and 40(45.5%) were seronegative. Among Q-fever sero-positive cows, 11(22.9%) were shedders and 37(77.1%) were not shedding C. burnetii in their milk. Of the sero-negative cows, 6(15.0%) and 34(85.0%) were shedders and non-shedders, respectively. With milk from Fulani nomadic cows predominantly taken raw or made into unheated fermented milk products, the health risk to the consumers of such products cannot be over-emphasized.
A new endoscopic ultrasonography image processing method to evaluate the prognosis for pancreatic cancer treated with interstitial brachytherapy.

AIM To develop a fuzzy classification method to score the texture features of pancreatic cancer in endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) images and evaluate its utility in making prognosis judgments for patients with unresectable pancreatic cancer treated by EUS-guided interstitial brachytherapy. METHODS EUS images from our retrospective database were analyzed. The regions of interest were drawn, and texture features were extracted, selected, and scored with a fuzzy classification method using a C++ program. Then, patients with unresectable pancreatic cancer were enrolled to receive EUS-guided iodine 125 radioactive seed implantation. Their fuzzy classification scores, tumor volumes, and carbohydrate antigen 199 (CA199) levels before and after the brachytherapy were recorded. The association between the changes in these parameters and overall survival was analyzed statistically. RESULTS EUS images of 153 patients with pancreatic cancer and 63 non-cancer patients were analyzed. A total of 25 consecutive patients were enrolled, and they tolerated the brachytherapy well without any complications. There was a correlation between the change in the fuzzy classification score and overall survival (Spearman test, r = 0.616, P = 0.001), whereas no correlation was found to be significant between the change in tumor volume (P = 0.663), CA199 level (P = 0.659), and overall survival. There were 15 patients with a decrease in their fuzzy classification score after brachytherapy, whereas the fuzzy classification score increased in another 10 patients. There was a significant difference in overall survival between the two groups (67 d vs 151 d, P = 0.001), but not in the change of tumor volume and CA199 level. CONCLUSION Using the fuzzy classification method to analyze EUS images of pancreatic cancer is feasible, and the method can be used to make prognosis judgments for patients with unresectable pancreatic cancer treated by interstitial brachytherapy.
Assessing the Effects of Climate Policy on Companies' Greenhouse Gas Emissions

We study the effect of climate policy on companies’ greenhouse gas emissions using emissions data for the headquarters and subsidiaries of the world’s biggest manufacturing, energy, and utility companies. Our results suggest that financial incentives and legal requirements to audit energy use reduce companies’ emissions, whereas support schemes aimed at promoting the combined generation of heat and power increased emissions of non-utility companies and feed-in tariffs aimed at increasing the use of renewable energy sources for electricity generation increase emissions of utility companies. We also find loans and subsidies for energy efficiency improvements to increase emissions in the short term. In addition, our results provide a solid foundation for researchers seeking consistent and comparable estimates on the mitigation effects of typical climate policy instruments in a cross-country setting.