Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ordinary Language and External Validity : Specifying Concepts in the Study of Ethnicity *

Do greater cultural differences between ethnic groups increase the probability of ethnic violence between them? Almost invariably, the questions of interest to social scientists are posed in terms of concepts rooted in ordinary language. In this case, for instance, an empirical inquiry would require a statement of the meaning of “cultural differences,” “ethnic group,” and “ethnic violence. ” We argue against the common social scientific practice of merely stipulating definitions (e.g., “By ‘ethnic group,’ we mean .). Instead, before jumping to stipulation, social scientists should analyze ordinary language usage in order to explicate the range of current meanings. Contrary to some interpretivist arguments against the possibility of cross-cultural analysis and generalization, this approach can facilitate quantitative studies addressing social scientific questions. We illustrate and defend these claims with ordinary language analyses of the meaning of “ethnic group,” “ethnic violence,” “dominant ethnic group,” and “cultural differences. ” *This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 2000 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 2000.
Neither the Bvg− Phase nor thevrg6 Locus of Bordetella pertussis Is Required for Respiratory Infection in Mice

ABSTRACT In Bordetella species, the BvgAS sensory transduction system mediates an alteration between the Bvg+ phase, characterized by expression of adhesins and toxins, and the Bvg− phase, characterized by the expression of motility and coregulated phenotypes in Bordetella bronchiseptica and by the expression of vrg loci in Bordetella pertussis. Since there is no known environmental or animal reservoir for B. pertussis, the causative agent of whooping cough, it has been assumed that this phenotypic alteration must occur within the human host during infection. Consistent with this hypothesis was the observation that a B. pertussis mutant, SK6, containing a TnphoA insertion mutation in a Bvg-repressed gene (vrg6) was defective for tracheal and lung colonization in a mouse model of respiratory infection (D. T. Beattie, R. Shahin, and J. Mekalanos, Infect. Immun. 60:571–577, 1992). This result was inconsistent, however, with the observation that a Bvg+ phase-locked B. bronchiseptica mutant was indistinguishable from the wild type in its ability to establish a persistent respiratory infection in rabbits and rats (P. A. Cotter and J. F. Miller, Infect. Immun. 62:3381–3390, 1994; B. J. Akerley, P. A. Cotter, and J. F. Miller, Cell 80:611–620, 1995). To directly address the role of Bvg-mediated signal transduction in B. pertussis pathogenesis, we constructed Bvg+ and Bvg− phase-locked mutants and compared them with the wild type for their ability to colonize the respiratory tracts of mice. Our results show that the Bvg+phase of B. pertussis is necessary and sufficient for respiratory infection. By constructing a strain with a deletion in thebvgR regulatory locus, we also show that ectopic expression of Bvg− phase phenotypes decreases the efficiency of colonization, underscoring the importance of Bvg-mediated repression of gene expression in vivo. Finally, we show that the virulence defect present in strain SK6 cannot be attributed to the vrg6mutation. These data contradict an in vivo role for the Bvg− phase of B. pertussis.
Supervised learning models to predict firm performance with annual reports: An empirical study

Text mining and machine learning methodologies have been applied toward knowledge discovery in several domains, such as biomedicine and business. Interestingly, in the business domain, the text mining and machine learning community has minimally explored company annual reports with their mandatory disclosures. In this study, we explore the question “How can annual reports be used to predict change in company performance from one year to the next? ” from a text mining perspective. Our article contributes a systematic study of the potential of company mandatory disclosures using a computational viewpoint in the following aspects: (a) We characterize our research problem along distinct dimensions to gain a reasonably comprehensive understanding of the capacity of supervised learning methods in predicting change in company performance using annual reports, and (b) our findings from unbiased systematic experiments provide further evidence about the economic incentives faced by analysts in their stock recommendations and speculations on analysts having access to more information in producing earnings forecast.
“Hard Work Beats Talent until Talent Decides to Work Hard”: Coaches' Perspectives regarding Differentiating Elite and Non-Elite Swimmers

Research addressing elite athletes tends to either identify differences between high-level and low-level performers or the developmental histories of elite athletes. The current study culls input from six individuals who simultaneously coach both elite (e.g., World Record holders) and non-elite (e.g., regional-level) swimmers, and have done so for an extended period of time, thereby filling a void in the literature by providing their opinions and perceptions regarding how athletic performance differences develop. Responses by participants to the open-ended question, “What do you feel contributes to a swimmer achieving top performances (e.g., World Records) vs. excellent performances (e.g., a Top-8 finish at NCAAs)? ” were analyzed. Emergent categories (i.e., intrapersonal, interpersonal, lifestyle, training, environment, and a systemic interaction among these) are presented and an interpretation is offered. Additionally, a critique of the methods implemented herein is offered and future research directions are proposed.
Music and cultural theory

Preface. Introduction. 1. The Problem of Affect and Meaning in Music. 2. Music and Cultural Theory. 3. Music and Psychoanalysis. 4. Theorizing Difference in Language and Music. 5. Music as a Medium in Sound. 6. Music as Structure. 7. Music's Semiological Moment. 8. Music - a Performative Semiological Model. 9. Music and Language in the Constitution of Society. 10. Towards a Sociology of Sound. Bibliography. Index.
The Validity of the Academic Rigor Index (ARI) for Predicting FYGPA

Acknowledgements The authors wish to acknowledge Andrew Wiley and Paul Sackett for reviewing earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to thank Brian Patterson for his assistance with SAS programming and related questions. Mission Statement The College Board's mission is to connect students to college success and opportunity. We are a not-for-profit membership organization committed to excellence and equity in education. The College Board is a mission-driven not-for-profit organization that connects students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the College Board was created to expand access to higher education. Today, the membership association is made up of more than 5,900 of the world's leading educational institutions and is dedicated to promoting excellence and equity in education. Each year, the College Board helps more than seven million students prepare for a successful transition to college through programs and services in college readiness and college success — including the SAT ® and the Advanced Placement Program ®. The organization also serves the education community through research and advocacy on behalf of students, educators and schools. For further information, visit www.collegeboard. org. and the acorn logo are registered trademarks of the College Board. SAT Reasoning Test and SAT Subject Tests are trademarks owned by the College Board. All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners. Visit the College Board on the Web: www.collegeboard. org. A recurrent trend in higher education research has been to identify additional predictors of college success beyond the traditional measures of high school grade point average (HSGPA) and standardized test scores, given that a large percentage of unaccounted variance in college performance remains. A recent study by Wyatt, Wiley, Camara, and Proestler (2012) expanded the definition of college readiness beyond test scores and HSGPA to include a measure of the academic rigor or challenge associated with a student's course work in high school, referred to as the academic rigor index (ARI). This study represents the first examination of the validity of ARI in predicting first-year grade point average (FYGPA). The correlation between ARI and FYGPA indicated a moderate effect overall and by gender, ethnicity, and household income subgroups; however, ARI did not add incremental validity above SAT scores and HSGPA. Additionally, when added to SAT scores and HSGPA, ARI had no impact on differential prediction by relevant subgroups. Given the current movement toward a more holistic assessment of college applicants, a standardized measure …
A Humanistic Viewpoint on Use-Inspired Motivation Research

In his path-breaking book, Stokes (1997) rejected the classic distinction between research that is ‘‘basic’’ and ‘‘applied’’ and instead suggested that research can be undertaken both for basic understanding and for use in practice. Kanfer (2009) uses this approach to identify future directions for use-inspired research on work motivation. In doing so, she focuses almost exclusively on research that is useful for managers and that has performance as its criterion. In the present commentary, I highlight that motivation research can also be useful for workers and have well-being as its criterion. Specifically, I pose and address two questions regarding use-inspired research on work motivation: ‘‘Useful for whom? ’’ and ‘‘Motivation for what? ’’ Next, I highlight a direct implication of these questions for the field of work motivation and in particular for the advancement of use-inspired motivation research. In conclusion, I advocate a humanistic viewpoint on use-inspired research that operates as part of a scientist–practitioner–humanist model of industrial–organizational (I–O) psychology (Lefkowitz, 2008).
The transition of the spirituality of the Christian Brothers in Australia from a traditional to a contemporary mode

This thesis grew out of my own experience as an Australian Christian Brother. After nearly thirty years of living and teaching as a Brother in Australia, I was appointed for the next twenty-six years to the Fiji Islands. For most of that time there was no Brothers’ community near to my assigned work for me to live in and, in isolation from the Brothers, I continued to follow the spiritual practices and customs of the Brothers’ tradition. When I left Australia, the Brothers’ expression of their spirituality was defined by a highly prescriptive routine of daily prayer and exact observance of many external practices. On my return to Australia and on my re-joining a Brothers’ community, I observed, to my confusion, that this traditional form of spirituality had been radically transformed into a variety of individual expressions, freely chosen by the Brothers to suit their personal needs and relevant to the changed conditions of society. Community life, as it had been once lived, had virtually ceased to exist. The thesis has been generated by my efforts to understand the new ways in which my confreres perceive spirituality, to explore the contemporary ways in which they express it and to consider how the traditional structures of the Religious Life might need to be changed to accommodate these contemporary expressions of spirituality. To begin with, an examination is undertaken of spirituality as it has been conceptualised from the Christian medieval mystics to contemporary times and a clear distinction is made between spirituality and religion. Further, the research study examines how the different social milieus in which the Brothers have lived in Australia over the last one hundred and fifty years have influenced the manner in which they express their spirituality. It attempts to determine the effect on the Brothers’ developing spirituality of the initial formation they received in the Religious life. This was a qualitative research study where interviews were used to collect data. Seventeen Australian Christian Brothers across Australia, ranging in age from their forties to their late eighties, agreed to participate in the project to share their stories. The focus of the interviews was to discover the participant’s understanding and expression of spirituality through their years as Christian Brothers. It was found that various social and religious influences brought about a transformation in these expressions of their spirituality from traditional forms to more contemporary forms. Given the age range of the participants, the researcher was able to compare and contrast different aspects of spirituality manifested by the Australian Christian Brothers in the times before and after the Second Vatican Council, a time when much change was happening within the Catholic Church. It became clear that if the traditional form of life of living in community is continued, respecting the individual member’s ways of relating to God will need accommodation and some adaptation both in structure and practice.
Self-Normalizing Neural Networks

Deep Learning has revolutionized vision via convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and natural language processing via recurrent neural networks (RNNs). However, success stories of Deep Learning with standard feed-forward neural networks (FNNs) are rare. FNNs that perform well are typically shallow and, therefore cannot exploit many levels of abstract representations. We introduce self-normalizing neural networks (SNNs) to enable high-level abstract representations. While batch normalization requires explicit normalization, neuron activations of SNNs automatically converge towards zero mean and unit variance. The activation function of SNNs are "scaled exponential linear units" (SELUs), which induce self-normalizing properties. Using the Banach fixed-point theorem, we prove that activations close to zero mean and unit variance that are propagated through many network layers will converge towards zero mean and unit variance -- even under the presence of noise and perturbations. This convergence property of SNNs allows to (1) train deep networks with many layers, (2) employ strong regularization, and (3) to make learning highly robust. Furthermore, for activations not close to unit variance, we prove an upper and lower bound on the variance, thus, vanishing and exploding gradients are impossible. We compared SNNs on (a) 121 tasks from the UCI machine learning repository, on (b) drug discovery benchmarks, and on (c) astronomy tasks with standard FNNs and other machine learning methods such as random forests and support vector machines. SNNs significantly outperformed all competing FNN methods at 121 UCI tasks, outperformed all competing methods at the Tox21 dataset, and set a new record at an astronomy data set. The winning SNN architectures are often very deep. Implementations are available at: this http URL.
An image inpainting method

Image inpainting technique has been widely used for reconstructing damaged old photographs and removing unwanted objects from images. In this paper, we present an image inpainting method based on the existing exemplar-based image inpainting idea. Our method improves the robustness and effectiveness by rational confidence computing method, matching strategy and filling scheme. Therefore, our method effectively prevents "growing garbage", which is a common problem in other methods. With our method, we can obtain preferable results to those obtained by other similar methods.
On remote and voter-verifiable voting

Voting is an important tool for modern societies. It is fundamental for the democracy. This mechanism must be fair and accurate. However, threats intrinsic in the voting process may compromise these requisites. In conventional voting, dishonest talliers may corrupt the ballot box, for instance. Remote voting has more threats due to the uncontrolled environment. In this work, we propose secure protocols for polling station and remote voting with attractive properties. Voter-verifiability is a novel security feature provided by recent voting systems. It allows voters to confirm that their votes are accurately counted in the tally. These systems provide better security guarantees than the conventional ones as voters are able to detect corruptions of votes and counting errors. They usually rely on cryptography to implement this feature. We introduce a novel concept of ballot box based on the Farnel approach. It provides voters, when they cast their votes, with one or more random selected receipts. This allows a different notion of voter-verifiability in which the voter may verify one or more random votes. The idea has a number of attractive features: ballot secrecy is achieved up front and does not have to be provided by anonymising mixes during tabulation. Also, it mitigates randomization attacks that are inherent in some voter-verifiable schemes. Based on the new ballot box, we introduce three new voter-verifiable paper-based schemes. One of these schemes does not employ cryptography and thus can be more easily understood by the average voter. The others require just a single cryptographic primitive and achieve better security guarantees. In addition to these schemes, we propose improvements to the Threeballot and Randell-Ryan voting protocols. These schemes are voter-verifiable and do not employ cryptography. However, they ensure less guarantees than cryptographic based systems. The voter-verifiable schemes given consider a controlled environment as conventional voting. Remote Internet voting, however, has many benefits over the conventional ones and is challenging. Although the existing technology render possible such voting, it has a number of associated threats as coercion and vote selling. We also propose a new scheme for remote Internet voting. The proposal mitigates coercive attacks and is more efficient for large scale voting than the previous solutions.
The conservative treatment of phimosis in boys.

OBJECTIVE To further test the application of topical steroids in boys referred to a paediatric surgical practice with pathological, non-retractable foreskins diagnosed as phimosis. PATIENTS AND METHODS This prospective study comprised two groups of 20 boys each (mean age 4.1 years, range 3-6) diagnosed as having phimosis; twice daily, a topical steroid (0.05% betamethasone cream) was applied on the narrowed preputial skin in the first group and a neutral cream (Vaseline) in the second (control) group. Patients were treated for 4 weeks and the retractability of the foreskin and any side-effects assessed. RESULTS Good retraction of the foreskin was achieved in 19 patients treated with betamethasone cream and the response was unsatisfactory in 16 patients from the control group; these 16 boys and one 6-year-old boy treated with betamethasone were circumsized. There were no side-effects or problems after the application of either cream. CONCLUSION Treatment with 0.05% betamethasone cream is a simple and safe method for the treatment of phimosis in boys older than 3 years. An early operation is necessary in cases of genuine phimosis when 1 month of treatment with topical steroids has failed. We strongly support the saying, "The fortunate foreskin of an infant boy will usually be left well alone by everyone but its owner'.
PFW: A Face Database in the Wild for Studying Face Identification and Verification in Uncontrolled Environment

To train and evaluate various face recognition algorithms, quite many databases have been created. But most of them have been created under controlled conditions to study the specific variations of the face recognition problem. These variations include position, pose, lighting, background, camera quality and gender. But in real environment, there are also many applications in which there is little or no control over such variations. Labeled Faces in the Wild, a database has been provided to study the latter, unconstrained face recognition problem. However, LFW is proposed for face verification problem, while we observe that a good verification performance cannot guarantee a good identification performance in real situation. Further, the face images in LFW are not sufficient for training to get a state of the art performance. PFW, POS Faces in the Wild, on the contrast, is a large database which can be served both for evaluating face verification and face identification algorithms. Specifically, PFW contains a certain number of identities and each identity contains quite many images, thus make it suitable both for large scale supervised and semi supervised training. In this paper, we also provide some rules for evaluating the identification algorithm performance in real environment. To the best of our knowledge, our database is the first public available large face data set proposed for face identification in unconstrained environment.
Pricing a Product Line

Many firms confront the recurring problem of pricing strategy for a line of products that are partial substitutes for each other. The difficulty of this problem stems from the complex interactions among the pricing decisions on the several products. A low price for one product may siphon demand away from another as customers realize the advantages of substituting one for the other. Or quantity discounts may induce customers to switch products. Confronting the problem in its full complexity, one realizes that all of the prices and terms must be set jointly to take full account simultaneously of the many interactions. In this paper we address a special case of the product-line pricing problem in which the prices of successively higher quality products can be determined sequentially. Our aims are quite practical. For example, for one class of models an explicit computational procedure has been programmed for a computer so that a pricing manager sitting at an interactive terminal with a visual display can readily explore the implications of a variety of assumptions. Alternatively, market data generated by a current pricing strategy can be used as input to predict ways in which profits might be improved by altering the array of We study the problem of setting prices for a line of products that are partial substitutes for each other. The main innovation is an application of nonlinear pricing to capture the role of price breaks designed to achieve market segmentation. We focus on products interpreted as "machines" that differ along a single dimension of "quality" interpreted as marginal operating cost. The pricing problem is, How should the terms of leases be designed to maximize the lessor's total profit? The net price to the customer may be a nonlinear function of the usage rate. Our results show how to compute an optimal price schedule.
Commentary: the effects of probiotics on barrier function and mucosal pouch microbiota during maintenance treatment for severe pouchitis in patients with ulcerative colitis – authors' reply

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