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Character strengths are basic psychological ingredients that enable us to act in ways that enhance our well-being and life satisfaction. Despite research linking strength-based behavior to psychological health, few studies have examined their role within treatment. This study utilized a large and diverse sample of treatment-seeking university students to examine three specific questions: 1) what are the relationships between character strengths and symptom, social role, and interpersonal relationship impairment at intake? 2) do character strengths predict treatment outcome? 3) do signature strengths predict number of sessions completed? Participants completed a measure of strengths at intake and an outcome-based measure at intake and at every subsequent psychotherapy session. Results demonstrated the importance of Zest in relation to all subscales, being an excellerator of treatment progress and associated with better and faster treatment outcome and completion. Other findings of note include the protective factor of Love of Learning in this population, the paradoxical relationship between outcome and Persistence, Justice and Perseverance as overall predictors of better outcomes, and Hope as a predictor of less sessions completed. Clinical and research implications are discussed throughout.

Due to their unique set of biomorphological features, pauciennial (annual and biennial) plants differ substantially from all other plant life forms, including perennial species. Thus, classical approaches to the Russian population biology of plants, which are associated with spectral analysis of ontegenic states, often have quite limited applicability or are inapplicable in general, i.e. the development of special approaches is required. The extremely high plasticity of pauciennials, as well as ontogenetic multivariation, results in a high heterogenity of the rhythms and rates of development, life state, and reproductive capacity (fecundity); thus, long-term observations (monitoring) on permanent plots with registration of the size of individuals by the number of phytomers (modules) in the dynamics and phenophases. The naturally asynchronous germination of seeds in populations of many species leads to polycohortness, the subsequent appearance of seedling cohorts among the individuals of active parts in populations. Each subsequent group or cohort appears to develop in the more stressful variants of ecological regimes (increased competition) prevailing at the time and therefore consist of smaller individuals. Analysis of frequency distributions of size (biomass) spectra usually reveals a positive skewness and, in the case of correct usage of statistics, can provide valuable information on populations of pauciennial plants, their life span, and a detailed description of features of their specific life forms. In contrast to the earlier declared view, the total fecundity of the individuals of the smallest size classes is much higher than that of the few highly fertile, largest individuals. The smallest individuals are most effective in terms of reproduction; they have a high reproductive effort, while isometry is common in pauciennials populations.

Pierre-Daniel Huet’s (1630-1721) journey to Sweden in 1652 offered him the opportunity to observe the customs and habits of the peoples of the Far North. The young scholar’s zest for geographic discovery and his topographic surveys of places mingled with ancient borealist topoi, with which he had become familiar early on through his readings of Greek and Latin authors. This article shows how Huet’s borealist topoi, especially on the influence of climate on people’s credulity, carry more weight in his writings than his description of places and his knowledge of physics. They feed his disparaging views on the Swedes from whom he suffered much hardship during his stay at the court of Queen Christina.

Clinical visual field testing is performed with commercial perimetric devices and employs psychophysical techniques to obtain thresholds of the differential light sensitivity (DLS) at multiple retinal locations. Current thresholding algorithms are relatively inefficient and tough to get satisfied test accuracy, stability concurrently. Thus, we propose a novel Bayesian perimetric threshold method called the Trail-Traced Threshold Test (T4), which can better address the dependence of the initial threshold estimation and achieve significant improvement in the test accuracy and variability while also decreasing the number of presentations compared with Zippy Estimation by Sequential Testing (ZEST) and FT. This study compares T4 with ZEST and FT regarding presentation number, mean absolute difference (MAD between the real Visual field result and the simulate result), and measurement variability. T4 uses the complete response sequence with the spatially weighted neighbor responses to achieve better accuracy and precision than ZEST, FT, SWeLZ, and with significantly fewer stimulus presentations. T4 is also more robust to inaccurate initial threshold estimation than other methods, which is an advantage in subjective methods, such as in clinical perimetry. This method also has the potential for using in other psychophysical tests.

Purpose of the Study: The purpose of the current research was to determine the effect of equitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being on promoting student's mental health. The researchers eagerly explored everyday situations happening in male elementary schools of district Lahore, focusing on pandemic situations with zeal and zest. Methodology: The researchers structured causal-comparative research focusing positivist paradigm on a sample of randomly selected 980 respondents enrolled in male elementary schools of district Lahore of Punjab-Pakistan. The authors collected the data after administering Scott (2006) Educational Equity and school reforms Scale, Prince-Embury (2013) Resiliency Scales for Children and Adolescents, Ryff’s (1989) Psychological Well-beings Scale, and Lukat et al. (2016) Positive Mental Health Scale. After ensuring ethical considerations, the researchers run regression technique, one way; ANOVA and Pearson Product Moment Correlation (r) on the participants data. Main findings: The findings revealed that educational equity effect 81%, resilience 87.10%, and psychological well-being affect 66.60% in promoting students mental health. Educational equity, resilience, and psychological well-being have the same effect on 6th, 7th, and 8th grades students in promoting their mental health. Further a significant strong association between educational equity and mental health (r = .900**, n = 985, p < .05), resilience and mental health (r = .946**, n = 984, p < .05) and psychological well-beings and students mental health (r = .815**, n = 985, p < .05). Applications of this study: The results of the research will be applicable for headteachers, teachers, and parents to get aware of the worth of equitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being that play an enormous role in promoting students mental health. The debatable constructs of the current research will provide capable stakeholders to know the entire magnitude of mental health that drastically instigate and enhance student's vigour, attentiveness, dependability, intellectual ability, and optimism. Novelty/originality of this study: It is evident from the literature that less work is conducted inequitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being that play a massive role in promoting students mental health. In the case of Pakistan, the situation is very alarming and the meager because none of the researchers took initiative to framed research on these burning constructs. However, this research will opened new dimensions for the future researchers that will raise their intentions to explore the effect of primary, secondary, higher secondary, and tertiary level students equitable education, resilience, and psychological well-being on their mental health.

Participative pricing demonstrates the basic idea of allowing customer participation in price-setting process. Nottingham Playhouse, IBIS Singapore, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wiener Deewan, Girl Talk, 8k, Zest consulting, Radiohead band and many more have successfully implemented pay-what-you-want (PWYW), the most innovative form of participative pricing. Based on the degree of participation, PWYW is the highest form that allows buyers to select any price they want to pay for a product/service, including zero. The present study examines how customers lower their motivation to pay more for products offered under PWYW by morally disengaging themselves from reciprocity concerns. It focuses on one mechanism of moral disengagement—displacement of responsibility and tests the proposed hypotheses in PWYW context. 284 responses were gathered using structured questionnaires at a reputed public university. Data were analysed using partial least-squares structural equation modelling. Findings indicate that customers’ moral disengagement via displacement of responsibility towards reciprocity concerns is negatively associated with willingness-to-pay more (WTPM). Results corroborate the attenuating role of perceived control on the negative association between displacement of responsibility towards reciprocity concerns and WTPM. However, relaxation from monetary commitments does not have a significant moderating effect on the negative relationship between moral disengagement and WTPM. This study is possibly the first to empirically investigate the interplay among individuals’ cognitive mechanisms, moral disengagement from reciprocity concerns and socio-demographic variables under participative pricing. Findings empirically substantiate the theory of moral disengagement, moral self-regulation and social cognitive theory. Practitioners should actively engage customers’ moral self-regulation process and provide more sense of perceived control while designing participative pricing offerings.

Objective The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the 24 character strengths in Peterson and Seligman's (2004) model on quality of life in persons with multiple sclerosis (MS), controlling for more commonly investigated biopsychosocial variables including resilience, social support, personality traits, depression, fatigue, and disability. Method Six hundred and 24 individuals with MS completed an online survey. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to test the contribution of character strengths over the control variables. Results The character strengths variables were significantly related to quality of life, even after controlling for the other variables. Individually, appreciation for beauty, gratitude, hope, and zest all significantly contributed to quality of life. The control variables, as a group, were significantly associated with quality of life. Individually, fatigue, depression, resilience, social support from family, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion, and openness all significantly contributed to quality of life. Conclusions The findings of this study provide support for the development of character strengths interventions to help increase quality of life in individuals with multiple sclerosis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Objective: This study investigated the validity of the Social Emotional Health Survey–Primary (SEHS-P;Furlong et al., 2013), which assesses four wellness dispositions (gratitude, optimism, zest, an...

A number of authors have developed a recipe for donuts using bird cherry flour and orange peel. It is known from literary sources that the use of bird cherry flour and orange peel has a positive effect on the quality of flour bakery and confectionery products. At the first stage of research, on the basis of organoleptic and physicochemical parameters, the optimal dosage of bird cherry flour was selected, which amounted to 30% of the total volume of wheat flour in the recipe. At the second stage, the donut recipe, using 30% bird cherry flour, served as a control option, and samples with the addition of 3.5,7.9% orange peel were used as prototypes. It was found that when 7% orange peel was applied, the donuts acquired a golden color, pleasant taste and aroma compared to the control sample. A further increase in the amount of orange zest led to a deterioration in the quality indicators of the baked product. At the final stage, we developed a donut recipe with a content of 30% bird cherry flour and 7% orange peel. It has been established that this ratio of ingredients improves both organoleptic and physicochemical characteristics. Thanks to the addition of orange peel, the content increases: vitamin C by 0.14 mg / 100g, carotenoids by 0.14 mg / 100g in products, as well as microelements: potassium - by 231.17, magnesium - by 25.89, iron - by 0.22, phosphorus - by 21.81. The acidity of the finished products increases by 0.029 degrees due to the presence of organic acids in the orange peel. The acidity of the dough also increases with an increase in the dosage of bird cherry flour due to the fact that the herbal supplement contains more organic acids (malic, citric, ascorbic) than wheat flour. The acidity increases from 2 to 13%, but is within the acceptable range. The energy and nutritional value of the finished products of the pilot sample increased by 14.84 kcal in comparison with the control sample.

We estimated the financial costs of different interventions against urogenital schistosomiasis, implemented by the Zanzibar Elimination of Schistosomiasis Transmission (ZEST) project, on Pemba and Unguja islands, Tanzania. We used available data on project activities, resources used, and costs reported in the accounting information systems of ZEST partners. The costs were estimated for all the activities related to snail control, behavior change interventions, the impact assessment surveys, and management of the whole program. Costs are presented in US$ for the full duration of the ZEST project from 2011/2012 to 2017. The total financial costs of implementing snail control activities over 5 years, excluding the costs for donated Bayluscide, were US$55,796 on Pemba and US$73,581 on Unguja, mainly driven by personnel costs. The total financial costs of implementing behavior change activities were US$109,165 on Pemba and US$155,828 on Unguja, with costs for personnel accounting for 47% on Pemba and 69% on Unguja. Costs of implementing biannual mass drug administration refer to the estimated 2.4 million treatments provided on Pemba over 4 years (2013–2016), and do not include the costs of donated praziquantel. The total cost per provided treatment was, on average, US$0.21. This study showed the value of exploiting administrative data to estimate costs of major global health interventions. It also provides an evidence base for financial costs and main cost drivers of implementing multiple combinations of intervention sets that inform decisions regarding the feasibility and affordability of implementing schistosomiasis control and elimination strategies.

The Covid-19 pandemic obliged people around the world to stay home and self-isolate, with a number of negative psychological consequences. This study focuses on the protective role of character strengths in sustaining mental health and self-efficacy during lockdown. Data were collected from 944 Italian respondents (mean age = 37.24 years, SD = 14.50) by means of an online survey investigating character strengths, psychological distress and Covid-19-related self-efficacy one month after lockdown began. Using principal component analysis, four strengths factors were extracted, namely transcendence, interpersonal, openness and restraint. Regression models with second-order factors showed that transcendence strengths had a strong inverse association with psychological distress, and a positive association with self-efficacy. Regression models with single strengths identified hope, zest, prudence, love and forgiveness as the strengths most associated with distress, love and zest as the most related to self-efficacy and zest to general mental health. Openness factor and appreciation of beauty showed an unexpected direct relation with psychological distress. These results provide original evidence of the association of character strengths, and transcendence strengths in particular, with mental health and self-efficacy in a pandemic and are discussed within the field of positive psychology.

Background: Various kind of medical imaging modalities are available for providing noninvasive view and for analyzing any pathological symptoms of human beings. Different noise may appear in those modalities at the time of acquisition, transmission, scanning, or at the time of storing. The removal of noises from the digital medical images without losing any inherent features is always considered a challenging task because a successful diagnosis relies on them. Numerous techniques have been proposed to fulfill this objective, and each having their own benefits and limitations. Discussion: In this comprehensive review article, more than 65 research articles are investigated to illustrate the applications of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) in the field of biomedical image denoising. In particular, the zest of this article is to highlight the hybridized filtering model using nature-inspired algorithms and artificial neural networks for suppression of noise. Various other techniques, such as fixed filter, linear adaptive filters and gradient descent learning based neural network filter are also included. Conclusion: This article envisages how to train ANN using derivative free nature-inspired algorithms, and its performance in various medical images modalities and noise conditions.

Objective The objective was to describe the experience of patients in self-managing. Method Phenomenology design was used in this study. Fifhteen of families who have family member which undergoing hemodialysis were recruited as participants. In-depth interviews were conducted at April to July 2018 to explore of the experiences of family in patients’ self-managing. Data were analyzed using Colaizzi. Result We found four themes of patients'self-management which reported by their family. There themes were (1) having positive and negative views on life changes after undergoing hemodialysis, (2) spirit for undergoing the process of hemodialysis, (3) controlling the activity and (4) limitation of food while undergoing hemodialysis and patient's expectations during hemodialysis. Conclusion Self-management of patients who receive hemodialysis includes self-management in physical form (controlling activities and food restrictions) and psychological (views on life changes and life zest).

In this study, we first discuss the current status and issues of disaster management education in the context of special support education in Japan, in view of the casualties of those with disabilities during major past earthquakes in Japan. We highlight that there are very few examples of practical implementation of, instructional material for, or previous studies on disaster management education for disabled children, or an established systematic instructional method. As a result, disaster management education tailored to the specific type of disability has been implemented on a school-to-school basis among Special Support Schools for children with disabilities. In many cases, teacher-led evacuation drills have been considered disaster management education. This is an indication that the disaster management education currently practiced in Special Support Schools is inadequate to achieve the goal of “fostering the attitude of acting on one’s initiative” as set forth by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). In view of the situation in Japan, where casualties due to natural disasters continue to occur frequently since the Great East Japan Earthquake, it is urgent that we promote practical disaster management education to foster the Zest for Life among disabled children. This paper is a case study of disaster management education that targets those with intellectual disabilities, which is the largest reported disability type among children enrolled in Special Support Schools in Japan. We applied the ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) process in instructional design to develop an earthquake disaster management program designed to heighten the capacity of disabled children to foresee and circumvent danger to themselves, so as to protect their lives from large earthquakes which occur frequently in Japan. Specifically, the objective is to apply the earthquake disaster management education program, developed by the authors in a previous study, to children with intellectual disabilities. To this end, we implemented the program at the target school and verified its educational effect while taking into consideration the degree or condition of disability and the learning characteristics of the intellectually disabled and developed a valid program for intellectually disabled children. The program allows the teachers of Special Support Schools to practice disaster management education in the context of daily classroom study with students without the need to dispatch a disaster management expert to the school each time a program is implemented. Additionally, the program can be customized by the onsite teacher for individual schools, which can lead to a systematic program in disaster management education. In addition, we propose a framework to establish a network of stakeholders, including disaster management experts or organizations and educational institutions to effectively and strategically promote disaster management education. This framework makes it possible to implement the present program the most impactful way, and to maximize the benefits to the schools in Tochigi prefecture.

COVID-19 was first identified in December 2019. As long as this type of coronavirus was new, the main way for governments to avoid the spread of the infection was enforced quarantine. Besides public health protection, quarantine can have a psychological impact on the residents, with main symptoms being angst, anxiety, depressive, and PTSD symptoms. As it has been found that character strengths can promote subjective wellbeing, the purpose of the study was to examine this relationship under the new situation of quarantine in the Greek population in adults who were in quarantine for at least two weeks. The total sample consisted of 354 participants who were aged 18–72-years-old. A total of 263 participants were women (74.3%), 91 were men (25.7%), and 94.6% of them were highly educated. The sample was a convenience sample. The tools used were PANAS, PERMA and finally VIA-114GR. The data analysis was completed using SPSS software version 26.0 (IBM Corp. Released 2019. IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 26.0. Armonk, NY, USA: IBM Corp) and EQS 6.1 (Multivariate Software Inc.: Encino, CA, USA, 2006). The results showed that love, curiosity, persistence, hope, and zest are strongly associated with subjective wellbeing, even in conditions such as quarantine, and can support specific aspects of it.

War correspondents have enormous allure for the historian of journalism, and even more so war correspondents who are famous authors in their own right. They bring zest, dash, and pep to the drudger...

Rot is associated with loss; loss of shape and solidity; loss of time and vitality; loss of zest and purity. Rot recalls dirt and death. As a part of my PhD research, Virginity as Performance: A pr...

Customer satisfaction provides an indication of how successful the organization is providing products and/or services to the market place. Organizations need to retain existing customers while targeting non-customers. So, to retain the customers for longer time the marketer has to know the customer satisfaction levels. Thus, this study is conducted to know the satisfaction levels of customers of TVS Scooty Zest 110. KEYWORDS: Customer, satisfaction, Price, quality

worked with particularized review of highly prominent studies on the topic to educate early scholars about the major scholarly developments on the topic. Methodology: Through this, the author has also reviewed and underlined how engagement can be of considerable value towards bringing passion, zeal and zest at work. To article goes further to offer details on the prominent theoretical underpinnings and the notable predictors of work engagement. Towards the end, the article also sheds light on the prominent model of work engagement, popularly known as JD-R model of engagement and the prominent efforts made towards extending in the past to help understand the concept better. Lastly, the paper also sheds light for early researcher on the concept of developmental Resources such as HR infused elements as a major gap that could be added to the JD-R and also considered by other emerging researchers for future research. Results: Overall, this simple yet critical insight-based piece of work provides a healthy piece of understanding and way forward for enthusiasts on the concept of engagement.

Caregiver burden is the negative impact that caregivers perceive as a result of their caregiving tasks. According to the stress process model, contextual variables and primary and secondary stressors produce negative mental health outcomes in caregivers. However, this relationship may be buffered by psychological resources which act as mediators/moderators. Although there is research on the mediating/moderating effect of mastery, coping strategies, and social support, the effect of psychological values remains unexplored. This study aimed to explore, after controlling for contextual variables and stressors, which character strengths are associated with caregiver burden. We also sought to analyze the mediating/moderating effect of character strengths on the relationship between burden and the significant contextual variables and stressors. To this end, a sample of 115 caregivers of people diagnosed with dementia completed a questionnaire battery. Correlational analysis, multiple regression modeling, and mediation and moderation analysis were performed. The results revealed that the caregivers who experience the greatest burden are those who live with the care recipient, who score higher on perceived stress, who feel their leisure time is limited, and who perceive more financial strain. Higher scores on caregiver burden were associated with lower scores on hope, zest, social intelligence, and love. Regression modeling indicated that hope was the strength which best predicted burden and that hope mediated the relationship between perceived stress and burden. No moderation effect was found. The results suggest that hope-based programs could enhance positive emotions and reduce the perceived negative impact of caregiving.

Adaptive emotion expression characterizes secure parent-child relationships in which children rely on attachment figures for secure base and safe haven support. We hypothesized that more securely attached children would report experiencing greater positive emotion. Children (N=92; M=11.91 years) completed the Friends and Family Interview which was coded for attachment security indicators (narrative coherence, mother and father safe haven support, mother and father secure base support). We analyzed Youth Values in Action Inventory strengths that reflected positive emotions (curiosity, zest, hope, love, gratitude). No attachment security indicators correlated with curiosity, all correlated with zest and gratitude, and four correlated with hope and love. Controlling for IQ, age, and temperament, attachment security significantly predicted positive emotion (12-19% variance); father secure base support uniquely predicted positive emotion. Our findings highlight the important role parental attachment plays in children's emotion experience and have implications for explaining why attachment might relate to children's other close relationships.

Research Findings: This study investigated the relationships of preservice teachers’ year of study in the teacher education program, creativity, zest, and self-efficacy in managing children’s behav...

The zest for Sapucai Street, with the emergence of nightlife and events that occur sporadically at weekends, is the main object of analysis in this paper. Located in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), this street bounds Floresta neighborhood and downtown and is one of the oldest in the city’s central area. Since 2012, leisure establishments have set up on Sapucai Street and have attracted mainly young customers. The changes on this Street are here analyzed from the point of view of commercial gentrification. To this end, participant observation and interviews were conducted with business’s owners, employees and customers in order to understand their motivations to invest and/or consume in that part of the city, and also to capture their representations about the Street. From the latest and still in process changes on Sapucai, we question the durability of commercial gentrification, which is subject to changes in a short period of time and presents a doubly ephemeral character that differentiates it from residential gentrification.

Character strengths are positively valued personality traits that are assumed to be stable across time and situations, but also malleable due to cultivation or deliberate intervention. Also, studies showed that character strengths are robustly related to well-being. Consequently, character strengths have often been used in interventions aimed at increasing well-being. However, the stability of character strengths and the longitudinal relationships with well-being are widely unexplored: First, previous reports on the stability of character strengths have mainly focused on one assessment instrument only and second, they did not consider other indicators of stability (and malleability) besides rank-order stability, (i.e., mean-level stability). In this longitudinal study, we assessed character strengths and well-being at two time points and examined the stability and malleability of character strengths and the convergence of changes in character strengths and well-being by means of correlation analyses. Two samples (n1 = 601, n2 = 1162) completed different measures of character strengths and instruments for the assessment of well-being, ill-being, and health within up to three and a half years. Results showed that character strengths are stable over longer time periods (test-retest reliabilities ranging from rtt = .60–.83) and that relationships between changes in strengths and well-being are highly parallel to what has been reported in cross-sectional studies (strongest relationships for zest, hope, curiosity, and love). Furthermore, results suggest that some strengths, most predominantly humor, but also spirituality and prudence might be more amenable for change than others. These results might bear important information for selecting character strengths in interventions.

Marceline Loridan-Ivens may be best known for her scene-stealing participation in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's cinema verité classic, Chronicle of a Summer (1961). However, as FQ contributing editor Joan Dupont makes manifestly clear in her evocative appreciation, Loridan-Ivens was a true force of nature; an actress, director, and writer who remained creatively active and productive throughout her long life. She was also a Holocaust survivor, who returned to her experiences in the camps through her writing and filmmaking but found a way for her trauma to coexist with an irrepressible zest for life. Through interviews with over eight of Loridan-Ivens closest friends and family members, Dupont creates a multiperspectival portrait of Loridan-Ivens, including her years of close collaboration with her life partner, director Joris Ivens.

Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth globally. In this critical interpretive synthesis, we examined literature on resiliency factors and suicidality. Systematic searches identified 474 articles, 37 of which were included. Results revealed internal (positive self-appraisal, zest for life, personal traits, and coping skills) and external factors (social support system and inclusive environments) contribute to resilience among youth, with age, sex and gender, and Indigenous identity as important intersecting considerations. Findings validated fostering resilience as primary suicide prevention among youth, with little explanation for how these factors may work to protect youth from suicidality. Continued research in this area requires a focus on how to promote resilience at the community and systems levels.

It has been an honour and pleasure to come to know Emeritus-Professor Ruut Veenhoven through the International Society for Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS). Thinking back over the many encounters we had at various scientific conferences, meetings and events and also, progressive stages of development in my academic journey on happiness research and promotion, three occasions always feature most strongly in my memory.

There is empirical evidence that life satisfaction (LS) in adolescence is associated with adequate development and future well-being. Research into the factors underpinning LS can therefore help to promote healthier development of societies. The aim of this study was to extend knowledge about LS among adolescents in Ecuador, a Latin American country for which research on this topic is lacking. Specifically, we analyze the relationship between LS and character strengths, controlling for gender, age, socioeconomic status, and family structure. Participants were 659 adolescents (43.1% female) aged between 12 and 18 years who completed the Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS) and the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths for Youth (VIA-Y). Their parents or legal guardians completed the Survey of Socioeconomic Stratification (SSES). Correlation analysis and regression modeling were performed. Results showed that LS was not related to age or socioeconomic status, but there was a significant association with gender and family structure, insofar as boys and adolescents living in intact families reported higher levels of LS. Overall, the majority of character strengths were positively related to LS. After eliminating overlap between strengths and controlling for sociodemographic variables, the strengths of hope, zest, love, and prudence significantly predicted LS. We discuss how these strengths, related to the cognitive component of well-being, may play a protective role against difficulties during adolescence. Character strengths-based interventions are proposed to promote healthy development in Ecuadorian adolescents. Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga/CBUA

The robust principles of treating interference as noise (TIN) when it is sufficiently weak, and avoiding it when it is not, form the background of this work. Combining TIN with the topological interference management (TIM) framework that identifies optimal interference avoidance schemes, we formulate a TIM-TIN problem for multilevel topological interference management, wherein only a coarse knowledge of channel strengths and no knowledge of channel phases is available to transmitters. To address the TIM-TIN problem, we first propose an analytical baseline approach, which decomposes a network into TIN and TIM components, allocates the signal power levels to each user in the TIN component, allocates signal vector space dimensions to each user in the TIM component, and guarantees that the product of the two is an achievable number of signal dimensions available to each user in the original network. Next, a distributed numerical algorithm called ZEST is developed. The convergence of the algorithm is demonstrated, leading to the duality of the TIM-TIN problem (in terms of GDoF). Numerical results are also provided to demonstrate the superior sum-rate performance and fast convergence of ZEST., Comment: This work will be submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible

Pre-trained text-to-text transformers such as BART have achieved impressive performance across a range of NLP tasks. Recent study further shows that they can learn to generalize to novel tasks, by including task descriptions as part of the source sequence and training the model with (source, target) examples. At test time, these fine-tuned models can make inferences on new tasks using the new task descriptions as part of the input. However, this approach has potential limitations, as the model learns to solve individual (source, target) examples (i.e., at the instance level), instead of learning to solve tasks by taking all examples within a task as a whole (i.e., at the task level). To this end, we introduce Hypter, a framework that improves text-to-text transformer's generalization ability to unseen tasks by training a hypernetwork to generate task-specific, light-weight adapters from task descriptions. Experiments on ZEST dataset and a synthetic SQuAD dataset demonstrate that Hypter improves upon fine-tuning baselines. Notably, when using BART-Large as the main network, Hypter brings 11.3% comparative improvement on ZEST dataset., Comment: Accepted to ACL 2021. Camera-ready version. Code: https://github.com/INK-USC/hypter

This chapter focuses on the shifting articulations of ‘competencies’ throughout the so called third great education reform of Japan, spanning from the mid-1980s to the present. In particular, the chapter traces the trajectory of ‘zest for living’ (ikiru chikara), one of the most used policy keywords to epitomize a particular set of dispositions and skills deemed essential for children to survive the new social and economic conditions. By tracing the changing meanings of this keyword as appeared in the series of official policy/council reports over the years, the chapter suggests that ‘zest for living’ has come to assume different meanings in different times in response to different policy necessities and circumstances. Of particular note here is that the period under investigation was characterized by the increasing influence of transnational policy discourses shaped and circulated by UNESCO and OECD and by the simultaneous processes of renationalization of education policy discourses. This chapter uses the Japanese case to demonstrate the complex intersections in the constitution of ‘competencies’ between national and transnational and their increasingly blurred distinction. In so doing, it problematizes the uncomplicated demarcation between these spatial categories and proposes a view that the national constitution of ‘competencies’, or education policy in general has always been both transnational and national simultaneously.

We introduce a new jet observable zest defined on exclusively constructed jets and study its potential to discriminate jets originated from Standard Model heavy particles like W, Z bosons and top quark from gluon initiated jets. Zest exhibits properties such as boost invariance, stability against global color exchange among partons, and inclusion or exclusion of a few soft particles in the jet. We also observe that for gluon jets, zest distribution is mostly insensitive to the jet mass. These properties make zest a suitable candidate for vetoing gluon jets at the colliders. Zest, when used in conjunction with other substructure observables that are uncorrelated to it, can further improve gluon jet veto. We generalize zest and show that in one limit it is synonymous to particle multiplicity and in the other limit, it projects only the leading particle. Optimization on the parameter of generalized zest further improves the discrimination ability of the observable. We find that for the top quark-initiated jets, the discrimination provided by generalized zest is in close comparison with a class of machine learning-based top taggers. We propose that studying other nonlinear infrared and collinear unsafe observables may help in unveiling the hidden physics of machine learning-based observables.