Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPolitical science (General)
Jason M. Pudlo · Politics and Religion
Houses of worship are often shelters after the storm. Yet, as climate change fuels natural disasters and communities increasingly rely on congregations during disaster recovery, are houses of worship ready to be houses of refuge? Examining clergy influence, does a higher concern about climate change by clergy result in improved congregational disaster readiness? Data for the study come from a 2019 nationwide survey of clergy. The survey includes measures of congregational disaster preparedness along with one of the first applications of the SASSY climate concern measure to clergy. Results show
View details →DOI: 10.1017/s1755048325000082 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNutrition. Foods and food supply
Phyllis Waruguru, Dasel Mulwa, Michael Okoth et al. · 2025 · Journal of Food Innovation, Nutrition, and Environmental Sciences
Background: Antiretroviral therapy (ART) effectively suppresses HIV viral load. However, people living with HIV (PLWH) fail to achieve optimal viral suppression and especially in resource limited settings. Nutritional supplements such as Moringa oleifera have been traditionally used to improve health outcomes in PLWH, yet their effects on viral load remain under researched. Objective: To evaluate the effect of dietary supplementation with Moringa oleifera seed flour on HIV viral load among adult women receiving ART in a resource-limited setting. Methods: This was a crossover clinical trial inv
View details →DOI: 10.70851/ynxgrq90 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Ruhollah Majdoddin · 2014 · arXiv
AFP Algorithm is a learning algorithm for Horn formulas. We show that it does not improve the complexity of AFP Algorithm, if after each negative counterexample more that just one refinements are performed. Moreover, a canonical normal form for Horn formulas is presented, and it is proved that the output formula of AFP Algorithm is in this normal form.
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
OFM Riaz Rahman Aranya, Kevin Desai · 2026 · arXiv
Synthetic data, an appealing alternative to extensive expert-annotated data for medical image segmentation, consistently fails to improve segmentation performance despite its visual realism. The reason being that synthetic and real medical images exist in different semantic feature spaces, creating a domain gap that current semi-supervised learning methods cannot bridge. We propose SRA-Seg, a framework explicitly designed to align synthetic and real feature distributions for medical image segmentation. SRA-Seg introduces a similarity-alignment (SA) loss using frozen DINOv2 embeddings to pull s
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu, Mohammad Pezeshki, Aaron Courville · 2026 · arXiv
On-policy self-distillation achieves strong pass@1 accuracy by using a single model as both teacher and student, with the teacher conditioned on a correct demonstration to provide dense token-level feedback. We show that this could come at a hidden cost: rollout diversity decreases and pass@k curves flatten (i.e., generating more rollouts fails to improve accuracy). We trace this to compounding biases in the design of self-distillation with sampled demonstrations. The teacher scores each student rollout while conditioned on a sampled correct rollout, channeling its feedback through the model's
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEducation (General)
Sasmita Tarihoran, Jufrizal Jufrizal · 2024 · English Review: Journal of English Education
This study examines the impact of a language program on the speaking skills of students at UIN SYAHADA Padangsidimpuan. With English proficiency being crucial for global communication, the research aimed to assess the program's effectiveness in improving students' speaking abilities. Using an ex post facto research design, 43 English department students were assessed. Speaking tests were administered at the start and end of the semester, and the data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon test. Findings showed a modest increase in mean scores, indicating some positive effect of the program. However,
View details →DOI: 10.25134/erjee.v12i3.10091 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Lennart Luettgau, Vanessa Cheung, Magda Dubois et al. · 2025 · arXiv
People increasingly seek personal advice from large language models (LLMs), yet whether humans follow their advice, and its consequences for their well-being, remains unknown. In a longitudinal randomised controlled trial with a representative UK sample (N = 6,474), we found that up to 79% of participants who had a 20-minute discussion with one of three AI chatbots (GPT-4o, LLama-3.3-70B, Gemini 3 Pro) about health, careers or relationships subsequently reported following its advice. Advice-following remained above 60% even for high-stakes recommendations, suggesting that users only weakly cal
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine
Mirzaei R, Soleimanzadeh A, Asri-Rezaei S · 2026 · Scientific reports
Dog semen conservation at cold temperatures (5 °C) is a valuable reproductive management tool, but it is bedeviled by issues of oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage that reduce sperm quality and viability. Urolithin A (UA), a natural…
View details →DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-49089-8 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine
Fujishima Y, Anderson D, Kamakura S et al. · 2026 · PNAS nexus
The lymphocyte culture method for chromosomal aberration analysis was established in the 1960s, and culture media supplemented with fetal bovine serum (FBS) have been routinely used. However, issues such as lot-to-lot variability,…
View details →DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag120 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine (General)
Oded Hershkovich, Inga Tetroashvili, Adam Lee Goldstein et al. · 2024 · Medicina
Background and Objectives: The incidence of proximal femoral fractures (PFFs) is rising, causing significant morbidity and mortality. Regional anesthesia (RA)’s benefits include the avoidance of intubation and mechanical ventilation, decreased blood loss, and improved analgesia. General anesthesia (GA) offers improved hemodynamic stability. This study examines the in-hospital post-surgical morbidity and mortality seen in PFFs in a cohort of the elderly undergoing GA or RA. Materials and Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study of 319 PFF patients older than 65 years over a single year. Re
View details →DOI: 10.3390/medicina60091446 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Ruth Cohen, Lu Feng, Ayala Bloch et al. · 2026 · arXiv
While natural-language explanations from large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted to improve transparency and trust, their impact on objective human-AI team performance remains poorly understood. We identify a Persuasion Paradox: fluent explanations systematically increase user confidence and reliance on AI without reliably improving, and in some cases undermining, task accuracy. Across three controlled human-subject studies spanning abstract visual reasoning (RAVEN matrices) and deductive logical reasoning (LSAT problems), we disentangle the effects of AI predictions and explanations u
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Amanpreet Singh, Mike D'Arcy, Arman Cohan et al. · 2022 · arXiv
Learned representations of scientific documents can serve as valuable input features for downstream tasks without further fine-tuning. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating these representations fail to capture the diversity of relevant tasks. In response, we introduce SciRepEval, the first comprehensive benchmark for training and evaluating scientific document representations. It includes 24 challenging and realistic tasks, 8 of which are new, across four formats: classification, regression, ranking and search. We then use this benchmark to study and improve the generalization ability o
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Chunliang Li, Tianze Cao, Sanyuan Zhao · 2026 · arXiv
Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling inefficiently applies a fixed computational depth to each position when generating high-resolution images. While existing methods accelerate inference by pruning tokens using frequency maps, their binary hard-pruning approach is fundamentally limited and fails to improve quality even with better frequency estimation. Observing that VAR models possess significant depth redundancy, we propose a paradigm shift from pruning entire tokens to adaptively allocating per-token computational depth. To this end, we introduce DepthVAR, a training-free framework that dy
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMedicine
Fereshteh Baygi, Theis Bitz Trabjerg, Lars Henrik Jensen et al. · 2025 · JMIR Formative Research
BackgroundEnhancing care coordination and sharing information in cancer care improves patient experiences by promoting clarity and satisfaction. ObjectiveThis study aims to assess the impact of cross-sectoral video consultation on patient perceptions of care coordination and satisfaction with received information compared to usual care. MethodsThis study presents secondary outcomes on patient perceptions of care coordination and satisfaction with received information from a 7-month follow-up of the Partnership Project. In this randomized controlled trial, patients with cancer were allocated to
View details →DOI: 10.2196/76910 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Adam Byerly, Daniel Khashabi · 2024 · arXiv
Self-consistency (SC) improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) across various tasks and domains that involve short content. However, does this support its effectiveness for long-context problems? We challenge the assumption that SC's benefits generalize to long-context settings, where LLMs often struggle with position bias, the systematic over-reliance on specific context regions-which hinders their ability to utilize information effectively from all parts of their context. Through comprehensive experimentation with varying state-of-the-art models, tasks, and SC formulations, w
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeurology. Diseases of the nervous system
Michael Christian Leitner, Michael Christian Leitner, Michael Christian Leitner et al. · 2023 · Frontiers in Neurology
IntroductionA significant number of Restitution Training (RT) paradigms claim to ameliorate visual field loss after stroke by re-activating neuronal connections in the residual visual cortex due to repeated bright light-stimulation at the border of the blind and intact fields. However, the effectiveness of RT has been considered controversial both in science and clinical practice for years. The main points of the controversy are (1) the reliability of perimetric results which may be affected by compensatory eye movements and (2) heterogeneous samples consisting of patients with visual field de
View details →DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2023.1114718 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessOtorhinolaryngology
Iqra Zakir, Ahmad Ahmad, Hamdan Pasha et al. · 2022 · Iranian Journal of Otorhinolaryngology
Introduction:Tympanoplasty is a common surgery for chronic otitis media and has conventionally been performed with a microscope for decades. The trend of endoscopic minimally invasive surgeries has been increasing worldwide for the last few decades. Few studies have discussed the outcomes of microscopic and endoscopic tympanoplasty. This study aims to compare results of tympanoplasty done with microscope vs endoscope in terms of graft take rate and improvement in conductive hearing loss.Materials and Methods:We did a retrospective review of 120 patients (54 male and 66 female) who underwent Ty
View details →DOI: 10.22038/ijorl.2022.61234.3104 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessBiotechnology
Katja Oberhofer, Patrick D. Wettenschwiler, Navrag Singh et al. · 2018 · Applied Bionics and Biomechanics
The introduction of hip belts to backpacks has caused a shift of loading from the spine to the hips with reported improvements in musculoskeletal comfort. Yet the effects of different hip belt tensions on gait biomechanics remain largely unknown. The goal of this study was to assess the influence of backpack weight and hip belt tension on gait biomechanics. Data from optical motion capture and ground reaction forces (GRF) during walking were acquired in nine healthy male subjects (age 28.0 ± 3.9 years). Six configurations of a commercial backpack were analyzed, that is, 15 kg, 20 kg, and 25 kg
View details →DOI: 10.1155/2018/4671956 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Aaron B. Wagner, Nirmal V. Shende, Yücel Altuğ · 2019 · arXiv
We introduce a novel mechanism, called timid/bold coding, by which feedback can be used to improve coding performance. For a certain class of DMCs, called compound-dispersion channels, we show that timid/bold coding allows for an improved second-order coding rate compared with coding without feedback. For DMCs that are not compound dispersion, we show that feedback does not improve the second-order coding rate. Thus we completely determine the class of DMCs for which feedback improves the second-order coding rate. An upper bound on the second-order coding rate is provided for compound-dispersi
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessAgricultural and Biological Sciences
Denis Boyer, Peter D. Walsh · 2010 · arXiv
Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on single trajectories offers the possibility of understanding how animals move and of testing basic movement models. Random walks have long represented the main description for micro-organisms and have also been useful to understand the foraging behaviour of large animals. Nevertheless, most vertebrates, in particular humans and other primates, rely on sophistic
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Fırat Öncel, Matthias Bethge, Beyza Ermis et al. · 2024 · arXiv
In the last decade, the generalization and adaptation abilities of deep learning models were typically evaluated on fixed training and test distributions. Contrary to traditional deep learning, large language models (LLMs) are (i) even more overparameterized, (ii) trained on unlabeled text corpora curated from the Internet with minimal human intervention, and (iii) trained in an online fashion. These stark contrasts prevent researchers from transferring lessons learned on model generalization and adaptation in deep learning contexts to LLMs. To this end, our short paper introduces empirical ob
Negative / Null Result ReportMedicine
Clemens NH, Boucher AN, Vaughn S et al. · 2026 · Journal of learning disabilities
Students in grades 2 through 4 with significant word reading difficulties were randomly assigned to one of two 10-week interventions. In the Dual Treatment condition, decoding instruction emphasized regularity in spelling-sound…
View details →DOI: 10.1177/00222194261417589 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn, David Kinney, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran et al. · 2025 · arXiv
Generative large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated gaps in diverse cultural awareness across the globe. We investigate the effect of retrieval augmented generation and search-grounding techniques on LLMs' ability to display familiarity with various national cultures. Specifically, we compare the performance of standard LLMs, LLMs augmented with retrievals from a bespoke knowledge base (i.e., KB grounding), and LLMs augmented with retrievals from a web search (i.e., search grounding) on multiple cultural awareness benchmarks. We find that search grounding significantly improves the LLM p
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering
Haoyang Li, Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen et al. · 2024 · arXiv
Deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement (SE) usually uses conventional activation functions, which lack the expressiveness to capture complex multiscale structures needed for high-fidelity SE. Group-Rational KAN (GR-KAN), a variant of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN), retains KAN's expressiveness while improving scalability on complex tasks. We adapt GR-KAN to existing DNN-based SE by replacing dense layers with GR-KAN layers in the time-frequency (T-F) domain MP-SENet and adapting GR-KAN's activations into the 1D CNN layers in the time-domain Demucs. Results on Voicebank-DEMAND sho
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Àlex Miranda-Pascual, Javier Parra-Arnau, Thorsten Strufe · 2026 · arXiv
Sampling is renowned for its privacy amplification in differential privacy (DP), and is often assumed to improve the utility of a DP mechanism by allowing a noise reduction. In this paper, we further show that this last assumption is flawed: When measuring utility at equal privacy levels, sampling as preprocessing consistently yields penalties due to utility loss from omitting records over all canonical DP mechanisms -- Laplace, Gaussian, exponential, and report noisy max -- , as well as recent applications of sampling, such as clustering. Extending this analysis, we investigate suppression as
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessDentistry
Mohammad Tavakoli, Ensiyeh Bateni, Mansour Rismanchian et al. · 2012 · Dental Research Journal
Background: The greater surface of bioactive glass nanoparticles presents an incomparable and promising feature similar to the biological apatite. Nanoparticles improve cellular adhesion, enhance osteoblast proliferation and differentiation, and increase biomineralization for periodontal regeneration and dental implants. Considering the fact that interaction between periodontal cells and bone graft materials are important for periodontal lesion regeneration, the present study was undertaken to investigate the genotoxicity of a novel synthesized nanoscale bioactive glass and compared it with No
View details →DOI: 10.4103/1735-3327.99831 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Hanbing Liu, Haoyang Li, Xiaokang Zhang et al. · 2025 · arXiv
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation. However, when applied to Text-to-SQL datasets, it often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it. Our investigation reveals the root cause: unlike math and code tasks, which naturally integrate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with DPO, Text-to-SQL datasets typically include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. By augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions, we achieve, for the first time, consistent and
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeoplasms. Tumors. Oncology. Including cancer and carcinogens
Rathi N. Pillai, MD, Suresh S. Ramalingam, MD, Meena Thayu, MD et al. · 2021 · JTO Clinical and Research Reports
Introduction: The programmed death-ligand 1 inhibitor atezolizumab improves progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) for patients with previously treated advanced NSCLC. Preclinical studies indicate that targeting CD38-positive cells with daratumumab may synergistically enhance atezolizumab’s antitumor activity by increasing the effector T-cell activity. Methods: This phase 1b-2 study included a safety run-in (one cycle of daratumumab plus atezolizumab) and randomized phases (daratumumab plus atezolizumab versus atezolizumab alone). The primary objective of the randomized phas
View details →DOI: 10.1016/j.jtocrr.2020.100104 Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessMathematics
Oliver J. Hines, Christian L. Hines · 2026 · arXiv
Gradient boosted decision trees require a stopping rule to avoid overfitting. The standard rule monitors a validation loss and stops if the loss fails to improve for a fixed patience period. However, the patience parameter has no interpretable scale and validation losses can be noisy or implicitly defined by a user-specified gradient. We propose ScoreStop, a gradient-based early-stopping rule that casts the stopping decision at each iteration as a test of the null hypothesis that the current predictor is the population risk minimizer. We use a functional score test, computed on validation data
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science
Zelu Deng, Yujie Zhong, Sheng Guo et al. · 2021 · arXiv
This work aims at improving instance retrieval with self-supervision. We find that fine-tuning using the recently developed self-supervised (SSL) learning methods, such as SimCLR and MoCo, fails to improve the performance of instance retrieval. In this work, we identify that the learnt representations for instance retrieval should be invariant to large variations in viewpoint and background etc., whereas self-augmented positives applied by the current SSL methods can not provide strong enough signals for learning robust instance-level representations. To overcome this problem, we propose InsCL
