Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The announcements in the Athens Metro stations: An example of glocalization?

Abstract This article explores the parallel English and Greek announcements heard in the Athens Metro stations. It is argued that these announcements constitute a new genre, characterized by a specific format including three stages (opening, main body, closing) and manifesting the interplay between global and local linguacultural influences. The way English is used in this context diverges from native English speaker norms and, despite the expected brevity because of the temporal and acoustic constraints of the environment, elaborate constructions are employed. Both the Greek and the English announcements are verbose, since elaboration is assumed to indicate the required formality and politeness. This in turn contributes to the construction of a serious and polite institution, which can therefore be trusted by passengers. The underlying assumption seems to be that in impressive surroundings such as the Athens Metro, the linguistic code should be equally impressive rather than follow the norms of pithy announcements heard in the London Underground stations. This partly reflects the current linguistic reality in Greece, where elaborate formal constructions are thought to convey “seriousness” and “importance”.
Risks older drivers face themselves and threats they pose to other road users.

BACKGROUND Although there is an ever increasing literature on older drivers, there is no comprehensive up-to-date presentation of how older drivers are impacted by traffic safety, and how they impact the road safety of others. METHODS This paper uses 1994-1996 US data to determine how many rates related to traffic safety depend on the age and sex of road users (fatalities, fatalities per licensed driver, etc.) Threats drivers pose to other road users are estimated by driver involvement in pedestrian fatality crashes. RESULTS It is found that renewing the licence of a 70-year-old male driver for another year poses, on average, 40% less threat to other road users than renewing the license of a 40-year-old male driver. The fatality risks drivers themselves face generally increase as they age, with the increased risk of death in the same severity crash being a major contributor. If this factor is removed, crash risks for 70-year-old male drivers are not materially higher than for 40-year-old male drivers; for female drivers they are. CONCLUSIONS Most driver rates increase substantially by age 80, in many cases to values higher than those for 20-year-olds. Given that a death occurs, the probability that it is a traffic fatality declines steeply with age, from well over 20% for late teens through mid twenties, to under one per cent at age 65, and under half a per cent at age 80.
The differential effect of organizational induction process on early work role adjustment

Early work role adjustment is hypothesized to be a function of previous work experiences, early organizational experiences, and personality differences. Formal collective induction into an organization was compared with informal individual induction. Induction mode was the dominant variable which predicted adjustment four months after employment. Formal collective induction contributed to higher job satisfaction and lower work/family conflict. The mode of induction did not affect team cohesion, role conflict, role ambiguity, or perceived worker influence in the workplace. Self-monitoring, a personality variable, contributed to the prediction of work/family conflict. Inducation mode did not interact with other independent variables in predicting job satisfaction or work/family conflict.
Fundamental Limits of Caching

Caching is a technique to reduce peak traffic rates by prefetching popular content into memories at the end users. Conventionally, these memories are used to deliver requested content in part from a locally cached copy rather than through the network. The gain offered by this approach, which we term local caching gain, depends on the local cache size (i.e., the memory available at each individual user). In this paper, we introduce and exploit a second, global, caching gain not utilized by conventional caching schemes. This gain depends on the aggregate global cache size (i.e., the cumulative memory available at all users), even though there is no cooperation among the users. To evaluate and isolate these two gains, we introduce an information-theoretic formulation of the caching problem focusing on its basic structure. For this setting, we propose a novel coded caching scheme that exploits both local and global caching gains, leading to a multiplicative improvement in the peak rate compared with previously known schemes. In particular, the improvement can be on the order of the number of users in the network. In addition, we argue that the performance of the proposed scheme is within a constant factor of the information-theoretic optimum for all values of the problem parameters.
Discrepancies in Self/Subordinates’ Perceptions of Leadership Behavior

The focus of this study was on how a leader’s gender, the organizational context (in-role vs. out-of-role), and self-monitoring ability related to discrepancies between the leader’s self-perceptions and group members’ perceptions of the leader’s consideration and initiating structure behaviors. Forty-nine male and 49 female leaders from industrial and educational settings, as well as members of their work teams, participated in this survey research. Results indicated greater discrepancies for women leaders in industrial settings (e. g., banking, accounting, and manufacturing) than for female leaders in education and male leaders in industry. In addition, discrepancies in perceptions of initiating structure were highest for high self-monitoring female leaders in industry. These results were explained from actor-observer difference, expectation states, and gender stereotype perspectives.
A Collaborative Research Project to improve the Academic Performance of a Diverse Sixth Grade Science Class

All educators must be prepared to meet the substantial instructional challenges that await them in 21st Century classrooms. Significant among these challenges will be the ability to improve the academic and behavioral performance of a more diverse and often impoverished student population within the context of an ever-expanding curriculum and an educational milieu that may provide fewer instructional resources and less educational support. To meet such challenges, all educators must work collaboratively to develop, implement, and evaluate effective teaching practices that can be applied feasibly and sustained over extensive time periods. Here, we have made a modest attempt to help one classroom teacher address some aspects of her impending instructional challenge. Using an alternating treatments design, we compared the effects of Response Cards, Numbered Heads Together, and Whole Group Question and Answer on 6th graders daily quiz scores and pretest-posttest performance in chemistry, and examined how each instructional intervention affected teacher questioning and student responding patterns in class. Implications are discussed for teachers, teacher educators, and educational consultants.
Use of pre-transformation to cope with outlying values in important candidate genes

Outlying values in predictors often strongly affect the results of statistical analyses in high-dimensional settings. Although they frequently occur with most high-throughput techniques, the problem is often ignored in the literature. We suggest to use a very simple transformation, proposed before in a different context by Royston and Sauerbrei, as an intermediary step between array normalization and high-level statistical analysis. This straightforward univariate transformation identifies extreme values and reduces the influence of outlying values considerably in all further steps of statistical analysis without eliminating the incriminated observation or feature. The use of the transformation and its effects are demonstrated for diverse univariate and multivariate statistical analyses using nine publicly available microarray data sets.
English as a 'mother tongue' in Singapore

This paper investigates the role of English and what it represents to speakers of the three major ethnic groups across three different age groups in Singapore. This paper reports a study conducted on 436 Singaporeans of different age and ethnic groups, looking at their language use and perceptions of English as a marker of their identity. The Singapore government has always been cautious about according the 'mother tongue' status to English. The latest 2010 census however reveals that over 30 per cent of Singaporeans report English to be the primary language used in the home, an increase from about 20 per cent in 2000. What remains unclear is the extent to which English has penetrated the psyche of the everyday Singaporean. The results in this study suggest that English in Singapore has to be reconceptualized as a new mother tongue, and to do so requires a reconfiguration of what it takes for a language to be a 'mother tongue. ' This paper will take this on by adapting Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson's (1989) and Rampton's (1995) objections and definitions of the term, and propose a set of conditions that can be used to define the term mother tongue.
The effects of part-time work experience on high school students

Journal of Career Development, Vol. 17(3), Spring 1991 Address correspondence to Bassem N. Kablaoui at the Department of Educational Organization, Administration and Policy Graduate School of Education, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260. The incidence of youth employment while still in high school has increased steadily, particularly over the last decade. The Office of the President’s Employment and Training Report (1982) states that, in 1982, 44 percent of males and 41 percent of females, aged 16 to 17 years, participated in the labor force while still attending high school. More recently, the Earning and Learning Report, conducted by the NAEP (1989), found in its National Report Card that 54 percent of llth grade students were employed at least part-time, and early returns of this report for 1988 indicated that 66 percent of high school seniors were working while still in school. This increasing trend of student employment is of growing concern for educators and lay people alike, as reflected in recent headlines of major newspapers such as The USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Buffalo News: &dquo;Students’ Jobs Cut School Activities,&dquo; &dquo;Learning in the market Place,&dquo; and &dquo;Should Kids Work Flipping Burgers? &dquo; Ironically, this trend of increasing student employment comes at a time when the nation is seeking ways to raise the educational standards of its system (American Education: Making it Work, Bennett, 1988; National Commission on Excellence in Education Report, 1983). This situation has forced educators, parents and researchers to
Mechanisms of Glucose Lowering of Dipeptidyl Peptidase-4 Inhibitor Sitagliptin When Used Alone or With Metformin in Type 2 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE To assess glucose-lowering mechanisms of sitagliptin (S), metformin (M), and the two combined (M+S). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We randomized 16 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) to four 6-week treatments with placebo (P), M, S, and M+S. After each period, subjects received a 6-h meal tolerance test (MTT) with [14C]glucose to calculate glucose kinetics. Fasting plasma glucose (FPG), fasting plasma insulin, C-peptide (insulin secretory rate [ISR]), fasting plasma glucagon, and bioactive glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) and gastrointestinal insulinotropic peptide (GIP) were measured. RESULTS FPG decreased from P, 160 ± 4 to M, 150 ± 4; S, 154 ± 4; and M+S, 125 ± 3 mg/dL. Mean post-MTT plasma glucose decreased from P, 207 ± 5 to M, 191 ± 4; S, 195 ± 4; and M+S, 161 ± 3 mg/dL (P < 0.01). The increase in mean post-MTT plasma insulin and in ISR was similar in P, M, and S and slightly greater in M+S. Fasting plasma glucagon was equal (∼65–75 pg/mL) with all treatments, but there was a significant drop during the initial 120 min with S 24% and M+S 34% (both P < 0.05) vs. P 17% and M 16%. Fasting and mean post-MTT plasma bioactive GLP-1 were higher (P < 0.01) after S and M+S vs. M and P. Basal endogenous glucose production (EGP) fell from P 2.0 ± 0.1 to S 1.8 ± 0.1 mg/kg ⋅ min, M 1.8 ± 0.2 mg/kg ⋅ min (both P < 0.05 vs. P), and M+S 1.5 ± 0.1 mg/kg ⋅ min (P < 0.01 vs. P). Although the EGP slope of decline was faster in M and M+S vs. S, all had comparable greater post-MTT EGP inhibition vs. P (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS M+S combined produce additive effects to 1) reduce FPG and postmeal plasma glucose, 2) augment GLP-1 secretion and β-cell function, 3) decrease plasma glucagon, and 4) inhibit fasting and postmeal EGP compared with M or S monotherapy.
What Makes Teacher Teams in a Vocational Education Context Effective?: A Qualitative Study of Managers' View on Team Working.

Purpose – At a time when secondary vocational education is implementing competence-based education (CBE) on a large scale, to adapt to the needs of students and of the labour market in a modern society, many vocational schools have recognised that interdisciplinary teacher teams are an important condition for this implementation. In order to provide students with the right competences for the labour market, different subject teachers should work and learn together and, by doing so, should be able to develop changes and improvements to ensure the effective implementation of CBE. In spite of the appeal of forming teacher teams in vocational education, studies on this subject show that teams in educational settings are not easily implemented. This paper aims to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach – In this study, 28 managers from a Vocational Education and Training (VET) college in The Netherlands were interviewed in order to find factors that are related to effective team functioning. The authors choose to rely on a qualitative approach, because there has hardly been any empirical validation of factors that are related to effective team functioning in a vocational education context. In order to determine what factors influence team effectiveness, the results from the interviews have been related to what is known about team effectiveness from the literature. Findings – By relating the results from the interviews to what is known about team effectiveness from the literature, a framework for future research on team effectiveness in schools is provided. In line with the organisational and psychological literature on team effectiveness, the managers distinguished several aspects in their definition of team effectiveness. Moreover, the findings of the study highlight the importance of the development of task interdependence, transformational leadership, and group efficacy for producing effective teams in education. Originality/value – Although teams and team functioning have been the focus of researchers from different disciplines and have been studied from different perspectives, studies on the conditions that support or limit the successful implementation of teacher teams in vocational education are still scarce. The results of this study are expected to provide a deeper understanding of the mechanism that underlies the ability of teacher teams in vocational education to function effectively
Integration of dynamic assessment and instructional conversations to promote development and improve assessment in the language classroom

This article explores how a primary school teacher utilized the frameworks of dynamic assessment (DA) and the instructional conversation (IC) within a Spanish as a foreign language classroom. DA was used to construct zones of proximal development with individuals in the classroom context. A menu of pre-scripted assisting prompts, used to respond to predictable lexical and grammatical errors, permitted the teacher to assess students while also promoting development. ICs were used to co-construct a group zone of proximal development (ZPD) in response to less predictable student errors or inquiries. The flexible mediation provided by the teacher in these instances allowed for the active involvement of more students as well as more responsive dialogue. This language teacher drew upon these two frameworks to navigate dual goals of instruction and assessment while providing mediation attuned to the ZPD of the learners. As students studied interrogative formation to complete the pedagogical task of an interview, the teacher alternated between these two frameworks based on her goal for each interaction. Class transcripts are analysed to reveal how these two complementary frameworks can be used in conjunction to meet both the students’ and teacher’s needs.
Religious Influences on Work–Family Trade-Offs

Despite a large body of research on the influences of religion on family life and gender ideology, few studies examined how religion affects work—family strategies. One set of strategies involves making employment or family trade-offs—strategies of devoting time or attention to either work or family in a situation in which one cannot devote the preferred amount of time and attention to both, strategies that may be experienced as making sacrifices, hard choices, or accommodations. Using 1996 General Social Survey data, the authors analyze how religion affects employment and family trade-offs. They develop hypotheses about the institutional effects of religious involvement and effects of involvement in a conservative religious subculture. They find that religious involvement and religious subculture shape trade-offs in gender-specific ways, and that religion affects more of men's trade-offs. They conclude by calling for further research on the social sources of cultural frameworks that shape men's and women's work—family strategies.
Nucleotide Sequences and Chromosomal Localization of 45S and 5S rDNA in Neolissochilus hexagonolepis (Pisces, Cyprinidae), Using Dual-Color Fish

Dual-color fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) was performed to study the simultaneous localization of major (45S) and minor (5S) family ribosomal RNA genes on chromosomes of Neolissochilus hexagonolepis. The partial 45S (18S, ITS 1, 5.8S, ITS 2 and 28S) and complete 5S (coding and NTS) rDNA units were amplified, sequenced, analyzed, and mapped on the metaphase chromosomes. The complete 18S, 5.8S and partial 28S rDNAs were 1849 bp, 157 bp and 1819 bp long, respectively. Internal transcribed spacers, namely ITS 1 (828 bp) and ITS 2 (359 bp), showed significant nucleotide variations from other fish species listed in NCBI database. The 5S rDNA contained an identical coding region of 120 bp and a highly divergent, non-transcribed 81-bp spacer. The specimens of N. hexagonolepis showed six bright fluorescent signals of 18S, while the 5S signals were present only on one pair of chromosomes. Subsequent analyses between conventional Ag-NORs and 18S rDNA FISH strongly suggested the possible inactivation of one pair of NORs that was localized at a telomeric position of a submetacentric chromosome. The sequencing and chromosomal localization of 45S and 5S rDNAs may serve as a useful genetic marker in taxonomic classification as well as in phylogenetic and evolutionary studies.
Microbial Community Structure and Activity Linked to Contrasting Biogeochemical Gradients in Bog and Fen Environments of the Glacial Lake Agassiz Peatland

ABSTRACT The abundances, compositions, and activities of microbial communities were investigated at bog and fen sites in the Glacial Lake Agassiz Peatland of northwestern Minnesota. These sites contrast in the reactivity of dissolved organic matter (DOM) and the presence or absence of groundwater inputs. Microbial community composition was characterized using pyrosequencing and clone library construction of phylogenetic marker genes. Microbial distribution patterns were linked to pH, concentrations of dissolved organic carbon and nitrogen, C/N ratios, optical properties of DOM, and activities of laccase and peroxidase enzymes. Both bacterial and archaeal richness and rRNA gene abundance were >2 times higher on average in the fen than in the bog, in agreement with a higher pH, labile DOM content, and enhanced enzyme activities in the fen. Fungi were equivalent to an average of 1.4% of total prokaryotes in gene abundance assayed by quantitative PCR. Results revealed statistically distinct spatial patterns between bacterial and fungal communities. Fungal distribution did not covary with pH and DOM optical properties and was vertically stratified, with a prevalence of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota near the surface and much higher representation of Zygomycota in the subsurface. In contrast, bacterial community composition largely varied between environments, with the bog dominated by Acidobacteria (61% of total sequences), while the Firmicutes (52%) dominated in the fen. Acetoclastic Methanosarcinales showed a much higher relative abundance in the bog, in contrast to the dominance of diverse hydrogenotrophic methanogens in the fen. This is the first quantitative and compositional analysis of three microbial domains in peatlands and demonstrates that the microbial abundance, diversity, and activity parallel with the pronounced differences in environmental variables between bog and fen sites.
Data-driven modelling of a gene regulatory network for cell fate decisions in the growing limb bud

Parameter optimization coupled with model selection is a convenient approach to infer gene regulatory networks from experimental gene expression data, but so far it has been limited to single cells or static tissues where growth is not significant. Here, we present a computational study in which we determine an optimal gene regulatory network from the spatiotemporal dynamics of gene expression patterns in a complex 2D growing tissue (non‐isotropic and heterogeneous growth rates). We use this method to predict the regulatory mechanisms that underlie proximodistal (PD) patterning of the developing limb bud. First, we map the expression patterns of the PD markers Meis1, Hoxa11 and Hoxa13 into a dynamic description of the tissue movements that drive limb morphogenesis. Secondly, we use reverse‐engineering to test how different gene regulatory networks can interpret the opposing gradients of fibroblast growth factors (FGF) and retinoic acid (RA) to pattern the PD markers. Finally, we validate and extend the best model against various previously published manipulative experiments, including exogenous application of RA, surgical removal of the FGF source and genetic ectopic expression of Meis1. Our approach identifies the most parsimonious gene regulatory network that can correctly pattern the PD markers downstream of FGF and RA. This network reveals a new model of PD regulation which we call the “crossover model”, because the proximal morphogen (RA) controls the distal boundary of Hoxa11, while conversely the distal morphogens (FGFs) control the proximal boundary.
Phonological Processing Skills and the Reading Recovery Program.

The aim of this study was to determine whether the Reading Recovery program would be more effective if systematic instruction in phonological recoding skills were incorporated into the program. First-grade at-risk readers were divided into 3 matched groups of 32 children each: a modified Reading Recovery group, a standard Reading Recovery group, and a standard intervention group. The children in the modified Reading Recovery group received explicit code instruction involving phonograms. Results indicated that although both Reading Recovery groups achieved levels of reading performance required for discontinuation of the program, the modified Reading Recovery group reached these levels of performance much more quickly