Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An exploration of the ways in which children with Communication Difficulties can be enabled to express views on their experience of meeting Educational Professionals : an action research project

This action research explored the ways in which children with Communication Difficulties could be enabled to express views on meeting educational professionals, particularly Educational Psychologists for the purpose of Statutory Assessment (SA). It built upon the body of literature on children’s participation and especially the importance of hearing the marginalised voice of children with Communication Difficulties in educational settings. Uniquely, the research elicited children’s understandings of the process and outcomes of assessment: looking beyond describing what they did or did not like. The research was framed by Self Determination Theory. Exploring the restraining and enabling factors in this process was the original contribution of this research to the field. A social constructionist epistemology underpinned this research: positioning children’s views as constructed through the interactive, cyclical process of being listened to, and acted upon. Each of the four stages of the research process led serially to the next, culminating in a final detailed piece of research. For this final research stage, thirteen children with Communication Difficulties, aged between six and ten years and attending mainstream settings, were recruited. They were observed giving views on their recent experiences of SA, supported by an adult and using an iPad application developed in the preceding stages. Semi-structured interviews followed the observations, using an explanatory leaflet about SA also developed during the research. These findings were then thematically analysed using a deductive approach. Findings identified particular socio-contextual factors that are perceived as enabling or restraining by children with Communication Difficulties. They were less likely to have contextually appropriate ways to respond to questions due to a lack of preparation, explanation and previous opportunities to practise giving views. Difficulties in communication were supported by conduits that encouraged alternative methods of communication and provided visual structure. Supporting adults played a key role within collaborative relationships that boosted the children’s autonomy and encouraged their competence. Outcomes from the research included the importance of: child-friendly information concerning the SA process and especially with a focus on preparing a child to meet with an EP; a multi-media application to support children’s views; a checklist for EPs and good practice guidance for schools.
A Computational Unification of Cognitive Control, Emotion, and Learning

Existing models that integrate emotion and cognition generally do not fully specify why cognition needs emotion and conversely why emotion needs cognition. In this thesis, we present a unified computational model that combines an abstract cognitive theory of behavior control (PEACTIDM) and a detailed theory of emotion (based on an appraisal theory), integrated in a theory of cognitive architecture (Soar). The theory of cognitive control specifies a set of required computational functions and their abstract inputs and outputs, while the appraisal theory specifies in more detail the nature of these inputs and outputs and an ontology for their representation. We argue that there is a surprising functional symbiosis between these two independently motivated theories that leads to a deeper theoretical integration than has been previously obtained in other computational treatments of cognition and emotion. We use an implemented model in Soar to test the feasibility of the resulting integrated theory, and explore its implications and predictive power in several task domains. With this integration, we then explore a possible functional benefit of emotion; namely, as an intrinsic motivator of reinforcement learning. This integration leads to other reinforcement learning extensions, such as automatic setting of the learning and exploration rate parameters.
Cognitive Processing Therapy Veteran/Military Version: Therapist's manual: (514742018-001)

The Veteran/military version of the therapist's manual for Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) has been organized to maximize the ease with which therapists prepare for and conduct CPT. Part I includes background information on CPT and other common issues related to PTSD that may arise during the therapy. We recommend that therapists read the entire manual before meeting with patients. Part II includes instructions on each of the 12 sessions. Each session opens with a summary that briefly outlines the format of the session and gives recommended times for each segment of the session. Each segment is then reviewed in detail, with goals, rationale, and sample dialogue. Call-outs are located throughout this section in the right margins of the text to allow therapists to quickly locate specific topics. Sample session progress notes follow the close of each session to facilitate tracking of therapist/patient progress. Relevant patient handouts also follow each session; please refer to the Materials Manual for additional information on handouts. Part III offers information on alternatives to conducting CPT, including variations of CPT and adaptations of CPT for group administration. Theory Behind CPT CPT is based on a social cognitive theory of PTSD that focuses on how the traumatic event is construed and coped with by a person who is trying to regain a sense of mastery and control in his or her life. The other major theory explaining PTSD is Lang's 2 (1977) information processing theory, which was extended to PTSD by Foa, Steketee, and Rothbaum 3 (1989) in their emotional processing theory of PTSD. In this theory, PTSD is believed to emerge due to the development of a fear network in memory that elicits escape and avoidance behavior. Mental fear structures include stimuli, responses, and meaning elements. Anything associated with the trauma may elicit the fear structure or schema and subsequent avoidance behavior. The fear network in people with PTSD is thought to be stable and broadly generalized so that it is easily accessed. When the fear network is activated by reminders of the trauma, the information in the network enters consciousness (intrusive symptoms). Attempts to avoid this (2006). Cognitive processing therapy for Veterans with military-related posttraumatic stress disorder. A comparison of cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure and a waiting condition for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder in female rape victims. Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is a 12-session therapy that has been found effective for posttraumatic …
Interference coloration as an anti-predator defence

Interference coloration, in which the perceived colour varies predictably with the angle of illumination or observation, is extremely widespread across animal groups. However, despite considerable advances in our understanding of the mechanistic basis of interference coloration in animals, we still have a poor understanding of its function. Here, I show, using avian predators hunting dynamic virtual prey, that the presence of interference coloration can significantly reduce a predator's attack success. Predators required more pecks to successfully catch interference-coloured prey compared with otherwise identical prey items that lacked interference coloration, and attacks against prey with interference colours were less accurate, suggesting that changes in colour or brightness caused by prey movement hindered a predator's ability to pinpoint their exact location. The pronounced anti-predator benefits of interference coloration may explain why it has evolved independently so many times.
Screening and Optimization of Biosurfactant Production by the Hydrocarbon-degrading Bacteria (Penyaringan dan Pengoptimuman Biosurfaktan yang Dihasilkan oleh Bakteria Pendegradasi-hidrokarbon)

Biosurfactants are amphiphilic compounds produced by microorganisms as secondary metabolite. The unique properties of biosurfactants make them possible to replace or to be added to synthetic surfactants which are mainly used in food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries and in environmental applications. In this study twenty hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria were screened for biosurfactant production. All of the bacterial isolates were grown in mineral salt medium (MSM) with addition of 1% (v/v) Tapis crude oil as carbon source. The presence of biosurfactant was determined by the drop-collapse test, microplate analysis, oil spreading technique, emulsification index (% Ei 24 ) and surface tension measurement. Only one isolate, Pseudomonas aeruginosa UKMP14T, was found to be positive for all the qualitative tests and reducing the surface tension of the medium to 49.5 dynes/cm with emulsification index of 25.29%. This isolate produced biosurfactant optimally at pH9.0 and incubation temperature of 37°C. Furthermore, P. aeruginosa UKMP14T when grown in MSM with addition of 1% (v/v) glycerol and 1.3 g/L ammonium sulphate with C/N ratio 14:1 produced biosurfactant with percentage of surface tension reduction at 55% or 30.6 dynes/cm with %Ei 24 of 43%. This percentage of surface tension reduction represents an increasing reduction in surface tension of medium by 39% over the value before optimization. This study showed that P. aeruginosa UKMP14T has the ability to biodegrade hydrocarbon and concurrently produce biosurfactant.
Prediction and Production of Simple Mathematical Equations: Evidence from Visual World Eye-Tracking

The relationship between the production and the comprehension systems has recently become a topic of interest for many psycholinguists. It has been argued that these systems are tightly linked and in particular that listeners use the production system to predict upcoming content. In this study, we tested how similar production and prediction processes are in a novel version of the visual world paradigm. Dutch speaking participants (native speakers in Experiment 1; German-Dutch bilinguals in Experiment 2) listened to mathematical equations while looking at a clock face featuring the numbers 1 to 12. On alternating trials, they either heard a complete equation ("three plus eight is eleven") or they heard the first part ("three plus eight is") and had to produce the result ("eleven") themselves. Participants were encouraged to look at the relevant numbers throughout the trial. Their eye movements were recorded and analyzed. We found that the participants' eye movements in the two tasks were overall very similar. They fixated the first and second number of the equations shortly after they were mentioned, and fixated the result number well before they named it on production trials and well before the recorded speaker named it on comprehension trials. However, all fixation latencies were shorter on production than on comprehension trials. These findings suggest that the processes involved in planning to say a word and anticipating hearing a word are quite similar, but that people are more aroused or engaged when they intend to respond than when they merely listen to another person.
ScoC Regulates Peptide Transport and Sporulation Initiation in Bacillus subtilis

ABSTRACT Oligopeptides are transported into Bacillus subtilis by two ABC transport systems, App and Opp. Transcription of the operon encoding the Opp system was found to occur during exponential growth, whereas the app operon was induced at the onset of stationary phase. Transcription of both operons was completely curtailed by overproduction of the ScoC regulator from a multicopy plasmid and was enhanced in strains with the scoC locus deleted. ScoC, a member of the MarR family of transcription regulators, is known from previous studies to be a negative regulator of sporulation and of protease production that acts by binding directly to the promoters of the genes it regulates. Since peptide transport is essential for inactivation of the negative regulation of sporulation by Rap phosphatases, the control of ScoC transcription repression activity plays a crucial role in the initiation of sporulation.
Explicit vs . Latent Concept Models for Cross-Language Information Retrieval

The field of information retrieval and text manipulation (classification, clustering) still strives for models allowing semantic information to be folded in to improve performance with respect to standard bag-of-word based models. Many approaches aim at a concept-based retrieval, but differ in the nature of the concepts, which range from linguistic concepts as defined in lexical resources such as WordNet, latent topics derived from the data itself as in Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) or (Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to Wikipedia articles as proxies for concepts, as in the recently proposed Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) model. A crucial question which has not been answered so far is whether models based on explicitly given concepts (as in the ESA model for instance) perform inherently better than retrieval models based on “latent” concepts (as in LSI and/or LDA). In this paper we investigate this question closer in the context of a cross-language setting, which inherently requires concept-based retrieval bridging between different languages. In particular, we compare the recently proposed ESA model with two latent models (LSI and LDA) showing that the former is clearly superior to the both. From a general perspective, our results contribute to clarifying the role of explicit vs. implicitly derived or latent concepts in (crosslanguage) information retrieval research.
Collaborative Correlation Tracking

Correlation filter based tracking has attracted many researchers’ attention in recent years for high efficiency and robustness. Most existing works focus on exploiting different characteristics with correlation filters for visual tracking, e.g. circulant structure, kernel trick, effective feature representation and context information. However, how to handle the scale variation and the model drift is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a collaborative correlation tracker to deal with the above problems. Firstly, we extend the correlation tracking filter by embedding the scale factor into the kernelized matrix to handle the scale variation. Then a novel long-term CUR filter for detection is learnt efficiently with random sampling to alleviate model drift by detecting effective object candidates in the collaborative tracker. In this way, the proposed approach could estimate the object state accurately and handle the model drift problem effectively. Extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed method.
Determinant of Customer Trust on E-Commerce and its Impact to Purchase and Word of Mouth Intention: a Case of Indonesia

Even though e-commerce business grows rapidly, still building customer trust on e-commerce becomes more difficult than building customer trust on physical store. This study aims to identify factors that influence customer trust on e-commerce, to compare how important those factors in influencing customer trust and furthermore, to assess how important customer trust for purchase and word of mouth intention. This study combines TOE (Technology, Organizational and Environment) and TPE (Technology, Personal and Environment) framework as reference models used in hypotheses modeling. This research uses quantitative study by conducting survey and accordingly distributing questionnaires to e-commerce users, thus obtaining 151 respondents. The result of this study showed the most essential factors that influence customer trust on e-commerce are web quality and vendor image. This study also revealed that customer trust has positive and significant impact to customer intention to purchase and word of mouth intention.
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: (i) representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
Serologic Assessment of Possibility for MERS-CoV Infection in Equids

To the Editor: In 2012, a novel coronavirus termed Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) emerged on the Arabian Peninsula; the virus has been responsible for >800 human cases. Recently, evidence of MERS-CoV infection in dromedaries was obtained from the Canary Islands, the Arabian Peninsula, and Africa (1–3). Viral sequences from dromedaries and from humans infected with MERS-CoV were highly similar, suggesting a prominent role of dromedaries as an animal reservoir of the virus (4). However, the serologic assessment of other animal species has been incomplete. Investigations of domestic animal species have been restricted to goats, sheep, and cattle (3) and a limited study of horses (n = 3) (5). No evidence of recent infection was found in either study.
Experience of Facility Based Childbirth in Rural Ethiopia: An Exploratory Study of Women's Perspective

Background In Ethiopia, majority (62%) of pregnant women attend antenatal care at least once, yet only 26% deliver with skilled birth attendants in the available health units. Thus, this study explored beliefs and behaviors related to labour and skilled attendance among the women, their perspectives on health care providers, and traditional birth attendants. Methods Sixteen key informant interviews and eight focus group discussions were conducted among purposively selected women who had previous experience of facility based childbirth but gave birth to their most recent child without skilled attendance in the last 12 months. Thematic content analysis was used to elicit and assess the various perspectives of each group of participants interviewed. Findings The study participants described a range of experiences they had during childbirth at health facilities that forced them to choose home delivery in their most recent delivery. Three themes and six subthemes emerging from women's description were abusive and disrespectful treatment, unskilled care, poor client provider interaction, noncontinuous care, lack of privacy, and traditional practices. Conclusion The abuse and disrespect from providers are deterring women from seeking skilled attendance at birth. Thus the health care providers need to improve client provider relationships.
Kinematics, turbulence and evolution of planetary nebulae ?;??

This paper discusses the location of a sample of planetary nebulae on the HR diagram. We determine the internal velocity fields of 14 planetary nebulae from high-resolution echelle spectroscopy, with the help of photoionization models. The mass averaged velocity is shown to be a robust, simple parameter describing the outflow. The expansion velocity and radius are used to define the dynamical age; together with the stellar temperature, this gives a measurement of the luminosity and core mass of the central star. The same technique is applied to other planetary nebulae with previously measured expansion velocities, giving a total sample of 73 objects. The objects cluster closely around the Schonberner track of 0.61 M, with a very narrow distribution of core masses. The masses are higher than found for local white dwarfs. The luminosities determined in this way tend to be higher by a factor of a few than those derived from the nebular luminosities. The discrepancy is highest for the hottest (most evolved) stars. We suggest photon leakage as the likely cause. The innermost regions of the non-(WC) nebulae tend to show strong acceleration. Together with the acceleration at the ionization front, the velocity field becomes "U"-shaped. The presence of strong turbulent motions in (WC) nebulae is confirmed. Except for this, we find that the (WC) stars evolve on the same tracks as non-(WC) stars.
An Australian MAU/QALY Instrument: Rationale and Preliminary Results

The paper presents the preliminary stages in the construction of an Australian Multi-attribute Utility Instrument for obtaining preferences regarding quality of life (QoL) for economic evaluation of health services. The project was undertaken following a review of existing MAU and generic QoL instruments, none of which had been validated for use with an Australian population and most of which did not meet standard psychometric criteria. The definition of `health' adopted by the research team came from the World Health Organization's definition. Following a review of 14 MAU/QoL instruments, a model of health-related QoL was constructed. This involved defining five dimensions: illness, independent living, physical ability, psychological state and social interaction. Focus groups of doctors were used to elicit the content and items appropriate for each dimension. An iterative procedure was followed, during which items were progressively refined until there was an overall consensus about adequate coverage, item content and item language. The item bank was then submitted to a patient sample. The bulk of the paper outlines the procedures which were used to construct a preliminary version of the MAU-instrument, and describes the psychometric properties of this research tool. The paper concludes with a brief review of the further research in progress to verify the structure of the preliminary instrument, to develop appropriate weights and to undertake standard tests of validity and reliability.
Compulsivity in anorexia nervosa: a transdiagnostic concept

The compulsive nature of weight loss behaviors central to anorexia nervosa (AN), such as relentless self-starvation and over-exercise, has led to the suggestion of parallels between AN and other compulsive disorders such as obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and addictions. There is a huge unmet need for effective treatments in AN, which has high rates of morbidity and the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, yet a grave paucity of effective treatments. Viewing compulsivity as a transdiagnostic concept, seen in various manifestations across disorders, may help delineate the mechanisms responsible for the persistence of AN, and aid treatment development. We explore models of compulsivity that suggest dysfunction in cortico-striatal circuitry underpins compulsive behavior, and consider evidence of aberrancies in this circuitry across disorders. Excessive habit formation is considered as a mechanism by which initially rewarding weight loss behavior in AN may become compulsive over time, and the complex balance between positive and negative reinforcement in this process is considered. The physiological effects of starvation in promoting compulsivity, positive reinforcement, and habit formation are also discussed. Further research in AN may benefit from a focus on processes potentially underlying the development of compulsivity, such as aberrant reward processing and habit formation. We discuss the implications of a transdiagnostic perspective on compulsivity, and how it may contribute to the development of novel treatments for AN.