Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Absorbed in Thought

This study used event-related potentials to explore whether mind wandering (task-unrelated thought, or TUT) emerges through general problems in distraction, deficits of task-relevant processing (the executive-function view), or a general reduction in attention to external events regardless of their relevance (the decoupling hypothesis). Twenty-five participants performed a visual oddball task, in which they were required to differentiate between a rare target stimulus (to measure task-relevant processes), a rare novel stimulus (to measure distractor processing), and a frequent nontarget stimulus. TUT was measured immediately following task performance using a validated retrospective measure. High levels of TUT were associated with a reduction in cortical processing of task-relevant events and distractor stimuli. These data contradict the suggestion that mind wandering is associated with distraction problems or specific deficits in task-relevant processes. Instead, the data are consistent with the decoupling hypothesis: that TUT dampens the processing of sensory information irrespective of that information’s task relevance.
Strategic Instruction in Middle School Social Studies

This article describes a cognitive strategy designed to enhance middle school students' comprehension of social studies texts and reports its implementation in social studies classrooms. The PEP road map instructional framework is intended to help social studies teachers scaffold the reading and writing experiences of at-risk students as they interact with social studies textbooks. Implementation by middle school students indicated an academically significant increase in reading comprehension for all students, improved metacognitive ability, attention to information contained in texts, and confidence in ability to grapple with ideas in authentic texts. Students can be taught to activate and refine their reading comprehension skills as they engage in meaningful encounters with conceptual ideas about social studies. Content-area teacher responses to the implementation of the strategy in their classrooms were encouraging.
Developer involvement considered harmful?: an empirical examination of Android bug resolution times

In large scale software development ecosystems, there is a common perception that higher developer involvement leads to faster resolution of bugs. This is based on conjectures around more ``eyeballs" making bugs ``shallow" -- whose validity and applicability are not without dispute. In this paper, we posit that the level of developer attention as well as its extent of diversity influence how quickly bugs get resolved. We report results from a study of 1,000+ Android bugs. We find statistically significant evidence that attention and diversity have contrasting relationships with the resolution time of bugs, even after controlling for factors such as interest, importance, dependency etc. Our results can offer helpful insights on team dynamics and project governance.
Influence of Internal Opportunity Structure and Sex of Worker on Turnover Patterns.

September 1979, volume 24 This research identifies the quitting and replacement patterns of some occupations in a state civil service, in order to examine the relevance both of structural limits on advancement opportunity and of worker characteristics upon such patterns and the long-term effects of such patterns on the distribution of men and women. Hypotheses about the effects of minority status in occupations are tested, to see whether the effect of sex of workers on quitting is the same in occupations with different advancement potential. ,
High-resolution noise-robust spectral-based pitch estimation

This paper introduces a new spectral representation-based pitch estimation method. Since pitch is never stationary during real conversations, but often undergoes changes because of intonation, the spectral representation is derived from the Short-time Harmonic Chirp Transform. This lets our technique to perform very well in noisy conditions, and to extract pitch values with high conﬁdence, even from segments with strong intona-tions. The paper discusses a new way of segment-vice pitch extraction and does not deal with continuous pitch tracking, which is a topic of our future work. However, the performance of the proposed method is demonstrated on real recordings and the noise-dependency of its accuracy is numerically analyzed.
International Journal of Multidisciplinary and Current Research an Overview: Metacognition in Education

Metacognition refers to " thinking about thinking " or our ability to know what we know, what we don't know and how to regulate as well as control such thinking. This article seeks to give an overview of some issues related to metacognition, a construct which received a considerable attention on the part of teaching theoreticians and researchers. It starts with a brief introduction of metacognition and then gives an account of its various definitions and components. The differences between cognition and metacognition are also mentioned. It concludes with some ideas and research findings on the teachability of this construct in different fields of study, especially language education.
Toxicity of model aliphatic amines and their chlorinated forms

Aliphatic amines can be found in many wastewater effluents from industry, agriculture, pharmacy, and food processing. Amines can induce toxicological responses that are relevant in biochemical treatment processes, as well as in natural waters. This research compared the toxicity and inhibition caused by three aliphatic amines (n‐propylamine, ethylmethylamine, and trimethylamine) and their chlorinated derivatives. The chemistry of chlorine interactions with these compounds was characterized by using membrane introduction mass spectrometry (MIMS). Acute toxicity assays were conducted by using a Microtox® system with Phosphobacterium phosphoreum (also known as Vibrio fischeri) for the aliphatic amine compounds and their corresponding chlorinated derivatives, as identified by MIMS. Inhibition tests were conducted by using the oxygen utilization rate test with an enhanced nitrifier culture. The median effective concentration (EC50) values for chloropropylamine, chloroethylmethylamine, and chlorodimethylamine obtained by Microtox with a contact time of 15 min were 12.68, 19.72, and 15.92 μM, respectively. The EC50 values of these aliphatic chloramines from the Microtox test decreased by roughly one order of magnitude as a result of chlorination. Inhibition of nitrifiers also was observed in these amines. Trimethylamine and n‐propylamine caused greater inhibition to nitrifiers than did ethylmethylamine under similar concentrations. Nitrifier inhibition from these amines increased after chlorination. The results of these tests indicated that aliphatic amines and their chlorinated derivatives could induce environmentally relevant toxicity responses in treatment settings and in receiving waters.
The Bologna Process as a Trojan Horse: Restructuring Higher Education in Hungary

Changes in higher education in Hungary are strongly related to those in the economic and social environment. Since the change of the political system in the late 1980s, Hungarian economic development has been marked by periods of contraction and expansion. Notwithstanding this process, influenced in part by the state’s imposition of restrictive policies to control economic growth, the need for higher education has continually grown. The number of tertiary students increased fourfold between 1990 and 2003, and the student–teacher ratio increased from 5.9 to 16.5—more than two and a half times. By 2005 more than 40 percent of the appropriate age group participated in higher education. In Hungary these processes—such as growing needs and fewer resources—occurred within a decade and simultaneously, while the same processes were consecutive and lasted for a longer time in the West. Since other significant issues of higher educational policy remained
Campylobacter fetus fetus abortions in vaccinated ewes

Abstract Aims: To investigate the cause of an outbreak of ovine abortion in 1996 in a flock of 300 two-tooth (rising 2-year-old) ewes vaccinated against Campylobacter fetus fetus infection and to subsequently characterise the strain of C. fetus fetus isolated from aborted foetuses. Methods: Standard bacteriological methods were used to identify C. fetus fetus isolates which were then antigenically typed and subjected to pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and compared to the vaccine strain. Results: C. fetus fetus was identified as the causal agent of the abortions despite the ewes having been vaccinated before ram introduction and at the time of ram removal. Four isolates cultured from aborted material were indistinguishable when compared using antigenic typing and PFGE, but all differed from the vaccine strain. Conclusions: Within the limitations of the available typing systems, it is proposed that PFGE maybe a useful tool to establish the distribution and strain variation of C. fetus fetus. Clinical relevance: This field case indicates the need for further study of non-vaccine C. fetus fetus strains which cause abortion in vaccinated ewes, and of the importance of these strains to the New Zealand sheep industry.
A Framework for Sustainable Heritage Management: A Study of UK Industrial Heritage Sites

In 2002, the World Heritage Committee declared heritage to be ‘an instrument for the sustainable development of all societies’. The term ‘sustainable development’, however, is inscribed with a complex economic, environmental and social agenda that challenges contemporary World Heritage management practice. This paper draws on a content analysis of six industrial UK World Heritage Site management plans. The analysis focuses on the extent that each plan integrates four key sustainability dimensions. Findings indicate that the planning frameworks and collaboration processes in operation at each site ensure conservation of the historical physical fabric but limit the development of a sustainable local cultural economy. A sustainable heritage management framework is presented based on the adoption of a long‐term strategic orientation and extensive local community participation in decision making. The framework is relevant to other complex heritage sites such as historic towns and cultural landscapes.
Global teleconnections in the oceanic phosphorus cycle: Patterns, paths, and timescales

[1] Nutrient transport and productivity teleconnections with the Southern Ocean are diagnosed in a data-assimilated circulation model coupled to a jointly optimized simple phosphorus cycling model. The North Atlantic has the strongest extratropical teleconnections with the Southern Ocean: phosphate (PO4) last utilized in the Southern Ocean sustains 29 ± 6% of the subpolar and 14 ± 6% of the subtropical, new production in the North Atlantic. A PO4 path-density diagnostic shows that these teleconnections are mediated by thermocline paths and reveals that most paths to anywhere north of 40°S lie in the deep Pacific. Forcing nearly complete Southern-Ocean nutrient utilization increases the overall number of paths to anywhere north of 40°S, but reduces the number of paths from the Pacific to the North Atlantic by trapping nutrients in return paths to the Southern Ocean. At the same time, the mean export-to-uptake transit times to anywhere north of 40°S increase, while the mean transit times to the North Atlantic decrease. Correspondingly, the amount of North-Atlantic production sustained by Southern-Ocean export increases in spite of decreased total production in response to Southern-Ocean nutrient trapping. The distributions of export-to-uptake, export-to-surface, and surface-to-surface transit times are computed and summarized in terms of their mean transit times and their mean interior residence times. The combined particle and advective–diffusive transport of nutrients is characterized by broad, skewed transit-time distributions, which result in mean residence times much longer than the mean transit times, in turn much longer than the most probable transit times.
Scalable detection of partial near-duplicate videos by visual-temporal consistency

Following the exponential growth of social media, there now exist huge repositories of videos online. Among the huge volumes of videos, there exist large numbers of near-duplicate videos. Most existing techniques either focus on the fast retrieval of full copies or near-duplicates, or consider localization in a heuristic manner. This paper considers the scalable detection and localization of partial near-duplicate videos by jointly considering visual similarity and temporal consistency. Temporal constraints are embedded into a network structure as directed edges. Through the structure, partial alignment is novelly converted into a network flow problem where highly efficient solutions exist. To precisely decide the boundaries of the overlapping segments, pair-wise constraints generated from keypoint matching can be added to the network to iteratively refine the localization result. We demonstrate the effectiveness of partial alignment for three different tasks. The first task links partial segments in full-length movies to videos crawled from YouTube. The second task performs fast web video search, while the third performs near-duplicate shot and copy detection. The experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art techniques.
In vitro activity of the nisin dehydratase NisB

The biosynthesis of several classes of ribosomally synthesized and posttranslationally modified peptides involves dehydration of serine and threonine residues. For class I lantibiotics, thiopeptides, and goadsporin, this dehydration is catalyzed by lanthionine biosynthetic enzyme B (LanB) or LanB-like proteins. Although LanB proteins have been studied since 1992, in vitro reconstitution of their dehydration activity has been elusive. We show here the in vitro activity of the dehydratase involved in the biosynthesis of the food preservative nisin (NisB). In vitro, NisB dehydrated its substrate peptide NisA eight times in the presence of glutamate, ATP, Mg2+, and the ribosomal/membrane fraction of bacterial cell extract. Mutation of 23 highly conserved residues of NisB identified a number of amino acids that are essential for dehydration activity. In addition, these mutagenesis studies identified three mutants, R786A, R826A, and H961A, that result in multiple glutamylations of the NisA substrate. Glutamylation was observed during both Escherichia coli coexpression of NisA with these mutants and in vitro assays. Treatment of the glutamylated substrate with WT NisB results in dehydrated NisA, suggesting that the glutamylated peptide is an intermediate in dehydration. Collectively, these studies suggest that dehydration involves glutamylation of the side chains of Ser and Thr followed by elimination. The latter step has precedent in the virginiamycin resistance protein virginiamycin B lyase. These studies will facilitate investigation of other LanB proteins involved in the biosynthesis of lantibiotics, thiopeptides, and goadsporin.
Ideaesthesia: Conceptual processes assign similar colours to similar shapes

One of the main problems in understanding synaesthesia is determining whether it is a sensory or semantic phenomenon-a problem also known as the distinction between ‘low-’ vs. ‘high-level’ synaesthesia. Recently, it has been reported that in grapheme-colour synaesthesia, the colour associated to a letter is chosen by similarity to other letters. Letters of similar shapes tend to elicit similar colours. The authors explained this result by low-level cross-wiring between grapheme and colour brain areas. In the present study we show that when new graphemes are learned, they also associate synaesthetic colours based on shape- and colour similarity. Importantly, these novel associations between graphemes and colors are created within minutes, which is too rapid to be accounted for by cross-wiring. In addition, the dimensions of similarity used to create these associations were more abstract than what would be expected from elementary features processed in the grapheme area. Therefore, we conclude that the result is better explained by high-level conceptual mechanisms that guide the choices and creation of synaesthetic concurrents.
The Role of Self-Schema in Attributions for Own Versus Other's Exercise Lapse

Kendzierski and Sheffield (2000) found that exerciser schematics made less stable attributions for an exercise lapse than did aschematics; this could occur because they either perceived similar causes differently or encountered less stable obstacles to exercise. This research tested the perceptual explanation by examining the stability of the attributions that undergraduates who did versus did not have an exerciser self-schema made for specified lapses that they imagined as having happened to themselves versus another student. It also explored whether exerciser self-schema status was associated with differences in attributions of personal and external control. Consistent with the perceptual explanation, students with an exerciser self-schema made less stable attributions for a lapse imagined as having happened to themselves than did students without an exerciser self-schema, but equally stable attributions for a lapse imagined as having happened to another. Moreover, a content analysis revealed that the 2 groups cited similar causes for their own imagined lapses, providing further evidence that the difference in perceived stability was due to the groups perceiving similar causes differently. Exerciser self-schema status was not associated with attributions of either personal control or (in any clear way) external control.
Analysis of Endocrine Disruption in Southern California Coastal Fish Using an Aquatic Multispecies Microarray

Background Endocrine disruptors include plasticizers, pesticides, detergents, and pharmaceuticals. Turbot and other flatfish are used to characterize the presence of chemicals in the marine environment. Unfortunately, there are relatively few genes of turbot and other flatfish in GenBank, which limits the use of molecular tools such as microarrays and quantitative reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) to study disruption of endocrine responses in sentinel fish captured by regulatory agencies. Objectives We fabricated a multigene cross-species microarray as a diagnostic tool to screen the effects of environmental chemicals in fish, for which there is minimal genomic information. The array included genes that are involved in the actions of adrenal and sex steroids, thyroid hormone, and xenobiotic responses. This microarray will provide a sensitive tool for screening for the presence of chemicals with adverse effects on endocrine responses in coastal fish species. Methods We used a custom multispecies microarray to study gene expression in wild hornyhead turbot (Pleuronichthys verticalis) collected from polluted and clean coastal waters and in laboratory male zebrafish (Danio rerio) after exposure to estradiol and 4-nonylphenol. We measured gene-specific expression in turbot liver by qRT-PCR and correlated it to microarray data. Results Microarray and qRT-PCR analyses of livers from turbot collected from polluted areas revealed altered gene expression profiles compared with those from nonaffected areas. Conclusions The agreement between the array data and qRT-PCR analyses validates this multispecies microarray. The microarray measurement of gene expression in zebrafish, which are phylogenetically distant from turbot, indicates that this multispecies microarray will be useful for measuring endocrine responses in other fish.
Design, Development and Evaluation of rK28-Based Point-of-Care Tests for Improving Rapid Diagnosis of Visceral Leishmaniasis

Background Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is diagnosed by microscopic confirmation of the parasite in bone marrow, spleen or lymph node aspirates. These procedures are unsuitable for rapid diagnosis of VL in field settings. The development of rK39-based rapid diagnostic tests (RDT) revolutionized diagnosis of VL by offering high sensitivity and specificity in detecting disease in the Indian subcontinent; however, these tests have been less reliable in the African subcontinent (sensitivity range of 75–85%, specificity of 70–92%). We have addressed limitations of the rK39 with a new synthetic polyprotein, rK28, followed by development and evaluation of two new rK28-based RDT prototype platforms. Methodology/Principal Findings Evaluation of 62 VL-confirmed sera from Sudan provided sensitivities of 96.8% and 93.6% (95% CI = K28: 88.83–99.61%; K39: 84.30–98.21%) and specificities of 96.2% and 92.4% (95% CI = K28: 90.53–98.95%; K39: 85.54–96.65%) for rK28 and rK39, respectively. Of greater interest was the observation that individual VL sera with low rK39 reactivity often had much higher rK28 reactivity. This characteristic of the fusion protein was exploited in the development of rK28 rapid tests, which may prove to be crucial in detecting VL among patients with low rK39 antibody levels. Evaluation of two prototype lateral flow-based rK28 rapid tests on 53 VL patients in Sudan and 73 VL patients in Bangladesh provided promisingly high sensitivities (95.9% [95% CI = 88.46–99.1 in Sudan and 98.1% [95% CI = 89.93–99.95%] in Bangladesh) compared to the rK39 RDT (sensitivities of 86.3% [95% CI = 76.25–93.23%] in Sudan and 88.7% [95% CI = 76.97–95.73%] in Bangladesh). Conclusions/Significance Our study compares the diagnostic accuracy of rK39 and rK28 in detecting active VL cases and our findings indicate that rK28 polyprotein has great potential as a serodiagnostic tool. A new rK28-based RDT will prove to be a valuable asset in simplifying VL disease confirmation at the point-of-care.
Anticipated Consequences of the 2011 Duty Hours Standards: Views of Internal Medicine and Surgery Program Directors

Purpose To assess internal medicine (IM) and surgery program directors’ views of the likely effects of the 2011 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education duty hours regulations. Method In fall 2010, investigators surveyed IM and surgery program directors, assessing their views of the likely impact of the 2011 duty hours standards on learning environment, workload, education opportunities, program administration, and patient outcomes. Results Of 381 IM program directors, 287 (75.3%) responded; of 225 surgery program directors, 118 (52.4%) responded. Significantly more surgeons than internists indicated that the new regulations would likely negatively impact learning climate, including faculty morale and residents’ relationships (P < .001). Most leaders in both specialties (80.8% IM, 80.2% surgery) felt that the regulations would likely increase faculty workload (P = .73). Both IM (82.2%) and surgery (96.6%) leaders most often rated, of all education opportunities, first-year resident clinical experience to be adversely affected (P < .001). Respondents from both specialties indicated that they will hire more nonphysician/midlevel providers (59.5% IM, 89.0% surgery, P < .001) and use more nonteaching services (66.8% IM, 70.1% surgery, P = .81). Respondents expect patient safety (45.1% IM, 76.9% surgery, P < .001) and continuity of care (83.6% IM across all training levels, 97.5% surgery regarding first-year residents) to decrease. Conclusions IM and surgery program directors agree that the 2011 duty hours regulations will likely negatively affect the quality of the learning environment, workload, education opportunities, program administration, and patient outcomes. Careful evaluation of actual impact is important.