Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Behind the starting line: school capacity building in early childhood education

This paper describes the process of school capacity building in Hong Kong's early childhood education at a time when there was a quest for quality education. A local preschool was selected for the study, which took part in a university–school support programme through which consultancy was hired from a university to provide school-based support. An action research approach was chosen in the research design. The process of building capacity was examined in the selected preschool over a year. The findings indicated that the preschool went through a process of capacity building, from the status quo ante, through the exploration stage to the initial implementation stage of change. Restructuring and reculturing were emerging in the change process, with the support of the school consultants.
Spindle orientation: a question of complex positioning

The direction in which a cell divides is determined by the orientation of its mitotic spindle at metaphase. Spindle orientation is therefore important for a wide range of developmental processes, ranging from germline stem cell division to epithelial tissue homeostasis and regeneration. In multiple cell types in multiple animals, spindle orientation is controlled by a conserved biological machine that mediates a pulling force on astral microtubules. Restricting the localization of this machine to only specific regions of the cortex can thus determine how the mitotic spindle is oriented. As we review here, recent findings based on studies in tunicate, worm, fly and vertebrate cells have revealed that the mechanisms for mediating this restriction are surprisingly diverse. Summary: This Review discusses key features of the spindle-orientating complex and reviews how this complex is regulated and localized to allow correct mitotic spindle orientation.
A Natural Language Mediation System for E-Commerce applications : an ontology-based approach

This paper describes how ontologies are used to mediate between languages and to infer answers to user questions in the multilingual e-commerce mediation system mkbeem. As an example, the paper discusses how a complex user request in human language is transformed into an ontological formula and subsequently exploited to identify a service which matches best. The mkbeem-system prototype is in principle language independent and has been tested for the time being in Finnish, French, English and Spanish.
First results on uniqueness of sparse non-negative matrix factorization

Sparse non-negative matrix factorization (sNMF) allows for the decomposition of a given data set into a mixing matrix and a feature data set, which are both non-negative and fulfill certain sparsity conditions. In this paper it is shown that the employed projection step proposed by Hoyer has a unique solution, and that it indeed finds this solution. Then indeterminacies of the sNMF model are identified and first uniqueness results are presented, both theoretically and experimentally.
Are Idle Hands the Devil's Workshop? Incapacitation, Concentration and Juvenile Crime

This paper examines the short-term effect of school on juvenile crime. To do so, we bring together daily measures of criminal activity and detailed school calendar information from 29 jurisdictions across the country, and use the plausibly exogenous variation generated by teacher in-service days to estimate the school-crime relationship. We find that the level of property crime committed by juveniles decreases by 14 percent on days when school is in session, but that the level of violent crime increases by 28 percent on such days. These results do not appear to be driven by inflated reporting of crime on school days or substitution of crime across days. Our findings suggest that incapacitation and concentration influence juvenile crime - when juveniles are not engaged in supervised activities, they are more likely to engage in certain anti-social behaviors; at the same time, the increase in interactions associated with school attendance leads to more interpersonal conflict and violence. These results underscore the social nature of violent crime and suggest that youth programs - particularly those with no educational component such as midnight basketball or summer concerts - may entail important tradeoffs in terms of their effects on juvenile crime.
Identification of Capsid Mutations That Alter the Rate of HIV-1 Uncoating in Infected Cells

ABSTRACT After viral fusion with the cell membrane, the conical capsid of HIV-1 disassembles by a process called uncoating. We recently utilized the cyclosporine (CsA) washout assay, in which TRIM-CypA-mediated restriction of viral replication is used to detect the state of the viral capsid, to study the kinetics of uncoating in HIV-1-infected cells. Here we have extended this analysis to examine the effects of p24 capsid protein (p24CA) mutations and cellular environment on the kinetics of uncoating in infected cells. We found that p24CA mutations can significantly increase (A92E), delay (E45A and N74D), or have no effect (G94D) on the rate of uncoating and that these alterations are not due to changes in reverse transcription. Inhibition of reverse transcription delayed uncoating kinetics to an extent similar to that of the wild-type virus with all the p24CA mutant viruses tested. In addition, we observed differences in uncoating in two cell lines, which suggests that the cellular environment can differentially impact the disassembly of wild-type and mutant capsids. Collectively, these experiments suggest that viral and cellular factors are important for the process of uncoating. Finally, these data support the model whereby early steps in reverse transcription facilitate HIV-1 uncoating. IMPORTANCE The HIV-1 capsid is a cone-shaped structure, composed of the HIV-1-encoded protein p24CA, which contains the viral RNA and other proteins needed for infection. After the virus enters a target cell, this capsid must disassemble by a process called uncoating. Uncoating is required for HIV-1 infection to progress, but the details of how this process occurs is not known. In this study, we used an in vivo assay to examine the uncoating process in HIV-1-infected cells. We determined that p24CA mutations could increase or decrease the rate of uncoating and that this rate varied in different cell lines. We also found that reverse transcription of the viral RNA altered the process of uncoating before the p24CA mutations. Collectively, these experiments provide a better understanding of how viral and cellular factors are involved with a poorly understood step in HIV-1 infection.
Organizational Citizenship Behaviors and Organizational Effectiveness: Examining Relationships in Taiwanese Banks

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) describe actions in which employees are willing to go above and beyond their prescribed role requirements. Theory suggests and recent research supports the notion that these behaviors are correlated with indicators of organizational effectiveness. Studies have yet to explore whether relationships between OCB and organizational effectiveness are generalizable to non-United States samples. The present study examined relationships between OCB and indicators of organizational effectiveness—employee-level customer-service behavior; and unit-level measures of profit, efficiency, and customer perceptions of service quality—for bank branches in Taiwan. The results suggest significant relationships between OCB and a number of the indicators of effectiveness. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed.
A Highly Scalable Key Pre-Distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Given the sensitivity of the potential WSN applications and because of resource limitations, key management emerges as a challenging issue for WSNs. One of the main concerns when designing a key management scheme is the network scalability. Indeed, the protocol should support a large number of nodes to enable a large scale deployment of the network. In this paper, we propose a new scalable key management scheme for WSNs which provides a good secure connectivity coverage. For this purpose, we make use of the unital design theory. We show that the basic mapping from unitals to key pre-distribution allows us to achieve high network scalability. Nonetheless, this naive mapping does not guarantee a high key sharing probability. Therefore, we propose an enhanced unital-based key pre-distribution scheme providing high network scalability and good key sharing probability approximately lower bounded by 1-e-1 ≈ 0.632. We conduct approximate analysis and simulations and compare our solution to those of existing methods for different criteria such as storage overhead, network scalability, network connectivity, average secure path length and network resiliency. Our results show that the proposed approach enhances the network scalability while providing high secure connectivity coverage and overall improved performance. Moreover, for an equal network size, our solution reduces significantly the storage overhead compared to those of existing solutions.
Validation of the Norwegian Pain Sensitivity Questionnaire

Background and purpose There is a large variation in people’s reactions to painful stimuli. Although some conditions are more painful, the variation between people is larger than the reaction to pain across conditions. Induced experimental pain is one way to assess some aspects of these differences in pain perception. Experimental nociceptive testing is time consuming and not always feasible in a clinical setting. In order to overcome the obstacles of assessing pain sensitivity using experimental stimulation, the Pain Sensitivity Questionnaire (PSQ) was developed. The purpose of this study is to validate the Norwegian version of the PSQ. Methods Construct validity was examined through an exploratory principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation. Internal consistency was measured by Cronbach’s alpha reliability for subscales and the total PSQ. As confounding variables such as age and gender may contribute to the experience of pain, a regression analysis was performed with demographic variables and PSQ scores as independent variables and the experimental measures of pain as the dependent variable. Results The factor analysis yielded at two factor solution, with an eigenvalue greater than one, explain 58% of the variance. Cronbach’s alpha for the PSQ was 0.92. In the regression analysis, only PSQ scores contributed to explain the experimental pain intensity and tolerance. Gender only influenced the experimental pain threshold, as men had statistically significant higher heat pain threshold than women. Conclusion This study shows that PSQ is a valid and reliable questionnaire and might be a promising instrument for assessing pain sensitivity in Norwegian clinical settings. Further studies are needed to examine whether the PSQ can be used in clinical settings to predict postoperative pain and the development of chronic pain.
Part set cuing in older adults: Further evidence of intact forgetting in aging

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to look at the effect of aging on part set cuing while equating for baseline performance in episodic memory. Younger and older participants listened to three different word lists, each containing 24 words relating to a particular category. During recall, 0, 33, or 66% of the items presented in the learning phase were re-presented as cues. The results showed that recall of the never cued items was equally impaired by the presence of cues in younger and older adults, thus showing equivalent part set cuing effects in both groups. These results parallel previous findings showing equivalent inhibitory effects in younger and older adults with tasks that do not require executive control and provide additional support to previous studies challenging the view that frontal/executive processes play a major role in part set cuing.
Retinoic acid is a negative physiological regulator of N‐cadherin during early avian heart morphogenesis

The vitamin A‐deficient (VAD) early avian embryo has a grossly abnormal cardiovascular system that is rescued by treating the embryo with the vitamin A‐active form, retinoic acid (RA). Here we examine the role of N‐cadherin (N‐cad) in RA‐regulated early cardiovascular morphogenesis. N‐cad mRNA and protein are expressed globally in the presomite through HH14 normal and VAD quail embryos. The expression in VAD embryos prior to HH10 is significantly higher than that in normal embryos. Functional analyses of the N‐cad overproducing VAD embryos reveal N‐cad involvement in the RA‐regulated cardiovascular development and suggest that N‐cad expression may be mediated by Msx1. We provide evidence that in the early avian embryo, endogenous RA is a negative physiological regulator of N‐cad. We hypothesize that a critical endogenous level of N‐cad is needed for normal early cardiovascular morphogenesis to occur and that this level is ensured by stage‐specific, developmentally regulated RA signaling.
The Nature and Extent of Obedience in Elementary School Classrooms

Abstract Approximately half the student body (154 students) of an ethnically mixed school in a middle-sized New England city were observed in groups of four and rated on the frequency and type of obedient behavior they displayed in a variety of contexts. Consistent with the behavior of adults in a very different laboratory setting (Milgram, 1974), the students, overall, showed a high level of obedience (86.3% for the average student). Ninety percent of the students were obedient at least 75% of the time, all the students were disobedient only 1.2% of the time, and at least 3 out of 4 students were obedient 88.6% of the time. Differences in sex, age, ethnicity, subject matter, and time of day did not produce differences of more than 10% in the students' level of obedience.
VHPOP: Versatile Heuristic Partial Order Planner

VHPOP is a partial order causal link (POCL) planner loosely based on UCPOP. It draws from the experience gained in the early to mid 1990's on flaw selection strategies for POCL planning, and combines this with more recent developments in the field of domain independent planning such as distance based heuristics and reachability analysis. We present an adaptation of the additive heuristic for plan space planning, and modify it to account for possible reuse of existing actions in a plan. We also propose a large set of novel flaw selection strategies, and show how these can help us solve more problems than previously possible by POCL planners. VHPOP also supports planning with durative actions by incorporating standard techniques for temporal constraint reasoning. We demonstrate that the same heuristic techniques used to boost the performance of classical POCL planning can be effective in domains with durative actions as well. The result is a versatile heuristic POCL planner competitive with established CSP-based and heuristic state space planners.
Small Espin: A Third Actin-bundling Protein and Potential Forked Protein Ortholog in Brush Border Microvilli

An ∼30-kD isoform of the actin-binding/ bundling protein espin has been discovered in the brush borders of absorptive epithelial cells in rat intestine and kidney. Small espin is identical in sequence to the COOH terminus of the larger (∼110-kD) espin isoform identified in the actin bundles of Sertoli cell–spermatid junctional plaques (Bartles, J.R., A. Wierda, and L. Zheng. 1996. J. Cell Sci. 109:1229–1239), but it contains two unique peptides at its NH2 terminus. Small espin was localized to the parallel actin bundles of brush border microvilli, resisted extraction with Triton X-100, and accumulated in the brush border during enterocyte differentiation/migration along the crypt–villus axis in adults. In transfected BHK fibroblasts, green fluorescent protein–small espin decorated F-actin–containing fibers and appeared to elicit their accumulation and/or bundling. Recombinant small espin bound to skeletal muscle and nonmuscle F-actin with high affinity (K d = 150 and 50 nM) and cross-linked the filaments into bundles. Sedimentation, gel filtration, and circular dichroism analyses suggested that recombinant small espin was a monomer with an asymmetrical shape and a high percentage of α-helix. Deletion mutagenesis suggested that small espin contained two actin-binding sites in its COOH-terminal 116–amino acid peptide and that the NH2-terminal half of its forked homology peptide was necessary for bundling activity.
A Cross-Country Comparison of Full and Partial Venture Capital Exits

This paper considers the issue of when venture capitalists (VCs) make a partial, as opposed to a full exit, for the full range of exit vehicles. A full exit for an IPO involves a sale of all of the venture capitalist's holdings within one year of the IPO; a partial exit involves sale of only part of the venture capitalist's holdings within that period. A full acquisition exit involves the sale of the entire firm for cash; in a partial acquisition exit, the venture capitalist receives (often illiquid) shares in the acquiror firm instead of cash. In the case of a buyback exit (in which the entrepreneur buys out the venture capitalist) or a secondary sale, a partial exit entails a sale of only part of the venture capitalist's holdings. A partial write-off involves a write down of the investment. We consider the determinants of full and partial venture capital exits for all five exit vehicles. We also perform a number of comparative empirical tests on samples of full and partial exits derived from a survey of Canadian and U.S. venture capital firms. The data offer support to the central hypothesis of the paper: that the greater the degree of information asymmetry between the selling VC and the buyer, the greater the likelihood of a partial exit to signal quality. The data also indicate differences between the U.S. and Canadian venture capital industries, and highlight the impact of legal and institutional factors on exit strategies across countries. Parts of this paper appear in an earlier and different version entitled The Extent of Venture Capital Exits: Evidence from Canada and the United States, forthcoming in a book pursuant to a conference at Tilburg University and edited by J. McCahery and L.D. R. Renneboog (Oxford University Press).
Effect of Financial Access on Savings by Low-Income People

This paper assesses the impact of increasing financial access on low-income people savings. Effects on households’ saving rates and on different informal savings instruments are considered. The paper uses an exogenous expansion of a Mexican savings institute, targeted to low-income people, as a natural experiment and the 1992 and 1994 National Surveys of Income and Expenditures. Results show that the expansion increased the average saving rate of affected households by more than 3 to almost 5 percentage points. The effect was even higher for the poorest households in the sample: their saving rate increased by more than 7 percentage points in some cases. Furthermore, the expansion, in general, had no effect on highincome households. In the case of informal savings instruments, evidence of crowding out of these instruments caused by the expansion is limited. Results do not rule out the possibility that a considerable fraction of the increase in households’ savings could have come from new savings. * I am in debt with James Poterba, Rudiger Dornbusch and Abhijit Banerjee for their comments and assistance. I also would like to thank Joshua Angrist, Jonathan Gruber, Michael Kremer, Michael Piore and Jaume Ventura for their comments. My extended thanks to the participants of the Public Finance Lunch, and the International Breakfast at the MIT. All remaining errors are mine. Contact: Fernando Aportela, Research Department, Banco de México, 5 de Mayo #18, Cuarto Piso Sección C, CP 06059, Col. Centro, Mexico City, Mexico. Email: faporte@banxico.org. mx.
Culture and the construal of agency : Attribution to individual versus group dispositions

The authors argue that cultures differ in implicit theories of individuals and groups. North Americans conceive of individual persons as free agents, whereas East Asians conceptualize them as constrained and as less agentic than social collectives. Hence, East Asian perceivers were expected to be more likely than North Americans to focus on and attribute causality to dispositions of collectives. In Study 1 newspaper articles about rogue trader scandals were analyzed, and it was found that U.S. papers made more mention of the individual trader involved, whereas Japanese papers referred more to the organization. Study 2 replicated this pattern among U.S. and Hong Kong participants who responded to a vignette about a maladjusted team member. Study 3 revealed the same pattern with respect to individual and group dispositionism using a different design that compared attributions for an act performed by an individual in one condition and by a group in the other condition.
Performance of Gifted Children on the PPVT and PPVT-R.

The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised were compared for 31 gifted children. The sample mean for the PPVT-R was significantly lower than for the PPVT. In addition, the PPVT and PPVT-R correlated to a significant degree, yielding a standard score correlation coefficient of . 83.
Olfaction and Human Social Behavior

A total of 94 undergraduate males participated in an experiment designed to examine the impact of a pleasant scent (perfume) on interpersonal attraction and social perception. Subjects met and interacted briefly with one of two female confederates who either wore perfume or did not, and who were dressed either neatly (in a blouse, skirt, and hose) or informally (in jeans and a sweatshirt). Results indicated that the presence of a pleasant scent increased attraction toward the confederates and produced positive shifts in perceptions of several of their traits when they were dressed informally. When the confederates dressed in a neater manner, however, opposite effects were observed. These findings were interpreted as stemming from the fact that subjects reacted more favorably to the confederates when they appeared to be intermediate rather than high or low along a dimension of informality-formality.
Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?

An analysis of the failure statistics of a commercially available fault -tolerant system shows that administration and software ar e the major contributors to failure. Various approaches to software fault-tolerance are then discussed -- notably process-pairs, transactions and reliable storage. It is pointed out that faults in production software are often soft (transient) and that a t ransaction mechanism combined with persistent processpairs provides fault-tolerant execution -- the key to software fault -tolerance.
Brain Development and Sexual Orientation

Abstract Sexual orientation (homo- vs. heterosexuality) is one of many sex differences observed in humans. Sex differences can result from differential postnatal experiences (interaction with parents, environment) or from biological factors (hormones and genes) acting pre- or postnatally. The first option is often favored to explain sexual orientation although it is supported by little experimental evidence. In contrast, many sexually differentiated behaviors are organized during early life by an irreversible action of sex steroids. In particular, the preference for a male or female sex partner is largely determined in rodents by embryonic exposure to sex steroids. The early action of these steroids also seems to affect sexual orientation in humans. Indeed, clinical conditions associated with major endocrine changes during embryonic life often result in an increased incidence of homosexuality. Furthermore, multiple sexually differentiated behavioral, physiological, or even morphological traits that are kn.