Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Guided participation in cultural activity by toddlers and caregivers.

In this Monograph, we examine how toddlers and their caregivers from four cultural communities collaborate in shared activities. We focus both on similarities across communities in processes of guided participation--structuring children's participation and bridging between their understanding and that of their caregivers--and on differences in how guided participation occurs. We examine the idea that a key cultural difference entails who is responsible for learning--whether adults take this responsibility by structuring teaching situations or whether children take responsibility for learning through observation and through participating in adult activities with caregivers' support. We speculate that these two patterns relate to cultural variation in the segregation of children from adult activities of their community and in emphasis on formal schooling. The four communities of our study vary along these lines as well as in other ways: a Mayan Indian town in Guatemala, a middle-class urban group in the United States, a tribal village in India, and a middle-class urban neighborhood in Turkey. In each community, we visited the families of 14 toddlers (aged 12-24 months) for an interview that was focused on child-rearing practices, which included observations of caregivers helping the toddlers operate novel objects spontaneously during adult activities. Results are based on systematic analysis of patterns of communication and attention in each family in each community, combining the tools of ethnographic description, graphic analysis, and statistics. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Resonance Wavelength Dependence and Mode Formation in Gold Nanorod Optical Antennas with Finite Thickness

In this paper we analyze the dependence of the resonance wavelength and mode formation of an optical gold nanorod antenna on its geometrical parameters in the wavelength range 500{1400nm. In particular, we prove that nanoantennas difier from RF counterparts, since the minima and maxima, i.e., nodes and anti-nodes, of the resonant modes do not go to zero and show very intense peak at the corners due to non-negligible thickness. Moreover, FDTD simulations reveal that the usually considered linear relation between the resonant wavelength and the nanorod length has to be modifled when the nanorod thickness is taken into account.
Prediction of retention times for a large set of pesticides based on improved gene expression programming

The purpose of the paper is to present a novel way to building Quantitative structure-retention relationship (QSRR) models. Studies was reported for predicting the retention times (RTs) of 110 pesticides which were detected by gas chromatography (GC) with mass selective detector (MSD). Chemical descriptors were calculated from the molecular structure of pesticides and the QSRR models of RTs with descriptors was built using the heuristic method (HM) and Improved Gene Expression Programming (IGEP), respectively. The obtained linear model of HM had a correlation coefficient R2 = 0.913, with a root mean square error (RMS) S2 of 0.0387 for the training set, while R2 =0.907, and RMS =0.0408 for the test set. The nonlinear model by IGEP gave better results: for the training set R2 = 0.971, S2 = 0.0176 and for the test set R2 =0.951, S2 =0.0267. The prediction results from nonlinear model are in agreement with the experimental values The QSRR model also reveals that the gas chromatographic RTs are associated with physicochemical property of pesticides.
Synthetic peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma agonist, rosiglitazone, increases plasma levels of adiponectin in type 2 diabetic patients.

OBJECTIVE Adiponectin, a plasma protein exclusively synthesized and secreted by adipose tissue, has recently been shown to have anti-inflammatory, antiatherogenic properties in vitro and beneficial metabolic effects in animals. Lower plasma levels of adiponectin have been documented in human subjects with metabolic syndrome and coronary artery disease. We investigated whether the level of this putative protective adipocytokine could be increased by treatment with a peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma (PPAR-gamma) agonist in diabetic patients. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Type 2 diabetic patients (30 in the treatment group and 34 in the placebo group) were recruited for a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trial for 6 months with the PPAR-gamma agonist rosiglitazone. Blood samples were collected and metabolic variables and adiponectin levels were determined in all patients before initiation of the study. RESULTS In the rosiglitazone group, mean plasma adiponectin level was increased by more than twofold (P < 0.0005), whereas no change was observed in the placebo group. Multivariate linear regression analysis showed that whether rosiglitazone was used was the single variable significantly related to the changes of plasma adiponectin. The amount of variance in changes of plasma adiponectin level explained by the treatment was approximately 24% (r(2) = 0.24) after adjusting for age, sex, and changes in fasting plasma glucose, HbA(1c), insulin resistance index, and BMI. CONCLUSIONS Rosiglitazone increases plasma adiponectin levels in type 2 diabetic subjects. Whether this may contribute to the antihyperglycemic and putative antiatherogenic benefits of PPAR-gamma agonists in type 2 diabetic patients warrants further investigation.
Unbalanced magnetic forces in rotational unsymmetrical transverse flux machine

The torque and unbalanced magnetic forces in a small flux concentrating permanent magnet transverse flux machine (FCPM-TFM) in segmented compact structure, which are the resultants of the tangential; axial and normal magnetic forces, respectively, are in general influenced by pole-teeth-winding configuration. The paper calculates the torque and unbalanced magnetic forces using finite element (FE-) method by solving Maxwell stress tensor via utilizing FLUX3D software from Cédrat. To investigate the influence of unsymmetrical winding pattern, in respect to the rotor, on the performance of this FCPM-TFM with distributed windings, a magneto static study followed by transient analysis have been conducted. Calculating the magnetic field components in the air gap, has required an introduction of a 2D grid in the middle of the air gap, whereby good estimations of the forces are obtained. In this machine, the axial magnetic forces exhibit bigger amplitudes compared to the normal forces. Practical results of a prototype motor are demonstrated throughout the analysis.
Towards an analytical framework for accountability regarding equal educational opportunities

PROF. JOHAN BECKMANN is the Head of the Department of Education Management at the University of Pretoria. He lectures in Education Law and his research interest areas include issues within education law such as racism in education, partnerships in education, governance of the education system and of educational institutions, fundamental human rights in education, legal aspects of human resources management in education and the protection of rights in education. He is a member of the executive of the South African Education Law and Policy Associations (SAELPA) and previously also served on the executive Committees of the Education Association of South Africa (EASA and the Education Management Association of South Africa (EMASA). He is currently a member of the editorial board of Perspectives in Education and has served as guest editor for two journals in Canada and South Africa.
Production and Secretion of a Recombinant Vibrio parahaemolyticus Chitinase by Escherichia coli and Its Purification from the Culture Medium

An open reading frame encoding the chitinase gene and its signal sequence was cloned from the Vibrio parahaemolyticus KN1699 genome. An expression plasmid containing the gene was introduced into Escherichia coli cells, and recombinant chitinase (Pa-rChi) was produced and secreted into the culture medium with the aid of the signal peptide. Pa-rChi was purified and its substrate specificity was determined.
Plx1 is the 3F3/2 kinase responsible for targeting spindle checkpoint proteins to kinetochores

Dynamic attachment of microtubules to kinetochores during mitosis generates pulling force, or tension, required for the high fidelity of chromosome separation. A lack of tension activates the spindle checkpoint and delays the anaphase onset. A key step in the tension–response pathway involves the phosphorylation of the 3F3/2 epitope by an unknown kinase on untensed kinetochores. Using a rephosphorylation assay in Xenopus laevis extracts, we identified the kinetochore-associated Polo-like kinase Plx1 as the kinase both necessary and sufficient for this phosphorylation. Indeed, Plx1 is the physiological 3F3/2 kinase involved in checkpoint response, as immunodepletion of Plx1 from checkpoint extracts abolished the 3F3/2 signal and blocked association of xMad2, xBubR1, xNdc80, and xNuf2 with kinetochores. Interestingly, the kinetochore localization of Plx1 is under the control of the checkpoint protein xMps1, as immunodepletion of xMps1 prevents binding of Plx1 to kinetochores. Thus, Plx1 couples the tension signal to cellular responses through phosphorylating the 3F3/2 epitope and targeting structural and checkpoint proteins to kinetochores.
The Effect of Raters’ Language Background on English-speaking Test Ratings across Test-takers’ Oral Proficiency Levels

This study examined whether or not raters’ language background influences Korean test-takers’ English-speaking evaluations. Five native and fourteen nonnative English-speaking raters scored 120 speaking samples divided into six different speaking levels in terms of accuracy, vocabulary, fluency and pronunciation. The MANOVA results showed that there were significant effects for raters’ language background on the ratings. Overall, the nonnative English-speaking raters were more severe in their judgments than the native English-speaking raters. There were significant mean differences in accuracy and vocabulary ratings between the two groups of raters across most test-takers’ speaking levels. However, there were no significant mean differences in ratings for higher levels of test-takers for some individual criteria such as fluency and pronunciation. This paper provided some evidence of the effect of language background on English-speaking ratings, indicating that there were some differences between the ratings produced by native and nonnative raters depending on test-takers’ oral proficiency levels and scoring criteria.
Budgetary Participation's Effect on Managerial Outcomes: Mediating Roles of Self-efficacy and Attitudes Toward Budgetary Decision Makers

This study employs social-cognitive and affective events theories to examine the mediating roles of attitudes toward budgetary decision makers and self-efficacy between budgetary participation and managerial outcomes. The relationships between mediating variables and between managerial outcomes were also examined in this study. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the theoretical model with 164 useful responses which was randomly drawn from the listing companies in Taiwan Stock Exchange. Although the mediating role of self-efficacy is not significant, the results show that the indirect effects of budgetary participation on managerial outcomes through attitudes are supported. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.
Environment, Migratory Tendency, Phylogeny and Basal Metabolic Rate in Birds

Basal metabolic rate (BMR) represents the minimum maintenance energy requirement of an endotherm and has far-reaching consequences for interactions between animals and their environments. Avian BMR exhibits considerable variation that is independent of body mass. Some long-distance migrants have been found to exhibit particularly high BMR, traditionally interpreted as being related to the energetic demands of long-distance migration. Here we use a global dataset to evaluate differences in BMR between migrants and non-migrants, and to examine the effects of environmental variables. The BMR of migrant species is significantly higher than that of non-migrants. Intriguingly, while the elevated BMR of migrants on their breeding grounds may reflect the metabolic machinery required for long-distance movements, an alternative (and statistically stronger) explanation is their occupation of predominantly cold high-latitude breeding areas. Among several environmental predictors, average annual temperature has the strongest effect on BMR, with a 50% reduction associated with a 20°C gradient. The negative effects of temperature variables on BMR hold separately for migrants and non-migrants and are not due their different climatic associations. BMR in migrants shows a much lower degree of phylogenetic inertia. Our findings indicate that migratory tendency need not necessarily be invoked to explain the higher BMR of migrants. A weaker phylogenetic signal observed in migrants supports the notion of strong phenotypic flexibility in this group which facilitates migration-related BMR adjustments that occur above and beyond environmental conditions. In contrast to the findings of previous analyses of mammalian BMR, primary productivity, aridity or precipitation variability do not appear to be important environmental correlates of avian BMR. The strong effects of temperature-related variables and varying phylogenetic effects reiterate the importance of addressing both broad-scale and individual-scale variation for understanding the determinants of BMR.
Peritonitis due to Streptococcus viridans in patients receiving continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis.

4 observations: peritonite due a Streptococcus viridans chez des malades sous dialyse peritoneale. Dans les 4 cas, presence de lesions buccales ou soins de chirurgie dentaire. Les germes peuvent etre la cause de la contamination par voie hematogene
The Downstream Regulation of Chemokine Receptor Signalling: Implications for Atherosclerosis

Heterotrimeric G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are key mediators of intracellular signalling, control numerous physiological processes, and are one of the largest class of proteins to be pharmacologically targeted. Chemokine-induced macrophage recruitment into the vascular wall is an early pathological event in the progression of atherosclerosis. Leukocyte activation and chemotaxis during cell recruitment are mediated by chemokine ligation of multiple GPCRs. Regulation of GPCR signalling is critical in limiting vascular inflammation and involves interaction with downstream proteins such as GPCR kinases (GRKs), arrestin proteins and regulator of G-protein signalling (RGS) proteins. These have emerged as new mediators of atherogenesis by functioning in internalisation, desensitisation, and signal termination of chemokine receptors. Targeting chemokine signalling through these proteins may provide new strategies to alter atherosclerotic plaque formation and plaque biology.
Ad Virality and Ad Persuasiveness

Many video ads are designed to go 'viral', so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between 'earning' this reach and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or adopt a favorable attitude towards the product. The analysis combines data on the total views of 400 video ads, and crowd-sourced measurement of advertising persuasiveness among 24,000 consumers. We measure persuasiveness by randomly exposing half of these consumers to a video ad and half to a similar placebo video ad, and then surveying their attitudes towards the focal product. Relative ad persuasiveness is on average 10% lower for every one million views an ad achieves. Ads that generated both views and online engagement in the form of comments did not suffer from the same negative relationship. We show that such ads retained their efficacy because they attracted views due to humor or visual appeal rather than because they were provocative or outrageous.
Towards a lightweight protocol for Industry 4.0: An implementation based benchmark

The next industrial revolution, generally referred to as Industry 4.0, is already here. This envisions a rapid transformation in the design, operation and service of manufacturing systems, where machines, sensors and actuators are interconnected in the factories in order to enable spontaneous collaboration, monitoring and control. Currently, Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) use regular Internet protocols (e.g. SOAP or HTTP) to communicate with each other. However, these protocols inherently present certain drawbacks or disadvantages: large footprint, CPU usage, high memory and energy consumption, etc. In recent years, new Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) protocols have emerged to solve this issue, such as the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT). These are lightweight protocols designed to face the challenges of industrial environments with a small footprint and overhead. These protocols have different features in terms of communication model and Quality of Service (QoS), that make them more suitable to an specific domain. Thus, it is important to identify the right metrics to adopt the most appropriate. This paper presents a theoretical and empirical comparison of MQTT and CoAP in terms of network overhead and latency, to assist system designers with this decision. Furthermore we describe the quantitative comparison conducted with their implementation in hardware platforms with high constraints. The achieved results provide useful metrics and guidelines to help designers to choose the appropriate schemes for their implementations.
Glove-TalkII: Mapping Hand Gestures to Speech Using Neural Networks

Glove-TalkII is a system which translates hand gestures to speech through an adaptive interface. Hand gestures are mapped continuously to 10 control parameters of a parallel formant speech synthesizer. The mapping allows the hand to act as an artificial vocal tract that produces speech in real time. This gives an unlimited vocabulary in addition to direct control of fundamental frequency and volume. Currently, the best version of Glove-TalkII uses several input devices (including a CyberGlove, a ContactGlove, a 3- space tracker, and a foot-pedal), a parallel formant speech synthesizer and 3 neural networks. The gesture-to-speech task is divided into vowel and consonant production by using a gating network to weight the outputs of a vowel and a consonant neural network. The gating network and the consonant network are trained with examples from the user. The vowel network implements a fixed, user-defined relationship between hand-position and vowel sound and does not require any training examples from the user. Volume, fundamental frequency and stop consonants are produced with a fixed mapping from the input devices. One subject has trained to speak intelligibly with Glove-TalkII. He speaks slowly with speech quality similar to a text-to-speech synthesizer but with far more natural-sounding pitch variations.
The Saccharomyces cerevisiae Prp5 Protein Has RNA-dependent ATPase Activity with Specificity for U2 Small Nuclear RNA*

The Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein Prp5 is a member of the “DEAD box” family of putative RNA-dependent ATPases and helicases. The protein was purified from Escherichia coli and determined to be an RNA-dependent ATPase. The ATPase activity is 7-fold more specific for full-length U2 than for any of the other small nuclear RNAs or nonspecific RNAs tested. An RNaseH assay in extracts was used to demonstrate that Prp5 mediates an ATP-dependent conformational change in the intact U2 small nuclear ribonucleoprotein. We propose that this conformational change makes the branch point pairing sequence of U2 RNA accessible for pairing with the intron allowing formation of the pre-spliceosome.
Reversing Implicit Gender Stereotype Activation as a Function of Exposure to Traditional Gender Roles

We examined the influence of exposure to traditional gender roles on the activation of gender stereotypes in Spanish women. An associative procedure was used to expose participants to stereotypical vs. counterstereotypical gender roles, and a word categorization task with stereotypically feminine communal/warmth and stereotypically masculine agentic/competence trait words measured participants’ automatic responses. Results show that women exposed to traditional roles reverse the activation of gender stereotypes. That is, they activated competence/agency faster for female primes and warmth/communion faster for male primes in a subsequent task. The implicit stereotype reversal was predicted by participants’ endorsement of positive attitudes toward affirmative action policies. The results are discussed in terms of the motivational influence of perceived discrimination in intergroup relations.
Understanding Unconscious Plagiarism: The Effects of Idea Elaboration and Perceived Idea Quality on Later Recall and Recognition of Ideas

Previous research has shown that idea improvement and perceived idea quality have differential effects on recall-own and generate-new plagiarism. Participants completed a generative task in pairs and read some ideas perceived to be of high quality before elaborating on a selection of the ideas. It was expected that other-generated ideas that had been improved or read out loud would be more susceptible to unconscious plagiarism. Participants returned a week later to complete recall-own generated, recall-own read, generate-new and source monitoring tasks. Partner-generated ideas were significantly more likely to be plagiarised following improvement only. Participants were significantly more likely to plagiarise their partner’s ideas in the generate-new task. These findings are discussed in relation to previous research and theories of unconscious plagiarism.
Estimating the Role of SST in Atmospheric Surface Wind Variability over the Tropical Atlantic and Pacific

The influence of sea surface temperature (SST) on interannual surface wind variability in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific is estimated using sensitivity experiments with the SINTEX-F GCM and the ensemble spread in a nine-member control simulation. Two additional estimates are derived for both SINTEX-F and the ERA-Interim reanalysis using regression analysis and singular value decomposition. All methods yield quite consistent estimates of the fraction of surface wind variability that is determined by SST and therefore potentially predictable. In the equatorial Atlantic, analysis suggests that for the period 1982–2014 approximately 2/3 of surface zonal wind variability in boreal spring and early summer is potentially predictable, while 1/3 is due to noise. Of the predictable component, up to about 35% may be driven from outside the tropical Atlantic, suggesting an important role for remote forcing and a diminished one for local feedbacks. In the northern tropical Atlantic, only 30% of boreal winter variability is predictable, most of which is forced from the Pacific. This suggests a minor role for local coupled air–sea feedbacks. For the equatorial Pacific, the results suggest high predictability throughout the year, most of which is due to local SST, with the tropical Atlantic only playing a minor role in boreal summer. In the tropical Atlantic, atmospheric internal variability is strongly dependent on the presence of deep convection, which, in turn, is related to mean SST. A similar, but weaker, state dependence of internal variability is evident in the tropical Pacific.