Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating the Impact of a SNAP Challenge on University Participant Attitudes Toward Poverty

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether a week-long SNAP Challenge completed by university participants influenced perceptions about poverty. Design: Pretest and posttest questionnaires measured changes in attitudes toward poverty after the SNAP Challenge using the Attitude Toward Poverty Short Form scale comprised of three factors: Personal Deficiency, Stigma, and Structural Perspective. Dispositional empathy was measured with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index and analyzed as a potential mediating variable of attitude change. Subjects: Student and non-student subjects were recruited from Winthrop University. Four hundred forty-six pretest questionnaires were initiated, 363 were completed, and 363 were eligible for inclusion. One hundred forty-three posttest questionnaires were initiated, 121 were completed, and 117 were eligible for inclusion. Eighty matched pairs met study inclusion criteria. Results: Attitudes toward poverty related to Stigma, but not Personal Deficiency or Structural Perspective improved significantly (t(79) = -3.421, p = . 001, d = 0.38). There was no correlation between days participants completed the SNAP Challenge and changes in attitudes toward poverty. Human Nutrition participants did not differ from other participants in the magnitude of attitude change observed. Empathy did not mediate the relationship between the SNAP Challenge experience and attitude change. Conclusion: The SNAP Challenge improved attitudes related to Stigma. It offers a unique experiential learning method for broadening perspectives about poverty. The Challenge should be integrated with classroom teaching about poverty and re-evaluated.
Effect of Adaptation on Object Representation Accuracy in Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex

Stimulus repetition produces a decrease of the response in many cortical areas and different modalities. This adaptation is highly prominent in macaque inferior temporal (IT) neurons. Here we ask how these repetition-induced changes in IT responses affect the accuracy by which IT neurons encode objects. This question bears on the functional consequences of adaptation, which are still unclear. We recorded the responses of single IT neurons to sequences of familiar shapes, each shown for 300 msec with an ISI of the same duration. The difference in shape between the two successively presented stimuli,that is, adapter and test, varied parametrically. The discriminability of the test stimuli was reduced for repeated compared with nonrepeated stimuli. In some conditions for which adapter and test shapes differed, the cross-adaptation resulted in an enhanced discriminability. These single cell results were confirmed in a second experiment in which we recorded multiunit spiking activity using a laminar microelectrode in macaque IT. Two familiar stimuli were presented successively for 500 msec each and separated with an ISI of the same duration. Trials consisted either of a repetition of the same stimulus or of their alternation. Small neuronal populations showed decreased classification accuracy for repeated compared with nonrepeated test stimuli, but classification was enhanced for the test compared with adapter stimuli when the test stimulus differed from recently seen stimuli. These findings suggest that short-term, stimulus-specific adaptation in IT supports efficient coding of stimuli that differ from recently seen ones while impairing the coding of repeated stimuli.
Ultra-high pressure homogenisation of milk: technological aspects of cheese-making and microbial shelf life of a starter-free fresh cheese

Fresh cheeses from pasteurised (80°C for 15 s), homogenised–pasteurised (15+3 MPa at 60°C; 80°C for 15 s) or ultra-high pressure homogenised milks (300 MPa and inlet temperature of 30°C) were produced in order to evaluate different technological aspects during cheese-making and to study their microbial shelf life. Although the coagulation properties of milk were enhanced by ultra-high pressure homogenisation (UHPH), the cheese-making properties were somewhat altered; both conventional homogenisation and UHPH of milk provoked some difficulties at cutting the curd due to crumbling and improper curd matting due to poor cohesion of the grains. Cheese-milk obtained by UHPH showed a higher microbiological quality than milk obtained by conventional treatments. Starter-free fresh cheeses made from UHPH-treated milk showed less syneresis during storage and longer microbiological shelf-life than those from conventionally treated milk samples.
Listening to Echoes: Teaching Young Black Men Literacy and the Distraction of ELA Standards

For young Black males, the current standards movement in English language arts (ELA) is distracting because it is rooted in a conception of ELA that fails to consider how Black males live and learn. Further, this movement should be seen as limiting because, as Ernest Gaines would have it, it has been less about inspiring belief as to free the mind so that the body can be free than about inspiring doubt as to cage the mind to the echoes of the past. In the process, the educational treatise on which “standards” are based seems bare and bound by the exclusive demands of tradition and uniformity and the stale taste of the elite as opposed to the concerns and unique attributes of all people—particularly people of color. As long as ELA standards remain fettered to the past and rooted in the narrow master narratives of its “elite” citizens, the teaching of literacy will remain shackled there too. And young Black men will continue to struggle to learn in ELA classrooms.
Writing anxiety and writing performance: a study of Barbadian students

Writing Anxiety and Writing Performance: A Study of Barbadian Students Ann Jacqueline Fergusson Writing anxiety has a negative influence on writing performance. The ability to write is a major criterion towards educational success. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of Interactive Approaches on the written compositions of 11-12 year old low-achieving secondary school students in Barbados. An intervention was designed to examine the effects of interactive strategies on the writing anxiety and writing performance of low-achieving secondary school students. The Experiment Group was exposed to a curriculum unit using interactive approaches over a 20 week period while the Control Group attended regular English classes. The experiment was conducted among two intact groups of 11-12 year old students (n=30). Two dimensions of writing were assessed at pre and post test. The Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Questionnaire (1975) was used to measure writing anxiety among experimental and control groups. Writing performance of both groups was assessed by means of three compositions in narrative, descriptive and expository genres. Three experienced markers using researcher designed criteria assessed the compositions. Measures used in analyzing the compositions included subordinate clause index (Hunt 5) for syntactic complexity, Applebee's framework for narrative compositions (58) and Tree diagram analysis (Donovan 420) for non-narrative compositions. Correlation analysis indicated inverse relationships between writing anxiety, writing performance and self-perception. Results suggest curriculum effects significantly reduced anxiety and resulted in improved writing performance among the treatment group. Significant improvement was observed on content, organisation and the use of relative clauses at the end of the treatment. Findings showed significant differences between the performance of the experiment group and the control group writing anxiety and performance. Males who received treatment obtained significantly higher post test scores than those in the control group. A larger number of students from the experimental group showed proficiency on all three genres than those in the control group. The use of interactive approaches has implications for classroom practice both in reducing anxiety and improving students' writing performance.
Deficiency of Ataxia Telangiectasia Mutated Kinase Delays Inflammatory Response in the Heart Following Myocardial Infarction

Background Ataxia‐telangiectasia results from mutations in ataxia telangiectasia mutated kinase (ATM) gene. We recently reported that ATM deficiency attenuates left ventricular (LV) dysfunction and dilatation 7 days after myocardial infarction (MI) with increased apoptosis and fibrosis. Here we investigated the role of ATM in the induction of inflammatory response, and activation of survival signaling molecules in the heart acute post‐MI. Methods and Results LV structure, function, inflammatory response, and biochemical parameters were measured in wild‐type (WT) and ATM heterozygous knockout (hKO) mice 1 and 3 days post‐MI. ATM deficiency had no effect on infarct size. MI‐induced decline in heart function, as measured by changes in percent fractional shortening, ejection fraction and LV end systolic and diastolic volumes, was lower in hKO‐MI versus WT‐MI (n=10 to 12). The number of neutrophils and macrophages was significantly lower in the infarct LV region of hKO versus WT 1 day post‐MI. Fibrosis and expression of α‐smooth muscle actin (myofibroblast marker) were higher in hKO‐MI, while active TGF‐β1 levels were higher in the WT‐MI 3 days post‐MI. Myocyte cross‐sectional area was higher in hKO‐sham with no difference between the two MI groups. MMP‐9 protein levels were similarly increased in the infarct LV region of both MI groups. Apoptosis was significantly higher in the infarct LV region of hKO at both time points. Akt activation was lower, while Bax expression was higher in hKO‐MI infarct. Conclusion ATM deficiency results in decreased dilative remodeling and delays inflammatory response acute post‐MI. However, it associates with increased fibrosis and apoptosis.
Purposeful Movement in an Early Childhood Classroom

The purpose of this action research was to determine the effects of physical activity through purposeful movement on behaviors and the ability to focus in a mixed-age Montessori Early Childhood classroom. The intervention took place over a period of six weeks in an independent school setting with 17 children ages 2.5 to 6. Data was collected using observation tallies and notes, a teacher journal, and interviews with the children. Results show some of the children’s behaviors were positively affected by the use of specific movement materials. Although there was not much change observed, the intervention appeared to help some children become less distracted and helped them with their ability to focus on lessons in the classroom. Movement lessons in the research that required focused attention for their use were seen to create feelings of calmness in the children. Further research might include the introduction of focused movement exercises such as yoga or the introduction of meditation.
Featured Article: Chemotherapeutic delivery using pH-responsive, affinity-based release

Doxorubicin is a chemotherapeutic drug typically administered systemically which frequently leads to cardiac and hepatic toxicities. Local delivery to a tumor has a chance to mitigate some of these toxicities and can further be mitigated by including a means of tumor-specific drug release. Our laboratory has explored the use of molecular interactions to control the rate of drug release beyond that capable of diffusion alone. To this system, we added an additional affinity group (adamantane) to doxorubicin through a pH-sensitive hydrazone bond. The result was a modified doxorubicin which had an even higher affinity to our drug delivery polymer, and virtually no release in normal conditions, but showed accelerated release of drug in tumor-like low pH. Further, we show that adamantane-modified doxorubicin (adamantane-doxorubicin) and cleaved adamantane-doxorubicin showed equivalent capacity to kill human U-87 glioblastoma cells in vitro as unmodified doxorubicin. Taken together, these data demonstrate our ability to load high levels of modified chemotherapeutic drugs into our affinity-based delivery platform and deliver these drugs almost exclusively in the acidic microenvironments, such as those surrounding the tumor tissue via pH-cleavable bond while minimizing drug delivery in neutral pH tissue, with the ultimate goal of reducing systemic through better local delivery. Impact statement Doxorubicin (DOX) is especially cytotoxic to the heart, liver, kidneys, and healthy tissues surrounding the tumor microenvironment. This systemic toxicity can be partially addressed by local, tumor-specific drug delivery systems. While pH-sensitive DOX delivery systems have been developed by several other groups, many lack a prolonged and consistent release profile required to successfully treat heterogeneous tumors. Our system of a chemically modified form of DOX combined with an affinity-based cyclodextrin delivery system is capable of delivering DOX for 87 days while maintaining its the drug cytotoxicity. This finding is particularly relevant to improving cancer treatments because it enables regulated local delivery of DOX specifically to tumor tissue and allows the drug to be continuously delivered over a therapeutically relevant amount of time.
An Epidemic of Negrophobia

I nDecember 1921, John Sydney de Bourg, a spokesman for the San Pedro de Macorís chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), complained of “an epidemic of negrophobia raging amongst the US Military Authorities” that threatened to “accentuate race hatred” in the Dominican populace. The establishment of the US military regime in November 1916 was intended to “reform permanently the institutions, practices and beliefs” of Dominican governance. US officials were charged with ending the cycle of revolutionary violence that had plagued the island nation by strengthening the central government through a combination of state-building and progressive reform. Yet, as de Bourg recognized, occupation forces also carried with them fears and prejudices which contributed to a racial hierarchy that denigrated blackness. Racism in the Dominican Republic long pre-dated the occupation. By the early twentieth century, blackness was a central element in Dominican intellectuals’ debates over the nation’s identity and future. Yet when the marines arrived they altered the contours of these debates and interrupted an ongoing negotiation over Dominican nationalism by exacerbating preexisting racial tensions. Thus, as the elite leadership of the Unión Nacionalista Dominicana (UND) searched for an ideology to legitimate their struggle for sovereignty, they turned to a glorification of their Catholic, Hispanic, and above all, white past. In the process, blackness became associated with foreign domination and negrophobia gained a prominent place in political debates over the boundaries of national belonging. Despite the occupation’s contribution to contemporary understandings of blackness in the Dominican Republic, it has received little attention from scholars of race until recently. In part, this is a reflection of a tendency to treat the Dominican Republic as an exception to a universal narrative of the African diaspora in Latin America. In his 2001 preface to David Howard’s Coloring the Nation, Silvio Torres-Saillant complained that the “recent literature on blackness in the Americas has dealt with the Dominican case. in either one of two ways: omission or trivialization. ” Studies that do treat the Dominican Republic are often framed as a search for the genesis of Dominicans’ “racial false-consciousness” which is then located either in the nineteenth-century Haitian occupation or the state ideology propounded by Rafael Trujillo’s regime to “divide and disorient the subordinate classes. ” In contrast, this article investigates the US occupation’s legacy for Dominican understandings of blackness. It builds upon the work of historians like Suzy Castor, Roberto Cassá, and April Mayes, who have stressed the occupation’s pernicious effect on Dominican racial identity. Yet in contrast to those studies that seek to pinpoint the genesis of Dominican racism, I borrow from Silvio Torres-Saillant’s conception of Dominican racial consciousness as an evolving construct. I find that US governance marked a
Women and Their Clitoris: Personal Discovery, Signification, and Use

Under continued, broad, and pervasive conditions of symbolic clitoridectomy—a bracketing of the clitoris by means of linguistic and discursive erasure—the carnal discovery of the clitoris poses circumstances where women often confront and negotiate symbolic purgatory, a situation in which most women discover “it” long before they fully acquire the symbolic knowledge that it, indeed, is a clitoris. Based on the written reports of fifteen women, we provide idiographic descriptions of women’s reported recollections of the clitoris by investigating three related dynamics: (1) how women interpret the meanings of the clitoris in circumstances relatively absent of significant symbols; (2) how the clitoris becomes a significant symbol for women; and (3) how broader discourses inform how women make meaning of the clitoris. This study documents a clitoral somatic career that is marked by three important junctures of discovery, knowledge, and meaning making: discovering the sensations of the clitoris, putting the clitoris into discourse, and negotiating contested uses of pleasure. As we argue, the sensual embodiment of the clitoris is emergent in active and reflective practices in which women both sense and make sense. Removing the clitoris most certainly affects a woman’s sexual pleasure; however, societal silence regarding the role of the clitoris may act similarly as a symbolic clitoridectomy. —Shirley M. Ogletree and Harvey J. Ginsburg, “Kept under the Hood: Neglect of the Clitoris in Common Vernacular” (2000)
The development of preferences for own-race versus other-race faces in 3-, 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants

Visual preferences for pairs of African and Caucasian faces were repeatedly assessed in 3-, 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants with a preferential looking paradigm. Two different patterns of preference development were found: First, the spontaneous own-race preference at three months reported in the literature tilts to a preference for other-race faces at nine months passing through a null-preference at six months. This replicates the pattern recently reported for Asian infants [Liu et al. (2015). Development of visual preference for own- versus other-race faces in infancy. Developmental Psychology. doi:10.1037/a0038835]. Second, at all three ages fixation time towards Caucasian faces significantly reduces across the consecutive trial presentation. This is a similar effect as in novelty preference studies to occur after a sufficiently long familiarization phase. Both patterns can be explained in terms of an advantaged own-race face processing with the emerging Other-Race-Effect.
Shape Quantization and Recognition with Randomized Trees

We explore a new approach to shape recognition based on a virtually infinite family of binary features (queries) of the image data, designed to accommodate prior information about shape invariance and regularity. Each query corresponds to a spatial arrangement of several local topographic codes (or tags), which are in themselves too primitive and common to be informative about shape. All the discriminating power derives from relative angles and distances among the tags. The important attributes of the queries are a natural partial ordering corresponding to increasing structure and complexity; semi-invariance, meaning that most shapes of a given class will answer the same way to two queries that are successive in the ordering; and stability, since the queries are not based on distinguished points and substructures. No classifier based on the full feature set can be evaluated, and it is impossible to determine a priori which arrangements are informative. Our approach is to select informative features and build tree classifiers at the same time by inductive learning. In effect, each tree provides an approximation to the full posterior where the features chosen depend on the branch that is traversed. Due to the number and nature of the queries, standard decision tree construction based on a fixed-length feature vector is not feasible. Instead we entertain only a small random sample of queries at each node, constrain their complexity to increase with tree depth, and grow multiple trees. The terminal nodes are labeled by estimates of the corresponding posterior distribution over shape classes. An image is classified by sending it down every tree and aggregating the resulting distributions. The method is applied to classifying handwritten digits and synthetic linear and nonlinear deformations of three hundred symbols. State-of-the-art error rates are achieved on the National Institute of Standards and Technology database of digits. The principal goal of the experiments on symbols is to analyze invariance, generalization error and related issues, and a comparison with artificial neural networks methods is presented in this context. Figure 1: LATEX Symbol
Mobile Learning in Distance Education: Utility or Futility?.

Can mobile technology improve flexibility and quality of interaction for graduate students in distance programs? This paper reports the results of an innovative study exploring the usability, learning, and social interaction of mobile access to online course materials at a Canadian distance education university. Through a system called MobiGlam, students accessed Moodle course materials on a variety of mobile devices. The Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education (FRAME) model (Koole, 2006) was used to examine the complexities of this mobile system, its perceived usefulness, and potential impact on distance students. The researchers recommend further study of the balance between the controls and constraints of social technologies and the needs of distance students. Is there a way to achieve a balance so as to encourage adaptation to new technologies and a greater sense of “connectedness” among learners? As a result of the study, the researchers remain supportive of “device-agnostic” mobile tools that permit the greatest freedom of choice to distance learners. Resume Est-ce que la technologie sans fil peut ameliorer la souplesse et la qualite de l’interaction pour les etudiants de 2eme et 3eme cycles dans des programmes a distance? Cette etude rapporte les resultats d’une recherche novatrice qui explore la facilite d’utilisation, l’apprentissage et l’interaction sociale de l’acces sans fil au contenu de cours en ligne dans une universite canadienne d’education a distance. Par l’entremise d’un systeme appele MobiGlam, les etudiants pouvaient acceder a du materiel de cours Moodle a partir de divers appareils sans fil. Le Framework for the Rational Analysis of Mobile Education (FRAME) (Koole, 2006) fut le modele utilise afin d’examiner les complexites de ce systeme sans fil, son utilite percue et son impact potentiel sur les etudiants a distance. Les chercheurs recommandent une etude plus approfondie de l’equilibre entre les controles et contraintes des technologies sociales et les besoins des etudiants a distance. Peut-on atteindre un certain equilibre de maniere a promouvoir l’adaptation aux nouvelles technologies et un plus grand sentiment de « connexite » parmi les etudiants? A la suite de cette etude, les chercheurs continuent a proner l’utilisation d’outils sans fil « a dispositif independant » qui offrent une plus grande liberte de choix aux etudiants a distance.