Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self- directed learning barriers in a virtual environment: a qualitative study

Introduction: There is a growing trend in online education courses in higher education institutes. Previous studies have shown that high levels of self-direction are essential for successful online learning. The present study aims to investigate challenges of and barriers to self-directed virtual-learning among postgraduate students of medical sciences. Method: 23 postgraduate virtual students of medical sciences in Iran, collected through maximum variation purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews, served as the sample of this study. The collected data were analyzed using the inductive content analysis method. Results: Three themes and six sub-themes were identified as barriers to self-directed learning in virtual education, including cognitive barriers (information overload and lack of focus on learning or mind wondering), communication barriers (inadequate coping skills and inadequate writing skills) and educational environment barriers (heavy workload and role ambiguity). Conclusion: By the importance of self-direction in online education, the present study results can be used by virtual education planners in the review and design of courses, so as to adequately equip students, obviate barriers to self-directed virtual education, and ultimately train highly self-directed learners in online medical education.
Complicating Conditions: Obstacles and Interruptions to Low-Income Students' College “Choices”

Although a major focus of current research and policymaking efforts involves understanding and minimizing the barriers to postsecondary access, conventional reform strategies do not appear to be effecting substantial change in the college-going opportunities for students from low-income and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. This article presents the results of a qualitative, longitudinal study of the high school-to-college transition for a sample of 16 low-income, Black and Latino students at two inner-city high schools in the Northeastern United States. Drawing on interviews with students over a three-year period—from their junior year of high school through one year after high school graduation—this analysis highlights the interruptions to students' postsecondary plans. In this sample, students' actual postsecondary paths, which included delayed college enrollment and two-year college matriculation, diverged substantially from the initial plans participants developed during high school. Ultimately, the findings illustrate how these students' life circumstances engender decisions that preclude the kinds of choices assumed in the college choice model.
The Roles of Price Points and Menu Costs in Price Rigidity

Macroeconomic models often generate nominal price rigidity via menu costs. This paper provides empirical evidence that treating menu costs as a structural explanation for sticky prices may be spurious. Using supermarket scanner data, I note two empirical facts: (1) price points, embodied in nine-ending prices, account for more than 60 percent of prices; (2) at the conclusion of sales, post-sale prices return to their pre-sale levels nearly 90 percent of the time. I construct a model that nests roles for menu costs and price points and estimate model variants via simulated method of moments. Excluding the two facts yields a statistically and economically significant role for menu costs in generating price rigidity. Incorporating the two facts yields an incentive to set nine-ending prices two orders of magnitude larger than the menu costs in this model. In this setting, the price point model can match the two stylized facts, but menu costs are effectively irrelevant as a source of price rigidity. The choice of a mechanism for price rigidity matters for aggregate dynamics.
Measurement-driven probability hypothesis density filter for multi-target tracking in passive radar

A measurement-driven probability hypothesis density (MD-PHD) filter based on track initiation is proposed in this paper to handle the incapability of PHD filter when dealing with unknown newborn intensity. Measurements are distinguished into two parts by using gating technology. The existing measurements are used to update intensity while the suspicious measurements are utilized to explore new target via track initiation. The sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) implementation of the proposed filter is derived and applied to passive scenario. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method not only tracks existing target accurately but also initiates new target duly without any prior knowledge of newborn intensity.
Reevaluation of the growth-permissive substrate properties of goldfish optic nerve myelin and myelin proteins

To determine whether optic nerve myelin of goldfish carries mammalian- like neurite growth inhibitory proteins which can be neutralized by the antibody IN-1, myelin fractions of fish optic nerves were used as substrates for fish retinal ganglion cell axons and rat dorsal root ganglia (DRG). Axonal growth was monitored and compared with that of IN- 1 treated preparations. Growth of fish retinal axons and rat DRG neurites was substantial on goldfish optic nerve myelin and no improvement was observed with IN-1. In contrast, rat CNS myelin allowed only poor growth, and number of axons and length of DRG neurites increased significantly with IN-1. In addition, proteins of fish optic nerve myelin and bovine CNS myelin were extracted, reconstituted in liposomes and applied to growth cones. When goldfish myelin proteins in liposomes were seeded onto growth cones, 77% of fish and 89% of rat DRG growth cones continued to elongate, and the proportion of elongating fish growth cones (80%) did not significantly change when liposomes were pretreated with IN-1. But 73% of fish and 93% of rat growth cones collapsed with liposomes containing proteins from bovine CNS myelin. Upon IN-1 treatment, only 24% of fish growth cones collapsed. Thus, axon growth in vitro indicates that goldfish optic nerves, which permit successful axon regeneration in vivo, lack mammalian-like neurite growth inhibitors which are neutralized by IN-1.
A neural network based optimization for wireless sensor node position estimation in industrial environments

The sensor node position estimation is essential in wireless sensor networks. Among many localization schemes, the position estimations based on Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) are mostly used in various systems and applications. However, RSSI data are highly affected from multipath propagation caused by the reflections from walls or objects. These reasons conduct the improper phenomena to radio signals. The significant variation of RSSI influences to the position estimation error especially in industrial environments. In this paper, we present a sensor node position estimation method in industrial environments and its optimization to reduce the error from multipath propagation by using neural networks. An experiment was performed in an electrical machine laboratory to evaluate the designed system in the real environment. The experimental results show that the average position error was reduced to 0.5 m.
Nonparametric semantic segmentation for 3D street scenes

In this paper we propose a method to generate a large scale and accurate dense 3D semantic map of street scenes. A dense 3D semantic model of the environment can significantly improve a number of robotic applications such as autonomous driving, navigation or localisation. Instead of using offline trained classifiers for semantic segmentation, our approach employs a data-driven, nonparametric method to parse scenes which easily scale to a large environment and generalise to different scenes. We use stereo image pairs collected from cameras mounted on a moving car to produce dense depth maps which are combined into a global 3D reconstruction using camera poses from stereo visual odometry. Simultaneously, 2D automatic semantic segmentation using a nonparametric scene parsing method is fused into the 3D model. Furthermore, the resultant 3D semantic model is improved with the consideration of moving objects in the scene. We demonstrate our method on the publicly available KITTI dataset and evaluate the performance against manually generated ground truth.
Professional and medical outcomes for French train drivers after “person under train” accidents: three year follow up study

Aims: To investigate psychiatric disorders, somatic health, and professional effects in French train drivers having experienced a “person under train” accident, and somatic health and professional effects. Methods: A total of 202 train drivers were evaluated several times: immediately after the event, three months later, and one, two, and three years later. These drivers were compared with 186 train drivers not exposed to that psychotraumatic shock. The evaluations relied primarily on the GHQ-28 and MINI questionnaires. Results: In the exposed group, at the first evaluation, the prevalence of post-traumatic stress was 4%; scores ⩾5 on the GHQ-28 were significantly higher than in the non-exposed group (32% versus 6%), for both the overall result and three sub-scores (somatic symptoms, anxiety and sleep, and psychosocial functioning). All these differences disappeared within a year. Vulnerability factors concerned prior traumas, acute and lasting life events, and the particular occupational situation where the driver is not accompanied but drives the train away alone in the aftermath of the accident. Over 95% of subjects had no short, medium, or long term impairment of their occupational fitness. Conclusions: Most of the psycho-behavioural disorders were observed in the immediate aftermath of the accident and disappeared within a year. The driver’s occupational future does not seem to be affected by the “person under train” accident. Consideration of a traumatic accident as a job related risk and close psychological support of drivers after an accident probably increase the subject’s ability to recover from the event.
Apolipoprotein AV is present in bile and its secretion increases with lipid absorption in Sprague-Dawley rats

Linda S. Zhang, Hirokazu Sato, Qing Yang, Robert O. Ryan, David Q. -H. Wang, Philip N. Howles, and Patrick Tso Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio; Center for Prevention of Obesity, Cardiovascular Disease & Diabetes, Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Oakland, California; and Department of Internal Medicine, Saint Louis University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
A Systematic Review of Laparoscopic Live-Donor Nephrectomy

Background. A systematic review was undertaken to assess the safety and efficacy of laparoscopic live-donor nephrectomy (LLDN) compared with open live-donor nephrectomy (OLDN). Methods. Literature databases were searched from inception to March 2003 inclusive. Comparative studies of LLDN versus OLDN (randomized and nonrandomized) were included. Results. There were 44 included studies, and the quality of the available evidence was average. There was only one randomized controlled trial and six nonrandomized comparative studies with concurrent controls identified. In terms of safety, for donors, there did not seem to be any distinct difference between the laparoscopic and open approaches. No donor mortality was reported for either procedure, and the complication rates were similar although the types of complications experienced differed between the two procedures. The conversion rate for LLDN to an open procedure ranged from 0% to 13%. In terms of efficacy, LLDN seemed to be a slower operation with longer warm ischemia times than OLDN, but this did not seem to have resulted in increased rates of delayed graft function for recipients. Donor postoperative recovery and convalescence seemed to be superior for LLDN, making it a potentially more attractive operation for living donors. Although in the short-term, graft function and survival did not seem to differ between the two techniques, long-term complication rates and allograft function could not be determined and further long-term follow-up is required. Conclusions. LLDN seems to be at least as safe and efficacious as OLDN in the short-term. However, it remains a technique in evolution. Further high-quality studies are required to resolve some of the outstanding issues surrounding its use, in particular, long-term follow-up of donor complications and recipient graft function and survival.
Feature Selection and Order Identification for Unsupervised Discovery of Statistical Temporal Structures in Video

We present algorithms for automatic feature selection and model order identification based on our previous solution to unsupervised structure discovery from video sequences. The overall problem is presented as simultaneously finding the statistical descriptions of structure and locating segments that matches the descriptions. Structures in video was modelled with hierarchical hidden Markov models, and model parameters was efficiently learned using EM. We extend the previous model adaptation scheme to learning not only the complexity of each structure, but also the total number of structures in the stream. Feature selection iterates between a wrapper and a filter method to partition the large feature pool into consistent and compact subsets, where the subsets are then ranked according to a normalized Bayesian Information criteria. Results on soccer videos are very promising: the best feature set agrees with manually identified significant features, the clusters are explainable with respect to manual labels, and the accuracy is comparable with previous works with supervised learning or manually chosen feature sets.
Household Childcare Choices and Women’s Work Behavior in Russia

The paper models household demand for childcare, mothers’ labor force participation and mothers’ working hours in Russia. The model estimates the effects of the price of childcare, mother’s wage, and household income on household behavior and well-being. Reduced-form models of the discrete and continuous household choices are estimated jointly using the Semi-Parametric Full Information Maximum Likelihood method. This method controls for the error term correlations across outcomes, and the correlation of the error terms that can result when panel data are used. The estimations indicate that mothers’ labor force participation and working hours are responsive to changes in the price of childcare and hourly wages. The simulations presented in this paper show that family allowance transfers—intended as a means of reducing poverty—do not have a significant effect on a household’s choice of childcare arrangements. Replacing family allowances with childcare subsidies may have a strong positive effect on women’s labor force participation and thus can be effective in reducing poverty.
New Technology and Techniques Feasibility of Intraoperative Navigation to the Sentinel Node in the Groin Using Preoperatively Acquired Single Photon Emission Computerized Tomography Data : Transferring Functional Imaging to the Operating Room

Accepted for publication March 31, 2014. Study received medical ethical committee approval. Supported by KWF-Translational Research Award PGF 2009-4344, NWO-STW-VIDI Grant STW-BGT11272 and EUROSTARS Grant E! 7555. * Correspondence: Interventional Molecular Imaging Laboratory, Leiden University Medical Center, Albinusdreef 2, P.O. Box 9600, Zone C2-S, 2300 RC, Leiden, The Netherlands (telephone: þ31(0)715266029; FAX:þ31(0)71 5248256; e-mail: o.r. brouwer@lumc.nl). † Financial interest and/or other relationship with SurgicEye.
Attributional biases in individualistic and collectivistic cultures: A comparison of Americans with Saudis.

The individualism/collectivism distinction led to hypotheses that Saudis, in comparison with Americans, would engage in 1) fewer internal attributions, 2) less self-serving bias, 3) more in-group-serving bias (both family-serving and in-group nationality-serving), and 4) more out-group-derogating bias. It was also predicted that in both cultures, immoral behavior and successful achievement would result in more internal attributions than would moral behavior or failure. A sample of university students in each country made attributions from eight vignettes. As expected, Americans were more internal and Saudis showed more out-group-derogating and intergroup bias
Key management scheme for multi-layer secure group communication

Many emerging applications are based on group communication model and many group communications like multimedia distribution and military applications require a security infrastructure that provides multiple levels of access control for group members in which group members are divided into a number of subgroups and placed at different privilege levels based on certain criteria and a member at higher level must be capable of accessing communication in its own level as well as its descendant lower levels and converse is not true. Two key management schemes have been developed to provide hierarchical access control: first method is key-based and the second one is share-based. Constructing a hierarchical group communication model based on secret shares is more flexible rather than using keys. In this paper we use share-based key management scheme and propose to reduce the storage at higher level users as compared to the scheme proposed by Dexter et al. by reusing a part of the pre-positioned information as common for all the layers in the system. We compare the storage and encryption cost of our scheme with the scheme proposed by Dexter et al. We also address periodic group rekeying.
Persistent Traditions in the Face of Natural Disasters: Stemmed and Waisted Stone Tools in Late Holocene New Britain, Papua New Guinea

Abstract Studies of the technology and function of small retouched stemmed and waisted stone tools from late Holocene sites in central New Britain provide a powerful means for monitoring the effects of the massive W-K2 volcanic eruption (3480–3150 cal BP), after which pottery occurs in this region for the first time. Use-wear and residue studies show that these tools were used for processing soft starchy plant materials (tubers and wood) and cutting and piercing skin. Despite the catastrophically destructive event, results indicate cultural continuity, most likely by descendants of the original population, rather than population replacement or major cultural change. These results contribute to the ongoing debate about possible migration from Island Southeast Asia c.3400 years ago.
Long Memory in Volatility and Trading Volume

We use fractionally-integrated time-series models to investigate the joint dynamics of equity trading volume and volatility. Bollerslev and Jubinski (1999) show that volume and volatility have a similar degree of fractional integration, and they argue that this evidence supports a long-run view of the mixture-of-distributions hypothesis. We examine this issue using more precise volatility estimates obtained using high-frequency returns (i.e., realized volatilities). Our results indicate that volume and volatility both display long memory, but we can reject the hypothesis that the two series share a common order of fractional integration for a fifth of the firms in our sample. Moreover, we find a strong correlation between the innovations to volume and volatility, which suggests that trading volume can be used to obtain more precise estimates of daily volatility for cases in which high-frequency returns are unavailable.
Satellite cell distribution within the soleus muscle of the adult mouse

The frequency of satellite cells was quantitated by electron microscopy in five proximal to distal regions of the soleus muscle of adult mice. In all, 236 satellite cell nuclei and 4,475 myonuclei were counted on 51 transverse thin sections. The mean percentage of satellite cells, as a ratio of satellite cells to myonuclei, per region was found to be 5.4%, 5.3%, 5.0%, 5.2% and 4.9% for the most proximal to distal areas, respectively. Analysis of variance revealed no significant differences between either the regions or the animals studied. The number of satellite cell nuclei per cross‐sectional area of muscle was also calculated for each of the five regions, and these values did not vary significantly from the proximal to distal ends of the muscle. Despite the fact that satellite cells were frequently noted in close association with cross‐sectional profiles of myoneural junctions, this study establishes that the number of such perisynaptic satellite cells was not large enough to affect significantly the mean percentages of all satellite cells counted within the motor endplate regions (areas 3 and 4) of the soleus muscle. It is concluded from this study that satellite cells are uniformly distributed throughout the whole muscle.
Acute hypoglycemia in humans causes attentional dysfunction while nonverbal intelligence is preserved.

OBJECTIVE Experimentally induced hypoglycemia in humans causes progressive but reversible cognitive dysfunction, but it is not known to what extent neuropsychological tests index abilities of cognitive functioning that are important in everyday life. This study examines the effects of acute insulin-induced hypoglycemia on attention and intelligence in nondiabetic humans. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS A hyperinsulinemic glucose clamp was used to achieve controlled euglycemia (4.50 [0.22] mmol/l) and hypoglycemia (blood glucose 2.59 [0.19] mmol/l) in 20 healthy volunteers. Subjects were studied on two occasions in a counterbalanced order. During each study condition, subjects completed parallel tests of cognitive function. Cognitive function was assessed by the Test of Everyday Attention and Raven's Progressive Matrices. RESULTS Hypoglycemia induced a significant deterioration in tests sensitive to both visual and auditory selective attention. During hypoglycemia, attentional flexibility deteriorated and speed of information processing was delayed. Sustained attention was preserved and intelligence scores did not deteriorate during hypoglycemia. CONCLUSIONS During hypoglycemia, a significant deterioration occurs in attentional abilities, whereas fluid intelligence is preserved. On the basis of these results, it can be surmised that many complex attention tasks relevant to everyday life are impaired during moderate hypoglycemia.