Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards a measurement framework for tools' ceiling and threshold

Software development tools are not catching up with the requirements of increasingly complex interactive software products and services. Successful tools are claimed to either be low-threshold/low-ceiling or high-threshold/high-ceiling, however no research to date addressed how to define and measure these concepts. This is increasingly important as these tools undergo an evaluation and adoption process by end-users. Here we hypothesized that the evaluation and adoption of tools is associated with the threshold (learnability). To assess this we conducted a learnability and usability study using three commercial Platform-as-a-Service tools. In this study we used an augmented think-aloud protocol with question asking where ten subjects were asked to create a simple web application. Our data shows that most learnability issues fall into two categories: understanding or locating. No evidence was found that usability defects correlate with the tools learnability score. Though we found an inverse correlation between the amount of issues and the learnability score.
Science Learning Model Based on Multisensory-Ecology in Early Childhood Education: A Conceptual Model

In early childhood education, science learning emphasizes providing direct and real experience. That experience is needed by children in order to promote knowledge about what they see, hear, taste, touch, and smell through its five senses. Ecology-based education is needed by humans and will benefit humanity. The children interaction with environment that support will encourage children to demonstrate their learning activities. However, the authors did not found a discussion about the conceptual model of science learning based on multisensory-ecology in the books and journals. The purpose of this study was to identify a conceptual model of science learning model with based of multisensory-ecology to early childhood. The method used to develop the conceptual model included literature review and interview. The reviews of literature included academic journals, books and proceeding aimed to collect, organize and synthesize existing knowledge. Key informant interview included in-depth interviews conducted to one person's head kidergarten, four kindergarten teachers and five experts which includes an expert on science learning, expert of learning ecology, early childhood education expert, psychologists and children development expert, and instructional design expert. It can be concluded that the science learning based on multisensory-ecology of conceptual model based on multisensory-ecological for early childhood consist five characteristic and five principals of learning science learning model with based of multisensoryecology. This paper will facilitate a better conceptual understanding of learning science on early childhood education, and thereby contribute, in a small way, to the larger body of discourse surrounding it. This conceptual model will provide a reference point for education and research purposes in early childhood education. This models can be one of the guidelines for kindergarten teachers to develop basic aspects of child development, which includes cognitive, social, emotional and physical simultaneously.
Resolution of Corporate Distress: Evidence from East Asia's Financial Crisis

The widespread financial crisis in East Asia caused large economic shocks, which varied by degree across the region. That crisis provides a unique opportunity for investigating the factors that determine the use of bankruptcy processes in a number of economies. The authors study the use of bankruptcy in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan (China), and Thailand. These economies differ in their institutional frameworks for resolving financial distress, partly because of the different origins of their judicial systems. One difference is the strength of creditor rights, which the authors document. They expect that differences in legal enforcement and judicial efficiency should affect the resolution of financial distress. Using a sample of 4,569 publicly traded East Asian firms, they observe a total of 106 bankruptcies in 1997 and 1998. They find that: 1) The likelihood of filing for bankruptcy is lower for firms with ownership links to banks and families, controlling for firm and country characteristics. 2) Filings are more likely in countries with better judicial systems. 3) Filings are more likely where there are both strong creditor rights and a good judicial system. These results alone do not allow the authors to address whether increased use of bankruptcy is an efficient resolution mechanism.
Bacterial actin MreB forms antiparallel double filaments

Filaments of all actin-like proteins known to date are assembled from pairs of protofilaments that are arranged in a parallel fashion, generating polarity. In this study, we show that the prokaryotic actin homologue MreB forms pairs of protofilaments that adopt an antiparallel arrangement in vitro and in vivo. We provide an atomic view of antiparallel protofilaments of Caulobacter MreB as apparent from crystal structures. We show that a protofilament doublet is essential for MreB's function in cell shape maintenance and demonstrate by in vivo site-specific cross-linking the antiparallel orientation of MreB protofilaments in E. coli. 3D cryo-EM shows that pairs of protofilaments of Caulobacter MreB tightly bind to membranes. Crystal structures of different nucleotide and polymerisation states of Caulobacter MreB reveal conserved conformational changes accompanying antiparallel filament formation. Finally, the antimicrobial agents A22/MP265 are shown to bind close to the bound nucleotide of MreB, presumably preventing nucleotide hydrolysis and destabilising double protofilaments. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.02634. 001
Desert and Tangibility: Decomposing House Money Effects in a Charitable Giving Experiment

Several papers have documented that when subjects play with standard laboratory “endowments” they make less self-interested choices then when they use money they have either earned through a laboratory task or brought from outside the lab. In the context of a charitable giving experiment we decompose common "house money" effects into two components: the tangibility of cash in hand relative to money (or ecu's) promised on a computer screen, and the desert of earned money relative to random windfall gains. While both components are found to be significant in non-parametric tests, the former effect, which has been neglected in previous studies, has a stronger effect on total donations. These results have clear implications for experimental design, and also suggest that the availability of less tangible payment methods may increase charitable donations.
Pushing Interdisciplinary in the Study of Groups and Teams

As the concluding article of the special issue from the Lorentz, Netherlands workshop, “New Frontiers in Analyzing Dynamic Group Interactions: Bridging Social and Computer Science,” the authors describe ways in which computer scientists and social scientists can integrate their work to pursue interdisciplinary that can satisfy the research agendas of both sets of scholars.
Shifting discourses in teacher education: Performing the advocate bilingual teacher

ABSTRACT This article analyses the co-construction of the Bilingual teacher as advocate among preservice Bilingual teachers, through the use of narratives drawn from actual stories of Bilingual teachers, by means of drama-based pedagogy inspired by Theater of the Oppressed techniques. This study uses critical discourse analysis and Bakhtinian intertextuality to analyze how preservice Bilingual teachers shifted the discourse, moving from discussing issues pertaining to Bilingual education, such as race and immigration, from the outside to from the middle, situating themselves as protagonists of the conflict. The improvisational nature of the performances, owing to the use of drama-based techniques, allowed the participants to explore critical issues, develop their stance toward issues of immigration and racism, and rehearse their identities as advocates.
A Uses and Gratifications Approach to Exploring Antecedents to Facebook Dependency

The purpose of this study was to explore the variables that impact participants’ dependency upon Facebook to achieve communication goals from a uses and gratifications (U&G) perspective. In support of U&G, all five Facebook motives played an important role in dependency outcomes. Participants motivated by virtual community, or meeting new people online, were most dependent on the medium. Big 5 personality traits, self-esteem, and social cohesion were examined and partially supported a social compensation perspective. Results are discussed in light of existing U&G and dependency research with respect to functional alternatives. Limitations and directions for future research are also offered.
The Multisite Family Study on Incarceration, Partnering, and Parenting: Program impacts

ABSTRACT The Multisite Family Study on Incarceration, Partnering, and Parenting documented the impact of couples-based relationship education on intimate relationship quality; parenting and coparenting quality; and employment, drug use, and recidivism. Matched comparison and wait list designs were implemented in four sites. Comparisons of weighted means and latent growth curve models showed consistent positive effects in the Indiana site on a number of family relationship quality outcomes and largely insignificant effects in Ohio, New York, and New Jersey. Delivering couples' healthy relationship retreats in the context of a broader character-and faith-based unit may help reinforce the skills learned.
A Tutorial on RAID Storage Systems

RAID storage systems have been in use since the early 1990’s. Recently, however, as the demand for huge amounts of on-line storage has increased, RAID has once again come into focus. This report reviews the history of RAID, as well as where and how RAID systems fit in the storage hierarchy of an Enterprize Computing System (EIS). We describe the known RAID configurations and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Since the focus of our research is on the performance of RAID systems we devote a section to the various factors which affect RAID performance. Modelling RAID systems for their performance analysis is the topic of the next section and we report on the issues as well as briefly describe one simulator, RAIDframe, which has been developed. We conclude with section which describes the current open research questions in the area.
Trends in Abundance and Size of Coho Salmon in the Pacific Rim

In the early 1960s, average Pacific-wide landings of coho salmon reached a stable level of over 12 million fish that persisted for 3 decades, followed by a sharp decrease to under 6 million fish in 1997-2003 as a result of reduced marine survival and fishery restrictions in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. Spawning escapement increased in most streams after 1999 in response to restricted fishing and improved marine survival for some stocks. Marine survival has been spatially and temporally variable, accounting for an average of 54% (range 41-68%) of variation in wild adult returns to twelve systems from Washington to southeast Alaska. Average survival rates have been highest (> 12%) in southeast Alaska and Puget Sound, and lowest (4-6%) for the Washington coast, with British Columbia being intermediate (6-10%). Marine survival was highly variable over a limited spatial scale, indicating that localized marine environments are critically important to overall ocean survival. The average weight of coho salmon harvested in Alaskan fisheries has changed little since the 1960s, but indicators of average weight in southern British Columbia to the Columbia River declined from the 1950s to early 1990s, followed by a rapid rebound from 1993 through 2004.
Coping and Attention: Implications for Child Health and Pediatric Conditions

Child health and illness are best conceptualized in terms of the interaction of biological, psychological, and social processes. Among the central factors in biopsychosocial models of health and illness are processes of coping and attention in response to stress. As a guide to research on biopsychosocial processes in child health and illness, a dual-process model of responses to stress is described, distinguishing between stress responses that are involuntary/automatic and those responses that are voluntary/controlled. Research on coping with stress is briefly reviewed, along with research on attentional processes in response to stress. The relationships between coping and attention are highlighted, along with the implications of this research for understanding children's health and illness. Throughout the article, examples are drawn from research on pediatric recurrent abdominal pain to illustrate important aspects of coping and attention.
Complexity on Small Scales: The Metallicity Distribution of the Carina Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy

The Carina dwarf spheroidal galaxy is the only galaxy of this type that shows clearly episodic star formation separated by long pauses. Here we present metallicities for 437 radial velocity members of this Galactic satellite. The metallicities and radial velocities were measured as part of a Large Programme with the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory, Chile. We obtained medium-resolution spectroscopy with the multiobject spectrograph FLAMES. Our target red giants cover the entire projected surface area of Carina. Our spectra are centered at the near-infrared Ca II triplet, which is a well-established metallicity indicator for old and intermediate-age red giants. The resulting data sample provides the largest collection of spectroscopically derived metallicities for a Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxy to date. Four of our likely radial velocity members of Carina lie outside this galaxy's nominal tidal radius, supporting earlier claims of the possible existence of such stars beyond the main body of Carina. We find a mean metallicity of [Fe/H] ∼ -1.7 dex on the 1997 metallicity scale of Carretta and Gratton for Carina. The formal FWHM of the metallicity distribution function is 0.92 dex, while the full range of metallicities is found to span approximately -3.0 dex < [Fe/H] < 0.0 dex. The metallicity distribution function might be indicative of several subpopulations distinct in metallicity. There appears to be a mild radial gradient such that more metal-rich populations are more centrally concentrated, matching a similar trend for an increasing fraction of intermediate-age stars (see the 2001 work of Harbeck and coworkers). This, as well as the photometric colors of the more metal-rich red giants, suggests that Carina exhibits an age-metallicity relation. Indeed, the age-metallicity degeneracy seems to conspire to form a narrow red giant branch despite the considerable spread in metallicity and wide range of ages. The metallicity distribution function is not well matched by a simple closed-box model of chemical evolution. Qualitatively better matches are obtained by chemical models that also take into account infall and outflows. A G dwarf problem remains for all these models.
Improving Survivability in Environment-driven Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms through Explicit Relative Fitness and Fitness Proportionate Communication

Ensuring the integrity of a robot swarm in terms of maintaining a stable population of functioning robots over long periods of time is a mandatory prerequisite for building more complex systems that achieve user-defined tasks. mEDEA is an environment-driven evolutionary algorithm that provides promising results using an implicit fitness function combined with a random genome selection operator. Motivated by the need to sustain a large population with sufficient spare energy to carry out user-defined tasks in the future, we develop an explicit fitness metric providing a measure of fitness that is relative to surrounding robots and examine two methods by which it can influence spread of genomes. Experimental results in simulation find that use of the fitness-function provides significant improvements over the original algorithm; in particular, a method that influences the frequency and range of broadcasting when combined with random selection has the potential to conserve energy whilst maintaining performance, a critical factor for physical robots.
Lateralized reward‐related visual discrimination in the avian entopallium

In humans and many other animals, the two cerebral hemispheres are partly specialized for different functions. However, knowledge about the neuronal basis of lateralization is mostly lacking. The visual system of birds is an excellent model in which to investigate hemispheric asymmetries as birds show a pronounced left hemispheric advantage in the discrimination of various visual objects. In addition, visual input crosses at the optic chiasm and thus testing of each hemisphere is easily accomplished. We aimed to find a neuronal correlate for three hallmarks of visual lateralization in pigeons: first, the animals learn faster with the right eye–left hemisphere; second, they reach higher performance levels under this condition; third, visually guided behavior is mostly under left hemisphere control. To this end, we recorded from the left and right forebrain entopallium while the animals performed a colour discrimination task. We found that, even before learning, left entopallial neurons were more responsive to visual stimulation. Subsequent discrimination acquisition recruited more neuronal responses in the left entopallium and these cells showed a higher degree of differentiation between the rewarded and the unrewarded stimulus. Thus, differential left–right responses are already present, albeit to a modest degree, before learning. As soon as some cues are associated with reward, however, this asymmetry increases substantially and the higher discrimination ratio of the left hemispheric tectofugal pathway would not only contribute to a higher performance of this hemisphere but could thereby also result in a left hemispheric dominance over downstream motor structures via reward‐associated feedback systems.
Behaviour versus performance: The veiled commitment of experimental psychology

The use and teaching of experimentation in psychology ought to accompany a discussion of what is within and what is beyond the reach of the method. I address this question by outlining the necessary restrictions that are prerequisite for conducting an experiment. The restrictions include establishing a fixed goal, the fulfillment of which represents successful participation in the experiment, a finite set of possible expressions for satisfying the goal, and a fixed assignment between each possible expression and how it should be performed. These restrictions entail rules that determine what counts as good participation (evaluation), and rules that determine whether a behaviour counts as participation at all (inclusion). Participants’ conformity to the rules makes experimentation possible and, more importantly, maintains the experimenter’s attention on features of performance. This selective attention, in turn, neglects participants’ capacities for adopting and violating rules, and possible alterations in their goals and interpretations. While these capacities fall beyond the scope of experimental psychology, their recognition is necessary for encountering what is not already understood at the start of a research project.
14 The impact of trade liberalization on tobacco consumption

Over the past two decades, trade in tobacco and tobacco products has expanded dramatically as a result of a variety of bilateral, regional, and international trade agreements that have significantly reduced trade barriers. This chapter provides a brief discussion of arguments derived from economic theory suggesting that the reductions in trade barriers will lead to greater competition, lower prices, and increased advertising and promotion in tobacco-product markets. This is followed by a review of recent trade agreements, highlighting features particularly relevant to tobacco. The limited empirical evidence on the impact of liberalized trade in tobacco products on their consumption is then discussed, followed by a new empirical analysis using data on 42 countries over the period from 1970 through 1995. This new analysis clearly demonstrates that trade liberalization has led to increases in cigarette smoking, with the most significant impact in low-income and middle-income countries. Finally, the globalization of the tobacco industry and global tobacco-control responses are briefly described.
The Differential Impacts of Two Forms of Insufficient Effort Responding

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in insufficient effort responding (IER). Previous research has demonstrated that IER can have detrimental effects on survey research ranging from introducing untrustworthy data to influencing psychometric and statistical results. The present simulations examine two forms of IER, straightlining (SL) and random responding (RR), in an attempt to determine whether the presence of these response patterns have differential impacts on data. In three studies, we explore the combined effects of extreme SL and RR, the effects of full and partial RR, and the effects of full and partial SL on scale characteristics such as inter-item correlations, alpha, and component structure. We also explore how various IER response distributions may influence these statistics. Empirical results demonstrate a tendency for SL to increase and RR to decrease the magnitude of inter-item correlations, alpha, and the first component eigenvalue. Results also indicate that the impact of SL may be more pronounced than the impact of RR in the organisational sciences. It is important for researchers to consider the type of IER in addition to the prevalence of IER in a sample prior to conducting statistical analyses.
TWiki-based facilitation in a newly formed academic community of practice

This paper reports on the first results of an ongoing project whose aim is to evaluate whether a wiki-based knowledge sharing tool like TWiki facilitates effective processes of knowledge building, sharing and transfer and fosters collaboration in a community of practice made up of Italian teachers. The project started in October 2004 and first data were collected five months later. The project was an attempt to provide them the opportunity to build more productive working relationships, stimulate new ideas, take advantage from the sharing of the broad range of professional knowledge and expertise that resides within the school. We chose TWiki as collaborative environment because its features met our needs quite well: it is open, free, easy to customize, has a versioning system and does not use proprietary technology.User training focused on both conceptual and technological aspects of TWiki.An ethnographic approach was applied to describe users' behaviour and dynamics. The results presented here describe a number of patterns of user activities together with some problems derived from the specific social and cultural context of TWiki usage observed.