Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving parenting: the why and the how

Parenting is often in the news these days because it is recognised as key to the prevention of crime and educational failure. Parenting skills therefore feature prominently in initiatives to support the government’s Respect Agenda and improve educational outcomes. Both the new Children’s Centres and Extended Schools are charged with providing parenting support to all families, particularly those living in deprived areas and those who are seen to be in difficulty. Pilot initiatives from the Department for Education and Skills (now Department for Children Families and Schools) like Early Intervention Pathfinders and Parent Support Advisors in England, and Flying Start in Wales have provided funding for some local authorities to offer parenting programmes and parenting support more generally, to parents in need in their localities. The English government has also commissioned a National Academy for Parenting Practitioners and this is currently being set up. Developed out of a collaboration between two of the major national charities with an interest in parenting (Parenting UK and the National Family and Parenting Institute) together with Kings College London, the Academy is charged with increasing the amount and quality of provision of parenting support throughout England, by offering good quality training to those who run parenting programmes and support parenting, and by undertaking research to extend the evidence base relating to parenting interventions.
Shared action spaces: a basis function framework for social re-calibration of sensorimotor representations supporting joint action

The article explores the possibilities of formalizing and explaining the mechanisms that support spatial and social perspective alignment sustained over the duration of a social interaction. The basic proposed principle is that in social contexts the mechanisms for sensorimotor transformations and multisensory integration (learn to) incorporate information relative to the other actor(s), similar to the “re-calibration” of visual receptive fields in response to repeated tool use. This process aligns or merges the co-actors’ spatial representations and creates a “Shared Action Space” (SAS) supporting key computations of social interactions and joint actions; for example, the remapping between the coordinate systems and frames of reference of the co-actors, including perspective taking, the sensorimotor transformations required for lifting jointly an object, and the predictions of the sensory effects of such joint action. The social re-calibration is proposed to be based on common basis function maps (BFMs) and could constitute an optimal solution to sensorimotor transformation and multisensory integration in joint action or more in general social interaction contexts. However, certain situations such as discrepant postural and viewpoint alignment and associated differences in perspectives between the co-actors could constrain the process quite differently. We discuss how alignment is achieved in the first place, and how it is maintained over time, providing a taxonomy of various forms and mechanisms of space alignment and overlap based, for instance, on automaticity vs. control of the transformations between the two agents. Finally, we discuss the link between low-level mechanisms for the sharing of space and high-level mechanisms for the sharing of cognitive representations.
Marriage in a British Evangelical Congregation: Practising Postfeminist Partnership?

This article explores understandings and practices of marriage in a congregation from the growing British evangelical Christian movement New Frontiers International (NFI). It investigates how those who subscribe to evangelical religion interact with the gendered ideas and behaviour of the more ‘secular’ society they inhabit. The data for this research are drawn from participant observation and interviews with members of the congregation. These are situated in the context of the official discourse of NFI and of contemporary debates about the move to individualized partnership. It is argued that though these evangelicals claim to shape their marriages according to ‘biblical’ patterns, they in fact reflect the partnership practices of their less religious peers. Building on work by Stacey and McRobbie, patterns of marriage and heterosexual partnership in contemporary Britain are conceptualized as ‘postfeminist’; the article locates within this framework NFI's declared – and undeclared – marriage practices. It finds that while they are somewhat more conservative than their ‘secular’ peers, NFI evangelicals are indeed practising postfeminist partnership. Observations are also offered on the impact of religion on people's ability to live out individualized partnerships.
A Low Coordination Overhead C-ARQ Protocol with Frame Combining

This paper proposes a low coordination overhead cooperative automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme with an integrated frame combiner, which exploits space diversity and cooperation between neighbouring nodes. In channels with a strong line of sight (LOS) component and low signal-to- noise ratio (SNR), the maximum achievable throughput of the proposed protocol is many times higher than for other ARQ schemes. For non LOS scenarios, the cooperative ARQ without frame combiner achieves the best efficiency results, and the overhead introduced by the frame combiner mechanisms leads to results which can be even below the classical ARQ mechanism.
Principles of microscale flexure hinge design for enhanced endurance

Articulation based on flexure hinges is increasingly popular in microrobotics because of the absence of Coulomb friction, ease of manufacturability, fluid motion, durability, and large angular ranges. However, the inherent flexibility of these hinges makes modeling very complex and specific to the particular engineering applications for which they were developed. In this paper we describe the development and testing of a simplified, versatile method for modeling the stress on a flexure hinge under multi-axis loads in order to maximize hinge lifespan. We also discuss other stress concentration reducing features and design rules that can be applied to more general flexure hinge designs to further extend hinge lifespan.
Reward Allocations to the Extremely Mobile Employee: A Qualification of Rational Selective Exploitation

In Experiment 1, undergraduate students role-played the position of a university department head dividing rewards among a group of six hypothetical employees who varied in competence (high or low) and mobility (high, medium, or low). The departments were described as being either high, medium, or low in available rewards, and being in a high-, medium- or low-demand field. As predicted, there was a quadratic relationship between reward allocation and mobility, with greatest rewards given at the intermediate level of mobility. Experiment 2 explored the same questions, except that actual university department heads divided rewards among the same six hypothetical employees as though they were members of their own department. Department heads were grouped on the basis of the actual resources in their department and the availability of faculty in their field. There was a quadratic relationship between faculty mobility and reward allocations; this effect was most evident for high competence employees under condi.
DC assisted bipolar switched reluctance machine

In this paper, a sinusoidally excited four-phase switched reluctance machine (SRM) with modified DC assisted windings is presented. The proposed four-phase SRM configuration with modified DC windings has reduced number of controllable phases and power converter devices. The DC winding configuration is modified from its traditional form by taking advantage of the machine's inherent 90 degree phase shift between adjacent phases to achieve the desired simplification in the drive. Different power electronic converters that can be used with the proposed winding configuration have also been investigated. The proposed concepts are then verified through coupled FEA circuit simulations on a case study motor.
Screening for Psychological Morbidity in HIV-Infected and HIV-Uninfected Pregnant Women Using Community Counselors in Zimbabwe

Objective: To examine the prevalence of psychological morbidity in HIV-infected and uninfected pregnant women seeking antenatal care in Zimbabwe. Methods: Pregnant women were screened for psychological morbidity at the initial antenatal care visit using the 14-item Shona Symptom Questionnaire (SSQ) before voluntary HIV counseling and testing (VCT). The primary outcome measure was “cases,” as determined by a SSQ score of= 8. Demographic characteristics and HIV status were compared between cases and noncases to determine the risk factors for psychological morbidity. Results: Of the 437 participants, psychological morbidity was detected in 73 (17%) women before undergoing VCT. Risk factors for psychological morbidity included having a spouse older than 35 years of age. HIV infection by itself was not a risk factor for psychological morbidity for women. Conclusions: There is a high burden of psychological morbidity among pregnant women in Zimbabwe. Mental health services should be integrated into antenatal care to improve psychological health for all women in Zimbabwe.
The Occurrence of Secondary Affective Disorder in an In-patient Population with Severe and Recurrent Affective Disorder

Summary One hundred and eighty nine consecutive in-patients with treatment-resistant affective disorder were administered the Renard Diagnostic Interview to determine whether the 45 with secondary affective disorder (SAD) differed from the 144 with primary affective disorder (PAD). The SAD group, including 15 subjects with bipolar disorder, had an earlier mean age of onset of depression and contained more unmarried individuals. The total secondary group could not usefully be differentiated by assessment of clinical symptoms or discriminating analysis of social and clinical variables. While the present study of a severely depressed population does not lend itself to generalisability, this combined sample does have characteristics of patients used in biological investigations. No significant inter-group discrimination was found to support a previous assumption that identification of a prior psychiatric disorder provides the most suitable mechanism for selecting a population for research in affective disorders.
Push-Pull Receptive Field Organization and Synaptic Depression: Mechanisms for Reliably Encoding Naturalistic Stimuli in V1

Neurons in the primary visual cortex are known for responding vigorously but with high variability to classical stimuli such as drifting bars or gratings. By contrast, natural scenes are encoded more efficiently by sparse and temporal precise spiking responses. We used a conductance-based model of the visual system in higher mammals to investigate how two specific features of the thalamo-cortical pathway, namely push-pull receptive field organization and fast synaptic depression, can contribute to this contextual reshaping of V1 responses. By comparing cortical dynamics evoked respectively by natural vs. artificial stimuli in a comprehensive parametric space analysis, we demonstrate that the reliability and sparseness of the spiking responses during natural vision is not a mere consequence of the increased bandwidth in the sensory input spectrum. Rather, it results from the combined impacts of fast synaptic depression and push-pull inhibition, the later acting for natural scenes as a form of “effective” feed-forward inhibition as demonstrated in other sensory systems. Thus, the combination of feedforward-like inhibition with fast thalamo-cortical synaptic depression by simple cells receiving a direct structured input from thalamus composes a generic computational mechanism for generating a sparse and reliable encoding of natural sensory events.
A belief network model for IR

We introduce a belief network model for IR which is derived from probabilistic considerations over a clearly defined sample space. This model subsumes the classical models in IR and generalizes the inference network model of Turtle and Croft. Further, we show how to extend the model with information from other queries (which we call contexts) to yield improved retrieval performance.
The XMM Cluster Survey: evidence for energy injection at high redshift from evolution of the X-ray luminosity-temperature relation

We measure the evolution of the X-ray luminosity-temperature (LX - T) relation since z ˜ 1.5 using a sample of 211 serendipitously detected galaxy clusters with spectroscopic redshifts drawn from the XMM Cluster Survey first data release (XCS-DR1). This is the first study spanning this redshift range using a single, large, homogeneous cluster sample. Using an orthogonal regression technique, we find no evidence for evolution in the slope or intrinsic scatter of the relation since z ˜ 1.5, finding both to be consistent with previous measurements at z ˜ 0.1. However, the normalization is seen to evolve negatively with respect to the self-similar expectation: we find E-1(z) LX = 1044.67 ± 0.09(T/5)3.04 ± 0.16(1 + z)-1.5 ± 0.5, which is within 2σ of the zero evolution case. We see milder, but still negative, evolution with respect to self-similar when using a bisector regression technique. We compare our results to numerical simulations, where we fit simulated cluster samples using the same methods used on the XCS data. Our data favour models in which the majority of the excess entropy required to explain the slope of the LX - T relation is injected at high redshift. Simulations in which active galactic nucleus feedback is implemented using prescriptions from current semi-analytic galaxy formation models predict the positive evolution of the normalization, and differ from our data at more than 5σ. This suggests that more efficient feedback at high redshift may be needed in these models.
Human neural stem cells enhance structural plasticity and axonal transport in the ischaemic brain

Stem cell transplantation promises new hope for the treatment of stroke although significant questions remain about how the grafted cells elicit their effects. One hypothesis is that transplanted stem cells enhance endogenous repair mechanisms activated after cerebral ischaemia. Recognizing that bilateral reorganization of surviving circuits is associated with recovery after stroke, we investigated the ability of transplanted human neural progenitor cells to enhance this structural plasticity. Our results show the first evidence that human neural progenitor cell treatment can significantly increase dendritic plasticity in both the ipsi- and contralesional cortex and this coincides with stem cell-induced functional recovery. Moreover, stem cell-grafted rats demonstrated increased corticocortical, corticostriatal, corticothalamic and corticospinal axonal rewiring from the contralesional side; with the transcallosal and corticospinal axonal sprouting correlating with functional recovery. Furthermore, we demonstrate that axonal transport, which is critical for both proper axonal function and axonal sprouting, is inhibited by stroke and that this is rescued by the stem cell treatment, thus identifying another novel potential mechanism of action of transplanted cells. Finally, we established in vitro co-culture assays in which these stem cells mimicked the effects observed in vivo. Through immunodepletion studies, we identified vascular endothelial growth factor, thrombospondins 1 and 2, and slit as mediators partially responsible for stem cell-induced effects on dendritic sprouting, axonal plasticity and axonal transport in vitro. Thus, we postulate that human neural progenitor cells aid recovery after stroke through secretion of factors that enhance brain repair and plasticity.
Cultural influences on the ABC implementation in Thailand’s environment

The activity‐based costing (ABC) system of the USA has been adopted by organizations in Thailand and elsewhere. Many cross‐cultural studies provide evidence that, because of cultural differences, successful accounting techniques and practices in one country need to be modified for effective use in another country. Using in‐depth interviews and questionnaires, this study examines the effects of cultural differences on the resistance against the ABC system in the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), the Provincial Electricity Authority (PEA) and the Metropolitan Electricity Authority (MEA) – the three largest state enterprises in Thailand. It finds that the resistance is high for a system that causes empowerment and redistribution of power. This finding is different from what was found for the USA. The difference can be explained by cultural differences, especially in the power distance dimension, in the two countries. So, Thailand’s implementation of the ABC system must recognize this fact, and system modifications are necessary.
Isothermal microcalorimetry accurately detects bacteria, tumorous microtissues, and parasitic worms in a label-free well-plate assay

Isothermal microcalorimetry is a label-free assay that allows monitoring of enzymatic and metabolic activities. The technique has strengths, but most instruments have a low throughput, which has limited their use for bioassays. Here, an isothermal microcalorimeter, equipped with a vessel holder similar to a 48-well plate, was used. The increased throughput of this microcalorimeter makes it valuable for biomedical and pharmaceutical applications. Our results show that the sensitivity of the instrument allows the detection of 3 × 104 bacteria per vial. Growth of P. mirabilis in Luria Broth medium was detected between 2 and 9 h with decreasing inoculum. The culture released 2.1J with a maximum thermal power of 76 μW. The growth rate calculated using calorimetric and spectrophotometric data were 0.60 and 0.57 h–1, respectively. Additional insight on protease activities of P. mirabilis matching the last peak in heat production could be gathered as well. Growth of tumor microtissues releasing a maximum thermal power of 2.1 μW was also monitored and corresponds to a diameter increase of the microtissues from ca. 100 to 428 μm. This opens new research avenues in cancer research, diagnostics, and development of new antitumor drugs. For parasitic worms, the technique allows assessment of parasite survival using motor and metabolic activities even with a single worm.
Effect of peer support on prevention of postnatal depression among high risk women: multisite randomised controlled trial

Objective To evaluate the effectiveness of telephone based peer support in the prevention of postnatal depression. Design Multisite randomised controlled trial. Setting Seven health regions across Ontario, Canada. Participants 701 women in the first two weeks postpartum identified as high risk for postnatal depression with the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale and randomised with an internet based randomisation service. Intervention Proactive individualised telephone based peer (mother to mother) support, initiated within 48-72 hours of randomisation, provided by a volunteer recruited from the community who had previously experienced and recovered from self reported postnatal depression and attended a four hour training session. Main outcome measures Edinburgh postnatal depression scale, structured clinical interview-depression, state-trait anxiety inventory, UCLA loneliness scale, and use of health services. Results After web based screening of 21 470 women, 701 (72%) eligible mothers were recruited. A blinded research nurse followed up more than 85% by telephone, including 613 at 12 weeks and 600 at 24 weeks postpartum. At 12 weeks, 14% (40/297) of women in the intervention group and 25% (78/315) in the control group had an Edinburgh postnatal depression scale score >12 (χ2=12.5, P<0.001; number need to treat 8.8, 95% confidence interval 5.9 to 19.6; relative risk reduction 0.46, 95% confidence interval 0.24 to 0.62). There was a positive trend in favour of the intervention group for maternal anxiety but not loneliness or use of health services. For ethical reasons, participants identified with clinical depression at 12 weeks were referred for treatment, resulting in no differences between groups at 24 weeks. Of the 221 women in the intervention group who received and evaluated their experience of peer support, over 80% were satisfied and would recommend this support to a friend. Conclusion Telephone based peer support can be effective in preventing postnatal depression among women at high risk. Trial registration ISRCTN 68337727.
Successful Integration of Membrane Technologies in a Conventional Purification Process of Tannery Wastewater Streams

The aim of this work is to design and integrate an optimized batch membrane process in a conventional purification process used for the treatment of tannery wastewater. The integration was performed by using two spiral wound membrane modules in series, that is, nanofiltration and reverse osmosis, as substitutes to the biological reactor. The membrane process was designed in terms of sensible fouling issues reduction, which may be observed on the nanofiltration membrane if no optimization is performed. The entity of the fouling phenomena was estimated by pressure cycling measurements, determining both the critical and the threshold flux on the nanofiltration membrane. The obtained results were used to estimate the need of the overdesign of the membrane plant, as well as to define optimized operating conditions in order to handle fouling issues correctly for a long period of time. Finally, the developed membrane process was compared, from a technical and economic point of view, with the conventional biological process, widely offered as an external service near tannery production sites, and, here, proposed to be substituted by membrane technologies.