Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mathematics self-efficacy and its relation to proficiency-promoting behavior and performance

Mathematics Self-Efficacy and Its Relation to Proficiency-Promoting Behavior and Performance Mark Gabriel Alday Causapin The purpose of this study was to verify Bandura’s theory on the relationship of self-efficacy and performance particularly in mathematics among high school students. A rural school in the Philippines was selected for its homogenous student population, effectively reducing the effects of confounding variables such as race, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, and language. It was shown that self-efficacy was a positive but minor predictor of future performance only for male students who previously had higher mathematics grades. The effects were different between genders. It was not a strong predictor for women regardless of previous grades, and men with weaker mathematics skills. On the other hand, mathematics self-efficacy was predicted by previous mathematics achievement for women; and also the number of siblings and parental education for the higher performing women. The use of a second language in the mathematics classroom negatively affected confidence and performance. It was also found that there were differences in terms of academic behavior, peers, and family life between students with high and low self-efficacy. Positive behaviors were found for all female students regardless of self-efficacy levels and fewer were found among men. Negative behaviors were only found among low self-efficacy students. No differences were found in terms of the lives and families of the participants, but the interviews revealed that family members and their experiences of poverty affected educational goals and ambitions. In terms of other dispositional factors, students expressed classroom and test anxieties, concerns of being embarrassed in front of their classmates, and beliefs that mathematics was naturally difficult and not enjoyable. The students who did not talk about any of these themes were better performing and had higher self-efficacy scores.
Resilience in Old Age: Social Relations as a Protective Factor

Resilience has traditionally been addressed primarily in childhood and adolescence, yet it is a relevant concept across the life span. Because older adults face increased challenges, it is important to examine factors that may promote resilience in old age, particularly social relations. Participants older than age 65 years who had experienced six or more major negative life events during the past 12 years were selected from Wave 2 (2005) of the Social Relations and Health study (N = 99). Network size and spousal relationship quality were assessed as indicators of social relations. Regression analyses indicate that the young-old and Whites exhibited fewer depressive symptoms, but there were no gender differences. Similarly, there were no age or race differences in life satisfaction. However, men were more satisfied with their life than women. Larger network size was associated with fewer depressive symptoms and greater life satisfaction. Those who reported more positive characteristics in their spousal relationship had fewer depressive symptoms and more life satisfaction, whereas those who reported more negative characteristics in their spousal relationship reported more depressive symptoms and less life satisfaction. This study highlights the importance of addressing resilience in old age and suggests that social relations may be an important protective factor facilitating resiliency in late life.
Narratives of the Night: The Use of Audio Diaries in Researching Sleep

This article draws on data from two major empirical studies of sleep to examine the use of audio diaries as an approach to researching sleep. Sleep has only recently emerged as a topic of interest to the sociologist, providing a valuable resource through which to examine the roles and relationships and gender inequalities which underpin everyday life. Yet accessing individual experiences of sleep is problematic. Considered a non-conscious activity, sleep takes place in most cases at night within the private domain of the home and is thus generally inaccessible to the social researcher and outside the conscious reality of the sleeper. In exploring the social aspects of sleep, we rely primarily on respondents’ interpretations of the sleep period given retrospectively in focus groups and in-depth interviews, distanced from the temporal, spatial and relational dimensions of the sleep event. This article also focuses on the use of audio diaries as a method designed to help bridge the gap between events in real time and retrospective accounts. We examine the narrative structure of audio diaries, discuss the principles and practice of using audio diaries in sleep research, illustrate the contribution of audio diary narratives to an understanding of the social context of sleep, and assess the use of audio diaries in social research. We conclude that, used in conjunction with other methods, audio diaries are an effective method of data collection, particularly for understanding experiences of intimate aspects of everyday life.
Considering planned change anew:stretching large group interventions strategically, emotionally and meaningfully

Large Group Interventions, methods for involving “the whole system” in a change process, are important contemporary planned organizational change approaches. They are well known to practitioners but unfamiliar to many organizational researchers, despite the fact that these interventions address crucial issues about which many organizational researchers are concerned. On the other hand, these interventions do not appear to be informed by contemporary developments in organizational theorizing. This disconnect on both sides is problematic. We describe such interventions and their importance; illustrate them with extended descriptions of particular Future Search and Whole‐Scale™ change interventions; summarize research on strategy, emotion, and sensemaking that may inform them; and suggest questions about the interventions that may stimulate research and reflection on practice. We also discuss conditions that may foster effective engagement between Large Group Interventions practitioners and organizational researchers. Our approach represents a way to conduct a review that combines scholarly literature and skilled practice and to initiate a dialog between them.
The Contribution of Older Siblings' Reactions to Emotions to Preschoolers' Emotional and Social Competence

SUMMARY According to Tompkins' (1991) theory on the socialization of emotion, young children's emotional and social competence are influenced by others' reactions to the children's emotions. Patterns of parental reactions to emotions have been shown to account for significant variance in preschoolers' emotion and social competence. However, the impact of others significant in the preschooler's life has been largely ignored. To help fill this gap, associations were examined between older siblings' reactions to 41 preschoolers' emotions and the preschoolers' social-emotional competence (i.e., affective balance, emotion knowledge, positive, prosocial, and provocative responding to peers' emotions, sociometric likability, and teacher-rated social competence). Using a multiple regression strategy, the contributions of sibling reactions and moderating demographic variables to preschooler emotional and social competence were evaluated. Certain sibling reactions, especially positive emotional responsiveness, were shown to play important roles. Many predictions were moderated by age of child, sex of one dyad member
Long non-coding RNA deep sequencing reveals the role of macrophage in liver disorders

Liver disorders such as hepatitis, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma are a series of the most life threatening diseases along with extensive inflammatory cellular infiltrations. Macrophage has been proved to be key regulators and initiators of inflammation, and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are recommended to play critical roles in the occurrence and development of a variety of diseases. To uncover the role of macrophage in liver disorders via lncRNA sequencing method, we first applied a lncRNA classification pipeline to identify 1247 lncRNAs represented on the Affymetrix Mouse Genome 430/430A 2.0 array. We then analyzed the lncRNA expression patterns in a set of previously published gene expression profiles of silica particle exposed macrophages and liver respectively, and identified and validated sets of differentially expressed lncRNAs shared by macrophages and liver. The functional enrichment analysis of these lncRNAs was processed on the basis of their expression signatures, three aspects including cis, trans and co-acting proteins were proposed. This is the first time to correlate macrophage with liver disorders via co-expressed lncRNAs. Our findings indicated that roles of macrophage in liver disorders were double-edged, the differentially expressed lncRNAs and their corresponding regulatory genes or proteins may serve as potential diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets.
Long-range regulation at the SOX9 locus in development and disease

The involvement of SOX9 in congenital skeletal malformation was demonstrated 15 years ago with the identification of mutations in and around the gene in patients with campomelic dysplasia (CD). Translocations upstream of the coding sequence suggested that altered expression of SOX9 was capable of severely impacting on skeletal development. Subsequent studies in humans and animal models pointed towards a complex regulatory region controlling SOX9 transcription, involving ∼1 Mb of upstream sequence. Recent data indicate that this regulatory domain may extend substantially further, with identification of several disruptions greater than 1 Mb upstream of SOX9 associated with isolated Pierre Robin sequence (PRS), a craniofacial disorder that is frequently a component of CD. The translocation breakpoints upstream of SOX9 can now be clustered into three groups, with a trend towards less severe skeletal phenotypes as the distance of each cluster from SOX9 increases. In this review we discuss how the identification of novel lesions surrounding SOX9 support the existence of tissue specific enhancers acting over a large distance to regulate expression of the gene during craniofacial development, and we highlight the potential for discovery of additional regulatory elements within the extended SOX9 control region.
The impact of CLIL on affective factors and vocabulary learning

The aim of this article is twofold: to assess the effectiveness of a CLIL (content and language integrated learning) module on affective factors (motivation and self-esteem), and to test the purported blurring effect of CLIL on gender differences in foreign language learning. Forty-six students in their fourth year of compulsory secondary education were administered a background questionnaire, a questionnaire on motivation and self-esteem, and a vocabulary test. Participants’ learning of vocabulary was tested on a pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test design. Results revealed that CLIL can help reduce gender differences in motivation. Similarly, vocabulary tests indicated that the CLIL module had a similar positive effect on both male and female students’ learning of the technical content-related vocabulary.
Improving Older Adults ' Online Security : An Exercise in Participatory Design

Older adults (65+) are often considered to be technologically less savvy than the average population, particularly with respect to using online applications [4]. This can have negative consequences for their financial, health, and well being, by hindering their access to resources such as online banking, relevant health information, and connections with family members and friends. The 2011 Census [7] indicate that 66% of such adults are daily Internet users; as such, it is important to also protect older adults' online safety and privacy – especially since seniors are a significant target of Internet scams or email phishing attacks. Solutions have been proposed to address this significant problem; however, these are not widely reaching – just in one year alone, older Canadian adults have lost an estimated $10 million to Internet scams [2]. Moreover, there is very little understanding of why seniors are disproportionately falling victim to online threats, despite the availability of various technologies that block such threats (e.g. browser add-ons). For this, we have begun studying the technological and non-technological barriers to the adoption of digital security technologies by older Internet users, and exploring design changes that increase their adoption. This paper presents a preliminary investigation of a participatory design approach to developing adoptable and usable online security interfaces for older adults.
The role of intercultural contact in learning German in Hungary: a structural equation modelling approach

This study investigates how contact with the German language and its speakers affects language-related attitudes and motivated behaviour in a foreign language context, namely Hungary, by means of structural equation modelling. Questionnaire data were collected from 189 students of German, who were all between 13 and 14 years old and attended the final, eighth, grade of the primary school system. Our results revealed that students' motivated learning behaviour was not only shaped by their attitudes towards the target language and its speakers, but also by the students' experiences about speaking German with visitors to Hungary as well as the perceived importance of these contact situations. Students' experience of direct contact with speakers of German was affected by their linguistic self-confidence whereas all the other contact- and attitude-related dimen- sions were socially constructed through the influence of the students' immediate learning environment
Prion Protein and Shadoo Are Involved in Overlapping Embryonic Pathways and Trophoblastic Development

The potential requirement of either the Prion or Shadoo protein for early mouse embryogenesis was recently suggested. However, the current data did not allow to precise the developmental process that was affected in the absence of both proteins and that led to the observed early lethal phenotype. In the present study, using various Prnp transgenic mouse lines and lentiviral vectors expressing shRNAs that target the Shadoo-encoding mRNA, we further demonstrate the specific requirement of at least one of these two PrP-related proteins at early developmental stages. Histological analysis reveals developmental defect of the ectoplacental cone and important hemorrhage surrounding the Prnp-knockout-Sprn-knockdown E7.5 embryos. By restricting the RNA interference to the trophoblastic cell lineages, the observed lethal phenotype could be attributed to the sole role of these proteins in this trophectoderm-derived compartment. RNAseq analysis performed on early embryos of various Prnp and Sprn genotypes indicated that the simultaneous down-regulation of these two proteins affects cell-adhesion and inflammatory pathways as well as the expression of ectoplacental-specific genes. Overall, our data provide biological clues in favor of a crucial and complementary embryonic role of the prion protein family in Eutherians and emphasizes the need to further evaluate its implication in normal and pathological human placenta biology.
School Self-Evaluation—Conditions and Caveats

In this article, school self-evaluation as a driving force of organizational learning is scrutinized. The self-evaluation process of three Flemish secondary schools is analysed. The results of intensive case studies are compared with the schools' interpretation of a self-evaluation tool about their organizational learning culture. The study indicates that schools have difficulty in translating the data of a self-evaluation process into adequate recommendations. School administrators have a reflex of mediating organizational problems with more of the same. A longitudinal analysis of the schools' actions based on the self-evaluation process indicates that 12 months after the self-evaluation the schools were unable to realize fundamental changes.
On the Confidentiality of Information Dispersal Algorithms and Their Erasure Codes

\emph{Information Dispersal Algorithms (IDAs)} have been widely applied to reliable and secure storage and transmission of data files in distributed systems. An IDA is a method that encodes a file $F$ of size $L=|F|$ into $n$ unrecognizable pieces $F_1$, $F_2$, . , $F_n$, each of size $L/m$ ($m<n$), so that the original file $F$ can be reconstructed from any $m$ pieces. The core of an IDA is the adopted non-systematic $m$-of-$n$ erasure code. This paper makes a systematic study on the \emph{confidentiality} of an IDA and its connection with the adopted erasure code. Two levels of confidentiality are defined: \emph{weak confidentiality} (in the case where some parts of the original file $F$ can be reconstructed explicitly from fewer than $m$ pieces) and \emph{strong confidentiality} (in the case where nothing of the original file $F$ can be reconstructed explicitly from fewer than $m$ pieces). For an IDA that adopts an arbitrary non-systematic erasure code, its confidentiality may fall into weak confidentiality. To achieve strong confidentiality, this paper explores a sufficient and feasible condition on the adopted erasure code. Then, this paper shows that Rabin's IDA has strong confidentiality. At the same time, this paper presents an effective way to construct an IDA with strong confidentiality from an arbitrary $m$-of-$(m+n)$ erasure code. Then, as an example, this paper constructs an IDA with strong confidentiality from a Reed-Solomon code, the computation complexity of which is comparable to or sometimes even lower than that of Rabin's IDA.
Further Characterization of Functional Domains of PerA, Role of Amino and Carboxy Terminal Domains in DNA Binding

PerA is a key regulator of virulence genes in enteropathogenic E. coli. PerA is a member of the AraC/XylS family of transcriptional regulators that directly regulates the expression of the bfp and per operons in response to different environmental cues. Here, we characterized mutants in both the amino (NTD) and carboxy (CTD) terminal domains of PerA that affect its ability to activate the expression of the bfp and per promoters. Mutants at residues predicted to be important for DNA binding within the CTD had a significant defect in their ability to bind to the regulatory regions of the bfp and per operons and, consequently, in transcriptional activation. Notably, mutants in specific NTD residues were also impaired to bind to DNA suggesting that this domain is involved in structuring the protein for correct DNA recognition. Mutations in residues E116 and D168, located in the vicinity of the putative linker region, significantly affected the activation of the perA promoter, without affecting PerA binding to the per or bfp regulatory sequences. Overall these results provide additional evidence of the importance of the N-terminal domain in PerA activity and suggest that the activation of these promoters involves differential interactions with the transcriptional machinery. This study further contributes to the characterization of the functional domains of PerA by identifying critical residues involved in DNA binding, differential promoter activation and, potentially, in the possible response to environmental cues.
Translation, Cross‐Cultural Adaptation, and Validity of the Korean Version of the Pain Sensitivity Questionnaire in Chronic Pain Patients

The purpose of this study was to translate pain sensitivity questionnaires (PSQ) into the Korean language, perform a cross‐cultural adaption of the PSQ, and validate the Korean version of PSQ in patients with degenerative spinal disease. The PSQ was translated forward and backward, cross‐culturally adapted by 2 independent translators, and approved by an expert committee. The final Korean version of the PSQ was tested on 72 patients with degenerative spinal disease. Test–retest reliability was evaluated for 60 patients (83%) who completed the second assessment in an interval of 4 weeks. The mean PSQ‐minor, PSQ‐moderate, and PSQ‐total (standard deviation [SD]) were 5.40 (2.02), 6.46 (1.98), and 5.93 (1.93), respectively. The PSQ‐total, PSQ‐minor, and PSQ‐moderate of the Korean version showed very good internal consistencies determined by the Cronbach's α of 0.926, 0.869, and 0.877, respectively. For convergent validity, the PSQ scores of the Korean version showed significant correlations with pain catastrophizing scale (PCS) (r = 0.377, P = 0.002; r = 0.365, P = 0.003; r = 0.362, P = 0.003 for PSQ‐total, PSQ‐minor, and PSQ‐moderate of the Korean version, respectively). For test–retest reliability, the intraclass correlation coefficients were 0.782 for PSQ‐total, 0.752 for PSQ‐minor, and 0.793 for PSQ‐moderate. In conclusion, the validated Korean version of PSQ is a transculturally equivalent, reliable, and valid tool to assess individual pain sensitivity.
Pancultural Associations Between Perceived Parental Acceptance and Psychological Adjustment of Children and Adults

This meta-analysis tests the pancultural generalizability of two central postulates drawn from parental acceptance-rejection theory (PARTheory). The meta-analysis is based on 66 studies involving 19,511 respondents from 22 countries on five continents. All studies used the child and adult versions of the Parental Acceptance-Rejection Questionnaires for Mothers and for Fathers as well as the child and adult versions of the Personality Assessment Questionnaire. Results of analyses showed that the mean unweighted and weighted effect sizes of correlations between perceived maternal and paternal acceptance with offspring’s psychological adjustment were significant for both children and adults across all cultures studied. The results also showed that the mean weighted effect size of the correlation between paternal acceptance and psychological adjustment was significantly stronger than the mean weighted effect size of the correlation between maternal acceptance and psychological adjustment for children (but not for adults).
Blissfully ignorant: the effects of general privacy concerns, general institutional trust, and affect in the privacy calculus

Existing research on information privacy has mostly relied on the privacy calculus model, which views privacy‐related decision‐making as a rational process where individuals weigh the anticipated risks of disclosing personal data against the potential benefits. In this research, we develop an extension to the privacy calculus model, arguing that the situation‐specific assessment of risks and benefits is bounded by (1) pre‐existing attitudes or dispositions, such as general privacy concerns or general institutional trust, and (2) limited cognitive resources and heuristic thinking. An experimental study, employing two samples from the USA and Switzerland, examined consumer responses to a new smartphone application that collects driving behavior data and provided converging support for these predictions. Specifically, the results revealed that a situation‐specific assessment of risks and benefits fully mediates the effect of dispositional factors on information disclosure. In addition, the results showed that privacy assessment is influenced by momentary affective states, indicating that consumers underestimate the risks of information disclosure when confronted with a user interface that elicits positive affect.