Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Enhancement of Interfacial Exciton Dissociation by Energetic Disorder Is a Nonequilibrium Effect

The dissociation of excited electron–hole pairs is a microscopic process that is fundamental to the performance of photovoltaic systems. For this process to be successful, the oppositely charged electron and hole must overcome an electrostatic binding energy before they undergo ground state recombination. It has been observed previously that the presence of energetic disorder can lead to a reduction in recombination losses. Here we investigate this effect using a simple model of charge dynamics at a donor–acceptor interface. We consider the effect of spatial variations in electronic energy levels, such as those that arise in disordered molecular systems, on dissociation yield and demonstrate that it is maximized with a finite amount of disorder. We demonstrate that this is a nonequilibrium effect that is mediated by the dissipation driven formation of partially dissociated intermediate states that are long-lived because they cannot easily recombine. We present a kinetic model that incorporates these states and show that it is capable of reproducing similar behavior when it is parametrized with nonequilibrium rates.
Desempenho de escolares com dislexia e transtorno do déficit de atenção e hiperatividade nos processos de leitura

Este estudo tem por objetivos caracterizar e comparar o desempenho de escolares com diagnostico interdisciplinar de dislexia e TDAH com escolares com bom desempenho academico nos processos de leitura. Participaram 60 escolares de ambos os generos, de 2a a 4a serie do ensino fundamental, divididos da seguinte forma: GI, 20 escolares com dislexia; GII, 20 escolares com TDAH, e GIII, 20 escolares com bom desempenho academico, pareados segundo genero, faixa etaria e escolaridade com o GI e o GII. Os escolares foram submetidos a aplicacao das provas de Avaliacao dos Processos de Leitura - PROLEC, composta pelos processos de identificacao de letras, lexico, sintatico e semântico. Os resultados evidenciaram que os escolares do GIII apresentaram desempenho superior em relacao ao GI e ao GII. Os escolares do GI e do GII apresentaram diferenca estatisticamente significante apenas nas provas de leitura de palavras nao frequentes e leitura de nao palavras do processo lexico. A dificuldade apresentada pelo GI e pelo GII nas provas do PROLEC pode ser justificada pela dificuldade de codificacao e decodificacao de simbolos. Nos escolares com TDAH, essa alteracao se deve ao comprometimento da interacao entre o processamento visual, linguistico, atencional e auditivo, e nos escolares com dislexia e em decorrencia de falha no processo de mediacao fonologica, que depende da utilizacao do conhecimento das regras de conversao grafema-fonema para a construcao da leitura da palavra. Essas alteracoes comprometem a realizacao da leitura e a compreensao do material lido.
The effect of lung transplantation on health-related quality of life: a longitudinal study.

STUDY OBJECTIVES To assess the change in health-related quality of life (HRQL) among Dutch lung transplant patients before and after transplantation. DESIGN Prospective longitudinal study on HRQL among 24 Dutch lung transplant patients who participated first as transplant candidates, and later as recipients in the study. This study design provides an accurate estimate of the change in HRQL as a result of lung transplantation because there is no confounding between change due to differences in composition between groups of patients at the different points of follow-up and the true change as a result of the transplantation. Patients completed self-administered questionnaires before transplantation, and at 1, 4, 7, 13, and 19 months after transplantation. The main HRQL measures were: the Nottingham health profile (NHP), the State-trait Anxiety Inventory, the Self-rating Depression Scale-Zung, the Karnofsky Performance Index, the index of well-being, and activities of daily living (ADL). SETTING University Hospital Groningen, the Netherlands. RESULTS Before transplantation, patients report major restrictions on the dimensions mobility and energy of the NHP, a low level of experienced well-being, and depressive symptoms. In addition, patients experience difficulties in performing ADL and report a low ability to take care of themselves. About 4 months after transplantation, mobility, energy, sleep, ADL dependency level, and dyspnea were particularly positively affected by the lung transplantation. These improvements were maintained in the following 15 months. CONCLUSIONS Lung transplantation contributes positively to the HRQL of surviving patients over time.
Schools That Make a Difference to Post-Compulsory Uptake of Physical Science Subjects: Some comparative case studies in England

This paper presents the findings of the qualitative component of a combined methods research study that explores a range of individual and school factors that influence the uptake of chemistry and physics in post-compulsory study in England. The first phase involves using the National Pupil Database to provide a sampling frame to identify four matched pairs of high-uptake and low-uptake schools by salient school factors. Case studies of these eight schools indicate that students employ selection strategies related to their career aspirations, their sense of identity and tactics, and their prior experience. The school factors influencing subject choice relate to school management, student support and guidance, and student empowerment. The most notable differences between students in high-uptake and low-uptake schools are that students in high-uptake schools appear to make a proactive choice in relation to career aspirations, rather than a reactive choice on the basis of past experience. Schools with a high uptake offer a diverse science curriculum in the final two years of compulsory study, set higher examination entry requirements for further study and, crucially, provide a range of opportunities for students to interact with the world of work and to gain knowledge and experience of science-related careers.
Activation of Rac1 and the p38 Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase Pathway in Response to Arsenic Trioxide*

Arsenic trioxide induces differentiation and apoptosis of malignant cells in vitro and in vivo, but the mechanisms by which such effects occur have not been elucidated. In the present study we provide evidence that arsenic trioxide induces activation of the small G-protein Rac1 and the α and β isoforms of the p38 mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase in several leukemia cell lines. Such activation of Rac1 and p38-isoforms results in downstream engagement of the MAP kinase-activated protein kinase-2 and is enhanced by pre-treatment of cells with ascorbic acid. Interestingly, pharmacological inhibition of p38 potentiates arsenic-dependent apoptosis and suppression of growth of leukemia cell lines, suggesting that this signaling cascade negatively regulates induction of antileukemic responses by arsenic trioxide. Consistent with this, overexpression of a dominant-negative p38 mutant (p38βAGF) enhances the antiproliferative effects of arsenic trioxide on target cells. To further define the relevance of activation of the Rac1/p38 MAP kinase pathway in the induction of arsenic-dependent antileukemic effects, studies were performed using bone marrows from patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia. Arsenic trioxide suppressed the growth of leukemic myeloid (CFU-GM) progenitors from such patients, whereas concomitant pharmacological inhibition of the p38 pathway enhanced its growth-suppressive effects. Altogether, these data provide evidence for a novel function of the p38 MAP kinase pathway, acting as a negative regulator of arsenic trioxide-induced apoptosis and inhibition of malignant cell growth.
STUDIES ON INFLUENZA INFECTION IN FERRETS BY MEANS OF FLUORESCEIN-LABELLED ANTIBODY

By means of fluorescein-labelled antibody staining, specific influenza viral antigens were seen in both the cytoplasm and the nucleus of infected ciliated epithelial cells covering the nasal turbinates of infected ferrets. Initially, only a small portion of the nasal epithelium showed fluorescence, and no appreciable abnormality of the cells could be detected by hematoxylin and eosin staining. The fluorescence soon spread to involve the entire epithelium, followed by desquamation coinciding with the onset of manifest illness. Pneumonia was seen in some of the infected ferrets, and in them, viral antigens were found in the bronchial epithelium and in the mediastinal lymph nodes. A rise of viral infectivity titer paralleled the observed spread of viral antigens. Many desquamated nasal epithelial cells and macrophages containing antigen were present in nasal smears. The finding would seem to offer a method for the rapid specific diagnosis of influenza infection.
Mode-Based Information Channels in Closely Coupled Dipole Pairs

Information channels supported by two orthogonal radiation modes in a pair of closely spaced dipole antennas are investigated. The radiation impedances of the two modes are closely related to the coupling behavior of the 2-element array as a function of the antenna spacing. Through a multiport impedance matching network, the common and difference modes of the coupled antenna system can be separated into different driving ports. Conjugate match can thus be independently performed for each port, resulting in a fully matched 2-element array. Such a 2-element array with closely spaced antennas can potentially offer a significant array gain or an ideal 2 times 2 multiple input multiple output channel capacity. Full-wave simulations of a pair of half-wave dipoles with 0.1 lambda spacing have demonstrated the feasibility of the approach for narrowband applications. By combining the common mode and difference mode, approximately 3 times of the gain of a single half-wave dipole can be achieved. Experimental validation with a test bed consisting of two lambda/4 monopoles and a rat-race coupler has been carried out. The concept may be extended onto closely coupled antenna systems with different numbers of elements.
Building Large Learning Models with Herbal

In this paper, we describe a high-level behavior representation language (Herbal) and report new work regarding Herbal’s ACT-R compiler. This work suggests that Herbal reduces model development time by a factor of 10 when compared to working directly in Soar, ACT-R, or Jess. We then introduce a large ACT-R model (541 rules) that we generated in approximately 8 hours. We fit the model to learning data. The comparison indicates that humans performing spreadsheet tasks appeared to start with some expertise. The comparison also suggests that ACT-R, when processing tasks consisting of hundreds of unique memory elements over times spans of twenty to forty minutes, may have problems accurately representing the learning rates of humans. In addition, our study indicates that the spacing between learning sessions has significant effects that may impact the modeling of memory decay in ACT-R.
Double-blind, placebo-controlled study of the efficacy of reboxetine and citalopram as adjuncts to atypical antipsychotics for negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE In this study, we assessed the efficacy of 2 pharmacodynamically different antidepressants, citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and reboxetine (a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), as adjunctive therapy to risperidone and olanzapine for the treatment of negative symptoms in schizophrenia. METHOD We performed a 6-month, multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial. The recruitment period was from November 2008 to December 2011.The sample comprised 90 patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (DSM-IV criteria) who exhibited negative symptoms. The patients were recruited from 10 centers in different cities of the Spanish State. The primary efficacy measure was change in score on the negative subscale of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) between baseline and 6-month assessment. Other efficacy measures were changes in the PANSS subscales and total score, as well as the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) subscales and total score. RESULTS For statistical analysis, we employed mixed-effects models. We did not find statistically significant differences between the placebo group and the 2 treatment groups at 6-month assessments for the PANSS total (P=.6511), any PANSS subscale (negative [P=.5533], positive [P=.1723], or general psychopathology [P=.2083]), or the SANS (P= .5884). Cohen d measure showed a small effect size below the 0.5 threshold for all comparisons. CONCLUSIONS In conclusion, our results do not support adjunctive use of citalopram or reboxetine with risperidone or olanzapine for the treatment of negative symptoms in schizophrenia. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01300364.
An Investigation of the Relationship between Students' Motivation and Academic Performance as Mediated by Effort

This study investigated the relationship between university students' motivation and their academic performance, with effort acting as a mediating variable. The study strives to add to the body of knowledge on motivation, effort and academic performance, with specific reference to tertiary level institutions in the South African context. Motivation is separated into intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, which were used as the independent variables. Academic performance is the dependent variable, which was measured using the cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA). A quantitative relational design was employed to investigate the degree to which motivation predicts a students' academic performance. The data were collected through an online questionnaire from a convenience sample of 254 commerce faculty students within a university in the Western Cape, ranging from first year to fifth year of study. The empirical results obtained from the data, using the Pearson correlation coefficients, indicated significant relationships between intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation and academic performance. Evidence was further found that students' intrinsic and extrinsic motivation influenced the amount of effort they exerted in trying to achieve their desired performance outcome. Through the use of Baron and Kenny's procedure to test mediation, effort was found to be a partial mediator of the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and academic performance. Furthermore, a multiple regression analysis of the data indicated that intrinsic motivation is the strongest predictor of academic performance, followed by effort. In the regression model extrinsic motivation could not explain unique variance in academic performance.
The Role of Accounting Information in the Sentiment-Price Relation

This study reconciles inconsistent evidence on the sentiment-price relation in prior studies by explicitly considering the effects of sentiment on both investor judgments and risk preferences. Using the uncertainty in accounting information, I am able to disentangle these two effects of sentiment and investigate the causes of the variations in the sentimentprice relation. The results show that, under low uncertainty, the effect of sentiment on risk preferences dominates in the sentiment-price relation, such that a negative effect of sentiment on price is observed. In contrast, under high uncertainty, the effect is less negative and, in fact, becomes positive. This suggests that in cases of high information uncertainty, the effect of sentiment on judgments dominates in the sentiment-price relation.
A Comparative Study on Term Weighting Schemes for Text Categorization

(cid:151)The term weighting scheme, which is used to convert the documents to vectors in the term space, is a vital step in automatic text categorization. The previous studies showed that term weighting schemes dominate the performance rather than the kernel functions of SVMs for the text categorization task. In this paper, we conducted experiments to compare various term weighting schemes with SVM on two widely-used benchmark data sets. We also presented a new term weighting scheme tf:rf for text categorization. The cross-scheme comparison was performed by using McNemar’s Tests. The controlled experimental results showed that the newly proposed tf:rf scheme is signi(cid:2)cantly better than other term weighting schemes. Compared with schemes related with tf factor alone, the idf factor does not improve or even decrease the term’s discriminating power for text categorization. The binary and tf:chi representations signi(cid:2)cantly underperform the other term weighting schemes.
Designing Optimal Spectral Filters for Inverse Problems

Spectral filtering suppresses the amplification of errors when computing solutions to ill-posed inverse problems; however, selecting good regularization parameters is often expensive. In many applications, data are available from calibration experiments. In this paper, we describe how to use such data to precompute optimal spectral filters. We formulate the problem in an empirical Bayes risk minimization framework and use efficient methods from stochastic and numerical optimization to compute optimal filters. Our formulation of the optimal filter problem is general enough to use a variety of assessments of goodness of the solution estimate, not just the mean square error. The relationship with the Wiener filter is discussed, and numerical examples from signal and image deconvolution illustrate that our proposed filters perform consistently better than well-established filtering methods. Furthermore, we show how our approach leads to easily computed uncertainty estimates for the pixel values.
A Preliminary Investigation of Certain Aspects of Intonation

Intonation is the linguistic form in which the speaker organizes certain kinds of information. It is well-known that intonation is related to the fundamental frequency pattern of the speech wave, but it must also be related to changes along other acoustic dimensions because the intonation “tones” are still recognisable in whispered speech. The fundamental frequency, intensity, spectrum and duration changes associated with six intonation “tones” were investigated. The need for further work of this kind was indicated. The relation of acoustic variables and intonation was further investigated by using speech synthesis. Syllables with the same spectrum and intensity were generated in which the fundamental frequencies were controlled by the intensity variations of humanly-produced syllables spoken on six different intonation “tones”. The test established that the synthesized syllables conveyed some of the information about the intonation of the humanly-produced syllables. Methods for carrying out experiments on intonation with phonetically untrained subjects were investigated. The need for further experiments using methods of speech analysis and synthesis along lines indicated is pointed out. The importance for analysis-synthesis telephony of more extensive knowledge about intonation is discussed in some detail.
Saccharin as a Sugar Surrogate Revisited

Two papers by George Collier are reviewed and replications and extensions of these data are presented. The first paper by Collier and Bolles (1968) reported the total caloric intake of rats during sucrose versus water preference tests. In addition, a paired comparison was made with each of a wide range of sucrose solutions. The latter experiment resulted in a re-thinking of "preference" in that it showed that although rats drank more of a middle range concentration, they always consumed more of the higher concentrations in paired comparison tests. Many other behavioral studies have confirmed that the rat's attraction to the taste of sucrose is a direct function of sucrose concentration. The second paper by Collier and Novell (1967) reported that saccharin was similar to sucrose in that intake increased and then decreased as concentration increased, although in direct choice tests, higher concentrations were preferred to lower ones except in one case. Subsequent studies using a wider range of saccharin concentrations and a variety of test measures revealed, however, that saccharin preference and acceptance decreases substantially as concentration exceeds 0.4% (19.5 mM). Furthermore, saccharin versus sucrose choice tests indicate that optimal saccharin solutions (0.2-0.4%) are "isopreferred" to only dilute sucrose solutions (2-4%). Thus, at best, saccharin is only a weak surrogate for sugar.
Childhood and Society

The original and vastly influential ideas of Erik H. Erikson underlie much of our understanding of human development. His insights into the interdependence of the individuals' growth and historical change, his now-famous concepts of identity, growth, and the life cycle, have changed the way we perceive ourselves and society. Widely read and cited, his works have won numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Combining the insights of clinical psychoanalysis with a new approach to cultural anthropology, Childhood and Society deals with the relationships between childhood training and cultural accomplishment, analyzing the infantile and the mature, the modern and the archaic elements in human motivation. It was hailed upon its first publication as "a rare and living combination of European and American thought in the human sciences" (Margaret Mead, The American Scholar). Translated into numerous foreign languages, it has gone on to become a classic in the study of the social significance of childhood.
Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life

This paper presents a broad overview of doctoral research into meaningful engagement with music making in a school context drawing upon a five-year participant-observation case study. It primarily involves an examination of the meaning of music to young people in an Australian school context and the processes that facilitate that involvement. It seeks to contribute to the understanding of how meaning and the processes that may give access to meaning in music education might be constructed and interpreted by teachers and curricula. The study privileges the voices of the student as makers of music in answering the question of meaning and access to meaningful music education but does so within a systemic environment which examines all aspects of context. The intention of the paper is to elaborate the meaning of music to young people and to explore the issues of how meaningful engagement might become transformative experience. The paper argues that meaning is located in social, personal and cultural experiences and suggests the need for access to all of these in music education. Through a narrative vignette drawn from the examination of context, it highlights the potential and possibilities of music experience for building and giving access to a range of music meanings. (The presentation will utilise recordings of children’s music embedded in the story to communicate these ideas.). An examination of the implications of what these ideas mean for a school, policy development and the characteristics and role of the teacher is drawn from the vignette. The study seeks to ‘put the meat on the bones of theory’ and prior to the conclusion lists the theoretical tenets that inform the study and in turn reciprocally enable a thicker description of each aspect of theory which contributes to the robustness of this theory. In conclusion, the paper seeks to describe how teachers might teach in and construct environments where students can make meaningful music and experience a transformation of consciousness that constitutes music learning.