Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning edge momentum: a new account of outcomes in CS1

Compared to other subjects, the typical introductory programming (CS1) course has higher than usual rates of both failing and high grades, creating a characteristic bimodal grade distribution. In this article, I explore two possible explanations. The conventional explanation has been that learners naturally fall into populations of programmers and non-programmers. A review of decades of research, however, finds little or no evidence to support this account. I propose an alternative explanation, the learning edge momentum (LEM) effect. This hypothesis is introduced by way of a simulated model of grade distributions, and then grounded in the psychological and educational literature. LEM operates such that success in acquiring one concept makes learning other closely linked concepts easier (whereas failure makes it harder). This interaction between the way that people learn and the tightly integrated nature of the concepts comprising a programming language creates an inherent structural bias in CS1, which drives students towards extreme outcomes.
Self-Supervised Siamese Learning on Stereo Image Pairs for Depth Estimation in Robotic Surgery

Robotic surgery has become a powerful tool for performing minimally invasive procedures, providing advantages in dexterity, precision, and 3D vision, over traditional surgery. One popular robotic system is the da Vinci surgical platform, which allows preoperative information to be incorporated into live procedures using Augmented Reality (AR). Scene depth estimation is a prerequisite for AR, as accurate registration requires 3D correspondences between preoperative and intraoperative organ models. In the past decade, there has been much progress on depth estimation for surgical scenes, such as using monocular or binocular laparoscopes [1,2]. More recently, advances in deep learning have enabled depth estimation via Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) [3], but training requires a large image dataset with ground truth depths. Inspired by [4], we propose a deep learning framework for surgical scene depth estimation using self-supervision for scalable data acquisition. Our framework consists of an autoencoder for depth prediction, and a differentiable spatial transformer for training the autoencoder on stereo image pairs without ground truth depths. Validation was conducted on stereo videos collected in robotic partial nephrectomy.
Keloid‐derived, plasma/fibrin‐based skin equivalents generate de novo dermal and epidermal pathology of keloid fibrosis in a mouse model

Keloids are wounding‐induced tumor‐like human scars. Unclear etiology and lack of animal models to reveal disease mechanisms and invent therapies deepen the grievous health and psychosocial state of vulnerable individuals. Epitomizing the injury–repair environment which triggers and fosters keloid formation and essential dermal/epidermal interactions in disease development, the novel animal model was established by implanting porous polyethylene ring‐supported plasma/fibrin‐based epidermal–dermal skin constructs on the dorsum of athymic NU/J mice. The implants were stable to 18 weeks, contained abundant human cells, and remodeled to yield scar architecture characteristic of keloid fibrosis compared with normal implants and clinical specimens: (1) macroscopic convex or nodular scar morphology; (2) morphogenesis and accumulation of large collagen bundles from collagen‐null initial constructs; (3) epidermal hyperplasia, aberrant epidermal–dermal patency, and features of EMT; (4) increased vasculature, macrophage influx, and aggregation; and (5) temporal‐spatial increased collagen‐inducing PAI‐1 and its interactive partner uPAR expression. Development of such pathology in the NU/J host suggests that T‐cell participation is less important at this stage than at keloid initiation. These accessible implants also healed secondary excisional wounds, enabling clinically relevant contemporaneous wounding and treatment strategies, and evaluation. The model provides a robust platform for studying keloid formation and testing knowledge‐based therapies.
Investigation of primary students’ motivation levels towards science learning

The present research was conducted with 518 students enrolled at the 6th, 7th and 8th classes of primary schools. A likert-type scale developed by Tuan, Chin and Shieh (2005) and translzated into Turkish by Yilmaz and Cavas (2007) was used to examine the motivation levels of students towards science learning. Research findings revealed that gender, academic success and taking private lesson had an effect on students' motivation levels towards science learning. It was found in the study that: the motivation level of female students was higher than male students; academic achievement and taking private course increased the motivation; and laboratory activities, and parents' educational levels did not have an effect on students' motivation.
Primary EFL Teachers’ Technology Use in China: Patterns and Perceptions

Drawing on survey data, this paper examines the patterns and perceptions of technology use by primary EFL teachers in China. Findings suggest that although Chinese EFL teachers hold positive attitudes toward the value of technology for teaching and learning, they use technology mainly for teacher-centered purposes, such as teaching preparation and instructional delivery, and seldom utilize technology for student-centered activities. Factors constraining student-oriented technological use in early EFL instruction include teacher-center pedagogical practices and lack of effective professional development that focuses on instructional design and technology integration. These findings suggest that China must redirect its effort to promote teacher conceptual and pedagogical change in integrating technology in early EFL instruction and emphasize alignment among technology, curriculum, and pedagogy in EFL teaching.
Introduction School Effectiveness in Developing Countries

He adds to this last point that `̀ it is much easier to ®nd evidence of implementation than of improved student achievement. '' In the larger ®eld of educational effectiveness research, including economically oriented education production function studies, important concerns have been ventilated as well. These concerns are about the size of `̀ net'' school effects in industrialized countries, the degree to which these are explained by the set of factors on which there is considerable international consensus, and about the limited success of studies that have attempted to test hypothetical causal models of underlying mechanisms (Creemers & Reezigt, 1996; Hanushek, 1997; Scheerens & Bosker, 1997). Hill (1998) concludes that the existing paradigm of empirical school effectiveness studies has come to an end. It is rarely possible to establish all the conditions that a full̄edged school effectiveness study would require in stand alone research projects. He sketches a new paradigm in which there can be a better integration between school effectiveness inquiry and school improvement. The core of this new paradigm is formed by system-wide monitoring and accountability studies.
Beyond Breadth-Speed-Test

We report a mixed-methods design experiment that aims to achieve deeper learning in a breadth-oriented, college-preparatory course—AP U.S. Government and Politics. The study was conducted with 289 students in 12 classrooms across four schools and in an “excellence for all” context of expanding enrollments in AP courses. Contributions include its investigation of a model of deeper learning, development of a test to assess it, and fusion of project-based learning with a traditional curriculum. Findings suggest that a course of quasi-repetitive projects can lead to higher scores on the AP test but a floor effect on the assessment of deeper learning. Implications are drawn for assessing deeper learning and helping students adapt to shifts in the grammar of schooling.
Supporting Youth at Risk: A Policy Toolkit for Middle-Income Countries

The World Bank has produced this policy Toolkit in response to a growing demand from our government clients and partners for advice on how to create and implement effective policies for at-risk youth. The author has highlighted 22 policies (six core policies, nine promising policies, and seven general policies) that have been effective in addressing the following five key risk areas for young people around the world: (i) youth unemployment, underemployment, and lack of formal sector employment; (ii) early school leaving; (iii) risky sexual behavior leading to early childbearing and HIV/AIDS; (iv) crime and violence; and (v) substance abuse. The objective of this Toolkit is to serve as a practical guide for policy makers in middle-income countries as well as professionals working within the area of youth development on how to develop and implement an effective policy portfolio to foster healthy and positive youth development.
Principled Principals?

In 2001 the Department for Education and Skills commissioned a major study of the leadership of English schools. The study made use of a wide variety of research methods in order to address a number of questions about school leaders and leadership. This article draws upon one of the many data sets of the research—the case studies of schools with ‘outstanding’ leaders—to discuss the values that leaders hold and to describe the various ways in which they are acted out. More specifically it offers a series of operational images of how the case-study principals translated their educational values into management and leadership practices. The school leaders in the case-study schools were clearly avoiding doing ‘bastard leadership’ by mediating government policy through their own values systems. The ways in which school leaders manage to promote and encourage shared values are explored and attention is given to how school leaders enact values-driven leadership specifically by: working with, managing and searching out change; paying careful attention to information management within the school; working very closely and sometimes seamlessly with theirleadership groups and management teams; and developing leadership capacityand responsibility throughout their schools.
Brain Mechanisms of Speeded Decisions in Humans

The goal of this Ph.D. thesis is to better understand the nature of decision making, and especially the way we decide quickly or accurately, by changing the height of our decision threshold, or the level of evidence we require before committing to a decision. The research involves the mathematical buildup of the threshold, how it affects behavior, and how it is implemented in the brain, both in terms of neuroanatomy and neurochemistry.
Relating Self-Concept Consistency to Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being in Eight Cultures

Western theories suggest that self-concept consistency is important for well-being, but cultural psychologists have proposed that this relationship may be weaker in collectivistic or dialectical cultures. Hypotheses regarding the ability of self-concept (cross-role) consistency and short-term stability to predict hedonic and eudaimonic well-being across cultures were tested. College students in the United States, Australia, Mexico, Venezuela, the Philippines, Malaysia, China, and Japan rated their traits in various roles at test and retest and completed measures of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. In all cultures, cross-role consistency and short-term stability were inversely associated with negative affect, an aspect of hedonic well-being, and positively associated with Big Five Emotional Stability. In contrast, cross-role consistency and short-term stability were related to eudaimonic well-being more reliably in individualistic cultures than in collectivistic cultures, although the results in China only partially conformed to this pattern. We concluded that cross-role variability and short-term instability of self-concepts have a significant temperamental or affective basis, and this temperamental basis is a cultural universal. In addition, cultural psychology predictions of a weaker relationship between self-concept consistency and well-being in collectivistic cultures, as compared with individualistic cultures, were largely supported for eudaimonic well-being.
Socio-Demographic Effects on Cultural Biases

Grid-group theory claims that patterns of social relations only, and not socio-demographic characteristics, can account for biases, of which the theory prescribes four: hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism and fatalism. Survey analysts conventionally employ respondents’ socio-demographic correlates when accounting for values. We take the value survey strategy and apply it to grid-group theory’s four biases. Employing a 1999 survey administered in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland (n= 4,832), we combine two goals in this article. We test how sex, age, education and income can account for biases. By extension, we test grid-group theory’s claim of no such effect. The results show that biases are influenced by socio-demographics in ways unaccounted for by the theory. The four correlates explain on average 9 per cent of the variation in the biases. Education is the only correlate that has a negative and significant effect across all biases in all countries. Women adhere to egalitarianism, whereas men adhere to individualism. Age is a consistent positive correlate of hierarchy, whereas income is a consistent negative correlate of fatalism. Grid-group theory will not be impaired if it can be shown how robust socio-demographic correlates interact with patterns of social relations.
Societal Heavy Drinking and Suicide Mortality among Russian Youth

Research has found an aggregate association between heavy drinking and suicide rates in general, and in Russia specifically. Alcohol is one of the most serious drug problems facing Russian youth, yet the aggregate alcohol-suicide association has not been tested for this population. Aggregate mortality data for Russian regions (n = 78) for the year 2000 were used to measure youth (age 10–19) suicides and a proxy for societal heavy drinking. We employed the negative binomial estimator to test the heavy societal drinking-youth suicide hypothesis, controlling for other structural factors thought to influence suicide rates. The results showed a positive and significant association between the two for overall, male, and female rates. These results are consistent with studies of alcohol and suicide in Russia, suggesting youth suicide rates are influenced by levels of heavy drinking among youth and those close to them.
In Search of Radical Democracy: The Ideological Character of Current Political Advocacies for Culture Change in Planning

This paper argues that current attempts to situate the crisis in planning in demoralised or old planning cultures are playing a key role in strengthening the ideological commitment of planning to an advanced liberal social order. In order to provide planners with the means to understand some of the ideological mechanisms at work in such processes, the 2007 Danish structural reform and the parallel advocacy for culture change in planning are analysed. Drawing on post-Marxist theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the analysis draws attention to the need for reflection on whether the current ideological commitment of planning is that which best serves a democratic society.
DeepSketch: Deep convolutional neural networks for sketch recognition and similarity search

In this paper, we present a system for sketch classification and similarity search. We used deep convolution neural networks (ConvNets), state of the art in the field of image recognition. They enable both classification and medium/highlevel features extraction. We make use of ConvNets features as a basis for similarity search using k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN). Evaluation are performed on the TU-Berlin benchmark. Our main contributions are threefold: first, we use ConvNets in contrast to most previous approaches based essentially on hand crafted features. Secondly, we propose a ConvNet that is both more accurate and lighter/faster than the two only previous attempts at making use of ConvNets for handsketch recognition. We reached an accuracy of 75.42%. Third, we shown that similarly to their application on natural images, ConvNets allow the extraction of medium-level and high-level features (depending on the depth) which can be used for similarity search.1
Implementing the Workforce Investment Act From In Between

The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) was the first legislation since 1991 to significantly revise federal funding for adult basic education (ABE). Federal ABE funds are distributed to state agencies that are in turn responsible for awarding the funds to local programs. In this role, the state agencies are in a pivotal in-between position in the policy process. This qualitative study identified and analyzed the ways in which preconditions that the state agencies' leadership created in four focal states helped shape their responses to new demands placed on them and the programs they fund by the new accountability system mandated by WIA. In particular, the findings look at how anticipating future policy changes, using relationships with the field, and using a professional development infrastructure influence the actions of state agencies when they function in between federal policy and local programs.
Towards a Biopsychological Understanding of Costly Punishment: The Role of Basal Cortisol

Recent findings have documented a negative relation of basal endogenous cortisol and aggression after a provocation (i.e., reactive aggression) in humans. We build on these findings and investigated the relation of endogenous cortisol and reactive aggression in a social dilemma situation, that is, costly punishment of individuals who did not appropriately contribute to a common group project. Specifically, we predicted that basal cortisol is negatively related to costly punishment of uncooperative individuals. In the present study, basal cortisol was assessed prior to a public goods game with the option to punish other group members. In line with previous research on reactive aggression and basal cortisol, we found that basal cortisol was indeed negatively related to costly punishment. The findings are important for understanding costly punishment because this tendency has been documented as a possible basis for the evolution of cooperation.
Correlation between the discharges of motor units recorded from the same and from different finger muscles in man.

1. Cross‐correlation analysis of the discharges of individual motor units recorded from various different finger muscles has been performed during weak, isometric, voluntary contractions in man. 2. The dominant feature in 88% of the cross‐correlograms studied was a narrow, central peak, the area of which significantly exceeded that expected for independent processes (P less than 0.001). The highest bin counts in these central peaks were mostly within 5 ms of time zero in the histograms, and the base of these peaks extended between 5 and 31 ms (modal value = 13 ms with 90% of the values lying between 8 and 18 ms). The width and displacement of the central cross‐correlogram peaks were similar irrespective of whether the contributory spike trains were recorded from motor units active in the same finger muscle or recorded from motor units in different, co‐activated finger muscles. 3. The time course of the central peaks in this study was found to be consistent with the hypothesis that it is generated by the joint occurrence of EPSPs evoked in motoneurones by branches of common stem presynaptic fibres using the theoretical model developed by Kirkwood (Kirkwood & Sears, 1978). The model parameters providing the best fit with our experimental data imply that synaptic contacts on motoneurones made by these common inputs lie on average peripherally in the dendritic tree and generate small (less than 300 microV) EPSPs superimposed on a high level of background synaptic noise. 4. Minima (troughs) were found either side of the central peak in 27% of the cross‐correlograms studied, and their appearance was invariably associated with a large central peak. These secondary features could not be modelled with the same operator parameters that describe the central peaks. Their presence was particularly noticed in association with very regular discharges from the output motoneurones. 5. Smaller and broader secondary peaks symmetrically displaced 30‐55 ms either side of the large, narrow central peak were observed in 7% of the cross‐correlograms studied. We suggest that these secondary features which were found at lags shorter than the interspike interval of the contributory motor unit spike trains reflect the autocorrelation functions of the spike trains of common input fibres. On this basis the observed displacement of these secondary peaks from the primary feature in the cross‐correlogram indicate firing rates for common input fibres in the range 18‐33 impulses s‐1. 6. In a small number of cases (1.4%) the cross‐correlogram was flat and indistinguishable from the results of cross‐correlating independent spike train data.
Psychotic Organization as a Metaphoric Frame for the Socioanalysis of Organizational and Interorganizational Dynamics

The notion of the pathological organization provides a starting frame for better understanding irrationality and madness in organizations, profit and nonprofit organizations alike. It has been used up until now to gain a better understanding of severe personality disturbances caused by pathological fixation. The concept originally referred to the narrow frame of individual ego organization, but it is argued that the notion of the psychotic organization provides a useful metaphoric frame for application to social organizations. The attempt is made to apply the metaphor to various organizational and interorganizational contexts: the intraorganizational dynamics of hospitals, the interorganizational relatedness of the hostile takeover of an enterprise, and the increasing dominance of the shareholder value optimization in a global context. The attempt at ignoring and denying psychotic organizational dynamics is vain, resembling the futile efforts to escape a plague that is devastating the country, which is so lucidly described by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Masque of the Red Death. ”