Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Non-Oil Exports in the Economic Growth of Nigeria: A Study of Agricultural and Mineral Resources

Exports have been described as catalysts for overall development and increase the earnings of the country thereby creating an avenue for growth by raising the national income of the country. Since the importance of foreign income cannot be over-emphasized, this study therefore examines the performance of non – oil exports over the years as well as the reason for that pattern and level of performance. The study evaluates the performance of Nigeria’s export promotion strategies as to whether they have been effective in diversifying the productive base of the Nigerian Economy from Crude oil as the major source of foreign exchange. The study runs from 1981 through 2010. Findings from the study reveal that non – oil exports have performed below expectations giving reason to doubt the effectiveness of the export promotion strategies that have been adopted in the Nigerian Economy. The study reveals that the Nigerian Economy is still far from diversifying from crude oil export and as such the crude oil sub – sector continues to be the single most important sector of the economy. The study made some recommendations for diversification to be achieved and for enhancing the productivity and output of non –oil commodities as well as providing markets for the commodities. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013. v3n2p403
Nanohydroxyapatite used as a pulpotomy and direct pulp capping agent in primary pig teeth.

PURPOSE Recently, a fully Nanocrystalline Hydroxyapatie (NHA) paste has been introduced for augmentation procedures in osseous defects and is attracting increasing interest in medicine and dentistry. The purpose of the present study was to assess and compare the pulp response of pig primary teeth after capping with NHA and formocresol in pulpotomy and NHA and calcium hydroxide in direct pulp capping. METHODS Forty teeth of two 4-month old pigs were pulpotomized and capped with these materials. Four weeks later, the animals were euthanized and the specimens were prepared for histological examination. RESULTS In the pulpotomy groups, there was a significant difference between NHA and FC in terms of pulp response, hard tissue formation and normal pulp tissue preservation. In the direct pulp capping groups, there was no significant difference between NHA and Ca(OH)2 in terms of criteria mentioned above. CONCLUSIONS The results of the present histological study show that, in the short term and in non-carious pig teeth, NHA appears to be biocompatible and provokes no moderate or severe inflammatory reaction in pulp tissue in both pulpotomy and direct pulp capping treatments.
The study of the European community: The challenge to comparative politics

The theoretical study of the European Community is traditionally conducted by using international relations approaches. However, as the Community has developed ‘an internal political arena’, several approaches have emerged from comparative politics. Contrasting the international relations and comparative politics approaches derived from the same ontological and methodological assumptions suggest that whereas the former (such as neo‐functionalism and intergovernmentalism) may be valid for the analysis of European ‘integration’, comparative politics approaches (such as cooperative federalism, consociationalism, and the Lipset‐Rockan thesis) are more appropriate for the analysis of European Community ‘polities’.
ERP IMPLEMENTATION FRAMEWORK FOR PRIVATE INSTITUTION OF HIGHER LEARNING ENVIRONMENT IN MALAYSIA

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are widely used by many multinational companies throughout the world. Recently, many institutions of higher learning have replaced their legacy systems to ERP systems as a means for integration advantages. Investment with this ERP system are representing the largest investment for institutions of higher learning, they invest millions of dollars and the time taken for the implementation sometimes takes two to three years, or even more. Without a solid history of successes and failures, implementers are at a disadvantage in knowing how best to implement ERP systems so that they will provide operational and strategic benefits to their owners. Due to these problems, this research is carried out in order to establish an implementation Campus ERP framework for Malaysia private institution of higher learning base on the hybrid framework. Key-Words: Campus Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Framework and Institution of higher learning.
Accounting for School-Sector Differences in University Entrance Performance

School-sector differences in student performance are often viewed as largely reflecting the intake characteristics of students and having little to do with differences in the provision of teaching and learning between school sectors. The contrary view is that school-sector differences show that non-government schools ‘add value’ to student performance through their delivery of the curriculum. This paper analyses tertiary performance (ENTER scores) among students who participated in the 2003 PISA study. It examines the extent to which school-sector differences are accounted for by students' socio-economic background, prior achievement, and various aspects of student learning. It concludes that sector gaps in students' tertiary entrance performance can be only partially attributed to socio-economic background and there are moderate value-added effects for school sector when taking into account students' prior achievement. Although aspects of student learning had important effects on ENTER scores, they generally did not further account for school-sector differences. Further analyses suggest that nongovernment schools promote a more academic environment that lifts student performance. This finding has policy implications for all sectors.
Use of classroom environment assessments in school psychology: A British perspective

The move from individual-centered to systems-oriented and consultancy-based approaches has inevitably affected school psychologists' perceptions of and need for appropriate assessment techniques. Of particular importance are techniques that make it possible to assess participants' perceptions of teaching-learning contexts. One such technique (Fraser's Individualised Classroom Environment Questionnaire) is described, together with the rationale of individualized learning on which it is based. Preliminary data on the validity and reliability of the ICEQ in English secondary schools are provided, and illustrative examples are presented on ways in which systems-oriented consultant psychologists can employ such data in their professional practice.
A double-blind randomized controlled trial of augmentation and switch strategies for refractory social anxiety disorder.

OBJECTIVE Most patients remain symptomatic after an initial intervention with approved treatments for generalized social anxiety disorder. This randomized controlled trial provides systematic, prospectively derived data on the relative benefits of "next-step" pharmacotherapies to improve outcomes for individuals with generalized social anxiety disorder who remain symptomatic after initial treatment. METHOD This three site, 12-week, double-blind randomized controlled trial compared the relative benefits of three strategies for patients remaining symptomatic (Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale [LSAS] score >50) after a 10-week trial of sertraline alone: the addition of up to 3.0 mg/day of clonazepam (sertraline plus clonazepam), a switch to up to 225 mg/day of venlafaxine, or prolonged sertraline treatment with placebo (sertraline plus placebo). RESULTS A total of 397 participants received at least one dose of sertraline; 181 nonresponders (LSAS score >50) at week 10 were randomly assigned to sertraline plus clonazepam, switch to venlafaxine, or sertraline plus placebo. Overall, 21% of patients achieved remission (LSAS score ≤30) at the endpoint, and 27% of patients assigned to sertraline plus clonazepam achieved remission compared with patients assigned to sertraline plus placebo (17%) or venlafaxine (19%), but the differences did not reach significance. Sertraline plus clonazepam was associated with a significantly greater drop in LSAS severity (p=0.020) and disability (p=0.0028) compared with sertraline plus placebo; no significant differences were observed on these parameters between venlafaxine and either sertraline plus placebo or sertraline plus clonazepam. In supplemental analysis, the overall response rate (LSAS score ≤50) was 46%, including a significantly greater proportion of patients in the sertraline plus clonazepam group (56%) compared with the sertraline plus placebo group responding (36%; p=0.027); differences did not reach significance between venlafaxine and sertraline plus placebo or sertraline plus clonazepam. CONCLUSIONS The findings suggest that the clonazepam augmentation strategy provides relative benefits for sertraline nonresponders in social anxiety disorder.
The polysemy of punishment memorialization: Dark tourism and Ontario's penal history museums

Contributing to debates about cultural representations of prisons and prisoners, as well as exploring the crossover between the dark tourism literature and cultural criminology, this article reflects on how penal museums in the province of Ontario, Canada, create and communicate meaning as it regards imprisonment and punishment. Drawing from field notes made after observations at penal museums located in central and eastern Ontario cities and towns, we contend that penal museum relics offer a polysemy of meaning to viewers, as critical, indifferent and punitive interpretations are possible. Based on analysis of tour guide narratives as well as penal relics, we explore how the process of memorialization in many of these museums is organized around the idea of penal reform, which positions imprisonment and punishment as remnants of the past and introduces a social distance between the punished and the penal spectator.
Supporting Conceptual Change in School Science: A possible role for tacit understanding

When students reason during school science, they often refer to conceptions that are derived from out-of-school experiences and are poor proxies for science orthodoxy. However, for some areas of science, these conceptions represent only a proportion of students' full conceptual knowledge, for tacit understanding exists that is superior to the understanding displayed when reasoning. Noting that tacit understanding is engaged when events are judged as natural or non-natural, the paper is concerned with software that: (a) requires direction and speed of falling objects to be predicted, i.e. a typical science reasoning task that engages conceptual knowledge; (b) presents simulations of predicted motion in the expectation that its naturalness or non-naturalness would be recognised. An evaluation study is reported where children aged 8–12 years worked with the software in contexts that typify computer use in classrooms, i.e. individually under adult guidance (n = 44 children) or in pairs with a classmate (n = 48 children). They were observed while they did this. Reasoning about object fall was assessed via change from individual pre-tests administered prior to software usage to individual post-tests administered a few weeks afterwards. The children who worked with the software showed greater pre- to post-test gains in conceptual understanding than control children (n = 47 children), who lacked software experience. The gains were especially marked for the children who worked in pairs. The approach taken is contrasted with traditional approaches to conceptual change in school science, e.g. strategies that rely upon classroom experiments.
Reconsidering the dimensions of approaches to learning

Background. The dimensionality of student approaches to learning, inherent in the instruments commonly used to measure them, lacks consistency with research, particularly concerning Asian students, conducted since the original instruments were devised. Aims. The study examined four strands of evidence to examine whether, and if so how, the dimensionality of the instruments should be modified. 1. A qualitative study of students’ perceptions of the motivational aspects of curricula. 2. A study by confirmatory factor analysis of the SPQ and LPQ which suggested that the surface strategy subscale can be split into two. 3. Recent research, mainly in Asia, which suggests the existence of approaches to learning which combine understanding with memorisation. 4. A review of literature relevant to the motivational dimensions of approaches to learning. Methods and Samples. Item 1 used semi-structured interviews with 55 undergraduate students. Item 2 used confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 4863 university students from Hong Kong universities who completed the Study Process Questionnaire. Items 3 and 4 were drawn from a review of pertinent literature. Results. The strands of evidence confirm earlier work which suggests that approaches to learning are best described by a model with two main factors, which we labelled meaning and reproducing. Each main factor has a strategy indicator characterised principally by the presence or absence of the intention to understand the material. We also found evidence of four motivation indicators; intrinsic interest, a positive motivator referring to courses with good career preparation, a negative minimising motive and achievement motivation. The final category needs to take into account the evidence of communal rather than competitive achievement motive. Conclusions. Our suggestion is that the instruments be redeveloped in two forms. A simple two-factor- deep and surface- instrument would be suitable for teaching evaluation and simple research applications. The development and testing of an instrument which took into account all the strategy and motive elements would be a useful exercise in clarifying the dimensionality of approaches to learning. It would also permit a more thorough examination of cultural influences upon approaches to learning.
Dynamics computation of structure-varying kinematic chains and its application to human figures

This paper discusses the dynamics computation of structure-varying kinematic chains which imply mechanical link systems whose structure may change from open kinematic chain to closed one and vice versa. The proposed algorithm can handle and compute the dynamics and motions of any rigid link systems in a seamless manner without switching among algorithms. The computation is developed on the foundation of the dynamics computation algorithms established in robotics, which is superior in efficiency due to explicit use of the generalized coordinates to those used in the general-purpose motion analysis softwares. Although the structure-varying kinematic chains are commonly found in computing human and animal motions, the computation of their dynamics has not been discussed in literature. The developed computation will provide a general algorithm for the computation of motion and control of humanoid robots and computer graphics human figures.
Therapist Self-Disclosure to Clients in Psychotherapy

This study assessed the extent to which therapists reveal information about themselves to psychotherapy clients in four areas: demographic information, personal beliefs, personal experiences, and affective experiences. Responses were obtained from 63 male Diplomates of the American Board of Professional Psychology. Disclosure occurred with equal frequency in all four areas, but disclosure of affective experiences appeared to increase overtime. Possible influences of therapist self-disclosure on intervention effectiveness are discussed.
The Role of Phonology in Young Children Learning to Read Words: The Direct-Mapping Hypothesis.

Abstract We present three experiments concerned with the processes used by 5-year-old children in learning to read words. In the first two experiments, based on a technique introduced by Ehri and Wilce (1985), children learned to associate printed three- or four-letter abbreviations, or cues, with spoken words (e.g., bzn for the word basin). All but one of the letters in the cue corresponded to phonemes in the spoken word. The single exceptional letter in the cue corresponded to a phoneme that was articulated similarly (Phonetic cues, e.g., z rather than s in bzn) or dissimilarly (Control cues, e.g., f rather than s in bfn) to one in the word. These critical letters were positioned either at the beginning or in the middle of the cues. Children found the phonetic cues easier to learn than the control cues when the critical letter was in the middle or at the beginning of the word. In a third experiment children learned to read words with a relatively direct correspondence between their letters and sounds more easily than words with less obvious letter-sound correspondences. It is argued that from a very early stage in learning to read, children are sensitive to the relationships between the phonological and written forms of words.
Corpus-based Semantic Class Mining: Distributional vs. Pattern-Based Approaches

Main approaches to corpus-based semantic class mining include distributional similarity (DS) and pattern-based (PB). In this paper, we perform an empirical comparison of them, based on a publicly available dataset containing 500 million web pages, using various categories of queries. We further propose a frequency-based rule to select appropriate approaches for different types of terms.
Excused Versus Unexcused: How Student Absences in Elementary School Affect Academic Achievement

The literature on school absences has focused predominantly on the reasons for student truancy, or it has assessed only aggregate student absences in their effect on achievement. However, this study brings forth a new issue: the relationship between types of absences—excused versus unexcused—and school performance. With a quantitative model of educational achievement on a longitudinal multilevel data set of all second-through fourth-grade students in the Philadelphia School District from 1994 to 2000, this study disaggregated absence information to provide new insight on the attendance–achievement relationship. Specifically, a model using fixed effects with classroom-level clustering was employed to determine how the distinction among varying proportions of excused versus unexcused absences related to students’ standardized test performance in reading and math. This article demonstrates that distinguishing between students with high rates of excused or unexcused absences is significant. Having a higher proportion of excused absences to total absences exhibits a positive relationship between reading and math test scores. Conversely, students with a higher proportion of unexcused absences places them at academic risk, particularly in math achievement and as early as in elementary school. Implications for policy are discussed.
Major improvements, but persisting inequalities in infant survival in Estonia 1992-2002.

BACKGROUND Inequality in adult health increased in Estonia during the transition period after 1991. We examined inequality in infant survival from 1992 to 2002. METHODS All 132 854 singleton live births reported to the Estonian Medical Birth Registry in 1992-2001 were linked to the Estonian Mortality Database. The effect of mother's education, nationality, marital status, and place of residence on neonatal (0-27 days) and post-neonatal (28-364 days) death was evaluated in logistic regression with adjustments for maternal age, parity, smoking, sex of the infant, birth weight, and gestational age. RESULTS Infant mortality decreased substantially. Risk of death in neonatal period was lowest in Tartu, with a decline from 4.9/1000 in infants born in 1992-1996 to 2.1/1000 in those born in 1997-2001. Decline in neonatal mortality in other regions was from 9.2/1000 to 5.1/1000. Persisting regional differences were unexplained by mothers' nationality, education, or marital status, or the infants' length of gestation. Decline in post-neonatal mortality was less marked and although risk differences between different socio-economic groups decreased, mothers' marital status and education in particular remained strongly associated with risk of post-neonatal death [odds ratio for infants born to mothers with basic or lower education compared to university education 3.70 (95% confidence interval 2.34-5.85) in 1992-1996 and 3.56 (2.06-6.14) in 1997-2001]. CONCLUSIONS Infant survival improved appreciably in Estonia after 1991 and risk differences between social groups decreased. The improvements were not accompanied by reduction in the strength of the effects of social characteristics on infant death measured as risk ratios.
Effect of Two Frequencies of Whole-Body Vibration Training on Balance and Flexibility of the Elderly: A Randomized Controlled Trial

ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate the effects of whole-body vibration training with different frequencies on the balance and flexibility of the healthy elderly. DesignThe participants were recruited from hospital volunteers and the community; all of them were healthy subjects, all over 65 years of age. The study involved three randomized groups in a parallel and single-blind design. The main outcome variables included the limits of stability test and the sit and reach test, which were measured at pre-training, Month 1 (Mid-training), Month 3 (Post-training), and Month 6 (Follow-up). ResultsA total of 45 subjects, with a mean age of 69.6 ± 3.9 years, were randomly divided into three groups. There was significant interaction in the performance of the limits of stability and sit and reach tests in the different groups at the four different time points (F = 25.218, P < 0.001, F = 12.235, P < 0.001, respectively). There was a significant difference in balance performance between the vibration groups at the frequencies of 20 Hz and 40 Hz and the control group at Month 1, Month 3, and Month 6 (P < 0.001). ConclusionWhole-body vibration training at 20 Hz has significant benefit to the balance and flexibility of the elderly who do not engage in habitual exercise.
A Case‐Control Study of Diabetes during Pregnancy and Low Milk Supply

Low milk supply is one of the most common reasons for stopping breastfeeding. Correlates of glucose intolerance are risk factors for delayed secretory activation, but it is not known if glucose intolerance is associated with persistent low milk supply. Our objective was to determine whether exposure to diabetes in pregnancy is greater among women with low milk supply as compared to women with latch problems in a Breastfeeding Medicine Clinic (BMC). We conducted a case‐control analysis of electronic medical records. We defined cases as low milk supply, but without latch or nipple problem; and controls as latch or nipple problem without low milk supply. We calculated odds of exposure to diabetes in cases versus controls in an unadjusted model and after adjusting for covariates (maternal and infant age, Cesarean delivery, preterm birth) and comorbidities (PCOS, hypothyroid or infertility). After excluding 74 with dual diagnoses, 14.9% of cases (26/175) versus 6.2% of controls (14/226) were exposed to diabetes (OR [95%CI], 2.6[1.3‐5.2]), a relation that remained robust after adjustment for covariates and comorbidities (AOR [95%CI], 2.4[1.2‐4.9]). Thus, women with low milk supply were significantly more likely to have been exposed to diabetes than those with latch or nipple problems. Identification of physiologic parameters that underlie the association between glucose intolerance and low milk supply is needed to enable more effective therapy options.