Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing Young Learners' Strategic L2 Vocabulary Learning in the Framework of Self-Regulation

Strategies used for learning a second language have been in the centre of research for more than three decades. However, in the study of second language acquisition the emphasis has only recently shifted to studying learning strategies in the broader framework of selfregulation. The aim of the present dissertation is to contribute to second language research by investigating Hungarian primary school learners’ vocabulary learning strategies in English as a foreign language from this broadening perspective. The research was designed to assess strategic vocabulary learning, to propose categories of young learners’ self-regulated vocabulary learning behaviour, and highlight age-related differences in this area. More than 400 learners took part altogether in the research in three age groups representing the population of language learners in a Hungarian primary school setting. Owing to the cognitive nature of strategic language learning, data sources were primarily based on the participants’ own perceptions of their learning process in the form of interviews and questionnaires, complemented by data obtained in classroom observation. The successive parts of the research, irrespective of the data collection method, were strongly based on each other in order to provide a large database, and to guarantee the feasibility of developing a final quantitative instrument. The results indicate that young learners use a variety of strategies to learn vocabulary, are aware of what they are doing to learn words, use self-motivational strategies, and employ their self-regulating capacity; consequently they can be considered as self-regulated in learning vocabulary. The classification of strategies yielded the aforementioned categories of young learners’ self-regulated vocabulary learning. As for agerelated differences, the youngest surprisingly proved to be the most strategic in vocabulary learning, indicating that self-regulation in vocabulary learning has developed by the age of 89. The finding that the oldest primary school learners were the second most strategic implies that although there is a certain change in self-regulated vocabulary learning, it does not show a linear development in the strongest sense and requires further explanation. The quantitative questionnaire that was developed and validated throughout the research can be used to measure young learners’ vocabulary learning in different contexts. A further and probably the most important outcome of the research are the various implications for teachers and teacher
Using a relational approach to retaining students and building mutually beneficial student‐university relationships

The practice of public relations at most universities has been relegated to a single office concerned primarily with managing institutional reputation. When public relations is conceptualized as relationship management, however, the role of public relations is expanded to include a campus‐wide approach to initiating, developing, and maintaining relationships with key public members who can affect the institution economically, socially, politically, and culturally. In the current investigation, 164 students were surveyed to determine whether student‐university relationship attitudes differentiated those who indicated they were planning on returning to the institution from those who were not or were undecided. Respondent student‐university relationship attitudes were measured using the Bruning and Ledingham (1999) organization‐public relationship scale, which examines the respondent's personal, professional, and community relationship attitudes. Also, focus groups were conducted to define student‐university personal, professional, and community relationships. The results showed that community relationships were strongly related to the criterion and personal and professional relationships were substantially related. Implications of these findings for the practice of public relations, suggestions for managing student‐faculty relationships, and limitations to the investigation are discussed.
Impact of age at first drink on stress-reactive drinking.

BACKGROUND Although recent data from animal models indicate that adolescent ethanol exposure increases self-administered ethanol intake in adult rats, the impact of age at first drink on the association between stress and drinking has not been studied in humans. METHODS Data collected in the 2001 to 2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) were used to estimate the extent to which age at first drink modified the association between stress and average daily volume (ADV) of ethanol intake in a sample of 26,946 past-year drinkers. Successive models estimated the magnitude and significance of the interaction between age at first drink (ages 14 or younger, 15-17, and 18 or older) and number of stressors (out of 12 past-year negative life events) after (1) adjusting for sociodemographic characteristics, (2) additionally adjusting for family history of alcoholism, comorbid psychopathology, adolescent, and past-year tobacco and illicit drug use, and (3) additionally adjusting for all other significant interactions with number of stressors. RESULTS Even after adjusting for a wide range of confounders and their interactions with stress, initiation of drinking at ages 14 and younger increased the association between the number of stressors and ADV of ethanol consumption by 8% (p=0.014), when considering the full range of 12 potential stressors. In fact, the positive association between stress and consumption was significant only for this group of drinkers with early adolescent exposure to ethanol. Within this group, ADV of consumption increased by an average of 7% with each additional stressor experienced, although the exact percentage increase varied as a function of other covariates that had significant interactions with stress. When a reduced set of 4 stressors was considered, the magnitudes of the associations were mostly unchanged, but the modifying effect of age at first drink fell short of statistical significance (p=0.309) in the fully adjusted model. CONCLUSIONS The findings of this study are consistent with the argument that early-onset drinking may increase stress-reactive ethanol consumption; however, these findings need to be replicated in an experimental human study in order to control fully the direction of the relationship between stress and consumption.
Practice Differences in the Diagnosis and Management of Eosinophilic Esophagitis Among Adult and Pediatric Gastroenterologists in Israel

Objectives: Eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) guidelines call for similar practices in adults and children with EoE. We compared the diagnostic and management practices of gastroenterologists treating adult and pediatric patients suspected of having, or diagnosed with, EoE. Methods: A 19-question multiple-choice questionnaire was given to gastroenterologists treating either adults or children. Questions explored 4 areas of interest: physician demographics, diagnosis and tissue sampling practices, management, and the need for societal publications on EoE. Results: Completed questionnaires were returned by 85/180 adult and 30/40 pediatric gastroenterologists (PGs). Compared to PGs, adult gastroenterologists (AGs) took esophageal biopsies significantly less frequently in the following scenarios: endoscopy without esophageal symptoms or macroscopic endoscopic findings (10% vs 57%; P < 0.001), dysphagia without macroscopic findings (83% vs 100%; P = 0.019), and gastroesophageal reflux symptoms with distal esophageal erythema (44% vs 100%; P < 0.001). Significantly fewer AGs reported taking gastric and duodenal biopsies when EoE was suspected (29% vs 90%; P < 0.001). AGs more often followed patients clinically (30% vs 0%; P < 0.001) rather than endoscopically, and were far less inclined to implement elimination diets compared to PGs (23% vs 68%; P < 0.001). Conclusions: Significant disparities exist between gastroenterologists treating adult and pediatric patients with EoE. These findings may impact rates of diagnosis, appropriate treatment, monitoring, long-term outcomes, and may affect negatively transition from pediatric to adult care.
Multi‐functional flow cytometry analysis of CD4+ T cells as an immune biomarker for latent tuberculosis status in patients treated with tumour necrosis factor (TNF) antagonists

Although monitoring tuberculosis (TB) infection during long‐term treatment with tumour necrosis factor (TNF) antagonists is of great importance, no monitoring strategy has yet proved successful. Indeed, even the newly proposed interferon‐gamma release assays (IGRAs) are known to produce dynamic changes in IFN‐γ plasma levels, making them unreliable indicators of patients' pathological/clinical status. We used intracellular cytokine flow cytometry (ICCFC) to investigate the performance of multi‐functional CD4+ T cells producing IFN‐γ, interleukin (IL)‐2 and/or TNF in response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis‐specific antigens in subjects treated with TNF antagonists. Patients were classified into three groups based on their TB status before commencement of treatment and on IFN‐γ level fluctuations evaluated by IGRA during a 36‐month follow‐up period. The cytokine profile of M. tuberculosis‐specific CD4+ T cells showed that latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) subjects had a higher frequency of double‐positive IFN‐γ+ IL‐2+ CD4+ T cells and triple‐positive IFN‐γ+ IL‐2+ TNF+ CD4+ T cells compared to those without LTBI, who showed IFN‐γ‐level fluctuations over time. In contrast, this latter group of patients showed similar proportions of cells producing IFN‐γ alone, IL‐2 alone and IL‐2 in combination with TNF in response to M. tuberculosis‐specific antigens. It therefore appears that patients with and without LTBI infection are characterized by different intracellular cytokine profiles. This is the first study evaluating ICCFC in patients treated with TNF antagonists, and suggests that multi‐functional analysis of CD4+ T cells could be useful for ruling out TB infection in patients classified at screening as LTBI‐negative but who show IGRA fluctuations under long‐term TNF antagonist treatment.
Pattern Recognition with Slow Feature Analysis

Slow feature analysis (SFA) is a new unsupervised algorithm to learn nonlinear functions that extract slowly varying signals out of the input data. In this paper we describe its application to pattern recognition. In this context in order to be slowly varying the functions learned by SFA need to respond similarly to the patterns belonging to the same class. We prove that, given input patterns belonging to C non-overlapping classes and a large enough function space, the optimal solution consists of C-1 output signals that are constant for each individual class. As a consequence, their output provides a feature space suitable to perform classification with simple methods, such as Gaussian classifiers. We then show as an example the application of SFA to the MNIST handwritten digits database. The performance of SFA is comparable to that of other established algorithms. Finally, we suggest some possible extensions to the proposed method. Our approach is in particular attractive because for a given input signal and a fixed function space it has no parameters, it is easy to implement and apply, and it has low memory requirements and high speed during recognition. SFA finds the global solution (within the considered function space) in a single iteration without convergence issues. Moreover, the proposed method is completely problem-independent.
Regulating Emotion in the Context of Interpersonal Decisions: The Role of Anticipated Pride and Regret

Recent theories about the relation between emotion and behavior hold that social behavior is influenced not only by the experience of emotion, but also by the anticipation of emotion. We argue that anticipating future emotional states is an emotion regulation strategy when it leads to a change in behavior. In the current studies we examined how construal of a fair or an unfair situation in terms of positive or negative anticipated emotions influences the fairness of subsequent behavior. We used the Ultimatum Bargaining Game – an experimental game in which participants divide a resource between themselves and another person – as a social situation that offers the opportunity to engage in fair and unfair behavior. In Study 1 we used an autobiographical recall task to manipulate anticipated emotions. Although the task did not influence anticipated emotions directly, results showed that anticipated pride about fair behavior increased levels of fairness, whereas anticipated pride about unfair behavior decreased levels of fairness. Similarly, anticipated regret about fair behavior decreased levels of fairness, whereas anticipated regret about unfair behavior increased levels of fairness. In Study 2 we replicated this pattern of findings, and found that participants who thought about their anticipated emotions (pride or regret) in relation to unfair behavior behaved more fairly. We discuss these findings in relation to theories of emotion regulation and economic decision-making.
Personalized Music Recommendation in a Mobile Environment

Addressing the spiraling amount of music and video consumption via streaming services, in particular on mobile devices, we present a music player application for the Android platform, which employs a hybrid approach to generate a list of track recommendations for a user. We propose and evaluate two different algorithms, namely a content-based algorithm and an approach that exploits social similarity. While the former is based on rhythm features, the latter exploits "related videos" relations from YouTube. We show via a user questionnaire that recommendation results based on content slightly, but statistically significantly, outperform the social approach. Given that full audio content is not available immediately in a streaming environment, however, we suggest a hybrid, dynamic approach to music recommendation. Playlists are created as a linear, user-adjustable mixture of both content and social similarity. They are offered to the user via an Android application dubbed "Beat Commander". Besides displaying the results of the playlist generation approach as text, the player features a dynamic visualization of the playlist, using a version of Sammon's mapping.
Impulsive Buying Behaviour of Women in Apparel industry in Pakistan

Impulsive behaviour means acting on instinct, this study is to conclude the behavioural impulsivity of women in particular; this study was specifically conducted to find out the relation, and the effect of factors that may influence the impulsive buying behaviour of females in the apparel industry. This study aims to provide an insight on the impulsive buying behaviour of women, in general, in the apparel industry, specifically, and what factors trigger this impulsive buying behaviour. Through previous researches, variables were identified and operationalized in this study. The identified variables were the effect of TV/Media, self-esteem, impulsivity, anxiety and social desirability. This study is quantitative in nature, measuring the cause and effect of the selected variables on the impulsive buying behaviour of women. Primary research was conducted through the use of a verified questionnaire, which was adapted and developed. This research is cross sectional. The results of this research showed that the impulsive buying behaviour of Pakistani women is greatly influenced by social desirability, and a positive relationship was found with all the other variables (impulsivity, TV/Media, self-esteem, anxiety), but the effect of these variables was moderate. This research aims to help the marketing departments of the apparel industry in their marketing campaigns and targeting the Pakistani women efficiently.
Bridging home and school: understanding immigrant mothers’ cultural capital and concerns about play-based learning

Abstract This article explores immigrant mothers’ experiences and perspectives on early learning to identify the underlying principles of parents’ learning theories and their concerns about pedagogic practices at school. It employs data from interviews with nineteen immigrant mothers that reveal a discord between learning beliefs and practices at home and school. The paper argues that mothers’ cultural capital may shape their perspectives on learning, which may subsequently influence their children’s cultural capital and interests. Supporting children’s learning at school requires examining home learning beliefs so that teachers can establish a two-way exchange of knowledge, ideas and perspectives with common objectives of respecting differences and exploring possible reconciliation of differences. This paper urges educators to bridge home and school through engaging in dialogue with parents so that parents’ cultural capital and their understanding about play-based learning work to their children’s advantage.
Role of GABAA-mediated inhibition in controlling the responses of regular spiking cells in turtle visual cortex

The visual cortex of freshwater turtles contains pyramidal cells, which have a regular spiking (RS) firing pattern, and several categories of aspiny, inhibitory interneurons. The interneurons show diverse firing patterns, including the fast spiking (FS) pattern. Postsynaptic potentials (PSPs) evoked in FS cells by visual stimulation of the retina reach their peak amplitudes as much as 200 ms before PSPs in RS cells (Mancilla et al., 1998). FS cells could, consequently, control the amplitudes of light-evoked PSPs in RS cells by producing disynaptic, feedforward inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSPs) that overlap in time with geniculocortical excitatory postsynaptic potentials (EPSPs). Since FS cells receive recurrent, excitatory inputs from RS cells, they could also control the amplitudes of light-evoked PSPs in RS cells via polysynaptic, feedback inhibition. The in vitro geniculocortical preparation of Pseudemys scripta was used to characterize the temporal relationships of EPSPs and IPSPs produced in RS cells by electrical activation of geniculate afferents and by diffuse light flashes presented to the retina. GABAA receptor-mediated inhibition was blocked using extracellular application of bicuculline (3.5 mM) or intracellular perfusion of picrotoxin (1 μM) in individual RS cells. Electrical stimulation of thalamic afferents produced compound PSPs. Blockade of GABAA receptor-mediated IPSPs with either bicuculline or picrotoxin provided evidence for both early and late IPSPs in RS cells. Analysis of the apparent reversal potentials of light-evoked PSPs indicated the existence of early IPSPs during the first 140–300 ms following light onset. Light responses of cells perfused with picrotoxin diverged from control light responses at about 300 ms after light onset and had maximum amplitudes that were significantly different from control light responses. These experiments indicate that the responses of RS cells to both electrical and natural stimulation of geniculate afferents are controlled by both early and late IPSPs, consistent with activation of both feedforward and feedback pathways.
An efficient dual-mode floating-point Multiply-Add Fused Unit

Multiply-Add Fused (MAF) units play a key role in the processor's performance for a variety of applications. Aiming at improving the MAF functionality this paper presents a dual-mode MAF architecture, which is able to perform either one double-precision or two single-precision operations in parallel. The design attains low latency by following a dual-path approach and by combining final addition with rounding. The organization performs a MAF instruction in three cycles, while single floating-point addition in two cycles. The design has been validated and implemented with TSMC 0.13um.
Cooperative Phenomena in Networks of Oscillators With Non-Identical Interactions and Dynamics

The incipience of synchrony in a diverse population of phase oscillators with non-identical interactions is an intriguing phenomenon. We study frequency synchronization of such oscillators composing networks with arbitrary topology in the context of the Kuramoto model and we show that its synchronization manifold is exponentially stable when the coupling has certain properties. Several example systems with periodic linear, cubic and sinusoidal coupling functions were examined, some including frustration and external fields. The numerical results confirmed the analytic findings and revealed some other interesting occurrences, like phase clustering in a synchronized network of strongly coupled oscillators. We also analyze the effects of the topology by considering random weighted networks.
Farming Not Alone: Farmville Play and the Implications on Social Capital

This study explored the relationship between Farmville play and social capital. The implications of social game play for players’ psychological wellness were also assessed. Using survey data collected from Farmville players in Taiwan, it was found that the intensity of Farmville play was positively associated with players’ perceived bridging and bonding social capital. The extent to which intensive Farmville play may lead to the psychological benefits of enhanced life satisfaction and reduced loneliness was discussed. In addition, players who tended to add unacquaintances were more likely to perform better than those who added people they knew. However, connecting with existing contacts through the game provides higher sense of bonding social capital. Implications on the concept of weak and strong ties were also discussed.
Scaling limit and aging for directed trap models

We consider one-dimensional directed trap models and suppose that the trapping times are heavy-tailed. We obtain the inverse of a stable subordinator as scaling limit and prove an aging phenomenon expressed in terms of the generalized arcsine law. These results confirm the status of universality described by Ben Arous and \v{C}ern\'y for a large class of graphs.
Data-Driven Optimization of Reward-Risk Ratio Measures

We investigate a class of fractional distributionally robust optimization problems with uncertain probabilities. They consist in the maximization of ambiguous fractional functions representing reward-risk ratios and have a semi-infinite programming epigraphic formulation. We derive a new fully parameterized closed-form to compute a new bound on the size of the Wasserstein ambiguity ball. We design a data-driven reformulation and solution framework. The reformulation phase involves the derivation of the support function of the ambiguity set and the concave conjugate of the ratio function. We design modular bisection algorithms which enjoy the finite convergence property. This class of problems has wide applicability in finance, and we specify new ambiguous portfolio optimization models for the Sharpe and Omega ratios. The computational study shows the applicability and scalability of the framework to solve quickly large, industry-relevant-size problems, which cannot be solved in one day with state-of-the-art mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) solvers.