Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ecology of Youth Collective Socialization

Collective socialization (CS) is a set of neighborhood social processes that can act as a protective or risk factor for youths. CS can create trust and social cohesion reflecting the positive attributes of a neighborhood. Research emphasizes CS as a neighborhood influence, but other theoretical models suggest that CS simultaneously exists within other aspects of the social ecology as it works through the peer group and school components to influence outcomes in youths. The current study extends theories of CS by examining how multiple social ecology influences—peer, school, and neighborhood—are related to youths’ wellbeing and school misbehavior. The School Success Profile data (N= 20,749 middle school and high school youths) were used to test the hypothesis that peer, school, and neighborhood CS processes are related to these outcomes. Structural equation models indicate that both positive and negative outcomes in youths are affected by multiple social ecology influences. The discussion provides suggestions for future research to inform interventions specific to the multiple aspects of the social ecology.
Managing digital heritage an analysis of the education and training curriculum for Africa's archives and records professionals

The education and training of archives and records professionals in Africa can be traced back several decades. Archives and records practitioners in Africa's different countries have, over the years, taken varying paths to attain their professional qualifications. A number of publications have offered an analysis of the historical developments. This paper outlines progress on an ongoing study by InterPARES Trust Africa Team that examines the curricula in different Africaneducational institutions and investigates the extent to which they address the increasingly complex environment that includes the management of digital records in networked environments. It is hoped that the study will inform curriculum development and review in the area of digital records at the institutions of higher learning in Africa.
The Power of Things

Qualitative research extensively utilises interviews to gain insight into the intricacy and texture of lived experience. However, there is growing recognition of the limitations of interviewing as a data-gathering method. Popular alternatives include a move to visual methods, such as photo-production, to enhance the interviewing process. In this article, we argue for the power of materiality in this process. We propose that material objects, such as photographs, items of clothing, and personal journals, have power to simultaneously provide proof of the past, produce increased narrative depth, force change in narratives, and change the interview process and the relationships caught up within it. We illustrate these issues by drawing on data from a research project about weight loss. We conclude by considering the implications and value of using material things in research.
Consumer attitude and behavioural intention towards Internet banking adoption in India

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the determinants of the customers’ attitude and behavioural intention to use Internet banking services, paying special attention to the role of perceived risk, trust, enjoyment, website design and social influence. Design/methodology/approach – A research model grounded on the technology acceptance model (TAM) reflecting the effects of trust, perceived risk, perceived enjoyment, perceived website design and social influence on TAM constructs is proposed. The structural equation modelling technique is used to analyse a sample of 697 individual Internet banking users in India through an online survey. Findings – The results of data analysis confirm some of the hypotheses drawn from the literature. Consistent with some of the other studies, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, trust and perceived enjoyment are found to be immediate direct determinants of customers’ attitude towards using Internet banking. Attitude, perceived risk, perc.
Regulation of Alloresponses after Bone Marrow Transplantation Using Donor T Cells Expressing a Thymidine Kinase Suicide Gene

Donor T cells have a critical role in promoting engraftment after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT), but also cause graft versus host disease (GVHD). Ex vivo T cell depletion has been an effective strategy to reduce GVHD but has been associated with impaired alloengraftment and host immunity. Using an MHC-mismatched murine model, we have examined an alternative approach to GVHD prevention whereby donor T cells are selectively eliminated in vivo after BMT using transgenic T cells in which a thymidine kinase (TK) suicide gene is targeted to the T cell. Lethally irradiated AKR/J (H-2 k ) mice transplanted with TCD C57BL/6 (B6)(H-2 b ) bone marrow (BM) plus B6 TK + T cells and then treated with GCV post-BMT had significantly less GVHD severity and improved immune reconstitution compared to untreated mice, providing proof of principle that this strategy could mitigate GVHD. To assess the impact of GCV administration on alloengraftment, sublethally irradiated AKR mice were transplanted with TCD B6 BM alone or admixed with limiting numbers (5 2 10 5 ) of B6 TK + T cells. When tested 3-4 weeks post-transplant, control TCD BM mice all rejected their grafts. Conversely, >80% of GCV-treated mice had sustained donor T cell engraftment comparable to what was observed in untreated animals. Notably, GCV-treated mice were more likely to have mixed T cell chimerism early post-BMT than untreated animals, however, nearly all GCV-treated mice progressed to complete donor T cell engraftment by 2-3 months post-transplant. Preservation of engraftment was critically dependent upon the GCV administration schedule and required that GCV be delayed for at least one week post-transplant. These studies demonstrate that specific incorporation of a suicide gene into donor T cells is a viable strategy that can be employed to reduce GVHD without compromising alloengraftment.
Information Rate Analysis of a Synaptic Release Site Using a Two-State Model of Short-Term Depression

Synapses are the communication channels for information transfer between neurons; these are the points at which pulse-like signals are converted into the stochastic release of quantized amounts of chemical neurotransmitter. At many synapses, prior neuronal activity depletes synaptic resources, depressing subsequent responses of both spontaneous and spike-evoked releases. We analytically compute the information transmission rate of a synaptic release site, which we model as a binary asymmetric channel. Short-term depression is incorporated by assigning the channel a memory of depth one. A successful release, whether spike evoked or spontaneous, decreases the probability of a subsequent release; if no release occurs on the following time step, the release probabilities recover back to their default values. We prove that synaptic depression can increase the release site’s information rate if spontaneous release is more strongly depressed than spike-evoked release. When depression affects spontaneous and evoked release equally, the information rate must invariably decrease, even when the rate is normalized by the resources used for synaptic transmission. For identical depression levels, we analytically disprove the hypothesis, at least in this simplified model, that synaptic depression serves energy- and information-efficient encoding.
Effects of Chicken Interferon Gamma on Newcastle Disease Virus Vaccine Immunogenicity

More effective vaccines are needed to control avian diseases. The use of chicken interferon gamma (chIFNγ) during vaccination is a potentially important but controversial approach that may improve the immune response to antigens. In the present study, three different systems to co-deliver chIFNγ with Newcastle disease virus (NDV) antigens were evaluated for their ability to enhance the avian immune response and their protective capacity upon challenge with virulent NDV. These systems consisted of: 1) a DNA vaccine expressing the Newcastle disease virus fusion (F) protein co-administered with a vector expressing the chIFNγ gene for in ovo and booster vaccination, 2) a recombinant Newcastle disease virus expressing the chIFNγ gene (rZJ1*L/IFNγ) used as a live vaccine delivered in ovo and into juvenile chickens, and 3) the same rZJ1*L/IFNγ virus used as an inactivated vaccine for juvenile chickens. Co-administration of chIFNγ with a DNA vaccine expressing the F protein resulted in higher levels of morbidity and mortality, and higher amounts of virulent virus shed after challenge when compared to the group that did not receive chIFNγ. The live vaccine system co-delivering chIFNγ did not enhanced post-vaccination antibody response, nor improved survival after hatch, when administered in ovo, and did not affect survival after challenge when administered to juvenile chickens. The low dose of the inactivated vaccine co-delivering active chIFNγ induced lower antibody titers than the groups that did not receive the cytokine. The high dose of this vaccine did not increase the antibody titers or antigen-specific memory response, and did not reduce the amount of challenge virus shed or mortality after challenge. In summary, regardless of the delivery system, chIFNγ, when administered simultaneously with the vaccine antigen, did not enhance Newcastle disease virus vaccine immunogenicity.
Visibility and Dissemination of Women's and Men's Sociological Scholarship

Citations to published scholarly work are frequently used as indicators of scholars' visibility and of the quality or impact of research. Studies of citation patterns have raised questions about whether women's scholarshipand research on gender are cited as frequently as other research published in sociology journals of equivalent quality. This paper traces patterns of citations to a sample of 100 articles published in Social Problems during 1974-83. Evidence that citation rates are not gender neutral, primarily as a result of the citation practices of women scholars, is presented. Women's work and gender articles are cited more frequently than other works, especially in nonsociological sources and by women scholars. Women's scholarship and gender articles take longer than other works to reach peak citation years, a pattern that might disadvantage women and scholars of gender related subjects when tenure decisions are made .
Numerical simulation and first-order hazard analysis of large co-seismic tsunamis generated in the Puerto Rico trench: near-field impact on the North shore of Puerto Rico and far-field impact on the US East Coast

Abstract. We perform numerical simulations of the coastal impact of large co-seismic tsunamis, initiated in the Puerto Rican trench, both in far-field areas along the upper US East coast (and other Caribbean islands), and in more detail in the near-field, along the Puerto Rico North Shore (PRNS). We first model a magnitude 9.1 extreme co-seismic source and then a smaller 8.7 magnitude source, which approximately correspond to 600 and 200 year return periods, respectively. In both cases, tsunami generation and propagation (both near- and far-field) are first performed in a coarse 2′ basin scale grid, with ETOPO2 bathymetry, using a fully nonlinear and dispersive long wave tsunami model (FUNWAVE). Coastal runup and inundation are then simulated for two selected areas, using finer coastal nested grids. Thus, a 15″ (450 m) grid is used to calculate detailed far-field impact along the US East Coast, from New Jersey to Maine, and a 3″ (90 m) grid (for the finest resolution), encompassing the entire PRNS, is used to compute detailed near-field impact along the PRNS (runup and inundation). To perform coastal simulations in nested grids, accurate bathymetry/topography databases are constructed by combining ETOPO2 2′ data (in deep water) and USGS' or NOAA's 15″ or 3″ (in shallow water) data. In the far-field, runup caused by the extreme 9.1 source would be severe (over 10 m) for some nearby Caribbean islands, but would only reach up to 3 m along the selected section of the East coast. A sensitivity analysis to the bathymetric resolution (for a constant 3″ model grid) of runup along the PRNS, confirms the convergence of runup results for a topographic resolution 24″ or better, and thus stresses the importance of using sufficiently resolved bathymetric data, in order to accurately predict extreme runup values, particularly when bathymetric focusing is significant. Runup (10–22 m) and inundation are found to be very large at most locations for the extreme 9.1 source. Both simulated spatial inundation snapshots and time series indicate, the inundation would be particularly severe near and around the low-lying city of San Juan. For the 8.7 source, runup along the PRNS would be much less severe (3–6 m), but still significant, while inundation would only be significant near and around San Juan. This first-order tsunami hazard analysis stresses the importance of conducting more detailed and comprehensive studies, particularly of tsunami hazard along the PRNS, for a more complete and realistic selection of sources; such work is ongoing as part of a US funded (NTHMP) tsunami inundation mapping effort in Puerto Rico.
Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (review)

Throughout the Second World War Britons and Americans had contemplated the post-war future of Germany. There was consensus on only one point; that it had to be changed. They discussed a variety of alternatives ranging from punitive and vengeful policies, to those which were educational and advocated reform. The War Crimes Trials have conventionally been viewed as part of the first category. Thus it is refreshing to see the trials being regarded as part of the broad re-educative effort, rather than the usual perception of a purely retaliatory exercise motivated by a desire for punishment. Bloxham asserts ‘the trials were the chief means by which Nazism was examined in depth; they were the scalpel to the bludgeon of the larger occupation and re-education policy, the foil to generalities. ’ (p. 80)
Consistent Behavior Development: Is a Personal-Rule or a Deliberation-Based Strategy More Effective?

ABSTRACT The development of consistent health behaviors is important for chronic illness prevention and management. The current study experimentally compared two strategies—a personal-rule and a deliberation strategy—designed to help participants consistently perform their intended behaviors over a 7-week period in a real-world setting. Although the personal-rule strategy had theoretical support from behavioral economics and empirical support from both animal and human lab experiments, the deliberation strategy group was significantly more successful than the personal-rule strategy group, both initially (time to first violation, p < .01, Cohen's d = .51) and over the entire 7-week period (overall success, p < .05, Cohen's d = .18). These effects were significant even after controlling for known predictors of behavioral success, including individual-difference variables, person-behavior factors, and resolution-related factors.
Five-year follow-up using a prostate stent as fiducial in image-guided radiotherapy of prostate cancer

Abstract Purpose. To report results from the five-year follow-up on a previously reported study using image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT) of localized or locally advanced prostate cancer (PC) and a removable prostate stent as fiducial. Material and methods. Patients with local or locally advanced PC were treated using five-field 3D conformal radiotherapy (3DRT). The clinical target volumes (CTV) were treated to 78 Gy in 39 fractions using daily on-line image guidance (IG). Late genito-urinary (GU) and gastro-intestinal (GI) toxicities were scored using the radiotherapy oncology group (RTOG) score and the common toxicity score of adverse events (CTC) score. Urinary symptoms were also scored using the international prostate symptom score (IPSS). Results. Median observation time was 5.4 year. Sixty-two of the 90 patients from the original study cohort were eligible for toxicity assessment. Overall survival, cancer-specific survival and biochemical freedom from failure were 85%, 96% and 80%, respectively at five years after radiotherapy. Late toxicity GU and GI RTOG scores ≥ 2 were 5% and 0%. Comparing pre- and post-radiotherapy IPSS scores indicate that development in urinary symptoms after radiotherapy may be complex. Conclusions. Prostate image-guided radiotherapy using a prostate stent demonstrated survival data comparable with recently published data. GU and GI toxicities at five-year follow-up were low and comparable to the lowest toxicity rates reported. These findings support that the precision of the prostate stent technique is at least as good as other techniques. IPSS revealed a complex development in urinary symptoms after radiotherapy.
Probing atomic ordering and multiple twinning in metal nanocrystals through their vibrations

Control of nanocrystal (NC) crystallinity currently raises great interest because of its potential benefits in both physics modeling and technological applications. Advances in methods for synthesizing perfect single-crystalline NCs are recent, so that the effect of crystallinity on NC properties has received only limited study and still needs to be properly investigated. Here, we report that crystallinity of gold NCs dramatically modifies their vibrations. Using low-frequency Raman scattering, we clearly demonstrate that single-domain NCs vibrate differently than their multiply twinned counterparts, through the splitting of the quadrupolar vibrations, which is only observed for the former. Using the resonant ultrasound approach, we calculate the vibrational frequencies of a gold sphere and show that elastic anisotropy induces a lift of degeneracy of the quadrupolar mode in good agreement with our experimental measurements. These findings open up challenging perspectives on using Raman spectroscopy to characterize nanocrystallinity.
Enhancing antibiotic stewardship by tackling “spurious” penicillin allergy

Approximately 90‐99% of patients with a label of penicillin allergy (PenA) are not allergic when comprehensively investigated. An inaccurate label of PenA has major public health implications—longer hospital stay, more frequent hospital admissions, greater use of fluoroquinolones, glycopeptides, cephalosporins and other expensive antibiotics resulting in significantly higher costs to the health service and predisposing to Clostridium difficile, methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections and vancomycin‐resistant enterococcus. We describe lessons learnt from recent studies regarding possible reasons contributing to an inaccurate label of PenA as well as propose a concerted multidisciplinary approach to address this important public health problem. Given the unmet need for allergy services in the UK and several other countries and knowledge gaps regarding PenA amongst healthcare professionals, we describe the potential role for a computerized clinical decision support system to enable non‐specialists rapidly identify and de‐label “low‐risk” hospitalized patients with a label of PenA thereby obviating the need for allergy tests. This approach however needs rigorous evaluation for feasibility, safety, patient and physician acceptability, cost‐effectiveness and its compatibility with information technology systems currently employed in the health service.
Policy evaluation with temporal differences: a survey and comparison

Value functions are an essential tool for solving sequential decision making problems such as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Computing the value function for a given policy (policy evaluation) is not only important for determining the quality of the policy but also a key step in prominent policy-iteration-type algorithms. In common settings where a model of the Markov decision process is not available or too complex to handle directly, an approximation of the value function is usually estimated from samples of the process. Linearly parameterized estimates are often preferred due to their simplicity and strong stability guarantees. Since the late 1980s, research on policy evaluation in these scenarios has been dominated by temporal-difference (TD) methods because of their data-efficiency. However, several core issues have only been tackled recently, including stability guarantees for off-policy estimation where the samples are not generated by the policy to evaluate. Together with improving sample efficiency and probabilistic treatment of uncertainty in the value estimates, these efforts have lead to numerous new temporal-difference algorithms. These methods are scattered over the literature and usually only compared to most similar approaches. The article therefore aims at presenting the state of the art of policy evaluation with temporal differences and linearly parameterized value functions in discounted MDPs as well as a more comprehensive comparison of these approaches.We put the algorithms in a unified framework of function optimization, with focus on surrogate cost functions and optimization strategies, to identify similarities and differences between the methods. In addition, important extensions of the base methods such as off-policy estimation and eligibility traces for better bias-variance trade-off, as well as regularization in high dimensional feature spaces, are discussed.
Electricity market optimization of heat pump portfolio

We consider a portfolio of domestic heat pumps controlled by an aggregator. The aggregator is able to adjust the consumption of the heat pumps without affecting the comfort in the houses and uses this ability to shift the main consumption to hours with low electricity prices. Further, the aggregator is able to place upward and downward regulating bids in the regulating power market based on the consumption flexibility. A simulation is carried out based on data from a Danish domestic heat pump project, historical spot prices, regulating power prices, and spot price predictions. The simulations show that electricity price reductions of 18-20% can be achieved compared to the heat pumps currently in operation.
Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions: Five Practices for Helping Teachers Move Beyond Show and Tell

Teachers who attempt to use inquiry-based, student-centered instructional tasks face challenges that go beyond identifying well-designed tasks and setting them up appropriately in the classroom. Because solution paths are usually not specified for these kinds of tasks, students tend to approach them in unique and sometimes unanticipated ways. Teachers must not only strive to understand how students are making sense of the task but also begin to align students' disparate ideas and approaches with canonical understandings about the nature of mathematics. Research suggests that this is difficult for most teachers (Ball, 1993, 2001; Leinhardt & Steele, 2005; Schoenfeld, 1998; Sherin, 2002). In this article, we present a pedagogical model that specifies five key practices teachers can learn to use student responses to such tasks more effectively in discussions: anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and making connections between student responses. We first define each practice, showing how a typical discussion based on a cognitively challenging task could be improved through their use. We then explain how the five practices embody current theory about how to support students' productive disciplinary engagement. Finally, we close by discussing how these practices can make discussion-based pedagogy manageable for more teachers.