Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Essential Skills for Success: Feedback from Beginning Teachers of Students with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders

This exploratory, case study used qualitative measures to investigate the perceptions of recent college graduates who were teaching students with emotional impairments / behavioral disorders on their preparedness to teach in the field. Structured open-ended interviews were conducted to explore how well their teacher education programs prepared them to work with this population and to meet the mandate of preparing students for entry in a global society. Findings garnered positive comments regarding global competencies and suggestions for improvements in teacher preparation. Effective communication and collaboration with school personnel and parents, organizing paperwork and data collection, decision making, and more relevant field placements were areas considered to be in need of increased focus. In recent years, the federal government has increasingly emphasized the need to provide an education that readies our students to compete in the global marketplace; current research suggests that teacher preparation plays a critical role in achieving this goal (Fadel, 2010; O’Connor & Zeichner, 2011; Quezada, 2010; Zeichner, 2010, 2012). Increasing both teacher content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (knowing how to effectively teach the requisite content) are key to student learning acquisition (Mansilla & Jackson, 2011). The Longview Foundation’s seminal report on Teacher Preparation for the Global Age: The Imperative for Change (2008) reported that globally competent teachers must not only possess sound knowledge of their subject matter area, but also possess the pedagogical skills that will help students become critical thinkers and understand multiple points of view within their subject matter. Mansilla & Jackson in their work on preparing youth for global competence report that when students are taught their content matter though this broader inquiry lens and meet the expectations of global investigations, they (a) apply their growing global competence to engage new topics with sophistication (and) are prepared to succeed in college and participate in the life of work and civic society (2011, p 30)”. The critical component though is teacher education;
Analysis and detection of P2P Botnet connections based on node behaviour

Fast development of computer and especially Internet caused many issues for its users as well as its benefits. Nowadays, cyber criminals are utilizing Botnets to reach their goals. They have noticed that centralized structure is detected quickly. Hence the Peer to Peer Botnets are the most recent kind of Botnets that, they are applying encryption as well as rootkit capabilities to not being detected. In addition they mimic the performance of P2P software such as BitTorrent to make hard distinguishing the healthy packet from malicious packet in a large dataset. The proposed method is based on the correlation of Process Name besides the Ports as well as the Network Traffic. In the existing Operating Systems, every process is assigned a number that is called Port. By using this unique port and the process name, our experimental results show an acceptable rate of detection.
Expression of a Cystatin Transgene in Eggplant Provides Resistance to Root-knot Nematode, Meloidogyne incognita

Root-knot nematodes (RKN) cause substantial yield decline in eggplant and sustainable management options to minimize crop damage due to nematodes are still limited. A number of genetic engineering strategies have been developed to disrupt the successful plant–nematode interactions. Among them, delivery of proteinase inhibitors from the plant to perturb nematode development and reproduction is arguably the most effective strategy. In the present study, transgenic eggplant expressing a modified rice cystatin (OC-IΔD86) gene under the control of the root-specific promoter, TUB-1, was generated to evaluate the genetically modified nematode resistance. Five putative transformants were selected through PCR and genomic Southern blot analysis. Expression of the cystatin transgene was confirmed in all the events using western blotting, ELISA and qPCR assay. Upon challenge inoculation, all the transgenic events exhibited a detrimental effect on RKN development and reproduction. The best transgenic line (a single copy event) showed 78.3% inhibition in reproductive success of RKN. Our results suggest that cystatins can play an important role for improving nematode resistance in eggplant and their deployment in gene pyramiding strategies with other proteinase inhibitors could ultimately enhance crop yield.
Dynamics of West Nile Virus Persistence in House Sparrows (Passer domesticus)

West Nile Virus (WNV) is now endemic throughout North America, with annual recurrence dependent upon successful overwintering when cold temperatures drive mosquito vectors into inactivity and halt transmission. To investigate whether avian hosts may serve as an overwintering mechanism, groups of eight to ten House Sparrows were experimentally infected with a WN02 genotype of WNV and then held until necropsy at 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15, or 18 weeks post-infection (pi) when they were assessed for the presence of persistent infection. Blood was collected from all remaining birds every two weeks pi, and sera tested for WNV RNA and WNV neutralizing antibodies. West Nile virus RNA was present in the sera of some birds up to 7 weeks pi and all birds retained neutralizing antibodies throughout the experiment. The detection of persistently infected birds decreased with time, from 100% (n = 13) positive at 3 weeks post-infection (pi) to 12.5% (n = 8) at 18 weeks pi. Infectious virus was isolated from the spleens of birds necropsied at 3, 5, 7 and 12 weeks pi. The current study confirmed previous reports of infectious WNV persistence in avian hosts, and further characterized the temporal nature of these infections. Although these persistent infections supported the hypothesis that infected birds may serve as an overwintering mechanism, mosquito-infectious recrudescent viremias have yet to be demonstrated thereby providing proof of principle.
Acquiring multispectral light transport using multi-primary DLP projector

Acquiring the light transport (LT) of a scene is important for various applications such as radiometric analysis, image-based relighting, and controlling appearance of the scene. The multispectral LT, i.e. the LT in multiple primary colors enables us not only to enhance the color gamut but also to investigate wavelength-dependent interactions between light and a scene. In this paper, we propose a method for acquiring the multispectral LT by using a single off-the-shelf multi-primary DLP (Digital Light Processing) projector; it does not require any self-built equipment, geometric registration, and temporal synchronization. Specifically, based on the rapid color switch due to a rotating color wheel in the projector, we present a method for estimating the spectral properties of the projector in a non-destructive manner, and a method for acquiring the images of a scene illuminated only by one of the primary colors. We conducted a number of experiments by using real images, and confirmed that our method works well and the acquired multispectral LT is effective for radiometric analysis and image-based relighting.
Protein turnover, amino acid requirements and recommendations for athletes and active populations

Skeletal muscle is the major deposit of protein molecules. As for any cell or tissue, total muscle protein reflects a dynamic turnover between net protein synthesis and degradation. Noninvasive and invasive techniques have been applied to determine amino acid catabolism and muscle protein building at rest, during exercise and during the recovery period after a single experiment or training sessions. Stable isotopic tracers (13C-lysine, 15N-glycine, 2H5-phenylalanine) and arteriovenous differences have been used in studies of skeletal muscle and collagen tissues under resting and exercise conditions. There are different fractional synthesis rates in skeletal muscle and tendon tissues, but there is no major difference between collagen and myofibrillar protein synthesis. Strenuous exercise provokes increased proteolysis and decreased protein synthesis, the opposite occurring during the recovery period. Individuals who exercise respond differently when resistance and endurance types of contractions are compared. Endurance exercise induces a greater oxidative capacity (enzymes) compared to resistance exercise, which induces fiber hypertrophy (myofibrils). Nitrogen balance (difference between protein intake and protein degradation) for athletes is usually balanced when the intake of protein reaches 1.2 g·kg−1·day−1 compared to 0.8 g·kg−1·day−1 in resting individuals. Muscular activities promote a cascade of signals leading to the stimulation of eukaryotic initiation of myofibrillar protein synthesis. As suggested in several publications, a bolus of 15-20 g protein (from skimmed milk or whey proteins) and carbohydrate (± 30 g maltodextrine) drinks is needed immediately after stopping exercise to stimulate muscle protein and tendon collagen turnover within 1 h.
This Paper Is Included in the Proceedings of the 11th Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (nsdi '14). Grass: Trimming Stragglers in Approximation Analytics Grass: Trimming Stragglers in Approximation Analytics

In big data analytics, timely results, even if based on only part of the data, are often good enough. For this reason, approximation jobs, which have deadline or error bounds and require only a subset of their tasks to complete, are projected to dominate big data workloads. Straggler tasks are an important hurdle when designing approximate data analytic frameworks, and the widely adopted approach to deal with them is speculative execution. In this paper, we present GRASS, which carefully uses speculation to mitigate the impact of stragglers in approximation jobs. GRASS's design is based on first principles analysis of the impact of speculation. GRASS delicately balances immediacy of improving the approximation goal with the long term implications of using extra resources for speculation. Evaluations with production workloads from Facebook and Microsoft Bing in an EC2 cluster of 200 nodes shows that GRASS increases accuracy of deadline-bound jobs by 47% and speeds up error-bound jobs by 38%. GRASS's design also speeds up exact computations (zero error-bound), making it a unified solution for straggler mitigation.
GRB060602B = Swift J1749.4−2807: an unusual transiently accreting neutron-star X-ray binary

We present an analysis of the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) and X-ray telescope (XRT) data of GRB060602B, which is most likely an accreting neutron star in a binary system and not a gamma-ray burst. Our analysis shows that the BAT burst spectrum is consistent with a thermonuclear flash (type I X-ray burst) from the surface of an accreting neutron star in a binary system. The X-ray binary nature is further confirmed by the report of a detection of a faint point source at the position of the XRT counterpart of the burst in archival XMM-Newton data approximately six year before the burst and in more recent XMM-Newton data obtained at the end of 2006 September (nearly four months after the burst). Since the source is very likely not a gamma-ray burst, we rename the source Swift J1749.4−2807, based on the Swift/BAT discovery coordinates. Using the BAT data of the type I X-ray burst, we determined that the source is at most at a distance of 6.7 ± 1.3 kpc. For a transiently accreting X-ray binary, its soft X-ray behaviour is atypical: its 2-10 keV X-ray luminosity (as measured using the Swift/XRT data) decreased by nearly three orders of magnitude in about 1 day, much faster than what is usually seen for X-ray transients. If the earlier phases of the outburst also evolved this rapidly, then many similar systems might remain undiscovered because the X-rays are difficult to detect and the type I X-ray bursts might be missed by all the sky surveying instruments. This source might be part of a class of very fast transient low-mass X-ray binary systems of which there may be a significant population in our Galaxy.
Secure exchange of information by synchronization of neural networks

A connection between the theory of neural networks and cryptography is presented. A new phenomenon, namely synchronization of neural networks is leading to a new method of exchange of secret messages. Numerical simulations show that two artificial networks being trained by Hebbian learning rule on their mutual outputs develop an antiparallel state of their synaptic weights. The synchronized weights are used to construct an ephemeral key exchange protocol for a secure transmission of secret data. It is shown that an opponent who knows the protocol and all details of any transmission of the data has no chance to decrypt the secret message, since tracking the weights is a hard problem compared to synchronization. The complexity of the generation of the secure channel is linear with the size of the network.
Phase-differencing in Stereo Vision - Solving the Localisation Problem

Complex Gabor filters with phases in quadrature are often used to model evenand odd-symmetric simple cells in the primary visual cortex. In stereo vision, the phase difference between the responses of the left and right views can be used to construct a disparity or depth map. Various constraints can be applied in order to construct smooth maps, but this leads to very imprecise depth transitions. In this theoretical paper we show, by using lines and edges as image primitives, the origin of the localisation problem. We also argue that disparity should be attributed to lines and edges, rather than trying to construct a 3D surface map in cortical area V1. We derive allowable translation ranges which yield correct disparity estimates, both for left-view centered vision and for cyclopean vision.
Affinity of fibronectin to collagens of different genetic types and to fibrinogen

Fibronectin, a fibroblast surface protein, was purified from human and chicken plasma and extracts of cultured chicken fibroblasts with affinity chromatography on gelatin coupled to Sepharose particles. A fibronectin-like protein was also isolated from the plasma of Torpedo fish. The collagen binding properties of fibronectin were studied with several genetically distinct collagens. Heat denatured types I, II, and III collagens were equal in their binding capacity and more active than the native collagens or A and B chains. Native type III collagen was more active than the other native collagens. Human and chicken fibronectins showed approximately the same pattern of specificity. Identical specificities were shown by the plasma and fibroblast forms of chicken fibronectin. Two cyanogen bromide peptides of the collagen alpha1 (II) chain, CB8 and CB12, derived from different parts of the chain, were active in fibronectin binding. A polymer of the tripeptide pro-gly-pro, and polyproline were inactive. Fibronectin also binds to fibrinogen and fibrin. Comparison of this binding to collagen binding showed that fibrinogen inhibited binding of fibronectin to collagen, but was less active than native collagen. Two other fibrous proteins, tropoelastin and keratin, did not bind fibronectin. The binding of fibronectin to fibrinogen was inhibited by collagen and incorporation of fibronectin into blood clot in the cold was inhibited by gelatin. These results suggest that the binding of fibronectin to collagen and fibrinogen depends on the same binding site in the fibronectin molecule. It is proposed that cell surface fibronectin mediates attachment of cells to the collagenous extracellular matrix and to a temporary fibrin matrix in a wound.
Relationship between Prolactin Plasma Levels and White Matter Volume in Women with Multiple Sclerosis

Background. The role of prolactin (PRL) on tissue injury and repair mechanisms in multiple sclerosis (MS) remains unclear. The aim of this work was to investigate the relationship between PRL plasma levels and brain damage as measured by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Methods. We employed a chemiluminescence immunoassay for measuring plasma levels of PRL. We used a 1.5 T scanner to acquire images and Jim 4.0 and SIENAX software to analyse them. Results. We included 106 women with relapsing remitting (RR) MS and stable disease in the last two months. There was no difference in PRL plasma levels between patients with and without gadolinium enhancement on MRI. PRL plasma levels correlated with white matter volume (WMV) (rho = 0.284, p = 0.014) but not with grey matter volume (GMV). Moreover, PRL levels predicted changes in WMV (Beta: 984, p = 0.034). Conclusions. Our data of a positive association between PRL serum levels and WMV support the role of PRL in promoting myelin repair as documented in animal models of demyelination. The lack of an increase of PRL in the presence of gadolinium enhancement, contrasts with the view considering this hormone as an immune-stimulating and detrimental factor in the inflammatory process associated with MS.
Alexithymia and Breast Cancer Surgery: A Systematic Review

The term alexithymia is a complex multidimensional construct that literally means “no words for mood”. There are two kind of alexithymia: primary and secondary or otherwise called trait and state alexithymia. There is still an unresolved debate about the nature of alexithymia as a trait or a state. The etiology of alexithymia has not been completely determined because of the numerous factors influencing its development. Alexithymia has been observed among patients with a variety of psychiatric disorders and medical conditions. The aim of this systematic review was to review studies investigating the correlations between alexithymia, depression and anxiety in breast cancer surgery women. Literature search was conducted in January, 2016. PubMed and Scopus databases were used to find studies for inclusion in the systematic review. Correlations between alexithymia, depression and anxiety evidenced that alexithymia may be considered a stable personality trait and an important factor to the development of anxiety symptoms. However, limitations of these studies must be considered and further investigations are needed.
X-RAYING THE INTERGALACTIC O vi ABSORBERS

The observed intergalactic O vi absorbers at z>0 have been regarded as a significant reservoir of the “missing baryons. ” However, to fully understand how these absorbers contribute to the baryon inventory, it is crucial to determine whether the systems are collisionally ionized or photoionized (or both). Using the identified intergalactic O vi absorbers as tracers, we search for the corresponding X-ray absorption lines, which are useful for finding the missing baryons and for revealing the nature of the O vi absorbers. Stacking the Chandra grating spectra along six AGN sight lines, we obtain three spectra with signal-to-noise ratios of 32, 28, and 10 per 12.5 mÅ spectral bin around the expected O vii Kα wavelength. These spectra correspond to O vi absorbers with various dynamic properties. We find no detectable Ne ix, O vii, O viii, N vii, or C vi absorption lines in the spectra, but the high counting statistics allows us to obtain firm upper limits on the corresponding ionic column densities (in particular on average at the 95% confidence level). Jointly analyzing these nondetected X-ray lines with the averaged O vi column density, we further limit the average temperature of the O vi-bearing gas to be T ≲ 105.7 K in collisional ionization equilibrium. We discuss the implications of these results for physical properties of the putative warm–hot intergalactic medium and its detection in future X-ray observations.
GoPros™ as an underwater photogrammetry tool for citizen science

Citizen science can increase the scope of research in the marine environment; however, it suffers from necessitating specialized training and simplified methodologies that reduce research output. This paper presents a simplified, novel survey methodology for citizen scientists, which combines GoPro imagery and structure from motion to construct an ortho-corrected 3D model of habitats for analysis. Results using a coral reef habitat were compared to surveys conducted with traditional snorkelling methods for benthic cover, holothurian counts, and coral health. Results were comparable between the two methods, and structure from motion allows the results to be analysed off-site for any chosen visual analysis. The GoPro method outlined in this study is thus an effective tool for citizen science in the marine environment, especially for comparing changes in coral cover or volume over time.
DADA: a data cube for dominant relationship analysis

The concept of dominance has recently attracted much interest in the context of skyline computation. Given an N-dimensional data set S, a point p is said to dominate q if p is better than q in at least one dimension and equal to or better than it in the remaining dimensions. In this paper, we propose extending the concept of dominance for business analysis from a microeconomic perspective. More specifically, we propose a new form of analysis, called Dominant Relationship Analysis (DRA), which aims to provide insight into the dominant relationships between products and potential buyers. By analyzing such relationships, companies can position their products more effectively while remaining profitable.To support DRA, we propose a novel data cube called DADA (Data Cube for Dominant Relationship Analysis), which captures the dominant relationships between products and customers. Three types of queries called Dominant Relationship Queries (DRQs) are consequently proposed for analysis purposes: 1)Linear Optimization Queries (LOQ), 2)Subspace Analysis Queries (SAQ), and 3)Comparative Dominant Queries (CDQ). Algorithms are designed for efficient computation of DADA and answering the DRQs using DADA. Results of our comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of DADA and its associated query processing strategies.
Talking Point

satisfy these tests, then this model is shown to be inappropriate and the parameter values derived therefrom of dubious value. We recommend that reviewers of submitted manuscripts containing such analyses insist on self-consistency as one criterion for acceptability for publication. Finally, we suggest that readers apply these extremely simple tests to already published results as one way (but not the only way 2) of evaluating their trustworthiness.
Blind Channel Estimation for Cyclic-Prefixed Single-Carrier Systems by Exploiting Real Symbol Characteristics

In this paper, we consider blind channel estimation for cyclic-prefixed single-carrier (CP-SC) systems via second-order statistics only. By exploiting the existence of real symbols in the transmitted data block, we develop a simple technique for blind channel estimation that does not need redundant precoding or virtual carriers. Hence, the proposed algorithm provides bandwidth efficiency. A side benefit of the proposed algorithm is that the phase ambiguity, which is an inherent problem in traditional blind channel estimation, is reduced to sign ambiguity only. This side benefit facilitates signal detection in digital communications where symbols are usually taken from a finite alphabet. Although the proposed method is mainly developed for channel estimation in single-input-single-output CP-SC systems, it can also be applied straightforwardly to single-input-multiple-output systems (either with CP-SC or other kinds) and multiple-input-multiple-output systems whenever real symbols exist or are deliberately inserted in the transmission.