Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors which affect the Retention Rate of Foster Carers

The thesis explored the factors which affect the retention of foster carers. It was based on an interview with two fostering social workers and a survey of foster carers from a particular HSE area. It divided its focus into three areas: (i) the process of becoming a foster carer, examining recruitment, assessment and training; (ii) the reality of fostering examining placement issues from beginning to end, and; (iii) the implications of issues from the previous two areas for social work practice. These areas were explored by combining the research findings with relevant literature and findings from other research studies.
Repeated methamphetamine administration changes the relative expression of D1 receptor but not of D2 receptor in mouse midbrain

The behavioural investigation showed stimulatory influence of methamphetamine (Met) after both acute administration and development of sensitization. Met administration increased D1 mRNA expression; non-significantly after the first dose and significantly (p<0.006) after the challenge dose. Changes in D2 mRNA expression were not significant at all, which is to certain extent in agreement with other reports suggesting that there is no clear information whether the interaction of D1 and D2 receptors can produce a cooperative or synergistic effect on reinforcement processes
Convex relaxations in the optimal control of electrified vehicles

When controlling the energy flow among multiple power sources in electrified powertrains, the typically non-convex set of the original formulation is relaxed to a convex super-set, and the problem is then approached by the means of convex optimization. In this paper we show that when using the backward simulation approach, where vehicle velocity is equal to the reference velocity, the global optimum of the original non-convex problem can be obtained by solving a relaxed convex problem. When vehicle velocity is kept as a state in the problem, in the so called forward simulation approach, we provide a condition for which, when satisfied, the solution of the relaxed problem will provide the solution of the non-relaxed problem.
HST/Acs Weak-Lensing and Chandra X-Ray Studies of the High-Redshift Cluster MS 1054-0321

We present Hubble Space Telescope/Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) weak-lensing and Chandra X-ray analyses of MS 1054-0321 at z=0.83, the most distant and X-ray luminous cluster in the Einstein Extended Medium-Sensitivity Survey (EMSS). The high-resolution mass reconstruction through ACS weak-lensing reveals the complicated dark matter substructure in unprecedented detail, characterized by the three dominant mass clumps with the four or more minor satellite groups within the current ACS field. The direct comparison of the mass map with the Chandra X-ray image shows that the eastern weak-lensing substructure is not present in the X-ray image and, more interestingly, the two X-ray peaks are displaced away from the hypothesized merging direction with respect to the corresponding central and western mass clumps, possibly because of ram pressure. In addition, as observed in our previous weak-lensing study of another high-redshift cluster CL 0152-1357 at z=0.84, the two dark matter clumps of MS 1054-0321 seem to be offset from the galaxy counterparts. We examine the significance of these offsets and discuss a possible scenario, wherein the dark matter clumps might be moving ahead of the cluster galaxies. The non-parametric weak-lensing mass modeling gives a projected mass of M(r<1 Mpc)=(1.02+-0.15)x 10^{15} solar mass, where the uncertainty reflects both the statistical error and the cosmic shear effects. Our temperature measurement of T=8. 9_{-0.8}^{+1.0} keV utilizing the newest available low-energy quantum efficiency degradation prescription for the Chandra instrument, together with the isothermal beta description of the cluster (r_c=16"+-15" and beta=0.78+-0.08), yields a projected mass of M(r<1 Mpc)=(1.2+-0.2) x 10^{15} solar mass, consistent with the weak-lensing result.
Trustworthiness Appraisal in Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality (BPD) is a highly impairing illness with marked instability across multiple domains, including affect, interpersonal functioning, identity, and behavior. Within the past 15 years, researchers have sought to understand and characterize deficits in social cognition that might contribute to or arise from affective or interpersonal dysfunction. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand one aspect of impaired social cognition in BPD: biased trust processing. Individuals with borderline features rate others as less trustworthy in laboratory tasks and act accordingly. However, little is known about the influence of affect on ratings or behavior, or whether biased processing is related to real-world functioning or is merely an artifact of the laboratory. The main study included two groups of participants: (1) individuals who met 3 or more diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder (n =30) and (2) a control group of individuals who met 2 or fewer diagnostic criteria (n = 47). An experimental paradigm was used to determine whether affectively arousing information has undue influence on trustworthiness ratings for individuals with borderline features. Individuals with borderline features made more negative trustworthiness appraisals overall. Additionally, negative affective information had more impact on trustworthiness ratings for individuals in the borderline features group relative to the control group. This effect was not mediated by rejection sensitivity or moderated by childhood trauma. A recognition task was used to examine the influence of momentary trustworthiness perceptions on recognition. Overall, individuals who rated faces as less trustworthy during the affective priming task also rated faces as less trustworthy during the recognition task. This
Sentence Alignment for Monolingual Comparable Corpora

We address the problem of sentence alignment for monolingual corpora, a phenomenon distinct from alignment in parallel corpora. Aligning large comparable corpora automatically would provide a valuable resource for learning of text-to-text rewriting rules. We incorporate context into the search for an optimal alignment in two complementary ways: learning rules for matching paragraphs using topic structure and further refining the matching through local alignment to find good sentence pairs. Evaluation shows that our alignment method outperforms state-of-the-art systems developed for the same task.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) National frenemies : linguistic intergroup attitudes in Canada

Intergroup sentiments have been shown to be an important determinant of social stability in multinational countries. The present study explores the present state of linguistic intergroup tensions in Canada to contribute to the understanding of outgroup attitudes among minorities and majorities. Four main findings are derived from the results of empirical analyses on survey data. (1) Cultural threat impacts outgroup attitudes in both the national minority and the national majority. (2) Education has a strong impact on feelings towards the linguistic outgroup. (3) Unexpectedly, age does not display a statistical influence on intergroup attitudes. (4) Specifically relating to Canada, intergroup feelings between Francophones and Anglophones have over the last quarter century become considerably more positive, both groups hold quite positive attitudes towards one another. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 7 October 2016; Accepted 10 November 2017
The Perceived Stigma of Mental Health Services Among Rural Parents of Children With Psychosocial Concerns.

OBJECTIVE To examine parents' perceptions of stigma regarding mental health services for their child, consider stigma in the context of novel service delivery settings (e.g., telehealth, primary care, and schools), and evaluate stigma with other factors known to influence service access. METHODS 347 caregivers of children with psychosocial concerns completed surveys regarding their perceptions of stigma, service delivery settings, and barriers to care. RESULTS Parents endorsed low levels of stigma around services. Greater perceived stigma was related to less willingness to seek services in a mental/behavioral health center or schools but not in other settings, even when other barriers were considered. Having a younger child and a history of prior services was associated with greater willingness to seek services. CONCLUSIONS Stigma does appear to present as a barrier, but only for some parents. Providing mental health services to young children and their parents in some nontraditional settings may increase access.
Transient neuronal coactivations embedded in globally propagating waves underlie resting-state functional connectivity

Significance Resting-state functional connectivity (FC) is a commonly used method in neuroimaging to noninvasively study network organization of brains in humans and other animals. FC is reproducible across different institutions and sensitive enough to detect network changes due to psychiatric disorders. FC is thus a core tool for projects such as the Human Connectome Project. However, because hemodynamic signals are an indirect measure of neuronal activity, actual spatiotemporal neuronal activity underlying FC is still unknown. This study used simultaneous wide-field optical imaging of neuronal calcium signals and hemodynamic signals in transgenic mice to understand the spatiotemporal neuronal dynamics underlying FC. Transient spatial patterns of neuronal coactivations embedded within waves of activity propagating across neocortex were found to be particularly important for FC. Resting-state functional connectivity (FC), which measures the correlation of spontaneous hemodynamic signals (HemoS) between brain areas, is widely used to study brain networks noninvasively. It is commonly assumed that spatial patterns of HemoS-based FC (Hemo-FC) reflect large-scale dynamics of underlying neuronal activity. To date, studies of spontaneous neuronal activity cataloged heterogeneous types of events ranging from waves of activity spanning the entire neocortex to flash-like activations of a set of anatomically connected cortical areas. However, it remains unclear how these various types of large-scale dynamics are interrelated. More importantly, whether each type of large-scale dynamics contributes to Hemo-FC has not been explored. Here, we addressed these questions by simultaneously monitoring neuronal calcium signals (CaS) and HemoS in the entire neocortex of mice at high spatiotemporal resolution. We found a significant relationship between two seemingly different types of large-scale spontaneous neuronal activity—namely, global waves propagating across the neocortex and transient coactivations among cortical areas sharing high FC. Different sets of cortical areas, sharing high FC within each set, were coactivated at different timings of the propagating global waves, suggesting that spatial information of cortical network characterized by FC was embedded in the phase of the global waves. Furthermore, we confirmed that such transient coactivations in CaS were indeed converted into spatially similar coactivations in HemoS and were necessary to sustain the spatial structure of Hemo-FC. These results explain how global waves of spontaneous neuronal activity propagating across large-scale cortical network contribute to Hemo-FC in the resting state.
Pixel Objectness

We propose an end-to-end learning framework for generating foreground object segmentations. Given a single novel image, our approach produces pixel-level masks for all"object-like"regions---even for object categories never seen during training. We formulate the task as a structured prediction problem of assigning foreground/background labels to all pixels, implemented using a deep fully convolutional network. Key to our idea is training with a mix of image-level object category examples together with relatively few images with boundary-level annotations. Our method substantially improves the state-of-the-art for foreground segmentation accuracy on the ImageNet and MIT Object Discovery datasets---with 19% improvements in some cases. Furthermore, with extensive evaluation on over 1 million images, we show it generalizes well to segment even object categories unseen in the foreground maps used for training. Finally, we demonstrate how our approach benefits image retrieval and image retargeting, both of which flourish when given our high-quality foreground maps.
Temporal Changes in Pneumococcal Colonization in HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected Mother-Child Pairs Following Transitioning From 7-valent to 13-valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine, Soweto, South Africa.

BACKGROUND We investigated the impact of infant pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) immunization on pneumococcal colonization among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected and HIV-uninfected mother-child pairs. METHODS Pneumococcal colonization was assessed in May 2010-February 2011 (period 1; 7-valent PCV era) and May 2012-April 2013 (period 2; 13-valent PCV era). Standard microbiological methods were used for pneumococcus isolation and serotyping. RESULTS In children 0-12 years, PCV13-serotype colonization decreased from period 1 to period 2 among HIV-uninfected (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 0.32; 95% confidence interval [CI], .25-.40) and HIV-infected children (adjusted OR, 0.37; 95% CI, .28-.49), while there was an increase in nonvaccine serotype colonization. Decreases in PCV13-serotype colonization were observed in HIV-uninfected women (adjusted OR, 0.44; 95% CI, .23-.81), with a similar trend in HIV-infected women. HIV-infected compared to -uninfected women had higher prevalence of overall (20.5% vs 9.7% in period 1; 13.8% vs 9.7% in period 2) and PCV13-serotype colonization (8.7% vs 5.4% in period 1; 4.8% vs 2.0% in period 2), P < . 04 for all observations. CONCLUSIONS Targeted PCV vaccination of African infants in a setting with high HIV prevalence was associated with PCV13-serotype colonization reduction, including among unvaccinated HIV-infected women.
Precocious IRBP gene expression during mouse development.

PURPOSE To determine if the time course for the onset of gene and protein expression for interphotoreceptor binding protein (IRBP) precedes that of opsin in the developing mouse retina. METHODS Relative mRNA levels of the IRBP and opsin genes were determined in prenatal and postnatal retinal RNA with RNase protection analysis (RPA). To determine if IRBP and opsin protein expressions are differentially regulated, dissociated retinal cells from postnatal (P) days 2 and 3 mice, that were injected with BrdU, were then double-labeled with antibodies against BrdU and either opsin or IRBP. RESULTS With RPA, IRBP mRNA was detected on embryonic (E) day 11 at the time of cone formation, whereas opsin mRNA was not detected until P0. It took until P3 for opsin expression to reach significant levels, whereas rods already appear during embryonic development. IBRP transcription preceded that of opsin because it rapidly increased from E13 to an early postnatal day. By P20, the expression levels of IRBP and opsin achieved constancy. Double antibody labeling revealed positive staining for both IRBP and BrdU as soon as 2 hours after injection, but it took until 40 hours for double positive staining for opsin and BrdU. CONCLUSION Because only IRBP protein expression was observed before the last mitosis of the photoreceptor precursor cells, IRBP could be essential for retinal development.
Striping Delay-Sensitive Packets Over Multiple Bursty Wireless Channels

Multi-homed mobile devices have multiple wireless communication interfaces, each connecting to the Internet via a low speed and bursty WAN link such as a cellular link. We propose a packet striping system for such multi-homed devices-a mapping of packets by a gateway to multiple channels, such that the overall performance is enhanced. We model and analyze the striping of delay-sensitive packets over multiple burst-loss channels. We derive the expected packet loss ratio when FEC (Forward Error Correction) and retransmissions are applied for error protection over multiple channels. We next model and analyze the case when the channels are bandwidth-limited. We develop a dynamic programming-based algorithm that solves the optimal striping problem for the ARQ, the FEC, and the hybrid FEC/ARQ case
Using delay-gradient TCP for multimedia-friendly ‘background’ transport in home networks

Home networks are seeing increased deployment of Wireless LAN (WiFi) links between conventional, gigabit/second wired Ethernet segments. This means an increasing number of internal bottlenecks, even as home networks are also expected to support latency-sensitive applications, regular TCP flows and an emerging class of low-priority, time-insensitive `background' TCP flows. This paper explores the novel use of CDG v0.1 (a delay-gradient TCP) for such background TCP connections in home networks. We show a CDG flow induces latencies of only tens of milliseconds regardless of the bottleneck's internal buffer size (useful when coexisting with latency-sensitive traffic) while achieving a significant fraction of spare link capacity. We also show CDG does not gratuitously steal capacity from commonly deployed “foreground” TCPs such as CUBIC and NewReno.
Bark and leaf chlorophyll fluorescence are linked to wood structural changes in Eucalyptus saligna

The efficiency of leaf photosynthesis has been measured using a technique called chlorophyll fluorescence. It is not widely known that in addition to leaf photosynthesis the bark of certain “smooth barked” trees can photosynthesize. In this paper we use chlorophyll fluorescence to measure the efficiency of bark photosynthesis. In this way we are able to compare the amount of wood decay in a tree with bark photosynthetic efficiency using chlorophyll fluorescence. The link between bark photosynthesis and wood decay discovered in this work has not been explored before.
"Nothing I Ever Do Seems to Please My Parents": Female and Male Self-Esteem as a Function of Mother's and Father's Nurturance.

Self-esteem as a function of parental nurturance was investigated. The results revealed that: a) 43% of the variance in self-esteem in women is associated with parental nurturance (30% in males) and b) father's nurturance is as important to self-esteem (in both females and males) as is mother's nurturance. The reaZtionship between individual dimensions of parental nurturance and self-esteeir were investigated. TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC). " Since the introduction of the concept of the "social self" (James, 1890) into the psychological literature, few social psychologists have denied the critical importance of social interactions in the development and definition of the self. Furthered by Cooley's (1902) "looking glass self" and Mead's (1934) more formalized discussion of symbolic interactionism, we have come to view social interactions as prominent in the process of apprehending and assuming specific characteristics about onc's self. As suggested by several researchers (e.g., Bachman, 1982; Coopersmith, 1967; Helper, 1958), parents are primary agents in the development of these "reflected appraisals" (Rosenberg, 1979). This research was supported in part by St. Thomas College Research Assistance Grant No. 33181. Correspondence concerning this paper should be sent to Dr. John R. Burl, Department of Psychology, College of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN. 55105. BEST COPY AVAILABLE 2 Female and Male Self-Esteem
On the Origin of Chaos in the Asteroid Belt

We consider the effect of gravitational perturbations from Jupiter on the dynamics of asteroids, when Jupiter is itself perturbed by Saturn. The presence of Saturn introduces a number of additional frequencies into Jupiter's orbit. These frequencies in turn produce chaos in narrow regions on either side of the chaotic zones associated with the mean motion resonances between the asteroids and Jupiter. The resonant arguments of these three-body resonances contain the longitudes of Jupiter and the asteroid together with either the secular frequency g6, or the longitude of Saturn. Resonances involving the longitude of Saturn are analogs of the Laplace resonance in the Jovian satellite system. We show that many three-body resonances involving the longitude of Saturn are chaotic. We give simple expressions for the width of the chaotic region and the associated Lyapunov time. In some cases the chaos can produce a diffusive growth in the eccentricity of the asteroid that leads to ejection of the asteroid on times shorter than the age of the solar system. We give simple estimates for the diffusion time. Finally, we present the results of numerical integrations testing the theory.
Students’ Preference for Teachers’ Motivational Strategies and their Perception of their Own Motivation toward Learning English: A Case of Private Vocational Colleges

This study aimed to investigate students’ preference for teachers’ motivational strategies, their perception of their own motivation toward learning English in relation to teachers’ motivational strategies, and the correlation between these two variables. The participants consisted of 320 first year vocational certificate students in the 7 private vocational colleges. A questionnaire and semi-structured interview were employed in data collection. The 24 motivational strategy items were categorized into four main categories based on Dornyei’s (2001b) framework. Descriptive statistics and Pearson's correlation coefficient were used to analyze the data. The findings indicated that 22 teachers’ motivational strategies were preferred at the “greatly preferred” level, whereas only two strategies were preferred at the “preferred” level. It was found that all 24 motivational strategies could motivate students to learn English. The students most preferred motivational strategies under the third category, maintaining and protecting students’ motivation. They also agreed that the motivational strategies under the third category could motivate them to learn the most. On the other hand, the strategies under the fourth category, encouraging positive self-evaluation, were least preferred and they least motivated the students to learn English. Interestingly, it was found that all preferred strategies could motivate the students to learn English.
Capacity-Delay Scaling in Arbitrary Wireless Networks

We establish capacity and delay scaling laws for a general network topology, interference model, and traffic model. There are two main contributions of this paper. Our first contribution is the derivation of capacity-delay scaling laws in terms of spectral properties of the wireless network using results of Diaconis and Stroock (1991) and Sinclair (1992). By representing a wireless network in terms of an appropriate capacitated graph, we determine precise (i.e. upper and lower bound) capacity scaling in terms of the maximal min-cut capacity over a class of graphs. Next, we establish delay scaling using very simple techniques. Our methods apply to general fixed and mobile network models. As a special case, we recover the results of Gupta and Kumar (2000), El Gamal, Mammen, Prabhakar and Shah (2004), Grossglauser and Tse (2002) and Diggavi, Grossglauser and Tse (2003). The second contribution is the derivation of capacity scaling laws for Gaussian channels. In particular, we provide upper and lower bounds on capacity scaling for an arbitrary wireless network with AWGN channels and non-cooperative transmissions. We characterize the capacity scaling for non-cooperative transmissions in terms of the cut-properties of the underlying network graph. We also provide information theoretic upper bounds for general fading AWGN channels. Finally, we evaluate our bounds for grid graph and geometric random graph.