Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Comparison of the Perceptions of School Work Culture by Administrators and Faculty in the Public Charter and Non-Charter Elementary Schools of a Central Florida County

This study investigated perceptions of school work culture of instructional staff members (administrators and faculty) in public charter and public non-charter elementary schools in a large urban metropolitan county of Central Florida by assessing differences in perceptions of administrators and faculty related to school work culture, perceptions between school administrators and faculty, and the interaction between type of school. The School Work Culture Profile (SWCP), a paper-and-pencil survey, was designed in 1988 by Snyder to obtain a measure of a school's work culture. The SWCP uses a Likert scale to assess the overall perception and four sub-domains of planning, development, program development, school assessment, and staff development. One hundred sixty-one teachers and administrators from public charter and public non-charter elementary schools participated. Results of ANOVA tests indicated differences by job category: administrators scored significantly higher than faculty on the overall perception and three sub-domains of school work culture: planning development, program development, and school assessment. There was no difference on the staff development sub-domain. Administrators and faculty members do perceive certain aspects of school work culture differently. Program Development, Planning Development, and School Assessment are administrative functions, whereas Staff Development may be perceived to be more of a personal function. There was no difference between perceptions of instructional staff by type of school (public charter and public non-charter). In addition, there was no interaction between job category and school type. The perceptions of administrators and faculty members of both types of schools do not appear to be dependent upon whether or not they work in charter or non-charter public schools. Public charter and public non-charter school instructional staff responded to SWCP sub-domains similarly; therefore, the type of school the respondents worked in, albeit public charter or public non-charter, did not impact their perceptions. Differences existed in perceptions between school administrators and faculty members, regardless of type of school, with the exception of the sub-domain of staff development. The mean perception for administrators in both types of schools was higher in the other three domains. No interaction occurred between type of school and type of job category for any sub-domain or the overall perception. The conclusions from this study included (a) schools are equal regardless of the type of school, (b) the culture of administrators and faculty members remains the same regardless of the type of school, (c) the perceptions of administrators and faculty members are not determined by the type of school in which they work—administrators and faculty members do perceive certain aspects of school work culture differently. Implications derived from the study include (a) efforts to mainstream and encourage cross-institutional…
When Are Momentum Profits Due to Common Factor Dynamics ?

This paper explores whether the profits of momentum strategies are due to momentum in some systematic factors. Using a novel statistical technique, the dynamic principal component method, we estimate non-i.i. d. factors from a panel of monthly stock returns for the period from 1965 to 1998. While the estimated first factor tends to be serially uncorrelated and closely tracks the equally weighted market return, several other factors exhibit positive momentum, and the idiosyncratic components of stock returns on average have slightly negative autocorrelation. Contrary to the conclusions of Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) and Grundy and Martin (2000), we find that stock returns’ responses to the small number of common factors account for most of momentum profits; momentum profits due to idiosyncratic components of returns are insignificant or even negative. Further, when momentum strategies are based on past realizations of the common components, they become even more profitable; when momentum strategies are based on the past realizations of the idiosyncratic components, they are not profitable. The evidence indicates that although momentum strategies are close to market nutral, they are subject to other systematic factor risks. We also perform a series of simulations to verify the reliability of inferences based on the dynamic principal component method. Finally, we show that to a certain extent the statistical factors can be dynamically related to a few macro-economic variables. Since the dynamic factor structure of stock returns is consistent with rational asset pricing theories, our findings support a rational explanation for the momentum phenomenon. JEL Classification: G12
READ STABILITY AND POWER ANALYSIS OF A PROPOSED NOVEL 8 TRANSISTOR STATIC RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY CELL IN 45 NM TECHNOLOGY

This paper presents the analysis of static noise margin (SNM), power dissipation, access time and dynamic noise margin of a novel low power proposed 8T static random access memory (SRAM) cell for read operation. In the proposed structure two voltage sources are used, one is connected with the Bit line and the other is connected with Bitbar line in order to reduce the voltage swing at the output nodes of the bit and the bit bar lines. Simulation results for read static noise margin, read power dissipation, read access time and dynamic noise margin have been compared to those of other SRAM cells, reported in different literatures. It is shown that the proposed SRAM cell has better static noise margin and dissipates lesser power in comparison to other SRAM cells. Analog and schematic simulations have been done in 45nm environment with the help of Microwind 3.1 by using BSimM4 model.
Economic Freedom, Political Freedom, and Economic Well-Being: A Causality Analysis

In recent years, a renewed interest has been shown in trying to further comprehend the factors that determine a country’s rate of economic growth. This is important since a higher growth rate means greater national output, potentially higher living standards, and an enhanced ability to attain economic and social objectives. Earlier studies of the causes of economic growth focused on the importance of increasing exogenous quantities of physical resources (land, labor, and capital) to enhance the rate of growth, while more recent evidence suggests that growth is determined by a much larger set of endogenously determined variables.1 Institutional factors—the political and economic customs and practices that exist within countries—have received particular attention in a number of recent studies. The importance of these factors lies in the fact that all economic decisions are made within a given institutional setting. And while it is difficult to know with certainty how these factors influence economic growth, it is generally assumed that greater economic and political freedom act as catalysts to enhance growth. But economic growth may also, in turn, enhance economic and political freedom.2
A descriptive study of program implementation among a group of high achieving coalitions in the drug-free communities support program

Substance abuse is a pervasive public health problem that affects all people and communities. Substance abuse can particularly devastate youth, as it correlates with many negative health outcomes including damage to the developing brain, dependence, delinquency, decreased academic potential, DUIs, and death. A potential solution to address these problems is the use of community coalitions. At the federal level, The Office of National Drug Control Policy's Drug-Free Communities Support Program does this through distributing competitive grants to eligible community coalitions that organize to prevent youth substance abuse. This study examines the degree of agreement between activities of 12 high achieving coalitions. The analysis determined that 6 activities were universally present among high achieving coalitions, 10 activities had high agreement, and 33 activities had
Identification of Hot Spots in Protein Structures Using Gaussian Network Model and Gaussian Naive Bayes

Residue fluctuations in protein structures have been shown to be highly associated with various protein functions. Gaussian network model (GNM), a simple representative coarse-grained model, was widely adopted to reveal function-related protein dynamics. We directly utilized the high frequency modes generated by GNM and further performed Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) to identify hot spot residues. Two coding schemes about the feature vectors were implemented with varying distance cutoffs for GNM and sliding window sizes for GNB based on tenfold cross validations: one by using only a single high mode and the other by combining multiple modes with the highest frequency. Our proposed methods outperformed the previous work that did not directly utilize the high frequency modes generated by GNM, with regard to overall performance evaluated using F1 measure. Moreover, we found that inclusion of more high frequency modes for a GNB classifier can significantly improve the sensitivity. The present study provided additional valuable insights into the relation between the hot spots and the residue fluctuations.
Gender Consciousness and Privilege

Develops a new framework for working in schools that helps educators make informed decisions about change at individual, classroom, curricular and school levels on behalf of gender equity. Addresses the issue of understanding the impact of education on the two sexes, and looks at responsibility for creating gender-fair environments, organising work and creating environments for learning. The book draws on a two-year study into the role that gender played as three Catholic high schools prepared to move from single sex to coeducation. It does not weigh the advantages of single sex against coeducative approaches, but studies gender in a setting where the particpants' consciousness of gender issues was heightened: faculty and administration were formally and informally discussing gender concepts and students were talking about male and female issues. The book shows that the combination of leadership, staff and curricular awareness, and an understanding of gender fair and gender affirmative practices can serve to improve institutional effectiveness and lead to higher levels of student achievement.
Maintenance and Manipulation in Spatial Working Memory: Dissociations in the Prefrontal Cortex

Two experiments were conducted to compare thec ries of the functional organization of spatial working memory within the human prefrontal cortex. In Experiment I, memory set size for locations was parametrically varied, allowing for the assessment of BOLD signal across maintenance requirements. In the sec ond experiment, manipulation of spatial information held in working memory was contrasted with simple maintenance of that information. Both experiment evoked significant activity in a distributed spatia working memory network. Although dorsolateral prefrontal activation increased monotonically with memory set size, this region was differentially engaged in task conditions involving explicit manipulation of in ternal representations. Activation in the superior frontal sulcal region was associated with maintenance of spatial information, increasing with memory se size. In contrast, ventrolateral prefrontal activation was present only at the highest memory set size, possibly due to the differential use of organizational strategies with more complex stimuli. These results sup port claims that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in the manipulation of internal representa tions and that the superior frontal sulcal region is involved in the maintenance of spatial information but they suggest a complex role for the ventrolatera prefrontal region.
Comparing a coevolutionary genetic algorithm for multiobjective optimization

We present results from a study comparing a recently developed coevolutionary genetic algorithm (CGA) against a set of evolutionary algorithms using a suite of multiobjective optimization benchmarks. The CGA embodies competitive coevolution and employs a simple, straightforward target population representation and fitness calculation based on developmental theory of learning. Because of these properties, setting up the additional population is trivial making implementation no more difficult than using a standard GA. Empirical results using a suite of two-objective test functions indicate that this CGA performs well at finding solutions on convex, nonconvex, discrete, and deceptive Pareto-optimal fronts, while giving respectable results on a nonuniform optimization. On a multimodal Pareto front, the CGA yields poor coverage across the Pareto front, yet finds a solution that dominates all the solutions produced by the eight other algorithms.
Alternative Interest Measures for Mining Associations in Databases

Data mining is defined as the process of discovering significant and potentially useful patterns in large volumes of data. Discovering associations between items in a large database is one such data mining activity. In finding associations, support is used as an indicator as to whether an association is interesting. In this paper, we discuss three alternative interest measures for associations: any-confidence, all-confidence, and bond. We prove that the important downward closure property applies to both all-confidence and bond. We show that downward closure does not hold for any-confidence. We also prove that, if associations have a minimum all-confidence or minimum bond, then those associations will have a given lower bound on their minimum support and the rules produced from those associations will have a given lower bound on their minimum confidence as well. However, associations that have that minimum support (and likewise their rules that have minimum confidence) may not satisfy the minimum all-confidence or minimum bond constraint. We describe the algorithms that efficiently find all associations with a minimum all-confidence or minimum bond and present some experimental results.
Natural Hendra Virus Infection in Flying-Foxes - Tissue Tropism and Risk Factors

Hendra virus (HeV) is a lethal zoonotic agent that emerged in 1994 in Australia. Pteropid bats (flying-foxes) are the natural reservoir. To date, HeV has spilled over from flying-foxes to horses on 51 known occasions, and from infected horses to close-contact humans on seven occasions. We undertook screening of archived bat tissues for HeV by reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). Tissues were tested from 310 bats including 295 Pteropodiformes and 15 Vespertilioniformes. HeV was detected in 20 individual flying-foxes (6.4%) from various tissues including spleen, kidney, liver, lung, placenta and blood components. Detection was significantly higher in Pteropus Alecto and P. conspicillatus, identifying species as a risk factor for infection. Further, our findings indicate that HeV has a predilection for the spleen, suggesting this organ plays an important role in HeV infection. The lack of detections in the foetal tissues of HeV-positive females suggests that vertical transmission is not a regular mode of transmission in naturally infected flying-foxes, and that placental and foetal tissues are not a major source of infection for horses. A better understanding of HeV tissue tropism will strengthen management of the risk of spillover from flying-foxes to horses and ultimately humans.
A Schumpeterian Model of Wage Inequality and Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement

This paper addresses the concern of whether the determinants of patent infringement and declaratory judgement suits may affect both long-term economic performance and wage inequality. In doing so, we construct a quality-ladder R&D-based endogenous growth model, in which the institutional setting for patent protection directly impacts the long-run private incentive to conduct R&D as well as to invest in human capital. We find that both the institutional setting and the Court's behaviour exacerbate wage inequality, while the steady-state effects on R&D effort and long-run growth are mixed.
Biomass Accumulation and Carbon Sequestration in Four Different Aged Casuarina equisetifolia Coastal Shelterbelt Plantations in South China

Thousands of kilometers of shelterbelt plantations of Casuarina equisetifolia have been planted to protect the southeast coastline of China. These plantations also play an important role in the regional carbon (C) cycling. In this study, we examined plant biomass increment and C accumulation in four different aged C. equisetifolia plantations in sandy beaches in South China. The C accumulated in the C. equisetifolia plant biomass increased markedly with stand age. The annual rate of C accumulation in the C. equisetifolia plant biomass during 0–3, 3–6, 6–13 and 13–18 years stage was 2.9, 8.2, 4.2 and 1.0 Mg C ha−1 yr−1, respectively. Soil organic C (SOC) at the top 1 m soil layer in these plantations was 17.74, 5.14, 6.93, and 11.87 Mg C ha−1, respectively, with SOC density decreasing with increasing soil depth. Total C storage in the plantation ecosystem averaged 26.57, 38.50, 69.78, and 79.79 Mg C ha−1 in the 3, 6, 13 and 18- yrs plantation, with most of the C accumulated in the aboveground biomass rather than in the belowground root biomass and soil organic C. Though our results suggest that C. equisetifolia plantations have the characteristics of fast growth, high biomass accumulation, and the potential of high C sequestration despite planting in poor soil conditions, the interactive effects of soil condition, natural disturbance, and human policies on the ecosystem health of the plantation need to be further studied to fully realize the ecological and social benefits of the C equisetifolia shelterbelt forests in South China.
Grammatical Search and Reanalysis

This paper investigates the extent to which existing structural commitments constrain the human parser's search for grammatical analyses of incoming material, specifically whether a Reanalysis As a Last Resort (RALR) strategy applies to sentence parsing. Two self-paced reading experiments investigate this issue using a structural ambiguity in which a local, easy reanalysis is pitted against a nonlocal attachment requiring no reanalysis. This ambiguity is created by embedding classic noun phrase/sentential complement ambiguities inside a relative clause modifying a subject NP. The results of both experiments indicate that readers' existing structural commitments do constrain their subsequent parsing decisions: nonlocal analyses which avoid reanalysis are consistently favored over local analyses which require an easy reanalysis. This conclusion is confirmed by the results of a subcategorization-bias manipulation in Experiment 2, which shows that readers show a consistent bias to avoid reanalysis, rather than a general bias for either local or matrix clause attachments.
Cognitive factors that can potentially affect pupils’ test performance

The two cognitive styles, ‘field dependent/field independent’ and ‘convergent/divergent’, were explored in relation to three formats of assessment (multiple choice, short answer and structural communication grid) in five classroom chemistry tests. The study was conducted in Greece with the participation of Grade-10 (upper secondary school) pupils (age 15-16). The field dependent/independent characteristic correlated with pupils’ performance in all the tests, and in almost all the formats of assessment. The convergent/divergent characteristic correlated with pupils’ performance in assessment where language was an important factor, but not in algorithmic types of questions or in questions where there is a greater use of symbols and less use of words. It seems that, in relation to the convergent/divergent characteristic, the chemistry content and presentation of the test is a factor affecting the type of questions being asked. This study suggests that some of the factors that affect pupils’ performance might be: (a) the content and presentation of the test, (b) the format of the test, (c) the psychology of the individual. [Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. , 2006, 7 (2), 64-83]
Permanent and transitory dynamics in house prices and consumption: some implications for the real effects of the financial crisis

In this article, a small-scale macroeconomic system is estimated in the framework of a common trends model, in order to explore the dynamic interactions between real house prices, consumption expenditure and output in the US and major European economies. The results point to important differences across countries, with long-run house price effects on consumption only for France, Germany and the US. However, interactions between house prices and consumption are detected in all countries at shorter horizons, with important implications of the current unwinding of the sub-prime crisis for real activity. Evidence for international comovements in the common trend component of house price dynamics is also found.
Interpretable Conditions for Identifying Direct and Indirect Effects

Abstract : This paper translates the conditions necessary for the identification of natural direct and indirect effects into a transparent language, thus permitting a more informed judgment of the plausibility of these conditions. We show that the conditions usually cited in the literature are overly restricted, and can be relaxed substantially, without compromising identification. In particular, we show that natural effects can be identified by methods other than adjustment. The identification conditions can be further relaxed in parametric models with interactions, and permit us to compare the relative importance of several pathways, mediated by interdependent variables.
Creative Philanthropy: Towards a New Philanthropy for the Twenty-First Century

Part 1: Why Philanthropy? 1. The Debate about Philanthropy 2. Models of Philanthropy in Context 3. Creative Philanthropy Part 2: In Search of Creative Philanthropy 4. Vignettes of Creative Philanthropy 5. Case Studies of Creative Philanthropy Part 3: Implications 6. What Makes for Creative Philanthropy? 7. Managing Creative Philanthropy 8. The Practice of Creative Philanthropy 9. The Way Forward
Visionära verk? En kartläggning av svenska myndigheters visionsformuleringar

This text offers an overview over and a categorization of visionary statements produced by Swedish government agencies. The visionary statements are analyzed with respect to the values that they highlight, whom they pinpoint as the principal or initiator, and whether or not the visionary statement is limited to the agency’s sphere of activity. From this discussion it can be concluded that the visionary statements among public agencies bears similarities with the visions used as management tools in the private sector. This similarity is highlighted by the tendency among the public agencies to emphasize economic values such as efficiency comparatively more than accountability and democracy. Since this study only covers official material retrieved form web pages it can draw conclusions about how the visionary statements are presented – and not concerning how they were initiated and developed. Nevertheless, the very existence of visionary statements among public agencies turns attention to the division between the politicians as policy makers and the bureaucracy as a purely implementing force – and to the question about where, when and by whom politics is being made.