Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stem Learning Achievement among Cambodian Middle School Students: An Examination of Gender and Psychosocial Factors ☆

Abstract International assessments have shown gender disparity in STEM among middle school students. Little is known of the gender disparity, the role of psychosocial factors, and school-to-work aspirations in STEM fields in the Cambodian context. The sample included 100 15-year-old students (53% females) from 10 schools in four provinces and the capital city. Classroom observations included eight classrooms from one of the 10 surveyed schools. This study’s measures were adapted from TIMSS’s including science and math interests, and perceived STEM support from teachers and parents. Results indicated that non-STEM subjects are on top of the most enjoyed subjects reported by the students. No statistical significance between genders on STEM interests was found. A multiple regression analysis showed that parents’ and teachers’ support in math, and teachers’ support in science, were predictive of STEM interests. Both parents and students tended to value math more than science, indicating a possible lack of understanding of science. Students showed a significant disconnect between STEM education received in classrooms and aspirations toward an actual career in STEM fields. Classroom observations indicated that while females tended to be shy in the classroom, most teachers did not exhibit behaviors suggesting gender discrimination patterns. Explanations of students’ interests in STEM regardless of gender, as well as the current climate in higher education and careers regarding the gender disparity in STEM, were discussed based on socioeconomic and sociocultural issues within the Cambodian context.
Quality control of Photosystem II: reversible and irreversible protein aggregation decides the fate of Photosystem II under excessive illumination

In response to excessive light, the thylakoid membranes of higher plant chloroplasts show dynamic changes including the degradation and reassembly of proteins, a change in the distribution of proteins, and large-scale structural changes such as unstacking of the grana. Here, we examined the aggregation of light-harvesting chlorophyll-protein complexes and Photosystem II core subunits of spinach thylakoid membranes under light stress with 77K chlorophyll fluorescence; aggregation of these proteins was found to proceed with increasing light intensity. Measurement of changes in the fluidity of thylakoid membranes with fluorescence polarization of diphenylhexatriene showed that membrane fluidity increased at a light intensity of 500–1,000 μmol photons m-2 s-1, and decreased at very high light intensity (1,500 μmol photons m-2 s-1). The aggregation of light-harvesting complexes at moderately high light intensity is known to be reversible, while that of Photosystem II core subunits at extremely high light intensity is irreversible. It is likely that the reversibility of protein aggregation is closely related to membrane fluidity: increases in fluidity should stimulate reversible protein aggregation, whereas irreversible protein aggregation might decrease membrane fluidity. When spinach leaves were pre-illuminated with moderately high light intensity, the qE component of non-photochemical quenching and the optimum quantum yield of Photosystem II increased, indicating that Photosystem II/light-harvesting complexes rearranged in the thylakoid membranes to optimize Photosystem II activity. Transmission electron microscopy revealed that the thylakoids underwent partial unstacking under these light stress conditions. Thus, protein aggregation is involved in thylakoid dynamics and regulates photochemical reactions, thereby deciding the fate of Photosystem II.
Operations Strategy Research in the POMS Journal

In this paper, we examine the operations strategy literature in the POMS journal to determine what has been learned and to suggest new directions for further study in this important area of research. Our review of this literature resulted in the selection of thirty‐one relevant articles, many of which draw upon multiple theoretical perspectives. We identify eight such theoretical perspectives, and go on to classify these perspectives in terms of the scope of inquiry employed in the research (focused versus aggregated) and the researcher's assumptions about choice processes (behavioral versus rational). In doing so, we show that this body of work is dominated by papers that draw upon theoretical perspectives enabling a more holistic scope of inquiry, with a bias towards a view of strategy as a highly rational process. Building on our systematic review and integration of the literature, we suggest multiple areas for future research.
Corpus for Coreference Resolution on Scientific Papers

The ever-growing number of published scientific papers prompts the need for automatic knowledge extraction to help scientists keep up with the state-of-the-art in their respective fields. To construct a good knowledge extraction system, annotated corpora in the scientific domain are required to train machine learning models. As described in this paper, we have constructed an annotated corpus for coreference resolution in multiple scientific domains, based on an existing corpus. We have modified the annotation scheme from Message Understanding Conference to better suit scientific texts. Then we applied that to the corpus. The annotated corpus is then compared with corpora in general domains in terms of distribution of resolution classes and performance of the Stanford Dcoref coreference resolver. Through these comparisons, we have demonstrated quantitatively that our manually annotated corpus differs from a general-domain corpus, which suggests deep differences between general-domain texts and scientific texts and which shows that different approaches can be made to tackle coreference resolution for general texts and scientific texts.
New output-based perceptual measure for predicting subjective quality of speech

The paper proposes a new output-based system for prediction of subjective speech quality, and evaluates its performance. The system is based on computing objective distance measures, such as the median minimum distance, between perceptually-based parameter vectors representing the voiced parts of the speech signal and appropriately matched reference vectors extracted from a pre-formulated codebook. The distance measures are then mapped into equivalent mean opinion scores (MOS) using regression. The codebook of the system is formed by optimally clustering the large number of speech parameter vectors extracted from an undistorted source speech database. The required clustering and matching processes are achieved by using an efficient data mining technique known as the self-organising map. The perceptually-based speech parameters are derived using perceptual linear prediction (PLP) and bark spectrum analyses. Reported evaluation results show that the proposed system is robust against speaker, utterance and distortion variations.
Lipopolysaccharide in adherence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to the cornea and contact lenses.

PURPOSE To determine the role of smooth or rough lipopolysaccharide on adherence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria to the rat cornea in vitro and on contact lenses of differing types. METHODS Adherence of a smooth (AK957) and isogenic rough strain (AK1012) of P. aeruginosa bacteria to rat corneas that were either normal, traumatized using a 20-gauge needle or treated for 15 min with 0.1N sodium hydrochloric acid was assessed by homogenization and viable counting. Adherence of these organisms to 43 unworn contact lenses representing the four Food and Drug Administration lens groups was also assessed using viable counts. RESULTS Attachment to contact lenses was greater for the smooth strain for all four lens types (P < 0.001). No variation in adherence to the different lens types was observed. Smooth bacteria also adhered to the cornea to a greater extent than the rough strain, regardless of trauma type (P < 0.001). Adherence to traumatized corneas was greater than to nontraumatized corneas for both strains of P. aeruginosa bacteria (P < 0.01). Measurement of surface hydrophobicity of the two bacterial strains revealed that the smooth strain was more hydrophobic than the rough strain (P < 0.001), perhaps accounting for the adherence pattern. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that bacterial surface characteristics may be important determinants of adherence and could explain the propensity of certain bacterial strains to infect the cornea.
MiR-185/AKT and miR-29a/Collagen 1a pathways are activated in IPF BAL cells

MicroRNA signatures of BAL cells and alveolar macrophages are currently lacking in IPF. Here we sought to investigate the expression of fibrosis-related microRNAs in the cellular component of the BAL in IPF. We thus focused on microRNAs previously associated with fibrosis (miR-29a, miR-29b, miR-29c, let-7d, and miR-21) and rapid IPF progression (miR-185, miR-210, miR-302c-3p miR-376c and miR-423-5p). Among the tested microRNAs miR-29a and miR-185 were found significantly downregulated in IPF while miR-302c-3p and miR-376c were not expressed by BAL cells. Importantly, the downregulation of miR-29a inversely correlated with the significantly increased levels of COL1A1 mRNA in IPF BAL cells. Collagen 1 a was found mainly overexpressed in alveolar macrophages and not other cell types of the BAL by immunofluorescence. In view of the downregulation of miR-185, we tested the response of THP-1 macrophages to profibrotic cytokine TGFb and observed the downregulation of miR-185. Conversely, proinflammatory stimulation lead to miR-185 upregulation. Upon examination of the mRNA levels of known miR-185 targets AKT1, DNMT1 and HMGA2, no significant correlations were observed in the BAL cells. However, increased levels of total AKT and AKTser473 phosphorylation were observed in the IPF BAL cells. Furthermore, miR-185 inhibition in THP-1 macrophages resulted in significant increase of AKTser473 phosphorylation. Our study highlights the importance of BAL microRNA signatures in IPF and identifies significant differences in miR-185/AKT and miR-29a/collagen axes in the BAL cells of IPF patients.
Functional Tolerance of CD8+ T Cells Induced by Muscle-Specific Antigen Expression1

Skeletal muscles account for more than 30% of the human body, yet mechanisms of immunological tolerance to this tissue remain mainly unexplored. To investigate the mechanisms of tolerance to muscle-specific proteins, we generated transgenic mice expressing the neo-autoantigen OVA exclusively in skeletal muscle (SM-OVA mice). SM-OVA mice were bred with OT-I or OT-II mice that possess a transgenic TCR specific for OVA peptides presented by MHC class I or class II, respectively. Tolerance to OVA did not involve clonal deletion, anergy or an increased regulatory T cell compartment. Rather, CD4+ T cell tolerance resulted from a mechanism of ignorance revealed by their response following OVA immunization. In marked contrast, CD8+ T cells exhibited a loss of OVA-specific cytotoxic activity associated with up-regulation of the immunoregulatory programmed death-1 molecule. Adoptive transfer experiments further showed that OVA expression in skeletal muscle was required to maintain this functional tolerance. These results establish a novel asymmetric model of immunological tolerance to muscle autoantigens involving Ag ignorance for CD4+ T cells, whereas muscle autoantigens recognized by CD8+ T cells results in blockade of their cytotoxic function. These observations may be helpful for understanding the breakage of tolerance in autoimmune muscle diseases.
Context Is Routinely Encoded During Emotion Perception

In the present study, we investigated whether context is routinely encoded during emotion perception. For the first time, we show that people remember the context more often when asked to label an emotion in a facial expression than when asked to judge the expression’s simple affective significance (which can be done on the basis of the structural features of the face alone). Our findings are consistent with an emerging literature showing that facial muscle actions (i.e., structural features of the face), when viewed in isolation, might be insufficient for perceiving emotion.
Cubic B-splines tomography at Loma Prieta

A high-resolution tomographic study, using cubic B-splines parameterization and employing a systematic approach to the choosing of appropriate damping and smoothing parameters, provided a three-dimensional P-wave velocity map of the Loma Prieta area. Used in the inversion were 11,977 high-quality raypaths from 844 aftershocks of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The velocity model exhibits a low-velocity feature between the San Andreas and Zayante-Vergeles faults in the top 10 km of the crust. This low-velocity feature is interpreted as a sedimentary unit exposed to the northwest and separated from the Salinian block by the Zayante-Vergeles fault. Below 10 km, no consistent change is observed between the Salinian and the Franciscan blocks. There appears to be a high correlation of aftershock activity and localized high-velocity anomalies southeast of the Loma Prieta mainshock. Whereas this anomaly may represent brittle rocks associated with a fault-zone asperity that failed after the mainshock, there is evidence to suggest it may be a body of serpentinite. The serpentinite exhibits high velocities and is potentially less competent than surrounding country rock, thus providing a sector along the fault more likely to be associated with many smaller earthquakes or creep behavior.
On the number of partitions of an integer in the m-bonacci base

Pour m ≥ 2, on definit les nombres de m-bonacci F k = 2 k pour 0 ≤ k ≤ m - 1 et F k = F k-1 + F k-2 + ··· + F k-m pour k ≥ m. Dans le cas m = 2, on retrouve les nombres de Fibonacci. Chaque entier positif n s'ecrit comme une somme distincte de nombres de m-bonacci d'une ou plusieurs facons. Soit R m (n) le nombre de partitions de n en base m-bonacci. En utilisant un theoreme de Fine et Wilf on deduit une formule pour R m (n) comme somme de coefficients binomiaux modulo 2. De plus, nous montrons que cette formule peut-etre utilisee pour determiner le nombre de partitions de n dans des systemes generaux de numeration incluant les systemes de nombres d'Ostrowski generalises associes aux suites episturmiennes.
Social learning and the replication process: an experimental investigation

Human cultural traits typically result from a gradual process that has been described as analogous to biological evolution. This observation has led pioneering scholars to draw inspiration from population genetics to develop a rigorous and successful theoretical framework of cultural evolution. Social learning, the mechanism allowing information to be transmitted between individuals, has thus been described as a simple replication mechanism. Although useful, the extent to which this idealization appropriately describes the actual social learning events has not been carefully assessed. Here, we used a specifically developed computer task to evaluate (i) the extent to which social learning leads to the replication of an observed behaviour and (ii) the consequences it has for fitness landscape exploration. Our results show that social learning does not lead to a dichotomous choice between disregarding and replicating social information. Rather, it appeared that individuals combine and transform information coming from multiple sources to produce new solutions. As a consequence, landscape exploration was promoted by the use of social information. These results invite us to rethink the way social learning is commonly modelled and could question the validity of predictions coming from models considering this process as replicative.
Hierarchical text classification and evaluation

Hierarchical classification refers to the assignment of one or more suitable categories from a hierarchical category space to a document. While previous work in hierarchical classification focused on virtual category trees where documents are assigned only to the leaf categories, we propose a top-down level-based classification method that can classify documents to both leaf and internal categories. As the standard performance measures assume independence between categories, they have not considered the documents incorrectly classified into categories that are similar to or not far from correct ones in the category tree. We therefore propose category-similarity measures and distance-based measures to consider the degree of misclassification in measuring the classification performance. An experiment has been carried out to measure the performance of our proposed hierarchical classification method. The results showed that our method performs well for a Reuters text collection when enough training documents are given and the new measures have indeed considered the contributions of misclassified documents.
EFFECT OF AMENDMENTS ON CHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF BENTONITE MINE SPOIL

Revegetation efforts generally have failed to establish substantial cover on bentonite mine spoil, but certain amendments have shown promise for improving spoil as a plant growth medium. These growth-promoting improvements were at least partially the result of effects of these amendments on spoil chemistry. We undertook this study to determine the effects of selected amendments (gypsum, fertilizer, and wood residue with N) and combinations thereof on several chemical properties of spoil. Amendment with wood residue with N increased the effects of either fertilizer (N, P, and K) or gypsum. Amendment with gypsum increased the level of soluble salts. Each amendment had chemical effects that would improve spoil as a plant growth substrate with the possible exception of increased salinity associated with gypsum.
An Information-Theoretic Approach to Distributed State Estimation

Abstract It is shown that the covariance intersection fusion rule, widely used in the context of distributed estimation, has a nice information-theoretic interpretation in terms of consensus on the Kullback-Leibler average of Gaussian probability density functions (PDFs). Based on this observation, a novel distributed state estimator based on the consensus among local posterior PDFs is proposed and its stability properties are analyzed.
Algorithm xxx : an Efficient Algorithm for Solving Rank-Deficient Least Squares Problems

Existing routines, such as xGELSY or xGELSD in LAPACK, for solving rank-deficient least squares problems require O(mn) operations to solve min ‖b−Ax‖ where A is an m by n matrix. We present a modification of the LAPACK routine xGELSY that requires O(mnk) operations where k is the effective numerical rank of the matrix A. For low rank matrices the modification is an order of magnitude faster than the LAPACK code.
Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology Are All Learners Created Equal? a Quantitative Analysis of Academic Performance in a Distance Tertiary Institution

This paper reports initial research results on the relationship between student learning styles and academic achievement in a distance education computing course with Internet-based student support. The learning styles of students in a computer concepts class were evaluated and classified according to the Felder-Soloman Learning Style Index. We have identified statistically significant differences in performance between different learner types, i.e. groups of students with different learning preferences. The best course performance in both course components: in-course assessment and final examination was identified in students with reflective, sensing, verbal and global learning preferences. One possible explanation of this result might be that the current teaching styles and distance learning environment (course material and online student support) gives an advantage to this type of learner. To test this hypothesis we are planning changes in the learning environment and methodology to cater for a variety of student learning styles. We can then test if academic achievement has been improved by comparing it with the results presented in this paper .
HIV and Syphilis Testing Preferences among Men Who Have Sex with Men in South China: A Qualitative Analysis to Inform Sexual Health Services

Background Health services for men who have sex with men (MSM) are inadequate in many areas around the world. HIV and syphilis test uptake remain suboptimal among MSM in China and many other regions. To inform the development of more comprehensive sexually transmitted disease (STD) testing programs among MSM, we collected descriptive data on MSM testing practices and preferences. Methods MSM in two large urban Chinese cities were recruited through community-based organizations and clinics to participate in semi-structured interviews. We purposively sampled MSM across a range of sociodemographic characteristics and testing history, and assessed preferences for HIV and syphilis testing in the context of facilitators and barriers to testing and previous testing experiences. Each interview transcript was coded and thematically analyzed using Atlas.ti 7.0. Results 35 MSM were interviewed. Confidentiality and privacy were the most important factors influencing participants’ decisions about whether and where to get tested. Men preferred rapid testing (results available within 30 minutes) compared to conventional tests where results take several hours or days to return. Participants described concerns about quality and accuracy of rapid tests offered in non-clinical settings such as community-based organizations. Men preferred testing service providers who were MSM-friendly, non-discriminatory, and medically trained. Preferred service center environments included: convenient but discrete location, MSM-friendly atmosphere, and clean/standard medical facilities. Conclusion Our data highlight the need for HIV/syphilis testing services that are confidential and inclusive of MSM. Rapid testing in decentralized (i.e. peripheral health facilities and community-level, non-clinical venues) settings provides an opportunity to reach individuals who have not been tested before, but must be accompanied by quality assurance systems and technical competence. Implementation research could further evaluate HIV/syphilis testing programs responsive to MSM preferences. Short Summary A qualitative study of MSM in South China found that men preferred rapid STD testing at MSM-focused test centers, but were concerned about test quality assurance and confidentiality.
A test of the relation between working-memory capacity and syntactic island effects

The source of syntactic island effects has been a topic of considerable debate within linguistics and psycholinguistics. Explanations fall into three basic categories: grammatical theories, which posit specific grammatical constraints that exclude extraction from islands; grounded theories, which posit grammaticized constraints that have arisen to adapt to constraints on learning or parsing; and reductionist theories, which analyze island effects as emergent consequences of non-grammatical constraints on the sentence parser, such as limited processing resources. In this article we present two studies designed to test a fundamental prediction of one of the most prominent reductionist theories: that the strength of island effects should vary across speakers as a function of individual differences in processing resources. We tested over three hundred native speakers of English on four different island-effect types (whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct islands) using two different acceptability rating tasks (seven-point scale and magnitude estimation) and two different measures of working-memory capacity (serial recall and n-back). We find no evidence of a relationship between working-memory capacity and island effects using a variety of statistical analysis techniques, including resampling simulations. These results suggest that island effects are more likely to be due to grammatical constraints or grounded grammaticized constraints than to limited processing resources.