Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness of online presence in a blended higher learning environment in the Pacific

ABSTRACT The widespread use of technology has facilitated many changes in the education sector including higher education. Academic institutes are concentrating their efforts on measuring the level of student engagement and participation in online learning environments for student success. This paper analyses student log data to quantify the effectiveness of online presence on student performance in a blended course using frequency and duration as indicators. The analysis shows both frequency and duration having a statistically significant impact on the students’ final marks. The study proposes a multiple linear regression model using these measurements to predict the final mark of students in a blended learning environment. The predictive regression model, explained through the use of two new models; Online Measurable Presence Model (OMPM) and Slingshot model, can be used to determine the effectiveness of student online presence for success in a blended higher learning environment in the Pacific.
The Transfer Transition: A Summary of Key Issues, Target Areas and Tactics for Reform.

This report discusses the increasing prevalence of transfer students and explores problems relating to educational access for minorities, artificial barriers to transfer (curricular, financial, and procedural), and college adjustment. Recommendations are made to both two-year and four-year institutions in the areas of: (1) curriculum, suggesting collaboration between two-year and four-year institutions to develop articulation agreements that enhance transferability of individual courses; (2) academic advisement, proposing the designation of specialized "transfer counselors" and the establishment of transfer resource centers; (3) transfer-student orientation and support programs, focusing on the need for summer transition programs, pre-semester orientations, and peer mentoring programs; (4) faculty involvement, proposing that two-year and four-year college faculty collaborate and that transfer students be assigned faculty mentors; and (5) institutional research and assessment, calling for more effective transfer student tracking, course placement, and student appraisal. The paper concludes with a discussion of how following these recommendations and enhancing the transfer experience can benefit postsecondary institutions. (Contains 49 references.) (EMH) ******************************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******************************************************************************** The Transfer Transition: A Summary of Key Issues, Target Areas and Tactics for Reform U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION ii CENTER (ERIC) This docum ent has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. El Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. Joseph B. Cuseo
Acoustic oscillations of rapidly rotating polytropic stars. I. Effects of the centrifugal distortion

Aims. A new non-perturbative method to compute accurate oscillation modes in rapidly rotating stars is presented. Methods. The effect of the centrifugal force is fully taken into account while the Coriolis force is neglected. This assumption is valid when the time scale of the oscillation is much shorter than the inverse of the rotation rate and is expected to be suitable for high radial order p-modes of δ Scuti stars. Axisymmetric p-modes have been computed in uniformly rotating polytropic models of stars. Results. In the frequency and rotation range considered, we found that as rotation increases (i) the asymptotic structure of the nonrotating frequency spectrum is first destroyed then replaced by a new form of organization (ii) the mode amplitude tends to concentrate near the equator (iii) differences to perturbative methods become significant as soon as the rotation rate exceeds about fifteen percent of the Keplerian limit. The implications for the seismology of rapidly rotating stars are discussed.
Bio-inspired physical layered device architectures for diffusion-based molecular communication: Design Issues and suggestions

The aim of molecular communication (MC) is to develop communication systems for biochemical information interchange among nano devices. While there have been research efforts to model, design and analyze various MC network and devices, a lot still have to be done before we can develop and deploy such systems. Following the traditional physical layered architecture of communication networks, this paper presents design initiatives, open research issues and proffer suggestion towards modeling and designing diffusion-based MC devices. Specifically, we present biologically inspired modular theoretical design approach to modeling and designing MC devices. We also discussed various issues that should be considered in developing an accurate system-theoretic model of an MC system.
Choosing the crook: A conjoint experiment on voting for corrupt politicians

The coexistence of harsh disapproval of corruption and the limited electoral consequences of malfeasant behavior remains a conundrum in social sciences. While elections should be used to hold politicians accountable, evidence shows that voters only mildly punish corrupt politicians. This paper assesses the trade-off hypothesis, which suggests that voters forgive corrupt candidates when these candidates provide other valued outcomes. It distinguishes two possible factors against which integrity can be traded—partisanship and economic performance—and tests them in a multidimensional experiment. With the results of an original conjoint analysis, this paper provides compelling evidence for the relative importance of corruption when casting a vote and the mitigating effects of other valued candidate characteristics. Even when obtaining highly credible information, partisanship determines the vote to the same extent as corruption. Additionally, co-partisanship and a strong economic performance moderate the negative effect corruption has on the vote.
Semantic Query Expansion for Arabic Information Retrieval

Traditional keyword based search is found to have some limitations. Such as word sense ambiguity, and the query intent ambiguity which can hurt the precision. Semantic search uses the contextual meaning of terms in addition to the semantic matching techniques in order to overcome these limitations. This paper introduces a query expansion approach using an ontology built from Wikipedia pages in addition to other thesaurus to improve search accuracy for Arabic language. Our approach outperformed the traditional keyword based approach in terms of both F-score and NDCG measures.
Block Coordinate Descent for Sparse NMF

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a ubiquitous tool for data analysis. An important variant is the sparse NMF problem which arises when we explicitly require the learnt features to be sparse. A natural measure of sparsity is the L$_0$ norm, however its optimization is NP-hard. Mixed norms, such as L$_1$/L$_2$ measure, have been shown to model sparsity robustly, based on intuitive attributes that such measures need to satisfy. This is in contrast to computationally cheaper alternatives such as the plain L$_1$ norm. However, present algorithms designed for optimizing the mixed norm L$_1$/L$_2$ are slow and other formulations for sparse NMF have been proposed such as those based on L$_1$ and L$_0$ norms. Our proposed algorithm allows us to solve the mixed norm sparsity constraints while not sacrificing computation time. We present experimental evidence on real-world datasets that shows our new algorithm performs an order of magnitude faster compared to the current state-of-the-art solvers optimizing the mixed norm and is suitable for large-scale datasets.
Hemorheological alterations, decreased cerebral microvascular oxygenation and cerebral vasomotion compensation in sickle cell patients

Sickle cell anemia (SS) is characterized by a reduced cerebral microvascular oxygen saturation (cerebral TOI), which is not associated with hemoglobin concentration. Cerebral TOI has never been studied in sickle cell‐hemoglobin C disease (SC). We focused on the relationships between hemorheological alterations and cerebral TOI in sickle cell patients with no cerebral vasculopathy and on the usefulness of TOI variability to assess the cerebral vasomotion activity. The blood rheological profile, the level of cerebral TOI (spatial resolved spectroscopy) and the cerebral TOI variability, which reflects vasomotion activity, were compared between 20 healthy subjects (AA), 21 SC patients, and 21 SS patients. Cerebral TOI exhibited the following order: AA > SC > SS. The low cerebral TOI in SS patients was related to red blood cell aggregation and deformability properties. The cerebral TOI variability of SS and SC patients was increased above healthy values and vasomotion activity was negatively associated with the reduced cerebral TOI in SS patients. We demonstrated that (1) blood rheology could be involved in the reduced cerebral TOI in SS patients but not in SC patients; (2) vasomotion activity is increased in SS and SC patients to compensate for the reduced cerebral TOI. Am. J. Hematol. 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Periodontitis in individuals with diabetes treated in the public health system of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of periodontitis among individuals with diabetes who use the public health system in the city of Belo Horizonte-Minas Gerais, Brazil, and the association of this condition with socioeconomic, behavioral and clinical variables. METHODS A cross-sectional study was carried out on a calculated sample of 300 individuals with diabetes. Periodontitis was defined as clinical attachment loss (CAL) > 3 mm in two or more non-adjacent teeth or those that exhibited CAL > 5 mm in 30.0% of teeth. All subjects were over 30 years of age and underwent a periodontal examination. Socioeconomic and behavioral characteristics as well as medical history and dental history were obtained from a structured interview. Multivariate analysis was conducted using Poisson regression. RESULTS Among the individuals with diabetes, 6.7% exhibited good periodontal health, 68.0% exhibited gingivitis and 25.3% exhibited periodontitis. The following variables were associated with periodontitis after adjustment: male (PR 1.67 95% CI 1.12, 2.49), individuals with diabetes for more than eight years (PR 1.63 95% CI 1.63, 2.38), smokers (PR 1.71 95% CI 1.10, 2.65); individuals with more than 12 missing teeth (PR 2.67 95% CI 1.73, 4.15) CONCLUSIONS Multiple determinants are associated with the prevalence of periodontitis among patients with diabetes.
Maternal Origin of Turkish and Iranian Native Chickens Inferred from Mitochondrial DNA D-loop Sequences

To assess genetic diversity and maternal origin of Turkish and Iranian native chicken breeds, we analyzed the mtDNA D-loop sequences of 222 chickens from 2 Turkish (Denizli and Gerze) and 7 Iranian (White Marandi, Black Marandi, Naked Neck, Common Breed, Lari, West Azarbaijan, and New Hampshire) native chicken breeds, together with the available reference sequences of G. gallus gallus in GenBank. The haplotype diversity was estimated as 0.24±0.01 and 0.36±0.02 for Turkish and Iranian populations, respectively. In total, 19 haplotypes were observed from 24 polymorphic sites in Turkish and Iranian native chicken populations. Two different clades or haplogroups (A and E) were found in Turkish and Iranian chickens. Clade A haplotypes were found only in White Marandi, Common Breed and New Hampshire populations. Clade E haplotypes, which are quite common, were observed in Turkish and Iranian populations with 18 different haplotypes, of which Turkish and Iranian chickens, Clade E, haplotype 1 (TRIRE1) was a major haplotype with the frequency of 81.5% (181/222) across all breeds. Compared to red jungle fowl, Turkish and Iranian chicken breeds are closely related to each other. These results suggest that Turkish and Iranian chickens originated from the same region, the Indian subcontinent. Our results will provide reliable basic information for mtDNA haplotypes of Turkish and Iranian chickens and for studying the origin of domestic chickens.
Capturing Term Dependencies using a Sentence Tree based Language Model

We describe a new probabilistic Sentence Tree Language Modeling approach that captures term dependency patterns in Topic Detection and Tracking’s (TDT) Story Link Detection task. New features of the approach include modeling the syntactic structure of sentences in documents by a sentence-bin approach and a computationally efficient algorithm for capturing the most significant sentence level term dependencies using a Maximum Spanning Tree approach, similar to Van Rijsbergen’s modeling of document-level term dependencies. The new model is a good discriminator of on-topic and off-topic story pairs providing evidence that sentence level term dependencies contain significant information about relevance. Although runs on a subset of the TDT2 corpus show that the model is outperformed by the unigram language model, a mixture of the unigram and the Sentence Tree models is shown to improve on the best performance especially in the regions of low false alarms.
Influence of non‐Newtonian rheology on magma degassing

Many volcanoes exhibit temporal changes in their degassing process, from rapid gas puffing to lava fountaining and long‐lasting quiescent passive degassing periods. This range of behaviors has been explained in terms of changes in gas flux and/or magma input rate. We report here a simple laboratory experiment which shows that the non‐Newtonian rheology of magma can be responsible, alone, for such intriguing behavior, even in a stationary gas flux regime. We inject a constant gas flow‐rate Q at the bottom of a non‐Newtonian fluid column, and demonstrate the existence of a critical flow rate Q* above which the system spontaneously alternates between a bubbling and a channeling regime, where a gas channel crosses the entire fluid column. The threshold Q* depends on the fluid rheological properties which are controlled, in particular, by the gas volume fraction (or void fraction) ϕ. When ϕ increases, Q* decreases and the degassing regime changes. Non‐Newtonian properties of magma might therefore play a crucial role in volcanic eruption dynamics.
CD73-Generated Adenosine: Orchestrating the Tumor-Stroma Interplay to Promote Cancer Growth

Despite the coming of age of cancer immunotherapy, clinical benefits are still modest. An important barrier to successful cancer immunotherapy is that tumors employ a number of mechanisms to facilitate immune escape, including the production of anti-inflammatory cytokines, the recruitment of regulatory immune subsets, and the production of immunosuppressive metabolites. Significant therapeutic opportunity exists in targeting these immunosuppressive pathways. One such immunosuppressive pathway is the production of extracellular adenosine by CD73, an ectonucleotidase overexpressed in various types of cancer. We hereafter review the biology of CD73 and its role in cancer progression and metastasis. We describe the role of extracellular adenosine in promoting tumor growth through paracrine and autocrine action on tumor cells, endothelial cells, and immune cells.
Social pacts in Europe : emergence, evolution, and institutionalization

The result of a four-year long comparative research study centred at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and financed by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme, this book presents the first full-length theoretical and comparative empirical study of new social pacts in Europe. Its aim is to bring the level of sophistication achieved in an earlier literature on neo-corporatism to the more contemporary phenomenon of 'social pacting'. The book brings a wide range of complementary theories to bear on the emergence, evolution, and institutionalization of pacts, compares systematically a wide range of cases across Europe, and provides in-depth studies of Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. The book contributes to the scholarly debate on economic adjustment and institutional change in European capitalism by focusing on three inter-related questions: (a) what explains national variation in reliance on social pacts? (b) what determines the outcomes of individual pact negotiations? and (c) under what conditions are pacts repeated and become regular features of socio-economic governance? The book's theoretical innovations include a novel application of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA) to help explain national differences in social pact adoption, the application of a game theoretic approach to explain social pact emergence, and a reinterpretation of traditional neo-corporatist and new institutionalist theory to help understand social pact consolidation and institutionalization.
Revisions to GDP, GDI, and Their Major Components

HE NATIONAL income and product accounts (NIPAs) provide a timely, comprehensive, and ac­ curate description of the condition of the U.S. economy. Their two featured measures—gross domes­ tic product (GDP) and gross domestic income (GDI)—are summary measures of the same concept of economic activity. GDP measures activity as the sum of all final expenditures in the economy; it is detailed on the product side of the domestic income and prod­ uct account. GDI measures activity as the sum of all in­ comes generated in production; it is detailed on the income side of the domestic income and product ac­ count. In principle, GDP and GDI give the same mea­ sure of economic activity, but in practice, they differ because each is estimated from different source data. 1 Measuring the accuracy of national accounts esti­ mates is a long-standing challenge for three main rea­ sons. One, the early GDP and GDI estimates are based on partial data and are intended to provide an “early read” on the general picture of economic activity for decision-makers. These early estimates are revised as more complete and accurate source data become avail­ able. Two, the source data for the national accounts come from a mix of survey, tax, and other business and administrative data; these source data are subject to a mix of sampling and nonsampling errors and biases that cannot be measured in terms of standard errors. Three, the national accounts are regularly revised to re­ flect the changes in the economic concepts and meth­ ods necessary for these accounts to provide a picture of the evolving U.S. economy that is relevant and accurate for today’s economy. These updates range from ex­ panding the definition of investment from investments
New evidence for an ENSO impact on low-latitude glaciers: Antizana 15, Andes of Ecuador, 0°28'S

[1] Continuous monthly mass balance measurements from the ablation zone of Antizana 15 glacier in the Andes of Ecuador between January 1995 and December 2002 indicate a strong dependence on El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Over the 8-year period investigated, mass balance was negative all year round during El Nino periods but remained close to equilibrium (positive anomalies) during La Nina events. On seasonal timescales, mean ablation rates remain at a quite constant level all year round, but interannual variability shows much larger changes from year to year during the key periods February–May and September. This variability is caused by large differences that occur in the seasonal cycle during the two opposite phases of ENSO. Since ENSO is phase locked to the seasonal cycle with largest sea surface temperature anomalies around boreal winter, November–February, and the atmospheric response to ENSO is delayed by 3 months over the Ecuadorian Andes, year-to-year variations in mass balance are largest between February and May. Energy balance studies at the glacier surface indicate that high air temperature, which favors rain over snowfall, weak and sporadic snowfall, insufficient to maintain a high glacier albedo, low wind speeds, which limit the transfer of energy from melting to sublimation, and reduced cloud cover, which increases the incoming short-wave radiation, are the dominant factors related to El Nino, which tend to increase ablation. La Nina events on the other hand are characterized by colder temperatures, higher snowfall amounts, and to a lesser degree, more constant winds, factors which increase albedo and sublimation and therefore preclude melting at the glacier surface. The effects of ENSO variability are also important over the accumulation area, which represents up to 80% of the glacier surface during La Nina events (1999–2000) and 45–60% in El Nino years. Since the accumulation rates increase during these cold periods, the specific net balance and the dynamics of the entire glacier are strongly affected. Longer mass balance records than this 8-year period are needed for conclusive answers about the dependence of the Ecuadorian glaciers on ENSO variability, but initial results suggest that the response observed on Antizana glaciers is very similar to what has been observed previously during ENSO periods on Andean glaciers in the outer tropics. The seasonal dependence on ENSO and the physical mechanisms linking ENSO with mass balance variations on Antizana, however, are different from the response observed on Andean glaciers in the outer tropics.
Semantics + filtering + search = twitcident. exploring information in social web streams

Automatically filtering relevant information about a real-world incident from Social Web streams and making the information accessible and findable in the given context of the incident are non-trivial scientific challenges. In this paper, we engineer and evaluate solutions that analyze the semantics of Social Web data streams to solve these challenges. We introduce Twitcident, a framework and Web-based system for filtering, searching and analyzing information about real-world incidents or crises. Given an incident, our framework automatically starts tracking and filtering information that is relevant for the incident from Social Web streams and Twitter particularly. It enriches the semantics of streamed messages to profile incidents and to continuously improve and adapt the information filtering to the current temporal context. Faceted search and analytical tools allow people and emergency services to retrieve particular information fragments and overview and analyze the current situation as reported on the Social Web. We put our Twitcident system into practice by connecting it to emergency broadcasting services in the Netherlands to allow for the retrieval of relevant information from Twitter streams for any incident that is reported by those services. We conduct large-scale experiments in which we evaluate (i) strategies for filtering relevant information for a given incident and (ii) search strategies for finding particular information pieces. Our results prove that the semantic enrichment offered by our framework leads to major and significant improvements of both the filtering and the search performance. A demonstration is available via: http://wis.ewi. tudelft.nl/twitcident/