Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing hybrid classes in a flexible learning environment

This paper describes the development of a regime comprising a teaching platform and associated assessment processes. The objective behind these is to enable the equitable assessment of student assignments in hybrid courses. In this paper, the term hybrid refers to courses where the student body comprises both campus-based and off-campus students. Additionally, in either of these groups students may elect to undertake their studies using online resources rather than attend in person. The paper commences with a background discussion on the problem and reasons for seeking alternative approaches to teaching and assessment in hybrid courses. This is followed by a detailed examination of the teaching processes, assessable components and the tools which are pivotal to the process. The paper describes the rationale and objectives behind each, the relationship between the different components and describes the relationship of each to the process as a whole. The paper concludes with some of the issues encountered during the evolution of the regime and discussion on further direction in respect to future research and development.
Sustained Low-Dose Treatment with the Histone Deacetylase Inhibitor LBH589 Induces Terminal Differentiation of Osteosarcoma Cells

Histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) were identified nearly four decades ago based on their ability to induce cellular differentiation. However, the clinical development of these compounds as cancer therapies has focused on their capacity to induce apoptosis in hematologic and lymphoid malignancies, often in combination with conventional cytotoxic agents. In many cases, HDACi doses necessary to induce these effects result in significant toxicity. Since osteosarcoma cells express markers of terminal osteoblast differentiation in response to DNA methyltransferase inhibitors, we reasoned that the epigenetic reprogramming capacity of HDACi might be exploited for therapeutic benefit. Here, we show that continuous exposure of osteosarcoma cells to low concentrations of HDACi LBH589 (Panobinostat) over a three-week period induces terminal osteoblast differentiation and irreversible senescence without inducing cell death. Remarkably, transcriptional profiling revealed that HDACi therapy initiated gene signatures characteristic of chondrocyte and adipocyte lineages in addition to marked upregulation of mature osteoblast markers. In a mouse xenograft model, continuous low dose treatment with LBH589 induced a sustained cytostatic response accompanied by induction of mature osteoblast gene expression. These data suggest that the remarkable capacity of osteosarcoma cells to differentiate in response to HDACi therapy could be exploited for therapeutic benefit without inducing systemic toxicity.
Learning Anaphoricity and Antecedent Ranking Features for Coreference Resolution

We introduce a simple, non-linear mention-ranking model for coreference resolution that attempts to learn distinct feature representations for anaphoricity detection and antecedent ranking, which we encourage by pre-training on a pair of corresponding subtasks. Although we use only simple, unconjoined features, the model is able to learn useful representations, and we report the best overall score on the CoNLL 2012 English test set to date.
Nepalese Adolescent's Environmental Discourses

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of gender, residential background, education, age and income on the environmental attitudes and behaviours of people. The data were gathered from 200 residents of Kirtipur, chosen randomly and were interviewed face to face. Student’s t-test and one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to analyse the changes in the environmental attitudes and behaviours of people in terms of gender, residential background, education, age and income. The results of the study showed that most of the people have realized their own responsibility in protecting environment and recognized the importance of environmental protection over economic development, and reduction in water consumption and turning off lights are most frequently practiced environmentally responsible behaviours. It also emerged from the study that environmental attitude and behaviour are under the influence of various socio-demographic variables; and pro-environmental attitudes can only be translated into environmentally responsible behaviours in low cost situation in context of developing country. The study also puts forth an open discourse about instilling ‘ environmental fashion culture ’ among younger generation people.
Diagnosis and treatment of eosinophilic esophagitis

Eosinophilic esophagitis is a newer disease entity that has been diagnosed with increasing frequency over the past 10 years. Patients present with a variety of symptoms including vomiting, failure to thrive, abdominal pain, dysphagia, and/or food impaction depending on the age of the patient. The diagnosis is confirmed by endoscopy with eosinophilic inflammation localized to the oesophagus, an area typically void of eosinophils.
Uncovering the drivers of customer engagement behaviours : investigating key mediating mechanisms underlying the link between customer satisfaction and customer engagement behaviours in a higher education context

This study aims to explore cognitive and affective mediating mechanisms between Customer Satisfaction (CS) and positive Customer Engagement Behaviours (CEBs) that are of direct benefit to a firm (i.e. Participation, Word-of-Mouth, Monetary Giving) or indirect benefit (, i.e. Human Capital Performance). Two studies were carried out, in England and Austria, in a higher education context. Study 1 comprised of: 8 focus groups with 48 undergraduate business students from England and Austria, 21 semi-structured interviews with alumni of undergraduate business studies from England and Austria, and 9 background expert interviews. Study 2 encompassed a mail survey with 209 multi-source cases from undergraduate business students, who had conducted a placement year, and their immediate managers or supervisors, in England. Findings reveal that the relationships between CS and CEBs are not direct as assumed in literature. Perceived Employability was found as a central cognitive mediator between CS and CEBs of direct and indirect benefit to a service provider. In addition, Gratitude and Love are of importance as affective mediators between CS and CEBs that are of direct benefit to a firm. This study contributes to the service field by developing and empirically testing a conceptual framework on CEBs, including often neglected CEBs; for instance, CEBs of indirect benefit to an organisation and monetary CEBs. The study also provides the first empirical evaluation of the serial mediation effects of two distinct positive emotions, Gratitude and Love, between CS and CEBs of direct benefit to a service provider. Finally, while most studies have focused on affective mediation effects and CEBs of direct benefit to a service provider, this study has found Perceived Employability to have a simple cognitive mediation effect between CS and CEBs of indirect benefit to a service provider.
Becoming teacher leaders in Israel: a meaning-making model

ABSTRACT Consensus is growing that teacher leadership benefits teaching quality and student performance. Despite the recognition that teacher leadership contributes to teachers’ professional development, little is known about how it is developed and how teachers experience the transition to the teacher-leader role. This study explores the internal mechanisms underlying the transition to and formation of teachers’ professional identity as teacher leaders. It is based on 60 interviews: 41 teachers who were selected to participate in a leadership training programme, 10 principals and 19 teacher-leaders’ colleagues. The findings led to a model with four central components: (1) Overall professional identity; (2) The experience of ‘being chosen;’ (3) An internal meaning-making process; and (4) External forces.
The Impact of Different Teaching Approaches and Languages on Student Learning of Introductory Programming Concepts

Learning to program, especially in the object-oriented paradigm, is a difficult undertaking for many students. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting with different introductory programming languages. However, determining the effectiveness of these interventions poses a problem. The research presented here developed an instrument to assess student learning of fundamental and object-oriented programming concepts, then used that instrument to investigate the impact of different teaching approaches and languages on university students’ ability to learn those concepts. Extensive data analysis showed that the instrument performed well overall. Reliability of the assessment tool was statistically satisfactory and content validity was supported by intrinsic characteristics, question response analysis, and expert review. Preliminary support for construct validity was provided through exploratory factor analysis. Three components that at least partly represented the construct “understanding of fundamental programming concepts” were identified: methods and functions, mathematical and logical expressions, and control structures. Analysis revealed significant differences in student performance based on instructional language and approach. The analyses showed differences on the overall score and questions involving assignment, mathematical and logical expressions, and code completion. Instructional language and approach did not appear to affect student performance on questions addressing object-oriented concepts.
Dynamics of quality-of-service routing with inaccurate link-state information

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Sender Authenticated Key Agreements Without Random Oracles

The purpose of this paper is to study sender authenticated key agreements by a third party, which uses the received parameters to verify the fact that a sender of a message knows his long-term private key. In particular, we propose a standard model for the protocol among three entities for the first time. The security of this protocol depends on the difficulty to solve two new problems related to one-way isomorphisms and the co-bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem on multiplicative cyclic groups. It is the first time that the security of a key agreement has been formally proved by using negligible probability. We believe that our contribution gives many applications in the cryptographic community.
Motor Skills and Executive Function Contribute to Early Achievement in East Asia and the Pacific

ABSTRACT Research Findings: This study examined the contributions of motor skills and executive function (EF) to early achievement. Participants were 7,797 children (3,889 girls) between 36 and 72 months of age from 6 countries in East Asia and the Pacific. Fine and gross motor skills, EF, language and literacy achievement, and mathematics achievement were evaluated using the East Asia-Pacific Early Child Development Scales, a tool that assesses child development in 7 domains. Children’s caregivers provided demographic information. There were 3 salient findings. First, gross and fine motor skills predicted both language and literacy and mathematics achievement. Second, in general, fine motor skills contributed more to the prediction of early achievement than gross motor skills. However, there were no differences between the contributions of fine and gross motor skills to the prediction of early language and literacy in Papua New Guinea or early mathematics in Timor-Leste. Third, EF partially mediated the relation between both early achievement and gross and fine motor skills in the overall sample, Cambodia, and Timor-Leste and fully mediated the association of gross motor skills and early achievement in China, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu. Practice or Policy: Implications of the findings for early childhood education are discussed.
Constrained simulations of the local universe – I. Mass and motion in the local volume

It has been recently claimed that there is no correlation between the distribution of galaxies and their peculiar velocities within the local volume (LV), namely a sphere of R = 7 h −1 Mpc around the Local Group (LG). It has been then stated that this implies that either locally dark matter is not distributed in the same way as luminous matter or peculiar velocities are not due to fluctuations in mass. To test this statement, a set of constrained N-body cosmological simulations, designed to reproduce the main observed large-scale structure, have been analysed. The simulations were performed within the flat-� , open and flat matter only cold dark matter (CDM) cosmogonies. Two unconstrained simulations of the flat-� and open CDM models were performed for comparison. LG-like objects have been selected so as to mimic the real LG environment. The local gravitational field due to all haloes found within each LV is compared with the exact gravitational field induced by all matter in the simulation. We conclude that there is no correlation between the exact and local gravitational field obtained by pairwise Newtonian forces between haloes. Moreover, the local gravitational field is uncorrelated with the peculiar velocities of haloes. The exact gravitational field has a linear correlation with the peculiar velocities but the proportionality constant relating the velocity with gravitational field falls below the prediction of the linear theory. Upon considering all matter inside the LVs, the exact and local gravitational accelerations show a much better correlation, but with a considerable scatter independent of the cosmological models. The main conclusion is that the lack of correlation between the local gravitation and the peculiar velocity fields around LG-like objects is naturally expected in the CDM cosmologies.
Toward an acoustic typology of motor speech disorders

Acoustic methods have progressed to the point that an acoustic typology of the motor speech disorders can be constructed from a parametric assessment of the speech subsystems (e.g., phonation, nasal resonance, vowel articulation, consonant articulation, intonation, and rhythm). The results of this analysis can be interpreted in respect to global functions in speech (e.g., voice quality, intelligibility, and prosody). This paper reviews studies showing that specific acoustic analyses have demonstrated or potential value toward the overall goal of constructing acoustic profiles of dysarthria and apraxia of speech. Several different acoustic measures are relevant to the study of the motor speech disorders, and these are increasingly supported by normative data and by guidelines for clinical application. Examples of these applications are discussed for a variety of specific neurologic diseases or perceptual types of disorder. Acoustic studies are useful in the study of motor speech disorders and recent progress points to a parametric analysis.
MP15-13 UROLOGISTS’ KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDES AND PRACTICE BEHAVIORS REGARDING SEXUAL MINORITY PATIENTS

INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES: Despite societal acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, sexual minorities continue to face health disparities. There is limited data on the interactions of urologic providers with LGBT patients. We sought to assess attitudes, knowledge and practice patterns of urologists regarding LGBT patients. METHODS: A 46-item online survey was administered to urologists from around the country. E-mail invitations were sent to the American Urological Association (AUA) Western Section, and academic urology departments within the United States. The survey assessed demographics, attitudes, knowledge, and practice patterns. The Chi-Square test was used to compare the distribution of responses, and multivariate regression analysis was used to determine the independent effect of age, year of graduation, gender, training in LGBT care, and the estimated volume of LGBT patients. RESULTS: 112 adult urologists responded to the survey (89 males, 23 females). More respondents reported being very comfortable discussing sexual health with heterosexual patients compared to LGBT patients (80.2% vs. 64.3%, p<0.0001). A majority (62.5%) of urologists do not ask patients about their sexual orientation, and 26.1% assume their patients to be heterosexual upon first encounter. While 58.9% of urologists said they were well informed on LGBT health issues, on average, <50% answered the portion of the survey testing physician knowledge correctly. A majority of participants (73.9%) reported less than 5 hours of education on how to care for LGBT patients in medical school or continuing education, and 72.7% felt that more training through professional societies is necessary. Urologists reporting > 5 hours of LGBT training were more likely to think it important to know patients′ gender identities (p=.0006). Those willing to be listed as LGBT-friendly providers, as well as urologists whose patient panels were estimated to be > 6% LGBT were significantly more comfortable with LGBT patients (p =0.02 and 0.007, respectively). No significant differences in responses were noted between male and female urologists. CONCLUSIONS: We found low levels of inquiry about patients′ sexual orientation among urologists. Most respondents were comfortable with LGBT patients, despite limited formal training on LGBT healthcare. However, there were significant knowledge gaps about LGBT urologic healthcare, and the majority of respondents felt the need for more education on LGBT health. Source of Funding: none
Gold‐Induced Fibril Growth: The Mechanism of Surface‐Facilitated Amyloid Aggregation

Abstract The question of how amyloid fibril formation is influenced by surfaces is crucial for a detailed understanding of the process in vivo. We applied a combination of kinetic experiments and molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate how (model) surfaces influence fibril formation of the amyloid‐forming sequences of prion protein SUP35 and human islet amyloid polypeptide. The kinetic data suggest that structural reorganization of the initial peptide corona around colloidal gold nanoparticles is the rate‐limiting step. The molecular dynamics simulations reveal that partial physisorption to the surface results in the formation of aligned monolayers, which stimulate the formation of parallel, critical oligomers. The general mechanism implies that the competition between the underlying peptide–peptide and peptide–surface interactions must strike a balance to accelerate fibril formation.
Learning to Collectively Link Entities

Recently Kulkarni et al. [20] proposed an approach for collective disambiguation of entity mentions occurring in natural language text. Their model achieves disambiguation by efficiently computing exact MAP inference in a binary labeled Markov Random Field. Here, we build on their disambiguation model and propose an approach to jointly learn the node and edge parameters of such a model. We use a max margin framework, which is efficiently implemented using projected subgradient, for collective learning. We leverage this in an online and interactive annotation system which incrementally trains the model as data gets curated progressively. We demonstrate the usefulness of our system by manually completing annotations for a subset of the Wikipedia collection. We have made this data publicly available. Evaluation shows that learning helps and our system performs better than several other systems including that of Kulkarni et al.
Resolvin D1 Reduces the Immunoinflammatory Response of the Rat Eye following Uveitis

This study investigated whether the administration of resolvin D1 to rats with endotoxininduced uveitis (EIU) ameliorates the immuno-inflammatory profile of the eye. 24 h after the administration of 200 μg LPS into the footpad of Sprague-Dawley rats, severe changes of the structure of the eye occurred concomitantly with a severe inflammatory and immune response. These latter included strong infiltration of PMN leukocytes CD11b+ T-lymphocytes CD4+ and CD8+ within the eye and a significant release of the cytokines/chemokines TNF-alpha, CXCL8, and RANTES too. Bolus of resolvin D1 (RvD1; 10–100–1000 ng/kg in 200 μL of sterile saline via the tail vein) significantly and dose-dependently (i) reduced the development of the ocular derangement caused by LPS; (ii) reduced the clinical score attributed to EIU; (iii) reduced the protein concentration and myeloperoxidase activity (MPO) in aqueous humor (AqH); and (iv) reduced neutrophils, T-lymphocytes, and cytokines within the eye.
Weighted‐Covariance Factor Decomposition of Varma Models Applied to Forecasting Quarterly U.S. Real GDP at Monthly Intervals

Suppose a vector autoregressive moving‐average model is estimated for m observed variables of primary interest for an application and n–m observed secondary variables to aid in the application. An application indicates the variables of primary interest but usually only broadly suggests secondary variables that may or may not be useful. Often, one has many potential secondary variables to choose from but is unsure which ones to include in or exclude from the application. The article proposes a method called weighted‐covariance factor decomposition (WCFD), comparable to Stock and Watson's method here called principle‐components factor decomposition (PCFD), for reducing the secondary variables to fewer factors to obtain a parsimonious estimated model that is more effective in an application. The WCFD method is illustrated in the article by forecasting quarterly observed U.S. real GDP at monthly intervals using monthly observed four coincident and eight leading indicators from the Conference Board ( http://www.conference‐board.org). The results show that root mean‐squared errors of GDP forecasts of PCFD‐factor models are 0.9–11.3% higher than those of WCFD‐factor models especially as estimation‐forecasting periods pass from the pre‐2007 Great Moderation through the 2007–2009 Great Recession to the 2009–2016 Slow Recovery.
Galaxy–galaxy lensing in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification data

We present galaxy-galaxy lensing results from 139 deg(2) of Dark Energy Survey (DES) Science Verification (SV) data. Our lens sample consists of red galaxies, known as redMaGiC, which are specifically selected to have a low photometric redshift error and outlier rate. The lensing measurement has a total signal-to-noise ratio of 29 over scales 0.09 < R < 15 Mpc h(-1), including all lenses over a wide redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.8. Dividing the lenses into three redshift bins for this constant moving number density sample, we find no evidence for evolution in the halo mass with redshift. We obtain consistent results for the lensing measurement with two independent shear pipelines, NGMIX and IM3SHAPE. We perform a number of null tests on the shear and photometric redshift catalogues and quantify resulting systematic uncertainties. Covariances from jackknife subsamples of the data are validated with a suite of 50 mock surveys. The result and systematic checks in this work provide a critical input for future cosmological and galaxy evolution studies with the DES data and redMaGiC galaxy samples. We fit a halo occupation distribution (HOD) model, and demonstrate that our data constrain the mean halo mass of the lens galaxies, despite strong degeneracies between individual HOD parameters.