Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A study of linguistic strategies in Irish Dáil debates with a focus on power and gender.

Parliamentary discourse has been described as fundamentally adversarial. In the context of the parliamentary debating chamber, power relations are negotiated and challenged through the strategic use of language. It is the aim of this study to identify the ways in which strategic language is used to negotiate the dynamics of power in the context of Irish parliamentary debate. Given that women are a minority in the Dail, the topic of gender is a relevant dimension to the research. As a secondary aim, the study investigates whether and in what ways gender is invoked in the strategic use of language. The study employs a multi-method qualitative approach to analyse strategic language use in the area of parliamentary discourse. It focuses on the micro-level of discourse by undertaking a close linguistic analysis of extracts from debate transcripts from the 31st Dail. Also, current members of the parliament are interviewed to gain perspectives on the dialectics of speaking in the institutionalised setting of the chamber. Linguistic strategies are analysed using a classification designed for the purposes of the study. The analysis indicates that TDs use a wide variety of forms of strategic language in Dail interaction. The study also suggests that there is an awareness of the informal and formal rules that are in place in the habitus of the Dail chamber. The multi-method framework of the study uncovers a set of different perspectives between TDs’ statements in the interview data and the findings from analysis of debate interaction. The study also suggests that female TDs may use strategic language which invokes gender in order to challenge male authority in debate interaction, and that female TDs may invoke gender more often than their male counterparts when using linguistic strategies.
The Advancement of Children's Verbal Referential Communication Skills: The Role of Metacognitive Guidance

36 children aged between 4-4 and 5-4 were assessed for both their understanding about the role of message ambiguity as a cause of communication failure, and their level of performance in verbal referential communication tasks. All children then took part in six half-hour sessions during which they practised listening and speaking in small groups, with the experimenter modelling appropriate behaviour on her turns. In addition, half the children received information about when and why listeners understood or failed to understand (metacognitive guidance) during the course of the sessions. Both groups improved in both performance and understanding in the immediate post-test and in a delayed post-test seven weeks later there was no sign of regression in understanding. The guidance group advanced more than the practice group in both performance and understanding (with the exception of those at the highest levels of understanding originally). Performance and understanding measures were significantly related to each other in the pre-test, and the relationship remained unchanged following intervention, with the exception of question-asking, which increased even among children who made no advances in understanding. The results were interpreted as suggesting that we can advance children's verbal communication skills not only by giving them information about communication, but also by treating them as though they understand that messages can be ambiguous and can cause communication failure.
Defining the language assessment literacy gap: Evidence from a parliamentary inquiry

This study identifies a unique context for exploring lay understandings of language testing and, by extension, for characterizing the nature of language assessment literacy among non-practitioners, stemming from data in an inquiry into the registration processes and support for overseas trained doctors by the Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing. The data come from Hansard transcripts of public hearings of the inquiry. Sections of the data related to language and language testing (as part of the current registration process for doctors seeking employment in Australia) were identified and coded using a thematic analysis. Findings reveal misconceptions about who is responsible for tests and for decisions based on scores in this context, as well as misconceptions about language testing procedures. Issues also emerge concerning the location of expertise in language and language testing. Discussion of these findings contributes to current debate within the language testing community (e.g., Taylor, 2009) about where responsibility lies for increasing language assessment literacy among non-practitioner stakeholders and how this might best be achieved.
Striatal Contribution to Cognition: Working Memory and Executive Function in Parkinson's Disease before and after Unilateral Posteroventral Pallidotomy

The basal ganglia are intimately connected to the frontal cortex via five fronto-striatal circuits. While the role of the frontal cortex in cognition has been extensively studied, the contribution of the basal ganglia to cognition has remained less clear. In Parkinson's disease, posteroventral pallidotomy (PVP) involves surgical lesioning of the internal section of the globus pallidus (GPi, the final output pathway from the basal ganglia) to relieve the motor symptoms of the disorder. PVP in Parkinson's disease provides a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of disruption of striatal outflow to the frontal cortex on cognition. We assessed executive function and working memory after withdrawal of medication in 13 patients with Parkinson's disease before and 3 months after unilateral PVP compared to 12 age-and IQ-matched normals assessed twice with an interval of 3 months. The tests used were: Wisconsin Card Sorting (WCST), Self-Ordered Random Number Sequences, Missing Digit Test, Paced Visual Serial Addition Test (PVSAT), and Visual Conditional Associative Learning Test (VCALT). After PVP, the patients performed significantly better on the Self-Ordered Random Number Sequences and the WCST, an improvement that was also observed in the normals across the two assessment and is therefore likely to reflect practice effects. Relative to the normals, the patients showed significant differential change following PVP on the Missing Digit Test and PVSAT, on which they performed worse after compared to before surgery, while the controls performed better on the second assessment. For the patients, performance on the VCALT also indicated deterioration after PVP, but the changes approached significance. The side of PVP had no effect on the results. The pattern of change observed 3 months after PVP was maintained at 15-month follow-up. The results suggest that striatal outflow to the frontal cortex may be essential for those aspects of executive function that showed deterioration after PVP. &
Religiosity, Reading and Educational Achievement among Jewish Students in Israel

Data from the PISA 2000 study were analyzed to compare educational achievement of Jewish students from public religious and public secular secondary schools in Israel. Public religious school students achieved higher scores in a standardized test of reading than students at public secular schools. This result was largely explained by students' reading habits and the home reading environment (operationalized as the number of books at home). Neither social capital (defined as school disciplinary climate and teacher helpfulness) nor participation in highbrow cultural activities explains the advantage of students at religious schools. The study suggests that Jewish observant families provide, on average, a richer reading environment than Jewish secular families, and thus are seen to promote students' reading skills.
Scaling up sexuality education in Senegal: integrating family life education into the national curriculum

Abstract In Senegal, school-based sexuality education has evolved over 20 years from family life education (FLE) pilot projects into cross-curricular subjects located within the national curriculum of primary and secondary schools. We conducted a literature review and semi-structured interviews to gather information regarding the scale and nature of FLE scale-up. Data were analysed using the ExpandNet/WHO framework, conceptualising scale-up from a systems perspective as composed of interrelated elements and strategic choices. Key enabling factors that facilitated the scale-up of FLE included (1) programme clarity, relevance and credibility; (2) programme adaptability to young people’s evolving sexual and reproductive health priorities; (3) the engagement of a strong and credible resource team comprising government and civil society agencies; (4) a favourable policy environment; and (5) deliberate strategic choices for horizontal and vertical scale-up. Barriers included sociocultural conservatism that creates resistance to content areas deemed to be culturally sensitive, resulting in partial scale-up in terms of content and coverage, as well as structural barriers that make it difficult to find space in the curriculum to deliver the full programme. Lessons learned from Senegal’s experience can strengthen efforts to scale-up school-based sexuality education programmes in other culturally conservative low- and middle-income countries.
Variation in response to anticonvulsants in a group of epileptic patients.

In 118 adult epileptic patients with grand mal and/or temporal-limbic epilepsy, the mean serum concentration of diphenylhydantoin, phenobarbital, primidone, and phenobarbital derived from primidone increased directly with mean dose administered. With a given dose of each drug, wide individual variation in serum concentration existed. Women consistently received a larger dose of each medication per unit of body weight than men, yet women uniformly obtained lower serum concentrations of each drug. Those subjects with more frequent and/or more poorly controlled seizures received the largest doses of diphenylhydantoin and phenobarbital and obtained higher serum concentrations of these drugs than those patients with less frequent and better controlled seizures. Men and women were unevenly distributed with regard to seizure frequency and control. The heterogenous nature of a population of seizure patients was emphasized.
Mental Reversal of Imagined Melodies: A Role for the Posterior Parietal Cortex

Two fMRI experiments explored the neural substrates of a musical imagery task that required manipulation of the imagined sounds: temporal reversal of a melody. Musicians were presented with the first few notes of a familiar tune (Experiment 1) or its title (Experiment 2), followed by a string of notes that was either an exact or an inexact reversal. The task was to judge whether the second string was correct or not by mentally reversing all its notes, thus requiring both maintenance and manipulation of the represented string. Both experiments showed considerable activation of the superior parietal lobe (intraparietal sulcus) during the reversal process. Ventrolateral and dorsolateral frontal cortices were also activated, consistent with the memory load required during the task. We also found weaker evidence for some activation of right auditory cortex in both studies, congruent with results from previous simpler music imagery tasks. We interpret these results in the context of other mental transformation tasks, such as mental rotation in the visual domain, which are known to recruit the intraparietal sulcus region, and we propose that this region subserves general computations that require transformations of a sensory input. Mental imagery tasks may thus have both task or modality-specific components as well as components that supersede any specific codes and instead represent amodal mental manipulation.
Do Observed Metallicity Gradients of Early-Type Galaxies Support a Hybrid Formation Scenario?

We measure radial gradients of the Mg2 index in 15 E-E/S0 and 14 S0 galaxies. Our homogeneous data set covers a large range of internal stellar velocity dispersions (2.0 < log σ < 2.5) and Mg2 gradients [▵Mg2/▵ log up to -0.14 mag dex-1]. We find for the first time a noticeable lower boundary in the relation between Mg2 gradient and σ along the full range of σ, which may be populated by galaxies predominantly formed by monolithic collapse. At high σ, galaxies showing flatter gradients could represent objects that suffered either important merging episodes or later gas accretion. These processes contribute to the flattening of the metallicity gradients, and their increasing importance could define the distribution of the objects above the boundary expected by the "classical" monolithic process. This result is in marked contrast to previous works, which found a correlation between ▵Mg2/▵ log and σ confined to the low-mass galaxies, suggesting that only galaxies below some limiting σ were formed by collapse, whereas the massive ones were formed by mergers. We show observational evidence that a hybrid scenario could also arise among massive galaxies. Finally, we estimate ▵[Z/H] from Mg2 and Hβ measurements and single stellar population models. The conclusions remain the same, indicating that the results cannot be ascribed to age effects on Mg2.
The effects of a home-based intervention for young children with intellectual disabilities in Vietnam.

BACKGROUND This study was conducted to examine the impact of a 1-year intervention for children with intellectual disabilities (ID) in Vietnam. METHOD Subjects were 30 preschool-aged children with ID (ages 3 to 6 years). Sixteen were assigned to an intervention group and 14 to a control group. Based on the Portage Curriculum (CESA 5 2003), the intervention trained parents to work with their children through modelling and coaching by teachers during weekly home visits. RESULTS Comparison of pre-, mid- and post-intervention assessments of the children based on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (Sparrow et al. 1984a) indicated that the intervention was promising: children in the intervention group improved significantly in most domains of adaptive behaviours, and also performed significantly better than the control group in the areas of personal care and motor skills. CONCLUSIONS The results from the Vietnam programme are discussed in terms of its implications and strategies for developing programmes for children with disabilities in developing countries.
Incentive Mechanism Design for Heterogeneous Peer-to-Peer Networks: A Stackelberg Game Approach

With high scalability, high video streaming quality, and low bandwidth requirement, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have become a popular way to exchange files and deliver multimedia content over the internet. However, current P2P systems are suffering from “free-riding” due to the peers' selfish nature. In this paper, we propose a credit-based incentive mechanism to encourage peers to cooperate with each other in a heterogeneous network consisting of wired and wireless peers. The proposed mechanism can provide differentiated service to peers with different credits through biased resource allocation. A Stackelberg game is formulated to obtain the optimal pricing and purchasing strategies, which can jointly maximize the revenue of the uploader and the utilities of the downloaders. In particular, peers' heterogeneity and selfish nature are taken into consideration when designing the utility functions for the Stackelberg game. It is shown that the proposed resource allocation scheme is effective in providing service differentiation for peers and stimulating them to make contribution to the P2P streaming system.
CERME 6 - WORKING GROUP 15 THEORY AND RESEARCH ON THE ROLE OF HISTORY IN MATHEMATICS EDUCATION

Probability and random variables turn out to be an obstacle in the teaching-learning process, partly due to the conceptual difficulties inherent in the topic. To help students get over this drawback, a unit on “Probability and Random Variables” was designed following the guidelines of the European Higher Education Area and subsequently put into practice at an engineering school. This paper focuses on the design, implementation and assessment of a specific activity of this unit concerning the introduction of the normal probability curve from a teaching-learning approach inspired by history. To this purpose a historical module on the normal curve elaborated by Katz and Michalowicz (2005) was adapted to develop different aspects of the topic.
[Enhanced expression of human vimentin intermediate filaments in hepatocellular carcinoma cells decreases their proliferative and invasive abilities in vitro].

OBJECTIVE Expression of vimentin in carcinoma cells is a marker for poor prognosis in patients. The aim of this investigation was to assess the influence of vimentin on the characteristics of carcinoma cells. METHODS The full-length vimentin gene open reading frame (1401 base pairs) was cloned into the plasmid vector pcDNA 3.1 (+), and these vectors were used to stably transfect the human hepatocellular carcinoma HepG2 cell line. Vimentin gene expression was evaluated by RT-PCR and Western blot. Proliferative activity and invasive potential of tumor cells were determined by the CellTiter 96 aqueous one solution cell proliferation assay and BioCoat GFR Matrigel invasion chamber, respectively. RESULTS DNA sequencing and restriction endonuclease digestion analysis demonstrated that the recombinant vector was correctly cloned. The stable cell line demonstrated a higher vimentin RNA and protein expression. However, both proliferative and invasive abilities of the cells were reduced in vitro ( P < 0.05). CONCLUSION A recombinant plasmid pcDNA3. 1-VIM is successfully constructed and a carcinoma cell line HepG2-pV highly expressing vimentin is obtained. Recombinant vimentin protein suppresses the proliferative and invasive abilities of HepG2 cells, suggesting that it might decrease malignant phenotype of tumor cells in vitro. This work makes a foundation for further study on the relationship between vimentin and biological phenotype of carcinoma cells.
Twentieth century sea level: An enigma

Changes in sea level (relative to the moving crust) are associated with changes in ocean volume (mostly thermal expansion) and in ocean mass (melting and continental storage): ζ(t) = ζsteric(t) + ζeustatic(t). Recent compilations of global ocean temperatures by Levitus and coworkers are in accord with coupled ocean/atmosphere modeling of greenhouse warming; they yield an increase in 20th century ocean heat content by 2 × 1023 J (compared to 0.1 × 1023 J of atmospheric storage), which corresponds to ζgreenhouse(2000) = 3 cm. The greenhouse-related rate is accelerating, with a present value ζ̇greenhouse(2000) ≈ 6 cm/century. Tide records going back to the 19th century show no measurable acceleration throughout the late 19th and first half of the 20th century; we take ζ̇historic = 18 cm/century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes about 6 cm/century to melting and other eustatic processes, leaving a residual of 12 cm of 20th century rise to be accounted for. The Levitus compilation has virtually foreclosed the attribution of the residual rise to ocean warming (notwithstanding our ignorance of the abyssal and Southern Oceans): the historic rise started too early, has too linear a trend, and is too large. Melting of polar ice sheets at the upper limit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates could close the gap, but severe limits are imposed by the observed perturbations in Earth rotation. Among possible resolutions of the enigma are: a substantial reduction from traditional estimates (including ours) of 1.5–2 mm/y global sea level rise; a substantial increase in the estimates of 20th century ocean heat storage; and a substantial change in the interpretation of the astronomic record.
Restoration of pharyngeal dilator muscle force in dystrophin‐deficient (mdx) mice following co‐treatment with neutralizing interleukin‐6 receptor antibodies and urocortin 2

What is the central question of this study? We previously reported impaired upper airway dilator muscle function in the mdx mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Our aim was to assess the effect of blocking interleukin‐6 receptor signalling and stimulating corticotrophin‐releasing factor receptor 2 signalling on mdx sternohyoid muscle structure and function. What is the main finding and its importance? The interventional treatment had a positive inotropic effect on sternohyoid muscle force, restoring mechanical work and power to wild‐type values, reduced myofibre central nucleation and preserved the myosin heavy chain type IIb fibre complement of mdx sternohyoid muscle. These data might have implications for development of pharmacotherapies for DMD with relevance to respiratory muscle performance.
Elastofibroma. Case Report

A case of subscapular elastofibroma in a 61-year-old male was studied by light and electron microscopy. Sixty-two cases of this lesion have been to date reported. At light microscopy, the mass was unencapsulated and consisted of dense collagen bundles with many thick elastinophilic fibers and globules. The ultrastructural examination showed the fibers contained a clear core of mature elastic tissue surrounded by a more electron-dense fibrillar material, which was attributed to newly formed elastin. After elastase digestion, the fibers failed to stain with orcein. The cells were very scanty and identified as fibroblasts. The hypothesis formulated by various authors about the nature of elastinophilic fibers and about the pathogenesis of elastofibroma are reviewed. Our findings seems to support those of most authors, who consider the lesion an abnormally increased reactive production of elastic tissue by fibroblasts in response to a mechanical stimulus.
Valor Hedonista, Satisfacción y Lealtad: Un Análisis Empírico en un Contexto de Servicios* Hedonic Value, Satisfaction and Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis in a Service Context*

Marketing scholars have long analysed the antecedents of consumer retention and loyalty. However, empirical examination of the role of perceived value and the moderating effect of some variables in this process is scarce. The purpose of this research is to explore the building of loyalty through the perceived value and consumer satisfaction in a service context. In particular, this paper draws on the hedonic value and its dimensions: aesthetics and play. Furthermore, through a multi-sample analysis, this study examines the moderating effect of past experience on the loyalty formation. We conclude with new insights and practical suggestions for service providers to influence consumers’ loyalty.