Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors that influence pupil engagement with science simulations: the role of distraction, vividness, logic, instruction and prior knowledge

Constructivist perspectives advocate high quality visual and auditory multimedia to simulate complex and authentic situations. However, the influence of symbolic or representational learning materials on pupil engagement or learning outcomes is not clear. This paper reports on pupil engagement with two types of simulation commonly found in school science (to illustrate practical experiments or depict microscopic chemical interactions). The project pilot phase involved three 15-16 year old male pupils and a main phase involved twenty one 14-15 year old pupils. They were presented with a digital record of their ‘think aloud’ behaviour with the simulation and they were asked for retrospective comment. Pre and post surveys were also used. Distraction, vividness, logic, instruction and prior knowledge played a significant role in determining the nature of engagement and the outcome of engagement. E-assessment involving multimedia or symbolic representation in science education must take great care if it is to ensure that what it is assessing is the pupil’s science capability and not information processing skills that rely on shared symbol identification or on the ability to follow the designers’ logic of instructions. [Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. , 2007, 8 (1), 1-12]
Endogenous estrogens, through estrogen receptor α, constrain autoimmune inflammation in female mice by limiting CD4+ T‐cell homing into the CNS

Sex hormones influence immune responses and the development of autoimmune diseases including MS and its animal model, EAE. Although it has been previously reported that ovariectomy could worsen EAE, the mechanisms implicated in the protective action of endogenous ovarian hormones have not been addressed. In this report, we now show that endogenous estrogens limit EAE development and CNS inflammation in adult female mice through estrogen receptor α expression in the host non‐hematopoietic tissues. We provide evidence that the enhancing effect of gonadectomy on EAE development was due to quantitative rather than qualitative changes in effector Th1 or Th17 cell recruitment into the CNS. Consistent with this observation, adoptive transfer of myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein‐specific encephalitogenic CD4+ T lymphocytes induced more severe EAE in ovariectomized mice as compared to normal female mice. Finally, we show that gonadectomy accelerated the early recruitment of inflammatory cells into the CNS upon adoptive transfer of encephalitogenic CD4+ T cells. Altogether, these data show that endogenous estrogens, through estrogen receptor α, exert a protective effect on EAE by limiting the recruitment of blood‐derived inflammatory cells into the CNS.
The Issues and Methodologies in Sustainability Assessment Tools for Higher Education Institutions

Assessment tools influence incentives to higher education institutions by encouraging them to move towards sustainability. A review of 16 sustainability assessment tools was conducted to examine the recent trends in the issues and methodologies addressed in assessment tools quantitatively and qualitatively. The characteristics of the current approaches as well as problems and obstacles are identified, and implications and suggestions offered for improvements. The sustainability assessment tools reviewed focus mainly on the environmental impacts of university operation and issues related to governance. Aspects of education, research and outreach activities are not well addressed by these tools. As activities for sustainability at higher education institutions increasingly involve inter-/trans-disciplinary cooperation and close collaboration with diverse stakeholders in society, it will be of critical importance to develop and implement concepts and methodologies for conducting comprehensive, long-term and integrated assessment of research, education and outreach on sustainability at higher education institutions.
Comprehension of Miranda Rights by Urban Adolescents with Law-Related Education

Law-related education has been recommended to improve juveniles' inadequate comprehension of Miranda rights. Whether such training results in adequate comprehension was assessed in this study of 48 urban, primarily black adolescents in a Street Law course. While students reported an unwillingness to waive their rights and their recognition-comprehension of the Miranda warnings was adequate on true-false and multiple-choice tests, these high-school juniors and seniors showed inadequate comprehension of Miranda vocabulary and misperceived the significance of the right to silence. The socioeconomic status and reading and listening abilities of students were related to their comprehension of Miranda rights. Implications for law-related education and protection of juveniles' rights in interrogations are discussed.
The Significance of Coeliac Disease Antibodies in Patients with Ankylosing Spondylitis: A Case-Controlled Study

The presence of anti-gliadin antibodies (AGA) and their relationship with intestinal permeability and prevalence of undiagnosed coeliac disease (CD) in ankylosing spondylitis (AS) were investigated. Blood samples from 30 AS patients and 19 age- and sex-matched controls were analysed for human leucocyte antigen (HLA)-B27, AGA and endomysial antibodies (EMA). Immunoglobulin (Ig) A-type AGA and IgG-type EMA were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. AGA-positive patients were examined by gastroduodenoscope and proximal small-bowel mucosa biopsies were performed. Eleven (36.7%) AS patients were AGA positive (compared with none of the control subjects) and three (10.0%) of these AS patients were also EMA positive. The presence of AGA was not associated with more severe AS. Mild-to-severe villous atrophy and hyperplasia of crypts with increased chronic inflammatory cells in the lamina propria, which is typical of CD, was only observed in one AGA/EMA-positive AS patient; CD was subsequently diagnosed by histology. Although AGA positivity might contribute to the pathogenesis of AS by increasing intestinal permeability to micro-organisms or by modifying intestinal immune mechanisms, further work is required to clarify its role in AS.
Complex Analysis of 700-Year-Old Skeletal Remains found in an Unusual Grave-Case Report

Aim: The present study was designed to analyze the 700-year-old human remains from an unusual grave using a combined approach that consisted of anthropological, archaeogenetic, genealogical, mass spectrometry, 3-dimensional (3D) modeling and facial reconstruction methods to confirm or reject several hypotheses about the skeletal remains. Methods: DNA was extracted from the skeleton and amplified using autosomal and Y-chromosome human identification short tandem repeat (STR) kits that were designed for forensic use, and sequence data were obtained from hyper variable region I (HVRI) mtDNA sequencing. Elemental mapping and quantification of investigated elements were performed using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). The Computed Tomography (CT) images of the skull were created in a transversal plane, and the scans were used to create 3D geometric models of the skull. A plastic physical model (a cast) of the skull was produced by rapid prototyping technology, and the model was used for sculptural facial approximation of the studied individual. Results: The Y-chromosome haplogroup of the sample was determined to be E1b1b, and the assigned mtDNA haplogroup was H. LA-ICP-MS and geochemical analysis revealed that the individual consumed plants and meats, except pork. Anthropological examination estimated the age of the individual to be between 45-55 years, and we did not find any traces of disablement or physical anomalies. Interestingly, we were able to produce a facial reconstruction according to the skull. Conclusion: Applying a multidisciplinary approach to the examination of the 14th century material enabled us to retrieve new types of information that helped us to interpret the excavated skeletal remains.
The Ecological and Population Validity of Reading Interventions for Adolescents

This article examined the ecological and population validity of research on reading interventions for adolescents in Grades 6 through 12. The 26 studies meeting selection criteria were analyzed to determine the characteristics of the students, interventionists, classroom structures, and school environments used, as well as whether there were differential effects of treatments across those characteristics. In the 20+ years since the calls by the Council for Learning Disabilities and National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities for greater specificity in descriptions of study participants and contexts, the findings of this study suggest that researchers have provided greater detail on participants, but many questions remain about the extent to which findings can be generalized. Specifically, gaps in the research exist with regard to African American and Native American students; English language learners; students in suburban, rural, and adjudicated schools; students in high school; interventions delivered by regular classroom teachers; interventions focused on vocabulary; and interventions in large groups and general education classrooms.
Depressive cognitions, maternal attitudes and postnatal depression

Objective: This study explored the relationship of depressive cognitions, socially prescribed perfectionism and self-silencing, to postnatal depression and women’s beliefs about motherhood. The study aimed to replicate, with a postnatal sample, findings in the depression literature that link certain depressive cognitions with depressive symptoms. Additionally, the study explored a proposed model in which these cognitions influenced the development of dysfunctional maternal attitudes and postnatal depressive symptoms. Background: Postnatal depression and dysfunctional maternal attitudes are situated within the interactional model of depression. The importance of beliefs about interpersonal relationships that are thought to lead to depressive symptoms is explored and explained theoretically. Methods: A cross-sectional design used correlational and SEM path analysis to examine interrelationships between variables. Participants were 77 postnatal women from 18 to 38 years of age attending their regular gynaecological appointments 4–8 weeks after childbirth. Measures used included: Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, Maternal Attitudes Questionnaire, Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale and the Silencing the Self Scale. Results: Socially prescribed perfectionism, externalised self-perception, self-silencing, the divided self and dysfunctional maternal attitudes were significantly correlated with postnatal depression (r = .354–.677) and with each other (r = .272–.574). SEM modelling (final model, χ2(7, 77) = . 891, CFI = 1.000, RMSEA = . 000) suggested that postnatal depression is most strongly related to externalised self-perception and socially prescribed perfectionism through the mediating effects of dysfunctional maternal attitudes and the divided self. Conclusions: Depressive cognitions were found to be related to postnatal depression in ways similar to depression in other life periods. The central finding of this study was the observation that dysfunctional maternal attitudes and the divided self-mediate the relationship between depressive cognitions and postnatal depression.
Domain Adaptation With Preservation of Manifold Geometry for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Adapting a pretrained classifier with unlabeled samples from an image for classification of another related image is a common domain adaptation strategy. However, traditional adaptation methods are not effective when the drift of spectral signatures is significant. Instead of iteratively redefining classifier parameters or decision boundaries, we exploit similar data geometries of images and preserve essential common data characteristics in a joint manifold space where similar samples are clustered. The proposed classification framework is based on aligning two global data manifolds with bridging pairs. In addition to global structures, we also consider the local scale by incorporating similar local clusters into the alignment process. In experiments with challenging temporal and spatially disjoint hyperspectral data sets, the proposed framework provides favorable classification results compared to two baseline methods, naive k-NN in both the original space and the manifold derived from pooled data. In comparisons with four state-of-the-art domain adaptation benchmark methods, the proposed method is demonstrated to be a competitive domain adaptation method, especially for the case when spectral changes between two data domains are significant. Results also provide insights related to the usefulness of incorporating global and local geometric characteristics of remote sensing data for domain adaptation studies.
Diversity analysis in Boro rice ( Oryza sativa L.) accessions

An experiment was conducted with 36 accessions of traditional (local) Boro rice germplasm accessions of three different groups (20 accessions as Kaliboro, 12 as Jagliboro and 4 as Tepiboro) during Boro season 2004 at BRRI farm to identify the duplicates with the help of morph-agronomic characters. On the basis of D 2 values, the 36 genotypes were grouped into six clusters with a range of intra (0.00 for cluster II to 1.78 for cluster I) and inter cluster (1.99 between cluster I and III to 21.20 between cluster II and III) distances. Cluster I comprised the highest number of genotypes (10) and cluster II the lowest (1), while cluster III, IV, V, and VI included 6, 7, 5, and 7 genotypes, respectively. Differences in cluster means existed for almost all the characters. The highest mean value for seedling height (21.68 cm), 1000-grain weight (20.97 g) and grain yield/hill (6.87 g) were observed in cluster I, II for days to 50% flowering (116), panicle length (22.80 cm), grains/panicle (74), and grain length (8.35 mm), cluster IV for tillers/hill (16.44) and panicles/hill (14.17), cluster V for harvest index (0.32) along with cluster I and VI, and cluster VI for plant height (117.17 cm) and flag leaf area (30.68 cm 2 ). None of the 12 characters had the highest mean value under cluster III. The canonical variate analysis showed in general that the important characters for the differentiation in the descending order of importance were grain length, days to 50% flowering, grains/panicle, grain yield/hill, panicle length, flag leaf area, plant height, seedling height, 1000-grain weight, panicles/hill, harvest index, and tillers/hill, but the similar name group accessions are not duplicate mainly due to dissimilarity of grain length, days to 50% flowering, grains/panicle and grain yield/hill characters. It is apparent from the results that the same name group accessions were quite different from each other. Keywords: Duplicate sorting; rice ( Oryza sativa L.); germplasm. DOI: 10.3329/bjar.v35i1. 5864 Bangladesh J. Agril. Res. 35(1) : 29-36, March 2010
Case-Based and Symbolic Classification Algorithms? - A Case Study using Version Space

Contrary to symbolic learning approaches, that represent a learned concept explicitly, case-based approaches describe concepts implicitly by a pair (CB; sim), i.e. by a measure of similarity sim and a set CB of cases. This poses the question if there are any differences concerning the learning power of the two approaches. In this article we will study the relationship between the case base, the measure of similarity, and the target concept of the learning process. To do so, we transform a simple symbolic learning algorithm (the version space algorithm) into an equivalent case-based variant. The achieved results strengthen the hypothesis of the equivalence of the learning power of symbolic and casebased methods and show the interdependency between the measure used by a case-based algorithm and the target concept.
The Effect of Task Analysis on Sequential Patterns of Music Instruction

Three groups of undergraduate elementary/early-childhood education majors participated in a study designed to help examine the effect of task analysis on use of complete sequential patterns and sequential pattern components in teaching music. A complete sequential pattern was defined as one continuing academic presentation or academic-related question, the resulting student response, and general or specific feedback. Three different teaching strategies were used for the three groups, and each group taught six times. One group wrote a task analysis before all teaching experiences; a second group was instructed to write two task analyses as an exercise, unrelated to actual teaching; a third group had no task-analysis instruction. Posttest videotapes of 60 subjects were analyzed for time spent in each component as well as in complete sequences. Results indicated the task-analysis group had a significantly greater number of complete sequences. The task-analysis group also had significantly more time in student performance. No significant differences were shown for specific or general feedback.
Teacher and Student Behavior in Suzuki String Lessons: Results from the International Research Symposium on Talent Education

The investigation described in this report documents the types of behavior that take place in the studios of nationally and/or regionally acclaimed string teachers whose instruction is based on the principles of Shinichi Suzuki. The specific focus of the investigation was the time allocated to different aspects of teacher, student, and parent behavior as teachers and students worked to improve students' playing of repertoire in the context of individual lessons. The study also examined the relationships among various student characteristics and the lesson behavior observed. Each of 29 string teachers was observed teaching two or three different students across three consecutive lessons—a total of 246 lessons. A unique aspect of the investigation was the enlistment of 13 expert string pedagogues who were trained to evaluate videotaped instruction using systematic observation procedures designed specifically for this project. The observation procedures were designed to address specific research questions that had been identified at the International Suzuki Institute Research Symposium (Aber, 1990).
Mechanism Design for Total Quality Management: Using the Bootstrap Algorithm for Changing the Control Game

When starting the software process improvement (SPI) journey, there are many SPI standards to select from. Selecting good SPI standards can be a technical problem, from a software engineering point of view, but it can also be a political problem, some standards fitting more with internal political agendas than others. As it is well-known that SPI without management commitment can have disastrous effects on SPI, so can also be the consequence of selecting standards that are technically unfit. The dilemma on how to select SPI standards provides a picture of SPI as a political game played out between managers, software engineers and SPI people. Starting with SPI from the viewpoint of control theory, the paper identifies different conflict situations within the control theory framework, and suggests using game theory and drama theory for finding optimal control strategies. Drama theory is further explored through a SPI case study that illustrates how SPI standards stabilize in spite of conflicts and social disaster. The contribution of the paper consists of introducing the concept of ‘evolutionary drama theory’ (derived from evolutionary game theory, EGT) as a tool for describing and analysing how an artefact like a SPI standard evolves towards equilibrium (evolutionary stable strategy, ESS) by looking at repeated dramas where equilibriums may not necessarily be found or, if found, may not necessarily fit with the ESS.
Ki‐ras mutations in 4‐(methylnitrosamino)‐1‐(3‐pyridyl)‐1‐butanone—initiated and butylated hydroxytoluene—promoted lung tumors in A/J mice

The promotional effects of butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) on lung tumorigenesis induced by 4‐(methylnitrosamino)‐1‐(3‐pyridyl)‐1‐butanone (NNK) was evaluated in a two‐stage model of lung tumorigenesis in the A/J mouse. Mice were treated in two separate experiments with 1.54 mmol/kg (9.1 mg/mouse) NNK, which induced an average of 8.4 and 9.1 tumors/mouse in the experiments. Animals fed a diet that contained 1 g/kg BHT after administration of the carcinogen in these two experiments demonstrated an increase of the tumor multiplicity by 63% and 43%. Multiplicity of forestomach tumors was not effected by BHT in the diet. No differences in lung tumor morphology were seen as a result of the promoting effect of BHT. Mutations in the Ki‐ras oncogene from lung tumors induced by NNK (19 tumors) or by NNK plus a diet containing BHT (34 tumors) were characterized by polymerase chain reaction, single‐strand conformational polymorphism, and direct sequencing. All 19 NNK‐induced tumors not promoted with BHT contained activated Ki‐ras genes with GC→AT transitions at the second base of codon 12. Only 11 of 34 NNK‐induced and BHT‐promoted tumors (32%) had this characteristic Ki‐ras alteration. These data suggest that the NNK‐initiated mouse lung tumorigenesis pathway, which involves the specific mutation of the Ki‐ras oncogene, is altered to a predominantly non‐ras mechanism when these tumors are promoted by BHT in the diet. ©1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Research Themes in Complex Informing

This paper introduces a six paper series that examines the manner in which complexity impacts the informing process. Two of these papers specifically consider how the objective complexity of the domain being studied changes the nature of the solution—with domains consisting of many interacting elements and changing criteria for success tending to produce highly rugged fitness landscapes that violate the normal assumptions of decomposability that we make in our research and incorporate into our theories. A third paper considers how the concept of utility impacts informing and is impacted by complexity. Another pair of papers examines, first, how the structure of a client’s mental models—referred to as structural complexity—changes with repetitive task performance and, then, how various cognitive filters work in concert with this structure during the informing process. The final paper specifically considers client-to-client informing processes, using the diffusion literature to argue that they are indispensible to complex informing and further mapping different models to different levels of informing complexity. Collectively, it is hoped that these papers will spur further research into the processes that enable complex informing.