Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
UPSHOTS OF EDUCATIONAL SUPERVISION ON PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: INSIGHT OF SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS AT GONDAR CITY, ETHIOPIA

ABSTRACT Educational supervision is very vital in the professional development of teachers. The study therefore aims at investigating the perception of secondary school teachers at Gondar city, Ethiopia, on educational supervision in relation to their professional development. In all, 106 teachers of the secondary school schools in Gondar city who had spent at least a year at their respective schools were randomly selected and used for the study. The questionnaire was used to collect the data. One key finding from the study is that generally, majority of the teachers perceived educational supervision as having a positive impact on their professional development in terms of developing experience; curriculum, teaching methods and materials; classroom management; characteristics of pupils; and assessment. They also perceive educational supervision as helping to identify the needs of teachers and accordingly, plans professional development activities. Another finding is that educational on their challenges through which solutions are found to overcome them. More so, there is no significant difference in the views of male and female teachers of secondary schools at Gondar city, in terms of developing their experiences, classroom management, characteristics of the pupils they teach, and assessment techniques. However, there is a significant difference in their responses in terms of curriculum, teaching methods and materials. The study, therefore, recommends that frequent and effective professional development activities should be organized by educational supervisors to enable teachers identify and develop their strengths, and address their weaknesses. Also, educational supervisors should not be interested in finding faults of teachers but more importantly, discussion with teachers to identify their strengths and weaknesses in order to improve on their professional knowledge, skills and experiences. KEY WORDS: perception, educational supervision, professional development, public, secondary schools, teachers
Retinal Microvasculature as a Model to Study the Manifestations of Hypertension

The retinal vasculature allows direct noninvasive visualization of the body’s mircrovasculature. Because the retina and other end organs (brain and kidney) share similar anatomical features and physiological properties, the retinal vessels offer a unique and easily accessible window to study the health and disease of the human microcirculation. Advanced retinal vascular imaging technologies have been developed to allow a more objective and precise assessment of retinal vascular changes. The changes in the retinal vasculature associated with hypertension can be broadly divided into 3 groups: (1) classic retinal vascular changes in response to blood pressure (referred to as hypertensive retinopathy signs), (2) changes in retinal vascular caliber, and (3) changes in more global geometrical patterns of the retina. In this review, we summarize the current understanding of the relationship between retinal vascular changes and blood pressure, the evidence for the retinal vasculature as a biological model to study the manifestation and early pathogenic correlates of hypertension, the latest advances in retinal vascular imaging technologies, and the future opportunities and challenges of retinal vascular imaging. We suggest that further development of retinal vascular analyses and standardized measurement protocols, evaluation of the clinical use of retinal vascular imaging in assessing cardiovascular risk prediction, and using retinal vascular imaging to test antihypertensive treatments will allow the translation of retinal vascular imaging as a tool to improve the diagnosis, prognosis, and management of hypertension in clinical practice.
Influences on control in diabetes mellitus: patient, doctor, practice, or delivery of care?

OBJECTIVE--To assess patient, doctor, practice, and process of care variables for their effect on glycaemic control in diabetes mellitus, and to quantify their relative effects. DESIGN--Search of general practice medical records, patient questionnaires and examination, doctor questionnaire, videotaping and analysis of consultations, and practice questionnaire. SETTING--12 practices with 32 participating general practitioners in Nottinghamshire. SUBJECTS--318 patients randomly selected from those with diabetes in each practice, 10 for each participating doctor. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE--Glycaemic control as measured by random glycated haemoglobin A1c estimation (random haemoglobin A1 measurement). RESULTS--Glycaemic control was significantly related to the disease process as measured by years since diagnosis, treatment group, and number of diabetes related clinical events. Females had significantly worse control than males. Other patient factors, such as age, social class, lifestyle, attitudes, satisfaction, and knowledge, had no association with glycaemic control. Of all the doctor factors examined, only doctors who professed a special interest in diabetes achieved significantly better glycaemic control. Bigger and better equipped practices and those with a diabetic miniclinic had patients with significantly better glycaemic control, as did those with access to dietetic advice. Patients attending hospital clinics had worse glycaemic control, but this seemed to be attributable to the case mix and practice characteristics. Shared care did not contribute to the multiple linear regression model. CONCLUSION--Glycaemic control among diabetic patients in the community is related to such factors as treatment group, sex, and years since diagnosis; it is also related to the organisation and process of care. The findings support concentrating diabetic care on partners with special interests in diabetes in well equipped practices with adequate dietetic support.
'Caution children crossing ahead': Child protection education with pre-service teachers using a strengths approach

This paper examines issues relating to child protection education for pre-service teachers and outline findings to date, from Phase one of the doctoral research of the author, into the use and potential of the Strengths Approach (McCashen, 2005) in this area of education. Although widely used in social work and therapeutic situations, the Strengths Approach is relatively unknown within the education sector. Review of the literature, however, would suggest there are interdisciplinary possibilities with the approach and that education students particularly may find it a useful tool in teaching child protection education. This paper examines the interplay of early research findings with the significant practical and moral demands of child protection education for pre-service teachers. Intrinsic to the research are the possible collaborations and partnerships between social work and education presented by the application of strengths approaches.
Stimulation‐induced changes in lower limb corticomotor excitability during treadmill walking in humans

Magnetic stimulation of human primary motor cortex (M1) paired with electrical stimulation of a peripheral motor nerve has been used to produce a lasting modulation of corticomotor (CM) excitability. This ‘paired associative stimulation’ (PAS) protocol has been used to induce bidirectional changes in excitability in upper limb CM pathways. The present study tested the hypothesis that temporally dependent PAS applied to the common peroneal nerve during the swing phase of walking would induce bidirectional changes in CM excitability consistent with the Hebbian principle of activity‐dependent plasticity. Fourteen subjects with no known neurological disorder participated in two data collection sessions each. PAS was delivered as a single block of 120 pairs of stimuli delivered in a 10 min period during treadmill walking at 4.0 km h−1. Changes in CM excitability were assessed by examining the size of motor potentials evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation prior to and following PAS. Tibialis anterior motor‐evoked potentials amplitude increased to 121% over baseline when the magnetic stimulus was delivered over M1 after the estimated arrival time of the afferent volley in sensorimotor cortex and decreased to 83% of baseline when the magnetic stimulus was delivered prior to the estimated afferent volley arrival. This extent of modulation was undiminished following a further 10 min period of walking without stimulation. The temporal nature of the bidirectional effects following PAS, their rapid evolution and subsequent persistence supported the study's hypothesis and were similar to the effects described by others in quiescent muscles of the upper limb.
CFD simulations of cyclone separators with different diameters: Analysis of gas cyclones with different cylinder diameters

The present work is based on studying the effect of varying cyclone main body diameter on its performance. For this purpose Stairmand high efficiency cyclone with main body diameter of 0.29m has been considered. Three different diameters are considered, viz. 0.9D, 1.0D and 1.1D; with D as the diameter of standard cyclone model and the constants being the scaling factor. Pressure drops and collection efficiencies of all the cyclone models have been predicted using commercially available CFD code FLUENT 6.3. 26. High quality block structured hexahedral mesh has been created using industry standard software ICEM CFD, upon which the Navier-Stokes equations are solved iteratively using finite volume methods. Reynolds stress model is used as a closure model to solve Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations that solves for stress tensors together with the equation for the dissipation rates. The present study shows remarkable effect of the cyclone diameter on its performance which are discussed in details.
A Simple Approach to Multiview Face Hallucination

Most face hallucination methods are usually limited to frontal face with small pose variations. This letter presents a simple and efficient multiview face hallucination (MFH) method to generate high-resolution (HR) multiview faces from a single given low-resolution (LR) one. The problem is addressed in two steps. A simple face transformation method is proposed by defining a constrained least square problem for LR multiview face transformation and a position-patch based face hallucination method is extended to incorporate HR multiview face details. Experimental results show that our approach has some advantages over existing MFH methods.
The Professional President: A Decade of Community Junior College Chief Executives.

This report draws a profile of community college presidents holding of fice in 1970 and compares their characteristics with the results of similar studies conducted in 1960 and 1964. The report is based on information from the National Career Study of Community College Presidents conducted in 1970-71 by the Mountain-Plains Community College Leadership Program of the University of Colorado. Of 737 questionnaires sent to college presidents, 498 or 68% were returned. The results show that 1970 presidents, contrasted with presidents in 1960 and 1964 studies, will not stay as long in that position, are more likely to have come from a previous community college job, are more likely to have a doctoral degree and to have earned it in education. The 1970 survey revealed that presidents viewed their previous experience in educational administration as the most important factor in their being hired and listed neducational challengen as the foremost reason for accepting the job. Fifty percent did not/aspire to another position, but of the 50% who did, half preferred another junior college presidency and half a university or 4-year college professorship. The study includes a discussion of the biographical background and career characteristics of community college presidents. (LP) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT. POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY. THE PROFESSIONAL PRESIDENT: A DECADE OF COMMUNITY JUNIOR COLLEGE CH I EF EXECUTIVES
Towards Terascale Semantic Acquisition

Although vast amounts of textual data are freely available, many NLP algorithms exploit only a minute percentage of it. In this paper, we study the challenges of working at the terascale. We present an algorithm, designed for the teraxale, for mining is-a relations that achieves similar performance to a state-of-the-art linguistically-rich method. We focus on the accuracy of these two systems as a function of processing time and corpus size.
The Computational Complexity of Ideal Semantics I: Abstract Argumentation Frameworks

We analyse the computational complexity of the recently proposed ideal semantics within abstract argumentation frameworks. It is shown that while typically less tractable than credulous admissibility semantics, the natural decision problems arising with this extension-based model can, perhaps surprisingly, be decided more efficiently than sceptical admissibility semantics. In particular the task of finding the unique maximal ideal extension is easier than that of deciding if a given argument is accepted under the sceptical semantics. We provide efficient algorithmic approaches for the class of bipartite argumentation frameworks. Finally we present a number of technical results which offer strong indications that typical problems in ideal argumentation are complete for the class PNP|| : languages decidable by polynomial time algorithms allowed to make non-adaptive queries to an np oracle.
Material Flow Analyses of Noncircular-Shaped Granular Media Using Discrete Element Methods

The mathematical development and application of two discrete element methods for analyzing the material flow of granular media is described. These two discrete element methods model the noncircular-shaped particles with analytical surface representations. 2D particles are modeled with a superquadric equation and 3D particles as ellipsoids. Two examples are then presented to illustrate the applicability of these techniques in engineering analysis. These examples include (1) flow of particulate media in a rotating drum; and (2) flow of ore material in an inclined ore pass system.
Attitudes toward Women's Participation in Public Life in the United Arab Emirates

The goals of this study are to identify attitudes of university students toward women’s participation in public life (social, economic, and political), and to determine the effect of independent factors on their attitudes. To achieve these goals, I used a selfreported questionnaire to collect data from a stratified random sample (1260 students), as well as descriptive statistics (percentages) and inferential statistics (forward stepwise regression). Results of the study revealed that the majority of respondents support women’s participation in public life in UAE society. Also, university students supported the right of women to have equal educational opportunities, as well as equal participation in civil societies, volunteer societies, and municipal councils. However, the majority tends to be less in favor of women in economic and political participation. Finally, empirical results were that gender, a mother's education, and nationality were associated with the university students' attitudes toward women’s participation in the social, economic, and political spheres.
NEURAL COMPUTATIONS UNDERLYING SPEECH RECOGNITION IN THE HUMAN AUDITORY SYSTEM

Current theories of speech perception in the human brain propose two separate, hierarchically organized cortical processing streams, a ventral and a dorsal stream. The ventral stream is generally believed to mediate acoustic decoding of the speech signal and, ultimately, link sounds to meanings. The function of the dorsal stream is less well understood, however, and has been a matter of some debate. It has recently been postulated that the dorsal stream may play a key role in sensorimotor integration linking speech sounds to motor articulations. To further investigate these theories we first examined the functional organization of human auditory cortex. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), robust hierarchical organization was identified in human auditory cortex. Whereas primary auditory cortex responded to all sounds tested, the surrounding regions responded only to sufficiently complex sounds; a surrounding belt region responded to both band-passed noise bursts and phonemes (but not pure tones), and a more distant parabelt region responded only to phonemes. We further probed the neural representations of phonemes in the human brain using a novel fMRI rapid adaptation (fMRI-RA) paradigm. In fMRI-RA, two stimuli are presented in each trial, and the resulting BOLD-signal is thought to reflect the dissimilarity between neuronal activation patterns for the two stimuli. By pairing speech sounds of comparable acoustic
An analysis of experiences and perceptions of technology-based learning in higher education institutions in Libya : informing the advancement of e-learning

E-learning is increasingly becoming a vital component of education worldwide, and educators acknowledge the importance and potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in facilitating the educational processes. Developing countries, including Libya, are lagging behind the expansion of e-learning, mainly because they lack the necessary infrastructure and resources to support it. While the adoption of e-learning in higher education has been well researched internationally, research relating to the Libyan higher education is very limited, and studies exploring the experiences and perceptions of students and instructors involved in e-learning are particularly scarce. This study investigated how ICTs and e-learning were experienced and perceived at two higher education institutions in Libya: University of Tripoli in Libya's capital, and a regional University of Al-Jabal Al-Gharbi.
Overexpression of a Minimal Domain of Calpastatin Suppresses IL-6 Production and Th17 Development via Reduced NF-κB and Increased STAT5 Signals

Calpain, a calcium-dependent cysteine protease, is reportedly involved in the pathophysiology of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). In addition, autoantibodies against calpastatin, a natural and specific inhibitor of calpain, are widely observed in RA. We previously reported that E-64-d, a membrane-permeable cysteine protease inhibitor, is effective in treating experimental arthritis. However, the exact role of the calpastatin-calpain balance in primary inflammatory cells remains unclear. Here we investigated the effect of calpain-specific inhibition by overexpressing a minimal functional domain of calpastatin in primary helper T (Th) cells, primary fibroblasts from RA patients, and fibroblast cell lines. We found that the calpastatin-calpain balance varied during Th1, Th2, and Th17 development, and that overexpression of a minimal domain of calpastatin (by retroviral gene transduction) or the inhibition of calpain by E-64-d suppressed the production of IL-6 and IL-17 by Th cells and the production of IL-6 by fibroblasts. These suppressions were associated with reductions in RORγt expression and STAT3 phosphorylation. Furthermore, inhibiting calpain by silencing its small regulatory subunit (CPNS) suppressed Th17 development. We also confirmed that overexpressing a minimal domain of calpastatin suppressed IL-6 by reducing NF-κB signaling via the stabilization of IκBα, without affecting the upstream signal. Moreover, our findings indicated that calpastatin overexpression suppressed IL-17 production by Th cells by up-regulating the STAT5 signal. Finally, overexpression of a minimal domain of calpastatin suppressed IL-6 production efficiently in primary fibroblasts derived from the RA synovium. These findings suggest that inhibiting calpain by overexpressing a minimal domain of calpastatin could coordinately suppress proinflammatory activities, not only those of Th cells but also of synovial fibroblasts. Thus, this strategy may prove viable as a candidate treatment for inflammatory diseases such as RA.
The role of emotions in consumption choices : the case of anticipated regret with boundedly rational agents August

The mere act of choosing implies giving up possible alternatives and is therefore likely to generate a feeling of regret, which agents anticipate at the decision stage. In line with regret theory, I study the impact of anticipated regret on the decisionmaking process. The key feature of the model consists in considering biased regret anticipations. I thus describe the combined effect of cognitive biases and anticipated regret on consumer choice and on the market outcome. I show that in a Hotellingtype vertically differentiated duopoly, inaccurate regret anticipations lead to a price distortion and ultimately to a drop in consumer welfare. Moreover, in a vertically differentiated duopoly, firms do not have incentives to spontaneously educate consumers. This finding makes a strong argument in favor of a legal intervention to counter the negative effects of consumer biases.
The reconciliation of primary accounting data for government entities and balances according to statistical measures: The case of the European Excessive Deficit Procedure Table 2

This article examines the scope and size of adjustments made by statisticians on source data from public accounting systems in EU member states to reach harmonised statistical measures. The article focuses on EDP Table 2 which shows the reconciliation from cash/cash modified or accrual public accounting to ESA 95, analyses the potential changes needed to EDP Table 2 if public accounting is on a full accrual/IPSAS basis, and proposes a possible way forward for better reconciling the relevant reporting balances. The analysis takes into account the study carried out by the European Commission report on the “Suitability of International Accounting Standards for the Public Sector (IPSAS) for the EU member states”, and the differences between statistical reporting and IPSAS highlighted by IPSASB in the consultation paper on “IPSASs and Government Finance Statistics”.