Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Micro-CT Imaging of Denatured Chitin by Silver to Explore Honey Bee and Insect Pathologies

Background Chitin and cuticle coatings are important to the environmental and immune defense of honey bees and insect pollinators. Pesticides or environmental effects may target the biochemistry of insect chitin and cuticle coating. Denaturing of chitin involves a combination of deacetylation, intercalation, oxidation, Schweiger-peeling, and the formation of amine hydrochloride salt. The term “denatured chitin” calls attention to structural and property changes to the internal membranes and external carapace of organisms so that some properties affecting biological activities are diminished. Methodology/Principal Findings A case study was performed on honey bees using silver staining and microscopic computer-tomographic x-ray radiography (micro-CT). Silver nitrate formed counter-ion complexes with labile ammonium cations and reacted with amine hydrochloride. Silver was concentrated in the peritrophic membrane, on the abdomen, in the glossa, at intersegmental joints (tarsi), at wing attachments, and in tracheal air sacs. Imaged mono-esters and fatty acids from cuticle coating on external surfaces were apparently reduced by an alcohol pretreatment. Conclusions/Significance The technique provides 3-dimensional and sectional images of individual honey bees consistent with the chemistries of silver reaction and complex formation with denatured chitin. Environmental exposures and influences such as gaseous nitric oxide intercalant, trace oxidants such as ozone gas, oligosachharide salt conversion, exposure to acid rain, and chemical or biochemical denaturing by pesticides may be studied using this technique. Peritrophic membranes, which protect against food abrasion, microorganisms, and permit efficient digestion, were imaged. Apparent surface damage to the corneal lenses of compound eyes by dilute acid exposure consistent with chitin amine hydrochloride formation was imaged. The technique can contribute to existing insect pathology research, and may provide an additional tool for research on CCD.
Research on Job Satisfaction of Elementary and High School Teachers and Strategies to Increase Job Satisfaction

Job satisfaction is an important topic in teacher education research. Exploring the issue of teacher job satisfaction helps us gain a deeper understanding of teachers' mental state, such as their occupational attitudes, zeal for teaching, and work enthusiasm, which affects the quality of teaching and education. From an examination of teachers' job satisfaction studies conducted in China (including Hong Kong) in the past ten years, we identified changes in job satisfaction among China's teachers and proposed suggestions that school and educational administrators may find relevant in their decision making and administration.
A Perfect Storm

Not unlike the causes of a massive meteorological event, several factors played into the “perfect storm” that unseated Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle in the 2002 South Dakota senatorial election. This multipronged case study analysis of the Daschle/Thune Senate race explores why John Thune won the state of South Dakota and thus became the first Senate candidate in 52 years to unseat a majority or minority leader. First, a content analysis of the political ads aired by each candidate is presented. Second, stories concerning Daschle and Thune from the state’s two largest newspapers are content analyzed to determine the framing or agenda-setting relationship of news stories. Finally, the study reports the effects of viewing the Thune/Daschle debate that took place on September 19, 2004. Results suggest that Thune may have captured the seat due to a culmination of factors, including campaign strategies, political ad strategies, and background electoral concerns.
EMULSION TECHNOLOGY AND RECENT TRENDS IN EMULSION APPLICATIONS

Emulsions are thermodynamically unstable heterogeneous biphasic system. There are certain parameters which if and emulsion follow considered as stable. There are lots of sign of physical and chemical instability of emulsion are creaming, cracking, phase inversion, flocculation. There are several methods of detect stability of prepared emulsion. Rheological assessment, macroscopic examination, globule size analysis and accelerated stability test. Many types of emulsifying agents are interfacial tension, film formation and electric potential and emulsion rheology. Emulgents form three types of films around dispersed phase globules are monomolecular, multimolecular and particulate film. Regard to the improvement in the effectiveness and stability several enhancements have been made in the emulsion technology micro emulsion, multiple emulsions, non aqueous emulsions, liposome emulsions, nanoemulsions and emulsions polymerization are few advances with the advancement in application of emulsion incorporate in this review.
Comparative Advantage Patterns and Domestic Determinants in Emerging Countries: An Analysis With a Focus on Technology

During the last two decades a number of emerging economies have become deeply engaged in technology-intensive production. This has been reflected in a shift in their international trade specialization from labor-intensive towards capital-intensive goods and in rapid productivity gains across all manufacturing activities. The paper draws on a sample of sixteen emerging countries to investigate the linkages between the pattern of revealed comparative advantages (RCAs), captured by a modified version of the Lafay index of international trade specialization, and the competitiveness structure of the domestic manufacturing sector, measured by a set of industry and country-specific variables. Positive and large RCAs are found to be associated with low unit labor costs in both low-technology (labor-intensive) and medium-or-high tech sectors; on the other hand, domestic accumulation of physical capital is associated with positive and large RCAs in medium-or-high tech sectors. The international disadvantage (negative RCAs) in technology-intensive production tends to increase for countries with low human capital, whereas it diminishes for countries that have large domestic markets and import technology through foreign capital goods.
A high speed, low power 8-tap digital FIR filter for PRML disk-drive read channels

This paper presents a high speed, low power 8-tap digital FIR filter for PRML disk-drive read channels. Enhancements on power consumption and speed are achieved by adopting the row compression scheme and proposed conditional carry selection method. The 8-tap digital FIR filter has been fabricated by 0.8um CMOS technology and occupied by 3.9mm×1.5mm. The experiment results show that the FIR filter operates to 180 MHz and disspates 140 mW/100 MHz at 3.7 V power supply. Approximately 27% reduction of the power is attained.
Leader fairness and employees' trust in coworkers: The moderating role of leader group prototypicality.

In this article, the association between perceived supervisor fairness and trust in coworkers as a collective entity is studied. Based on identity-related theories on fairness, trust and leader effectiveness it was hypothesized that perceived supervisor distributive, procedural and interactional fairness are positively and more strongly related to employee trust in their coworkers if the supervisor is highly group prototypical rather than less group prototypical. An empirical study, conducted with 176 employees within 30 work groups, supported this hypothesis. Fairness of a less group prototypical supervisor was not associated with trust in coworkers, whereas especially unfairness of the group prototypical supervisor was detrimental for trust in coworkers. The study concludes that leader’s prototypicality might not work as a substitute for fairness, as some recent studies have suggested, when the outcome is not directly related to the assessment of the leader. Thus, leaders should not count on the trust they earn by being group prototypical but they should also aim at fairness. Implications for collective distrust theory (Kramer, 1994; 1998) are also discussed.
A Rich Source of Labels for Deep Network Models of the Primate Dorsal Visual Stream

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have structures that are loosely related to that of the primate visual cortex. Surprisingly, when these networks are trained for object classification, the activity of their early, intermediate, and later layers becomes closely related to activity patterns in corresponding parts of the primate ventral visual stream. The activity statistics are far from identical, but perhaps remaining differences can be minimized in order to produce artificial networks with highly brain-like activity and performance, which would provide a rich source of insight into primate vision. One way to align CNN activity more closely with neural activity is to add cost functions that directly drive deep layers to approximate neural recordings. However, suitably large datasets are particularly difficult to obtain for deep structures, such as the primate middle temporal area (MT). To work around this barrier, we have developed a rich empirical model of activity in MT. The model is pixel-computable, so it can provide an arbitrarily large (but approximate) set of labels to better guide learning in the corresponding layers of deep networks. Our model approximates a number of MT phenomena more closely than previous models. Furthermore, our model approximates population statistics in detail through fourteen parameter distributions that we estimated from the electrophysiology literature. In general, deep networks with internal representations that closely approximate those of the brain may help to clarify the mechanisms that produce these representations, and the roles of various properties of these representations in performance of vision tasks. Although our empirical model inevitably differs from real neural activity, it allows tuning properties to be modulated independently, which may allow very detailed exploration of the origins and functional roles of these properties.
Microtubule Targeting of Substrate Contacts Promotes Their Relaxation and Dissociation

We recently showed that substrate contact sites in living fibroblasts are specifically targeted by microtubules (Kaverina, I., K. Rottner, and J.V. Small. 1998. J. Cell Biol. 142:181–190). Evidence is now provided that microtubule contact targeting plays a role in the modulation of substrate contact dynamics. The results are derived from spreading and polarized goldfish fibroblasts in which microtubules and contact sites were simultaneously visualized using proteins conjugated with Cy-3, rhodamine, or green fluorescent protein. For cells allowed to spread in the presence of nocodazole the turnover of contacts was retarded, as compared with controls and adhesions that were retained under the cell body were dissociated after microtubule reassembly. In polarized cells, small focal complexes were found at the protruding cell front and larger adhesions, corresponding to focal adhesions, at the retracting flanks and rear. At retracting edges, multiple microtubule contact targeting preceded contact release and cell edge retraction. The same effect could be observed in spread cells, in which microtubules were allowed to reassemble after local disassembly by the application of nocodazole to one cell edge. At the protruding front of polarized cells, focal complexes were also targeted and as a result remained either unchanged in size or, more rarely, were disassembled. Conversely, when contact targeting at the cell front was prevented by freezing microtubule growth with 20 nM taxol and protrusion stimulated by the injection of constitutively active Rac, peripheral focal complexes became abnormally enlarged. We further found that the local application of inhibitors of myosin contractility to cell edges bearing focal adhesions induced the same contact dissociation and edge retraction as observed after microtubule targeting. Our data are consistent with a mechanism whereby microtubules deliver localized doses of relaxing signals to contact sites to retard or reverse their development. We propose that it is via this route that microtubules exert their well-established control on cell polarity.
Dissociable effects of game elements on motivation and cognition in a task-switching training in middle childhood

Although motivational reinforcers are often used to enhance the attractiveness of trainings of cognitive control in children, little is known about how such motivational manipulations of the setting contribute to separate gains in motivation and cognitive-control performance. Here we provide a framework for systematically investigating the impact of a motivational video-game setting on the training motivation, the task performance, and the transfer success in a task-switching training in middle-aged children (8–11 years of age). We manipulated both the type of training (low-demanding/single-task training vs. high-demanding/task-switching training) as well as the motivational setting (low-motivational/without video-game elements vs. high-motivational/with video-game elements) separately from another. The results indicated that the addition of game elements to a training setting enhanced the intrinsic interest in task practice, independently of the cognitive demands placed by the training type. In the task-switching group, the high-motivational training setting led to an additional enhancement of task and switching performance during the training phase right from the outset. These motivation-induced benefits projected onto the switching performance in a switching situation different from the trained one (near-transfer measurement). However, in structurally dissimilar cognitive tasks (far-transfer measurement), the motivational gains only transferred to the response dynamics (speed of processing). Hence, the motivational setting clearly had a positive impact on the training motivation and on the paradigm-specific task-switching abilities; it did not, however, consistently generalize on broad cognitive processes. These findings shed new light on the conflation of motivation and cognition in childhood and may help to refine guidelines for designing adequate training interventions.
Tunneling-Hopping Transport Model for Reverse Leakage Current in InGaN/GaN Blue Light-Emitting Diodes

The nature of charge transport in GaN-based light-emitting diodes (LEDs) under reverse biases still remains elusive as the bias- and temperature-dependent characteristics of the current can hardly be formulated using a single transport mechanism. In this letter, based on numerical fitting, we develop a combined tunneling-hopping transport model to describe the complete electrical characteristics of the reverse leakage current in InGaN/GaN blue LEDs. This model depicts that the current behaviors are majorly limited by the charge transport process through the depletion region near the neutral n-side, where electrons at the valance band are ready to tunnel into the unoccupied localized gap states in neighborhood near the electron quasi-Fermi level (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${E}_{\mathrm {fn}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>), followed by variable-range hopping or nearest-neighbor hopping via these localized states along a relatively constant <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${E}_{\mathrm {fn}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, depending on temperature.
Aiding the Detection of Fake Accounts in Large Scale Social Online Services

Users increasingly rely on the trustworthiness of the information exposed on Online Social Networks (OSNs). In addition, OSN providers base their business models on the marketability of this information. However, OSNs suffer from abuse in the form of the creation of fake accounts, which do not correspond to real humans. Fakes can introduce spam, manipulate online rating, or exploit knowledge extracted from the network. OSN operators currently expend significant resources to detect, manually verify, and shut down fake accounts. Tuenti, the largest OSN in Spain, dedicates 14 full-time employees in that task alone, incurring a significant monetary cost. Such a task has yet to be successfully automated because of the difficulty in reliably capturing the diverse behavior of fake and real OSN profiles. We introduce a new tool in the hands of OSN operators, which we call SybilRank. It relies on social graph properties to rank users according to their perceived likelihood of being fake (Sybils). SybilRank is computationally efficient and can scale to graphs with hundreds of millions of nodes, as demonstrated by our Hadoop prototype. We deployed SybilRank in Tuenti's operation center. We found that ∼90% of the 200K accounts that SybilRank designated as most likely to be fake, actually warranted suspension. On the other hand, with Tuenti's current user-report-based approach only ∼5% of the inspected accounts are indeed fake.
The Use of Educational Standards and Benchmarks in Indicator Publications

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of educational standards and benchmarks in international indicator and other relevant policy publications, particularly those originating in the UK. However, first it is necessary to examine what is meant by educational standards and benchmarks and how these concepts are defined. The use of standards and benchmarks in two key indicator publications EAG and KD will then be addressed and further detailed examples from UK government publications will also be provided, particularly in relation to target setting.
Who Chooses Military Service? Correlates of Propensity and Enlistment in the U.S. Armed Forces

This article examines factors correlated with plans for military service (military propensity) and actual enlistment. It reports bivariate and multivariate regression analyses, conducted separately for men and women, using survey data from nationwide samples totaling more than 100,000 U.S. high school seniors (classes of 1984–1991), and follow-up data from a subsample of more than 15,000 of the high school seniors obtained 1 or 2 years after graduation. Correlations between propensity and actual enlistment are high among women (η = .38) and very high among men (η = .57). Enlistment rates are lower among individuals with college-educated parents, high grades, and college plans; rates are higher among men, African Americans, Hispanics, and those who view military work roles as attractive. These relations are interpreted primarily as indirect effects on enlistment via propensity.
Fluoroquinolone resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates: associated genetic mutations and relationship to antimicrobial exposure.

OBJECTIVES We assessed the fluoroquinolone (FQ) susceptibility of clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in an endemic area. The genetic mutations responsible for FQ resistance were also evaluated. METHODS A total of 420 M. tuberculosis isolates during January 2004 to December 2005 were randomly selected. Data on the clinical characteristics of the patients were obtained from medical records. The MICs of ofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin and moxifloxacin were determined. Spoligotyping and sequencing of the gyrA and gyrB genes were performed for all isolates resistant to any tested FQ. RESULTS Of the 420 isolates, 52 (12.4%), 26 (6.2%), 26 (6.2%) and 30 (7.1%) were resistant to isoniazid, rifampicin, ethambutol and streptomycin, respectively. Multidrug resistance was found in 5.0% of isolates. For all tested FQs, the susceptibility rate was higher than 97%. Resistance to any first-line drug and isolation from a patient with prior anti-tuberculous treatment were correlated with FQ resistance. Multidrug resistance had the strongest correlation with FQ resistance (19% of isolates). Neither the previous use of FQs nor the duration of FQ exposure was correlated with the FQ susceptibility. Of the 14 FQ-resistant isolates, five (35.7%) had gyrA mutations (four D94G and one A90V) and another one (7.1%) had a gyrB mutation (N538D). CONCLUSIONS This study found FQ resistance in 3.3% of all clinical isolates of M. tuberculosis. FQ resistance was correlated with first-line drug resistance and prior anti-tuberculous treatment, suggesting the need for routine FQ susceptibility testing in patients with these characteristics.
Teacher Effects on Minority and Disadvantaged Students’ Grade 4 Achievement

ABSTRACT The authors examined the differential effects of teachers on female, minority, and low-socioeconomic status (SES) students’ achievement in Grade 4. They used data from a randomized experiment (Project STAR) and its follow-up study (LBS). Student outcomes included Grade 4 SAT scores in mathematics, reading, and science and student demographics included gender, race, and SES. The authors used multilevel models to determine how teacher effectiveness interacted with student gender, race, and SES. We also explored whether teacher effects were more pronounced in schools with high proportions of minority or female students. Results indicated that all students benefited from having effective teachers. The differential teacher effects on female, minority, and low-SES students’ achievement, however, were insignificant. There is some evidence in mathematics that teacher effects are more pronounced in high-minority schools. Finally, teacher effects seem to be consistent within and between schools.
SQL-Encoder: Improving NL2SQL In-Context Learning Through a Context-Aware Encoder

Detecting structural similarity between queries is essential for selecting examples in in-context learning models. However, assessing structural similarity based solely on the natural language expressions of queries, without considering SQL queries, presents a significant challenge. This paper explores the significance of this similarity metric and proposes a model for accurately estimating it. To achieve this, we leverage a dataset comprising 170k question pairs, meticulously curated to train a similarity prediction model. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that the proposed model adeptly captures the structural similarity between questions, as evidenced by improvements in Kendall-Tau distance and precision@k metrics. Notably, our model outperforms strong competitive embedding models from OpenAI and Cohere. Furthermore, compared to these competitive models, our proposed encoder enhances the downstream performance of NL2SQL models in 1-shot in-context learning scenarios by 1-2\% for GPT-3.5-turbo, 4-8\% for CodeLlama-7B, and 2-3\% for CodeLlama-13B.
Internship Design and Its Impact on Student Satisfaction and Intrinsic Motivation

This study examines the role that experiential education, in the form of internships, plays in the professional development of hospitality and tourism management students. In particular, it analyzes the internship through an evaluation of job design by both applying J. R. Hackman and G. R. Oldham's (1975) job characteristics model and developing a proposed intern version of that model. The outcomes demonstrate that dimensions of work undertaken during the internship contribute significantly to an individual's satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. A comparison of the 2 models demonstrates that the proposed intern model offers improved R 2 coefficients over the original job characteristics model by using different predictive variables and thus may be seen as a better guide for designing effective internship experiences.