Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teaching methodologies at university and their relationship with the development of transversal competences / Metodologías de enseñanza en la universidad y su relación con el desarrollo de competencias transversales

Abstract This paper aims to understand the use of different methodologies and their relationship with the development of transversal competencies within higher education. A total of 1,137 final-year undergraduate students from the University of Murcia participated in this study, and the data collection instrument used is the CECTGRA questionnaire designed ad hoc. Among the most noteworthy results is the prevalence of lectures compared with other more active methodologies and the perception that the development of transversal competencies could be improved. A positive correlation is obtained between the use of active methodologies and the successful development of different types of competencies. This work invites reflection on the methodologies used by university teachers to develop transversal competencies and the reconsideration of their educational practice.
Adoption: A Strategy to Fulfill Sex Preferences of U.S. Parents.

Objective This article examines adoption as a strategy used by parents to fulfill their preference for a specific sex composition among their children in the United States. Background Evidence from the United States suggests that parents with children of the same sex are more likely to continue childbearing, as parents generally desire at least one girl and one boy. What is unknown, however, is whether parents use adoption to fulfill this same preference. Method Using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (n=1,107,800 children), the authors test the relationships among the sex composition of preceding siblings, child sex, and adoption status. Results Children who had same-sex preceding siblings were more likely to be adopted, as opposed to biologically related to their parents, than children who had mixed-sex preceding siblings. Further, adopted children were more likely to be of the missing sex (i.e., adopted girls were more likely than were adopted boys to have only preceding brothers). Conclusion These findings suggest a need to consider parental sex preferences and child sex in studies on adoption decisions. Further, adoption provides one mechanism parents can use to achieve a balanced sex composition among their children.
Effect of photoperiod on body mass, food intake and body composition in the field vole, Microtus agrestis

SUMMARY Many small mammals respond to seasonal changes in photoperiod by altering body mass and adiposity. These animals may provide valuable models for understanding the regulation of energy balance. Here, we present data on the field vole (Microtus agrestis) – a previously uncharacterised example of photoperiod-induced changes in body mass. We examined the effect of increased day length on body mass, food intake, apparent digestive efficiency, body composition, de novo lipogenesis and fatty acid composition of adipose tissue in cold-acclimated (8°C) male field voles by transferring them from a short (SD, 8 h:16 h L:D) to long day photoperiod (LD, 16 h:8 h L:D). During the first 4 weeks of exposure to LD, voles underwent a substantial increase in body mass, after which the average difference between body masses of LD and SD voles stabilized at 7.5 g. This 24.8% increase in body mass reflected significant increases in absolute amounts of all body components, including dry fat mass, dry lean mass and body water mass. After correcting body composition and organ morphology data for the differences in body mass, only gonads (testes and seminal vesicles) were enlarged due to photoperiod treatment. To meet energetic demands of deposition and maintenance of extra tissue, voles adjusted their food intake to an increasing body mass and improved their apparent digestive efficiency. Consequently, although mass-corrected food intake did not differ between the photoperiod groups, the LD voles undergoing body mass increase assimilated on average 8.4 kJ day-1 more than animals maintained in SD. The majority (73–77%) of the fat accumulated as adipose tissue had dietary origin. The rate of de novo lipogenesis and fatty acid composition of adipose tissue were not affected by photoperiod. The most important characteristics of the photoperiodic regulation of energy balance in the field vole are the clear delineation between phases where animals regulate body mass at two different levels and the rate at which animals are able to switch between different levels of energy homeostasis. Our data indicate that the field vole may provide an attractive novel animal model for investigation of the regulation of body mass and energy homeostasis at both organism and molecular levels.
Politicising ESE in postcolonial settings: the power of historical responsibility, action and ethnography

Abstract This article argues that the mission of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) is inherently political and that, by not acknowledging this, ESE interventions risk becoming part of the problem of sustainability rather than the solution. The article offers a theoretical framework for thinking about the (de)politicising effects of ESE rooted in three key elements: historical responsibility, action and the postcolonial condition. This framework builds on Ricoeur’s phenomenology, Arendt’s theory of action and the work of postcolonial scholars in arguing for a grounded understanding of ESE, which necessitates the use of ethnographic methods in ESE research.
Simple and Efficient Signature-based Consensus Protocol in the Asynchronous Distributed System

The consensus problem in distributed systems is mainly solved by message exchange. Most of past consensus algorithms rely on exchange of oral messages to achieve consensus among processors. As oral messages are susceptible to influences from malicious attackers, this type of consensus protocols usually requires a large number of rounds of message exchange, and the complexity of message exchange is also excessively high. In light of this drawback of oral message-based consensus algorithms, some scholars proposed signed message-based consensus algorithm to reduce the number of rounds of message exchange required. However, some signed message-based consensus algorithms still have certain drawbacks which make them ineffective in some conditions. To address this issue, we propose a new signed message-based consensus algorithm in this paper. We integrate the concept of grouping into the proposed algorithm and find the best number of groups through mathematical analysis to further reduce the rounds of message exchange required. In other words, the proposed algorithm makes use of digital signature and the concept of grouping to solve the consensus problem. This algorithm can not only increase the fault-tolerance of distributed systems but also significantly reduce the rounds of message exchange required to achieve consensus. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.itc. 41.2. 931
The Influence of Sub-Microscopic Media Animation on Students' Critical Thinking Skills Based on Gender

This study aimed to examine the influence of sub-microscopic media animation on students’ critical thinking skills in terms of gender. The study used pre-test and post-test control group design. The sample consisted of experimental group and control group, each of which consisted of 27 students (12 males and 15 females). The sampling technique used was purposive sampling. Data on critical thinking skills was taken using a description test on buffer concepts. Further data were analysed using a t-test at 95% significant level. The results showed that sub-microscopic media animation influence students' critical thinking skills, both male and female. In the experimental group, students' critical thinking skills are higher than male students, which means that sub-microscopic animation media influence female students' critical thinking skills better than male students.
A comparison of volatility models: Does anything beat a GARCH(1,1) ?

By using intra-day returns to calculate a measure for the time-varying volatility, Andersen and Bollerslev (1998a) established that volatility models do provide good forecasts of the conditional variance. In this paper, we take the same approach and use intra-day estimated measures of volatility to compare volatility models. Our objective is to evaluate whether the evolution of volatility models has led to better forecasts of volatility when compared to the first “species” of volatility models. We make an out-of-sample comparison of 330 different volatility models using daily exchange rate data (DM/$) and IBM stock prices. Our analysis does not point to a single winner amongst the different volatility models, as it is different models that are best at forecasting the volatility of the two types of assets. Interestingly, the best models do not provide a significantly better forecast than the GARCH(1,1) model. This result is established by the tests for superior predictive ability of White (2000) and Hansen (2001). If an ARCH(1) model is selected as the benchmark, it is clearly outperformed. We thank Tim Bollerslev for providing us with the exchange rate data set, and Sivan Ritz for suggesting numerous clarifications. All errors remain our responsibility.
Prediction of postpartum depression using machine learning techniques from social media text

Early screening of mental disorders plays a crucial role in diagnosis and treatment. This study explores how data‐driven methods can leverage the information available on social media platforms to predict postpartum depression (PPD). A generalized approach is proposed where linguistic features are extracted from user‐generated textual posts on social media and categorized as general, depressive, and PPD representative using multiple machine learning techniques. We find that techniques used in our study exhibit strong predictive capabilities for PPD content. Holdout validation showed that multilayer perceptron outperformed other techniques such as support vector machine and logistic regression used in this study with 91.7% accuracy for depressive content identification and up to 86.9% accuracy for PPD content prediction. This work adopts a hierarchical approach to predict PPD. Therefore, the reported PPD accuracy represents the performance of the model to correctly classify PPD content from non‐PPD depressive content.
ReMBF: A Reliable Multicast Brute-Force Co-allocation Scheme for Multi-user Data Grids

In this paper we propose a novel co-allocation scheme, called a Reliable Multicast Brute-Force co-allocation scheme (ReMBF for short), which employs a reliable multicast (RM for short) technique with the Brute-Force (BF for short) scheme to accelerate data retrieval and delivery, and reliably transmit data to its users for data grids. Several types of data access patterns, including Zipf-like, geometric, and uniform distributions, are utilized to model user access behaviors and evaluate the performance of ReMBF. The simulation results demonstrate that ReMBF can efficiently deliver a bulk of data in a shorter time period compared with two state-of-the-art schemes.
Global analysis of chaperone effects using a reconstituted cell-free translation system

Protein folding is often hampered by protein aggregation, which can be prevented by a variety of chaperones in the cell. A dataset that evaluates which chaperones are effective for aggregation-prone proteins would provide an invaluable resource not only for understanding the roles of chaperones, but also for broader applications in protein science and engineering. Therefore, we comprehensively evaluated the effects of the major Escherichia coli chaperones, trigger factor, DnaK/DnaJ/GrpE, and GroEL/GroES, on ∼800 aggregation-prone cytosolic E. coli proteins, using a reconstituted chaperone-free translation system. Statistical analyses revealed the robustness and the intriguing properties of chaperones. The DnaK and GroEL systems drastically increased the solubilities of hundreds of proteins with weak biases, whereas trigger factor had only a marginal effect on solubility. The combined addition of the chaperones was effective for a subset of proteins that were not rescued by any single chaperone system, supporting the synergistic effect of these chaperones. The resource, which is accessible via a public database, can be used to investigate the properties of proteins of interest in terms of their solubilities and chaperone effects.
The real effects of finance : evidence from exports

In this paper, we investigate the link between financial development and exports. Using bilateral trade data, we find that having a better financial system increases exports. To explain this result, we propose that exporting firms face significant up-front fixed costs in product design, marketing, distribution etc. In an economy where outside financing for such investments is difficult to secure, exports suffer. Consistent with this explanation, we find that the marginal impact of financial development on exports is higher in those industries and country pairs where up-front investments are large, due to either product characteristics or economic distance between exporter and importer. Further supporting evidence comes from periods of bank crises, when exports of goods with high up-front costs fall more than other exports. Finally, we examine the effect of finance on the responsiveness of exports to exchange rates. We find that short-term elasticity of exports is considerably higher in countries with good finance, and that the allocation of exports across importers is much more sensitive to relative real exchange rates. * Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; bo.becker@gsb.uchicago. edu ** Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago *** We wish to thank John Romalis, Luigi Zingales, Atif Mian, Per Strömberg, Raghuram Rajan, Jens Josephson, René Stulz, Ulf Axelson, Anil Kashyap, Marianne Bertrand as well as seminar participants at the CEPR/Banca D’Italia conference on Financial Structure, Product Market Structure and Economic Performance and the University of Chicago for comments and suggestions.
‘It’s an invisible wound’: the disenfranchised grief of post-separation mothers who lose care time

ABSTRACT This paper enriches understandings of the implications of contemporary custody law for mothers and their children. It does so through a discussion of mothers’ grief and emotional pain over involuntarily losing care time with children. Mothers involuntarily lose care time by becoming non-resident parents against their will or by having a shared care parenting order imposed on them. Both experiences of losing maternal care time are becoming more commonplace as a result of the gender neutrality of custody laws across the Anglo-West and the increased emphasis given to shared care parenting as a viable post-separation parenting arrangement. Yet investigations into the emotions engendered by mothers’ loss of care time are sparse. Exploratory qualitative research with twelve mothers who involuntarily lost care time reveals the intensity and durability of their grief, its entanglement with emotions like fear, and its significance, as a relational welfare approach emphasises, to children’s best interests.
Effects of Boxing-Specific Training on Physical Fitness and Punch Power in Korean National Boxers

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of 16-week boxing-specific training on specific fitness and punch power in Korean national team boxers. METHODS: Elite male amateur boxers (n=15) from the Korean national team participated in the study. Weight categories of the participants were light fly, fly, bantam, light, light welter, welter, middle, and light heavy. This boxing-specific training program was designed to improve strength and power, and punching power during pre-season for elite boxers. Boxing-specific training program was composed of three parts; power circuit training, tubing and ball training, and boxing power shuttle-run. The specific fitness such as strength and power and punch power were evaluated before, at the mid-way (8-week), and after the training for all the study participants. RESULTS: As for maximum strength, there were significant improvements in bench press and squat between pre- and post-training. Both the absolute and relative strength of trunk flexion and extension were improved in the post-training compared to the pre-training. Right and left isokinetic power were also improved at the post-training compared to the pre-training. Punch power for facial straight and hook attacks showed significant improvement at the post-training compared to pre-training. Straight punch power was significantly related to the bench press (r=.515, p=.001), and the right arm extension power (r=.535, p=.001). Hook punch power was significantly related to the right arm extension power (r=.417, p=.006). CONCLUSIONS: In conclusion, boxing-specific training was effective to the improvement of strength, power and punch power for elite amateur boxers.
A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Health Literacy in the Iranian Population: Findings and Implications

Context: Health literacy includes social and cognitive skills determining individuals’ motivation to obtain and understand health information, thus empowers them to promote healthy behaviors. The exact level of health literacy in the Iranian population is unknown, as different Iranian studies have reported different health literacy rates in the Iranian population. Objectives: Therefore, this study aimed to investigate health literacy in the Iranian population by systematically combining and analyzing findings from the previous studies. Data Sources: A total of 26 articles in Persian and in English, published up to December 2017 were reviewed. Searching for articles with the keywords prevalence, abundance, health literacy, and Iran was conducted in the following national and international databases: Scientific Information Database (SID), Medline, Magiran,Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Scopus. The data were analyzed using the meta-analysis method and a random effects model. The heterogeneity among the studies was examined using the I2 statistic. All the analyses were performed using the STATA 12 software. Results: The highest levels of health literacy were for the region 1 of Iran, including the following provinces: Alborz, Tehran, Qazvin, Mazandaran, Semnan, Golestan, and Gom (46.7% with 95% CI: 25.7 - 67.7). Moreover, pregnant women (37.4% with 95% CI: 27 - 53.3) had the highest level of health literacy. In contrast, older people (60.2% with 95% CI: 43.7 - 76.8) and patients with diabetes (55.4% with 95% CI: 35.6 - 75.2) had the lowest health literacy levels. Conclusions: The lowest health literacy level was in older people and patients with diabetes. Therefore, it seems necessary to provide education for communitiesandgroups with inadequate health literacy levels, especially older peopleandpatients with chronic diseases to improve their health.
What Can Departments Do to Increase Students’ Retention? A Case Study of Students’ Sense of Belonging and Involvement in a Biology Department

The aim of this case study was to explore the sense of belonging to and involvement in a biology department for students participating in a biology program designed to create a strong sense of belonging with high levels of involvement and higher student retention rates. The study is based on 10 semistructured interviews with biology majors. Analysis showed that the students have created a strong sense of community among peers and good relationships with specific faculty and staff. However, the positive social environment did not fully translate into sense of belonging to and involvement in the biology department. Analysis also implied a strong focus on careers related to medical school among students and that students not sharing this strong focus might feel disconnected from the group. Taken together, the interviews identify several different aspects for departments to consider as a way to enhance students’ sense of belonging and involvement.
Semantic Facial Expression Editing using Autoencoded Flow

High-level manipulation of facial expressions in images --- such as changing a smile to a neutral expression --- is challenging because facial expression changes are highly non-linear, and vary depending on the appearance of the face. We present a fully automatic approach to editing faces that combines the advantages of flow-based face manipulation with the more recent generative capabilities of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). During training, our model learns to encode the flow from one expression to another over a low-dimensional latent space. At test time, expression editing can be done simply using latent vector arithmetic. We evaluate our methods on two applications: 1) single-image facial expression editing, and 2) facial expression interpolation between two images. We demonstrate that our method generates images of higher perceptual quality than previous VAE and flow-based methods.
Evaluation of Sentence Selection for Speech Summarization

In the last several years, a number of papers have addressed the area of automatic speech summarization. Many of them have applied evaluation metrics adapted from those used in speech recognition research, rather than from those used in text summarization. We consider whether ASR-inspired evaluation metrics produce different results than those taken from text summarization, and why. We evaluate various standard summarizers as well as our own systems on a subset of the SWITCHBOARD spoken dialogue dataset with both kinds of metrics. We find a statistically significant departure between the two classes in their relative rank of these systems. Our preliminary conclusion is that considerably greater caution must be exercised when using ASR-based measures than we have witnessed to date in the speech summarization literature.
The structure of super line graphs

For a given graph G = (V, E) and a positive integer k, the super line graph of index k of G is the graph S/sub k/(G) which has for vertices all the k-subsets of E(G), and two vertices S and T are adjacent whenever there exist sϵS and tϵT such that s and t share a common vertex. In the super line multigraph L/sub k/(G) we have an adjacency for each such occurrence. We give a formula to find the adjacency matrix of L/sub k/(G). If G is a regular graph, we calculate all the eigenvalues of L/sub k/(G) and their multiplicities. From those results we give an upper bound on the number of isolated vertices.
Study of accuracy and grammatical complexity in EFL writing

The present study seeks to compare the writing products of EFL undergraduates using as measures accuracy and grammatical complexity. It also intends to describe the evolution of the morphological and syntactic errors as English is used by learners. A total of 100 learners of English as a foreign language participated in the study. They were divided into two groups according to their Oxford Placement Test score: group A was formed by 36 advanced students; and group B was made up of 64 upper intermediate students. Compositions were collected as the basis of this study. Results show that upper intermediate students exhibited a higher error mean in each of the error categories, namely, grammatical morphemes, lexical choice and syntax, as well as punctuation and spelling. However, an analysis of variance shows the differences between groups to be significant only in spelling errors and in punctuation errors.