Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Understanding and addressing the achievement gap through individualized instruction and formative assessment

This article synthesizes findings regarding the development of competence and learned helplessness and factors influencing persistence and intrinsic motivation, suggests the process through which small differences in early achievement are magnified by the current structure of schools, and reviews evidence suggesting that the characteristics of a specific type of individualized instruction and assessment system may be especially suited to remediate these differences. Age‐graded schools and group tests label students as ‘below’ and ‘above’ average, inadvertently demoralizing below‐average students, depressing effort and achievement, and perpetuating the gap in achievement between poor students and their more affluent peers. Analysis of the research literature suggests that the psychological experience of school for both high and low achieving students may be altered through a structure where instruction is individualized, students are challenged at their own levels, and each student receives objective assessment information confirming that he or she is successfully advancing to higher levels.
Effect of Overtime Work and Insufficient Sleep on Postural Sway in Information‐Technology Workers

In Japan, death from overwork (“karoshi” in Japanese) is the focus of social concern. Extremely long work hours and deprivation of sleep exert vital exhaustion and mood changes, resulting in disease conditions such as depression and ischemic heart disease . As the prevention of diseases caused by heavy overtime schedules is a live issue in Japan, decisive and objective indicators are necessary for the early detection of irrecoverable damage to workers’ health. Young overtime workers, under forty, are often passed over by routine medical check-ups, nevertheless they have been suffering from shortened sleep and lack of effective rest. Especially information-technology workers in Japan are involved in extreme overwork beyond daytime working hours in order to compete in the global market. Detailed health assessments should be carried out with a view to identifying and implementing measures to relieve adverse health effects in overtime workers. The critical flicker fusion frequency (CFF) test is a suitable method for the measurement of short-term visual strain , however, few studies have indicated that CFF is sensitive as an objective measure of chronic fatigue. Therefore other convenient tools are required to detect exhausted workers at risk. Computerized static posturography has been used to examine balance function disorders, measuring displacements of the body’s center of pressure by the use of a force platform during static upright posture. The posturographic measurements are reportedly suitable for monitoring fatigue. Since continued insufficient sleep can lead to inability to concentrate, perceptual changes and dizziness, we performed a quantitative study using postural sway parameters as the disturbance stimulation of foot pressure movement in order to evaluate fatigued conditions of overtime workers at the early stage. The purpose of this study was to find medical evidence for the effects of extended working hours and short sleep time among younger workers under forty, and to recommend certain measures for their health assessment and control.
Immunosuppression induced by nitric oxide and its inhibition by interleukin‐4

Mice immunized with attenuated Salmonella typhimurium, strain SL3235, while protected against virulent challenge, are unable to mount in vivo and in vitro antibody responses to non‐Salmonella antigens, such as tetanus toxoid and sheep red blood cells, and exhibit profoundly suppressed responses to B and T cell mitogens. Suppression of antibody responses is mediated by macrophage (Mϕ)‐released soluble factors, and is completely reversed by treatment with interleukin (IL)‐4. The present report identifies the suppressor factor as nitric oxide (NO), and provides evidence for a mechanism by which IL‐4 abrogates suppression. Suppressed antibody responses correlated with high levels of NO secretion by splenocytes of SL3235‐immunized mice. NO production was observed only in cultures consisting of the adherent cell fraction of immune splenocytes. Further, immunosuppression was reversed by NG‐monomethyl‐L‐arginine (NMLA), a competitive inhibitor of NO synthesis, and was completely blocked by the addition of excess L‐arginine. Treatment with IL‐4, or anti‐interferon (IFN)‐γ monoclonal antibody (mAb), also abrogated suppression. Optimal reversal of suppression was observed only when NMLA, IL‐4, or anti‐IFN‐γ mAb, was added at day 0 of the 5‐day plaque‐forming cell assay. Treatment with either IL‐4 or anti‐IFN‐γ mAb also lead to a sharp inhibition of NO production by immune spleen cells. Moreover, the addition of IL‐4 to splenic adherent Mϕ inhibited their ability to generate NO. Our data characterize an immunoregulatory pathway, involving IFN‐γ and NO, by which Mϕ mediate immunosuppression and identify IL‐4 as a potent inhibitor of this pathway.
Applying Deeper Learning and Confucian Values in Enhancing School Effectiveness

The study investigates how school teachers' personal background influences their deeper learning capacity and the school effectiveness. Furthermore, the study examines the correlation between teachers' learning capacity and school effectiveness. Four sets of analyses are performed: t tests, one-way ANOVAs, Pearson correlations, and stepwise regression analyses. The research targets a single top-ranking urban junior high school that has the highest admission rates for senior high schools in Taiwan. Data were collected from 192 school teachers, drawn from various grade levels. Results show that (a) personal background does affect teachers' deeper learning capacity and school effectiveness and (b) deeper learning capacity has a strong correlation with school effectiveness.
Predicting Success and Failure of Learning Disabled Children on Academic Tasks.

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that the performance of learning disabled (LD) children on academic tasks depends on the presence or absence of a match between optimal response mode and method of task presentation. In this study the Detroit Tests of Learning Aptitude (DTLA) and the procedure described by Owen, Braggio, and Ellen were used to determine the optimal response modes of LD children. On the basis of pretest-posttest comparisons, the performance of LD children on the DTLA could be characterized as one of three different optimal response modes (covert, vocal, or visual-manual). Then, it was shown that by knowing the LD child’s optimal response mode, it was possible to predict performance on a paired-associate task. For all children the level of correct performance on the paired-associate task was higher when the stimulus items were presented using a method of task presentation similar to the LD child’s optimal response mode, and lower when the method of task presentati.
[Evaluation of gender differences of family caregivers with reference to the mode of caregiving at home and caregiver distress in Japan].

PURPOSE Male caregivers are growing in number, as the frequency of spouse caregiving rapidly increases. This study aimed to examine gender differences in family caregivers with reference to the mode of caregiving and caregiver distress in Japan. It was designed to clarify the characteristics of both female and male caregivers. METHODS The subjects were 2,020 users of public Long-term Care Insurance, randomly stratified and sampled in Higashi-osaka city, Osaka prefecture. Data were collected through mailed, anonymous self-report questionnaires. 1,287 (63.7%) surveys were collected and data from 868 caregivers and care recipients were analyzed, after excluding incomplete cases from 947 participants who were family caregivers. We compared males and females for the level of nursing needs, cognitive disorders of their care recipients, the types and amounts of care provided, the levels of their burdens and the depression associated with providing care, the availability of informal support, the frequency of usage of Long-term care insurance services, and the types of stress coping strategies. RESULTS Of the total, 27.1% of the caregivers were male. Their age was higher than that of females, but the age of care recipients of female caregivers was significantly higher than that of care recipients of males. There were no significant gender differences in the level of nursing needs of recipients. However, cognitive disorders of care recipients of female caregivers were more severe. Female caregivers spent more time providing care, and performed a greater number of care activities. In particular, female caregivers assisted their care recipients in taking medications, dressing, bathing, eating, meal preparation, shopping, laundry, and money management more often to a significant degree. Furthermore, the average scores for burden and depression were higher in female than in male caregivers. Concerning the usage of Long-term care insurance services, males used a Home-helper service more often. Female caregivers used types of Informal support seeking and Positive acceptance of caregiving role as coping strategies more often than the men. Multiple logistic regression analysis indicated that caregiver's subjective burden and types of informal support seeking, as well as acceptance of the caregiving role were significantly higher in female caregivers. CONCLUSIONS These results suggest that there are significant gender differences regarding the mode of caregiving and experience of caregiver distress in Japan. It is important that future research be focused on supplying appropriate social support for family caregivers, taking gender differences into account.
Deep Hashing Network for Efficient Similarity Retrieval

Due to the storage and retrieval efficiency, hashing has been widely deployed to approximate nearest neighbor search for large-scale multimedia retrieval. Supervised hashing, which improves the quality of hash coding by exploiting the semantic similarity on data pairs, has received increasing attention recently. For most existing supervised hashing methods for image retrieval, an image is first represented as a vector of hand-crafted or machine-learned features, followed by another separate quantization step that generates binary codes. However, suboptimal hash coding may be produced, because the quantization error is not statistically minimized and the feature representation is not optimally compatible with the binary coding. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Hashing Network (DHN) architecture for supervised hashing, in which we jointly learn good image representation tailored to hash coding and formally control the quantization error. The DHN model constitutes four key components: (1) a sub-network with multiple convolution-pooling layers to capture image representations; (2) a fully-connected hashing layer to generate compact binary hash codes; (3) a pairwise cross-entropy loss layer for similarity-preserving learning; and (4) a pairwise quantization loss for controlling hashing quality. Extensive experiments on standard image retrieval datasets show the proposed DHN model yields substantial boosts over latest state-of-the-art hashing methods.
Hepatitis A antibodies in two socioeconomically distinct populations of São Paulo, Brazil.

To evaluate the prevalence of antibody against hepatitis A in two socioeconomically distinct populations of a developing country, 540 serum specimens from children and adults living in Sao Paulo, Brazil, were tested for IgG anti HAV by a commercial radioimunoassay (Havab, Abbott Laboratories). The prevalence of anti-HAV in low socioeconomic level subjects was 75.0% in children 2-11 years old and 100.0% in adults, whereas in middle socioeconomic level significantly lower prevalences were observed (40.3% in chidren 2-11 years old and 91.9% in adults). Voluntary blood donors of middle socioeconomic level showed a prevalence of 90.4%. These data suggest that hepatitis A infection remains a highly endemic disease in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Hospital-Based Surveillance for Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers and Hepatitides in Ghana

Background Viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHF) are acute diseases associated with bleeding, organ failure, and shock. VHF may hardly be distinguished clinically from other diseases in the African hospital, including viral hepatitis. This study was conducted to determine if VHF and viral hepatitis contribute to hospital morbidity in the Central and Northern parts of Ghana. Methodology/Principal Findings From 2009 to 2011, blood samples of 258 patients with VHF symptoms were collected at 18 hospitals in Ashanti, Brong-Ahafo, Northern, Upper West, and Upper East regions. Patients were tested by PCR for Lassa, Rift Valley, Crimean-Congo, Ebola/Marburg, and yellow fever viruses; hepatitis A (HAV), B (HBV), C (HCV), and E (HEV) viruses; and by ELISA for serological hepatitis markers. None of the patients tested positive for VHF. However, 21 (8.1%) showed anti-HBc IgM plus HBV DNA and/or HBsAg; 37 (14%) showed HBsAg and HBV DNA without anti-HBc IgM; 26 (10%) showed anti-HAV IgM and/or HAV RNA; and 20 (7.8%) were HCV RNA-positive. None was positive for HEV RNA or anti-HEV IgM plus IgG. Viral genotypes were determined as HAV-IB, HBV-A and E, and HCV-1, 2, and 4. Conclusions/Significance VHFs do not cause significant hospital morbidity in the study area. However, the incidence of acute hepatitis A and B, and hepatitis B and C with active virus replication is high. These infections may mimic VHF and need to be considered if VHF is suspected. The data may help decision makers to allocate resources and focus surveillance systems on the diseases of relevance in Ghana.
Mangarevan Doublets: Preliminary Evidence for Proto-Southeastern Polynesian

The Mangarevan language of the Gambier Islands, situated between Tahiti and Easter Island, displays one of the largest collections of doublets among the fortyodd Polynesian languages. These doublets indicate a pre-Proto-Central Eastern settlement of the island from the Marquesas via the Eastern Tuamotus. They also witness a later Proto-Central Eastern intrusion on the island of similar provenience. The cumulative weight of evidence suggests that Proto-Southeastern Polynesian, a hitherto unrecognized language that seemingly comprised ProtoEastern Polynesian's first differentiation, was spoken by the first settlers of the Eastern Tuamotus, Mangareva, Pitcairn, Henderson, and Rapanui.
LEVEL OF PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT AS REFLECTED IN RESPONSES TO THE HOLTZMAN INKBLOT TECHNIQUE.

Summary To investigate the relationships between chronological age and scores on 10 variables from the Holtzman Inkblot Technique, 586 normal Ss comprising five criterion age-groups ranging from 5.2 to 19.5 years were tested. Each group had an equal number of males and females. Following a statistical correction for number of rejections, a sex-by-age analysis of variance revealed no significant sex differences or sex-by-age interactions. However, significant age-group differences were found for all 10 variables, six of them resulting in steadily increasing means across the five groups. These age trends are consistent with the sequence of perceptual change outlined by developmental theory, and are interpreted as indicating a developmental shift in the dominance of perceptual functions.
Salivary metabolite signatures of oral cancer and leukoplakia

Oral cancer, one of the six most common human cancers with an overall 5‐year survival rate of <50%, is often not diagnosed until it has reached an advanced stage. The aim of the current study is to explore salivary metabolomics as a disease diagnostic and stratification tool for oral cancer and leukoplakia and evaluate the potential of salivary metabolome for detection of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Saliva metabolite profiling for a group of 37 OSCC patients, 32 oral leukoplakia (OLK) patients and 34 healthy subjects was performed using ultraperformance liquid chromatography coupled with quadrupole/time‐of‐flight mass spectrometry in conjunction with multivariate statistical analysis. The OSCC, OLK and healthy control groups demonstrate characteristic salivary metabolic signatures. A panel of five salivary metabolites including γ‐aminobutyric acid, phenylalanine, valine, n‐eicosanoic acid and lactic acid were selected using OPLS‐DA model with S‐plot. The predictive power of each of the five salivary metabolites was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic curves for OSCC. Valine, lactic acid and phenylalanine in combination yielded satisfactory accuracy (0.89, 0.97), sensitivity (86.5% and 94.6%), specificity (82.4% and 84.4%) and positive predictive value (81.6% and 87.5%) in distinguishing OSCC from the controls or OLK, respectively. The utility of salivary metabolome diagnostics for oral cancer is successfully demonstrated in this study and these results suggest that metabolomics approach complements the clinical detection of OSCC and stratifies the two types of lesions, leading to an improved disease diagnosis and prognosis.
Thai English: Rhythm and vowels

We explore two aspects of English spoken by native speakers of Thai: rhythm and the vowel system, and compare each to the substrate language Thai, to target varieties of English, and to two New Englishes in Asia. Data was collected from a group of Thai speakers who participated in an interview in English, and who read a Thai paragraph, and English words, sentences and a paragraph. For rhythm, we measured the “Pairwise Variability Index” (nPVI, Grabe and Low 2002) and the proportion of time in an utterance devoted to vowels (%V, Ramus, Nespor and Mehler 1999) of Thai read speech, and English spontaneous and read speech. We find that the English of Thai speakers had stress-timed values of high nPVI, like Thai and British English (BrE), and low %V, like BrE but not Thai. Neither measure of rhythm resembled New Englishes’ more syllable-timed lower nPVI and high %V. The vowel system of Thai English revealed transfers of both quality and quantity from the substrate, resulting in a system distinct from British, American, and New Englishes.
Valorization of Lignin by Partial Wet Oxidation Using Sustainable Heteropoly Acid Catalysts

The production of carboxylic acids by partial wet oxidation of alkali lignin at elevated temperatures and pressures was studied experimentally. Two different heteropoly acids, phosphotungstic acid (H3PW12O40) and phosphomolybdic acid (H3PMo12O40), were used to catalyze the oxidation of lignin under hydrothermal conditions. Factors influencing the total yield of carboxylic acids formed during the partial oxidation of lignin were investigated. Formic, acetic and succinic acids were the major products identified. Of the two catalysts used, phosphomolybdic acid gave the most promising results, with carboxylic acid yields and lignin conversions of up to 45% and 95%, respectively.
Variations in subjective wellbeing: the mediating role of a psychological resource

This study examines the mediating role of psychological resources on life satisfaction, an indicator of subjective wellbeing. The evidence identifies several life events and changing circumstances that can be potentially detrimental to the wellbeing of older adults. Based on the literature, a theoretical model was developed with the hypothesis that adaptation to potentially adverse events draws on psychological resources central to the self. The study participants were a random sample of 423 community-dwelling people aged 70 years and over. All respondents were interviewed in their own homes using a structured schedule. Quantitative data were obtained on age, gender, social support, marital status, physical functioning, bodily pain, loneliness, isolation and housing difficulties. Subjective well-being was assessed by the life satisfaction index, and the psychological mediator was conceptualised as a measure of environmental mastery. The first round of analyses found that variations in well-being were associated with housing difficulties, isolation, loneliness, physical functioning, pain, support networks and marital status. The full model established perfect mediation by environmental mastery occurred for the variables housing problems and physical functioning, and partial mediation occurred for the variable loneliness – supporting the original hypothesis. The results add to the evidence from an increasing number of studies that demonstrates how psychological resources underlie the processes of adaptation to the changing situations that accompany increasing age and prevent negative outcomes.
Social and Health Factors Associated with Support among Elderly Immigrants in Canada

This article assesses determinants of social support among the foreign-born elderly in Canada. We draw cross-sectional data from the second cycle of the National Population Health Survey, conducted by Statistics Canada in 1996-1997, and use ordinary least squares models for our empirical analysis. We focus on three measures of social support: perceived social support, social involvement, and social contact. Generally, we find that poorphysical and/ormental health is negatively associated with ourmeasures of support. Emotional problems, one of the most consistent predictors, erode social support. Also, social involvement declines with mobility problems but increases with self-reported health status, whereas social contact also increases with cognitive function. As with otherstudies, and consistent with relationships witnessed among the native-born population, our results indicate that the married/cohabiting are more likely than the separated/divorced or widowed to perceive social support. Further, we find that those with children experience greater perceived support.
The perception of emotional facial expressions in normals and in schizophrenic patients

The research compares the perception of facial expressions (FE) of emotions in controls and schizophrenic patients. Three studies are presented. The first and the second study use a new morphing technique to test whether Categorical Perception (CP) exists for static displays of FE. The joint analysis of an identification (first study) and a discrimination task using morphing transitions between Neuter-Happiness and Neuter-Anger expressions demonstrate the presence of CP only for Anger in controls. CP does not occur in first-episode schizophrenia patients. The third study tests the identification of the six basic emotions in dynamic conditions. The results of a recognition task of FE from video clips showing the transformation between a neutral face and an emotional face demonstrates that schizophrenia patients need more time and a more intense facial activity than controls to detect basic emotions. It also shows that patients show selective impairments in the identification of Fear and Disgust.
Signal-mediated export of proteins from the malaria parasite to the host erythrocyte

Intracellular parasites from the genus Plasmodium reside and multiply in a variety of cells during their development. After invasion of human erythrocytes, asexual stages from the most virulent malaria parasite, P. falciparum, drastically change their host cell and export remodelling and virulence proteins. Recent data demonstrate that a specific NH2-terminal signal conserved across the genus Plasmodium plays a central role in this export process.