Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Changing the Spots of Leopards: A Look into the Process of Teacher Change and its Impact on Inclusive Pedagogy

For the last two decades, systems of education have been shifting special education teaching practice away from segregated classes to inclusive schools (Reiser & Secretariat, 2012; Sharma, Loreman, & Forlin, 2012; UNESCO, 1994). Despite much success, this shift has not come without its challenges. Research has found teachers’ attitudes and beliefs about students with exceptionalities influence their inclusive pedagogy (Avramidis & Norwich, 2002; MacFarlane & Woolfson, 2013; Scruggs & Mastropieri, 1996). This paper examines the current literature on teacher attitudes and beliefs towards inclusion as well as the process of teacher change. It is concluded that despite unfavourable attitudes, when teachers have training and support paired with authentic experiences, attitudes can shift and inclusive pedagogy adopted.
Engine On/Off Control for Dimensioning Hybrid Electric Powertrains via Convex Optimization

This paper presents a novel heuristic method for optimal control of mixed-integer problems that, for given feasible values of the integer variables, are convex in the rest of the variables. The method is based on Pontryagin's maximum principle and allows the problem to be solved using convex optimization techniques. The advantage of this approach is the short computation time for obtaining a solution near the global optimum, which may otherwise need very long computation time when solved by algorithms guaranteeing global optimum, such as dynamic programming (DP). In this paper, the method is applied to the problem of battery dimensioning and power split control of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV), where the only integer variable is the engine on/off control, but the method can be extended to problems with more integer variables. The studied vehicle is a city bus, which is driven along a perfectly known bus line with a fixed charging infrastructure. The bus can charge either at standstill or while driving along a tramline (slide in). The problem is approached in two different scenarios: First, only the optimal power split control is obtained for several fixed battery sizes; and second, both battery size and power split control are optimized simultaneously. Optimizations are performed over four different bus lines and two different battery types, giving solutions that are very close to the global optimum obtained by DP.
Entropy: The Markov Ordering Approach

The focus of this article is on entropy and Markov processes. We study the properties of functionals which are invariant with respect to monotonic transformations and analyze two invariant “additivity” properties: (i) existence of a monotonic transformation which makes the functional additive with respect to the joining of independent systems and (ii) existence of a monotonic transformation which makes the functional additive with respect to the partitioning of the space of states. All Lyapunov functionals for Markov chains which have properties (i) and (ii) are derived. We describe the most general ordering of the distribution space, with respect to which all continuous-time Markov processes are monotonic (the Markov order). The solution differs significantly from the ordering given by the inequality of entropy growth. For inference, this approach results in a convex compact set of conditionally “most random” distributions.
The Study of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Iranian Patients With Lung Cancer

Background: Mycobacterium tuberculosis has the ability to invade type II alveolar epithelial cells. As a result, the associations between invasion of alveolar epithelial cells and pathogenesis of lung infection seem strong. Objectives: The current study aimed to evaluate the presence of M. tuberculosis in patients with lung cancer. Patients and Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on samples collected from 380 patients with lung cancer who referred to two state-run hospitals in Mashhad, Iran. Microscopic and cultural methods were utilized to assess the presence of M. tuberculosis in the patients` specimens. Results: The subjects included 252 (66.3%) males and 128 (33.7%) females. Based on cultural and microscopic methods, M. tuberculosis infection was observed in twenty six (6.8%) of cases. Conclusions: Results of the current study showed the high prevalence of M. tuberculosis among the patients with lung cancer; therefore, it seems that continuous surveillance is essential to monitor the M. tuberculosis in the patients with lung cancer.
Physical Activity Level and Sedentary Behaviors among Public School Children in Dakar (Senegal) Measured by PAQ-C and Accelerometer: Preliminary Results

Background: Physical inactivity and sedentary lifestyles are major risk factors of childhood obesity. This study aimed to measure physical activity (PA) levels by accelerometer and Physical Activity Questionnaire for Older Children (PAQ-C) among Senegalese school children and the relation with Body Mass Index (BMI) and body composition. Methodology: 156 pupils 8–11 years old were randomly selected in four elementary public schools of Dakar. BMI z-score was used to categorize children according to their weight status. PA was measured by PAQ-C in the 156 pupils and by accelerometer (Actigraph GT3X+, Pensacola, FL, USA) in a subsample of 42 children. Body composition was determined by deuterium dilution method. Results: PAQ-C results were comparable in the 156 and 42 pupils. The 42 pupils presented a light activity measured by accelerometer, while PAQ-C classified the majority of them (57%; n = 24) in the moderate PA level. Children spent most of their time (min/day) in sedentary activities and light activities than in moderate and intense activity levels. Accumulation of 60 min/day Moderate-to-Vigorous Physical Activity (MVPA) was achieved by 54.8% (n = 23) of the pupils. MVPA decreased in girls in relation to their body fatness. There was a significant difference in MVPA between boys and girls. Similarly, overweight/obese (45 ± 16 min/day) children had lower MVPA than their normal and underweight peers (88 ± 34 and 74 ± 36 min/day, respectively; p = 0.004). Conclusions: The two methods are inconsistent for measuring light and moderate PA levels. Although PAQ-C is an uncomplicated routine method, various activities were not adapted for genuine activities in Senegalese children and therefore needs to be validated in African children.
Speech-Language Assessment in the Clinical Setting

Time constraints are a significant factor for clinic-based and school-based speech-language pathologists. Yet, with a planning process that incorporates parent information and accounts for child temperament, a comprehensive speech and language assessment can be completed within a 90-minute time frame. A parent questionnaire is completed prior to the assessment date, focusing on developmental history, including information about family history of learning difficulties and episodes of otitis media. Standardized and nonstandardized procedures are included in the assessment process in order to obtain clinically relevant information and provide parents and public service agencies with necessary qualifying scores. The Bankson-Bernthal Test of Phonology (BBTOP; Bankson & Bernthal, 1991) is the choice of instruments for standardized articulation/phonology testing, whereas the Preschool Language Scale-3 (PLS-3; Zimmerman, Steiner, & Pond, 1992) and a spontaneous language sample are recommended as language measures.
Lightweight measures for timbral similarity of musical audio

Timbral similarity measures basedon Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients have been widely reported as the basis for a possible general music similarity function, which would have wide application to searching, browsing and recommendation. Many of the reported methods, however, have computational requirements that make them impractical for searching realistic collections using current hardware. We compare lightweight measures that appear to perform equally well, and introduce a simplification that reduces memory requirements and execution time by a further order of magnitude. This yields a similarity measure that will scale easily to large commercial collections. We give comparative results over two contrasting music collections, one of which has been widely studied, allowing direct comparison with previous work.
Lossy network correlated data gathering with high-resolution coding

Sensor networks measuring correlated data are considered, where the task is to gather data from the network nodes to a sink. A specific scenario is addressed, where data at nodes are lossy coded with high-resolution, and the information measured by the nodes has to be reconstructed at the sink within both certain total and individual distortion bounds. The first problem considered is to find the optimal transmission structure and the rate-distortion allocations at the various spatially located nodes, such as to minimize the total power consumption cost of the network, by assuming fixed nodes positions. The optimal transmission structure is the shortest path tree and the problems of rate and distortion allocation separate in the high-resolution case, namely, first the distortion allocation is found as a function of the transmission structure, and second, for a given distortion allocation, the rate allocation is computed. The second problem addressed is the case when the node positions can be chosen, by finding the optimal node placement for two different targets of interest, namely total power minimization and network lifetime maximization. Finally, a node placement solution that provides a tradeoff between the two metrics is proposed.
Exchangeability of N Termini in the Ligand-gated Porins ofEscherichia coli *

The ferric siderophore transporters of the Gram-negative bacterial outer membrane manifest a unique architecture: Their N termini fold into a globular domain that lodges within, and physically obstructs, a transmembrane porin β-barrel formed by their C termini. We exchanged and deleted the N termini of two such siderophore receptors, FepA and FhuA, which recognize and transport ferric enterobactin and ferrichrome, respectively. The resultant chimeric proteins and empty β-barrels avidly bound appropriate ligands, including iron complexes, protein toxins, and viruses. Thus, the ability to recognize and discriminate these molecules fully originates in the transmembrane β-barrel domain. Both the hybrid and the deletion proteins also transported the ferric siderophore that they bound. The FepA constructs showed less transport activity than wild type receptor protein, but the FhuA constructs functioned with turnover numbers that were equivalent to wild type. The mutant proteins displayed the full range of transport functionalities, despite their aberrant or missing N termini, confirming (Braun, M., Killmann, H., and Braun, V. (1999) Mol. Microbiol. 33, 1037–1049) that the globular domain within the pore is dispensable to the siderophore internalization reaction, and when present, acts without specificity during solute uptake. These and other data suggest a transport process in which siderophore receptors undergo multiple conformational states that ultimately expel the N terminus from the channel concomitant with solute internalization.
Approaches to Learning, Cognitive Style, and Motives as Predictors of Academic Achievement

The purpose of the present study was to analyse the relationship between approaches to learning (deep, strategic, and surface), cognitive style, motives, and academic achievement. A sample of 192 undergraduate psychology students with a mean age of 21.7 years participated. Motives and styles were related to the three approaches to learning in theoretically meaningful ways. Moreover, approaches to learning were found to predict academic achievement, while styles and motives only had indirect effects on achievement. Among the approaches to learning, the deep approach unexpectedly did not predict achievement, while the surface and strategic approaches as expected significantly predicted achievement.
Do Software Developers Understand Open Source Licenses?

Software provided under open source licenses is widely used, from forming high-profile stand-alone applications (e.g., Mozilla Firefox) to being embedded in commercial offerings (e.g., network routers). Despite the high frequency of use of open source licenses, there has been little work about whether software developers understand the open source licenses they use. To our knowledge, only one survey has been conducted, which focused on which licenses developers choose and when they encounter problems with licensing open source software. To help fill the gap of whether or not developers understand the open source licenses they use, we conducted a survey that posed development scenarios involving three popular open source licenses (GNU GPL 3.0, GNU LGPL 3.0 and MPL 2.0) both alone and in combination. The 375 respondents to the survey, who were largely developers, gave answers consistent with those of a legal expert's opinion in 62% of 42 cases. Although developers clearly understood cases involving one license, they struggled when multiple licenses were involved. An analysis of the quantitative and qualitative results of the study indicate a need for tool support to help guide developers in understanding this critical information attached to software components.
The Deterrent Influence of Punishment

The general disrepute of the "classical" school of criminology and of the theory that capital punishment deters murder has led many investigators to assume that punishment, as administered through formal sanctioning agencies, does not prevent norm vio lation. An intensive study of parking violators indicates that, at least in this limited area, an increase in the severity and certainty of punishment does act as a deterrent to further violation. These findings suggest the necessity for a reappraisal of current think ing. Studies demonstrating the ineffectuality of punishment as a deterrent to certain types of offenses should not be interpreted to mean that punishment is ineffective in deterring all types of offenses.
Perceived Job Attributes, Job Satisfaction, and Psychological Distress: A Comparison of Working Men and Women

This paper evaluates the importance of perceived job attributes in accounting for previously observed sex differences in job satisfaction and psychological distress. This study sample consisted of 854 males and 272 females who were working full time. The results indicated that male ratings of job satisfaction were equivalent to those of females, while women scored higher than men on a measure of psychological distress. However, when job attribute perceptions were held constant, female job satisfaction was significantly higher than that of males and there were no sex differences in levels of psychololgical distress. Only marginally significant sex-by-job attribute interactions were found for job satisfaction and psychological distress, suggesting similar bases of satisfaction and mental health across sex. The results are discussed in terms of female expectations regarding employment and the importance of role-related stress in accounting for sex differences in psychological morbidity.
Transforming the Frog into a Prince: Effective Schools Research, Policy, and Practice at the District Level.

Drawing upon his experiences as a former school superintendent and an academic, Larry Cuban examines the implications of the effective schools research for policy and practice at the district level. He focuses on the critical role played by the superintendent and by district-level policies in creating preconditions for local school improvement. Examining the issues that both separate and connect the worlds of theory and practice, Cuban describes the dilemma of school leaders who, armed with only an incomplete theory of school improvement, must make important policy decisions in the face of time pressures and political demands. He warns of some of the unintended consequences of effective schools practices that employ top-down strategies to achieve the narrow goal of raising test scores. Administrators, he argues, need a variety of policy tools and top-down and bottom-up strategies to generate significant improvement at the local level.
Overall Quality of Fruits and Vegetables Products Affected by the Drying Processes with the Assistance of Vacuum-Microwaves

The seasonality of fruits and vegetables makes it impossible to consume and use them throughout the year, thus numerous processing efforts have been made to offer an alternative to their fresh consumption and application. To prolong their availability on the market, drying has received special attention as currently this method is considered one of the most common ways for obtaining food and pharmaceutical products from natural sources. This paper demonstrates the weakness of common drying methods applied for fruits and vegetables and the possible ways to improve the quality using different drying techniques or their combination with an emphasis on the microwave energy. Particular attention has been drawn to the combined drying with the assistance of vacuum-microwaves. The quality of the dried products was ascribed by chemical properties including the content of polyphenols, antioxidant capacity and volatiles as well as physical parameters such as color, shrinkage, porosity and texture. Both these fields of quality classification were considered taking into account sensory attributes and energy aspects in the perspective of possible industrial applications. In conclusion, the most promising way for improving the quality of dried fruit and vegetable products is hybrid drying consisting of osmotic dehydration in concentrated fruit juices followed by heat pump drying and vacuum-microwave finish drying.
In vitro extinction learning in Hermissenda: involvement of conditioned inhibition molecules

Extinction of a conditioned association is typically viewed as the establishment of new learning rather than the erasure of the original memory. However, recent research in the nudibranch, Hermissenda crassicornis (H.c.) demonstrated that extinction training (using repeated light-alone presentations) given 15 min, but not 23 h, after memory acquisition reversed both the cellular correlates of learning (enhanced Type B cell excitability) and the behavioral changes (reduced phototaxis) produced by associative conditioning (pairings of light, CS, and rotation, US). Here, we investigated the putative molecular signaling pathways that underlie this extinction in H.c. by using a novel in vitro protocol combined with pharmacological manipulations. After intact H.c. received either light-rotation pairings (Paired), random presentations of light and rotation (Random), or no stimulation (Untrained), B cells from isolated CNSs were recorded from during exposure to extinction training consisting of two series of 15 consecutive light-steps (LSs). When in vitro extinction was administered shortly (2 h, but not 24 h) after paired training, B cells from Paired animals showed progressive and robust declines in spike frequency by the 30th LS, while control cells (Random and Untrained) did not. We found that several molecules implicated in H.c. conditioned inhibitory (CI) learning, protein phosphatase 1 (PP1) and arachidonic acid (AA)/12-lipoxygenase (12-LOX) metabolites, also contributed to the spike frequency decreases produced by in vitro extinction. Protein phosphatase 2B (PP2B) also appeared to play a role. Calyculin A (PP1 inhibitor), cyclosporin A (PP2B inhibitor), and baicalein (a 12-LOX inhibitor) all blocked the spike frequency declines in Paired B cells produced by 30 LSs. Conversely, injection of catalytically-active PP1 (caPP1) or PP2B (caPP2B) into Untrained B cells partially mimicked the spike frequency declines observed in Paired cells, as did bath-applied AA, and occluded additional LS-produced reductions in spiking in Paired cells.
Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians

What was the Keynesian revolution in economics? Why did it not succeed to the extent that Keynes and his close pupils had hoped for? Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians addresses these and other questions by tracing the historical development of Keynesian economics. The book is split into three parts. Part I contains the author's CaffA¨ Lectures on Keynes's 'unaccomplished revolution'. Part II is a series of biographical essays where the author, himself a witness and participant of the group on which he writes, presents the successful and unsuccessful endeavours of Keynes's most important pupils: Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor, Pierro Sraffa and Richard Goodwin. Part III of the book looks to the future by developing a conceptual analytical framework that makes sense of Keynes's 'revolution in economics', discussing the many ways in which the Keynesian way of doing economics is incompatible with the neoclassical tradition.
Understanding the Disposition of Urban Planning Students Toward Social Justice and Equity Themes

This research surveys how graduate level urban planning students think about social justice and equity issues and how academic instruction in urban planning affects the disposition of students toward these issues and themes in the context of their development as urban planning professionals. Although the quantitative findings did not demonstrate that the graduate curriculum and instruction had any appreciable impact on student understanding and navigation of equity and social justice themes, qualitative evidence did suggest that students are understanding and care about issues related to social justice and equity and were interested in incorporating those issues into their professional practice. This research also suggests that graduate academic instruction may fall short in supporting students with the useful integration of social justice and equity issues into their professional practice.
Postmenopausal hormone therapy and subclinical cerebrovascular disease

Objective: The Women's Health Initiative Memory Study (WHIMS) hormone therapy (HT) trials reported that conjugated equine estrogen (CEE) with or without medroxyprogesterone acetate (MPA) increases risk for all-cause dementia and global cognitive decline. WHIMS MRI measured subclinical cerebrovascular disease as a possible mechanism to explain cognitive decline reported in WHIMS. Methods: We contacted 2,345 women at 14 WHIMS sites; scans were completed on 1,424 (61%) and 1,403 were accepted for analysis. The primary outcome measure was total ischemic lesion volume on brain MRI. Mean duration of on-trial HT or placebo was 4 (CEE+MPA) or 5.6 years (CEE-Alone) and scans were conducted an average of 3 (CEE+MPA) or 1.4 years (CEE-Alone) post-trial termination. Cross-sectional analysis of MRI lesions was conducted; general linear models were fitted to assess treatment group differences using analysis of covariance. A (two-tailed) critical value of α = 0.05 was used. Results: In women evenly matched within trials at baseline, increased lesion volumes were significantly related to age, smoking, history of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, lower post-trial global cognition scores, and increased incident cases of on- or post-trial mild cognitive impairment or probable dementia. Mean ischemic lesion volumes were slightly larger for the CEE+MPA group vs placebo, except for the basal ganglia, but the differences were not significant. Women assigned to CEE-Alone had similar mean ischemic lesion volumes compared to placebo. Conclusions: Conjugated equine estrogen–based hormone therapy was not associated with a significant increase in ischemic brain lesion volume relative to placebo. This finding was consistent within each trial and in pooled analyses across trials.