Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Decade of Social Group Work Research: Trends in Methodology, Theory, and Program Development

This study examines a decade of social work group outcome research. Fifty-four group research studies were identified in nine key social work journals and from Social Work Research and Abstracts. Methodological aspects of the studies were reviewed including theoretical orientation, group format, leadership, design, target problem or area, and measurement. Results of the review indicate that investigations of cognitive-behavioral groups dominate the research literature. Although a wide array of target problems have been studied, children's social skills and behavior problems are the most frequently examined. Among the markers of increasing methodological sophistication of the group research literature were balancing of group leadership across comparison group conditions and the use of multiple measures for determining outcome. Although experimental studies were the most frequent design used, they were outnumbered by the combination of quasi-experimental group compansons and nonexperimen tal designs.
Trends in Access and Equity in Higher Education: Britain in international perspective

The papers in this issue, with their focus on access and equality in British higher education, make it clear that the structure of access to education has shifted since the end of the 1940s. Before the Second World War the main European preoccupation with educational equity was focused on entry to secondary schools. This was the decisive point of selection in traditional education systems and remained so, for example, when OECD staged its first major review and conference on the issue of equity in 1961 at Kungalv in Sweden (OECD, 1961). But in the past two or three decades, with secondary schooling becoming universal, attention has perforce shifted onto entry to higher education or, more accurately, entry into some form of postcompulsory schooling, a stage of mass tending to universal provision, whether classified as training or further or higher education. Crucial selection now occurs at the transition out of secondary education. The underlying idea of meritocratic society gives tertiary schooling a new significance. The 'meritocratic' question itself remains in debate. Definition and measurement apart, it cannot be maintained that qualifications from schooling exactly determine market rewards. Other factors, including luck and the function of prices as signals of profitable shortages, may be in play, though a typical path analysis usually shows the highest coefficient for some measure of education where income or occupational status is the dependent variable. Market rewards accrue from occupational as well as educational experience and have no necessary relation to merit. The concept of merit is, however, more apt for analysing access to advanced forms of education than for measuring the justification or defensibility of variations in income. Within the frame of fairness or desert, the balance of social interest has also shifted in the ensuing period of spectacular educational expansion. Rightly or wrongly the major focus of traditional concern was with social class as the largest obstacle to mobilising the productive power of nations and realising a more acceptable social equity in the distribution of opportunity. More recently attention has shifted to gender and to ethnicity. Class, gender and ethnicity are now the three giants in the path of aspirations towards equity, though awareness of other obstacles, including rurality and religion has persisted. And most significantly, there are strong signs, in discussion as well as in research, of heightened awareness that educational achievement and lifechances generally are fundamentally shaped by the structure of family upbringing. A picture of advanced industrial countries is beginning to emerge which links economic growth to regimes of low fertility. The two features of modernised society are correlated in some way with the decline of the traditional family, at least in the 129
Encapsulation of Sn@carbon nanoparticles in bamboo-like hollow carbon nanofibers as an anode material in lithium-based batteries.

In the past decades, considerable attention has been focused on electrochemical energy storage devices with both high energy and high power densities because of their potential applications in powering electric vehicles and portable electronic devices. Until now, rechargeable, so-called “Liion batteries” (LIBs) remain the most promising systems. It is still a major challenge to develop new materials and cells with high energy density, long cycle life, excellent rate capability performance, and environmental compatibility. To meet these requirements, substantial efforts have been made to develop new electrode materials and to design new structures of electrode materials. [1–10] As an anode material for LIBs, metallic tin (Sn) has attracted tremendous interest owing to its high theoretical capacity of about 990 mA h g � 1 as Li4.4Sn, which is significantly higher than that of graphitic carbon (372 mA h g � 1 for LiC6). [11–13] Nevertheless, practical implementation of metallic tin to LIBs is greatly hampered by the poor cyclability. One reason for the poor cycle life is the substantial volume changes that occur during charging and discharging, resulting in both mechanical failure and loss of electrical contact at the electrode. Another reason is the suspected tin nanoparticle aggregation during the discharging process. [14, 15] The current strategies to overcome the so-called pulverization of Sn address three issues: reducing the alloy particle size, using composite materials, and selecting an optimized binder. [1, 16, 17] Various reports have demonstrated
The Caregiver Role Identity Scale

Objective: This article reports the validation of the Caregiver Role Identity Scale, designed to measure the prominence of helping professionals’identity as personal and professional caregivers. The authors developed the measure to test its application to burnout, depression, and professional impairment among social workers. Method: Data from a probability sample of 751 practicing social workers were collected in an anonymous survey about social workers’ health and work issues. The authors split the sample to conduct exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Results: The exploratory analysis demonstrated good internal consistency reliability, good content validity, and preliminary discriminant validity. The confirmatory analysis demonstrated excellent factorial validity for a revised scale, retaining reliability and demonstrating convergent validity. Caregiver role identity was related to burnout, depression, professional impairment, and not seeking help for personal problems. Conclusions: This scale may be a useful tool for early identification, prevention, and intervention strategies for impairment among social workers.
Stalking, Gender, and Coping Strategies: A Partial Test of Broidy and Agnew's Gender/General Strain Theory Hypotheses

Abstract Using data from the Supplemental Victimization Survey (SVS) of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and relying on theoretical direction provided by Broidy and Agnew's gendered strain theory, we examine gender differences in the emotional reactions and behavioral outcomes to one type of serious strain: stalking. We found females experienced significantly higher levels of stalking strain than males for only one type of stalking strain, the experience of stalking appeared to elevate anger among male victims and reduce anger among female victims, and female victims were more likely to express a variety of nonangry emotions in response to stalking stress as well as adopt a variety of legitimate coping mechanisms in order to deal with their victimization. We also uncovered that one emotional reaction to strain, fear, was more prominent for females than males. The implications of our findings are also discussed.
Electoral institutional change and democratization: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink

Drawing on evidence from first and second elections in emerging democracies, this article addresses issues pertinent to understanding the interplay between institutional design and change on the one hand and on the other hand the course of the democratization process, its background and concomitants. Because the electoral system (understood broadly, that is, not only as seat allocation rules) is often seen as an institution conducive to the legitimation of emerging ‐ and therefore fragile ‐democracies, it is important to examine how the development of the electoral system has influenced the democratic transition outcome, in a number of cases. Cases considered include Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal and Tanzania, while comparisons with countries outside the third world such as Bosnia‐and‐Herzegovina and South Africa throw additional light on the argument. By seeking to avoid both the fallacy of electomlism and the fallacy of anti‐electoralism, the article argues that the electoral system is a crucial factor behind .
Genetics at school level: addressing the difficulties

Background : A wide range of studies has offered suggestions why genetics is difficult and some of their key findings are summarised. Underpinning all of this is the way the brain works when handling information. The limitations of working memory capacity offer an interpretation of these difficulties Purpose : The aim is to confirm that working memory capacity (and the related concept of field dependency) controls performance in understanding genetics and whether it is possible to improve performance by changing the teaching approach to mininise overload. Programme description : The curriculum in Taiwan in genetics is outlined briefly. A wide range of measurements were made. Using a diagnostic test of understanding of underpinning ideas, the key areas of weakness were detected before the pupils started the course. Sample : Stage 1: 141 students in Taiwan, aged 13, boys and girls, drawn from a cross-section of Taiwanese pupils at this age, following their first course in genetics. Stage 2: 361 students, drawn from a cross-section of Taiwanese pupils at the same age, and divided into two groups (experimental–control) which both encompass the same ability range. Design and methods : Stage 1: test of pre-knowledge using structural communication grids, applied before the course commenced; working memory capacity using the figural intersection test; extent of field dependency using the group embedded figure test; understanding of genetics was measured at end of course; school test data collated. Stage 2: following a completely revised approach, performance in genetics was measured using traditional school tests and a word association test. Student perspectives were measured. Results : The test of pre-knowledge revealed key areas of difficulty. In addition, it was found that working memory capacity and extent of field dependency both correlated extremely highly with all measures of performance. Given that it has been established that working memory capacity controls performance, working memory demand explains why genetics is difficult. It was found that re-structuring the teaching approach to minimise mental overload brought about a very marked improvement in performance. Conclusions : The findings suggest that it is possible to reduce difficulties in understanding genetics by means of teaching re-design to minimise potential working memory overload, with concomitant improvements in learner confidence.
Chronic Kidney Disease and Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease—Is There a Link?

Research in recent years has led to the recognition of the importance of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and its relationship to the metabolic syndrome (MS). This has led to a growing interest in the potential prognostic value of NAFLD for adverse cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcome. On the other hand, searching for new risk factors for chronic kidney disease (CKD) development and progression is very important. Growing evidence suggests that the MS is an important factor in the pathogenesis of CKD. The best confirmation of this pathogenic link is hypertensive and diabetic nephropathy as the main causes of CKD. Furthermore, the possible link between NAFLD and CKD has also attracted research interest and recent data suggest an association between these two conditions. These findings have fuelled concerns that NAFLD may be a new and added risk factor for the development and progression of CKD. NAFLD and CKD share some important cardiometabolic risk factors and possible common pathophysiological mechanisms, and both are linked to an increased risk of incident CVD events. Therefore, common factors underlying the pathogenesis of NAFLD and CKD may be insulin resistance, oxidative stress, activation of rennin-angiotensin system, and inappropriate secretion of inflammatory cytokines by steatotic and inflamed liver.
A pr 2 00 3 Picard groups in Poisson geometry

We study isomorphism classes of symplectic dual pairs P ← S → P , where P is an integrable Poisson manifold, S is symplectic, and the two maps are complete, surjective Poisson submersions with connected and simply-connected fibres. For fixed P , these Morita self-equivalences of P form a group Pic(P ) under a natural “tensor product” operation. Variants of this construction are also studied, for rings (the origin of the notion of Picard group), Lie groupoids, and symplectic groupoids. DEDICATED TO PIERRE CARTIER
Quality of Reciprocated Friendships of Students with Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Seventh Grade

This study focuses on companionship, intimacy, and support of reciprocated friendships of students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), students with motor and/or sensory disabilities, and typically developing students with their classmates at the start of mainstream secondary school. The study included 1379 typically developing students, 65 students with ASD, and 50 students with motor and/or sensory disabilities of 100 different classes in 56 schools. Sociometric techniques were used. No differences were found between companionship and support of the reciprocated friendships of the three groups. Students with ASD did report significantly less intimacy in their friendships than typically developing students did. The number of friends was not related to companionship or intimacy, but was positively associated with support of the students' reciprocated friendships. Furthermore, perceptions of shared friendship quality did not differ among students with ASD, students with motor and/or sensory disabilities, and their typically developing friends. Future research is needed to tap into the predictors and consequences of reciprocated friendships of students with special education needs in mainstream classes.
Antibodies to Periodontal Pathogens and Stroke Risk

Background and Purpose— The association between cerebrovascular events and periodontitis has been found in few studies based on clinical periodontal examinations. However, evidence on the association between periodontal pathogens and stroke is lacking. Therefore, the aim of the study was to investigate whether elevated levels of serum antibodies to major periodontal pathogens predict stroke in a case–control study. Methods— The study population comprised 6950 subjects (aged 45 to 64 years) who participated in the Mobile Clinic Health Survey in 1973 to 1976 in Finland. During a follow-up of 13 years, a total of 173 subjects had a stroke. From these, 64 subjects had already experienced a stroke or had signs of coronary heart disease (CHD) at baseline, whereas 109 subjects were apparently healthy. Two controls per case were matched for age, gender, municipality, and disease status. Serum IgG and IgA class antibody levels to the periodontal pathogens, Actinobacillus actinomycetemcomitans and Porphyromonas gingivalis, were determined by multiserotype enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Results— The cases identified during the follow-up that were free of stroke or CHD at baseline were more often IgA-seropositive for A. actinomycetemcomitans than were their controls, 41.3% versus 29.3%. Compared with the seronegative, the seropositive subjects had a multivariate odds ratio of 1.6 (95% CI, 1.0 to 2.6) for stroke. The patients with a history of stroke or CHD at baseline were more often IgA-seropositive for P. gingivalis than were their controls, 79.7% versus 70.2%. When compared with the seronegative, the seropositive subjects had an odds ratio of 2.6 (1.0 to 7.0) for secondary stroke. Conclusions— The present prospective study provides serological evidence that an infection caused by major periodontal pathogens is associated with future stroke.
The Failure of Input-Based Schooling Policies

In an effort to improve the quality of schools, governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them. By concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools, the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement. This paper provides a review of the United States and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies. It then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources. Finally, alternative performance incentive policies are described.
Convergence rate analysis of distributed gradient methods for smooth optimization

We derive the convergence rate of a distributed gradient algorithm for smooth optimization in networked systems. We assume that each agent in the network has a convex cost function fi(x), known only to agent i, and the goal is to minimize the sum ΣNi=1 fi(x) of all agents' costs; such problem formulation arises in various networked applications, like, e.g., distributed inference or source localization in sensor networks. With the distributed gradient algorithm under study, each agent, at each iteration k, performs a weighted average of its own and its neighbors' solution estimates, and performs a step in the direction of the negative of its local function's gradient. We establish a novel result that the distributed gradient algorithm has the convergence rate O(1/k2/3), in terms of the cost function optimality gap, under the assumption of convex fi's with Lipschitz continuous and bounded gradients.
‘Othering’ and ‘selving’ in therapeutic dialogue

In this article we consider therapeutic conversations about suffering and sexual identity through an ethical and practical lens we refer to as ‘othering’ and ‘selving’. The ethical lens is shaped by recent developments in discursive theory and approaches to therapy. Our practical lens draws from research by discourse analysts showing how conversational practices feature in consequential ways in delicate discussions such as those about suffering and sexual identity. After helping readers understand these lenses we then use them in examining actual discussions about identity and suffering. We conclude with some general ideas and reflective questions for therapists wishing to extend these kinds of sensitivities and conversational practices in their work with clients.
On the Consistency of Output Code Based Learning Algorithms for Multiclass Learning Problems

A popular approach to solving multiclass learning problems is to reduce them to a set of binary classification problems through some output code matrix: the widely used one-vs-all and all-pairs methods, and the error-correcting output code methods of Dietterich and Bakiri (1995), can all be viewed as special cases of this approach. In this paper, we consider the question of statistical consistency of such methods. We focus on settings where the binary problems are solved by minimizing a binary surrogate loss, and derive general conditions on the binary surrogate loss under which the one-vs-all and all-pairs code matrices yield consistent algorithms with respect to the multiclass 0-1 loss. We then consider general multiclass learning problems defined by a general multiclass loss, and derive conditions on the output code matrix and binary surrogates under which the resulting algorithm is consistent with respect to the target multiclass loss. We also consider probabilistic code matrices, where one reduces a multiclass problem to a set of class probability labeled binary problems, and show that these can yield benefits in the sense of requiring a smaller number of binary problems to achieve overall consistency. Our analysis makes interesting connections with the theory of proper composite losses (Buja et al., 2005; Reid and Williamson, 2010); these play a role in constructing the right ‘decoding’ for converting the predictions on the binary problems to the final multiclass prediction. To our knowledge, this is the first work that comprehensively studies consistency properties of output code based methods for multiclass learning.
Refinement and Pattern Formation in Neural Circuits by the Interaction of Traveling Waves with Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity

Traveling waves in the developing brain are a prominent source of highly correlated spiking activity that may instruct the refinement of neural circuits. A candidate mechanism for mediating such refinement is spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP), which translates correlated activity patterns into changes in synaptic strength. To assess the potential of these phenomena to build useful structure in developing neural circuits, we examined the interaction of wave activity with STDP rules in simple, biologically plausible models of spiking neurons. We derive an expression for the synaptic strength dynamics showing that, by mapping the time dependence of STDP into spatial interactions, traveling waves can build periodic synaptic connectivity patterns into feedforward circuits with a broad class of experimentally observed STDP rules. The spatial scale of the connectivity patterns increases with wave speed and STDP time constants. We verify these results with simulations and demonstrate their robustness to likely sources of noise. We show how this pattern formation ability, which is analogous to solutions of reaction-diffusion systems that have been widely applied to biological pattern formation, can be harnessed to instruct the refinement of postsynaptic receptive fields. Our results hold for rich, complex wave patterns in two dimensions and over several orders of magnitude in wave speeds and STDP time constants, and they provide predictions that can be tested under existing experimental paradigms. Our model generalizes across brain areas and STDP rules, allowing broad application to the ubiquitous occurrence of traveling waves and to wave-like activity patterns induced by moving stimuli.
Religious giving by individuals : A cross denominational study

Empirical research to date has provided some evidence on factors important to the determination of religious giving as well as to cross denominational differences in religious giving patterns. For example, regression based models of religious giving, typically utilizing data on congregations and congregational contributions, lend considerable support to the observation that Catholics contribute less in amount and as a share of income than do Protestants. A number of possible explanations for this difference can be offered. Two often cited reasons are: (1) a lower estimated marginal propensity to give out of income for Catholics than for Protestants and (2) the more formalized structure of the giving process found in Protestant denominations. Here data on religious giving by individuals of different denominations is used to estimate a single equation econometric model using (a) the least squares and (b) the Tobit techniques. The least squares results corroborate past findings regarding differences in the religious giving of Catholics and Protestants. Unlike past results, however, the Tobit results reported suggest that though income is a statistically significant factor in the religious giving for both groups and the marginal impacts are actually higher for Catholics than for Protestants.