Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
"Indefensible, Illogical, and Unsupported"; Countering Deficit Mythologies about the Potential of Students with Learning Disabilities in Mathematics.

This paper describes two myths that circulate widely about the potential of students with Learning Disabilities to learn mathematics: (1) that students with Learning Disabilities cannot benefit from inquiry-based instruction in mathematics, and only from explicit instruction; and (2) that students with Learning Disabilities cannot construct their own mathematical strategies and do not benefit from engaging with multiple strategies. In this paper, I will describe how these myths have developed, and identify research that counters these myths. I argue that these myths are the unintended consequences of deficit constructions of students with Learning Disabilities in educational research. Using neurodiversity to frame disability as diversity rather than deficit, I assert that students with Learning Disabilities can learn mathematics to the highest levels, and that these limiting mythologies hold them back.
The interplay of attention and consciousness in visual search, attentional blink and working memory consolidation

Despite the acknowledged relationship between consciousness and attention, theories of the two have mostly been developed separately. Moreover, these theories have independently attempted to explain phenomena in which both are likely to interact, such as the attentional blink (AB) and working memory (WM) consolidation. Here, we make an effort to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, a theory of consciousness based on the notion of global workspace (GW) and, on the other, a synthesis of theories of visual attention. We offer a theory of attention and consciousness (TAC) that provides a unified neurocognitive account of several phenomena associated with visual search, AB and WM consolidation. TAC assumes multiple processing stages between early visual representation and conscious access, and extends the dynamics of the global neuronal workspace model to a visual attentional workspace (VAW). The VAW is controlled by executive routers, higher-order representations of executive operations in the GW, without the need for explicit saliency or priority maps. TAC leads to newly proposed mechanisms for illusory conjunctions, AB, inattentional blindness and WM capacity, and suggests neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness. Finally, the theory reconciles the all-or-none and graded perspectives on conscious representation.
Extensive In Vivo Resilience of Persistent Salmonella

Chronic infections caused by persistent pathogens represent an important health problem. Here, we establish a simple practical mouse Salmonella infection model for identifying bacterial maintenance functions that are essential for persistency. In this model, a substantial fraction of Salmonella survived even several days of treatment with a potent fluoroquinolone antibiotic indicating stringency of the model. Evaluation of twelve metabolic defects revealed dramatically different requirements for Salmonella during persistency as compared to acute infections. Disrupted synthesis of unsaturated/cyclopropane fatty acids was the only defect that resulted in rapid Salmonella clearance suggesting that this pathway might contain suitable targets for antimicrobial chemotherapy of chronic infection.
Diversity and Seasonal Impact of Acanthamoeba Species in a Subtropical Rivershed

This study evaluated the presence of Acanthamoeba species in the Puzih River watershed, which features typical subtropical monsoon climate and is located just above the Tropic of Cancer in Taiwan. The relationship between the seasonal and geographical distributions of Acanthamoeba species in this rivershed was also investigated. Acanthamoeba species were detected in water samples using the amoebal enrichment culture method and confirmed by PCR. A total of 136 water samples were included in this study, 16 (11.7%) of which contained Acanthamoeba species. Samples with the highest percentage of Acanthamoeba (32.4%) were obtained during the summer season, mainly from upstream areas. The identified species in the four seasons included Acanthamoeba palestinensis (T2), Acanthamoeba sp. IS2/T4 (T4), Acanthamoeba lenticulata (T5), Acanthamoeba hatchetti (T11), Acanthamoeba healyi (T12), and Acanthamoeba jacobsi (T15). The most frequently identified Acanthamoeba genotype was T4 (68.7%). Acanthamoeba genotype T4 is responsible for Acanthamoeba keratitis and should be considered for associated human health risk potential in the rivershed.
Skill Heterogeneity and Equilibrium Unemployment

Opportunities facing skilled and unskilled workers diverged over the last quarter of the twentieth century in the UK. We develop an empirical framework consistent with these trends that highlights the importance of skill heterogeneity in both wage setting and labour demand in explaining aggregate labour market outcomes. The framework enables us to quantify the macroeconomic effects of shocks that impact particularly on one group rather than another. Copyright 2007 , Oxford University Press.
Defensive Pessimism and Goal Setting

Studies have found that the defensive pessimism cognitive strategy which involves going into situations with unrealistically low expectations despite previous high performance, leads to lower levels of performance when individuals taking on this strategy have expectations placed upon them in the form of encouragement (Norem & Cantor, 1986a, 1986b). Thus far, no one has applied goal setting theory to this phenomenon to try to investigate the possible interactive effects of goal setting and encouragement on performance (Locke & Latham, 2002). This study hypothesized that specific difficult goals would have negative effects on individuals more likely to take on a defensive pessimistic strategy, similar to the negative effects encouragement has on these individuals, while both specific difficult goals and encouragement would have positive effects for individuals more likely to take on an optimistic strategy (i.e., entering situations with high expectations of performance and high levels of previous performance). However, overall results of this study demonstrated that specific difficult goals had a positive impact for all individuals, regardless of where they fell on the optimism-defensive pessimism spectrum, with an exception to this positive effect when individuals who were more likely to take on a defensive pessimistic strategy also received encouragement. This suggests that the cognitive strategy that defensive pessimists use is interfered with when they are encouraged and assigned a specific difficult goal, which is the opposite of the effects that specific difficult goals and encouragement have on optimists. DEFENSIVE PESSIMISM AND GOAL SETTING 3
MODELING THE FATE OF TOLUENE IN A CHAMBER WITH ALFALFA PLANTS 1. THEORY AND MODELING CONCEPTS

A model was developed to investigate the fate of organic contaminants in soils in the presence of vegetation. The model has two modules. The first module simulates the soil-water and root-water pressure heads under the influence of water extraction by the roots of growing vegetation. Evapotranspiration due to alfalfa plants is an outflux boundary condition at the soil surface for this model. The distributions for water and air contents and Darcy water flux are obtained from the soil-water pressure heads. The second module simulates the fate of soil constituents in the porous medium using the Darcy water flux. The constituents assumed to be present in vegetated soil were contaminant, biomass, oxygen, and root exudates. A Galerkin finite element method was used to solve the model equations in two dimensions to enable comparison with an experimental system. The domain simulating the experimental chamber was assumed to be comprised of rectangular elements with bilinear shape functions which represented the variations within each element. Convergence to solution for the non-linear equations was accomplished using the Picard iterative algorithm. The time derivative was approximated using an implicit CrankNicholson scheme.
The norm game in a mean-field society

Mean field Master equations for the norm game are investigated. The strategies are: to obey the norm or not and to punish those who break it or not. The punishment, the temptation, the punishment cost and the relaxation of vengeance are modeled by four parameters; for the fixed points, only two ratios of these parameters are relevant. The analysis reveals two phases; in one of them, nobody obeys the norm and nobody punishes. This phase is stable if the punishment is small enough. In the other phase, the proportion of defectors depends on the parameters and in some cases it can be arbitrarily small. A transcritical bifurcation appears between the two phases. Numerical calculations show that the relaxation time shows a sharp maximum at the bifurcation point. The model is adapted also for the case of two mutually punishing groups. A difference between the solutions for two groups appears if the punishment of one group by the other is weaker, than the opposite.
Thermalism in Greece: An Ancient Cultural Habitus in Crisis

This paper examines thermalism in Greece both in its historical development and in the context of current challenges engendered by economic recession. The authors’ intention is to discuss bathing in thermal springs as a sociocultural practice deeply rooted in history and collective experience, to follow its transformations in the course of time, and to analyze the complexity of its present state. The latter issue, which is dealt with in more detail, is explored through academic literature, the evaluation of quantitative and qualitative data, and empirical research. The last part of the paper discusses the conclusions of our study of the Greek case with a view to contributing to the overall assessment of popular thermalism in Europe
ELECTRONIC SYSTEM FOR EXPERIMENTATION IN AC ELECTROGRAVIMETRY II: IMPLEMENTED DESIGN

A detailed description of the electronic system designed to improve the measurements in an experimental AC electrogravimetry setup is presented. This system is committed to acquire appropriated data for determining the Electrogravimetric Transfer Function (EGTF) and provide information regarding the mass transfer in an electrochemical cell in the AC Electrogravimetry Technique, but maintaining a good trade-off between the locking frequency bandwidth and the resolution in the frequency tracking, that is, enlarging the bandwidth of the system to follow signals with frequency as higher as 1 kHz, but maintaining an accurate and continuous tracking of this signal. The enlarged bandwidth allows the study of fast kinetic process in electrochemical applications and the continuous tracking let to achieve a precise measurement with good resolution rather than average frequency records obtained by conventional frequency meters. The system is based on an Analogue-Digital Phase Locked Loop (A-D PLL). Resumen: En este articulo se presenta una descripcion detallada del sistema electronico disenado para mejorar las medidas en un sistema experimental de electrogravimetria AC. El sistema disenado se encarga de adquirir los datos adecuados para determinar la funcion de transferencia electrogravimetrica (EGTF) y proveer informacion relacionada con la transferencia de masa en una celda electroquimica en la tecnica de electrogravimetria AC, pero manteniendo un buen compromiso entre el ancho de banda de enganche y la resolucion en el seguimiento de la frecuencia, es decir, el sistema incrementa el ancho de banda para permitir el seguimiento de senales con frecuencias hasta de 1 kHz, pero conservando un exacto y continuo seguimiento de esta senal. El aumento del ancho de banda permite el estudio de procesos con una cinetica rapida en aplicaciones electroquimicas y el seguimiento continuo de la senal permite la obtencion de medidas precisas con buena resolucion en contraste con los datos de frecuencia promediados entregados por los frecuencimetros convencionales. El sistema se basa en un bucle de enganche de fase analogico-digital (A-D PLL).
Laplacian Texture Synthesis and Mixing on Surfaces

In neighborhood-based texture synthesis, adjacent local regions need to satisfy color continuity constraints in order to avoid visible seams. Such continuity constraints seriously restrict the variability of synthesized textures, making it impossible to generate new textures by mixing multiple input textures with very different base colors. In this paper, we propose to relax such restrictions and decompose synthesis into two relatively disjoint stages. In the first stage, an intermediate synthesized texture is generated by only considering the high frequency details during region search and matching. Such a scheme broadens the search space during texture synthesis, but may produce obvious seams due to large discontinuities in low frequency components. In the second stage, instead of performing local feathering along these discontinuities, we perform Laplacian texture reconstruction, which retains the high frequency details but computes new consistent low frequency components to eliminate the seams. It does not only affect texels close to the discontinuities, but also modifies the rest of the texels. Therefore, it can be viewed as a global feature-preserving smoothing step, and is more effective than local feathering. Experiments indicate that our two-stage synthesis can produce desirable results for regular texture synthesis as well as texture mixing from multiple sources.
A Computational Model of How Cholinergic Interneurons Protect Striatal-dependent Learning

An essential component of skill acquisition is learning the environmental conditions in which that skill is relevant. This article proposes and tests a neurobiologically detailed theory of how such learning is mediated. The theory assumes that a key component of this learning is provided by the cholinergic interneurons in the striatum known as tonically active neurons (TANs). The TANs are assumed to exert a tonic inhibitory influence over cortical inputs to the striatum that prevents the execution of any striatal-dependent actions. The TANs learn to pause in rewarding environments, and this pause releases the striatal output neurons from this inhibitory effect, thereby facilitating the learning and expression of striatal-dependent behaviors. When rewards are no longer available, the TANs cease to pause, which protects striatal learning from decay. A computational version of this theory accounts for a variety of single-cell recording data and some classic behavioral phenomena, including fast reacquisition after extinction.
Position-Aware Representations for Relevance Matching in Neural Information Retrieval

To deploy deep learning models for ad-hoc information retrieval, suitable representations of query-document pairs are needed. Such representations ought to capture all relevant information required to assess the relevance of a document for a given query, including uni-gram term overlap as well as positional information such as proximity and term dependencies. In this work, we investigate the use of similarity matrices that are able to encode such position-specific information. Extensive experiments on TREC Web Track data confirm that such representations can yield good results.
A novel hierarchical speech emotion recognition method based on improved DDAGSVM

In order to improve the recognition accuracy of speech emotion recognition, in this paper, a novel hierarchical method based on improved Decision Directed Acyclic Graph SVM (improved DDAGSVM) is proposed for speech emotion recognition. The improved DDAGSVM is constructed according to the confusion degrees of emotion pairs. In addition, a geodesic distance-based testing algorithm is proposed for the improved DDAGSVM to give the test samples differently distinguished many decision chances. Informative features and SVM optimized parameters used in each node of the improved DDAGSVM are gotten by Genetic Algorithm (GA) synchronously. On the Chinese Speech Emotion Database (CSED) and the Audio-Video Emotion Database (AVED) recorded by our workgroup, the recognition experiment results reveal that, compared with multi-SVM, binary decision tree and traditional DDAGSVM, the improved DDAGSVM has the higher recognition accuracy with few selected informative features and moderate time for 7 emotions.
Secret key generation for correlated Gaussian sources

We consider secret key (SK) generation by two terminals, each of which observes an i.i. d. source which is correlated with the other; the two sources are jointly Gaussian with known distribution. The terminals are then allowed to communicate with each other, possibly interactively in many rounds and without rate restrictions, over a noiseless two-way public channel. Randomization is permitted at each terminal. The goal is for the terminals to generate a SK comprising discrete common randomness which is concealed from an eavesdropper that has access to the public interterminal communication. We establish that this maximum rate of SK generation, i.e., SK capacity, is, as expected, the per-symbol mutual information I of the correlated sources. Our main technical contribution is a new scheme for achieving SK capacity using structured codes. In our scheme, vector quantization at rate R nats/source symbol of the source at terminal 1 is performed by employing nested lattice codes with dithering. Then, a SK is generated by the terminals from the quantized random sequence at terminal 1 and the (unquantized) Gaussian source at terminal 2, using both lossy and lossless data compression techniques. Our algorithm, using a rate-R lattice quantizer, achieves a maximum SK rate of 1/2 log 1/(e-2I+(1-e-2I)e-2R), which tends to the SK capacity I with increasing R. Thus, our result also specifies the associated tradeoff between quantization rate R and the maximum achievable SK rate. This tradeoff is shown to be optimum among a certain restricted class of schemes for SK generation that involve quantization at rate R of a Gaussian source at one terminal.
A trial of imaging selection and endovascular treatment for ischemic stroke.

BACKGROUND Whether brain imaging can identify patients who are most likely to benefit from therapies for acute ischemic stroke and whether endovascular thrombectomy improves clinical outcomes in such patients remains unclear. METHODS In this study, we randomly assigned patients within 8 hours after the onset of large-vessel, anterior-circulation strokes to undergo mechanical embolectomy (Merci Retriever or Penumbra System) or receive standard care. All patients underwent pretreatment computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging of the brain. Randomization was stratified according to whether the patient had a favorable penumbral pattern (substantial salvageable tissue and small infarct core) or a nonpenumbral pattern (large core or small or absent penumbra). We assessed outcomes using the 90-day modified Rankin scale, ranging from 0 (no symptoms) to 6 (dead). RESULTS Among 118 eligible patients, the mean age was 65.5 years, the mean time to enrollment was 5.5 hours, and 58% had a favorable penumbral pattern. Revascularization in the embolectomy group was achieved in 67% of the patients. Ninety-day mortality was 21%, and the rate of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage was 4%; neither rate differed across groups. Among all patients, mean scores on the modified Rankin scale did not differ between embolectomy and standard care (3.9 vs. 3.9, P=0.99). Embolectomy was not superior to standard care in patients with either a favorable penumbral pattern (mean score, 3.9 vs. 3.4; P=0.23) or a nonpenumbral pattern (mean score, 4.0 vs. 4.4; P=0.32). In the primary analysis of scores on the 90-day modified Rankin scale, there was no interaction between the pretreatment imaging pattern and treatment assignment (P=0.14). CONCLUSIONS A favorable penumbral pattern on neuroimaging did not identify patients who would differentially benefit from endovascular therapy for acute ischemic stroke, nor was embolectomy shown to be superior to standard care. (Funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; MR RESCUE ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00389467.).
Moment graphs and Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials

urnberg Abstract. Motivated by a result of Fiebig (2007), we categorify some properties of Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials via sheaves on Bruhat moment graphs. In order to do this, we develop new techniques and apply them to the combinatorial data encoded in these moment graphs. R´ esum´ e. Motiv´ es par un resultat de Fiebig (2007), nous categorifions certaines propri´´ es des polynde Kazhdan- Lusztig en utilisant faisceaux sur les graphes moment de Bruhat. Pour faire ca, nous d´ eveloppons de nouvelles techniques et les appliquons ensuite aux donncombinatoires encoddans ces graphes moment.
Decadal Predictability of the Atlantic Ocean in a Coupled GCM: Forecast Skill and Optimal Perturbations Using Linear Inverse Modeling

Abstract The decadal predictability of three-dimensional Atlantic Ocean anomalies is examined in a coupled global climate model [the third climate configuration of the Met Office Unified Model (HadCM3)] using a linear inverse modeling (LIM) approach. It is found that the evolution of temperature and salinity in the Atlantic, and the strength of the meridional overturning circulation (MOC), can be effectively described by a linear dynamical system forced by white noise. The forecasts produced using this linear model are more skillful than other reference forecasts for several decades. Furthermore, significant nonnormal amplification is found under several different norms. The regions from which this growth occurs are found to be fairly shallow and located in the far North Atlantic. Initially, anomalies in the Nordic seas impact the MOC and the anomalies then grow to fill the entire Atlantic basin, especially at depth, over one to three decades. It is found that the structure of the optimal initial conditio.
Experimental Evidence for the Truth Conditional Contribution and Shifting Information Status of Appositives

15 sentence in which they appear. Here, we address this question head-on experimentally. We first investigate the information status of appositives and find that while nominal appositives (e.g. a classical violinist) and sentence-medial appositive relative clauses (e.g. who is a classical violinist) are largely not at issue, sentence-final appositive relative clauses can become at issue, as witnessed in their becoming the target of a direct rejection and 20 being associated with subsequent questions. We then investigate the truth conditional contribution of appositives to sentences in which they appear, and find that whenever an appositive is false, participants judge the entire sentence False. Reaction times complement truth value ratings to demonstrate that this decision is largely automatic. We discuss possible reasons for the difference among appositive types and sentential