Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Conceptual Confusion Among Rural Filipinos in Adapting to Modern Procedures of Amicable Settlement

Based upon field trips to the Central Luzon region of the Philippines in 1980 and 1985, an assessment is made of the changing Filipino system of dispute settlement. Various points of conceptual confusion are explored regarding the system of community justice established by Marcos during the martial law period. The system is briefly described and evidence provided which suggest that rural villagers tend to resist change in the traditionally and locally governed system of amicable settlement.
Gradient-Directed Multiexposure Composition

In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method that takes advantage of the gradient information to accomplish the multiexposure image composition in both static and dynamic scenes. Given multiple images with different exposures, the proposed approach is capable of producing a pleasant tone-mapped-like high-dynamic-range image by compositing them seamlessly with the guidance of gradient-based quality assessment. In particular, two novel quality measures, namely, visibility and consistency, are developed based on the observations of gradient changes among different exposures. Experiments in various static and dynamic scenes are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
On Correctness of Graph Programs Relative to Recursively Nested Conditions

We propose a new specification language for the proof-based approach to verification of graph programs by introducing μ-conditions as an alternative to existing formalisms which can express path properties. The contributions of this paper are the lifting of constructions from nested conditions to the new, more expressive conditions, and a proof calculus for partial correctness relative to μ-conditions.
Interaction of Listeria monocytogeneswith Human Brain Microvascular Endothelial Cells: InlB-Dependent Invasion, Long-Term Intracellular Growth, and Spread from Macrophages to Endothelial Cells

ABSTRACT Invasion of endothelial tissues may be crucial in a Listeria monocytogenes infection leading to meningitis and/or encephalitis. Internalization of L. monocytogenes into endothelial cells has been previously demonstrated by using human umbilical vein endothelial cells as a model system. However, during the crossing of the blood-brain barrier, L. monocytogenes most likely encounters brain microvascular endothelial cells which are strikingly different from macrovascular or umbilical vein endothelial cells. In the present study human brain microvascular endothelial cells (HBMEC) were used to study the interaction of L. monocytogenes with endothelial cells, which closely resemble native microvascular endothelial cells of the brain. We show thatL. monocytogenes invades HBMEC in an InlB-dependent and wortmannin-insensitive manner. Once within the HBMEC, L. monocytogenes replicates efficiently over a period of at least 18 h, moves intracellularly by inducing actin tail formation, and spreads from cell to cell. Using a green fluorescent protein-expressingL. monocytogenes strain, we present direct evidence that HBMEC are highly resistant to damage by intracellularly growingL. monocytogenes. Infection of HBMEC with L. monocytogenes results in foci of heavily infected, but largely undamaged endothelial cells. Heterologous plaque assays with L. monocytogenes-infected P388D1 macrophages as vectors demonstrate efficient spreading of L. monocytogenes into HBMEC, fibroblasts, hepatocytes, and epithelial cells, and this phenomenon is independent of the inlC gene product.
Mentoring on a Programme for New University Teachers: A partnership in revitalizing and empowering collegiality

This paper evaluates the use of subject‐based collegial mentors in an initial teacher development programme for new lecturers in a research‐intensive UK university. The use of mentors is common in such programmes but their status tends to be that of critical friend and they have little formal influence in the programme. In the programme reported, departmental mentors were accorded a higher status as collegial partners and members of the programme team who also acted as formal assessors. The rationale for their enhanced involvement was to facilitate a genuine sense of ownership and responsibility by subject departments for the initial development of their new lecturers as university teachers. The evaluation study found that formalized mentoring engendered a strong sense of collegiality and ownership by disciplinary communities of practice in the process of initial teacher development. Some of the anticipated issues, such as the potential role conflict of mentor as guide and assessor, did not arise. The longer‐term development of the use of disciplinary mentoring in the programme is discussed. Cet article évalue l’emploi de collègues‐mentors disciplinaires dans le cadre d’un programme de développement initial pour les enseignant‐es au sein d’une université de recherche située au Royaume‐Uni. L’emploi de mentors est chose commune dans le cadre de tels programmes; leur rôle tend cependant à être celui d’“ami critique”, ce qui leur accorde peu d’influence dans le cadre du programme. Dans ce cas‐ci, le mentors départementaux se sont vus accorder un statut supérieur, étant considérés comme partenaires‐collègues et membres de l’équipe du programme, devenant du coup des évaluateurs formels. Leur implication accrue visait à faciliter le développement d’un sentiment de propriété et de responsabilité par les départements disciplinaires relativement au développement initial en tant qu’enseignant‐e de leurs nouveaux membres. Cette recherche‐évaluation semble indiquer que le mentorat formalisé a engendré un fort sentiment de collégialité et de propriété par les communautés disciplinaires de pratique au sein du processus de développement initial des enseignants. Certains des problèmes anticipés, tels que le conflit potentiel causé par les rôles contradictoires de guide et d’évaluateur du mentor, ne se sont pas concrétisés. Le développement à long terme de l’emploi du mentorat disciplinaire au sein du programme est aussi abordé.
Modeling of Plasmon Resonances of Multiple Flat Noble-Metal Nanostrips With a Median-Line Integral Equation Technique

The surface plasmon and the periodicity-induced resonances in the scattering and absorption of light by multiple flat nanosize noble-metal strips are investigated using a new efficient model. It exploits the fact that the nanostrip thickness is a small fraction of the wavelength in the visible range. This justifies shrinking the strip cross section to its median line and using the generalized boundary conditions on that line, with the strip thickness entering the coefficients. As a result, the scattering problem is reduced to the singular and hypersingular integral equations. We discretize them using quadrature formulas of interpolation type and build an algorithm having guaranteed convergence and controlled accuracy of computations. It enables fast simulation of structures consisting of many noble-metal strips. Near- and far-field characteristics for finite flat grating of silver and gold nanostrips are presented.
Clients' perceptions of contact with professionals within healthcare and social insurance offices

Aims: An increasing number of people interact with professionals within healthcare and social insurance offices during periods of sick leave due to musculoskeletal disorders. Knowledge of clients' perceptions of such contact is scarce. This study analysed clients' perceptions of their contact with professionals within healthcare and social insurance offices. Methods: A cohort study was conducted in the municipality of Linköping, Sweden. Participants were all citizens who in 1985 were aged 25 - 34 years and had at least one new sick-leave spell due to back, neck, or shoulder diagnoses exceeding 28 days (n=213). In 1996, 11 years after inclusion, a questionnaire about perception of contact with professionals, self-perceived health, and mental health was administered. Register data on sickness absence and disability pension from 1985 - 96 were also obtained. Results: Factor analysis indicated the existence of three dimensions of contact with professionals: supportive treatment, distant treatment, and empowering treatment. Women perceived their contact with both social insurance officers and healthcare professionals as more supportive than did the men. Respondents with disability pensions perceived their contact with social insurance officers as more supportive and empowering than persons without disability pensions. Respondents with mental health problems perceived their contact with both types of professionals as more distant. Respondents with neck/shoulder diagnoses perceived their contact with healthcare professionals as more empowering than respondents with low back diagnoses. Conclusion: There was a relationship between clients' perceptions of contact with professionals and the sex, disability pension, diagnosis, and mental health of clients.
MERIT-Infonomics Research Memorandum series Understanding absorptive capacities in an “innovation Systems” context: consequences for economic and employment growth

This paper seeks to broaden our understanding of the concept underlying absorptive capacity at the macro –level, paying particular attention to the growth and development perspectives. We provide definitions of absorptive and technological capacity, external technology flows, productivity growth, employment creation and their interrelations. We then analyse the elements of absorptive capability, focusing on the nature of the relationship within a systems view of an economy, focusing primarily on the role of firm and non-firm actors and the institutions that connect them, both within and across borders. We also undertake to explain how the nature of absorptive capacity changes with stages of economic development, and the importance of the different aspects of absorptive capability at different stages. The relationship is not a linear one: the benefits that accrue from marginal increases in absorptive capability change over time. Finally, we provide a tentative and preliminary conceptual argument of how the different stages of absorptive capacity are related to productivity growth, economic growth and employment creation.
Enhanced Oil Recovery Using Nanoparticles

Nanoparticles have been speculated as good in-situ agents for solving reservoir engineering problems. Some selected types of nanoparticles that are likely to be used include oxides of Aluminium, Zinc, Magnesium, Iron, Zirconium, Nickel, Tin and Silicon. It is therefore imperative to find out the effect of these nanoparticle oxides on oil recovery since this is the primary objective of the oil industry. These nanoparticles were used to conduct EOR experiments under surface conditions. Distilled water, brine, ethanol and diesel were used as the dispersing media for the nanoparticles. Two sets of experiments were conducted. The first involved displacing the injected oil with the nanofluids. In the second case, the sands were soaked in nanofluids for 60 days before oil was injected into the system and displaced with low salinity brine. Generally, using nanofluids to displace injected oil produced a better result. Results obtained from the experiments indicate that Aluminium oxide and Silicon oxide are good agents for EOR. Aluminium oxide nanoparticle is good for oil recovery when used with distilled water and brine as dispersing agents. For the use of ethanol, Silane treated Silicon oxide gave the highest recovery in all the conducted experiments while hydrophobic Silicon oxide in ethanol also yielded good results. Aluminium oxide reduces oil viscosity while Silicon oxide changes rock wettability in addition to reduction of interfacial tension between oil and water caused by the presence of ethanol. For the use of diesel as a nanoparticle dispersing fluid, because diesel and crude oil are miscible, the actual crude oil recovery cannot be determined but the overall result with Aluminium, Nickel and Iron oxides appears good. Magnesium oxide and Zinc oxide dispersed in distilled water and brine cause permeability problems. Generally, distilled water lowers oil recovery. This emphasizes the significant role a fluid plays as a nanoparticle dispersing agent in the formation because it can contribute positively or negatively in oil recovery apart from the effect of the nanoparticles. Introduction Application of nanotechnology in the oil and gas industry is just emerging. Recent research projects have shown that nanotechnology has the potential to solve or manage several problems in the petroleum industry. One of the speculated areas of application is in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). EOR is especially important now because of the recent global rise in energy demand which is expected to be met by the oil and gas industry. The ability of nanoparticles to alter certain factors in the formation and in oil properties can be taken advantage of to enhance recovery. This involves introducing these nanoparticles into formations and studying its effect on oil recovery.
Protein Targeting to the Parasitophorous Vacuole Membrane of Plasmodium falciparum

ABSTRACT Red blood cell (RBC) invasion and parasitophorous vacuole (PV) formation by Plasmodium falciparum are critical for the development and pathogenesis of malaria, a continuing global health problem. Expansion of the PV membrane (PVM) during growth is orchestrated by the parasite. This is particularly important in mature RBCs, which lack internal organelles and no longer actively synthesize membranes. Pfs16, a 16-kDa integral PVM protein expressed by gametocytes, was chosen as a model for studying the trafficking of material from the parasite across the PV space to the PVM. The locations of Pfs16-green fluorescent protein (GFP) reporter proteins containing distinct regions of Pfs16 were tracked from RBC invasion to emergence. Inclusion of the 53 C-terminal amino acids (aa) of Pfs16 to a GFP reporter construct already containing the N-terminal secretory signal sequence was sufficient for targeting to and retention on the PVM. An amino acid motif identified in this region was also found in seven other known PVM proteins. Removal of the 11 C-terminal aa did not affect PVM targeting, but membrane retention was decreased. Additionally, during emergence from the PVM and RBC, native Pfs16 and the full-length Pfs16-GFP reporter protein were found to concentrate on the ends of the gametocyte. Capping was not observed in constructs lacking the amino acids between the N-terminal secretory signal sequence and the transmembrane domain, suggesting that this region, which is not required for PVM targeting, is involved in capping. This is the first report to define the amino acid domains required for targeting to the P. falciparum PVM.
Paired Maternal and Paternal Parenting Styles, Child Custody and Children's Emotional Adjustment to Divorce

Abstract Parenting styles have been found to be associated with child development outcomes and these relationships are consistent across different family structures, including nondivorced, divorced, and remarried families. This research is often criticized because it has been conducted primarily with mothers, despite the recognition of fathers' important role in children's development. The current study was conducted to explore the combined contribution of maternal and paternal parenting styles on their children's psychological adjustment. Participants were 518 children between the ages of 10 and 18 whose parents were married and subsequently divorced. Children completed a measure of parenting and co-parenting (the Co-Parenting Behavior Questionnaire), a measure of self-esteem (the Hare Self-Esteem Scale), and rated their own adjustive behaviors with the Behavior Problem Index. Parents also rated their children's internalized and externalized behaviors with the parent from the Behavior Problem Index. Mother's and father's parenting styles were categorized into the four, distinct and non-overlapping, parenting styles (Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive, Absent/Disengaged) using the children's ratings of their parenting behaviors. Mother's and father's parenting style categories were then paired and yielded 235 mother-father pairs whose styles fell into seven combinations with sufficient numbers for statistical calculations. MANOVAs indicated that parenting style pairs influenced all of the adjustive outcomes. The healthiest children were those with at least one parent rated as authoritative and, in most cases, the presence of a parent rated as authoritative was found to mitigate the deleterious effects of both permissive and absent-disengaged parents. In contrast, children with at least one parent rated as absent/disengaged were found to have the greatest adjustive problems.
Control of state-constrained nonlinear systems using Integral Barrier Lyapunov Functionals

This paper presents a control design for nonlinear systems with state constraints, based on the use of our newly introduced Integral Barrier Lyapunov Functionals (iBLF). The integral functional allow the mixing of the original state constraints with the errors in a form amenable to stable backstepping control design. This reduces some of the conservatism associated with the use of purely error-based functions with transformed error constraints. We show that, under the proposed iBLF-based control, output tracking error is bounded by an exponentially decreasing function of time, all states always remain in the constrained state space, and that the stabilizing functions and control input are bounded, subject to significantly relaxed feasibility conditions. A numerical example illustrates the performance of the proposed control.
The temporal patterns of worry and emotionality and their differential effects on test performance

Abstract Spielberger's Trait-State anxiety distinction and Liebert&Morris's Worry-Emotionality distinction were employed to examine the differential effects of worry and emotionality on test performance and the temporal patterns of these components of anxiety. The roles of performance expectancy and item difficulty were also examined. Eighty-eight college students (79 females and 9 males) were randomly assigned to three different item difficulty groups (hard, moderate, or easy) at the initial stage of the study. All subjects completed a Test Anxiety Inventory three weeks before the final exam and a Performance Expectancy Questionnaire and three Worry-Emotionality Questionnaires during their final exam. The results demonstrated the differential roles of worry and emotionality on test performance in terms of the associated patterns of their state forms with the other independent variables (performance expectancy and item difficutly), although their distinctiveness was attenuated in their trait forms.
Research Use in School District Central Office Decision Making

The current educational policy climate in the USA places immense pressure on school district central offices to use evidence to inform their decisions in order to improve student learning. In light of both the expectations of evidence-based decision making and the significance of central offices in supporting teaching and learning, there is considerably little understanding of whether, how and why central office decision makers use research evidence to support educational decisions. Through an embedded case study of Hamilton School District and three central office decisions, this research examines the role of research in central office decisions, focusing on how research is used, what research resources are used and the factors that influence use. Evidence of limited instrumental and political uses of research in comparison to conceptual and symbolic use, preferences for practitioner-oriented resources, and the importance of research attributes, organizational context and culture, and decision-maker characteristics are presented. Findings suggest a need for strategies to improve instrumental use, including reconsidering the production and dissemination of research, facilitating the flow of knowledge within the central office, and further examination of conceptual uses of research.
End-To-End Face Detection and Recognition

Plenty of face detection and recognition methods have been proposed and got delightful results in decades. Common face recognition pipeline consists of: 1) face detection, 2) face alignment, 3) feature extraction, 4) similarity calculation, which are separated and independent from each other. The separated face analyzing stages lead the model redundant calculation and are hard for end-to-end training. In this paper, we proposed a novel end-to-end trainable convolutional network framework for face detection and recognition, in which a geometric transformation matrix was directly learned to align the faces, instead of predicting the facial landmarks. In training stage, our single CNN model is supervised only by face bounding boxes and personal identities, which are publicly available from WIDER FACE \cite{Yang2016} dataset and CASIA-WebFace \cite{Yi2014} dataset. Tested on Face Detection Dataset and Benchmark (FDDB) \cite{Jain2010} dataset and Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) \cite{Huang2007} dataset, we have achieved 89.24\% recall for face detection task and 98.63\% verification accuracy for face recognition task simultaneously, which are comparable to state-of-the-art results.
Minimum presentation time for masked facial expression discrimination

Backward masking is a popular method of preventing awareness of facial expressions, but concerns have been expressed as to the effectiveness of masking in previous research, which may have resulted in unjustified claims of unconscious processing. We examined the minimum presentation time for discrimination of fearful, angry, happy and neutral faces in a backward masking task using both objective sensitivity measures, based on signal detection analysis, and subjective awareness ratings. Results from two experiments showed for all expressions the mean sensitivity and the sensitivity scores of most individual participants were above chance at presentation times of 20 ms. Awareness ratings for happy, fearful and angry also exceeded baseline ratings from 20 ms onwards. Overall sensitivity in both experiments was greatest for happy expressions, which is an agreement with previous reports. The results support the possibility of incomplete masking in earlier studies that used masking to prevent awareness of facial expressions.
A Systematic Review of Pedagogical Agents’ Persona, Motivation, and Cognitive Load Implications for Learners

Abstract After more than a decade of pedagogical agent research, this review synthesizes the affective implications of learning with pedagogical agents. The review investigates different affective measures within 99 pedagogical agent outcome measures. The results suggest that learners may prefer pedagogical agents compared to non-agent control conditions, and pedagogical agents may provide motivational benefits for some populations under certain conditions. However, it is unclear whether pedagogical agents impose extraneous cognitive load. Overall, consistent with research around learning outcomes (Mayer, Dow, & Mayer, 2003), the results suggest that the image of the agent may not be necessary for the learner to receive the affective benefits of the interaction. We delineate limitations of the current study and future research directions.