Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enhancing self-reflection and mathematics achievement of at-risk urban technical college students

A classroom-based intervention study sought to help struggling learners respond to their academic grades in math as sources of self-regulated learning (SRL) rather than as indices of personal limitation. Technical college students (N = 496) in developmental (remedial) math or introductory college-level math courses were randomly assigned to receive SRL instruction or conventional instruction (control) in their respective courses. SRL instruction was hypothesized to improve students’ math achievement by showing them how to self-reflect (i.e., self-assess and adapt to academic quiz outcomes) more effectively. The results indicated that students receiving self-reflection training outperformed students in the control group on instructor-developed examinations and were better calibrated in their task-specific self-efficacy beliefs before solving problems and in their selfevaluative judgments after solving problems. Self-reflection training also increased students’ passrate on a national gateway examination in mathematics by 25% in comparison to that of control students.
Minimum congestion mapping in a cloud

We study a basic resource allocation problem that arises in cloud computing environments. The physical network of the cloud is represented as a graph with vertices denoting servers and edges corresponding to communication links. A workload is a set of processes with processing requirements and mutual communication requirements. The workloads arrive and depart over time, and the resource allocator must map each workload upon arrival to the physical network. We consider the objective of minimizing the congestion. We show that solving a subproblem about mapping a single workload to the physical graph essentially suffices to solve the general problem. In particular, an α-approximation for this single mapping problem gives an O(α log nD)-competitive algorithm for the general problem, where n is the number of nodes in the physical network and D is the maximum to minimum workload duration ratio. We also show how to solve the single mapping problem for two natural class of workloads, namely depth-d-trees and complete-graph workloads. For depth-d tree, we give an nO(d) time O(d2 log (nd))-approximation based on a strong LP relaxation inspired by the Sherali-Adams hierarchy.
Automatic Portrait Segmentation for Image Stylization

Portraiture is a major art form in both photography and painting. In most instances, artists seek to make the subject stand out from its surrounding, for instance, by making it brighter or sharper. In the digital world, similar effects can be achieved by processing a portrait image with photographic or painterly filters that adapt to the semantics of the image. While many successful user‐guided methods exist to delineate the subject, fully automatic techniques are lacking and yield unsatisfactory results. Our paper first addresses this problem by introducing a new automatic segmentation algorithm dedicated to portraits. We then build upon this result and describe several portrait filters that exploit our automatic segmentation algorithm to generate high‐quality portraits.
Mouse Placental Prostaglandins Are Associated with Uterine Activation and the Timing of Birth1

Abstract We explored a potential mechanism linking placental prostaglandins (PGs) with a fall in plasma progesterone and increased expression of uterine activation proteins in the mouse. PG endoperoxide H synthase 2 (PGHS-2) mRNA expression increased in placenta in late gestation in association with an 8-fold increase in PGF2α concentration, reaching a peak on Gestational Day (GD) 18. This peak coincided with the final descent in plasma progesterone and birth on GD 19.3 ± 0.2. Implantation of a progesterone-releasing pellet in intact pregnant dams on GD 16 delayed birth at term until GD 20.9 ± 0.4 and inhibited the GD 18 increase in placental PGF2α levels in conjunction with a delayed fall in plasma progesterone that reached its lowest level 1 day after term birth. The mRNA levels of uterine activation proteins, connexin-43 (CX-43), oxytocin receptor, PGF2α receptor (FP), and PGHS-2, and the concentration of uterine PGF2α all increased at normal term birth. At progesterone-delayed term birth on GD 19.3, even though tissue PGF2α concentrations were at the same high levels observed at normal term birth, CX-43 and FP mRNA levels were lower than those at normal term birth, thereby possibly contributing to the delay of birth. These data are consistent with the hypotheses that fetal placental PGs affect the timing of birth by hastening luteolysis, that uterine activation initiates labor, and that birth may be delayed by blocking or decreasing the expression of two of the uterine activation proteins.
Assessing a learning organization model: A teacher’s perspective

The main objective of this article is to analyse the four basic dimensions of the learning organization (LO) – leadership towards learning, learning structure, learning opportunities and learning culture – within the school organization context. A quantitative study utilizing a survey was carried out. By means of an ad hoc questionnaire, secondary and high school teachers were asked about some characteristics of their educational organizations that could be related to a LO. The analyses of the internal structure of the questionnaire and internal consistency of the scores were satisfactory. A questionnaire has been validated that can serve as a model for the evaluation of learning organizations in the context of high school. One school sample is analysed according to the LO model. The suitability of the model for different types of schools is verified.
Production and Welfare: Progress in Economic Measurement

While the GDP was intended by its originators as a measure of production, the absence of a measure of welfare in the national accounts has led to widespread misuse of the GDP to proxy welfare. Measures of welfare are needed to appraise the outcomes of changes in economic policies and evaluate the results. Concepts that describe the income distribution, such as poverty and inequality, fall within the scope of welfare rather than production. This paper reviews recent advances in the measurement of production and welfare within the national accounts, primarily in the United States and international organizations. Expanding the framework beyond the national accounts has led to important innovations in the measurement of both production and welfare. (JEL D63, E01, E23, E24, E31, I20)
Site-Specific Amino Acid Frequency, Fitness and the Mutational Landscape Model of Adaptation in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1

Analysis of the intensely studied HIV-1 gp120 V3 protein region reveals that the among-population mean site-specific frequency of an amino acid is a measure of its relative marginal fitness. This surprising result may arise if populations are displaced from mutation–selection equilibrium by fluctuating selection and if the probability of fixation of a beneficial amino acid is proportional to its selection coefficient.
The Mass, Baryonic Fraction, and X-Ray Temperature of the Luminous, High-Redshift Cluster of Galaxies MS 0451.6–0305

We present new Chandra X-ray observations of the luminous and cosmologically significant X-ray cluster of galaxies, MS 0451.6-0305, at z = 0.5386. Spectral imaging data for the cluster are consistent with an isothermal cluster of (10.0-10.6) ± 1.6 keV, with an intracluster Fe abundance of (0.32-0.40) ± 0.13 solar. The systematic uncertainties, arising from calibration and model uncertainties, of the temperature determination are nearly the same size as the statistical uncertainties, since the time-dependent correction for absorption on the detector is uncertain for these data. We discuss the effects of this correction on the spectral fitting. The effects of statistics and fitting assumptions of two-dimensional models for the X-ray surface brightness are thoroughly explored. This cluster appears to be elongated, and so we quantify the effects of assuming an ellipsoidal gas distribution on the gas mass and the total gravitating mass estimates. These data are also jointly fitted with previous Sunyaev-Zeldovich observations to obtain an estimate of the cluster's distance (DA = 1219 ± 387 Mpc, statistical followed by systematic uncertainties) assuming spherical symmetry. If, instead, we assume a Hubble constant, the X-ray and Sunyaev-Zeldovich data are used together to test the consistency of an ellipsoidal gas distribution and to weakly constrain the intrinsic axis ratio. The mass derived from the X-ray data is consistent with the weak-lensing mass and is only marginally less than the mass determined from the optical velocities. We confirm that this cluster is very hot and massive, further supporting the conclusion of previous analyses that the universe has a low matter density and that cluster properties have not evolved much since z ~ 0.5. Furthermore, the presence of iron in this high-redshift cluster at an abundance that is the same as that of low-redshift clusters implies that there has been very little evolution of the cluster iron abundance since z ~ 0.5. We discuss the possible detection of a faint, soft, extended component that may be the by-product of hierarchical structure formation.
German psych verbs – insights from a decompositional perspective

This thesis is concerned with German psychological verbs, i.e. verbs characterized by the fact that one of their arguments is associated with a psychological process bearing the thematic role Experiencer. These psych verbs have been prominent in linguistic discussion on syntax, semantics, and their interfaces for at least 30 years, and are often considered to form a special group of verbs with specific ‘psych properties’. Not only the theoretical analysis but also the correct characterization of their empirical properties is a matter of controversy in the literature, and no consensus has been established with respect to either. Therefore, in the first part of this thesis, the empirical properties of object experiencer verbs such as agentivity, aspectual properties, passive, and the behaviour of these verbs with respect to a number of other grammatical phenomena are examined. Special focus is placed on alternating verbs formed on the basis of the same Root, such as e.g. ärgern–verärgern–sich ärgern, wundern–verwundern –sich wundern, etc. The results of the empirical analysis show that neither ObjExp verbs nor experiencers form a homogeneous group with coherent properties. On the contrary, these verbs fall into several different groups of verbs with clearly different properties. Consequently, psych verbs cannot be analysed as one (special) group of verbs. The theoretical part of this thesis therefore puts forward a decompositional analysis couched in the paradigm of Distributed Morphology, which analyses the different psych verbs as different groups of verbs, and explains their properties as the consequence of general grammatical principles (their aspectual properties, and the presence/absence of an external argument), not special psych properties. The discussion of stative causative ObjExp verbs plays a major part. As a result, the conclusion has to be drawn that ‘psych verbs’ do not constitute a grammatically relevant (special) group of verbs, but that these verbs follow different general patterns known from the study of other verbs.
A short primer on situated cognition

In recent years there has been a lot of buzz about a new trend in cognitive science. The trend is associated with terms like 'embodiment', 'enactivism', 'distributed cognition', and 'the extended mind'. The ideas expressed using these terms are a diverse and sundry lot, but three of them stand out as especially central. First, cognition depends not just on the brain, but also on the body (the embodiment thesis). Second, cognitive activity routinely exploits structure in the natural and social environment (the embedding thesis). Third, the boundaries of cognition extend beyond the boundaries of individual organisms (the extension thesis). Each of these theses contributes to a picture of mental activity as dependent on the situation or context in which it occurs, whether that situation or context is relatively local (as in the case of embodiment) or relatively global (as in the case of embedding and extension). It is this picture of the mind that lies at the heart of
CEO Compensation and Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation of UK Panel Data

This paper examines the link between CEO pay and performance employing a unique, hand-collected panel data set of 390 UK non-financial firms from the FTSE All Share Index for the period 1999-2005. We include both cash (salary and bonus) and equity-based (stock options and long-term incentive plans) components of CEO compensation for a panel of large UK companies. Different from previous studies, we use GMM-system estimation method, which controls for the presence of unobserved firm-specific effects and for the endogeneity of explanatory variables. In addition, we control for a comprehensive set of corporate governance variables. The empirical results indicate that there is a positive and significant relationship between firm performance and the level of CEO cash compensation while the relationship is positive but not significant for total compensation. This finding suggests that corporate governance reports in the UK, such as Greenbury Report (1995) that proposed CEO compensation be more closely linked to performance, have not been totally effective. We also find that proportion of non-executive directors on board does not have a significant impact on CEO cash compensation, while non-executive directors' share ownership has a significant impact suggesting that ownership can provide incentives for non-executive directors to be more active in monitoring for CEO compensation packages. Our results also indicate that institutional ownership has a positive and significant influence on CEO pay-for-performance sensitivity of option grants. Finally, we find that longer CEO tenure is associated with lower pay-for-performance sensitivity of option grants suggesting the entrenchment effect of CEO tenure.
Network Quality over Quantity: Exploring the Influence of Network Structure and Function on U.S. Older Adult Physical and Mental Health

Author(s): Bui, Bonnie | Advisor(s): Faust, Katherine | Abstract: Does the structure of an individual’s personal network effect their physical and mental health? Or does the structure of the network influence individual health by influencing the functions of the network or the individual’s health behaviors? In my dissertation, I examine these questions using two waves of nationally representative data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project and employing conditional change models.In study 1, I examine the associations between network structure, network function, and health. I find no direct associations between baseline network structure and later health. However, I do find that baseline network structure is associated with later network function, which, in turn, is associated with health. I also find limited support for a feedback loop in which baseline health has effects on later network structure. Perceived social support may be more important for the health of older adults than network structure characteristics, but network structure is meaningful in that it provides the source from which support can be derived.In study 2, I examined the effects of spousal loss on depression across different levels of spousal support, including baseline network structure and network function to observe whether they served as a buffer to spousal bereavement. The findings revealed that losing a spouse was positively associated with the number of depressive symptoms, but only for those with highly supportive spouses. None of the network structure and function measures at baseline were associated with later depression. The findings imply that spousal bereavement in late life depends on how supportive the spouse was.In study 3, I examine the social network factors that influence health risk behaviors—specifically, cigarette use and alcohol consumption. Findings show that personal networks can have protective effects on smoking or drinking; however, for current smokers and drinkers, personal networks are enabling. Having more support and having health discussion partners reduced the adoption of health-compromising behaviors. In conclusion, health-compromising behaviors may not necessarily be adopted as a coping mechanism, but may be a pro-social activity that is increased when there are others in the network who also engage in similar activities.
A Survey and Current Research Challenges in Multi-Label Classification Methods

Classification is used to predict class of unseen instance as accurate as possible. Multi label classification is a variant of single label classification where set of labels associated with single instance. Multi label classification is used by modern applications, such as text classification, functional genomics, image classification, music categorization etc. This paper introduces the task of multi-label classification, methods for multi-label classification and evolution measure for multi-label classification. Also done comparative analysis of multi label classification methods on the basis of theoretical study and than on the basis of simulation done on various data sets.
Embodying an outgroup: the role of racial bias and the effect of multisensory processing in somatosensory remapping

We come to understand other people's physical and mental states by re-mapping their bodily states onto our sensorimotor system. This process, also called somatosensory resonance, is an essential ability for social cognition and is stronger when observing ingroup than outgroup members. Here we investigated, first, whether implicit racial bias constrains somatosensory resonance, and second, whether increasing the ingroup/outgroup perceived physical similarity results in an increase in the somatosensory resonance for outgroup members. We used the Visual Remapping of Touch effect as an index of individuals' ability in resonating with the others, and the Implicit Association Test to measure racial bias. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to detect near-threshold tactile stimuli delivered to their own face while viewing either an ingroup or an outgroup face receiving a similar stimulation. Our results showed that individuals' tactile accuracy when viewing an outgroup face being touched was negatively correlated to their implicit racial bias. In Experiment 2, participants received the interpersonal multisensory stimulation (IMS) while observing an outgroup member. IMS has been found to increase the perceived physical similarity between the observer's and the observed body. We tested whether such increase in ingroup/outgroup perceived physical similarity increased the remapping ability for outgroup members. We found that after sharing IMS experience with an outgroup member, tactile accuracy when viewing touch on outgroup faces increased. Interestingly, participants with stronger implicit bias against the outgroup showed larger positive change in the remapping. We conclude that shared multisensory experiences might represent one key way to improve our ability to resonate with others by overcoming the boundaries between ingroup and outgroup categories.
Learning Outcome Literacy: The Case of Five Elementary Mathematics Teachers

Learning outcome (LO) literacy is conceptualized as a necessary skill for planning teaching and learning activities effectively. The skill has two main components: understanding and interpreting learning outcomes. The current study aimed to identify learning outcome literacy of elementary mathematics teachers with regard to this conceptualization. It is a case study based on the qualitative design. Participants were 5 mathematics teachers working at different elementary (5 8 grade) schools in Turkey. Observations and semi-structured interviews were used for data collection based on 10 learning outcomes selected from algebra and number learning domains in local mathematics curriculum. Content analysis method was used for data analysis. According to the findings, LO literacy can be regarded as a basic teacher competence and it requires the teacher to use the knowledge and skills he/she has. The results showed that participant teachers' LO literacy was insufficient. Considering the interrelation among its components, LO literacy should be developed with all the sub-components for effective teaching of LOs.
Measurements and Modeling of Distributed Antenna Systems in Railway Tunnels

This paper covers some of the work carried out in the planning of the global system for mobile communication for railway (GSM-R) of the tunnels on the new high-speed trains in Spain. Solutions based on distributed antenna systems have been tested by installing several 900-MHz transmitters inside and outside of a 4000-m tunnel and measuring the propagation in different conditions. The measurements have been used to model the effects of tunnel propagation, including curves, trains passing from the outside to the inside, and the effect of two trains passing inside the tunnel. All cases have been tested by comparing solutions using isofrequency and multifrequency distributed transmitters inside the tunnel. The improvements of signal-to-noise ratio and the reduction of the blocking effects of two trains passing have demonstrated the advantages of using isofrequency distributed antenna systems in tunnels. Finally, a complete propagation model combining both modal analysis and ray tracing has been applied to predict the propagation loss inside and outside these tunnels, and results have been compared with the measurements. The model has proven to be very useful for radio planning in new railway networks.
A hardware algorithm for fast logarithmic computation with exponential convergence rate

Abstract A hardware algorithm is proposed for improving the speed of the linear digit‐recurrence logarithmic algorithm. The convergence rate of this logarithmic algorithm is exponential. Furthermore, the size of the lookup tables used in the algorithm is smaller than the size of the lookup tables used in the digit‐recurrence algorithms. When the word length of the operand is less than or equal to 64 bits, the operations involved in each stage of the logarithmic computation only include small table lookup operation, digit‐multiplication, and simple square operations. We conclude that the hardware implementation of our proposed algorithm is very efficient.
The Relevance of the Value Relevance Literature for Financial Accounting Standard Setting

In this paper we critically evaluate the standard-setting inferences that can be drawn from value relevance research studies that are motivated by standard setting. Our evaluation concentrates on the theories of accounting, standard setting and valuation that underlie those inferences. Unless those underlying theories are descriptive of accounting, standard setting and valuation, the value-relevance literature’s reported associations between accounting numbers and common equity valuations have limited implications or inferences for standard setting; they are mere associations. We argue that the underlying theories are not descriptive and hence drawing standard-setting inferences is difficult. r 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: M41; M44; G12