Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing Motivation to Write

Two decades of cognitive research have shown writing to be a highly fluid process of problem solving requiring constant monitoring of progress toward task goals. Becoming an able writer brings great intellectual and social rewards, but the extended nature and difficulty of this process create unique motivational challenges. Speech development provides some models for development of writing motivation, but writing requires special attention to motivational conditions. Four clusters of conditions are proposed as keys to developing motivation: nurturing functional beliefs about writing, fostering engagement using authentic writing tasks, providing a supportive context for writing, and creating a positive emotional environment. Teachers' own conceptions of writing are seen as crucial to establishing these conditions in most writing contexts. Systematic motivational research complementing our knowledge about the cognitive processes of writing is needed to understand the development of motivation to write.
Chapter 3: Who Will Teach? Historical Perspectives on the Changing Appeal of Teaching as a Profession

The current reform movement in American education is jeopardized by a possible decline in the academic qualifications of the teaching force. The ability to improve education in American public schools will depend in large measure on the ability of those schools to recruit and retain talented teachers. If teaching is widely viewed as an undesirable occupation, the talented personnel needed to implement and sustain the recent educational reforms are likely to seek other outlets for their professional aspirations. This chapter examines the desirability of teaching as a career from a historical perspective. It focuses first on the reward structure in teaching, and second on the social origins and composition of the teaching force. How has the reward structure affected the social composition of the teaching force, and
Responding to student expectations: a partnership approach to course evaluation

This paper presents a study that used newly developed instruments to investigate student expectations at two points in a semester‐based course. Course convenors were able to make some changes in response to the feedback, explain to students how the feedback had informed the course processes, and work with tutors on delivery enhancements. The administration of these instruments, a partnership approach involving students, tutors and lecturers, contributed to the creation of a responsive teaching and learning environment. In addition to enabling real‐time changes to be made, evaluation of the total teaching and learning experience ensured that improvements were made to subsequent offerings of the same course. Also, insights from one course were evaluated in terms of applicability to other courses offered within the same academic discipline. The study finds that establishing student expectations provides a framework for developing a responsive and iterative approach to achieving excellence in teaching and learning.
Future Directions in Youth Involvement Research

Youth activity involvement has received increasing research and theoretical attention and should be of particular interest to social development investigators. Involvement has been correlated with a wide range of positive developmental indices, although not for all activities nor for all children. However, our ability to interpret such findings has been restricted by measurement and design limitations. Greater attention needs to be given to assessment issues and to determining the unique effects of psychological vs. behavioral engagement, as well as to capturing the dynamic nature of engagement and the moderating role of individual differences. ‘Big picture’ models of the entire engagement process (such as the one presented here) will help identify gaps in our research knowledge and will integrate existing evidence and theory.
Comparison of Wheelchair Athletes and Nonathletes on Selected Mood States

The Profile of Mood States was administered to two groups of male university students in wheelchairs. Both the 26 wheelchair athletes and the 28 wheelchair nonathletes exhibited the iceberg profile associated with positive mental health. Multivariate analysis indicated that wheelchair athletes had a significantly lower score on Depression than the wheelchair nonathletes but all scores were in the normal range.
Circulating nucleic acids in blood of healthy male and female donors.

The analysis of circulating nucleic acids (cirNAs) in blood provides helpful information for medical diagnostics (1). Thus, there has been intensive investigation of the factors influencing nucleic acid concentrations in plasma and serum, such as changes in DNA concentrations in serum and plasma during storage of blood samples (2) and the influence of blood processing on cell-free DNA quantification (3)(4)(5). Recent observations demonstrated that cirNAs are found not only free in blood plasma but also bound to the cell surface (6). Physiologic factors determining cirNA concentrations in blood remain to be elucidated. In the present study, we compared the concentration of cell-surface–bound and cell-free cirNAs in blood samples from 15 healthy men and 20 healthy women. Venous blood (8 mL) was collected into 13-mL tubes (cat. no. 55.459; Sarstedt) containing 2 mL of sterile phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) containing 50 mmol/L EDTA. The samples were stored at 4 °C and treated within 4 h after blood collection. Plasma was collected after low-speed centrifugation …
A Class of Nonconvex Penalties Preserving Overall Convexity in Optimization-Based Mean Filtering

ℓ1 mean filtering is a conventional, optimization based method to estimate the positions of jumps in a piecewise constant signal perturbed by additive noise. In this method, the ℓ1 norm penalizes sparsity of the first-order derivative of the signal. Theoretical results, however, show that in some situations, which can occur frequently in practice, even when the jump amplitudes tend to ∞, the conventional method identifies false change points. This issue, which is referred to as the stair-casing problem herein, restricts practical importance of ℓ1 mean filtering. In this paper, sparsity is penalized more tightly than the ℓ1 norm by exploiting a certain class of nonconvex functions, while the strict convexity of the consequent optimization problem is preserved. This results in a higher performance in detecting change points. To theoretically justify the performance improvements over ℓ1 mean filtering, deterministic and stochastic sufficient conditions for exact change point recovery are derived. In particular, theoretical results show that in the stair-casing problem, our approach might be able to exclude the false change points, while ℓ1 mean filtering may fail. A number of numerical simulations assist to show superiority of our method over ℓ1 mean filtering and another state-of-the-art algorithm that promotes sparsity tighter than the ℓ1 norm. Specifically, it is shown that our approach can consistently detect change points when the jump amplitudes become sufficiently large, while the two other competitors cannot.
A Systematic Approach to Visual System Rehabilitation — Population Receptive Field Analysis and Real-time Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Neurofeedback Methods

Visual information transmission flows from the retinal ganglion cells to the lateral geniculate nucleus and then to the primary visual cortex (V1), the chief cortical relay of visual information and in turn, to “higher” extrastriate areas. Beyond area V1, visual processing is distributed across multiple interconnected brain areas, the precise role of which and their interactions are not yet, completely understood. To add to the dynamic complexity of the system, feedback from higher areas and modulation by top-down processes, such as attention are often critical in the formation of visual percepts (Deco and Lee; 2004; Olhausen, 2003; Kastner and Unger‐ leider, 2000; Mumford, 1994; Hubel and Weisel, 1977).
Domain adaptation for object recognition: An unsupervised approach

Adapting the classifier trained on a source domain to recognize instances from a new target domain is an important problem that is receiving recent attention. In this paper, we present one of the first studies on unsupervised domain adaptation in the context of object recognition, where we have labeled data only from the source domain (and therefore do not have correspondences between object categories across domains). Motivated by incremental learning, we create intermediate representations of data between the two domains by viewing the generative subspaces (of same dimension) created from these domains as points on the Grassmann manifold, and sampling points along the geodesic between them to obtain subspaces that provide a meaningful description of the underlying domain shift. We then obtain the projections of labeled source domain data onto these subspaces, from which a discriminative classifier is learnt to classify projected data from the target domain. We discuss extensions of our approach for semi-supervised adaptation, and for cases with multiple source and target domains, and report competitive results on standard datasets.
Augmenting a Feature Set of Movies Using Linked Open Data

Augmenting a feature set using mappings to the Web of data is an up-and-coming way to enrich data in the original dataset. Those enrichments are valuable especially for the recent preference learning algorithms and recommender systems. In this paper, we describe the process of mapping and augmenting the movie ratings dataset MovieTweetings from the perspective of RecSysRules 2015 Challenge. The ad-hoc queries to DBpedia are used as an underlying concept. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing mapping dataset of movies for MovieTweetings. We also provide a brief discussion about the benefits of the augmented feature set for an elementary rule-based representation of the user preferences.
Discriminant validation of measures of job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment.

Discriminant validity of measures of job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment was empirically evaluated using data collected from a sample of 577 full-time employees of a 327-bed Veterans Administration Medical Center, The LISREL vi computer program was used to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis of items from measures of these three concepts and to evaluate relations between other job-related variables and the three attitudinal measures. Results of these analyses indicated that the measures of job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment assess empirically distinct concepts.
Wave Breaking and Mixing at the Subtropical Tropopause

Abstract This paper discusses Rossby wave breaking on the isentropic surfaces that intersect the subtropical tropopause, using winds and isentropic potential vorticity from high-resolution meteorological analysis. The focus is both on particular aspects of individual wave breaking events, as well as on more general aspects such as the spatial and temporal distribution of the mixing associated with these events. The direction and intensity of wave breaking is shown to exhibit the same dependence on stagnation points in the wind field as that seen in previous highly idealized numerical model studies. Wave breaking that results in stratospheric intrusions into the troposphere can be categorized as weak or strong, depending on the development of filaments or larger, coherent vortices or cutoff lows. The events presented show a deep vertical structure that approximately spans the region between the 330-K and 370-K isentropic surfaces, where the tropopause is steeply sloping through the subtropical jets. This i.
Brain systems that mediate both emotion and cognition.

Abstract Neurobiological research with animals strongly suggests that the brain systems which mediate emotion overlap with those that mediate cognition to such a degree that it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain any clear distinction between them. Possible reasons for this overlap are discussed; and a model of brain systems that simultaneously subserve emotion and cognition is presented. The model postulates the existence of three fundamental systems of this kind in the mammalian brain: a behavioural approach system, a fight/flight system, and a behavioural inhibition system. The neuropsychology of each of these systems is briefly presented.
The Bordetella pertussis Type III Secretion System Tip Complex Protein Bsp22 Is Not a Protective Antigen and Fails To Elicit Serum Antibody Responses during Infection of Humans and Mice

ABSTRACT The type III secretion system (T3SS) of pathogenic bordetellae employs a self-associating tip complex protein Bsp22. This protein is immunogenic during infections by Bordetella bronchiseptica and could be used as a protective antigen to immunize mice against B. bronchiseptica challenge. Since low-passage clinical isolates of the human pathogen Bordetella pertussis produce a highly homologous Bsp22 protein (97% homology), we examined its vaccine and diagnostic potential. No Bsp22-specific antibodies were, however, detected in serum samples from 36 patients with clinically and serologically confirmed whooping cough disease (pertussis syndrome). Moreover, although the induction of Bsp22 secretion by the laboratory-adapted 18323 strain in the course of mice lung infection was observed, the B. pertussis 18323-infected mice did not mount any detectable serum antibody response against Bsp22. Furthermore, immunization with recombinant Bsp22 protein yielded induction of high Bsp22-specific serum antibody titers but did not protect mice against an intranasal challenge with B. pertussis 18323. Unlike for B. bronchiseptica, hence, the Bsp22 protein is nonimmunogenic, and/or the serum antibody response to it is suppressed, during B. pertussis infections of humans and mice.
Individual Risk Preference and Sector Choice: Are Risk-Averse Individuals More Likely to Choose Careers in the Public Sector?

Prior research indicates that public employees are more risk averse than private employees. Little is known, however, about the causes of such differences. This study tries to examine the effects of the “self-select mechanism” and asks the following question: Do workers choose their sectors based on their risk preferences? Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey, this study finds that higher levels of risk aversion are predictive of a greater propensity to pursue careers in the public sector. Findings indicate that an individual’s risk preference is the key to his or her career choices. Managerial implications and suggestions are discussed.
Radial glia regulate vascular patterning around the developing spinal cord

Vascular networks surrounding individual organs are important for their development, maintenance, and function; however, how these networks are assembled remains poorly understood. Here we show that CNS progenitors, referred to as radial glia, modulate vascular patterning around the spinal cord by acting as negative regulators. We found that radial glia ablation in zebrafish embryos leads to excessive sprouting of the trunk vessels around the spinal cord, and exclusively those of venous identity. Mechanistically, we determined that radial glia control this process via the Vegf decoy receptor sFlt1: sflt1 mutants exhibit the venous over-sprouting observed in radial glia-ablated larvae, and sFlt1 overexpression rescues it. Genetic mosaic analyses show that sFlt1 function in trunk endothelial cells can limit their over-sprouting. Together, our findings identify CNS-resident progenitors as critical angiogenic regulators that determine the precise patterning of the vasculature around the spinal cord, providing novel insights into vascular network formation around developing organs. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.20253. 001
The VLTI/PIONIER near-infrared interferometric survey of southern T Tauri stars - I. First results

Context. The properties of the inner disks of bright Herbig AeBe stars have been studied with near-infrared (NIR) interferometry and high resolution spectroscopy. The continuum (dust) and a few molecular gas species have been studied close to the central star; however, sensitivity problems limit direct information about the inner disks of the fainter T Tauri stars. Aims. Our aim is to measure some of the properties (inner radius, brightness profile, shape) of the inner regions of circumstellar disk surrounding southern T Tauri stars. Methods. We performed a survey with the VLTI/PIONIER recombiner instrument at H-band of 21 T Tauri stars. The baselines used ranged from 11 m to 129 m, corresponding to a maximum resolution of ~3 mas (~0.45 au at 150 pc). Results. Thirteen disks are resolved well and the visibility curves are fully sampled as a function of baseline in the range 45–130 m for these 13 objects. A simple qualitative examination of visibility profiles allows us to identify a rapid drop-off in the visibilities at short baselines( 3 au, at 150 pc) contribution of light from the disk. We demonstrate that this component is compatible with scattered light, providing strong support to an earlier prediction. The amplitude of the drop-off and the amount of dust thermal emission changes from source to source suggesting that each disk is different. A by-product of the survey is the identification of a new milli-arcsec separation binary: WW Cha. Spectroscopic and interferometric data of AK Sco have also been fitted with a binary + disk model. Conclusions. The visibility data are reproduced well when thermal emission and scattering from dust are fully considered. The inner radii measured are consistent with the expected dust sublimation radii. The modelling of AK Sco suggests a likely coplanarity between the disk and the binary’s orbital plane.
Changes in cardiovascular effects of dopamine in response to graded hypothermia in vivo*

Objective:Inotropic drugs are frequently administered in hypothermic patients to support an assumed inadequate circulation, but their pharmacologic properties at reduced temperatures are largely unknown. Thus we estimated dopamine pharmacokinetics as well as left ventricular function and global hemodynamics after dopamine infusions at various core temperatures in a pig model of surface cooling and rewarming. Design:Prospective, randomized, open, placebo-controlled experimental study. Setting:University-affiliated animal research laboratory. Subjects:Sixteen healthy, anesthetized juvenile (2–3 months) castrated male pigs. Interventions:After normothermic infusions of dopamine at different doses (4, 8, and 16 &mgr;g/kg/min), effects of dopamine (n = 8) or saline (n = 8) were tested at 25°C and during rewarming (30–34°C). Measurements and Main Results:Dopamine half-time was 5.4 ± 0.7 min at normothermia, increased to 11.6 ± 0.8 min at 25°C, but returned to control during rewarming at 34–35°C. Dopamine infusion at 25°C elevated dopamine plasma concentration four-fold compared to the same infusion rate at normothermia, leading to increased systemic vascular resistance index not seen at normothermia. Also, in contrast to the dopamine-mediated increase in cardiac index observed at normothermia, high-dose dopamine at 25°C left cardiac index unchanged despite a concomitant increase in heart rate, since stroke index decreased by 43%. During rewarming, cardiovascular effects of dopamine at moderate hypothermia (30–34°C) were principally similar to responses during normothermia. Conclusions:Pharmacodynamic effects and pharmacokinetics of dopamine are maintained during the rewarming phase at moderate hypothermia. However, at 25°C dopamine pharmacokinetics were seriously altered and dopamine failed to increase cardiac index since stroke index was reduced with incrementing dosages. Properties of the low-flow, high-viscosity circulatory state, combined with altered pharmacokinetics of dopamine, may explain lack of beneficial – and potentially harmful – effects from dopamine administration at 25°C.
Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City

Inner-city black America is often defined by random, senseless street violence. In fact, although violence is a salient feature, its use is far from random; it is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, how you talk, whether you make eye-contact, your understanding of the pecking order - such crucial details can have life-or-death consequences and young people are particularly at risk. In this anatomy of the inner-city psyche, the author shows how the code is a response to the lack of well-paid jobs; to the stigma of race; to rampant drug use; to alienation and to lack of hope. The police exercise no control, and the individual's safety and sense of worth are defined by how much respect he can command in public; this deference is based physical and psycholgical control and on an implied threat of violence. The most powerful force counteracting the code is the strong, loving decent family. Unfortunately, the culture of the street thrives and often defeats decency because it controls public space so that individuals with better aspirations are often entangled in the code.
Living on Polluted Soil

The study evaluated stress-related complaints of residents living on contaminated ground. Two hundred and fifteen residents of an area that was contaminated by toxics of a former coking plant (toxins were benzo(a)pyrene, dicyclopentadi-ene, benzol, toluol, and xylol) were compared to a control group composed of 200 subjects living in an uncontaminated part of the same city. Data are based on a standardized interview concerning stress-related somatic and psychological symptoms and on exposure parameters. The residents of the contaminated area were also required to report their estimation of danger and trust in the city council’s managing of the redevelopment. The results show that the residents reported significantly more stress symptoms than the control group. In a stepwise regression analysis, symptoms turned out to be best predicted by cognitive variables. Exposure parameters were excluded from the regression model because they provided a comparatively small contribution to the explanation of variance.
Philosophical analysis and the moral concept of racism

This paper uses tools of philosophical analysis critically to examine accounts of the nature of racism that have recently been offered by writers including existentialist philosopher Lewis Gordon, conservative theorist Dinesh D'Souza, and sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant. These approaches, which conceive of racism either as a bad-faith choice to believe, a doctrine, or as a type of ‘social formation’, are found wanting for a variety of reasons, especially that they cannot comprehend some forms of racism. I propose an account that conceives racism chiefly as a motivational/volitional matter, in short, as a form of moral viciousness. I show how this approach offers a unified account that comprises inter alia individual and institutional racism, expressed and unexpressed racism. I point out advantages that my view has over Thomas Schmid's somewhat similar suggestion, and use the account to examine a number of claims made about racism by H. L. Gates, Jr, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Gertrude Ezorsky, and others. Finally, I defend this approach from the general criticism that Benjamin DeMott has levelled against any effort so to understand racism.