Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Poverty, social assistance, and the employability of mothers : restructuring welfare states

Why do some welfare states provide income support for mothers to care for their school-aged children at home while others expect mothers to find employment when their youngest child is six months old? This study, a fundamental contribution to the social policy and social welfare theory, compares recent efforts to restructure social programmes for low-income mothers in four countries: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. While these countries are sometimes classified as "liberal" welfare states, this book demonstrates that they vary considerably in terms of benefit development, expectations concerning maternal employment, and restructuring processes. The authors examine changes to income security programmes, discuss the social, political and economic conditions affecting these programmes, and analyze the discourse promoting reform. Using a feminist and political economy perspective, they conclude that recent, often expensive, efforts to make beneficiaries more employable have not always enabled them to exit welfare or poverty. While full-time employment opportunities are becoming scarcer, governments are requiring beneficiaries to enter the workforce, often with little social support or improvement in income. Regardless of the impact of employability initiatives on poverty levels, the study concludes that these policies are important ideological instruments in tempering demands on contemporary welfare systems. The result is a more residual welfare state, in which social provision is increasingly presented as a meagre last resort.
A Learning Agenda for Abortion Stigma: Recommendations from the Bellagio Expert Group Meeting

Stigma discredits individuals, communities, and institutions and marks them as inferior. The stigma surrounding abortion plays a critical role in its social, medical, and legal marginalization around the world. Based on the existing field of knowledge, in June 19, 2012, researchers, practitioners, and advocates from 11 countries participated in an intensive meeting on abortion stigma to refine a conceptual framework for abortion stigma and set a future learning agenda to guide research and programmatic efforts to address abortion stigma.
Some effects of fault recovery order on software reliability models

Since traditional approaches to software reliability modeling allow the user to formulate predictions using data from one realization of the debugging process, it is necessary to understand the influence of the fault recovery order on predictive performance. We introduce an experimental methodology using a data structure called the debugging graph and use it to analyze the effects of various fault recovery orders on the predictive accuracy of four well-known software reliability algorithms. Further we note fault interactions and their potential effects on the predictive process. Based on our experiment, we conjecture that the accuracy of a reliability prediction is affected by the fault recovery order as well as by fault interactions. <<ETX>>
Mental health in U.S. adults: The role of positive social support and social negativity in personal relationships

This study examines positive social support, social negativity, and anxiety and mood disorders in a random sample of 4688 adults aged 21-54 years from the National Comorbidity Survey (1990-1992). Social negativity with spouses, relatives, and friends had a strong positive association with the number of anxiety and mood disorder episodes. One surprising finding was that positive support was not as strongly associated with the number of anxiety and mood disorder episodes as social negativity. Positive support from spouses or friends was not associated with a lower number of episodes of either anxiety or mood disorders. Only positive support from relatives was associated with a lower number of episodes of both anxiety and mood disorders. These results may be due to variation by source in the link between support and negativity. Given that much previous research has focused on the role of positive social support, these findings demonstrate the significant impact that negative social exchanges can have on mental health.
The factor structure of prenatal psychological and psychosocial functioning in first-time expectant parents

To evaluate the psychological and psychosocial functioning of couples undergoing their first pregnancy, 327 couples from Melbourne, Victoria completed measures of depression, anger, anxiety, positive and negative affect, current social support, perceived quality of couple's relationship, and recalled childhood family relationships during the early third trimester of pregnancy. To examine the nature of the pregnant couples' experience of pregnancy, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted separately for males and females. Four similar but not identical clusters were identified for both the men and women. The first large general factor for both sexes was concerned with psychological dysphoria (anxiety, anger and gender role stress). Three group factors were concerned separately with the individual's relationship functioning, their social support from family and friends, and the quality of their recalled childhood family relationships. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated these four-dimensional solutions showed good fit to the data and indicated differences between the female and male underlying structures. The differences between the men and women's factor structure are examined and implications of these findings are discussed.
ANTECEDENTS AND IMPACT OF INTERNET ADDICTION AMONG INDIAN COLLEGE STUDENTS IN KERALA, INDIA

The present generation of Indian adolescents relies heavily on the Internet which has become an integral part of every Indian college student’s daily routine. As with other developing countries, adolescents and college students in India are dependent on the Internet for both educational and non-educational purposes. Not surprisingly then, Internet addiction has become an increasingly serious societal problem but one which unfortunately has attracted little or no research interest within the Indian context. The present study has been designed to address this issue by investigating how Internet addiction-related behaviors may vary as a function of Indian college students’ perception of their parents’ parenting styles and their emotive states (depression, anxiety, stress), and subsequently, how such Internet addiction-related behaviors may influence their well-being (psychological well-being, loneliness, and academic performance). Overall, the findings from the present study indicate that the parenting styles of mothers and fathers in Kerala, India have differential influences on their children’s psychological well-being, academic performance, and loneliness. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to the cultural nuances and parameters that circumscribe the Indian college student’s family life.
Teacher formative assessment and talk in classroom contexts: assessment as discourse and assessment of discourse

There is now widely recognized support for classroom-based formative teacher assessment of student performance as a pedagogically desirable approach to assessment which is capable of promoting learning. However, the highly localized and socially co-constructed nature of this type of assessment has raised conceptual and research issues that transcend the theoretical and epistemological concerns of the more established standardized language assessment. One such issue concerns the part played by classroom spoken discourse in the teaching-assessment interaction between teachers and students. This article argues that there is a need to develop theoretically informed research approaches to study how this type of assessment is accomplished through teacher-student discourse in the classroom. Using data collected in two multiethnic and multilingual elementary classrooms we present an analysis, drawing on systemic functional linguistics, to suggest an approach to empirical research and to discuss a number of teaching-learning and research methodological issues.
The comparative psychology of marsupials

Outdated views on behavioural evolution held that marsupials should be less “smart” than standard laboratory mammals. Changing attitudes, based on ecological, physiological, and phylogenetic considerations, led to the conclusion that marsupial mammals represent an alternative rather than an inferior mammalian design. We review the available research on marsupial psychology and conclude that the most studied marsupial, the American opossum, may be one of the most successful nonhuman animals ever tested on many standard psychological tasks. The traditional eutherian bias in psychological research on mammals has resulted in most of the few analyses of marsupials being conducted as comparative sidelines to eutherian research. However, the two evolutionary radiations of marsupials (in the Americas, and in Australia) represent a natural experiment that offers great potential for comparative analysis of the relationship between ecological pressures and psychological skills.
A synthetic low-frequency mammalian oscillator

Circadian clocks have long been known to be essential for the maintenance of physiological and behavioral processes in a variety of organisms ranging from plants to humans. Dysfunctions that subvert gene expression of oscillatory circadian-clock components may result in severe pathologies, including tumors and metabolic disorders. While the underlying molecular mechanisms and dynamics of complex gene behavior are not fully understood, synthetic approaches have provided substantial insight into the operation of complex control circuits, including that of oscillatory networks. Using iterative cycles of mathematical model-guided design and experimental analyses, we have developed a novel low-frequency mammalian oscillator. It incorporates intronically encoded siRNA-based silencing of the tetracycline-dependent transactivator to enable the autonomous and robust expression of a fluorescent transgene with periods of 26 h, a circadian clock-like oscillatory behavior. Using fluorescence-based time-lapse microscopy of engineered CHO-K1 cells, we profiled expression dynamics of a destabilized yellow fluorescent protein variant in single cells and real time. The novel oscillator design may enable further insights into the system dynamics of natural periodic processes as well as into siRNA-mediated transcription silencing. It may foster advances in design, analysis and application of complex synthetic systems in future gene therapy initiatives.
Coeducation and Sex Roles

In order to test conflicting hypotheses about the effects of coeducational versus single-sex schooling, 538 first-term Australian university students who had attended single sex or coeducational high schools were compared on a number of variables relating to sex roles. Those from the two types of schools did not differ significantly on the Australian Sex Roles Inventory or on a measure of nontraditional attitudes towards sex roles, although males and females differed in predictable ways. Most subjects, particularly those from coeducational schools, felt that coeducational schools are preferable and lead to a more natural attitude towards the opposite sex. Subjects from coeducational rather than single-sex schools said that they had more opposite-sex friends in high school and were more likely to feel that their school helped rather than hindered their everyday relations with the opposite sex and their chances for a happy marriage. However subjects did not feel that boys and girls learn or behave better in coeducational schools, and there were no differences in the percentages of subjects from the two types of schools who reported having had sexual intercourse or been in love while in high school. The single-sex schools attended tended to differ from the coeducational ones in being smaller, more urban, and more likely to be selective, which made comparisons difficult to interpret. Nevertheless it seems reasonable to conclude that coeducational schooling, at least for this selective sample, may have some advantages in fostering interactions with the opposite sex.
Application of filtering methods for removal of resuscitation artifacts from human ECG signals

Band-pass, Kalman, and adaptive filters are used for removal of resuscitation artifacts from human ECG signals. A database of separately recorded human ECG and animal resuscitation artifact signals is used for evaluation of the methods. The considered performance criterion is the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement, defined as the ratio of the SNRs of the filtered signal and the given ECG signal. The empirical results show that for low SNR of the given signal, a band-pass filter yields the best performance, while for high SNR, an adaptive filter yields the best performance.
Assessment for learning: Developing formative assessment in the classroom

This article reports on a research project designed to investigate and develop formative classroom assessment in primary schools. The project was a collaborative one, involving two university based researchers and a team of teacher researchers. It used an action research approach to try to bring about changes in classroom assessment practices. The article reports on changes in practice particularly involving the clarification and communication of assessment criteria to pupils.
A block based ALADIN scheme for highly parallelizable direct Optimal Control

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) requires the online solution of a nonlinear Optimal Control Problem (OCP) at each sampling instant. This paper presents a novel, block based and highly parallelizable algorithm which solves nonlinear OCPs using a recently proposed Augmented Lagrangian based method (ALADIN). The latter employs techniques from standard Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) methods within a more parallelizable framework. An implementation tailored to optimal control is proposed where Nonlinear Programs (NLPs) are solved approximately and concurrently on each stage while a centralized consensus step is used to update the dual variables of the coupling constraints. The implementation also comprises algorithmic concepts to extend the parallelizability of the consensus step and a blocking technique to accelerate convergence. The performance of the resulting scheme is illustrated using as benchmark example the control of an overhead crane.
Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering

We analyze programs for undergraduate women in science and engineering as strategic research sites in the study of disparities between women and men in scientific fields within higher education. Based on responses to a survey of the directors of the universe of these programs in the United States, the findings reveal key patterns in the programs’ (1) definitions of the issues of women in science and engineering, (2) their solutions to address the issues, (3) their goals and perceived success with goals, and (4) their organizational characteristics and relationship to the larger institutional environments. The findings—which are conceptually grounded in the distinction between structural/institutional and individual issues facing women in science—have implications for understanding gender, science, and higher education, and for initiatives undertaken to improve the condition of women in scientific fields. The findings may also inform strategic efforts to reduce gender disparity in other organizational contexts.
Control of T-S Fuzzy Systems Using Fuzzy Weighting-Dependent Lyapunov Function

Over the past two decades, there has been a rapidly growing interest in approximating a nonlinear system by a Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model (Takagi & Sugeno, 1985). In general, this model is represented by using a set of fuzzy rules to describe a global nonlinear system in terms of a set of local linear models which are smoothly connected by fuzzy membership functions. Based on the T-S fuzzy model, recently, various fuzzy controllers have been developed under the so-called parallel-distributed compensation (PDC) scheme (in which each control rule is distributively designed for the corresponding rule of a T-S fuzzy model) and have been widely and successfully applied in fields ranging from aerospace to process control. The reason is because the fuzzy model-based control method provides a natural, simple and effective design approach to complement other nonlinear control techniques that require special and rather involved knowledge. Below are listed the main features of T-S model-based fuzzy control method: 1. It does not require severe structural assumptions on the plant model. 2. It preserves well-understood linear intuition. 3. It is naturally compatible with decompositions of the overall control problem. The decompositions are typically not hierarchical, and the interactions of sub-problems are captured by physical variables that are typically state variables in a more complete model of the overall system. 4. It enables control systems to respond rapidly to changing operating conditions. For this reason, it is important that the selected physical variables reflect changes in plant dynamics as operating conditions change. In fact, the T-S model-based fuzzy control method (of divide and conquer type) constructs a nonlinear controller, with certain required dynamic properties, by combining, in some sense, the members of appropriate family of linear time-invariant controllers. Here, nonlinear control design task is broken into a number of linear sub-problems, which enable linear design methods to be applied to nonlinear problems. Within the general framework of the T-S fuzzy model-based control method, a flurry of research activities have quickly yielded many important results on the design of fuzzy control systems by means of the following Lyapunov function approaches: 1. Common quadratic Lyapunov function approach (Tanaka & Sugeno, 1992; Tanaka et al, 1996; Wang et al, 1996; Cao & Frank, 2000; Assawinchaichote, 2004).
Influences of norm proximity and norm types on binge and non‐binge drinkers: examining the under‐examined aspects of social norms interventions on college campuses

Aims: Social norms interventions for reducing excessive drinking on college campuses have reported mixed results. In an attempt to understand the inconsistencies, this study examined some of the under‐examined aspects of the social norms approach. Design: A cross‐sectional survey of undergraduate students at two large mid‐western universities in the USA was conducted. Norm proximity (campus vs. friends' norms), norm types (descriptive vs. injunctive norms), and college drinker types (frequent binge drinkers, occasional binge drinkers, and non‐binge drinkers) were differentiated. Findings: The influences of friends' norms are stronger than those of campus and those of descriptive norms are stronger than injunctive norms. Friends' descriptive norms influenced frequent and occasional binge drinkers' behavior most strongly, whereas the campus descriptive norm and self‐efficacy influenced non‐binge drinkers' behavior. Conclusions: Proximity and types of norms as well as types of college drinkers will need to be distinguished in the future design and evaluation of social norms interventions.
Early literacy development in children at risk for dyslexia. A longitudinal study of the general magnocellular theory.

In this project the hypothesis of an auditory temporal processing deficit in dyslexia was tested by examining auditory processing in relation to phonological skills in two contrasting groups of five-year-old preschool children, a familial high risk and a familial low risk group. Participants were individually matched for gender, age, nonverbal IQ, school environment and parental educational level. Psychophysical thresholds were estimated for gap detection, frequency modulation detection and tone-in-noise detection using a three-interval forced choice adaptive staircase paradigm embedded within a computer game. Phonological skills were measured by tasks assessing phonological awareness, rapid serial naming and verbal short-term memory. Significant group differences were found for phonological awareness and letter knowledge. In contrast, none of the auditory tasks differentiated significantly between both groups. However, both frequency modulation and tone-in-noise detection were significantly related to phonological awareness. This relation with phonological skills was not present for gap detection.
Targeting Activated Akt with GDC-0068, a Novel Selective Akt Inhibitor That Is Efficacious in Multiple Tumor Models

Purpose: We describe the preclinical pharmacology and antitumor activity of GDC-0068, a novel highly selective ATP-competitive pan-Akt inhibitor currently in clinical trials for the treatment of human cancers. Experimental Design: The effect of GDC-0068 on Akt signaling was characterized using specific biomarkers of the Akt pathway, and response to GDC-0068 was evaluated in human cancer cell lines and xenograft models with various genetic backgrounds, either as a single agent or in combination with chemotherapeutic agents. Results: GDC-0068 blocked Akt signaling both in cultured human cancer cell lines and in tumor xenograft models as evidenced by dose-dependent decrease in phosphorylation of downstream targets. Inhibition of Akt activity by GDC-0068 resulted in blockade of cell-cycle progression and reduced viability of cancer cell lines. Markers of Akt activation, including high-basal phospho-Akt levels, PTEN loss, and PIK3CA kinase domain mutations, correlate with sensitivity to GDC-0068. Isogenic PTEN knockout also sensitized MCF10A cells to GDC-0068. In multiple tumor xenograft models, oral administration of GDC-0068 resulted in antitumor activity ranging from tumor growth delay to regression. Consistent with the role of Akt in a survival pathway, GDC-0068 also enhanced antitumor activity of classic chemotherapeutic agents. Conclusions: GDC-0068 is a highly selective, orally bioavailable Akt kinase inhibitor that shows pharmacodynamic inhibition of Akt signaling and robust antitumor activity in human cancer cells in vitro and in vivo. Our preclinical data provide a strong mechanistic rationale to evaluate GDC-0068 in cancers with activated Akt signaling. Clin Cancer Res; 19(7); 1760–72. ©2012 AACR.