Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Informal Mentoring Relationships: A Multiple Case Study of Novice Music Educators and Their Mentors

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, to examine the outcomes and implications of being in an informal mentoring relationship at various junctures of the novice music educator’s teaching career. Second, to investigate the usefulness of Social Exchange Theory (SET) as a lens to examine these relationships and mentoring practices. Research questions addressed the nature of informal mentoring relationships in a music education setting, factors prompting these relationships to continue, and the nature of mentoring interactions based on SET concepts. Three novice general music teachers, varying from one to four years in teaching experience, with their informal music teacher mentors provided details about their mentoring experiences in this multiple case study. A total of 21 interviews took place over the course of one school year, ranging from individual interviews, paired mentor-mentee interviews, small novice teacher and mentor focus group interviews, and a large focus group interview. Using interviews and group discussions as data, the nature and value of informal mentoring relationships were analyzed in relation to main concepts found in SET. Deductive codes based on SET were used to identify patterns and subsequent themes. These themes and other findings were described qualitatively and illustrated by direct quotations from participant responses. Findings indicate that effective mentoring was able to occur because of the following factors: (a) the element of choice in selecting a mentoring partner, (b) the establishment of connection based on similar backgrounds and teaching philosophies which facilitated value and trust, (c) the establishment of a reciprocating relationship, and (d) the quality of mentors and mentoring practices. The SET concepts of rewards, costs, and exchange rules were also found to be useful in the analysis of these mentoring relationships. In this study, there were not only implications for the novice music teacher participants but for their mentors as well. The novice teacher participants were able to “give back” to their mentors by means of new ideas, resources, friendship, and support. These prolonged mentorships cultivated support systems for the novice and the experienced music educator needed to thrive in the music education profession.
Is there an Association Between Comorbidities and Income or Literacy in Incident Dialysis Patients Living in Contagem, Brazil?

Socioeconomic disparities are suspected to play an important role in the development of non-communicable chronic diseases and increase the risk for mortality and morbidity among patients with end-stage renal disease. This study aimed to investigate a possible association between educational levels, monthly per capita income and prevalence of clinical comorbidities found in patients at the initiation of the hemodialysis therapy. A sample of 214 patients was analyzed. Patients were stratified according to their educational level in two groups: ≤ 4 and > 4 years of formal education. For the monthly per capita income the following groups were considered: < US$300.00, ≥ US$300.00 and < US$450.00 and ≥ US$450.00. There was no statistical significant difference regarding the prevalence of comorbidities when comparing different educational levels. Similar results were found when monthly per capita income was analysed. In spite of that, there was an elevated frequency of patients with ≤ 4 years of formal education (73.36%, p<0.05) and with a monthly per capita income below US$450.00 (80.84%, p<0.05) among those initiating hemodialysis therapy. In conclusion, despite the fact that there was no statistical association between the prevalence of comorbidities and socioeconomic factors our data indicated that disadvantage populations might be at elevated risk to initiate dialysis therapy in the city of Contagem, Brazil.
Minimal Mesoscale Model for Protein-Mediated Vesiculation in Clathrin-Dependent Endocytosis

In eukaryotic cells, the internalization of extracellular cargo via the endocytic machinery is an important regulatory process required for many essential cellular functions. The role of cooperative protein-protein and protein-membrane interactions in the ubiquitous endocytic pathway in mammalian cells, namely the clathrin-dependent endocytosis, remains unresolved. We employ the Helfrich membrane Hamiltonian together with surface evolution methodology to address how the shapes and energetics of vesicular-bud formation in a planar membrane are stabilized by presence of the clathrin-coat assembly. Our results identify a unique dual role for the tubulating protein epsin: multiple epsins localized spatially and orientationally collectively play the role of a curvature inducing capsid; in addition, epsin serves the role of an adapter in binding the clathrin coat to the membrane. Our results also suggest an important role for the clathrin lattice, namely in the spatial- and orientational-templating of epsins. We suggest that there exists a critical size of the coat above which a vesicular bud with a constricted neck resembling a mature vesicle is stabilized. Based on the observed strong dependence of the vesicle diameter on the bending rigidity, we suggest that the variability in bending stiffness due to variations in membrane composition with cell type can explain the experimentally observed variability on the size of clathrin-coated vesicles, which typically range 50–100 nm. Our model also provides estimates for the number of epsins involved in stabilizing a coated vesicle, and without any direct fitting reproduces the experimentally observed shapes of vesicular intermediates as well as their probability distributions quantitatively, in wildtype as well as CLAP IgG injected neuronal cell experiments. We have presented a minimal mesoscale model which quantitatively explains several experimental observations on the process of vesicle nucleation induced by the clathrin-coated assembly prior to vesicle scission in clathrin dependent endocytosis.
Novel Strategies and Tools for Enhanced Sensitivity in Routine Biomolecule Analytics

The combination of flexible and robust immunoassay technology with the sensitivity of DNA as a signal amplification template is realized in Immuno-PCR (“IPCR”). Classical ELISA is converted to IPCR by exchange of antibodyenzyme detection conjugates with antibody-DNA conjugates. The value of ultra-sensitive analytics deriving from this for pharmaceutical R&D is threefold: (I) Deeper understanding of biomolecular interactions for the development of new compounds. (II) Monitoring of compounds at very low concentrations in toxicokinetic and pharmacokinetic clinical studies. (III.) Control of compound functionality and therapeutic effects by surveillance of characteristic biomarkers and/or immunogenicity reactions. This review summarizes background information about general selection of IPCR targets, actual standard assay procedures and work with biological matrices. Quantitative real-time detection as well as optimized reagents and protocols revealed a typically 100-10,000-fold increase in sensitivity and a broad dynamic range compared to ELISA. Case studies are discussed for (I) the analysis of biomolecular interaction with proximity ligation technologies and IPCR, (II) pharmacokinetic studies of novel drugs with validation data for assay precision and recovery and (III) biomarker profiling, including cytokine multiplex assays and polyplex trace analysis in extremely small sample volumes. In a survey of results from recent innovations, the potential of this emerging field of applications is evaluated for novel pathways in study design and analytics.
Cedex Discussion Paper Series Majoritarian Contests with Asymmetric Battlefields: an Experiment 1

The focus for the Centre is research into individual and strategic decision-making using a combination of theoretical and experimental methods. On the theory side, members of the Centre investigate individual choice under uncertainty, cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, as well as theories of psychology, bounded rationality and evolutionary game theory. Members of the Centre have applied experimental methods in the fields of public economics, individual choice under risk and uncertainty, strategic interaction, and the performance of auctions, markets and other economic institutions. Much of the Centre's research involves collaborative projects with researchers from other departments in the UK and overseas. Abstract We investigate a version of the classic Colonel Blotto game in which individual battles may have different values. Two players allocate a fixed budget across battlefields and each battlefield is won by the player who allocates the most to that battlefield. The winner of the game is the player who wins the battlefields with highest total value. We focus on the case where there is one large and several small battlefields, such that a player wins if he wins the large and any one small battlefield, or all the small battlefields. We compute the mixed strategy equilibrium for these games and compare this with choices from a laboratory experiment. The equilibrium predicts that the large battlefield receives more than a proportional share of the resources of the players, and that most of the time resources should be spread over more battlefields than are needed to win the game. We find support for the main qualitative features of the equilibrium. In particular, strategies that spread resources widely are played frequently, and the large battlefield receives more than a proportional share in the treatment where the asymmetry between battlefields is stronger.
A method for the automated detection phishing websites through both site characteristics and image analysis

Phishing website analysis is largely still a time-consuming manual process of discovering potential phishing sites, verifying if suspicious sites truly are malicious spoofs and if so, distributing their URLs to the appropriate blacklisting services. Attackers increasingly use sophisticated systems for bringing phishing sites up and down rapidly at new locations, making automated response essential. In this paper, we present a method for rapid, automated detection and analysis of phishing websites. Our method relies on near real-time gathering and analysis of URLs posted on social media sites. We fetch the pages pointed to by each URL and characterize each page with a set of easily computed values such as number of images and links. We also capture a screen-shot of the rendered page image, compute a hash of the image and use the Hamming distance between these image hashes as a form of visual comparison. We provide initial results demonstrate the feasibility of our techniques by comparing legitimate sites to known fraudulent versions from Phishtank.com, by actively introducing a series of minor changes to a phishing toolkit captured in a local honeypot and by performing some initial analysis on a set of over 2.8 million URLs posted to Twitter over a 4 days in August 2011. We discuss the issues encountered during our testing such as resolvability and legitimacy of URL's posted on Twitter, the data sets used, the characteristics of the phishing sites we discovered, and our plans for future work.
Party Support, Values, and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity

The legitimacy of the electoral process is crucial for the consolidation of democracy. We here focus on individual perceptions of electoral integrity (IPEI) and seek to understand what factors can explain different degrees of IPEI. In particular, we use the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (2010–14) to examine how antiauthoritarian values affect individuals' directional bias, driven by political party support, in evaluating electoral integrity. The results show that IPEI do depend on an interaction of political party support and the strength of antiauthoritarian values. However, the addition of the latter does not lead to a convergence of integrity evaluations among winners and losers, as may be expected under the assumption that antiauthoritarian values drive voters to more carefully monitor and evaluate the electoral process. Instead, it leads to greater polarization between electoral winners and losers. We explain the result with reference to the motivated reasoning literature on biased information processing: While antiauthoritarian convictions lead people to obtain more information on the electoral process, their political leanings bias their reading of this information, which in effect leads to stronger polarization in perceptions.
Social Construction of Health Inequities: A Critical Ethnography on Day Labourers in Japan

Although evidence of health inequities abound, why people in lower socio-economic classes have poorer health has not been sufficiently explored. The purpose of this study is to examine day labourers’ pathways to health inequities in a segregated, urban district in Japan. Critical ethnography was employed to investigate day labourers’ social environments and cultural behaviours in order to reveal the ways that social inequalities embedded in mainstream society and the day labourers’ sub-culture produce and sustain day labourers’ disadvantages, leading them into poorer health than the average population. Data were collected through observations of day labourer’s daily activities, events within the district and their interactions with social workers at a hospital. In addition, interviews were conducted with 16 day labourers and 11 professionals and advocates. The study found several components in the pathways to health inequities of day labourers. First, certain people in Japan are ostracized from the social, economic and political mainstream due to an inability to enact traditional Japanese labour practices. Commonly such exclusions make men become day labourers to survive. In a day labourer district, they are exposed to further social inequalities embedded in the work system and their living circumstance. Living and working as a member of the day labour community, they develop collective strategies in order to survive and preserve their social identities as day labourers. However, such strategies do not provide people with opportunities to lead healthy lives. The study also identified several social
Influence of Anthropogenic Disturbances on Stand Structural Complexity in Andean Temperate Forests: Implications for Managing Key Habitat for Biodiversity

Forest attributes and their abundances define the stand structural complexity available as habitat for faunal biodiversity; however, intensive anthropogenic disturbances have the potential to degrade and simplify forest stands. In this paper we develop an index of stand structural complexity and show how anthropogenic disturbances, namely fire, logging, livestock, and their combined presence, affect stand structural complexity in a southern Global Biodiversity Hotspot. From 2011 to 2013, we measured forest structural attributes as well as the presence of anthropogenic disturbances in 505 plots in the Andean zone of the La Araucanía Region, Chile. In each plot, understory density, coarse woody debris, number of snags, tree diameter at breast height, and litter depth were measured, along with signs of the presence of anthropogenic disturbances. Ninety-five percent of the plots showed signs of anthropogenic disturbance (N = 475), with the combined presence of fire, logging, and livestock being the most common disturbance (N = 222; 44% of plots). The lowest values for the index were measured in plots combining fire, logging, and livestock. Undisturbed plots and plots with the presence of relatively old fires (> 70 years) showed the highest values for the index of stand structural complexity. Our results suggest that secondary forests < 70-year post-fire event, with the presence of habitat legacies (e.g. snags and CWD), can reach a structural complexity as high as undisturbed plots. Temperate forests should be managed to retain structural attributes, including understory density (7.2 ± 2.5 # contacts), volume of CWD (22.4 ± 25.8 m3/ha), snag density (94.4 ± 71.0 stems/ha), stand basal area (61.2 ± 31.4 m2/ha), and litter depth (7.5 ± 2.7 cm). Achieving these values will increase forest structural complexity, likely benefiting a range of faunal species in South American temperate forests.
Reflexivity, participatory art, and the failures of monist representation

ABSTRACT This essay engages in a dual-disciplinary theorizing of reflexivity as response to crises of democratic representation. We trace this crises through the parallel lenses of democratic theory and art history. As political theorists explore alternative representations of ‘the people,’ contemporary artists have developed their own responses to the crisis of monist representation. In both state institutions and in participatory art – and in the theorizing of both – we find the rejection of monist representations of ‘the people’ and the embracement of pluralist, partial, and proximate representations. These public reflexive spaces give voice to new, partial publics, and call attention to past and present exclusions.
High Intake of Energy and Fat in Southwest Chinese Women with PCOS: A Population-Based Case-Control Study

Background Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common reproductive endocrinological disease with heterogeneous phenotype. Obesity contributes to the increased prevalence and severity of PCOS. Whether the intakes of major nutrients are higher in Chinese PCOS patients is still unknown. Objectives To study the intakes of total energy, protein, fat and carbohydrate in Southwest Chinese PCOS patients. Methods 1854 women were included in the cross-sectional study. A population-based case-control study was conducted. The dietary habits and nutrients intake status of 169 PCOS patients and 338 age-matched controls were investigated by the method of semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire. Results The actual intake of total energy (P = 0.01) and fat (P = 0.01) were higher, but carbohydrate was lower (P = 0.01) in PCOS patients as compared with the controls. The energy percentage supplied by protein (12.33%±2.27% vs. 19.26%±5.91%, P<0.001) and carbohydrate (48.72%±6.41% vs. 68.31%±8.37%, P<0.001) were lower in Southwest Chinese PCOS patients than those of control, however, the energy percentage supplied by fat was higher (38.95%±5.71% vs. 12.42%±5.13%, P<0.001) in PCOS. Conclusions Limit the intake of total energy and fat shall be recommended to the Southwest Chinese PCOS patients. Women with PCOS in Southwest China shall consult with the nutritionist for improving the dietary structure.
Polynomially Solvable Instances of the Shortest and Closest Vector Problems With Applications to Compute-and-Forward

A particular instance of the shortest vector problem (SVP) appears in the context of compute-and-forward. Despite the NP-hardness of the SVP, we will show that this certain instance can be solved in complexity order <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$O(n\psi \log (n\psi ))$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\psi = \sqrt {P\|{\text{h}}\|^{2}+1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> depends on the transmission power and the norm of the channel vector. We will then extend our results to integer-forcing and finally introduce a more general class of lattices for which the SVP and the closest vector problem can be approximated within a constant factor.
Impaired sequence learning in carriers of the DYT1 dystonia mutation

Previous positron emission tomography (PET) studies have shown that nonmanifesting carriers of the DYT1 dystonia mutation express an abnormal pattern of resting glucose metabolism. To determine whether motor behavior is impaired in these subjects, we compared movement and sequence learning in 12 clinically unaffected DYT1 carriers with 12 age‐matched controls. Regional differences in brain function during task performance were assessed with simultaneous H215O/PET. We found that motor performance was similar in the DYT1 and control groups, with no significant differences in movement time and spatial accuracy measured during each of the tasks. In contrast, sequence learning was reduced in gene carriers relative to controls (p < 0.01). PET imaging during motor execution showed increased activation in gene carriers (p < 0.001, uncorrected) in the left premotor cortex and right supplementary motor area, with concomitant reduction in the posterior medial cerebellum. During sequence learning, activation responses in DYT1 carriers were increased in the left ventral prefrontal cortex, and lateral cerebellum. These findings suggest that abnormalities in motor behavior and brain function exist in clinically nonmanifesting DYT1 carriers. Although localized increases in neural activity may enable normal movement execution in these subjects, this mechanism may not compensate for their defect in sequence learning. Ann Neurol 2003;54:102–109
Quantitative Structural Changes of the Rat Thoracic Aorta in Early Spontaneous Hypertension: Tissue Composition, and Hypertrophy and Hyperplasia of Smooth Muscle Cells

The thoracic aorta of 21-, 28-, 35-, and 45-day-old spontaneously hypertensive (SH) and Wistar Kyoto (WK) rats was analyzed morphometrically to evaluate the cellular hypertrophy and proliferation of medial smooth muscle cells during the development of genetically determined hypertension. The absolute increase in volume of collagen and ground substance, and elastic tissue was also measured. In SH animals, cellular hypertrophy was found to be the dominant mechanism of muscle growth in the 21- to 28-day and 35- to 45-day intervals, resulting in an overall 68% enlargement of the mean cell volume from 21 to 45 days. The total number of smooth muscle cells increased only 21% (not statistically significant) and the tendency toward hyperplasia was restricted to the 28- to 35-day period. Normotensive controls showed cell proliferation mainly from 21 to 28 days and cellular hypertrophy from 35 to 45 days with an absolute 33% increase in the number of cells and a 26% larger volume of the mean smooth muscle cell at 45 days of age. From 21 to 45 days, the above changes in cell size and number provoked an overall 104% and 67% growth of the muscle mass in SH and WK rats, respectively. The initial response phase of spontaneous hypertension was also characterized by an increase of collagen and ground substance, 184%, which was slightly greater than that of the elastic component, 168%. Changes in mural concentration of fibrous proteins that were similar to but of less magnitude than those of controls, were seen. These results demonstrate that short-term spontaneous hypertension determines a simultaneous growth adaptation in every component structure of the media of the thoracic aorta leading to a disproportionate accumulation of scleroproteins that markedly exceeds that of the contractile component of the vessel wall. At a cellular level, smooth muscle cell hypertrophy is the prevailing process that underlies the tissue response of the aorta in early hypertension.
Scaled Indexing of General Shapes for complicated 3D motion recognition

Motion recognition based on trajectory is important for motion analysis. Complicated motion recognition is still a challenge in various applications of robot and automation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework with a new model, Scaled Indexing of General Shapes (S-IGS), for complicated motion recognition. The Scaled IGS is a quantified hierarchical model, representing 3D motion trajectories with mixed-parameterized primitives. The mixed parameters include not only general shape classes, but also their reference values. The reference value is a particular parameter of primitive which is effective to distinguish the primitives of the same general shape class. Based on this model, we explore the motion recognition with both primitive alignment and inner-parameter matching. The conducted experimental results verified the accuracy and efficiency of this approach.