Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From obligatory WH-movement to optional WH-in-situ in Labourdin Basque

In this article, we analyze the nature and origin of a new <small class="caps">wh </small>-question strategy employed by young speakers of Labourdin Basque. We argue that this new strategy implies a parametric change: while Basque has always been a bona fide <small class="caps">wh </small>-movement language, these new constructions are instances of <small class="caps">wh </small>-in-situ and display the syntactic and semantic properties and patterns of in-situ <small class="caps">wh </small>-questions in French. We analyze the emergence of this new strategy as being due to the combination of three factors: (i) the abundance of structurally ambiguous <small class="caps">wh </small>-questions in the primary linguistic data, (ii) the change in the sociolinguistic profile of bilingual Basque-French speakers, and (iii) an economy bias for movementless derivations.
AN INVESTIGATION INTO STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS AND LECTURERS’ PERCEPTIONS OF A VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are widely used in both distance learning and for on-campus learning, providing supporting tools which allow students to access learning materials, activities and assignments. This study is part of the lead author’s PhD research on an intelligent learning environment that investigates current uses and issues of learning environments and information technologies that students use in their learning activities.
Leadership Effectiveness and Personality Characteristics of Group Members

Perceptions of leadership appear to be changing. Research has shown a shift in emphasis in regard to the factors influencing leadership effectiveness in a group. Whereas early scholars focused on leaders personality characteristics as key to leadership effectiveness in group situations, today, there has been a turning toward a concern for group members' characteristics and a parallel concern for the ensuing influence on leadership behavior. The old belief that only the leader has the inherent ability to make things happen has been found wanting. Emphasis is fast shifting away from the idea that leadership effectiveness is unilaterally influenced by the leader's personality characteristics toward the notion that leadership effectiveness is bilaterally influenced by the dynamics of both the leader and the group members' personality characteristics. This paper presents some findings of research on leadership to support the critical influence of group members' characteristics on leadership effectiveness. Implications are noted for leaders, trainers, and researchers.
The new abolitionists? The World Bank and the ‘boldness’ of global school fee elimination reforms

This article explores the ambiguity within the World Bank's (WB) stance on primary school fees by examining the recently launched school fee abolition initiative. Drawing on key texts from this initiative and two decades of WB educational policy, we suggest that the discursive work around school fees performed by the Bank is a reflection of broader historical shifts in its representation as a development institution. Our three-part analysis shows how the language of school fee abolition, its putative boldness as a policy initiative, and the careful construction of non-adversarial partnerships work to reposition the WB as a champion of global education rights without relinquishing its neoliberal policy prescriptions. The analysis demonstrates the inseparability of two strands of discourse analysis – the linguistic and the discursive – and the socially productive nature of their interaction.
Representational Similarity Analysis – Connecting the Branches of Systems Neuroscience

A fundamental challenge for systems neuroscience is to quantitatively relate its three major branches of research: brain-activity measurement, behavioral measurement, and computational modeling. Using measured brain-activity patterns to evaluate computational network models is complicated by the need to define the correspondency between the units of the model and the channels of the brain-activity data, e.g., single-cell recordings or voxels from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Similar correspondency problems complicate relating activity patterns between different modalities of brain-activity measurement (e.g., fMRI and invasive or scalp electrophysiology), and between subjects and species. In order to bridge these divides, we suggest abstracting from the activity patterns themselves and computing representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs), which characterize the information carried by a given representation in a brain or model. Building on a rich psychological and mathematical literature on similarity analysis, we propose a new experimental and data-analytical framework called representational similarity analysis (RSA), in which multi-channel measures of neural activity are quantitatively related to each other and to computational theory and behavior by comparing RDMs. We demonstrate RSA by relating representations of visual objects as measured with fMRI in early visual cortex and the fusiform face area to computational models spanning a wide range of complexities. The RDMs are simultaneously related via second-level application of multidimensional scaling and tested using randomization and bootstrap techniques. We discuss the broad potential of RSA, including novel approaches to experimental design, and argue that these ideas, which have deep roots in psychology and neuroscience, will allow the integrated quantitative analysis of data from all three branches, thus contributing to a more unified systems neuroscience.
Best Practices in Promoting Reading Comprehension in Students with Learning Disabilities 1976 to 1996

Abstract In this review, the best practices for facilitating reading comprehension for students with learning disabilities are described and summarized. these best practices were derived from the results of an extensive literature review of research in reading comprehension with students with learning disabilities. analysis of all relevant literature revealed consistently high effects for some reading comprehension strategies. strongest outcomes were observed for teacher-led questioning and self-questioning strategies, followed by text-en hancem ent strategies, and, finally, strategies involving basic skills instruction and reinforcement. the few studies that were located in the area of whole language yielded less positive outcomes. implications for effective practice are described.
Knockout of Ku86 accelerates cellular senescence induced by high NaCl

NaCl induces DNA breaks, thus leading to cellular senescence. Here we showed that Ku86 deficiency accelerated the high NaCl-induced cellular senescence. We find that 1) high NaCl induces rapid cellular senescence in Ku86 deficient (xrs5) cells, 2) Ku86 deficiency shortens lifespan of C. elegans in high NaCl, and 3) cellular senescence is greatly accelerated in renal inner medullas of Ku86-/- mice. Further, although water balance is known to be compromised in old mice, this occurs at much earlier age in Ku86-/- mice. When subjected to mild water restriction, 3 month old Ku86-/-, but not Ku86+/+, mice rapidly become dehydrated as evidenced by decrease in body weight, increased production of antidiuretic hormone, increased urine osmolality and decreased urine volume. The deficiency in water balance does not occur in Ku86+/+mice until they are much older (14 months). We conclude that Ku86 deficiency accelerates high NaCl-induced cellular senescence, particularly in the renal medulla where NaCl normally is high.
The effects of behavioural outcome goals, learning goals, and urging people to do their best on an individual's teamwork behaviour in a group problem-solving task.

La recherche recente demontre que les buts d'apprentissage sont superieurs aux buts axes sur les resultats dans le contexte de tâches complexes. L'efficacite des buts axes sur les resultats comportementaux (etablis a l'aide d'une echelle d'observation comportementale), les buts d'apprentissage et l'incitation des personnes a faire de leur mieux ont ete examines dans le contexte d'un programme d'apprentissage destine a ameliorer le comportement individuel en equipe dans le cadre d'une tâche de resolution de probleme en groupe. Les participants (n = 50) qui ont etabli des buts comportementaux ou des buts d'apprentissage ont connu une plus grande autoefficacite que ceux qui avaient ete incites « a faire de leur mieux ». L'autoefficacite entrait en correlation positive avec le comportement en travail d'equipe et l'engagement envers un but. Ces conclusions suggerent que les buts axes sur les resultats comportementaux peuvent attenuer la necessite d'imposer des buts d'apprentissage dans le cas de tâches complexes.
Trade Liberalisation and the Industry Wage Structure in India

This paper represents one of the first attempts at analysing econometrically the link between trade protection and inter-industry wage premia in India. This analysis combines detailed tariff data with micro survey data for three years that span the period of rapid trade liberalisation in the 1990s. Augmented Mincerian earnings equations are estimated using a set of human capital measures and a variety of worker, industry and state characteristics after correcting for potential selection bias. Interindustry wage premia are obtain as deviations from an employment-weighted mean differential. This paper finds that the impact of trade liberalisation on the inter-industry wage premia for regular workers is substantial and that industries that undergo tariff reductions have lower wages relative to other industries. This positive tariff-wage effect is evident whether or not industry fixed effects are included and is consistent with the short-run specific factors and the medium-run Ricardo-Viner models of trade. JEL codes: F16, F14, J31
CRF system recruitment mediates dark side of compulsive eating

Dieting to control body weight involves cycles of deprivation from palatable food that can promote compulsive eating. The present study shows that rats withdrawn from intermittent access to palatable food exhibit overeating of palatable food upon renewed access and an affective withdrawal-like state characterized by corticotropin-releasing factor-1 (CRF1) receptor antagonist-reversible behaviors, including hypophagia, motivational deficits to obtain less palatable food, and anxiogenic-like behavior. Withdrawal was accompanied by increased CRF expression and CRF1 electrophysiological responsiveness in the central nucleus of the amygdala. We propose that recruitment of anti-reward extrahypothalamic CRF-CRF1 systems during withdrawal from palatable food, analogous to abstinence from abused drugs, may promote compulsive selection of palatable food, undereating of healthier alternatives, and a negative emotional state when intake of palatable food is prevented.
A progressive shuttle run test to estimate maximal oxygen uptake.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the validity of using a 20 m progressive shuttle run test to estimate maximal oxygen uptake. Running ability was described as the final level attained on the shuttle run test and as time on a 5 km run. Maximal oxygen uptake (VO2 max) was determined directly for seventy-four volunteers (36 men, 38 women) who also completed the shuttle run test. Maximal oxygen uptake values were 58.5 +/- 7.0 and 47.4 +/- 6.1 ml.kg-1.min-1 for the men and women respectively (mean +/- SD, P less than 0.01). The levels attained on the shuttle run test were 12.6 +/- 1.5 (men) and 9.6 +/- 1.8 (women; P less than 0.01). The correlation between VO2 max and shuttle level was 0.92. The correlation between VO2 max and the 5 km run was -0.94 and the correlation between both field tests was -0.96. The results of this study suggest that a progressive shuttle run test provides a valid estimate of VO2 max and indicates 5 km running potential in active men and women.
Mirror Reversal and Visual Rotation Are Learned and Consolidated via Separate Mechanisms: Recalibrating or Learning De Novo?

Motor learning tasks are often classified into adaptation tasks, which involve the recalibration of an existing control policy (the mapping that determines both feedforward and feedback commands), and skill-learning tasks, requiring the acquisition of new control policies. We show here that this distinction also applies to two different visuomotor transformations during reaching in humans: Mirror-reversal (left-right reversal over a mid-sagittal axis) of visual feedback versus rotation of visual feedback around the movement origin. During mirror-reversal learning, correct movement initiation (feedforward commands) and online corrections (feedback responses) were only generated at longer latencies. The earliest responses were directed into a nonmirrored direction, even after two training sessions. In contrast, for visual rotation learning, no dependency of directional error on reaction time emerged, and fast feedback responses to visual displacements of the cursor were immediately adapted. These results suggest that the motor system acquires a new control policy for mirror reversal, which initially requires extra processing time, while it recalibrates an existing control policy for visual rotations, exploiting established fast computational processes. Importantly, memory for visual rotation decayed between sessions, whereas memory for mirror reversals showed offline gains, leading to better performance at the beginning of the second session than in the end of the first. With shifts in time-accuracy tradeoff and offline gains, mirror-reversal learning shares common features with other skill-learning tasks. We suggest that different neuronal mechanisms underlie the recalibration of an existing versus acquisition of a new control policy and that offline gains between sessions are a characteristic of latter.
Antibiotic Use in Developing Countries

Antimicrobials have been used successfully for over 6 decades, but genes expressing resistance to them have emerged in strains of bacteria and have disseminated through the global ecosystem to reach infecting microorganisms, produce disease, and seriously interfere with therapy, allowing infections to progress and kill despite antibiotic administration. The upsurge in prevalence of such resistance genes in the bacterial population that colonize and infect humans involves two processes, emergence and dissemination, in both of which there have been contributions from the developing world, where resistance is common and increasing. The emergence of pneumococcal isolates noted in Papua New Guinea and later in South Africa that 1 decade later spread to most of the world and the intercontinental spread between the United States and Venezuela of a new gentamicin resistance gene carried on an epidemic plasmid are examples of the ability of bacteria to travel freely, without regard to borders. Complex societal issues such as the misuse of antibiotics by physicians, pharmacists, and the public; the suboptimal quality of the drugs (emergence); and conditions such as crowding, lack of hygiene, poor or nonexistent hospital infection control practices, or insufficient surveillance (dissemination) play a largely unmeasured role that requires study and solutions. In the meantime, we may intervene to delay the emergence of resistance and to limit its spread by promoting the judicious use of antibiotics both at the local level as well as from multinational organized cooperative efforts. Education and improvement of surveillance and socioeconomic conditions are integral parts of any solution strategy.
Deep Convolutional Neural Network-Based Early Automated Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Fundus Image

The automatic detection of diabetic retinopathy is of vital importance, as it is the main cause of irreversible vision loss in the working-age population in the developed world. The early detection of diabetic retinopathy occurrence can be very helpful for clinical treatment; although several different feature extraction approaches have been proposed, the classification task for retinal images is still tedious even for those trained clinicians. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks have manifested superior performance in image classification compared to previous handcrafted feature-based image classification methods. Thus, in this paper, we explored the use of deep convolutional neural network methodology for the automatic classification of diabetic retinopathy using color fundus image, and obtained an accuracy of 94.5% on our dataset, outperforming the results obtained by using classical approaches.
Implicit Memory in Music and Language

Research on music and language in recent decades has focused on their overlapping neurophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive underpinnings, ranging from the mechanism for encoding basic auditory cues to the mechanism for detecting violations in phrase structure. These overlaps have most often been identified in musicians with musical knowledge that was acquired explicitly, through formal training. In this paper, we review independent bodies of work in music and language that suggest an important role for implicitly acquired knowledge, implicit memory, and their associated neural structures in the acquisition of linguistic or musical grammar. These findings motivate potential new work that examines music and language comparatively in the context of the implicit memory system.
Age-Related Changes in the Neurophysiology of Language in Adults: Relationship to Regional Cortical Thinning and White Matter Microstructure

Although reading skill remains relatively stable with advancing age in humans, neurophysiological measures suggest potential reductions in efficiency of lexical information processing. It is unclear whether these age-related changes are secondary to decreases in regional cortical thickness and/or microstructure of fiber tracts essential to language. Magnetoencephalography, volumetric MRI, and diffusion tensor imaging were performed in 10 young (18–33 years) and 10 middle-aged (42–64 years) human individuals to evaluate the spatiotemporal dynamics and structural correlates of age-related changes in lexical-semantic processing. Increasing age was associated with reduced activity in left temporal lobe regions from 250 to 350 ms and in left inferior prefrontal cortex from 350 to 450 ms (i.e., N400). Hierarchical regression indicated that age no longer predicted left inferior prefrontal activity after cortical thickness and fractional anisotropy (FA) of the uncinate fasciculus (UF) were considered. Interestingly, FA of the UF was a stronger predictor of the N400 response than cortical thickness. Age-related reductions in left-lateralization of language responses were observed between 250 and 350 ms, and were associated with left temporal thinning and frontotemporal FA reductions. N400 reductions were not associated with poorer task performance. Rather, increasing age was associated with reduction in the left prefrontal N400, which in turn was also associated with slower response time. These results reveal that changes in the neurophysiology of language occur by middle age and appear to be partially mediated by structural brain loss. These neurophysiological changes may reflect an adaptive process that ensues as communication between left perisylvian regions declines.
Mechanism of excessive purine biosynthesis in hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase deficiency.

Certain gouty subjects with excessive de novo purine synthesis are deficient in hypoxanthineguanine phosphoribosyltransferase (HG-PRTase [EC 2.4.2.8]). The mechanism of accelerated uric acid formation in these patients was explored by measuring the incorporation of glycine-(14)C into various urinary purine bases of normal and enzyme-deficient subjects during treatment with the xanthine oxidase inhibitor, allopurinol. In the presence of normal HG-PRTase activity, allopurinol reduced purine biosynthesis as demonstrated by diminished excretion of total urinary purine or by reduction of glycine-(14)C incorporation into hypoxanthine, xanthine, and uric acid to less than one-half of control values. A boy with the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome was resistant to this effect of allopurinol while a patient with 12.5% of normal enzyme activity had an equivocal response. Three patients with normal HG-PRTase activity had a mean molar ratio of hypoxanthine to xanthine in the urine of 0.28, whereas two subjects who were deficient in HG-PRTase had reversal of this ratio (1.01 and 1.04). The patterns of (14)C-labeling observed in HG-PRTase deficiency reflected the role of hypoxanthine as precursor of xanthine. The data indicate that excessive uric acid in HG-PRTase deficiency is derived from hypoxanthine which is insufficiently reutilized and, as a consequence thereof, catabolized inordinately to uric acid. The data provide evidence for cyclic interconversion of adenine and hypoxanthine derivatives. Cleavage of inosinic acid to hypoxanthine via inosine does not contribute significantly to the formation of uric acid in either normal man or in patients with HG-PRTase deficiency.HG-PRTase was not completely absent in red blood cells from a boy with the Lesch-Nyhan syndrome; with hypoxanthine as substrate, the activity in erythrocyte hemolysates was 0.64% of normal values.
Reversal of the concreteness effect in a patient with semantic dementia

Abstract Normal subjects are better at identifying and remembering concrete as compared to abstract words (the concreteness effect). We present data on a patient, DM, who shows the opposite pattern. DM has a progressive semantic loss due to atrophic changes in his temporal lobes, particularly on the left. His semantic impairment predominantly involves object terms, with relative sparing of abstract nouns and most aspects of verb meaning. DM showed an advantage for abstract words on a wide range of tasks (e.g. producing definitions, synonymy judgments). These data challenge accounts that attribute the concreteness effect to a quantitative superiority at the level of the underlying conceptual representations. We suggest that there are qualitative differences between abstract and concrete concepts, and that, in particular, concrete concepts are more dependent on perceptual attributes that were disproportionately impaired in DM. We propose, further, that perceptual components of semantic representations are a.
The Transmission of Affect

The idea that one can soak up someone else's depression or anxiety or sense the tension in a room is familiar. Indeed, phrases that capture this notion abound in the popular vernacular: "negative energy," "dumping," "you could cut the tension with a knife. " The Transmission of Affect deals with the belief that the emotions and energies of one person or group can be absorbed by or can enter directly into another. The ability to borrow or share states of mind, once historically and culturally assumed, is now pathologized, as Teresa Brennan shows in relation to affective transfer in psychiatric clinics and the prevalence of psychogenic illness in contemporary life. To neglect the mechanism by which affect is transmitted, the author claims, has serious consequences for science and medical research. Brennan's theory of affect is based on constant communication between individuals and their physical and social environments. Her important book details the relationships among affect, energy, and "new maladies of the soul," including attention deficit disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, codependency, and fibromyalgia.