Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Educators’ Perceptions of Augmentative and Alternative Communication to Facilitate Communication Among Preschool Students With Disabilities

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how preschool educators perceive augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and how those perceptions influence AAC utilization in preschool classrooms. Specifically, this investigation focused on gaining better understandings about educators’ views, beliefs, and attitudes about AAC utilization to facilitate communication. The conceptual and theoretical frameworks at the crux of this research were the theory of planned behavior, sociocultural theory, and social justice theory. Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior has already been used to predict how beliefs come to pass, create reality, and influence behavior. Similarly, Vygotsky theorizes how language mediates behavior and human action. Social justice and sociocultural theories conceptualize how educators may perceive their roles as advocate, instructor, facilitator of communication, and equalizer. Semistructured, openended interviews, classroom observations, and document review were the data collection sources used. The study is framed around the following overarching research question and subquestion: RQ1: How do early childhood special educators perceive utilization of AAC systems in facilitating communication among preschool-aged students? SQ1: How do early childhood special educators’ perceptions of AAC systems influence how they utilize AAC techniques among preschool-aged students? Findings suggest that preschool special educators value the use of AAC and understand the basic human right for all students to participate. However, special education teachers and special education paraprofessionals perceive their roles and responsibilities, as communicative partners and facilitators, differently. The data reveal that limited knowledge and resources are barriers to facilitating communication, through the use of AAC systems. It may be inferred that educators with more knowledge about disability, technology, and AAC systems perceive fewer barriers to
Bridging the divide between ideal and actual Communicative Language Teaching

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) comes recommended as an ideal teaching method in Zimbabwe because of its ability to assist learners to become communicatively competent. Most studies on CLT in Zimbabwe focus on secondary schools, neglecting the primary school where all learning begins. This article describes the activities used by teachers when implementing CLT and ascertains the difference between the ideal and actual in CLT. The study was framed within the interpretivist paradigm, using a qualitative single case study. A conceptual framework based on Socio-cultural Theory (SCT), Experiential Learning or Teaching Theory, Instructional Communication, Communicative Competence Theory and the Seven Areas of Policy Development for Language-in-Education Policy Implementation, was used. Vygotsky’s SCT was used to guarantee interaction with the More Knowledgeable Others (teachers or peers) and mediation tools (teaching methods). Instructional Communication and Communicative Competence were utilised to explore language in the classroom. The Seven Areas of Policy Development for Languagein- Education Policy Implementation and the Experiential Learning or Teaching Theory were used to ensure the use of CLT methods, and whether teachers reflect to improve on them. Non-participant observations, semi-structured interviews and document analysis were used to collect data, which were analysed using inductive and thematic analysis. Findings show that teachers still use traditional methods of teaching and also affirm that activities indicated in participants’ scheme-cum-plans were not implemented. Findings suggest the theorisation of CLT only. The study recommends teacher educators to equip student teachers with adequate skills to deal with CLT classes beginning in the formative stages of the education system.Keywords: Accuracy, activities, Audiolingual Method, Communicative LanguageTeaching, English Second Language, fluency, Grammar-translation Method, interaction,methodological beliefs, pedagogical beliefs
Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Central Catalan and Castilian Spanish

The general literature on the phonetic correlates of stress agrees that duration, and in stress accent languages, F0 are consistent correlates of stress. However, the role of amplitude changes in the speech signal is more controversial. In particular, the conflicting results of spectral tilt as a correlate of stress have been attributed to the effects of vowel reduction. We examined the stress correlates of duration, overall intensity and spectral tilt in Catalan and Spanish in both accented and unaccented contexts while controlling for formant frequency differences between morphologically corresponding vowels in stressed and unstressed environments by comparing vowels that maintain the same quality across stress contexts with those that do not. Duration was a consistent stress correlate in all vowels in both languages, regardless of their formant frequency differences across stress contexts and of the absence of pitch accents. In fact, stress-related formant frequency differences between corresponding vowels amplify the duration cues to the stress contrast. On the other hand, the use speakers made of intensity was not as pervasive as that of duration. Specifically, changes in spectral tilt were significant only in Catalan and in those vowels that alternate a more open and peripheral realization in stressed syllables with a mid-central realization in unstressed syllables, indicating that spectral tilt is related to the formant frequency differences linked to the centralization processes rather than to the stress contrast.
A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis

Program comprehension is an important activity in software maintenance, as software must be sufficiently understood before it can be properly modified. The study of a program's execution, known as dynamic analysis, has become a common technique in this respect and has received substantial attention from the research community, particularly over the last decade. These efforts have resulted in a large research body of which currently there exists no comprehensive overview. This paper reports on a systematic literature survey aimed at the identification and structuring of research on program comprehension through dynamic analysis. From a research body consisting of 4,795 articles published in 14 relevant venues between July 1999 and June 2008 and the references therein, we have systematically selected 176 articles and characterized them in terms of four main facets: activity, target, method, and evaluation. The resulting overview offers insight in what constitutes the main contributions of the field, supports the task of identifying gaps and opportunities, and has motivated our discussion of several important research directions that merit additional consideration in the near future.
SONIC GESTURES AS INPUT IN HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION : TOWARDS A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH

While the majority of studies in sonic interaction design (SID) focuses on sound as the output modality of an interactive system, the broad scope of SID includes also the use of sound as an input modality. Sonic gestures can be defined as sound-producing actions generated by a human in order to convey information. Their use as input in computational systems has been studied in several isolated contexts, however a systematic approach to their utility is lacking. In this study, the focus is on general sonic gestures, rather than exclusively focusing on musical ones. Exemplary interactive systems applying sonic gestures are reviewed, and based on previous studies on gesture, the first steps towards a systematic framework of sonic gestures are presented. Here, sonic gestures are studied from the perspectives of typology, morphology, interaction affordances, and mapping. The informational richness of the acoustic properties of sonic gestures is highlighted.
Using video games to combine learning and assessment in mathematics education

One problem with most education systems is that learning and (summative) assessment are generally treated as quite separate things in schools. We argue that video games can provide an opportunity to combine these processes in an engaging and effective way. The present study focuses on investigating the effectiveness and the assessment power of two different mathematics video games, Semideus and Wuzzit Trouble. In the current study, we validated the Semideus game as a rational number test instrument. We used it as a pre- and a post-test for a three-hour intervention in which we studied the effectiveness of Wuzzit Trouble, a game built on whole number arithmetic and designed to enhance mathematical thinking and problem solving skills. The results showed that (1) games can be used to assess mathematical knowledge validly, and (2) even short game-based interventions can be very effective. Based on the results, we argue that game-based assessment can create a more complete picture of mathematical knowledge than simply measuring students' accuracy, providing indicators of student misconceptions and conceptual change processes
Scheduling Partially Ordered Events in a Randomised Framework: Empirical Results and Implications for Automatic Configuration Management

Automatic configuration management involves maintaining a set of shared and distributed resources in such a way that they serve a community of users fairly, promptly and reliably. In this context, this paper discusses experiments that measure the effect of adding randomized scheduling of partially ordered events to configuration management tools. Three characteristics of randomized scheduling are investigated: efficiency, robustness and security. A configuration management process is efficient if it minimizes the use of resources. It is robust if it is not vulnerable to malicious acts or inadvertent human errors. It is secure if its management model is hidden from observers. Several experiments suggest that randomized scheduling of partially ordered events has advantages over commonly used deterministic strategies, on average producing more efficient schedules. Further, randomized scheduling greatly degrades the accuracy of observer predictions of future behavior. In addition, randomized scheduling obscures the management model such that an observer will have to make a large number of observations in order to obtain the complete management model. The results of the study support the use of randomization in automatic configuration management tools.
Neural network and regression based processor load prediction for efficient scaling of Grid and Cloud resources

An effective and efficient resource allocation policy could benefit the cloud environment by saving cost. To support the continuous load increase, the cloud platform needs to create new virtual machines. However, substantial amount of time is required for the creation and the setup of a virtual machine. Therefore, allocating resources in advance based on prediction models could improve the quality of the service of the cloud platform. In this paper we present time delay neural network and regression methods for predicting future workload in the Grid or Cloud platform. We use real world workload traces to test the performance of our algorithms. We also present an overall evaluation of this approach and its potential benefits for enabling efficient auto-scaling of Cloud user resources.
An Image Retrieval Approach Based on Composite Features and Graph Matching

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) considers the characteristics of the image itself, for example its shapes, colors and textures. The Current approaches to CBIR differ in terms of which image features are extracted. Recent work deals with combination of distances or scores from different and independent representations. This work attempts to induce high level semantics from the low level descriptors of the images. In this paper, we propose a new approach that integrates techniques of salient, color and texture features. Our approach extracts interest salient regions that work as local descriptors. A greedy graph matching algorithm with a proposed modified scoring function is applied to determine the final image rank. The proposed approach is appropriate for accurately retrieving images even in distortion cases such as geometric deformations and noise. This approach was tested on proprietary image databases. Also an offline case study is developed where our approach is tested on images retrieved from Google keyword based image search engine. The results show that a combination of our approach as a local image descriptor with another global descriptor outperforms other approaches.
Configuration of nilpotent groups and isomorphism

The concept of configuration was first introduced by Rosenblatt and Willis to give a condition for amenability of groups. We show that if $G_1$ and $G_2$ have the same configuration sets and $H_1$ is a normal subgroup of $G_1$ with abelian quotient, then there is a normal subgroup $H_2$ of $G_2$ such that $\frac{G_1}{H_1}\cong\frac{G_2}{H_2}. $ Also configuration of FC-groups and isomorphism is studied.
A Case Study on Parallel SynchronousImplementations for Tabu Search Based onNeighborhood

We study in this paper diierent synchronous strategies for the parallel implementation of tabu search on a parallel machine. The task scheduling problem on heterogeneous processors under precedence constraints is used as the framework for the development, implementation, validation, and performance evaluation of diierent parallel strategies. Several strategies are proposed, discussed and compared: the master-slave model, with two diierent schemes for improved load balancing, and the single-program-multiple-data model, with single-token and multiple-token schemes for message passing. The IBM SP1 parallel machine running PVM is used for the implementation and the evaluation of these strategies. Computational results are presented and the behavior of the diierent strategies is discussed, evaluated, and compared.
Deploying chains of virtual network functions: On the relation between link and server usage

Recently, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been proposed to transform from network hardware appliances to software middleboxes. Normally, a demand needs to invoke several Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in a particular order following the service chain along a routing path. In this paper, we study the joint problem of VNF placement and path selection to better utilize the network. We discover that the relation between the link and server usage plays a crucial role in the problem. We first propose a systematic way to elastically tune the proper link and server usage of each demand based on network conditions and demand properties. In particular, we compute a proper routing path length, and decide, for each VNF in the service chain, whether to use additional server resources or to reuse resources provided by existing servers. We then propose a chain deployment algorithm to follow the guidance of this link and server usage. Via simulations, we show that our design effectively adapts resource usage to network dynamics, and, hence, serves more demands than other heuristics.
Cognitive processing in women with dyspareunia: What is more salient, the pain or the sex?

Cognitive Processing in Women with Dyspareunia: What is More Salient, The Pain or The Sex? by Lea Thaler, B.A. Dr. Marta Meana, Examination Committee Chair Professor of Psychology University of Nevada, Las Vegas A debate exists in the literature over whether dyspareunia should be classified as a sexual dysfunction or as a pain disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We do not know, however, the extent to which women with this disorder experience it as more of a pain problem, or more of a sexual problem, or whether both aspects are equally salient. Cognitive methodologies have been informative in the study of sexual information and stimulus processing. By examining visual attention and basic memory for painand sex-related words, this study aimed to elucidate whether there was a differential saliency between the pain and sex aspects of dyspareunia. Twenty women with dyspareunia and twenty women experiencing no sexual dysfunction (controls) participated in visual attention and memory protocols designed to detect differences as a function of group membership and type of stimulus. In terms of visual attention, results revealed that all women attended more to pain words than to sex words. In terms of memory, all women had better recall for sex-related words; however, women
Bead-based immunoassay allows sub-picogram detection of histidine-rich protein 2 from Plasmodium falciparum and estimates reliability of malaria rapid diagnostic tests

Detection of histidine-rich protein 2 (HRP2) from the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum provides evidence for active or recent infection, and is utilized for both diagnostic and surveillance purposes, but current laboratory immunoassays for HRP2 are hindered by low sensitivities and high costs. Here we present a new HRP2 immunoassay based on antigen capture through a bead-based system capable of detecting HRP2 at sub-picogram levels. The assay is highly specific and cost-effective, allowing fast processing and screening of large numbers of samples. We utilized the assay to assess results of HRP2-based rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) in different P. falciparum transmission settings, generating estimates for true performance in the field. Through this method of external validation, HRP2 RDTs were found to perform well in the high-endemic areas of Mozambique and Angola with 86.4% and 73.9% of persons with HRP2 in their blood testing positive by RDTs, respectively, and false-positive rates of 4.3% and 0.5%. However, in the low-endemic setting of Haiti, only 14.5% of persons found to be HRP2 positive by the bead assay were RDT positive. Additionally, 62.5% of Haitians showing a positive RDT test had no detectable HRP2 by the bead assay, likely indicating that these were false positive tests. In addition to RDT validation, HRP2 biomass was assessed for the populations in these different settings, and may provide an additional metric by which to estimate P. falciparum transmission intensity and measure the impact of interventions.
The Antioxidant Enzyme GPX1 Gene Polymorphisms Are Associated with Low BMD and Increased Bone Turnover Markers

Recently, oxidative stress has been suggested as participating in the development of osteoporosis. Glutathione peroxidase 1 (GPX1) is one of antioxidant enzymes responsible for the defence of cells against oxidative damage and thus for protection against age related diseases such as osteoporosis. The aim of present study was to associate genetic variances of GPX1 enzyme with bone mineral density (BMD) and biochemical bone turnover markers and to show the influence of antioxidative defence system in genetics of osteoporosis. We evaluated 682 Slovenian subjects: 571 elderly women and 111 elderly men. All subjects were genotyped for the presence of GPX1 gene polymorphisms Pro198Leu and polyAla region. BMD and biochemical markers were also measured. General linear model analysis, adjusted to height, and (one-way) analysis of variance were used to assess differences between the genotype.and haplotype subgroups, respectively. The significant or borderline significant associations were found between the polyAla or the Pro198Leu polymorphisms and total hip BMD (0.018; 0.023, respectively), femoral neck BMD (0.117; 0.026, respectively) and lumbar spine BMD (0.032; 0.086, respectively), and with biochemical bone turnover markers such as plasma osteocalcin (0.027; 0.025, respectively) and serum C-terminal telopeptide of type I collagen concentrations (0.114; 0.012, respectively) in whole group. Haplotype analysis revealed that the 6-T haplotype is associated significantly with low BMD values (p > 0.025) at all measured locations of the skeleton, and with high plasma osteocalcin concentrations (p = 0.008). This study shows for the first time that the polymorphisms polyAla and Pro198Leu of the GPX1 gene, individually and in combination, are associated with BMD and therefore may be useful as genetic markers for bone disease. Moreover, it implies the important contribution of the oxidative stress to pathogenesis of osteoporosis.
EVIDENCE FOR THE MISSING BARYONS IN THE ANGULAR CORRELATION OF THE DIFFUSE X-RAY BACKGROUND

The amount of detected baryons in the local universe is at least a factor of 2 smaller than that measured at high redshift. It is believed that a significant fraction of the baryons in the current universe is “hiding” in a hot filamentary structure filling the intergalactic space, the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM). We found evidence of the missing baryons in the WHIM by detecting their signature on the angular correlation of diffuse X-ray emission with the XMM-Newton satellite. Our result indicates that 12% ± 5% of the total diffuse X-ray emission in the energy range 0.4–0.6 keV is due to intergalactic filaments. The statistical significance of our detection is several sigmas (χ2>136, N = 19). The error bar in the X-ray flux is dominated, instead, by cosmic variation and model uncertainties.
Schistosomiasis Prevalence and Intensity of Infection in Latin America and the Caribbean Countries, 1942-2014: A Systematic Review in the Context of a Regional Elimination Goal

Background In 2012 the World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA65.21 on elimination of schistosomiasis, calling for increased investment in schistosomiasis control and support for countries to initiate elimination programs. This study aims to analyze prevalence and intensity of Schistosoma mansoni infection in children in Latin America and the Caribbean countries and territories (LAC), at the second administrative level or lower. Methodology A systematic review of schistosomiasis prevalence and intensity of infection was conducted by searching at PubMed, LILACS and EMBASE. Experts on the topic were informally consulted and institutional web pages were reviewed (PAHO/WHO, Ministries of Health). Only SCH infection among children was registered because it can be a ‘proxi-indicator’ of recent transmission by the time the study is conducted. Principal Findings One hundred thirty two full-text articles met the inclusion criteria and provided 1,242 prevalence and 199 intensity of infection data points. Most of them were from Brazil (69.7%). Only Brazil published studies after 2001, showing several 'hot spots' with high prevalence. Brazil, Venezuela, Suriname and Saint Lucia need to update the epidemiological status of schistosomiasis to re-design their national programs and target the elimination of Schistosoma mansoni transmission by 2020. In Antigua and Barbuda, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Montserrat and Puerto Rico schistosomiasis transmission may be interrupted. However the compilation of an elimination dossier and follow-up surveys, per WHO recommendations, are needed to verify that status. Hence, the burden of subtle SCH chronic infection may be still present and even high in countries that may have eliminated transmission. Heterogeneity in the methodologies used for monitoring and evaluating the progress of the schistosomiasis programs was found, making cross-national and chronological comparisons difficult. Conclusions There is a need for updating the schistosomiasis status in the historically endemic countries and territories in LAC to address the required public health interventions for control and elimination programs or to verify the elimination of transmission of Schistosoma mansoni. Improved reporting and standardization of the monitoring and evaluation methodologies used are recommended, while using available WHO guidelines. Meeting a regional elimination goal will require additional and improved epidemiological data by age group and sex.