Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Unheard Voices: First Generation Students and the Community College

First generation students are less likely to persist in college than their peers who have grown up in college educated families. This qualitative research study explores the experiences of 38 first generation students enrolled at four different community colleges in Northern and Central Oregon. During my research into first generation students, I became convinced that there was a gap in examining the lives and self-reported experiences of these students in the community college environment. The majority of first generation research has been conducted on traditional aged first generation students at four-year universities, and this research is used to inform practices at community colleges where the populations are markedly different. I chose to use the research methodologies of Narrative Inquiry and Phenomenology to examine first-hand the experiences of these students. In order to tell the stories of these students, I used Autoethnography to reflect upon my own personal experiences as a first generation student. The study sought to provide answers to the following questions: 1. How do first generation community college students balance the academic rigours of college along with the external responsibilities they have outside college. 2. What are those external and internal factors that affect the persistence of first generation students in the community college setting? The research was conducted using interviews, from which themes of shared experiences were developed. Some of these themes include factors that are tied to the success or persistence of first generation students, and provide unique insights into the lives of this population. The purpose of this thesis is to expose the lived experiences of first generation students attending community college. My hope is that this study will raise a greater awareness of the needs of first generation students and in turn improve practices in higher education.
Are there diff erences between male versus female Emergency Medical Services professionals on emotional labor and job satisfaction

Background: The research question investigated was: Do female Emergency Medical Services (EMS) professionals exert less emotional labor (less surface acting and deep acting) than male EMS professionals, and do females report higher job satisfaction? Surface acting involves displaying emotions that are not felt, for example, an EMS professional who “puts on” a sympathetic face for a patient’s problem but she/he is actually irritated. Thus, surface acting focuses on one’s outward behavior, such as regulating or modifying one’s emotional expression. Deep acting focuses on modifying inner feelings, where one attempts to “actually feel” the emotions one wishes to display, such as compassion for a patient’s problem. Methods: A large sample of 24,586 (33.9% response rate) nationally certified EMS professionals filled out a short paper and pencil survey in the Fall, 2011 to test the research question. Gender, surface acting, deep acting, and job satisfaction were measured. Results: The results showed that while female EMS professionals had statistically significant lower surface acting and deep acting, and higher job satisfaction than EMS males, the mean differences in scale scores were practically or clinically trivial. However, the results also showed that for all EMS respondents, as surface acting increased, job satisfaction decreased. Conclusion: Very small, non-meaningful differences in female versus male surface acting, deep acting, and job satisfaction were found. However, surface acting had a substantial negative relationship to job satisfaction while deep acting did not. Continued research into emotional labor, including its impact on EMS professionals is recommended, as well as role play training to help EMS professionals increase their deep acting skills.
2 TRACING FAIRNESS INTENTIONS : CHINESE WHISPER

The paper aims at defining the role of intentions for reciprocity. The ultimatum game is modified, by adding a kind of randomizer (“Chinese Whisper”), to generate outcomes which are not intended und thus to separate the proposers’ initial intentions from their actual offers. The mechanism ensures that the responder reacts to changing intentions and not to changing outcomes. This experimental approach also has the advantage that the number of available options for the proposer is not limited. Our evidence supports the view that fairness theory should explicitly address intentions – responders exhibit different acceptance rates depending on the intentions of proposers. JEL Classification: C72, C91
The Short Term Effect of Pranayama on the Lung Parameters

Introduction: Yoga is a science which has been practised in India from over thousands of years. Besides its spiritual achievements, the practice of yoga is accompanied by a number of beneficial physiological effects in the body. Pranayama is an art of controlling the life force of breath. It produces many systemic psycho-physical effects in the body, besides its specific effects on the respiratory functions. This study is designed to study the effects of short- term pranayama (6 weeks) on the pulmonary function parameters. Methods: The study group consisted of 50 young adults (26 males and 24 females) who were newly recruited for yoga training at the Patanjali Yoga Center, Kolar. They were motivated to undergo pranava, Nadishuddi and Savitri Pranayama training for 1 hour daily, for 6 days a week. The first phase of the recording of the pulmonary parameters was done at the beginning of their course. The second phase of the recording was done after 6 weeks of the regular pranayama practice. Results: The FVC - before pranayama showed a value of
Risk factors of gastric ulcers in dogs.

Received: Revised: Accepted: May 24, 2014 July 28, 2014 December 10, 2014 The aim of the study was to identify the risk factors causing gastric ulcer formation in dogs and determining the prevalence of their occurrence. The study group consisted of 49 dogs of different breeds and genders, between 1-16 years of age. All the dogs were found to have gastric ulcers during an endoscopic examination. The differentiation of peptic ulcers from gastric neoplastic ulcers was based on a histopathological examination, whereas Helicobacter sp. was detected through PCR-assays. Peptic ulcers were diagnosed in 40 dogs and gastric neoplasia was identified in 9 dogs. 46 dogs tested positive for Helicobacter sp. The study confirmed a multifactorial cause of gastric ulcers, where the greatest risk factor of peptic ulcers in dogs was the usage of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, whereas adenocarcinoma was the greatest risk factor of gastric ulcers of neoplastic origin. ©2014 PVJ. All rights reserved
Changes in Serum Inflammatory Proteins during Peritonitis in CAPD Patients

The serum concentrations of IgG, IgA, IgM, C3, C4, haptoglobin, tranferrin, αl-antitrypsin, αl-acid glycoprotein, and C-reactive protein were measured in 14 CAPD patients during the course of peritonitis and at one, two and three months thereafter. Of these parameters only the CRP showed consistent changes paralleling the course of the peritonitis. The CRP baseline values in CAPD patients (second and third month after peritonitis) were similar to those found in non-dialysed normal controls, suggesting that the CRP changes, which were observed, can be attributed to the peritonitis; CRP may be a valid acute phase reactant during peritonitis in PD patients.
DIALOGICAL AND PARTICIPATIVE TRAINING IN NURSING EDUCATION : CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF CRITICAL AND REFLECTIVE AND CREATIVE THINKING OF STUDENTS

Objective: to identify how the graduates of a nursing course in a public university in southern Brazil carry out the methodologies used in the process of training and their contribution to the development of critical-reflective and creative thinking. Method: Qualitative research anchored in the Paulo Freire reference. The study included 11 students of the final year of the nursing course. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted in the first half of 2012 and analyzed under the proposal of content analysis. Results: the themes that emerged for analysis were: training as a dialogic and participatory process (including: the teacher cares about the students and the learning process), and active methodologies encouraged me to “seek knowledge”. The analysis showed that nursing education is dialogic and participatory, and that teachers care about the learning of the students. Conclusion: the use of innovative methodologies and problem-solving help to build knowledge. The close relationship between teachers and students is fundamental in the teaching and learning process, in which the teacher assumes the role of facilitator and the students are the protagonists of their learning process.
On the universality of the critical scaling exponents during sol-gel transition

The evolution of viscoelastic properties near the sol-gel transition is studied by performing oscillatory rheological measurements on two different types of systems: a colloidal dispersion and a thermo-responsive polymer solution under isothermal and non-isothermal conditions. While undergoing sol-gel transition, both the systems pass through a critical point. An approach to the critical point is characterized in terms of divergence of zero shear viscosity and the subsequent appearance of the low frequency modulus. In the vicinity of the critical gel state, both the viscosity and the modulus show a power-law dependence on relative distance from the critical point. Interestingly, the longest relaxation time has been observed to diverge symmetrically on both the sides of the critical point and also shows a power-law dependence on relative distance from the critical point. The critical (power-law) exponents of the zero-shear viscosity and modulus are observed to be related to the exponents of the longest relaxation time by the hyper scaling laws. The dynamic critical exponent has also been calculated from the growth of the dynamic moduli. Remarkably, the critical relaxation exponent and dynamic critical exponent predicted from the scaling laws precisely agree with the experimental values from the isothermal as well as non-isothermal experiments. The associated critical exponents show remarkable internal consistency and universality for different kinds of systems undergoing the sol-gel transition.
A permutation test for assessing the presence of individual differences in treatment effects

An important goal of personalized medicine is to identify heterogeneity in treatment effects and then use that heterogeneity to target the intervention to those most likely to benefit. Heterogeneity is assessed using the predicted individual treatment effects framework, and a permutation test is proposed to establish if significant heterogeneity is present given the covariates and predictive model or algorithm used for predicted individual treatment effects. We first show evidence for heterogeneity in the effects of treatment across an illustrative example data set. We then use simulations with two different predictive methods (linear regression model and Random Forests) to show that the permutation test has adequate type-I error control. Next, we use an example dataset as the basis for simulations to demonstrate the ability of the permutation test to find heterogeneity in treatment effects for a predicted individual treatment effects estimate as a function of both effect size and sample size. We find that the proposed test has good power for detecting heterogeneity in treatment effects when the heterogeneity was due primarily to a single predictor, or when it was spread across the predictors. Power was found to be greater for predictions from a linear model than from random forests. This non-parametric permutation test can be used to test for significant differences across individuals in predicted individual treatment effects obtained with a given set of covariates using any predictive method with no additional assumptions.
Infinite energy equivariant harmonic maps, domination, and anti-de Sitter $3$-manifolds

We generalize a well-known existence and uniqueness result for equivariant harmonic maps due to Corlette, Donaldson, and Labourie to a non-compact infinite energy setting and analyze the asymptotic behaviour of the harmonic maps. When the relevant representation is Fuchsian and has hyperbolic monodromy, our construction recovers a family of harmonic maps originally studied by Wolf. We employ these maps to solve a domination problem for representations. In particular, following ideas laid out by Deroin-Tholozan, we prove that any representation from a finitely generated free group to the isometry group of a CAT$(-1)$ Hadamard manifold is strictly dominated in length spectrum by a large collection of Fuchsian ones. As an intermediate step in the proof, we obtain a result of independent interest: parametrizations of certain Teichm{\"u}ller spaces by holomorphic quadratic differentials. The main consequence of the domination result is the existence of a new collection of anti-de Sitter $3$-manifolds. We also present an application to the theory of minimal immersions into the Grassmanian of timelike planes in $\mathbb{R}^{2,2}$.
The mechanisms involved in the activation of transcription factors and BNP gene expression in loaded heart

Cardiac hypertrophy is an adaptive response of the heart to a variety of mechanical, hemodynamic, neurohumoral, and pathologic stimuli. Prolonged pathophysiological load leads to development of left ventricular hypertrophy and ultimately to heart failure. The natriuretic peptides including the Btype natriuretic peptide (BNP) provide the physiological feedback mechanism to suppress the load signal. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the cis elements within the BNP promoter that mediate the cardiac load responses in vivo, and to study the involvement of paracrine factors, such as endothelin-1 (ET-1) and angiotensin II (Ang II) in activating these transcription factors. In this study, cardiac overload was produced by bilateral nephrectomy, and infusions of arginine8vasopressin (AVP) or Ang II. In isolated perfused rat heart, the direct wall stretch was achieved by inflating the left ventricular balloon. To identify the cis elements within the BNP promoter that mediate hemodynamic overload response, the approach of DNA injection into the myocardium was used. Mutation or deletion of proximal BNP GATA sites abrogated the response to nephrectomy. AVP-induced acute pressure overload increased left ventricular BNP mRNA and peptide levels. In gel mobility shift assays, pressure overload produced rapid activation of transcription factor GATA4 DNA binding, which was completely inhibited by the ET-1 receptor antagonist bosentan. Both ET1 and Ang II receptor antagonism inhibited the wall stretch-induced increases in left ventricular GATA4 and AP-1 binding activities in isolated perfused heart preparation. BNP promoter activity and BNP mRNA and peptide levels were regulated distinctly in chronic hemodynamic overload produced by Ang II. In conclusion, GATA4 appears to be necessary and sufficient to confer transcriptional activation of BNP gene during hemodynamic stress in vivo. ET-1 is a signaling molecule mediating the cardiac response to acute pressure overload in vivo. In isolated rat heart, Ang II and ET-1 are required for the stimulation of GATA4 and AP-1 binding activity in response to direct left ventricular wall stretch. Finally, posttranscriptional mechanisms play an important role in the regulation of BNP gene expression in pressure overload produced by Ang II in vivo.
An Induced Multi-Relational Framework for Answer Selection in Community Question Answer Platforms

This paper addresses the question of identifying the best candidate answer to a question on Community Question Answer (CQA) forums. The problem is important because Individuals often visit CQA forums to seek answers to nuanced questions. We develop a novel induced relational graph convolutional network (IR-GCN) framework to address the question. We make three contributions. First, we introduce a modular framework that separates the construction of the graph with the label selection mechanism. We use equivalence relations to induce a graph comprising cliques and identify two label assignment mechanisms---label contrast, label sharing. Then, we show how to encode these assignment mechanisms in GCNs. Second, we show that encoding contrast creates discriminative magnification---enhancing the separation between nodes in the embedding space. Third, we show a surprising result---boosting techniques improve learning over familiar stacking, fusion, or aggregation approaches for neural architectures. We show strong results over the state-of-the-art neural baselines in extensive experiments on 50 StackExchange communities.
econstor Make Your Publications Visible . A Service of zbw

There is a growing literature comparing the current financial crisis or Great Recession to the worst economic crisis of capitalism, the Great Depression. However, the role of rising income inequality, which has risen dramatically before both crises, is rarely discussed. In this paper we discuss the rise of top-end inequality and its effects on household consumption, saving, and debt for the 1920s by applying a non-standard theory of consumption, the relative income hypothesis, to the period of interest. We argue that income inequality is linked to the increase of household consumption and the simultaneous decline of household savings as well as rapidly increasing household debt. Thus, the rise of top-end inequality in connection with a broader institutional change, such as the deregulation of financial markets, has contributed to a build-up of financial and macroeconomic instability, in the period leading to the Great Depression.
STUDY ON PREVALENCE OF DEPRESSION AND ADVERSE DRUG REACTIONS AMONG SOUTH INDIAN EPILEPTIC PATIENTS

Objectives: To compare the prevalence and intensity of adverse drug reactions (ADR) in patients receiving antiepileptic monotherapy and polytherapy, and to assess the pattern of depression associated with the therapy. Methods: This is a prospective observational study conducted in neurology outpatient department for a time period of 6 months in a tertiary care hospital, South India. Patients diagnosed as epileptic for more than 6 months and receiving stable doses of antiepileptic drugs (AED) for 3 months were included in the study. Study participants receiving monotherapy and polytherapy were divided into groups. A detailed validated questionnaire was used to assess the incidence and severity of depression and ADRs among the study participants. Mann–Whitney test, Kruskal–Wallis test, and Wilcoxon signed rank test were used to know the statistical significance at p<0.05. Results: Among 91 patients with epilepsy, depression was observed mainly in the study group receiving polytherapy than monotherapy. The severity of ADR observed among various study groups during the first and second visit were compared, which showed that all range of intensity scores were reported. During the second visit, the severity of ADR was high when compared to the first visit. Further incidence of ADRs with AED therapy was compared which showed clinically significant values in all ADRs reported in both monotherapy and polytherapy. Conclusion: Our study showed, maximum ADRs were among the patients receiving polytherapy, and depression was observed in patients receiving polytherapy. This suggests the need for safe drug practice. Keywords: Epilepsy, Anti-epileptics, Adverse drug reactions, Depression, Monotherapy, Polytherapy.
GOOD CLINICAL PRACTICE; EDUCATION AS A NECESSITATE FOR RADIOLOGY

A good clinical practice (GCP) is an ethical and scientific quality act from oldest enduring customs in the historic times of medicine. As the guiding ethical code it is primarily known for its edict to do no harm to the tolerant. However, the complexities of modern medicine research necessitate a more elaborate set of guidelines that address a physician’s ethical and scientific responsibilities such as obtaining informed consent or disclosing risks of these biohazards. Our country in last decades has excelled so much in terms of offering training programs for these professional to bridge the gap between the therapeutic interventions and knowledge of these working individuals. We have done a survey on both male and female working in specific hospitals in Karachi. They were interviewed about their skills, duties and knowledge about standards of clinical practice. With reference to the patient care and conditions they were inquired about the medical background, awareness of the sufferer’s ailment and ethical concerns like patient safety & rights. We have found nearly disappointing results as most of these workers were ignorant of the fact that they lack basic knowledge of related responsibilities of concerned patients. Rest of the data also gave the evidence for a huge breach among the awareness, education and realistic approach in this selected workforce. We suggest that caregivers must be aware of indications and have strong medical foundation of the concerned departments where they are serving. We propose the medical education and clinical workshops of this set of serving individuals at ground levels along with the technical fine tuning with the help of case studies and good clinical practice.
ResUNet++: An Advanced Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation

Accurate computer-aided polyp detection and segmentation during colonoscopy examinations can help endoscopists resect abnormal tissue and thereby decrease chances of polyps growing into cancer. Towards developing a fully automated model for pixel-wise polyp segmentation, we propose ResUNet++, which is an improved ResUNet architecture for colonoscopic image segmentation. Our experimental evaluations show that the suggested architecture produces good segmentation results on publicly available datasets. Furthermore, ResUNet++ significantly outperforms U-Net and ResUNet, two key state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, by achieving high evaluation scores with a dice coefficient of 81.33%, and a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 79.27% for the Kvasir-SEG dataset and a dice coefficient of 79.55%, and a mIoU of 79.62% with CVC-612 dataset.
Separating Local & Shuffled Differential Privacy via Histograms

Recent work in differential privacy has highlighted the shuffled model as a promising avenue to compute accurate statistics while keeping raw data in users' hands. We present a protocol in this model that estimates histograms with error independent of the domain size. This implies an arbitrarily large gap in sample complexity between the shuffled and local models. On the other hand, the models are equivalent when we impose the constraints of pure differential privacy and single-message randomizers.
Satellite Image Time Series Classification With Pixel-Set Encoders and Temporal Self-Attention

Satellite image time series, bolstered by their growing availability, are at the forefront of an extensive effort towards automated Earth monitoring by international institutions. In particular, large-scale control of agricultural parcels is an issue of major political and economic importance. In this regard, hybrid convolutional-recurrent neural architectures have shown promising results for the automated classification of satellite image time series. We propose an alternative approach in which the convolutional layers are advantageously replaced with encoders operating on unordered sets of pixels to exploit the typically coarse resolution of publicly available satellite images. We also propose to extract temporal features using a bespoke neural architecture based on self-attention instead of recurrent networks. We demonstrate experimentally that our method not only outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in terms of precision, but also significantly decreases processing time and memory requirements. Lastly, we release a large open-access annotated dataset as a benchmark for future work on satellite image time series.