Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effect of Reciprocal Teaching on Iranian Pre-intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Reciprocal Teaching (RT) is a kind of reading strategy that facilitates the teaching of English reading comprehension. It consists of four main reading strategies: predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing (Palincsar& Brown, 1984). The lack of good reading comprehension skills is exacerbated by the central role of reading comprehension in higher education achievement (Ahmadi &Gilakjani, 2012). It is, however, postulated that one solution to poor reading comprehension skills seems to be the teaching of reading comprehension strategies. Accordingly, the present study aimed to investigate the effects of reciprocal teaching on Iranian preintermediate EFL learners’ reading comprehension. In doing so, a quasi-experimental pretest posttest control group research design was used. Of 43 participants who initially took part in the present study, thirty-one female Iranian pre-intermediate EFL students whose age ranged from 14 to 20 years old at Royan English Language Institute in Gorgan, Golestan Province, Iran, were randomly selected and divided into one control group and one experimental group. The homogeneity of their proficiency level was established using an Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT) (2004). All students in both groups participated in a reading comprehension test as the pretest. The pretest was piloted and adapted from the Objective Placement Test of Interchange by Cambridge English Language Assessment (Lesley, Hansen, & Zukowski, 2008). The experimental group utilized RT strategy two times a week typically 50 minutes in duration for three weeks, and the control group was taught based on the nonreciprocal teaching strategy. At the end of the treatment, the posttest, similar to the pretest was administered to both groups. Having used an independent samples t-test, the data analysis showed that the RT group outperformed the participants who did not receive RT strategy in their reading comprehension ability. The findings indicated that RT had a significantly positive effect on the EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Based on the findings of the present study, it is suggested that students can think about their reading process, improve a plan of action, monitor their own reading in order to construct their own knowledge, and self-evaluate their reading process. They are able to become autonomous readers, which is the aim of teaching reading for EFL students.
Assessment of the Influence of Organizational Structure on Implementation of Strategic Plans in Faith-Based Healthcare Institutions in Kitui County

Despite many faith-based healthcare institutions formulating the best strategic plans, implementation of these strategic plans remains a daunting task to the organizations. Many challenges have been cited as the main cause of this trend but internal factors influencing the implementation of strategic plans in faith-based healthcare institutions have not been adequately investigated. This paper was, therefore, an attempt to discuss the internal factors influencing the implementation of strategic plans in faith-based healthcare institutions in Kitui County. The paper assessed organizational structure as the main internal factor influencing implementation of strategic plans in faith-based healthcare institutions in Kitui County. The study employed descriptive survey research design. To ensure sufficient representation, the researcher obtained a stratified sample of 130 officers from 421 employees from the faith-based healthcare institutions in Kitui County. Data collection was through the use of questionnaires, interview and observation schedules. The data was analyzed through SPSS version 21, using both the descriptive and inferential statistics. Although there is no optimal organizational structure, the study recommended that organizations should have suitable structures which are aligned to the strategic objectives, are responsive to the environment, with clear responsibility for strategic plan implementation and delegation of authority.
Chapter 6 MODELING OF AMBULATORY HEART RATE USING LINEAR AND NEURAL NETWORK APPROACHES

This chapter presents new results on modeling 24 hour (circadian) human heart rate data colected with the LifeShirt system using a variety of linear regression and neural network models. Such modeling is important in biopsychology, chronobiology, and chronomedicine where signals colected continuously from human subjects for one or several days need to be interpreted. Ambulatory heart rate is influenced by a variety of factors, including physical activity, posture, and respiration, and our models try to predict heart rate based on these factors. The analyses described in the chapter indicate that neural and especialy neuro-fuzzy techniques provide beter results in the modeling of human heart rate at the circadian scale than conventional linear regression. The advantages of the neuro-fuzzy approaches consist in their computational efficiency, beter interpretability, and the possibility of incorporation of prior knowledge for easier model construction.
Active control of dispersion within a channel with flow and pulsating walls

Channels are fundamental building blocks from biophysics to soft robotics, often used to transport or separate solutes. As solute particles inevitably transverse between streamlines along the channel by molecular diffusion, the effective diffusion of the solute along the channel is enhanced - an effect known as Taylor dispersion. Here, we investigate how the Taylor dispersion effect can be suppressed or enhanced in different settings. Specifically, we study the impact of flow profile and active or pulsating channel walls on Taylor dispersion. We derive closed analytic expressions for the effective dispersion equation in all considered scenarios providing hands-on effective dispersion parameters for a multitude of applications. In particular, we find that active channel walls may lead to three regimes of dispersion: either dispersion decrease by entropic slow down at small Peclet number, or dispersion increase at large Peclet number dominated either by shuttle dispersion or by Taylor dispersion. This improves our understanding of solute transport e.g. in biological active systems such as blood flow and opens a number of possibilities to control solute transport in artificial systems such as soft robotics.
Safety and efficacy of lenalidomide (Len), bortezomib (Bz), and dexamethasone (Dex) in patients (pts) with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (MM): A phase I/II study

8520 Background: Single-agent Bz and Len/Dex are approved for pts with relapsed MM following ≥1 prior therapy. Len/Bz±Dex is active in relapsed/refractory MM, and Len/Dex and Bz/Dex are active in frontline MM. Primary objectives of this phase I/II study were to define the MTD and assess response rate to Len/Bz/Dex in previously untreated MM pts. Methods: Pts received Len 15–25mg on d 1–14, Bz 1.0–1.3mg/m2 on d 1, 4, 8, 11, and Dex 40/20mg (cycles 1–4/5–8) on day of and after Bz for up to eight 21-d cycles, initially at 4 planned dose levels (table). Dose escalation proceeded depending on dose-limiting toxicities (DLTs). Based on safety data, dose level 4M was added with a reduced Dex starting dose (20/10mg). Toxicities were graded by NCI CTCAE v3.0. Pts with G>2 peripheral neuropathy (PN) were excluded. Responses were assessed by modified EBMT and Uniform Criteria. Pts with ≥PR could proceed to ASCT after ≥4 cycles. Results: 66 pts have been enrolled to date. Data are available on 53 pts (median age 58 yr.
Monitoring Mechanism, Overvaluation, and Earnings Management

Prior research suggests that overvalued equity can exert market pressures on managers to inflate earnings. However, we posit that in a well-functioning capital market, external and internal monitoring mechanisms can deter such behaviors. Using U.S. data from 1987 to 2005, we test the market pressure hypothesis against the monitoring hypothesis. Consistent with the monitoring hypothesis, we find no statistical relation between the degree of overvaluation and future accruals or real earnings management for highly monitored firms, such as large companies, S&P 1500 companies, or companies followed by analysts. The market pressure hypothesis holds only when monitoring is weak. JEL Classification: G10, G34, M40, M52
Formation, Tentative Mass Spectrometric Identification, and Color Stability of Acetaldehyde-Catalyzed Condensation of Red Radish (Raphanus sativus) Anthocyanins and (+) Catechin

Red radish anthocyanins are relatively stable due to the acylation of anthocyanins with organic and phenolic acid moieties. The objective of this study was to create and identify a novel ethyl-bridged acylated anthocyanin with a stable violet color from red radishes in the presence of acetaldehyde and catechin. After incubation at ambient temperature for one week at 21 °C the reaction mixture with acetaldehyde and catechin turned from bright red to a vivid purple color. The newly formed compounds were tentatively identified with liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry. Color stability (CIE L*C*h) was monitored over six months at 21 °C and anthocyanin stability was evaluated by HPLC. Next, radishes were fermented by Zymomonas mobilis, a high acetaldehyde producing bacteria. Natural sources of catechin were used to replace the catechin standard, but the same purple color did not appear with the addition of cocoa powder or fava beans. The ethyliden-bridged radish anthocyanins possess excellent color stability and could serve as a natural food colorant.
Kalpa Publications in Computing

The era of PUFs has been characterized by the efforts put into research and the development of PUFs that are resilient against attacks, in particular, machine learning (ML) attacks. Due to the lack of systematic and provable methods for this purpose, we have witnessed the ever-continuing competition between PUF designers/ manufacturers, cryptanalysts, and of course, adversaries that maliciously break the security of PUFs. This is despite a series of acknowledged principles developed in cryptography and complexity theory, under the umbrella term “hardness amplification”. This paper aims at narrowing the gap between these studies and hardware security, specifically for applications in the domain of PUFs. To this end, this paper provides an example of somewhat hard PUFs and demonstrates how to build a strongly secure construction out of these considerably weaker primitives. Our theoretical findings are discussed in an exhaustive manner and supported by the silicon results captured from real-world PUFs.
Development of a 3D-Printable Ultra-High Performance Fiber-Reinforced Concrete for Digital Construction

This paper presents the systematic development and performance characterization of a non-proprietary 3D-printable ultra-high-performance fiber-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) for digital construction. Several fresh and hardened properties of the developed 3D-printable UHPFRC matrix (without fiber) and composite (with 2% volume fraction of steel fibers) were evaluated and compared to that of conventionally mold-cast UHPFRC. Additionally, the effects of testing direction on the compressive and flexural strengths of the printed UHPFRC were investigated. The fresh properties of the UHPFRC developed in this study satisfied the criteria for extrudability, buildability, and shape-retention-ability, which are relevant for ensuring printability. The printed UHPFRC exhibited superior flexural performance to the mold-cast UHPFRC due to alignment of the short fibers in the printing direction. The high compressive and flexural strengths, along with the deflection-hardening behavior, of the developed UHPFRC can enable the production of thin 3D-printed components with significant reduction or complete elimination of conventional steel bars.
Propofol inhibits stromatoxin-1-sensitive voltage-dependent K+ channels in pancreatic β-cells and enhances insulin secretion

Background Proper glycemic control is an important goal of critical care medicine, including perioperative patient care that can influence patients’ prognosis. Insulin secretion from pancreatic β-cells is generally assumed to play a critical role in glycemic control in response to an elevated blood glucose concentration. Many animal and human studies have demonstrated that perioperative drugs, including volatile anesthetics, have an impact on glucose-stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS). However, the effects of the intravenous anesthetic propofol on glucose metabolism and insulin sensitivity are largely unknown at present. Methods The effect of propofol on insulin secretion under low glucose or high glucose was examined in mouse MIN6 cells, rat INS-1 cells, and mouse pancreatic β-cells/islets. Cellular oxygen or energy metabolism was measured by Extracellular Flux Analyzer. Expression of glucose transporter 2 (GLUT2), potassium channels, and insulin mRNA was assessed by qRT-PCR. Protein expression of voltage-dependent potassium channels (Kv2) was also assessed by immunoblot. Propofol’s effects on potassium channels including stromatoxin-1-sensitive Kv channels and cellular oxygen and energy metabolisms were also examined. Results We showed that propofol, at clinically relevant doses, facilitates insulin secretion under low glucose conditions and GSIS in MIN6, INS-1 cells, and pancreatic β-cells/islets. Propofol did not affect intracellular ATP or ADP concentrations and cellular oxygen or energy metabolism. The mRNA expression of GLUT2 and channels including the voltage-dependent calcium channels Cav1.2, Kir6.2, and SUR1 subunit of KATP, and Kv2 were not affected by glucose or propofol. Finally, we demonstrated that propofol specifically blocks Kv currents in β-cells, resulting in insulin secretion in the presence of glucose. Conclusions Our data support the hypothesis that glucose induces membrane depolarization at the distal site, leading to KATP channel closure, and that the closure of Kv channels by propofol depolarization in β-cells enhances Ca2+ entry, leading to insulin secretion. Because its activity is dependent on GSIS, propofol and its derivatives are potential compounds that enhance and initiate β-cell electrical activity.
N ov 2 01 9 Individual-based models under various time-scales

Through the recent results that we present, we wish to highlight the various time-scales on which the demographic dynamics and the natural selection can be retrieved from individual-based models. Although these results are by no means exhaustive, both on the mathematical and the biological level, they are very complementary. Indeed, they provide a viewpoint for the most classical time-scales of interest. They namely encompass the time-scale of the life of a single individual, the longer one on which a population can be characterized, the ecological one and at least four nested ones on which selection occurs. The limiting behavior is generally deterministic. Yet, since the selection acts on the alea in the history of individuals, the probabilities are shown to be a key element of understanding. Besides, the scarcity of mutations fixing in the poplation also induces some stochasticity. Résumé : Les résultats récents présentés dans cet article décrivent des limites d’échelles de modèles individus-centrés. Grâce à eux, nous allons mettre en lumière les différentes échelles de temps caractéristiques des variations démographiques et de la sélection naturelle. L’objectif n’est pas d’être exhaustif, autant au niveau mathématique que biologique. Néanmoins, ces résultats sont très complémentaires car ils fournissent un aperçu des principales échelles de temps d’intérêt. Ils englobent notamment l’échelle de temps de la vie d’un individu, celle plus longue où la population peut être décrite comme une entité avec ses caractéristiques propres, celle démographique bien sûr, et au moins quatre autres échelles sur lesquelles la sélection joue un rôle. La dynamique limite est généralement déterministe. Pour autant, puisque l’action de la sélection se base sur l’aléa présent dans l’histoire des individus, les probabilités apparaissent comme un élément clé de compréhension. Par ailleurs, l’exceptionalité des événements de fixation de mutations induit aussi une stochasticité.
An Analysis of Verbal Numerical Aptitude: An Untold Story of Students in West Sumatera

Gender is believed to be one of factors that influence verbal aptitude and numerical aptitude. However, nowadays there are findings which reveal and seem breaking this belief. This research was conducted to prove the concepts related to gender in relation to the verbal aptitude and also numerical aptitude. The data of the research were collected from 633 respondents who are male and female. The research was used non parametric test by using U-test which found Sig 2 tailed 0,846 on verbal aptitude and 0,081 on numerical aptitude. The results of this study is there is no significant difference among verbal aptitude and numerical aptitude on male and female. Furthermore, it is assumed that the concept related to the difference of verbal and numerical aptitude cannot be generalized and it could be appeared on certain culture only
THE EFFECT OF VISUALIZING STATISTICAL INFORMATION IN BAYESIAN REASONING PROBLEMS

In this paper, we compare the effectiveness of two visualizations, i.e. the tree diagram and the unit square, in increasing people’s performance in Bayesian reasoning tasks. We summarize the results of three experiments with randomized samples of about nearly 300 university students. In the first experiment the students only had to compute ratios of different set-subset relations included in Bayesian situations. On step further, in the second experiment the students had to solve tasks by applying Bayes’ rule. In the third experiment we investigated the visualizations concerning the students’ ability to assess the impact of changing base rates in Bayesian situations. In all experiments there was empirical evidence for the unit square being more supportive. On this base we conducted a replication study with about 140 students in six different classes of lower secondary level to research on potential effects of mathematical education. The survey and the data-analysis of the fourth study are taking place currently. The results will be presented at the conference.
Thesis proposal Modeling Diversity in the Machine Learning Pipeline

Randomness is a foundation on which many aspects of the machine learning pipeline are built. From training models with stochastic gradient descent to tuning hyperparameters with random search, independent random sampling is ubiquitous. While independent sampling can be fast, it can also lead to undesirable properties, such as when samples are very similar. Abstaining from the independence assumption, we propose to examine the role of diversity in these samples, especially in cases where we have limited computation, limited space, or limited data. We address three applications: tuning hyperparameters, subsampling data, and ensemble generation. Hyperparameter optimization requires training and evaluating numerous models, which can often be time consuming. Random search allows for training and evaluating these models fully in parallel; we model diversity explicitly in this regime, and find that sets of hyperparameter assignments which are more diverse lead to better optima than conventional random search, a low discrepancy sequence, and even a sequential Bayesian optimization approach. Drawing a subset of a dataset is useful in many applications, such as when the full training set is too large to fit into memory. How these subsets are drawn is important, as their distribution may differ significantly from that of the full dataset, especially in the case when some labels are much more common than others. We address this by proposing to sample smaller datasets that are diverse, both in terms of labels and features. Ensembling models is a popular technique when minimizing task-specific errors is more important than computational efficiency or interpretability. Diversity among the models in an ensemble is directly tied to the the ensemble’s error, with more diversity often leading to lower error. We propose to apply our diversity promoting techniques to ensemble generation, first when selecting data to train the base models (as in bagging), and second when choosing which already-trained models will comprise an ensemble.
Improvement of Learning Independence and Learning Outcomes on Textile Course through Hybrid Learning Model

This study was aimed to find out the relationship between learning independence and learning outcomes, as well as to determine the effect of hybrid learning on students‟ learning outcomes. The design used in this study was Non-Equivalent Control Group Design, consisting of four treatment groups with various proportions of hybrid learning, three of which respectively were 50%, 60%, and 70%, while another group was a conventional group. This conventional group performed as the control group. The sample of this study was 104 students of the 10 th grade of Vocational High School majoring at Fashion study program. The data were collected using questionnaires and knowledge test, and analyzed using Anacova technique. The results of this study showed that (1) the significance of the relationship between learning independence and learning outcomes was 0.000, (2) the significance of the effect of hybrid learning on learning outcomes was 0.037, and (3) the highest average learning outcome was obtained by the treatment group with the proportion of hybrid learning of 60%.
How Do auDiT ProfeSSionalS influence conSTanT rePuTaTion THrouGH auDiT QualiTy of THai cerTifieD Public accounTanTS?

This study examines the audit professionals affect to constant reputation through audit quality. Audit professionals consist of audit knowledges and audit ethics which necessary attribute for auditor’s responsibilities. They mainly determine and issue opinions on firm’s financial statement report in which indicated the accurate firm’s situation. However, audit professionals directly impact to constant reputation but also they influence more on audit quality through constant reputation. All relationships are posited the positive effects. Moreover, the investigation of individual improvement as a moderator on the audit quality-constant reputation relationship is tested. Thus, samples are certified public accountants (CPA) that are accountable on audit reports. Questionnaire was used to collect data and examine by regression analysis. The results show the positive effects of audit professionals and audit quality, as well as constant reputation. They imply that both audit knowledges and audit ethics have an overall positive effect on audit quality and impact to constant reputation. Furthermore, audit quality-mediator of audit professionals-constant reputation relationships has just been occurred. Inclusively, an effect of moderator—individual improvement influence on the relationship between audit quality and constant reputation. Giving discussion is competently executed and remarkable future research is emerged. Theoretically, contributions and conclusions will also be purposed.