Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The discourse of interculturality and its transnational migration: towards a comparative analysis of its appropriation by academic and political actors in the state of Veracruz

This paper analyses the ways in which social and educational networks are being configured around the actors participating in the increasingly transnational field of intercultural education both at the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural and the Veracruz State Ministry of Education. It starts by defining the notion of discursive migration as conceptual transformations that occur when particular discourses cross certain national as well as disciplinary frontiers, such as the constant exchange of the heterogeneous notions of multi‐ and interculturality in the case of the field of ‘intercultural studies’, which stem from different Anglo‐Saxon as well as continental European and Latin American origins, but which are currently applied to the post‐indigenista situation of ‘indigenous education’ in Mexico. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two different institutions in the state of Veracruz, the appropriation and reinterpretation of, as well as the resistance against, the discourse of interculturality are studied by comparing the training of ‘intercultural and bilingual’ teachers through the state educational authorities and the notion of intercultural education, as applied within the so‐called ‘Intercultural University of Veracruz’. En este trabajo se analiza la forma en que se compone y transforma la noción de interculturalidad, lo cual es analizado a través del trabajo etnográfico realizado en dos instituciones educativas del estado mexicano de Veracruz: en la Secretaría de Educación estatal, por un lado, y en la Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural, por otro. El estudio cobra importancia debido a que en la actualidad la interculturalidad se ha convertido en el eje central de diversos procesos formativos. Las interrogantes que guían el trabajo son: ¿Cuál es el significado que adquiere en los diferentes contextos la interculturalidad? ¿Cómo se significa o resignifica la interculturalidad en los actores académicos y políticos? ¿Y qué sucede con el discurso sobre la interculturalidad cuando ‘migra’? Para responder a lo anterior, en un primer momento mostramos la problemática a estudiar, la forma en la que los discursos cambian de sentido. Posteriormente, presentamos la manera en que el discurso intercultural es transferido a través de la adaptación de categorías relacionadas con el análisis de transferencia de conocimientos. Finalmente, distinguimos el carácter ‘migratorio’ de este.
Estimation of externalities in interdependent security: A case study of large systems

With increasing connectivity among comprising agents or (sub-)systems in complex systems, there is a growing interest in better understanding interdependent security and finding an effective means of dealing with inefficiency in security investments. As a first step toward this goal, we study the problem of approximating the total contributions of agents to social cost, which differ from their private costs, with the help of a population game and the Chung-Lu random graph model. We first establish an interesting relation between the local minimizers of social cost and the Nash equilibria of a population game with slightly altered costs. Second, under a mild technical assumption, we demonstrate that there exists a unique minimizer of social cost and it coincides with the unique Nash equilibrium of the aforementioned population game. This finding tells us how to modify the private cost functions of selfish agents in order to encourage additional investments in security, in the process improving social efficiency.
Popular education in Latin America: a technology for the North?

The transfer of technology from the USA and other Northern Hemisphere powers (Japan and Germany, for example) is ubiquitous. From ’free market’ economics to television and music, the industrial countries have dominated the creation and diffusion of technologies. However, the industrial nations can also learn from the developing world. Social work in the USA has not often looked toward developing countries for ideas. Some promising work in this regard is that of Walz et al. (1990) in applying Gandhian ideas to social work. As their work illustrates, intellectuals and social workers in developing countries working in situations with large problems and scarce resources have developed useful ideas and methods. Certainly social workers in the North encountering large problems with scarce resources can benefit from additional ideas and technologies. In the case of Latin America two important ideas deserve examination for their usefulness in the North: liberation theology and popular education. These perspectives are distinctly Latin American in origin with both intending to assist people to change their situation. While there are social workers in the North who are familiar with these ideas, they have not received widespread attention. Of course the cultural context which led to the creation of these ideas may be so unique that it is not possible to transfer these ideas out of this context. However, this is a question deserving of examination. This article is an examination of the idea of popular education and its potential as a method for social work in the North. Popular education as it is practiced in Latin America is described, its potential for use in the very different cultural context of the USA is
An exploration of therapists' reactions to working with children displaying sexually problematic behaviour: a thematic analytic study

Nine therapists were interviewed regarding their reactions to children displaying sexually problematic behaviour and how they managed these reactions. The framework of countertransference was used to understand therapists' reactions. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The participants reported a wide range of powerful and intense reactions including powerlessness, feeling deskilled, fear, shock, having sexual feelings and feeling like an abuser. They described a number of personal changes in themselves including personal growth and becoming less trusting. They also reported using various personal and professional resources to manage their reactions. Working with children displaying sexually problematic behaviour can evoke powerful reactions in therapists and other professionals who work with these children. It is therefore important to raise awareness of the impact of working with these children and normalise therapists' experiences so that they can be more open and active in seeking support when needed. Further implications for practice and future research are also discussed.
Spectrally adapted mercer kernels for support vector signal interpolation

Interpolation of nonuniformly sampled signals in the presence of noise is a hard and deeply analyzed problem. On the one hand, classical approaches like the Wiener filter use the second order statistics of the signal, and hence its spectrum, as a priori knowledge for finding the solution. On the other hand, Support Vector Machines (SVM) with Gaussian and sinc Mercer kernels have been previously proposed for time series interpolation, with good properties in terms of regularization and sparseness. Hence, in this paper we propose to use SVM-based algorithms with kernels having their spectra adapted to the signal spectrum, and to analyze their suitability for nonuniform interpolation. For this purpose, we investigate the performance of the SVM with autocorrelation kernels for one-dimensional time series interpolation. Simulations with synthetic signals show that SVM-based algorithms with the proposed kernels provide good performance for signals with different kinds of spectrum, even in the case of highly nonuniform sampling.
SELECTION OF VARYING SPATIALLY ADAPTIVE REGULARIZATION PARAMETER FOR IMAGE DECONVOLUTION

The deconvolution in image processing is an inverse illposed problem which necessitates a trade-off between delity to data and smoothness of a solution adjusted by a regularization parameter. In this paper we propose two techniques for selection of a varying regularization parameter minimizing the mean squared error for every pixel of the image. The rst algorithm uses the estimate of the squared point-wise bias of the regularized inverse. The second algorithm is based on direct multiple statistical hypothesis testing for the estimates calculated with different regularization parameters. The simulation results on images illustrate the ef ciency of the proposed technique.
Sliding Window Based Machine Learning System for the Left Ventricle Localization in MR Cardiac Images

The most commonly encountered problem in vision systems includes its capability to suffice for different scenes containing the object of interest to be detected. Generally, the different backgrounds in which the objects of interest are contained significantly dwindle the performance of vision systems. In this work, we design a sliding windows machine learning system for the recognition and detection of left ventricles in MR cardiac images. We leverage on the capability of artificial neural networks to cope with some of the inevitable scene constraints encountered in medical objects detection tasks. We train a backpropagation neural network on samples of left and nonleft ventricles. We reformulate the left ventricles detection task as a machine learning problem and employ an intelligent system (backpropagation neural network) to achieve the detection task. We treat the left ventricle detection problem as binary classification tasks by assigning collected left ventricle samples as one class, and random (nonleft ventricles) objects are the other class. The trained backpropagation neural network is validated to possess a good generalization power by simulating it with a test set. A recognition rate of 100% and 88% is achieved on the training and test set, respectively. The trained backpropagation neural network is used to determine if the sampled region in a target image contains a left ventricle or not. Lastly, we show the effectiveness of the proposed system by comparing the manual detection of left ventricles drawn by medical experts and the automatic detection by the trained network.
Toll-Like Receptor 2 Deficiency Is Associated with Enhanced Severity of Group B Streptococcal Disease

ABSTRACT Group B streptococcus (GBS) has been recognized as an ever-growing cause of serious invasive infections in nonpregnant adults, in particular, in association with severe underlying diseases. The most common manifestations include primary bacteremia, urinary tract infections, pneumonia, meningitis, peritonitis, and osteoarticular infections. Toll-like receptor-2 (TLR2) mediates host responses to gram-positive bacteria. TLR2 function was investigated in murine GBS-induced sepsis and arthritis in wild-type (wt) and TLR2-deficient (TLR2−/−) mice. Mice were infected with different doses of GBS (107, 5 × 106, or 106 CFU per mouse). Mortality, appearance of arthritis, GBS growth in the organs, and local and systemic cytokine and chemokine production were examined. TLR2−/− mice showed earlier and higher mortality rates and increased incidence and severity of arthritis than wt mice at all the infecting doses employed. Histopathological analysis of the joints confirmed clinical observations. TLR2−/− mice exhibited a higher microbial load in blood, kidneys, and joints than wt animals. In vitro experiments performed with peritoneal polymorphonuclear cells and macrophages showed a significantly lower bactericidal ability of cells from TLR2−/− mice. Increased systemic and local levels of interleukin-1β (IL-1β), IL-6, tumor necrosis factor alpha, macrophage inflammatory protein-1α (MIP-1α), and MIP-2 accompanied the more severe development of sepsis and arthritis in TLR2−/− mice. In conclusion, the lack of TLR2 was associated with an impaired host resistance to GBS infection, likely due to a diminished bacterial clearing and a consequent enhanced inflammatory response.
A Principled Infotheoretic \phi-like Measure

Integrated information theory is a mathematical, quantifiable theory of conscious experience. The linchpin of this theory, the $\phi$ measure, quantifies a system's irreducibility to disjoint parts. Purely as a measure of irreducibility, we pinpoint three concerns about $\phi$ and propose a revised measure, $\psi$, which addresses them. Our measure $\psi$ is rigorously grounded in Partial Information Decomposition and is faster to compute than $\phi$.
EMG controlled multifunctional prosthetic hand: Preliminary clinical study and experimental demonstration

This paper presents our new progress on research of electromyography (EMG) controlled prosthetic hand. Preliminary clinical study is conducted on amputees. EMG data from the residual muscles of three amputees are used to evaluate the new features, discriminant bispectra (DBS) and discriminant Fourier cepstrum (DFC). The performance is also compared with other traditional features, autoregressive (AR) coefficient, time domain statics (TDS), and power spectral distribution (PSD). Some promising results are presented. It shows that DFC and DBS outperforms the other features. The implementation of EMG algorithm is accomplished. Based on the prosthetic hand (SJT-2 hand), experimental demonstration is conducted by both healthy and amputated subjects.
Children's Reactions to a War Situation as a Function of Age and Sex

The goal of the study was to assess children's reactions to the stress induced by the 1991 Gulf War as a function of gender and age. It was conducted during the third week of the 1991 Gulf War in Israel. The participants were 229 boys and 189 girls who attended the 2nd, 6th, and 10th grades. They were asked to report behavior problems (for before and during the war), anxiety level (before and during the war), and war-related symptomatic behavior. The findings indicate that the war had an adverse effect on the well being of children, in particular girls. Girls in comparison to boys reported higher levels of anxiety and more behavior problems for the war period as well as more war related symptoms. Gender differences were mostly found for the data relating to the war period and not for the pre-war period. Age moderated the effect of gender on war related symptoms and on anxiety. Whereas among the younger children (2nd grade) no gender effects were found, among the older ones (6th and 10th grades) the gender effects were apparent. In sum (a) the Gulf war had an adverse effect on the well being of children, in particular on the well being of girls. (b) The gender effects appeared only among the older children.
Implicit False Memory: Effects of Modality and Multiple Study Presentations on Long-Lived Semantic Priming

In the Deese paradigm, studying a list of semantic associates (holiday, beach, etc.) produces false explicit memory for a nonpresented lure (vacation). Here, we examine false memory with implicit retrieval. Experiment 1 tested memory for lures and matched on-list targets, using stem completion (implicit) and stem-cued recall (explicit). We replicated McDermott's (1997) finding of implicit false memory at a 10-min delay, using better controls for explicit contamination. In Experiment 2, we show that this semantic priming is modality-specific (on the visual test, lure priming was reduced with auditory study of the semantic associates), consistent with the perceptual nature of stem completion. In Experiment 3, additional study presentations reduced false memory with explicit, but not implicit, retrieval, consistent with suppression of gist-based responses by veridical information only when explicit retrieval is required. Results also dissociate implicit and explicit false memory and demonstrate similarities between false and true memories with implicit retrieval.
Students helping students: a learning partnership initiative for distance language learners

This study looks at the effectiveness of an intervention to improve student retention on a distance language course. Of the six beginners' language courses offered by the UK's Open University, the beginners' Welsh course has consistently had the lowest retention rates since it was first presented in 2008. In order to address this, a project was launched where learners were paired with native or highly competent speakers. Learners reported that such partnerships helped them with key skill areas such as learning vocabulary and understanding spoken Welsh, as well as strengthening their motivation to complete the course. Of the students who agreed to take part in the initiative, 72% of them completed the course, whereas only 25% of those who chose not to take part actually completed. Funding for many courses is very often linked to retention rates and this type of initiative could be adapted to suit various types of courses to help increase students' motivation to continue.
Entire mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway is present in preimplantation mouse embryos

To understand how mitogenic signals are transduced into the trophoblasts in preimplantation embryos, the expression of mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway molecules was tested. We used immunocytochemical means and reverse transcriptase‐polymerase chain reaction to test whether MAPK pathway molecule gene products exist at the protein and phosphoprotein level in the zygote and the RNA level in the egg and zygote. In addition, all antibodies detected the correct‐sized major band in Westerns of placental cell lines representing the most prevalent cell type in preimplantation embryos. A majority of mRNA transcripts of MAPK pathway genes were detected in unfertilized eggs, and all were expressed in the zygote. We found that the MAPK pathway protein set consisting of the following gene products was present: FRS2α, GRB2, GAB1, SOS1, Ha‐ras, Raf1/RafB, MEK1,2,5, MAPK/ERK1,2, MAPK/ERK5, and RSK1,2,3 (see abbreviations). These proteins were detected in trophoblasts in embryonic day (E) 3.5 embryos when they could mediate mitogenic fibroblast growth factor signals from the embryo or colony stimulating factor‐1 signals from the uterus. The phosphorylation state and position of the phosphoproteins in the cells suggested that they might function in mediating mitogenic signals. Interestingly, a subtle transition from maternal MAPK function to zygotic function was suggested by the localization for three MAPK pathway enzymes between E2.5 and E3.5, Raf1 phospho is largely cell membrane‐localized at E2.5 and E3.5, and MEK1,2 phospho accumulates in the nucleus on E2.5 and E3.5. However, MAPK phospho shifts from nuclear accumulation at E2.5 to cytoplasmic accumulation at E3.5. This finding is similar to the cytoplasmic MAPK phospho localization reported in fibroblast growth factor signaling fields in postimplantation embryos (Corson et al. [ 2003 ] Development 130:4527–4537). This spatial and temporal expression study lays a foundation to plan and analyze perturbation studies aimed at understanding the role of the major mitogenic pathway in preimplantation mouse embryos. Developmental Dynamics 231:72–87, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
What makes categories difficult to classify?: a study on predicting classification performance for categories

In this paper, we try to predict which category will be less accurately classified compared with other categories in a classification task that involves multiple categories. The categories with poor predicted performance will be identified before any classifiers are trained and additional steps can be taken to address the predicted poor accuracies of these categories. Inspired by the work on query performance prediction in ad-hoc retrieval, we propose to predict classification performance using two measures, namely, category size and category coherence. Our experiments on 20-Newsgroup and Reuters-21578 datasets show that the Spearman rank correlation coefficient between the predicted rank of classification performance and the expected classification accuracy is as high as 0.9.
The VuNet Desk Area Network: Architecture, Implementaion, and Experience

The VuNet is a gigabit-per-second desk-area ATM network that interconnects general-purpose workstations, network-based multimedia devices, and bridges to other networks, workstations access the multimedia devices over the network and coordinate the movement of information streams among the different parts of the system. This architecture presents several advantages over the traditional workstation-centric models, including the ability to easily share network-based devices, to access nonlocal devices, and to relieve the workstation of a portion of the I/O work. This paper describes the philosophy, implementation choices, advantages, and limitations of the VuNet ATM network implementation, as well as performance and current status. >
Video games and the elderly

We studied the effects of playing video games (Super Tetris) on the reaction time, cognitive/perceptual adaptability, and emotional well-being of 22 non-institutionalized elderly people aged 69 to 90. Volunteers in an elderly community in the Netherlands were randomly assigned to a videogame-playing experimental group or a non-playing control group. The televisions of the 10 videogame players were provided with Nintendo SuperNes systems. Participants played Super Tetris 5 hours a week for 5 weeks, and maintained a log of their play. Before and after this play period, measures of reaction time (Sternberg Test), cognitive/perceptual adaptability (Stroop Color Word Test), and emotional well-being (self-report questionnaire) were administered. Playing video games was related to a significant improvement in the Sternberg reaction time task, and to a relative increase in self-reported well-being. On the Stroop Color Word Test, both the experimental and control groups improved significantly, but the difference between groups was not statistically significant. The videogame-playing group had faster reaction times and felt a more positive sense of well-being compared to their nonplaying counterparts. Consistent with previous research on video games and the elderly, the present study finds the strongest effects on measures of reaction time, and the weakest effects on cognitive performance measures. Explanations and alternative interpretations of these findings are discussed.