Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interpersonal Behavior, Laboratory Learning Environments, and Student Outcomes in Senior Biology Classes.

The purpose of this study was to investigate associations between students' perceptions of their biology teachers' interpersonal behavior and their laboratory learning environments and their attitudinal, achievement, and performance outcomes. A sample of 489 students from 28 senior biology classes in eight schools in Tasmania, Australia completed the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) and the Science Laboratory Environment Inventory (SLEI). Responses to two attitude questionnaires, achievement on an external written examination, and performance in laboratory practical tests were used as student outcome measures. Statistical analyses supported the reliability and validity of the QTI and the SLEI when used with senior secondary biology students. We investigated associations between students' perceptions of teacher behavior and their laboratory learning environment with student outcomes, including the unique and common contributions of the QTI and SLEI to variance in student outcomes. Associations with students' perceptions of the learning environment were stronger for the attitudinal outcomes than for the cognitive or practical skills outcomes. Some commonality between the QTI and SLEI scales was found in their contributions to the variance in attitudinal outcomes, but not in their contributions to variance in cognitive and practical skill outcomes. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 26–43, 2000
An “effects‐indicator” model of volunteer satisfaction: A functionalist theory approach

Abstract The purpose of this investigation was to develop and evaluate a causal model of volunteer satisfaction. The model includes three sets of concepts derived from functionalist theory. The first set includes a direct measure of the extent to which volunteer work experiences are satisfying psychological functions of volunteering. In addition, that set of variables includes measures of six traditional “cause‐indicators” from existing research on volunteer satisfaction in park and recreation settings. This set of variables is assumed to affect eudaimonic happiness, which is the effects‐indicator of satisfaction in the model. Eudaimonic happiness, in turn, is assumed to affect key volunteer worker attitudes and behaviours. Attitudes and behaviours included in the model are organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviour, and retention. Causal linkages among these three sets of variables were tested using a sample of 167 volunteers from two different park and recreation agencies. Path analysis techniques were used to refine the original model. The result is a model that specifies that nature of work and extent to which psychological functions are served affect volunteer happiness and commitment. Quality of supervision also affects commitment which, in turn, affects volunteer retention and organizational citizenship behaviour.
Men's Enjoyment of Explicit Erotica: Effects of Person-Specific Attitudes and Gender-Specific Norms

Through three studies, we examined how person‐specific sexual attitudes and gender‐specific sexual norms influence men's erotica enjoyment (operationalized as self‐regulated viewing of erotic slides). In Study 1, men viewed more erotica than did women, supporting a gender‐typing interpretation that legitimizes erotica enjoyment for men but condemns it for women. In Study 2, gender was a situational variable; men viewed erotica while alone, with a female co‐participant, or with a male co‐participant. As expected, female (but not male) presence inhibited men's enjoyment, suggesting that the female presence was associated with negative sentiments about erotica. In Study 3, the co‐participants explicitly expressed either a positive or negative sentiment about pornography. As predicted, only these expressed sentiments influenced erotica enjoyment; the gender‐based norms were no longer salient. Overall, the findings suggest that erotica enjoyment is a gender‐typed behavior and that a man's enjoyment is influenc.
Rapamycin Upregulates Autophagy by Inhibiting the mTOR-ULK1 Pathway, Resulting in Reduced Podocyte Injury

The podocyte functions as a glomerular filtration barrier. Autophagy of postmitotic cells is an important protective mechanism that is essential for maintaining the homeostasis of podocytes. Exploring an in vivo rat model of passive Heymann nephritis and an in vitro model of puromycin amino nucleotide (PAN)-cultured podocytes, we examined the specific mechanisms underlying changing autophagy levels and podocyte injury. In the passive Heymann nephritis model rats, the mammalian target-of-rapamycin (mTOR) levels were upregulated in injured podocytes while autophagy was inhibited. In PAN-treated podocytes, mTOR lowered the level of autophagy through the mTOR-ULK1 pathway resulting in damaged podocytes. Rapamycin treatment of these cells reduced podocyte injury by raising the levels of autophagy. These in vivo and in vitro experiments demonstrate that podocyte injury is associated with changes in autophagy levels, and that rapamycin can reduce podocyte injury by increasing autophagy levels via inhibition of the mTOR-ULK1 pathway. These results provide an important theoretical basis for future treatment of diseases involving podocyte injury.
A theory of humor

Humor, that certain psychological state which tends to produce laughter, isfully characterized by three conditions which individually are necessary and jointly sufficient for humor to occur. The conditions of this theory describe a subjective state of apparent emotional absurdity, where the perceived Situation is seen äs normal, and where, simultaneously, some affective commitment of the perceiver to the way something in the Situation ought to be is violated. This theory is explained in detail and its logical properties and empirical consequences are explored. Recognized properties of humor are explained (incongruity, surprise, aggression, emotional transformation, apparent comprehension difficulty, etc.). A wide variety of biological, sociallcommunicational, and other classes of humor related phenomena are characterized and explained in terms ofthe theory. Practical applications are suggested, including ways to figure out misunderStandings in everyday life. Humor is affective absurdity Across history from Aristotle to Freud, and across all the intellectual disciplines of the humanities and human sciences, thoughtful and sensitive people have always sought an understanding of the problem of humor. Humor is an inherently mysterious and interesting phenomenon which pervades human life. The serious study of it is "part of the field" (if only marginally) in a great many academic disciplines, including at least anthropology, the classics, Communications, education, linguistics, literature, medicine, philosophy, psychology, religious studies, Humor 11-2 (1998), 161-215 0933-1719/98/0011-161 © Walter de Gruyter
Wishart Mechanism for Differentially Private Principal Components Analysis

We propose a new input perturbation mechanism for publishing a covariance matrix to achieve (epsilon,0)-differential privacy. Our mechanism uses a Wishart distribution to generate matrix noise. In particular, we apply this mechanism to principal component analysis (PCA). Our mechanism is able to keep the positive semi-definiteness of the published covariance matrix. Thus, our approach gives rise to a general publishing framework for input perturbation of a symmetric positive semidefinite matrix. Moreover, compared with the classic Laplace mechanism, our method has better utility guarantee. To the best of our knowledge, the Wishart mechanism is the best input perturbation approach for (epsilon,0)-differentially private PCA. We also compare our work with previous exponential mechanism algorithms in the literature and provide near optimal bound while having more flexibility and less computational intractability.
Trematodes in Snails near Raccoon Latrines Suggest a Final Host Role for this Mammal

Of the 18 trematode species that use the horn snail, Cer- ithidea californica, as a first intermediate host, 6 have the potential to use raccoons as a final host. The presence of raccoon latrines in Car- pinteria Salt Marsh, California, allowed us to investigate associations between raccoons and trematodes in snails. Two trematode species, Pro- bolocoryphe uca and Stictodora hancocki, occurred at higher preva- lences in snails near raccoon latrines than in snails away from latrines, suggesting that raccoons may serve as final hosts for these species. Fecal remains indicated that raccoons fed on shore crabs, the second intermediate host for P. uca, and fish, the second intermediate host for S. hancocki. The increase in raccoon populations in the suburban areas surrounding west coast salt marshes could increase their importance as final hosts for trematodes in this system. ABSTRACT: Of the 18 trematode species that use the horn snail, Cer- ithidea californica, as a first intermediate host, 6 have the potential to use raccoons as a final host. The presence of raccoon latrines in Car- pinteria Salt Marsh, California, allowed us to investigate associations between raccoons and trematodes in snails. Two trematode species, Pro- bolocoryphe uca and Stictodora hancocki, occurred at higher preva- lences in snails near raccoon latrines than in snails away from latrines, suggesting that raccoons may serve as final hosts for these species. Fecal remains indicated that raccoons fed on shore crabs, the second intermediate host for P. uca, and fish, the second intermediate host for S. hancocki. The increase in raccoon populations in the suburban areas surrounding west coast salt marshes could increase their importance as final hosts for trematodes in this system.
THE ISOLATION OF POLIOMYELITIS VIRUS FROM HUMAN EXTRA-NEURAL SOURCES. II. COMPARISON OF VIRUS CONTENT OF BLOOD, OROPHARYNGEAL WASHINGS, AND STOOLS OF CONTACTS.

The first successful isolation from the nasopharynx of an asymptomatic contact was that reported by Flexner, Clark, and Fraser, in 1913 (1). Kling and Pettersson in 1914 (2) obtained positive results in one of three pools of nasopharyngeal washings collected from the immediate families of three patients. In 1932 and in 1935, Paul, Trask, and Webster (3, 4) were unable to demonstrate virus in nasopharyngeal washings of 24 contacts. No attempt to recover virus from the blood of contacts is known to have been reported heretofore. In contrast to these few positive results from the nasopharynx, stools of individuals exposed to the disease have yielded virus relatively frequently. Thus Kramer, Gilliam, and Molner in 1939 (5) reported isolation of virus from 4 of 20 well contacts and from 2 of 3 individuals with transient symptoms. Piszczek and his associates (6) found positive stools from 8 of 38 individuals exposed to poliomyelitis, and McClure and Langmuir (7) claim to have demonstrated virus in the feces of 10 of 14 well contacts, and 10 of 13 contacts with minor illnesses. This latter is an extraordinarily high score in contrast with the results of other workers. In the study by Wenner and Casey (8) stools of virtually the entire population of a small community were tested 7 to 12 weeks -after an outbreak of poliomyelitis occurred. Specimens from 62 individuals with minor illnesses and 108 with no symptoms were negative; one child with a vague antecedent illness had a positive stool on two occasions. Brown, Francis, and Pearson (9) detected virus in the stools of 5 of 6 close contacts of a patient with paralytic poliomyelitis 7 days after the onset of the patient's illness, while nasopharyngeal washings from 4 of the 5 positive contacts were negative. One of the positive contacts developed paralytic poliomyelitis 19 days after the positive specimen was obtained; nasopharyngeal washings of the same date were not tested. Pearson and his associates (10) in a community study during an epidemic found that 6 of 8 households representing 27 familial contacts and 8 of 45 households containing 80 non-familial contacts were positive for virus. In contrast, from only
Human Action Recognition

Human Action Recognition Human action recognition is an important topic of computer vision research and applications. The goal of the action recognition is an automated analysis of ongoing events from video data. A reliable system capable of recognizing various human actions has many important applications. The applications include surveillance systems, health-care systems, and a variety of systems that involve interactions between persons and electronic devices such as human-computer interfaces. In this project, the problem of human action recognition from video sequences is addressed. Human Action Recognition(HAR) for both Depth as well as RGB video sequences were analysed. In Depth based HAR, we propose two methods, first with the local features and second uses the global features. In both methods, l1minimization framework was employed for classification. Experiments were performed on Video Analytics Lab(VAL) dataset. For RGB based HAR, Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA) was used with Space Time Interest Points(STIP) feature descriptors. STIP effectively captures the local structure in spatio temporal dimensions of the video sequence. Each video sequence was represented as a ’bag-of-visual words’. Experiments were performed on WEIZMANN, KTH and Video Analytics Lab(VAL) databases in two scenarios, one in which number of topics for all actions were constant and manually chosen, another where number of topics for each action changed depending on human action categories.
Simplified soft-output demapper for binary interleaved COFDM with application to HIPERLAN/2

A comparison in the performance between hard- and soft-decision Viterbi decoding, with application to the HIPERLAN/2 standard, is presented. The results show that when channel state information (CSI) is included in the generation of the soft-decision information, the soft-decision method greatly outperforms the hard method. Moreover, a simplified algorithm for the soft-output demapper for the 16-QAM and 64-QAM constellations is developed, which allows the complexity of the demapper to be maintained at almost the same level for all the possible modes of HIPERLAN/2.
Adjuvant endocrine therapy alone in patients with node-positive, luminal A type breast cancer

Abstract Luminal A breast cancer has a much better prognosis than other subtypes, with a low risk of local or regional recurrence. However, there is controversy around under- versus overtreatment with regard to adjuvant treatment of node-positive, luminal A breast cancer. The purpose of this study was to identify whether adjuvant systemic chemotherapy has any benefit in node-positive, luminal A breast cancer and to evaluate feasibility of endocrine therapy without chemotherapy in this group. This was a retrospective study of 11,025 patients who were surgically treated for invasive breast cancer at Samsung Medical Center between January 2004 and December 2013. Luminal A subtype was defined as ER+, HER2-, and Ki-67 < 14%. We compared AC based (AC: doxorubicin or epirubicin, plus cyclophosphamide) adjuvant chemotherapy versus endocrine therapy without chemotherapy in patients with node-positive, luminal A breast cancer. We performed 1: n matching, with a maximum n of 8 on endocrine therapy group (n = 50) to chemotherapy group (n = 642). The median age of the patients in each group at the time of surgery was 58.3 ± 9.5 years in the chemotherapy group and 58.7 ± 11.7 in the endocrine therapy only group. The median follow-up time was 51.9 months (range, 1–125 months). In multivariable analysis, omission of adjuvant chemotherapy in luminal A cancer had no influence on OS and DFS. Axillary lymph node metastasis and progesterone receptor (PR) status were significantly different between the endocrine therapy alone group and the chemotherapy group in terms of OS. Nuclear grade, PR status, and adjuvant radiotherapy were significantly different between the endocrine therapy alone group and the chemotherapy group with regard to DFS. In survival analysis, there were no differences in OS (P = .137) and DFS (P = .225) between the 2 groups. Adjuvant chemotherapy could provide little benefit to postmenopausal patients with luminal A, node-positive breast cancer, and endocrine therapy alone may help reduce morbidity. Future studies with a large number of patients and longer follow-up time are necessary to determine whether chemotherapy might be avoided in this patient population.
Social Justice, Integrated Development Planning and Post-apartheid Urban Reconstruction

The paper focuses on the intersection between South African urban reconstruction and the development of social justice debates in urban geography. Drawing on a case study located in the Cape Metropolitan Region of South Africa, this investigation illustrates how decision-makers have implemented a planning strategy referred to as integrated development planning (IDP) to aid post- apartheid urban reconstruction. In so doing, the paper shows how this mechanism draws upon the spatial imagination as a method of (re)directing the development of this city. Moreover, the case study demonstrates how an imagined urban space, expressed in the planning system of the IDP, functions as a device by which shared understandings of social justice are enabled. Finally, the paper reflects on how these findings might (re)direct the theoretical development of the social justice concept in geographical and urban planning debates.
Social Skills Deficits in Learning Disabilities: The Psychiatric Comorbidity Hypothesis

The hypothesis that social skills deficits in learning disabilities may reflect the comorbidity of learning disabilities with psychiatric diagnoses is partially supported by prevalence rates of learning disabilities within samples of individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depressive or dysthymic disorder. The maladaptive social skills patterns of children with specific subtypes of learning disabilities appear to mimic the symptom patterns of children with ADHD, depression or dysthymia, thus providing additional support for the psychiatric comorbidity hypothesis. This article includes a discussion of the implications of a psychiatric comorbidity hypothesis for increased special education support, further delineation of subtypes of learning disabilities, therapeutic, psychological or psychopharmacologic treatment, and collaborative efforts between professionals in mental health and learning disabilities.
Approaches to the early treatment of invasive fungal infection

Invasive fungal infections account for significant morbidity and mortality in the seriously immunocompromised host, especially those suffering from hematologic malignancies and the recipients of hematopoietic cell transplant. One of the reasons for the continuing high mortality rates due to invasive fungal infection is the delay in administering appropriate therapy. As preemptive antifungal therapy is not feasible for lack of a predictive test, early empiric therapy is currently the only approach likely to result in improvement in survival. Here, we present our approach to both invasive candidiasis and invasive mold infection. Therapy should be initiated at the first signs and symptoms of disease, utilizing knowledge of local fungal epidemiology, the patient's recent antifungal agent exposure, and the diagnostic tests immediately available, to select an appropriate antifungal agent most likely to be effective against the suspected fungal species.
The Evolution of Methotrexate as a Treatment for Ectopic Pregnancy and Gestational Trophoblastic Neoplasia: A Review

Methotrexate was developed in 1949 as a synthetic folic acid analogue to compete with folic acid and thus interfere with cell replication. While initially developed as a potential treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a serendipitous observation led to methotrexate's use to effect the dramatic cure of a case of advanced choriocarcinoma. This prompted the exploration for the potential of methotrexate to treat other conditions involving disordered trophoblastic tissue. Methotrexate has subsequently revolutionized the treatment of two pregnancy-related conditions—gestational trophoblastic neoplasia and ectopic pregnancy. This article reviews the development of modern treatment protocols that use methotrexate to medically treat these two important gynaecological conditions.
The Web as a Baseline: Evaluating the Performance of Unsupervised Web-based Models for a Range of NLP Tasks

Previous work demonstrated that web counts can be used to approximate bigram frequencies, and thus should be useful for a wide variety of NLP tasks. So far, only two generation tasks (candidate selection for machine translation and confusion-set disambiguation) have been tested using web-scale data sets. The present paper investigates if these results generalize to tasks covering both syntax and semantics, both generation and analysis, and a larger range of n-grams. For the majority of tasks, we find that simple, unsupervised models perform better when n-gram frequencies are obtained from the web rather than from a large corpus. However, in most cases, web-based models fail to outperform more sophisticated state-of-theart models trained on small corpora. We argue that web-based models should therefore be used as a baseline for, rather than an alternative to, standard models.
PlanetData Network of Excellence FP 7 – 257641 D 1 . 3 Efficient sensor data management techniques Coordinator :

This deliverable surveys the state-of-the-art techniques for model-based sensor data acquisition and management. In particular, we presented a comprehensive overview of the various aspects of model-based sensor data acquisition and management. Primarily, the objectives of the model-based techniques are efficient data acquisition, handling missing data, outlier detection, data compression, data aggregation and summarization.
Sense of Belonging to School: Can Schools Make a Difference?

Abstract Using education survey data from 6,883 Grade 6 students in 148 schools and from 6,868 Grade 8 students in 92 schools in New Brunswick, Canada, the author applied student and school characteristics to explain differences among students and schools regarding students' sense of belonging to school. Results of hierarchical linear modeling showed that in Grades 6 and 8, discrepancies in students' sense of belonging were mainly within schools, rather than between schools. At the student level, sense of belonging in both grades was affected more by students' mental and physical conditions and less by their individual and family characteristics. Students' self-esteem was the single most important predictor of their sense of belonging, followed by their health status. At the school level, school climate (academic press or expectation in Grade 6 and disciplinary climate in Grade 8) was more important than school context in shaping students' sense of belonging.
A Semantic Subsystem of Visual Attributes

Abstract We propose that the many different forms of selective semantic impairment that have been reported over the past 20 years may be classified into three general classes: semantic-category selective, modality-of-input selective, and semantic-attribute selective. Particular patients may exhibit more than one form of selectivity, i.e. there can be doubly and perhaps even triply selective semantic impairments. We then describe a patient with a singly selective semantic impairment of a form not previously described: he was unable to access visual semantic attributes in semantic memory, whereas he could access semantic attributes relevant to other sensory modalities, and could also access non-perceptual semantic attributes. This pattern of results was independent both of modality of input and of semantic category of probed item. We infer from these data the existence of a semantic subsystem specific to the storage of information about visual attributes of animate and inanimate objects. An ERP study of sem.