Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Working with Me, Working at Me: Fathers' Narratives of Child Welfare

This article examines the experiences of fathers involved in the child welfare system. Fathers who were interviewed as part of a multiyear Canadian project were atypical in that they were actively engaged with the child welfare system. Their stories show how, although not always physically present, child welfare's ghostly form is still very much a part of the daily lives of fathers and their families. These fathers had to be resourceful and resilient as they endeavored to look “promising” to the child welfare system. The critical analysis offers insights into a more father-inclusive approach to child welfare that has implications for policy and practice development.
Modulation of Plasma Membrane H+-ATPase Activity Differentially Activates Wound and Pathogen Defense Responses in Tomato Plants

Systemin is an important mediator of wound-induced defense gene activation in tomato plants, and it elicits a rapid alkalinization of the growth medium of cultured Lycopersicon peruvianum cells. A possible mechanistic link between proton fluxes across the plasma membrane and the induction of defense genes was investigated by modulating plasma membrane H+-ATPase activity. Inhibitors of H+-ATPase (erythrosin B, diethyl stilbestrol, and vanadate) were found to alkalinize the growth medium of L. peruvianum cell cultures and to induce wound response genes in whole tomato plants. Conversely, an activator of the H+-ATPase (fusicoccin) acidified the growth medium of L. peruvianum cell cultures and suppressed systemin-induced medium alkalinization. Likewise, in fusicoccin-treated tomato plants, the wound- and systemin-triggered accumulation of wound-responsive mRNAs was found to be suppressed. However, fusicoccin treatment of tomato plants led to the accumulation of salicylic acid and the expression of pathogenesis-related genes. Apparently, the wound and pathogen defense signaling pathways are differentially regulated by changes in the proton electrochemical gradient across the plasma membrane. In addition, alkalinization of the L. peruvianum cell culture medium was found to depend on the influx of Ca2+ and the activity of a protein kinase. Reversible protein phosphorylation was also shown to be involved in the induction of wound response genes. The plasma membrane H+-ATPase as a possible target of a Ca2+-activated protein kinase and its role in defense signaling are discussed.
A Home‐based Description of Attachment in Physically Disabled Infants

This study investigated attachment security and behavior in 34 physically disabled infants and 26 non-disabled infants by using convergent, categorical (secure, avoidant and ambivalent) and continuous (Attachment Behavior Q-Set) measures of the relationship, based on the same set of home observations. Proportions of attachment classifications were not different for disabled and non-disabled infants, but insecure infants in the disabled group scored consistently lower on the AQS security score than non-disabled insecure infants. This result suggests that while proportions of attachment classifications may not vary as a function of infant status, insecure disabled infants are more insecure than insecure non-disabled infants. An analysis of 5 behavioral dimensions of the AQS showed that secure infants emitted the same kinds of attachment behaviors without regard for infant status. Insecure disabled infants, however, showed lower levels of secure base behavior and physical contact with mother than their non-disabled counterparts, and showed a marginal tendency to fuss more as well. Discussion focuses on the potential benefits of using convergent, categorical and continuous measures of attachment in the study of both typical and atypical groups of infants.
A 10-bit 250MS/s pipelined ADC with a merged S/H & 1st stage using an optimal opamp sharing technique

This paper presents a very high-speed low-power 10bit pipelined ADC in a 90nm CMOS technology. A modified opamp-sharing technique is proposed which enables merging the S/H and first stage with optimum power saving. The new technique saves power by changing the bias currents of the input and output stages of the amplifier. Stage scaling and low power dynamic comparators are also utilized to reduce power consumption more effectively. Using this approach, a 10-bit 250MSample/s pipelined ADC has been designed in a 90nm CMOS technology. According to HSPICE simulation results, the ADC achieves a 54.5dB SNDR with a nyquist-rate, 1Vp-p, diff input signal while consuming only 29mW with a 1V supply voltage.
Comparing and combining retrieval practice and the keyword mnemonic for foreign vocabulary learning.

Experiment 1 compared the effectiveness of retrieval practice, the keyword mnemonic and rote rehearsal for learning foreign language vocabulary. Both mnemonic methods produced similar recall and were superior to rote rehearsal. In Experiment 2, participants learned German vocabulary using keywords, retrieval practice or their own method. Retrieval practice and keyword-based recall were similar and superior to self-directed study. In Experiment 3, participants studied using keywords, retrieval practice, a combination or an elaboration strategy. Criterion testing occurred immediately and after a week. For receptive learning, retrieval practice and keywords were equally beneficial but for productive learning, retrieval practice was more effective. Combining strategies produced mixed results with significant benefits only for receptive learning in the delayed test. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Conformation of L-tyrosine studied by fluorescence-detected UV-UV and IR-UV double-resonance spectroscopy.

The laser-induced fluorescence spectrum of jet-cooled L-tyrosine exhibits more than 20 vibronic bands in the 35450-35750 cm(-1) region. We attribute these bands to eight conformers by using results of UV-UV hole-burning spectroscopy. These isomers are classified into four groups; each group consists of two rotational isomers that have a similar side-chain conformation but different orientations of the phenolic OH. The splitting of band origins of rotational isomers is 31, 21, 5, and 0 cm(-1) for these groups. IR-UV spectra suggest that conformers belonging to two of the four groups have an intramolecular OH.N hydrogen bond between the COOH and NH2 groups. By comparing experimental and theoretical results of L-tyrosine with those of L-phenylalanine, we propose probable conformers of L-tyrosine.
Comparative Response of Platelet fV and Plasma fV to Activated Protein C and Relevance to a Model of Acute Traumatic Coagulopathy

Background Acute traumatic coagulopathy (ATC) has been linked to an increase in activated protein C (aPC) from 40 pM in healthy individuals to 175 pM. aPC exerts its activity primarily through cleavage of active coagulation factor Va (fVa). Platelets reportedly possess fVa which is more resistant to aPC cleavage than plasma fVa; this work examines the hypothesis that normal platelets are sufficient to maintain coagulation in the presence of elevated aPC. Methods Coagulation responses of normal plasma, fV deficient plasma (fVdp), and isolated normal platelets in fVdp were conducted: prothrombin (PT) tests, turbidimetry, and thromboelastography (TEG), including the dose response of aPC on the samples. Results PT and turbidimetric assays demonstrate that normal plasma is resistant to aPC at doses much higher than those found in ATC. Additionally, an average physiological number of washed normal platelets (200,000 platelets/mm3) was sufficient to eliminate the anti-coagulant effects of aPC up to 10 nM, nearly two orders of magnitude above the ATC concentration and even the steady-state pharmacological concentration of human recombinant aPC, as measured by TEG. aPC also demonstrated no significant effect on clot lysis in normal plasma samples with or without platelets. Conclusions Although platelet fVa shows slightly superior resistance to aPC's effects compared to plasma fVa in static models, neither fVa is sufficiently cleaved in simulations of ATC or pharmacologically-delivered aPC to diminish coagulation parameters. aPC is likely a correlative indicator of ATC or may play a cooperative role with other activity altering products generated in ATC.
Reliable Pitch Marking of Affective Speech at Peaks or Valleys Using Restricted Dynamic Programming

The affective communication channel plays a key role in multimodal human-computer interaction. In this context, the generation of realistic talking-heads expressing emotions both in appearance and speech is of great interest. The synthetic speech of talking-heads is generally obtained from a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer. One of the dominant techniques for achieving high-quality synthetic speech is unit-selection TTS (US-TTS) synthesis. Affective US-TTS systems are driven by affective annotated speech databases. Since affective speech involves higher acoustic variability than neutral speech, achieving trustworthy speech labeling is a more challenging task. To that effect, this paper introduces a methodology for achieving reliable pitch marking on affective speech. The proposal adjusts the pitch marks at the signal peaks or valleys after applying a three-stage restricted dynamic programming algorithm. The methodology can be applied as a post-processing of any pitch determination and pitch marking algorithm (with any local criterion for locating pitch marks), or their merging. The experiments show that the proposed methodology significantly improves the results of the input state-of-the-art markers on affective speech.
Modelling the half-bridge dc-dc converter with selfheating taken into account

This paper concerns to modelling components of the half-bridge converter. The electrothermal models of the impulse-transformer and semiconductor devices, being the essential components of dc-dc converters, are presented. The converters with transformers containing in turn powder cores, ferrite cores and nanocrystalline cores are examined. The results of measurements of this circuit and the results of its computations obtained with the use of the presented electrothermal models and the classical models of the considered elements are presented. The usefulness of the proposed models of components of the considered converter is discussed, and also the influence of the applied electrothermal model of the transformer on differences between the results of calculations and measurements are evaluated.
Supporting Instructional Improvement in Low-Performing Schools to Increase Students’ Academic Achievement

ABSTRACT This is an impact evaluation of the Technical Support to Failing Schools Program, a Chilean compensatory program that provided 4-year in-school technical assistance to low-performing schools to improve students’ academic achievement. The author implemented a quasi-experimental design by using difference-in-differences estimation combined with propensity scores matching procedures to estimate treatment effects. The main findings were the following: (a) the program had positive effects on fourth-grade students’ achievement in both language and mathematics; (b) program effect size was 0.23 standard deviations, and not sensitive to control for covariates; (c) there were larger effects for students in the middle part of the students’ test-score distribution; (d) after the intervention had ceased, the program impact declined rapidly; and (e) the program reduced grade retention by 1.5 percentage points.
Coming to Terms with Power Lines

Though infrastructure planning and provision often unsettle homeowners and communities, facilitating research has been sporadic. Via a qualitative design, this article studies homeowners’ perceptions of high-voltage overhead transmission lines (HVOTLs) with respect of design, cost differentials, health effects, safety issues, visual and noise impacts, environmental damage and interference with property rights. The results support inductive modelling which situates and theorizes the risk associated with power line placement. Apart from informing power and planning agencies, the project acts as a foundation for later quantitative work undertaken to enlarge explanation of residents’ reactions to HVOTL proposals.
Lean thinking, banish waste and create wealth in your corporation

Lean thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones is the undisputed Number 1 book worldwide about lean management. It is written for those who are interested in redesigning their business processes and/or are open to a change of the company culture. The authors aspire to make the theory accessible and to provide explicit examples. The combination of examples and theory makes this book a good tool for action learning. The American authors Womack and Jones were one of the first to study and analyse the philosophy and methods behind the success of the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota. By the early 1980s, the Americans found out that Toyota was not an average company. Although many Americans believed that the Japanese cars were inferior to the vehicles made by their Ford or General Motors, the truth appeared to be slightly different. Directly after the SecondWorldWar, Toyota changed its core business from building textile machineries to car manufacturing. It was in this period that Toyota laid the foundations of lean management, by organizing its production process in a flexible way, completely opposite to the widely used system of mass production. Toyota’s production process is based on a system that always starts with determining the value for a customer, which will ultimately determine the production process used. By way of example, Toyota only produces cars ‘on demand’ rather than by mass advance production. This way you only produce to the needs and timing of a customer. To be able to do this, you need a flexible production system with short lead times. Instead of pushing the products through the system, you create ‘pull’. A pull system has less waste, such as stocks, defects and transport. All the processes have to be in line, in order to let the product flow through the system as fast as possible. This flexibility has been the reason for the Americans to label the Toyota production system ‘lean’. Over the past 60 years lean became Toyota’s philosophy on which the company culture is based. All the work methods used today by the Toyota employees are derived from lean. For a Toyota employee it is equally important to learn how to manufacture or sell a car, as it is to know how to work according to the lean system. I am a lean consultant and as a part of my lean implementation program, I always advise my clients to read Lean thinking so as to get a better understanding of the lean Action Learning: Research and Practice Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2007, pp. 105–114
Assessing usability from formal user-interface designs

The authors demonstrate the usability analysis of Object-Z user-interface designs. Usability can be defined in terms of five salient properties of an interactive system: task efficiency, reuse, user-computer communication, robustness and flexibility Formal user interface designs have been advocated as a basis for determining the usability of an interactive system prior to the expense of system development. However, to date, a comprehensive demonstration of the utility of formal designs for this purpose has not been forthcoming. We investigate the limitations of model-based methods, such as Object-Z as a basis for analysis of user interface designs.
A network-aware MAC and routing protocol for effective load balancing in ad hoc wireless networks with directional antenna

Use of directional antenna in the context of ad hoc wireless networks can largely reduce radio interference, thereby improving the utilization of wireless medium. Our major contribution in this paper is to devise a routing strategy, along with a MAC protocol, that exploits the advantages of directional antenna in ad hoc networks for improved system performance. In this paper, we have illustrated a MAC and routing protocol for ad hoc networks using directional antenna with the objective of effective load balancing through the selection of maximally zone disjoint routes. Zone-disjoint routes would minimize the effect of route coupling by selecting routes in such a manner that data communication over one route will minimally interfere with data communication over the others. In our MAC protocol, each node keeps certain neighborhood status information dynamically in order that each node is aware of its neighborhood and communications going on in its neighborhood at that instant of time. This status information from each node is propagated periodically throughout the network. This would help each node to capture the approximate network status periodically that helps each node to become topology-aware and aware of communications going on in the network, although in an approximate manner. With this status information, each intermediate node adaptively computes routes towards destination. The performance of the proposed framework has been evaluated on QualNet Network Simulator with DSR (as in QualNet) as a benchmark. Our proposed mechanism shows four to five times performance improvement over DSR, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of this proposal.
eQuality for All: Extending Automated Quality Measurement of Free Text Clinical Narratives

INTRODUCTION Electronic quality monitoring(eQuality) from clinical narratives may advance current manual quality measurement techniques.We evaluated automated eQuality measurement tools on clinical narratives of veterans' disability examinations. METHODS We used a general purpose indexing engine to encode clinical concepts with SNOMED CT. We developed computer usable quality assessment rules from established quality indicators and evaluated the automated approach against a gold standard of double independent human expert review. Rules were iteratively improved using a training set of 1446 indexed exam reports and evaluated on a test set of 1454 indexed exam reports. RESULTS The eQuality system achieved 86%sensitivity (recall), 62% specificity, and 96%positive predictive value (precision) for automated quality assessment of veterans' disability exams. Summary data for each exam type and detailed data for joint exam quality assessments are presented. DISCUSSION The current results generalize our previous results to ten exam types covering over 200 diagnostic codes. eQuality measurement from narrative clinical documents has the potential to improve healthcare quality and safety.
Ridge Regression Con dence

Recently kernel based methods for machine learning have shown good performance on a range of standard problems in areas such as pattern recognition, density estimation and regression estimation. One attractive feature of these methods is that they usually make very few assumptions about the data's underlying distribution; typically requiring no more than that the data should be independently identically distributed (iid). A weakness of these methods has been that they givèbare' predictions, i.e., they predict labels with no associated conndence information. In risk-sensitive settings such as medical diagnosis conndence information is highly desirable. Several approaches have been taken to obtain conndence information. PAC analysis can provide bounds on the probabilty of error but these can return values larger than 1. Bayesian approaches can give strong conndence bounds but require one to make a priori assumptions about the data's distribution and if these assumptions do not reeect the true distribution the bounds will not be valid. We give an algorithm which allows reasonably tight tolerance intervals for regression estimates to be found without assuming anything above iid. 1. Main idea This paper describes a method of nding conndence information about predictions. Why is this desirable? Consider two investors, A and B who are each considering investing in two companies making their IPOs, C and D. They are both interested in how prootable the companies are likely to be after the rst year. A uses regression estimation and predicts gures of 150 and 200 respectively. B uses regression estimation augmented with conndence measures and obtains 90% tolerance regions 140{160 and 50{350. Investor B is now in a much better position to make an informed purchase than investor A. As we mentioned in the abstract, our approach exploits an underlying assumption of many machine learning methods, including the theory of Ridge Regression, that the data in training and test sets are independently identically distributed but makes no further assumptions. More speciically, we assume that some training set (z 1 new example x l+1 are given; the label y l+1 of the new example is withheld. Our only assumption is that the sequence (z 1 are generated independently from the same probability distribution. We wish to state something about our conndence in diierent values ^ y for the label y l+1 of the new example. The idea of our approach is to look at all possible completions (z 1 for every possible completion (1) …
Bridging gaps: service learning in teacher education

Teacher education programs face significant challenges in preparing future teachers for diverse classroom settings. Rising student socioeconomic and ethnic diversity is sharply juxtaposed against a relatively homogenous preservice teacher population. This article advances arguments that support the incorporation of service-learning experiences into New Zealand Preservice Teacher Education programs to mediate the ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic polarization of pupils and their teachers by providing additional preparation for teaching in disadvantaged school contexts. The benefits of including service learning into New Zealand teacher education programs will be discussed as they relate to best practices for preservice teachers and by association the schools and pupils they serve.
The third homomorphism theorem on trees: downward & upward lead to divide-and-conquer

Parallel programs on lists have been intensively studied. It is well known that associativity provides a good characterization for divide-and-conquer parallel programs. In particular, the third homomorphism theorem is not only useful for systematic development of parallel programs on lists, but it is also suitable for automatic parallelization. The theorem states that if two sequential programs iterate the same list leftward and rightward, respectively, and compute the same value, then there exists a divide-and-conquer parallel program that computes the same value as the sequential programs. While there have been many studies on lists, few have been done for characterizing and developing of parallel programs on trees. Naive divide-and-conquer programs, which divide a tree at the root and compute independent subtrees in parallel, take time that is proportional to the height of the input tree and have poor scalability with respect to the number of processors when the input tree is ill-balanced. In this paper, we develop a method for systematically constructing scalable divide-and-conquer parallel programs on trees, in which two sequential programs lead to a scalable divide-andconquer parallel program. We focus on paths instead of trees so as to utilize rich results on lists and demonstrate that associativity provides good characterization for scalable divide-and-conquer parallel programs on trees. Moreover, we generalize the third homomorphism theorem from lists to trees.We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with various examples. Our results, being generalizations of known results for lists, are generic in the sense that they work well for all polynomial data structures.
Biological characterization of human monoclonal antibodies to rabies virus

Rabies virus antigen-specific human monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) that recognized either viral glycoprotein, ribonucleoprotein, or matrix proteins were generated. Only glycoprotein-specific MAb neutralized a variety of rabies viruses and protected laboratory rodents against lethal rabies virus infection. The determinant recognized by this MAb does not appear to reside in previously defined antigenic sites of the viral glycoprotein.