Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Cross-system Communication to Promote Educational Well-being of Foster Children: Recommendations for a National Research, Practice, and Policy Agenda

This study captures the voices of school-based behavioral specialists employed across the state of Michigan to share how well schools and child welfare agencies communicate and collaborate to address the educational well-being of foster care children on their caseloads. This includes knowledge of federal policies and how they support and hinder communication across systems. Participants included a total of 249 K–12 employed school psychologists, counselors, and social workers. Survey methodology was used, and both inferential and narrativeanalyses revealed that these schoolpractitioners werehighlyunawareof how to identify the foster care children in their schools and what supports they need. The three groups of school-based professionals were similarly unaware, they have minimal communication with outside agencies, and they largely do not take initiative in reaching out to communicate and collaborate with community-based agencies outside the school. Despite that, collectively, the work of child welfare and education professionals could have a substantial impact on retention and the overall student performance of children who are living in out-of-home care. Implicationsofthislackofcommunication and awarenessarediscussed, and recommendations to guide a national research agenda for advocacy and policy efforts are identified.
Conversational Expectations as a Basis for Order Effects in Persuasion

The current study demonstrates the role of conversational processes in order effects in persuasive communications. Conversational rules guide individuals' expectations about the position of the most important arguments within a persuasive message. We argue that these expectations contribute to the influence of arguments on attitude change, that is, if the important arguments are expected at a certain position, they become more influential than the other arguments of the persuasive message. In the current study, we presented participants with a persuasive message in which the order of arguments was experimentally manipulated. An order effect occurred when the conversational expectation regarding the order of arguments was applicable. However, no reliable order effect was observed when the conversational expectation was discredited. Importantly, consistent with the explanation of conversational order effects, the interactive effects of argument order and conversational expectation on the attitude was mediated by the perceived importance of the arguments.
Exploring the clinical utility of WAIS–III and WMS–III

While some of the modifications made to produce the WAIS–III and WMS–III (Wechsler, 1997a, 1997b) make sense from a neuropsychological standpoint, there are many questions still unanswered about the validity and reliability of these tests and their ultimate utility to neuropsychologists. The new tests have been criticized for having long administration times, which is problematic given pressures to decrease rather than increase the length and cost of neuropsychological evaluations (Ryan et al., 1998). Clinical neuropsychologists want to know if these tests can help them evaluate their patients more accurately with greater sensitivity and specificity than the alternatives, and experimental neuropsychologists want to know if they can help answer theoretical questions.
Focus on Music Education in Nigeria

Traditionally, music is a supreme motivator. In the African context, whether in war, in communal development projects or just for summoning people to emergency meetings, appropriate music has been regarded as indispensable in infusing patriotism, challenge, dynamism, and animation. The town-crier employing his own brand of music (ululation, ogene clapperless bell, or ekwe small slit drum) does his rounds delivering his message to the people in music and song. Music is integral to the African’s life-long educational system. Africans use music as much as music controls their life and speech. Learning traditional music is therefore life-long and starts quite early in life. Apart from this informal process of music education, there is also the apprenticeship system which is undergone by master instrumentalists and dance groups. Western education brought along with it Western culture, and a new musical
The impact of tropical forest logging and oil palm agriculture on the soil microbiome

Selective logging and forest conversion to oil palm agriculture are rapidly altering tropical forests. However, functional responses of the soil microbiome to these land‐use changes are poorly understood. Using 16S rRNA gene and shotgun metagenomic sequencing, we compared composition and functional attributes of soil biota between unlogged, once‐logged and twice‐logged rainforest, and areas converted to oil palm plantations in Sabah, Borneo. Although there was no significant effect of logging history, we found a significant difference between the taxonomic and functional composition of both primary and logged forests and oil palm. Oil palm had greater abundances of genes associated with DNA, RNA, protein metabolism and other core metabolic functions, but conversely, lower abundance of genes associated with secondary metabolism and cell–cell interactions, indicating less importance of antagonism or mutualism in the more oligotrophic oil palm environment. Overall, these results show a striking difference in taxonomic composition and functional gene diversity of soil microorganisms between oil palm and forest, but no significant difference between primary forest and forest areas with differing logging history. This reinforces the view that logged forest retains most features and functions of the original soil community. However, networks based on strong correlations between taxonomy and functions showed that network complexity is unexpectedly increased due to both logging and oil palm agriculture, which suggests a pervasive effect of both land‐use changes on the interaction of soil microbes.
Hyperspectral feature selection and classification with a RBF-based novel Double Parallel Feedforward Neural Network and evolution algorithms

Band selection is an important preprocessing procedure for analysis of hyperspectral data, which suffers from the vast amount of data and Hughes phenomenon. In recent years, band (feature) selection using Neural Network such as Multi-layer Forward Neural Network (MLFNN), Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) and Double Parallel Feedforward Neural Network (DPFNN) becomes a promising method for dimensionality reduction. In the paper, we present a novel feature selection method using the improved DPFNN (IDPFNN), where it is the RBFNN not MLFNN to keep parallel connection with the Single-layer Feedforward Neural Network (SLFNN). The algorithm combines the procedure of structure optimization with that of feature selection using a hybrid algorithm based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). An AVIRIS data set is used for evaluation of the performance of the proposed method through the experiments of feature selection and classification. The experimental results show the better effectiveness of the algorithm of IDPFNN.
Assessing psychosocial vulnerability and care needs of pretransplant patients by means of the INTERMED.

OBJECTIVE We investigated whether the INTERMED, a generic instrument for assessing biopsychosocial case complexity and direct care, identifies organ transplant patients at risk of unfavourable post-transplant development by comparing it to the Transplant Evaluation Rating Scale (TERS), the established measure for pretransplant psychosocial evaluation. METHOD One hundred nineteen kidney, liver, and heart transplant candidates were evaluated using the INTERMED, TERS, SF-36, EuroQol, Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), and Hospital Anxiety & Depression Scale (HADS). RESULTS We found significant relationships between the INTERMED and the TERS scores. The INTERMED highly correlated with the HADS,MADRS, and mental and physical health scores of the SF-36 Health Survey. CONCLUSIONS The results demonstrate the validity and usefulness of the INTERMED instrument for pretransplant evaluation. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate the different qualities of INTERMED and TERS in clinical practice. The advantages of the psychiatric focus of the TERS and the biopsychosocial perspective of the INTERMED are discussed in the context of current literature on integrated care.
The Teaching-Box: A universal robot learning framework

There exist many powerful machine learning software libraries, which help the engineer to build robots that learn autonomously. However, engineering of an autonomous robot still is a challenging and time consuming task even with these learning libraries. With the open source Teaching-Box presented here, the “training” of a robot becomes easier due to the following features. The Java library of the Teaching-Box provides algorithms for reinforcement learning as well as for learning by demonstration (utilizing supervised learning algorithms) and data structures for exchanging policies between the different ways of learning. As an initial policy one can even take a manually coded behaviour and then improve it for example with reinforcement learning. A human trainer feedback (e.g. via the speech interface) can be used to increase the learning speed. The Eclipse based GUI facilitates the design of the robot learning projects and visualizes the learning process. For connecting the various modules of a project, open interface standards such as RL-Glue are used and an easy integration of the Teaching-Box into standard robot middleware is possible.
Adaptation of the Parent Report Language Use Inventory for 18- to 47-months-old children to European Portuguese: a pilot Study

PURPOSE: Language acquisition and development takes in account the child's interaction with the surrounding environment. Daily social interactions with people and communication with others allow the child to acquire language being pragmatics considered a system of rules that support the communicative use of language. Identification and assessment of children at risk for language disorders are crucial in order to carry out an effective early intervention. This study was carried out taking into account first, the relevance of pragmatics as a component of language, and second the lack of assessment tools in Portugal to assess these abilities. Therefore, the aim of this study consists on the translation, adaptation and validation of the inventory "Language Use Inventory" (LUI), to European Portuguese. The LUI is a standardized parent report measure designed to assess pragmatic language development in children within 18- to 47-month-old. METHODS: All procedures recommended by test adaptation guidelines were adopted in this study. A pilot study was carried out with a sample of 120 inventories, answered by the parents/caregivers of the Portuguese children in the target age groups. RESULTS: Cronbach's alpha, which is a numerical coefficient of reliability obtained for the scale strongly confirm a very good internal consistency for the LUI-Pt with 0.97 for the total scale, and coefficients between 0, 71 - 0, 96 for the subscales. CONCLUSION: Preliminary results indicate the internal validity of the LUI-Pt for Portuguese children confirming its clinical usefulness as an assessment tool.
Handwritten Information Extraction from Historical Census Documents

This paper describes a complete system for hand-written information extraction in historical documents. The system was evaluated in real conditions and at a large scale (8 millions of snippets) on the tables of the 1930 US Census. The location of the table position was based on a registration algorithm using printed word anchors. The rows and columns were extracted for nine different fields. For each field, a recognizer based either on convolutional neural networks for small lexicon fields or recurrent neural networks for large lexicon fields were trained. This system yields very high results for data extraction, allowing to achieve more than 70% of automation rate at a error rate similar to human keyers for a complete identity field.
Explaining the Results of an Optimization-Based Decision Support System – A Machine Learning Approach

In this paper, we present work conducted in order to explain the results of a commercial software used for real-time decision support for the flow management of a combined wastewater network. This tool is deployed in many major cities and is used on a daily basis. We apply decision trees to build rules for classifying and interpreting the solutions of the optimization model. Our main goal is to build a classifier that would help a user understand why a proposed solution is good and why other solutions are worse. We demonstrate the feasibility of the approach to our industrial application by generating a large dataset of feasible solutions and classifying them as satisfactory or unsatisfactory based on whether the objective function is a certain percentage higher than the optimal (minimum) objective. We evaluate the performance of the learned classifier on unseen examples. Our results show that our approach is very promising according to reactions from analysts and potential users.
Pollen evidence of the earliest maize agriculture in Costa Rica

The domestication of maize and its spread throughout the Americas has long generated interest. Four symposia on maize at the March-April 2004 meeting of the Society of American Archaeologists in Montreal1 helped to push research (and debates) forward. While there is at present widespread acceptance that one of the teosintes (likely Zea mays subsp.parviglumus) is the ancestor of domesticated maize (Zea mays subsp. mays), many questions remain about where, when, and how domestication took place, and about the subsequent spread of cultivated maize throughout the Americas (Society for Ameri can Archaeology 2004a, b; Smalley and Blake, 2003). Botanical evidence for the presence of maize at different sites and times is key to the debate. This evidence consists of maize macrofossils (usually cobs, kernels, or frag ments) and maize microfossils (pollen grains and phytoliths) for which ages can be deter mined using radiocarbon analysis. Until recendy, almost all radiocarbon ages for maize macrofossils or microfossils were based on standard radiocarbon assays of associated charcoal or other organic remains in the soils or sediments from which the maize fossils were recovered. The development of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon daring, which requires a much smaller mass of sample, has made it possible to date indi vidual maize kernels or cob fragments, and has led to die application of more exacting standards to botanical evidence of the history of maize and other New W;orld crops (Smith, 1994? 95; Fritz, 1994). Under these new standards, die primary class of botanical evidence consists of seeds or other plants parts that show morphologies indicative of deliberate planting and harvesting2 and that are direcdy dated by AMS methods (Smith, 1994-95). Cultigen pollen and phytoliths that are not direcdy dated constitute less desir able, secondary classes of evidence, as do macrofossils that are not directly dated. Rein terpretation of the history of maize based only on primary botanical evidence, including direct AMS dates on maize cobs from rockshelters in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico that had previously been dated only indirecdy (Long era/., 1989), led Fritz (1994) to question the standard 5000 BC date for maize domestication. The earliest primary botanical evi dence she found was for a direcdy dated cob from the San Marcos (Tehuacan) cave that yielded an AMS date of 4700 ? 110 14C years BP, a radiocarbon age that corresponds to a calendar age of between 3700 and 3100 BC when corrected for known variations in atmospheric 14C (see Table 1 for calibration mediods and for.calibrated age ranges for all dates for maize subsequendy presented here). More recendy, Piperno and Flannery (2001: 2102) dated two "primitive-looking maize cobs" from Guild Naquitz cave in Oaxaca, Mexico, to 5420 ? 60 14C years BP and 5410 ? 40 14C years BP. Based on an analysis by Beadle and Ford, the dated cobs are thought to represent either "maize-teosinte hybrids
Security Studies and Organization Studies: Parallels and Possibilities

This note provides an outline of the field of security studies, drawing comparison between it and that of organization studies. It is noted that whilst having many parallels, the two fields exist almost entirely in isolation from each other. The potential overlaps between the fields offer opportunities to extend the range of each and to contribute to the renewal of organization studies.
Positivity of hit-and-run and related algorithms

We prove positivity of the Markov operators that correspond to the hit-and-run algorithm, random scan Gibbs sampler, slice sampler and Metropolis algorithm with positive proposal. In particular, the results show that it is not necessary to consider the lazy versions of these Markov chains. The proof relies on a well known lemma which relates the positivity of the product $MTM^*$, for some operators $M$ and $T$, to the positivity of $T$. It remains to find that kind of representation of the Markov operator with a positive operator $T$.
Profile of the HIV Epidemic in Cape Verde: Molecular Epidemiology and Drug Resistance Mutations among HIV-1 and HIV-2 Infected Patients from Distinct Islands of the Archipelago

HIV-1 and HIV-2 have been detected in Cape Verde since 1987, but little is known regarding the genetic diversity of these viruses in this archipelago, located near the West African coast. In this study, we characterized the molecular epidemiology of HIV-1 and HIV-2 and described the occurrence of drug resistance mutations (DRM) among antiretroviral therapy naïve (ARTn) patients and patients under treatment (ARTexp) from different Cape Verde islands. Blood samples, socio-demographic and clinical-laboratory data were obtained from 221 HIV-positive individuals during 2010–2011. Phylogenetic and bootscan analyses of the pol region (1300 bp) were performed for viral subtyping. HIV-1 and HIV-2 DRM were evaluated for ARTn and ARTexp patients using the Stanford HIV Database and HIV-GRADE e.V. Algorithm Homepage, respectively. Among the 221 patients (169 [76.5%] HIV-1, 43 [19.5%] HIV-2 and 9 [4.1%] HIV-1/HIV-2 co-infections), 67% were female. The median ages were 34 (IQR = 1–75) and 47 (IQR = 12–84) for HIV-1 and HIV-2, respectively. HIV-1 infections were due to subtypes G (36.6%), CRF02_AG (30.6%), F1 (9.7%), URFs (10.4%), B (5.2%), CRF05_DF (3.0%), C (2.2%), CRF06_cpx (0.7%), CRF25_cpx (0.7%) and CRF49_cpx (0.7%), whereas all HIV-2 infections belonged to group A. Transmitted DRM (TDRM) was observed in 3.4% (2/58) of ARTn HIV-1-infected patients (1.7% NRTI, 1.7% NNRTI), but not among those with HIV-2. Among ARTexp patients, DRM was observed in 47.8% (33/69) of HIV-1 (37.7% NRTI, 37.7% NNRTI, 7.4% PI, 33.3% for two classes) and 17.6% (3/17) of HIV-2-infections (17.6% NRTI, 11.8% PI, 11.8% both). This study indicates that Cape Verde has a complex and unique HIV-1 molecular epidemiological scenario dominated by HIV-1 subtypes G, CRF02_AG and F1 and HIV-2 subtype A. The occurrence of TDRM and the relatively high level of DRM among treated patients are of concern. Continuous monitoring of patients on ART, including genotyping, are public policies to be implemented.
Functional–Anatomic Study of Episodic Retrieval Using fMRI I. Retrieval Effort versus Retrieval Success

A number of recent functional imaging studies have identified brain areas activated during tasks involving episodic memory retrieval. The identification of such areas provides a foundation for targeted hypotheses regarding the more specific contributions that these areas make to episodic retrieval. As a beginning effort toward such an endeavor, whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine 14 subjects during episodic word recognition in a block-designed fMRI experiment. Study conditions were manipulated by presenting either shallow or deep encoding tasks. This manipulation yielded two recognition conditions that differed with regard to retrieval effort and retrieval success: shallow encoding yielded low levels of recognition success with high levels of retrieval effort, and deep encoding yielded high levels of recognition success with low levels of effort. Many brain areas were activated in common by these two recognition conditions compared to a low-level fixation condition, including left and right prefrontal regions often detected during PET episodic retrieval paradigms (e.g., R. L. Buckner et al., 1996, J. Neurosci. 16, 6219-6235) thereby generalizing these findings to fMRI. Characterization of the activated regions in relation to the separate recognition conditions showed (1) bilateral anterior insular regions and a left dorsal prefrontal region were more active after shallow encoding, when retrieval demanded greatest effort, and (2) right anterior prefrontal cortex, which has been implicated in episodic retrieval, was most active during successful retrieval after deep encoding. We discuss these findings in relation to component processes involved in episodic retrieval and in the context of a companion study using event-related fMRI.
Citrobacter youngae and Pantoea agglomerans Peritonitis in a Peritoneal Dialysis Patient

differentiating between E. avium and other common enterococci (E. faecalis, E. faecium), because the latter organisms are commonly resistant to clindamycin and gentamicin (10). In our patient, the E. avium was found to be susceptible to gentamicin and penicillin, compatible with previous reports. Administering intraperitoneal ampicillin is sufficient in this scenario to eliminate E. avium peritonitis. In addition, E. avium resistance to vancomycin has not been reported to date, but vancomycin resistance in E. faecalis and E. faecium has been reported worldwide (9,10). These hints could assist in separating the various enterococcal species, because prompt institution of the proper antibiotics in PD peritonitis can not only reduce damage to the peritoneum, but also potentially the rate of antibiotic resistance.
Effects of college students’ video-gaming behavior on self-concept clarity and flow

We explored time spent playing and other video gamer behavior in relation to the psychological constructs of self-concept clarity and flow. Survey data were collected from a paper-and-pencil survey of a student sample from a university in northwestern United States. We found that compared with gamers with low self-concept clarity spent more time playing video games. Furthermore, flow was positively associated with time spent playing. Gamers who spent more time playing reported more flow experiences. This research contributes to understanding of the relationship between gamer psychologies and gaming behavior amongst college students.
Residential Satisfaction of Persons with an Intellectual Disability Living in an Institution or in the Community.

Young adults with an intellectual disability who were resident either in a residential institution or who had moved into independent community accommodation from that institution were interviewed in order to measure how satisfield they were with their lives. All of these people were working at the same large sheltered workshop. Interviews assessed satisfaction with residence, leisure, work, interpersonal relationships, financial position, training and skills. Self esteem and locus of control were also assessed. The only significant differences between the two groups were in their residential satisfaction where those in the institution were more satisfied with their social life while those in the community were more satisfied with their autonomy. There were no significant differences between the two groups in their self esteem or locus of control scores. Those who had moved into the community indicated that they liked living there more than they had in the institution and similarly, those in the institutio.