Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can Thinking be Taught? Linking Critical Thinking and Writing in an EFL Context

While thinking critically is often perceived to be the primary purpose of reading, the question of whether it can actually be taught in classrooms has been extensively debated. This paper bases itself on a qualitative case study of university students completing a degree in English Language and Literature. It explores the way in which critical thinking can be taught in EFL contexts. The paper suggests that critical thinking is best defined as a series of skills which can be continuously worked upon by students for whom constant revision and application of these skills is a significant way of internalizing what has often been seen to be just an attitude or bent of mind. This skill is further enhanced when students get an opportunity to write on the areas which have been discussed in the class, particularly if they are of some relevance to the students’ own contexts. Based on the open question format of Norris and Ennis (1989) and subsequent evaluation using the rubrics of McLaughlin and Moore (2012) which take into account the critical reading component in writing, this paper investigates the extent to which critical thinking could be enhanced through in-class social practices such as discussions and subsequent writing. The study concludes that continuous practice, both oral and written, provide opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking abilities as they become more successful in incorporating nuanced and critical ideas into their academic writings. This has implications for students’ academic and personal achievements because, clearly, an inability to read critically will result in an inability to write insightfully. Various strategies are then suggested to facilitate learners’ use of critical thinking skills so that they may successfully incorporate them into their writing, both in an academic context and as a life-long skill.
Reflections on Executive Education: The User and Provider's Perspectives

Companies are increasingly recognizing executive education as a crucial tool for developing their managers. The underlying assumption is that it can improve managerial decision making, by creating and transmitting knowledge, which in turn has a positive impact on company performance. Since knowledge and capability developed in-house might not avoid the natural evolutionary rigidities of organizations, external pressures for strategic orientation and change may make it necessary to incorporate outsiders' views. Thus, collaboration with outsiders such as business schools, consultants, coaches and trainers has the clear potential to impact organizational performance. As cognitive biases can impede the formation of new perspectives in decision making, the use of outsiders can help mitigate people's tendency to seek information that confirms their own preconceptions. By acting as catalysts, outsiders may serve as agents of change; moreover, if well managed, such partnering can provide value.
Highly wearable galvanic skin response sensor using flexible and conductive polymer foam

Owing to advancements in daily physiological monitoring technology, diverse healthcare applications have emerged recently. The monitoring of skin conductance responses has extensive feasibility to support healthcare applications such as detecting emotion changes. In this study, we proposed a highly wearable and reliable galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor that measures the signals from the back of the user. To enhance its wearability and usability, we employed flexible conductive foam as the sensing material and designed it to be easily attachable to (and detachable from) a wide variety of clothes. We evaluated the sensing reliability of the proposed sensor by comparing its signal with a reference GSR. The average correlation between the two signals was 0.768; this is sufficiently high to validate the feasibility of the proposed sensor for reliable GSR sensing on the back.
Revival of a Dusty Old Profession

This text is the inaugural lecture presented by Professor Sven Tarp at the Aarhus School of Business on March 14, 2008. Firstly, the text provides a brief retrospect of the history of lexicography with emphasis on the experience of the big Chinese encyclopedias and the ﬁ rst big National Danish Dictionary. On this basis, it calls for the further development of an independent theory of lexicography in order to go beyond the experience of past and present lexicographic works and project the discipline into the future. It then discusses some of the problems hampering this process. With a call for innovation, it urges the lexicographers to produce the works that are really needed by users and the State to ﬁ nance the production of such tools of national, cultural, social and economic importance in the present information era. Finally, it concludes that the researchers in lexicography need the audacity to go beyond the usual boundaries and generate new ideas, even if they are initially not welcomed or even understood.
Photodynamic Inactivation of Planktonic Cultures and Biofilms of Candida albicans Mediated by Aluminum‐Chloride‐Phthalocyanine Entrapped in Nanoemulsions

New drug delivery systems, such as nanoemulsions (NE), have been developed to allow the use of hydrophobic drugs on the antimicrobial photodynamic therapy. This study evaluated the photodynamic potential of aluminum‐chloride‐phthalocyanine (ClAlPc) entrapped in cationic and anionic NE to inactivate Candida albicans planktonic cultures and biofilm compared with free ClAlPc. Fungal suspensions were treated with different delivery systems containing ClAlPc and light emitting diode. For planktonic suspensions, colonies were counted and cell metabolism was evaluated by XTT assay. Flow cytometry evaluated cell membrane damage. For biofilms, the metabolic activity was evaluated by XTT and ClAlPc distribution through biofilms was analyzed by confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). Fungal viability was dependent on the delivery system, superficial charge and light dose. Free ClAlPc caused photokilling of the yeast when combined with 100 J cm−2. Cationic NE‐ClAlPc reduced significantly both colony counts and cell metabolism (P < 0.05). In addition, cationic NE‐ClAlPc and free ClAlPc caused significant damage to the cell membrane (P < 0.05). For the biofilms, cationic NE‐ClAlPc reduced cell metabolism by 70%. Anionic NE‐ClAlPc did not present antifungal activity. CLSM showed different accumulation on biofilms between the delivery systems. Although NE system showed a lower activity for planktonic culture, cationic NE‐ClAlPc showed better results for Candida biofilms.
Improving reliability in lossy wireless networks using network coding

Wireless communications between devices can be lossy owing to a number of issues, such as channel fading, interference or mobility of devices. In some scenarios, the lossy characteristic of wireless communications can be random hence better characterized from a stochastic perspective. In view of this, lossy wireless networks have been studied recently, where the transmission between each pair of nodes is successful with a certain probability. This paper investigates the reliability of broadcast in lossy networks, where the reliability is measured by the probability that every node in the network receives the packets of every other node. To improve the reliability, nodes can cooperate with each other using network coding techniques. In this paper, a neighbor network coding scheme is proposed and network reliability under this coding scheme is investigated analytically. This paper shows that reliability of networks can be improved considerably by using the proposed neighbor coding scheme. Further, closed-form upper and lower bounds on the network reliability are presented. Moreover, an optimal neighbor coding scheme that maximizes the reliability of a given network is discussed.
Analytic Quality: Evaluation of Performance and Insight in Multimedia Collection Analysis

In this paper, we present analytic quality (AQ), a novel paradigm for the design and evaluation of multimedia analysis methods. AQ complements the existing evaluation methods based on either machine-driven benchmarks or user studies. AQ includes the notion of user insight gain and the time needed to acquire it, both critical aspects of large-scale multimedia collections analysis. To incorporate insight, AQ introduces a novel user model. In this model, each simulated user, or artificial actor, builds its insight over time, at any time operating with multiple categories of relevance. The methods are evaluated in timed sessions. The artificial actors interact with each method and steer the course by indicating relevant items throughout the session. AQ measures not only precision and recall, but also throughput, diversity of the results, and the accuracy of estimating the percentage of relevant items in the collection. AQ is shown to provide a wide picture of analytic capabilities of the evaluated methods and enumerate how their strengths differ for different purposes. The AQ time plots provide design suggestions for improving the evaluated methods. AQ is demonstrated to be more insightful than the classic benchmark evaluation paradigm both in terms of method comparison and suggestions for further design.
‘Who is a tourist?’

This article discusses the concept of the ‘tourist’ within tourist studies. It critiques the conceptual category of tourist in recent literature on typologies of tourists and tourist experiences. Although greater understanding of the tourist has been identified as one of the principal research issues for tourism research, the focus is on types and forms of touristic experience rather than uses of the concept of ‘tourist’ as a lay category, thereby taking for granted its function within a wider cultural discourse of holidaymaking and travelling. The article raises questions concerning the construct ‘tourist’ and discusses the implications of such ambiguities for theory and empirical analysis of interview data on tourist experiences. This discussion reviews the literature on tourist experience and typologies, a discussion of the use of the concept of ‘tourist’ as a members’ category, and proposes a tentative clarification of the issues as a basis from which to direct future empirical research questions.
On Cameron-Liebler line classes

Cameron-Liebler line classes are sets of lines in PGð3; qÞ that contain a fixed number x of lines of every spread. Cameron and Liebler classified them for x A f0; 1; 2; q 2 � 1; q 2 ; q 2 þ 1g and conjectured that no others exist. This conjecture was disproven by Drudge and his counterexample was generalised to a counterexample for any odd q by Bruen and Drudge. Nonexistence of Cameron-Liebler line classes was proven for dierent values of x by Penttila, Bruen and Drudge, Drudge, and Govaerts. In this paper, a new lower bound on x for existence of Cameron-Liebler line classes is obtained, and in the specific cases where q is a square or a cube, this new bound is improved upon.
HfO2-Based Highly Stable Radiation-Immune Ferroelectric Memory

In this letter, HfO<sub>2</sub>-based ferroelectric random access memory (FeRAM) with metal–insulator–metal structure is studied for the first time under radiation conditions. Y-doped HfO<sub>2</sub>-based FeRAM devices show high immunity to <sup>60</sup>Co <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\gamma $ </tex-math></inline-formula> ray radiation. Basic FeRAM parameters, such as leakage current, permittivity, remanent polarization, endurance, and fatigue, show almost no degradation after <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\gamma $ </tex-math></inline-formula> ray radiation with a total dose as high as 12.96 Mrad (SI). Furthermore, the ferroelectric hysteresis loops show no distortion after radiation. The high stability of Y-doped HfO<sub>2</sub> FeRAM devices under radiation demonstrates their great potential for nuclear and aerospace applications.
Ethnomethodology for Social Work

This article provides an introduction for social workers to ethnomethodology (EM), and suggests that they can find not only a similarity of attention between their front-line work and EM, but ways of making sense which explicate the connections between concrete and practical activity and the accomplishment of local as well as extra-local orders. EM redirects analytic attention to the ordinary and mundane ways that people in their everyday lives jointly produce, account for, and manage local, practical, and taken-for-granted scenes to produce social order. EM, by attending to what people ‘do’ in concert, rather than what they might say, think, or imagine, provides a essential empirical redirection for social work at a time when increasing attention is being given to language, discourse, and narrative. Through EM social workers can find tools to explicate the essential reflexivity of their practice and the incorrigible indexicality of professional and client accounts. By turning to EM social workers can rec.
Rules of the Game: Effects of a Game-based Metaphor on Instructional Activity Design and the Use of Student Mentors on Learning Outcomes in a Middle School General Science Class

Rules of the Game: Effects of a Game-based Metaphor on Instructional Activity Design and the Use of Student Mentors on Learning Outcomes in a Middle School General Science Class Angie Dowling This study investigated the effects of a game-like environment on instructional activity design and the use of student mentors on learning outcomes in a middle school general science class. The participants for this study were 165 students, ages 13-14 years old, who were enrolled in 8 grade at a mid-Atlantic middle school. Two research questions were used to conduct the research: 1. Can science content be designed and successfully delivered instructionally using a gamelike learning environment? 2. Does the use of student mentors/assistants help direct and maintain the flow of the class away from the technological issues toward the necessary learning outcomes while also increasing the science content understanding acquired by the mentors while also increasing class and student engagement? For this study an introductory biology unit was designed using a game-like curricular structure. Student mentors were utilized in order to aid focus on the content and not the technology. The results indicated that the instructional design of the unit using a game-like environment was successful and students exhibited learning. The mentor students were instrumental in steering their fellow students away from the “Siren’s Call” of the instrument (in this case StarLogo) and enabled increased focus on the content.
The first decade of GUI ripping: Extensions, applications, and broader impacts

This paper provides a retrospective examination of GUI Ripping - reverse engineering a workflow model of the graphical user interface of a software application - born a decade ago out of recognition of the severe need for improving the then largely manual state-of-the-practice of functional GUI testing. In these last 10 years, GUI ripping has turned out to be an enabler for much research, both within our group at Maryland and other groups. Researchers have found new and unique applications of GUI ripping, ranging from measuring human performance to re-engineering legacy user interfaces. GUI ripping has also enabled large-scale experimentation involving millions of test cases, thereby helping to understand the nature of GUI faults and characteristics of test cases to detect them. It has resulted in large multi-institutional Government-sponsored research projects on test automation and benchmarking. GUI ripping tools have been ported to many platforms, including Java AWT and Swing, iOS, Android, UNO, Microsoft Windows, and web. In essence, the technology has transformed the way researchers and practitioners think about the nature of GUI testing, no longer considered a manual activity; rather, thanks largely to GUI Ripping, automation has become the primary focus of current GUI testing techniques.
Assessing Client Satisfaction with Treatment for Substance Use Problems and the Development of the Treatment Perceptions Questionnaire (TPQ)

This report describes the development of a brief 10-item scale to measure client satisfaction with treatment for substance use problems. The Treatment Perceptions Questionnaire (TPQ) was developed from two independent studies. The first field study recruited 123 subjects from inpatient and community treatment programmes. Each respondent completed an interviewer-administered questionnaire comprising the TPQ and other measures of personal/social functioning and treatment processes and perceptions. A sub-sample (n = 38) participated in a three-day re-test administration of the instrument with two interviewers. In a second study of outcomes from oral and injectable methadone maintenance treatment, the TPQ was administered to a further 33 patients as part of a six-month outcome evaluation. Results from these studies show that the instrument has good construct and discriminant validity, good internal reliability and acceptable test-retest reliability. The TPQ can be used in research studies of treatment process and outcome and routine programme audit activities.
Predictors of Health Information Needs among U.S. Mainland and Puerto Rican Caregivers

Stroke caregivers often do not have the information necessary to adequately manage the stroke recovery process at home. We explore how the educational needs of stroke caregivers vary by race, ethnicity, and place, and their association with caregiver characteristics. We surveyed 276 stroke caregivers living on the U.S. Mainland and in Puerto Rico to assess their educational needs related to stroke recovery. Caregivers report a high overall need for educational materials with Puerto Rican stroke caregivers having greater needs compared to whites and African Americans on the Mainland. Increased caregiver educational needs are associated with greater desire to institutionalize, less positive appraisals of caregiving, greater use of coping strategies, and greater burden. All caregivers can benefit from educational materials, but special attention to island-dwelling Puerto Rican caregivers may provide additional benefit. Future research and interventions should focus on tailoring educational materials for race, culture, and other caregiver characteristics.
Etiology and Incidence of Viral and Bacterial Acute Respiratory Illness among Older Children and Adults in Rural Western Kenya, 2007–2010

Background Few comprehensive data exist on disease incidence for specific etiologies of acute respiratory illness (ARI) in older children and adults in Africa. Methodology/Principal Findings From March 1, 2007, to February 28, 2010, among a surveillance population of 21,420 persons >5 years old in rural western Kenya, we collected blood for culture and malaria smears, nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal swabs for quantitative real-time PCR for ten viruses and three atypical bacteria, and urine for pneumococcal antigen testing on outpatients and inpatients meeting a ARI case definition (cough or difficulty breathing or chest pain and temperature >38.0°C or oxygen saturation <90% or hospitalization). We also collected swabs from asymptomatic controls, from which we calculated pathogen-attributable fractions, adjusting for age, season, and HIV-status, in logistic regression. We calculated incidence by pathogen, adjusting for health-seeking for ARI and pathogen-attributable fractions. Among 3,406 ARI patients >5 years old (adjusted annual incidence 12.0 per 100 person-years), influenza A virus was the most common virus (22% overall; 11% inpatients, 27% outpatients) and Streptococcus pneumoniae was the most common bacteria (16% overall; 23% inpatients, 14% outpatients), yielding annual incidences of 2.6 and 1.7 episodes per 100 person-years, respectively. Influenza A virus, influenza B virus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and human metapneumovirus were more prevalent in swabs among cases (22%, 6%, 8% and 5%, respectively) than controls. Adenovirus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinovirus/enterovirus, parechovirus, and Mycoplasma pneumoniae were not more prevalent among cases than controls. Pneumococcus and non-typhi Salmonella were more prevalent among HIV-infected adults, but prevalence of viruses was similar among HIV-infected and HIV-negative individuals. ARI incidence was highest during peak malaria season. Conclusions/Signficance Vaccination against influenza and pneumococcus (by potential herd immunity from childhood vaccination or of HIV-infected adults) might prevent much of the substantial ARI incidence among persons >5 years old in similar rural African settings.
Logdet Divergence Based Sparse Non-Negative Matrix Factorization for Stable Representation

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) decomposes any non-negative matrix into the product of two low dimensional non-negative matrices. Since NMF learns effective parts-based representation, it has been widely applied in computer vision and data mining. However, traditional NMF has the riskrisk learning rank-deficient basis learning rank-deficient basis on high-dimensional dataset with few examples especially when some examples are heavily corrupted by outliers. In this paper, we propose a Logdet divergence based sparse NMF method (LDS-NMF) to deal with the rank-deficiency problem. In particular, LDS-NMF reduces the risk of rank deficiency by minimizing the Logdet divergence between the product of basis matrix with its transpose and the identity matrix, meanwhile penalizing the density of the coefficients. Since the objective function of LDS-NMF is nonconvex, it is difficult to optimize. In this paper, we develop a multiplicative update rule to optimize LDS-NMF in the frame of block coordinate descent, and theoretically prove its convergence. Experimental results on popular datasets show that LDS-NMF can learn more stable representations than those learned by representative NMF methods.
Developing policy and practice for dyslexia across a local authority: a case study of educational psychology practice at organisational level

In this paper two premises are set out: first, that within Children’s Services educational psychologists (EPs) have a distinctive contribution to make towards policy and practice in relation to “dyslexia”; second, that they may be well placed to lead development work at an organisational level within a local authority. Building on previously unpublished work, the authors report a case study of the development of a local authority dyslexia policy led by an EP over a two year period. Data were collected from an account by the lead EP, a policy development group members’ focus group, and a questionnaire survey of special educational needs coordinators (SENCos). The findings confirm the scientist-practitioner contribution of the lead EP to both the product and the process of successful policy development and implementation. Facilitators, barriers and secondary benefits in relation to successful policy development within multi-disciplinary Children’s Services are considered, and the policy-practice inter-relationship is theorised.