Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Talking technology: language and literacy in the primary school examined through children's encounters with mechanisms

The Role of Language and Dedicated Terminology Language plays a pivotal role in teaching and learning across the curriculum. This article embraces an examination of certain dedicated terms within technology education that children may encounter as part of their primary school experience. Four language-related issues are explored. The first of these concerns the difficulty that may be experienced in defining certain technological terms. The second concerns the ways in which primary school children use their own versions of terminology to describe specific artifacts and functions. The third issue concerns the role of some manufacturers and publishers in employing inappropriate terminology within educational products. The final issue revolves around the psycho-social development of language in young children and the contribution this may make to the acquisition of appropriate technical terms. These issues are woven together to form a complex linguistic tapestry with implications for classroom practice. Language, when seen as the instrument of communication used by the speech community (Labov, 1994), provides the basic platform for the communication of ideas. Our language is packaged into words. These convenient vocal units express culturally-derived fragments of meaning, and indeed it seems that we all have an intuitive grasp of what constitutes a word as a distinct unit within our own language (Langacker, 1972). The use of the term “word” is qualified with culture, since it is the sharing of the meaning of our words in prescribed cultural settings that enables us to sustain the building blocks of our language. As Pinker (1994) said, “A word is the quintessential symbol. Its power comes from the fact that every member of a linguistic community uses it interchangeably in speaking and understanding.Words. are a universal currency within a community” (p. 151). Within the community of the primary school, the core elements of language such as speaking, listening, reading and writing can be gained in all manner of subjects (DFE 1995, SCAA 1997a), including Design and Technology (SCAA, 1997b). ____________________________
The development and evaluation of individual Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (iCST) for people with dementia

Background: Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) can improve cognition and quality of life (QoL) for people with dementia. However, previously this has only been delivered in a group format. Aim: To develop and evaluate the effectiveness of a home-based, carer-led individual CST (iCST) programme. Methods: The trial followed the Medical Research Council (MRC) framework. The development phase included; assessment of studies of home based cognitive stimulation, consultation with carers, people with dementia and healthcare professionals on the adaption of the CST and maintenance CST (maintenance CST) programmes, focus groups (n=32), ten interviews, a period of field-testing (n=22), an online survey and a consensus conference. A multi-centre, single-blind, pragmatic, randomised controlled trial (RCT) was conducted. In total, 356 people with mild to moderate dementia and their carers were recruited. Dyads were randomly assigned into the iCST arm (three, 30 minute sessions per week for 25 weeks plus support) or treatment as usual (TAU) control. The iCST training DVD was developed as part of the trial. Results: In the development phase the concept of iCST was well received, and both carers and people with dementia responded positively to the first drafts of materials. Anticipated issues, such as finding time to do sessions and suitability of the carer to deliver sessions were identified in the focus groups and interviews. The field-testing phase demonstrated that implementation of the iCST intervention was feasible. However, the majority of dyads completed fewer than three sessions per week. Identified barriers to participation included, lack of time, illness, and motivation. The training and support package appeared to be suitable as carers were able to deliver the intervention without intensive support. Two drafts of the materials were produced before a final version ready for use in the main RCT. Of the 180 iCST dyads, 134 (74%) were included in the intention to treat (ITT) analysis. There were 178 TAU dyads, of which 139 (78%) were available for analysis. At follow-up 2 (FU2) there were no significant differences between the iCST and TAU groups in the primary outcomes of cognition (Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale - cognitive [ADAS-cog], SMD = -0·55, 95% CI -2·00,0·90; p=0·45) and self-reported QoL (Quality of Life Alzheimer’s Disease [QOL-AD], SMD = -0·02, 95% CI -1·22,0·82; p= 0·97). People with dementia receiving iCST rated the relationship with their carer more positively (SMD = 1·77, 95% CI 0·26,3·28; p= 0·02). No other secondary outcomes were significant. Conclusions: The rigorous development of the intervention was beneficial as the feasibility of the intervention was explored both in theory and practice. There was no evidence of iCST benefitting either cognition or QoL for the person with dementia. However, it did improve the relationship with the carer. Future work should investigate delivery of iCST by paid carers or professionals and developing the intervention for a computer platform.
Verifying Programs under Snapshot Isolation and Similar Relaxed Consistency Models

We present a static verification approach for programs running under snapshot isolation (SI) and similar relaxed transactional semantics. Relaxed conflict detection schemes such as snapshot isolation (SI) are used widely. Under SI, transactions are no longer guaranteed to be serializable, and the simplicity of reasoning sequentially within a transaction is lost. In this paper, we present an approach for statically verifying properties of transactional programs operating under SI. Differently from earlier work, we handle transactional programs even when they are designed not to be serializable. We present a source-to-source transformation which augments the program with an encoding of the SI semantics. Verifying the resulting program with transformed user annotations and specifications is equivalent to verifying the original transactional program running under SI ‐ a fact we prove formally. Our encoding preserves the modularity and scalability of VCC’s verification approach. We applied our method successfully to benchmark programs from the transactional memory literature.
Health-related quality-of-life findings for the prostate cancer prevention trial.

BACKGROUND The Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial (PCPT)-a randomized placebo-controlled study of the efficacy of finasteride in preventing prostate cancer-offered the opportunity to prospectively study effects of finasteride and other covariates on the health-related quality of life of participants in a multiyear trial. METHODS We assessed three health-related quality-of-life domains (measured with the Health Survey Short Form-36: Physical Functioning, Mental Health, and Vitality scales) via questionnaires completed by PCPT participants at enrollment (3 months before randomization), at 6 months after randomization, and annually for 7 years. Covariate data obtained at enrollment from patient-completed questionnaires were included in our model. Mixed-effects model analyses and a cross-sectional presentation at three time points began at 6 months after randomization. All statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS For the physical function outcome (n = 16 077), neither the finasteride main effect nor the finasteride interaction with time were statistically significant. The effects of finasteride on physical function were minor and accounted for less than a 1-point difference over time in Physical Functioning scores (mixed-effect estimate = 0.07, 95% confidence interval [CI] = -0.28 to 0.42, P = .71). Comorbidities such as congestive heart failure (estimate = -5.64, 95% CI = -7.96 to -3.32, P < .001), leg pain (estimate = -2.57, 95% CI = -3.04 to -2.10, P < .001), and diabetes (estimate = -1.31, 95% CI = -2.04 to -0.57, P < .001) had statistically significant negative effects on physical function, as did current smoking (estimate = -2.34, 95% CI = -2.97 to -1.71, P < .001) and time on study (estimate = -1.20, 95% CI = -1.36 to -1.03, P < .001). Finasteride did not have a statistically significant effect on the other two dependent variables, mental health and vitality, either in the mixed-effects analyses or in the cross-sectional analysis at any of the three time points. CONCLUSION Finasteride did not negatively affect SF-36 Physical Functioning, Mental Health, or Vitality scores.
The effects of age of second language learning on the production of English vowels

ABSTRACT This study examined the English vowel productions of 240 native speakers of Italian who had arrived in Canada at ages ranging from 2 to 23 years and 24 native English speakers from the same community. The productions of 11 vowels were rated for degree of foreign accent by 10 listeners. An increase in perceived accentedness as a function of increasing age of arrival was observed on every vowel. Not one of the vowels was observed to be produced in a consistently native-like manner by the latest-arriving learners, even though they had been living in Canada for an average of 32 years. However, high intelligibility (percent correct identification) scores were obtained for the same set of productions. This was true even for English vowels that have no counterpart in Italian.
The Cross-Neutralizing Activity of Enterovirus 71 Subgenotype C4 Vaccines in Healthy Chinese Infants and Children

Background EV71 is one of major etiologic causes of hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) and leads to severe neurological complications in young children and infants. Recently inactivated EV71 vaccines have been developed by five manufactures and clinically show good safety and immunogenicity. However, the cross-neutralizing activity of these vaccines remains unclear, and is of particular interest because RNA recombination is seen more frequently in EV71 epidemics. Methodology/Principal Findings In this post-hoc study, sera from a subset of 119 infants and children in two clinical trials of EV71 subgenotype C4 vaccines (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01313715 and NCT01273246), were detected for neutralizing antibody (NTAb) titres with sera from infected patients as controls. Cytopathogenic effect method was employed to test NTAb against EV71 subgenotype B4, B5, C2, C4 and C5, which were prominent epidemic strains worldwide over the past decade. To validate the accuracy of the results, ELISpot assay was employed in parallel to detect NTAb in all the post-vaccine sera. After two-dose vaccination, 49 out of 53 participants in initially seronegative group and 52 out of 53 participants in initially seropositive group showed less than 4-fold differences in NTAb titers against five EV71 strains, whereas corresponding values among sera from pediatric patients recovering from EV71-induced HFMD and subclinically infected participants were 8/8 and 41/43, respectively. The geometric mean titers of participants against five subgenotypes EV71 all grew significantly after vaccinations, irrespective of the baseline NTAb titer. The relative fold increase in antibody titers (NTAb-FI) against B4, B5, C2, and C5 displayed a positive correlation to the NTAb-FI against C4. Conclusions/Significance The results demonstrated broad cross-neutralizing activity induced by two C4 EV71 vaccines in healthy Chinese infants and children. However, the degree of induced cross-protective immunity, and the potential escape evolution for EV71 still need to be monitored and researched in future for these new vaccines.
Dual functions of α4β1 integrin in epicardial development

The epicardium of the mammalian heart arises from progenitor cells outside the developing heart. The epicardial progenitor (EPP) cells migrate onto the heart through a cyst-mediated mechanism in which the progenitors are released from the tissue of origin as cysts; the cysts float in the fluid of the pericardial cavity and attach to the naked myocardial surface of the heart, and cells in the cysts then migrate out to form an epithelial sheet. In this paper, we show that the gene encoding the α4 subunit of α4β1 integrin (α4β1) is essential for this migratory process. We have generated a knockin mutation in mice replacing the α4 integrin gene with the lacZ reporter gene, placing lacZ under the control of the α4 integrin promoter. We show that in homozygous mutant embryos, the migration of EPP progenitor cells is impaired due to inefficient budding of the cysts and a failure of the cells in the cysts to migrate on the heart. This study provides direct genetic evidence for essential roles for α4β1 integrin–mediated cell adhesion in the migration of progenitor cells to form the epicardium, in addition to a previous finding that α4β1 is essential for maintaining the epicardium (Yang, J.T., H. Rayburn, and R.O. Hynes. 1995. Development. 121:549–560).
Improving the accuracy of fast dense stereo correspondence algorithms by enforcing local consistency of disparity ﬁelds

Accurate, dense 3D reconstruction is an important requirement in many applications, and stereo represents a viable alternative to active sensors. However, top-ranked stereo algorithms rely on iterative 2D disparity optimization methods for energy minimization that are not well suited to the fast and/or hardware implementation often required in practice. An exception is represented by the approaches that perform disparity optimization in one dimension (1D) by means of scanline optimization (SO) or dynamic programming (DP). Recent SO/DP-based approaches aim to avoid the well known streaking effect by enforcing vertical consistency between scanlines deploying aggregated costs, aggregating multiple scanlines, or performing energy minimization on a tree. In this paper we show that the accuracy of two fast SO/DP-based approaches can be dramatically improved by exploiting a non-iterative methodology that, by modeling the coherence within neighboring points, enforces the local consistency of disparity ﬁelds. Our proposal allows us to obtain top-ranked results on the standard Mid-dlebury dataset and, thanks to its computational structure and its reduced memory requirements, is potentially suited to fast and/or hardware implementations.
Large human sperm vacuoles observed in motile spermatozoa under high magnification: nuclear thumbprints linked to failure of chromatin condensation.

BACKGROUND An embryo's ability to grow and implant can be improved by selection of a normal spermatozoon with a vacuole-free head. However, large vacuoles in spermatozoa have yet to be fully characterized. The present study aimed to determine whether these vacuoles are of nuclear, membrane and/or acrosomal origin. METHODS We studied 15 infertile patients with differing sperm profiles. For each sperm sample, we used high-magnification (×10 000) contrast microscopy to select and assess 30 normal 'top' spermatozoa and 30 spermatozoa with a large sperm-head vacuole (≥ 25% of the head's cross-sectional area). We subsequently analysed the spermatozoa's degree of chromatin condensation (aniline blue staining), DNA fragmentation (terminal deoxyribonucleotidyl transferase-mediated dUTP nick-end labelling assay) and chromosome content (fluorescence in situ hybridization X,Y,18). Atomic force microscopy enabled us to map the plasma sperm membrane in detail. Three-dimensional deconvolution microscopy enabled us to reconstruct images of the nucleus and acrosome in 'top' and 'vacuolated' spermatozoa. RESULTS We studied a total of 450 'top' spermatozoa and 450 vacuolated spermatozoa. The rate of non-condensed chromatin was higher for 'vacuolated' spermatozoa than for 'top' spermatozoa (36.2 ± 1.9 versus 7.6 ± 1.3%, respectively; P < 0.0001). 'Top' and 'vacuolated' spermatozoa did not differ significantly in terms of DNA fragmentation (0.7 ± 0.4 versus 1.3 ± 0.4% respectively; P = 0.25) or aneuploidy (1.1 ± 0.5 versus 2.2 ± 0.7% respectively; P = 0.21). The majority of aneuploid spermatozoa (9 out of 15) lacked chromatin condensation. In all vacuolated spermatozoa, the acrosome was intact, the plasma membrane was sunken but intact and the large vacuole was identified as an abnormal, 'thumbprint'-like nuclear concavity covered by acrosomal and plasmic membranes. CONCLUSIONS The large vacuole appears to be a nuclear 'thumbprint' linked to failure of chromatin condensation.
Robust Algorithms for Max Independent Set on Minor-Free Graphs Based on the Sherali-Adams Hierarchy

This work provides a Linear Programming-based Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for two classical NP-hard problems on graphs when the input graph is guaranteed to be planar, or more generally Minor Free. The algorithm applies a sufficiently large number (some function of 1/� when 1 + � approximation is required) of rounds of the so-called Sherali-Adams Lift-and-Project system. needed to obtain a (1 + � )-approximation, where f is some function that depends only on the graph that should be avoided as a minor. The problem we discuss are the well-studied problems, the Max Independent Set and Min Vertex Cover problems. An curious fact we expose is that in the world of minor- free graph, the Min Vertex Cover is harder in some sense than the Max Independent Set. Our main result shows how to get a PTAS for Max Independent Set in the more general "noisy setting" in which input graphs are not assumed to be planar/minor-free, but only close to being so. In this setting we bound integrality gaps by 1 + � , which in turn provides a 1+ � approximation of the optimum value; however we don't know how to actually find a solution with this approximation guarantee. While there are known combinatorial algorithms for the non-noisy setting of the above graph problems, we know of no previous approximation algorithms in the noisy setting. Further, we give evidence that current combinatorial techniques will fail to generalize to this noisy setting.
Advances in plant proteomics toward improvement of crop productivity and stress resistancex

Abiotic and biotic stresses constrain plant growth and development negatively impacting crop production. Plants have developed stress-specific adaptations as well as simultaneous responses to a combination of various abiotic stresses with pathogen infection. The efficiency of stress-induced adaptive responses is dependent on activation of molecular signaling pathways and intracellular networks by modulating expression, or abundance, and/or post-translational modification (PTM) of proteins primarily associated with defense mechanisms. In this review, we summarize and evaluate the contribution of proteomic studies to our understanding of stress response mechanisms in different plant organs and tissues. Advanced quantitative proteomic techniques have improved the coverage of total proteomes and sub-proteomes from small amounts of starting material, and characterized PTMs as well as protein–protein interactions at the cellular level, providing detailed information on organ- and tissue-specific regulatory mechanisms responding to a variety of individual stresses or stress combinations during plant life cycle. In particular, we address the tissue-specific signaling networks localized to various organelles that participate in stress-related physiological plasticity and adaptive mechanisms, such as photosynthetic efficiency, symbiotic nitrogen fixation, plant growth, tolerance and common responses to environmental stresses. We also provide an update on the progress of proteomics with major crop species and discuss the current challenges and limitations inherent to proteomics techniques and data interpretation for non-model organisms. Future directions in proteomics research toward crop improvement are further discussed.
Impacto da orientação empreendedora nas alianças estratégicas e a influência da alta administração

The management literature draws attention to the gap of strategic alliances (SA) in the paradigm of entrepreneurial orientation (EO). The aim of this paper is to propose a model where EO is associated with SA, this relationship being influenced by its predecessor (top management), and EO working as a multidimensional construct. Data collected from 101 Brazilian firms were analyzed using structural equation modeling and supported those hypotheses. Improving firms’ EO, particularly risk taking (RT), is important in order to promote SA. Obviously, top management can influence SA, but firms with an RT competence are more likely to promote SAs and conduct their implementation. Therefore, the present study offers the following contributions: (1) consolidating the EO construct by using it in a multidimensional way in a reflexive model, particularly the risk dimension; (2) advancing studies relating EO and SA by showing that top management has a significant influence on the EO-SA relationship; (3) the model used is robust and representative of the field of strategy and entrepreneurship as it explained 25.5% of the EO-SA relationship; (4) we suggest that EO should be used to increase SA and firm performance, which can reduce entrance barriers and business risks, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Sensor Collection and Analysis of Radio Frequencies ( SCARF )

In today's net-centric warfare environment, effective management and use of the electromagnetic spectrum is critical. Increasing demands on wireless spectrum from radio traffic, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication, wireless networks, improvised explosive device (IED) jammers, and sensor networks result in sources competing for, and at times conflicting over, limited frequency spectrum. From an intelligence perspective, having a clear understanding of the RF environment, both friendly and foe, is an important essential of battlefield management. This paper presents the Sensor Collection and Analysis of Radio Frequencies (SCARF) system with a focus on the information processing requirements of the sensors and various system components. The overall architecture, sensor processing and fusion challenges, visualization algorithms, and current implementation status are discussed.
Three-dimensional reconstruction and morphological characterization of pituitary macroadenomas

Introduction The aim was to investigate the relationship between the tumor (clinicopathologic and radiological) characteristics and the morphological parameters of pituitary macroadenoma or giant adenoma patients using a three-dimensional (3D) reconstructed model. Material and methods Magnetic resoanance imaging (MRI) was performed preoperatively; tumor grade was determined by the Knosp-Steiner classification and tumor morphology by the SIPAP classification. Pituitary adenomas and adjacent structures were reconstructed three-dimensionally by volume rendering. Results Fifty-two and 6 patients underwent surgery via the transnasal transsphenoidal or pterional approach, respectively. Knosp-Steiner grades I to IV adenomas were observed in 5.2%, 25.9%, 22.4% and 46.6% of the patients, respectively. The 3D model was reconstructed in all cases with superb delineation of tumor morphology and the spatial relationship between the tumor and adjacent tissues. Pituitary adenomas were categorized into intrasellar (13.8%), suprasellar (20.7%), infrasellar (17.2%), and lobulated adenomas (48.3%). Suprasellar adenomas had the smallest (2.27 ±3.22 cm3) and lobulated adenomas the largest volume (24.61 ±30.50 cm3). Intrasellar adenomas were all functioning, while 75%, 60% and 60.7%, respectively, of suprasellar, infrasellar and lobulated adenomas were nonfunctioning, with a significant association between tumor morphology and secretory function (p = 0.005). Conclusions Three-dimensional reconstruction of pituitary macroadenomas offers a simplified morphological classification of pituitary adenomas and may be helpful for neurosurgeons to categorize and characterize pituitary adenomas.