Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mental Health Treatment Preferences of Older and Younger Primary Care Patients

Objective: To compare mental health treatment history and preferences in older and younger primary care patients. Method: We surveyed 77 older (60+) and 312 younger adult primary care patients from four outpatient medical clinics about their mental health treatment history and preferences. Results: Older adults were less likely than younger adults to report a history of mental health treatment (29% vs. 51%) or to be currently receiving treatment (11% vs. 23%). They were also less likely to indicate that they currently desire help with emotional problems (25% vs. 50%). Older adults were more likely to hold a belief in self-reliance that could limit their willingness to accept treatment for mental health problems, although they were less likely than younger adults to identify other barriers to treatment. Older adults reported that they were less likely to attend programs in primary care targeting mental health issues (counseling, stress management) than younger adults, although they were as willing as younger adults to attend programs targeting physical health issues (healthy living class, fitness program). Age remained a significant predictor of mental health treatment history and preferences even after controlling for other demographic variables. Conclusion: These results suggest that older adults in the primary care setting may be less willing to accept mental health services than younger adults. Results further suggest that perceived barriers may differ for older and younger patients, which may indicate the need for age-specific educational messages and services targeted to older adults in primary care.
The Effect of Handedness in Vocational Training among Adults with Intellectual Disability

Aim: The main aim of this study was to describe the relationship between right-handed, left-handed and mixed-handed adults with intellectual disability and their success in vocational training courses. Method: A total of 71 research participants in Iran with moderate and severe intellectual disability were chosen and their hand preferences were determined by means of a hand preference test. Results: The results showed that the research participants who were right-handers or left-handers were significantly more successful than those participants who were mixed-handers. There was a significant relationship between left or right handedness and success in job training (chi2 = 11.490, df = 2, p = 0.003). Left-handers were statistically more successful in job training programmes than their mixed-hander counterparts (chi2 = 9.252, df = 1, p = 0.002). A similar difference was found between right-hander and mixed-hander groups (chi2 = 9.047, df = 1, p = 0.003). The difference between left and right handers in job training was not statistically significant (chi2 = 0.227, df = 1, p = 0.634). Conclusion: Hand preference could be an important consideration in the vocational rehabilitation assessment and evaluation of people with intellectual disabilities. Training programmes may need to be tailored to suit an individual according to handedness, particularly with those who are mixed-handers.
Effectiveness of Supplemental Educational Services

Abstract: One of the modifications of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (known as the No Child Left Behind Act) gave parents of low-income students in low-performing schools a choice of Supplemental Educational Services (SEdS). SEdS include tutoring or other academic support services offered outside the regular school day, at no charge to students or their families, by public or private organizations that have been approved by the state. We examine the impacts of SEdS on test scores among 24,000 students in school districts where SEdS were oversubscribed in Florida, Ohio, and Connecticut. Oversubscribed school districts are required to make SEdS available to the lowest achieving students among eligible applicants, creating the opportunity to estimate impacts using a regression discontinuity design, which relies on districts’ use of a continuous measure of prior academic achievement to determine which eligible applicants will be offered services. We find no impact of SEdS on student test scores.
Variable Stiffness Actuator applied to an active ankle prosthesis: Principle, energy-efficiency, and control

Series elastic actuators are very popular in rehabilitation robotics. Among other advantages, elastic elements between the actuator and the load permit to store and release energy during the task completion, such that the energy balance is improved and the motor power peak is decreased. In rhythmic tasks like walking, this reduces to design the spring stiffness such that it works at resonance. To comply with different gaits and cadences, it is therefore necessary to design Variable Stiffness Actuators (VSA). This paper proposes three contributions: (i) we apply a particular concept of VSA to an active ankle prosthesis; (ii) we discuss the relevance of using VSA to change the stiffness also within the gait cycle; and (iii) we elaborate some control strategies for this device. Our guideline is to track a mechanical design and a controller maximizing energy efficiency. We establish that a promising approach is simply to control the amount of energy stored in the elastic element.
Blending Narratives: A Storytelling Strategy for Social Studies

Blending narratives allows students to combine their personal experiences with specific social studies content to tell a story. Each story created and told by students is uniquely different. The primary purposes of blending narratives are to validate each student in the classroom and allow them to demonstrate knowledge of classroom content. Students determine which prior experiences they should draw from to demonstrate their comprehension of the content. The blended narratives are complemented and supported by instrumental music that is appropriate for the classroom and is chosen by the teacher and students. The author provides an example of a blended narrative and step-by-step instructions for implementing this strategy in the classroom.
A Co-evolved Continuum of Language, Culture and Cognition: Prospects of Interdisciplinary Research

This paper deals with questions of language evolution and discusses the emergence of linguistic communication systems in the framework of a co-evolving continuum of language, culture and cognition. Different approaches have tried to unravel the mechanisms underlying language evolution and put emphasis on different aspects, for instance, biological vs. cultural mechanisms. While both are important, I will argue that at least a strong nativism should be refuted. After comparing both approaches, evidence from various lines of research (but especially agent-based models) will be reviewed to argue for the existence of cultural evolutionary processes. In these experiments linguistic structure emerges from scratch via self-organization and selection merely due to interaction and cultural transmission. At the same time, the diversity we can observe in growing cross-linguistic data suggests that many grammatical and conceptual categories that had been considered ‘universal’ do in fact vary. These findings, especially in the semantic domain of space have led to claims about the relation of language and general cognition and a revival of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, but it remains unclear in which directions language, culture and cognition interact. Here I argue that these problems can be approached in the presented framework from an evolutionary perspective. I propose how to address them empirically by combining agent-based models, experimental semiotics and insights from comparative linguistics. I further aim to stress the importance of the ecological environment in evolutionary models and give ex-amples of how it can be taken into account in future empirical work. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.sal. 0.25. 8504
Author Identification in American Courts

Recent work has taken different approaches in attempting to use linguistics to identify the authors of documents by the style of their writing. Traditionally, linguists have sought to identify similarities and differences in a host of features, including spelling, syntax, word usage and others, and to draw inferences regarding authorship based on a comparison of those features. However, developments in the law of evidence in the United States during the past ten years have focused the attention of courts on the validity and reliability of a technique before an expert will be permitted to offer an opinion based upon it. Courts are especially mindful of whether a technique can identify an error rate with sufficient reliability. In this context, it is incumbent on the field to respond with methods that will be acceptable to courts. This paper discusses some significant achievements being made in meeting this challenge, including efforts to identify syntactic features that are diagnostic of authorship, eclectic methods that look for constellations of similarities, and the use of linguistic corpora, a development in which Malcolm Coulthard played a pioneering role.
Dissimilarity-based learning for complex data

Rapid advances of information technology have entailed an ever increasing amount of digital data, which raises the demand for powerful data mining and machine learning tools. Due to modern methods for gathering, preprocessing, and storing information, the collected data become more and more complex: a simple vectorial representation, and comparison in terms of the Euclidean distance is often no longer appropriate to capture relevant aspects in the data. Instead, problem-adapted similarity or dissimilarity measures refer directly to the given encoding scheme, allowing to treat information constituents in a relational manner. This thesis addresses several challenges of complex data sets and their representation in the context of machine learning. The goal is to investigate possible remedies, and propose corresponding improvements of established methods, accompanied by examples from various application domains. The main scientific contributions are the following: (I) Many well-established machine learning techniques are restricted to vectorial input data only. Therefore, we propose the extension of two popular prototype-based clustering and classification algorithms to non-negative symmetric dissimilarity matrices. (II) Some dissimilarity measures incorporate a fine-grained parameterization, which allows to configure the comparison scheme with respect to the given data and the problem at hand. However, finding adequate parameters can be hard or even impossible for human users, due to the intricate effects of parameter changes and the lack of detailed prior knowledge. Therefore, we propose to integrate a metric learning scheme into a dissimilarity-based classifier, which can automatically adapt the parameters of a sequence alignment measure according to the given classification task. (III) A valuable instrument to make complex data sets accessible are dimensionality reduction techniques, which can provide an approximate low-dimensional embedding of the given data set, and, as a special case, a planar map to visualize the data's neighborhood structure. To assess the reliability of such an embedding, we propose the extension of a well-known quality measure to enable a fine-grained, tractable quantitative analysis, which can be integrated into a visualization. This tool can also help to compare different dissimilarity measures (and parameter settings), if ground truth is not available. (IV) All techniques are demonstrated on real-world examples from a variety of application domains, including bioinformatics, motion capturing, music, and education.
Informal learning after organizational change

This inductive, qualitative study investigates how learning took place among nine experienced engineers in an industrial setting after a major reorganization. A thematic analysis of the transcripts revealed that the learning was informal and that it fell into three distinct categories: learning new workflows, learning about the chemical process, and developing engineering expertise. The participants also describe five limitations to the learning in this context. The dynamic context of this study had a strong influence on the learning that took place.
For kick and country: the 2010 VIVA World Cup and sport as a site for expressions of alternate ‘national’ identities

The VIVA World Cup is an alternative football tournament for groups unrepresented in international sport, including groups that identify along political, geographic, ethnic, and linguistic lines. This study of the 2010 edition, held in Gozo, Malta, examines the organizers' insistence that their event is political and the ways in which the ‘national’ interests of participating groups challenged this position. While the VIVA World Cup could offer participants a site for resistance, the footballers in Gozo asserted cultural distinctiveness and celebrated affective attachments not to protest the exclusivity of world sport, but so that they could join in too.
Resolving Uncertainty about the Number of Bidders in Independent Private- Value Auctions: An Experimental Analysis

Results from first-price, sealed-bid auctions, in which there is uncertainty regarding the number of bidders, are reported. Consistent with recent theoretical findings, concealing information regarding the number of bidders raises more revenue for the seller than revealing information. Individual bids show that (1) narrowly interpreted, the Nash equilibrium bidding theory underlying these theoretical predictions is rejected, as less than 50% of all bids satisfy the strict inequality requirements of the theory, but (2) a majority of the deviations from these inequality requirements favor the revenue-raising predictions of the Nash model, and, in a large number of cases, involve marginal violations of the theory.
Partners in a Learning Organization: A Student-Focused Model of Professional Development

Abstract This research report presents a student-focused model aimed at involving students, academics, and administrators in improving and enhancing learning and teaching at a university business school. The “partners in learning” model involves using student feedback to develop curriculum, teaching, and assessment; systematic, in-context professional development; and curriculum review. This longitudinal study reports that without strong educational leadership and organizational commitment, positive change is slow in showing results. The lessons learned are included for university professional developers.
Electrode position optimization in magnetoelectric sensors based on magnetostrictive-piezoelectric bilayers on cantilever substrates

Finite element method (FEM) simulations are performed to investigate the sensitivity to dc magnetic fields of magnetoelectric sensors on cantilever substrates with trenches or weights at different positions. For a simple layered cantilever, a 15% higher signal voltage across the piezoelectric layer is obtained for optimally positioned electrodes and an insulating magnetostrictive material. A further 25% increase in the signal voltage is achieved for a trenched cantilever design with a pick-up region.
Microsecond time-scale kinetics of transient biochemical reactions

To afford mechanistic studies in enzyme kinetics and protein folding in the microsecond time domain we have developed a continuous-flow microsecond time-scale mixing instrument with an unprecedented dead-time of 3.8 ± 0.3 μs. The instrument employs a micro-mixer with a mixing time of 2.7 μs integrated with a 30 mm long flow-cell of 109 μm optical path length constructed from two parallel sheets of silver foil; it produces ultraviolet-visible spectra that are linear in absorbance up to 3.5 with a spectral resolution of 0.4 nm. Each spectrum corresponds to a different reaction time determined by the distance from the mixer outlet, and by the fluid flow rate. The reaction progress is monitored in steps of 0.35 μs for a total duration of ~600 μs. As a proof of principle the instrument was used to study spontaneous protein refolding of pH-denatured cytochrome c. Three folding intermediates were determined: after a novel, extremely rapid initial phase with τ = 4.7 μs, presumably reflecting histidine re-binding to the iron, refolding proceeds with time constants of 83 μs and 345 μs to a coordinatively saturated low-spin iron form in quasi steady state. The time-resolution specifications of our spectrometer for the first time open up the general possibility for comparison of real data and molecular dynamics calculations of biomacromolecules on overlapping time scales.
The role of the teacher in moral education

Department of Counseling Psychology Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts T eachers, like their students, are moral philosophers. They must ask of themselves what they ask of their students. The classroom confronts both teachers and students with a myriad of potential moral dilemmas surrounding issues like cheating, truth telling, and keeping promises. Teachers need to struggle with questions of what is right and what is good, therefore, before walking into the classroom as well as during actual classroom interaction. A cognitive developmental framework of teaching not only recognizes the potential learning that can result from philosophical inquiry in the classroom, but this approach also encourages an open-ended dialogue about crucial moral questions. As a philosopher the teacher needs to realize that children and adolescents have the capacity to reason philosophically and to become aware of themselves and others as reasonable thinkers.
The role of spirituality and religion for those bereaved due to a traumatic death

Abstract After a sudden traumatic death, bereaved relatives may feel particularly distressed. We look at the role of spirituality (including religion, whether following communal forms or more individually expressed) in people's lives after the traumatic death of a relative. Our findings are based on narrative interviews with 40 people bereaved through murder, manslaughter, car crash, train accident, fire, bomb explosion, industrial explosion, or pedestrian incident. People were interviewed in their homes throughout the UK. A qualitative interpretive approach was taken, combining thematic analysis with constant comparison. A few people said that after the death they felt angry or cynical about religion, but many people turned to spirituality or religion for help at this time. People reported that through spirituality or religion they found practical support, comfort, help in making sense of what had happened, belief in continued existence beyond death, a way of ensuring ‘continuing bonds’, and healing. Despite declining church attendance and a decline in the number of people who call themselves Christians, it seems that in the UK religion still remains important for people bereaved by a traumatic death.
Computational Social Indicators: A Case Study of Chinese University Ranking

Many professional organizations produce regular reports of social indicators to monitor social progress. Despite their reasonable results and societal value, early efforts on social indicator computing suffer from three problems: 1) labor-intensive data gathering, 2) insufficient data, and 3) expert-relied data fusion. Towards this end, we present a novel graph-based multi-channel ranking scheme for social indicator computation by exploring the rich multi-channel Web data. For each channel, this scheme presents the semi-structured and unstructured data with simple graphs and hypergraphs, respectively. It then groups the channels into different clusters according to their correlations. After that, it uses a unified model to learn the cluster-wise common spaces, perform ranking separately upon each space, and fuse these rankings to produce the final one. We take Chinese university ranking as a case study and validate our scheme over a real-world dataset. It is worth emphasizing that our scheme is applicable to computation of other social indicators, such as Educational attainment.
A network of genetic repression and derepression specifies projection fates in the developing neocortex

Neurons within each layer in the mammalian cortex have stereotypic projections. Four genes—Fezf2, Ctip2, Tbr1, and Satb2—regulate these projection identities. These genes also interact with each other, and it is unclear how these interactions shape the final projection identity. Here we show, by generating double mutants of Fezf2, Ctip2, and Satb2, that cortical neurons deploy a complex genetic switch that uses mutual repression to produce subcortical or callosal projections. We discovered that Tbr1, EphA4, and Unc5H3 are critical downstream targets of Satb2 in callosal fate specification. This represents a unique role for Tbr1, implicated previously in specifying corticothalamic projections. We further show that Tbr1 expression is dually regulated by Satb2 and Ctip2 in layers 2–5. Finally, we show that Satb2 and Fezf2 regulate two disease-related genes, Auts2 (Autistic Susceptibility Gene2) and Bhlhb5 (mutated in Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia), providing a molecular handle to investigate circuit disorders in neurodevelopmental diseases.
REDUCTION OF SEVERE ISCHEMIA/REPERFUSION INJURY IN RAT KIDNEY GRAFTS BY A SOLUBLE P-SELECTIN GLYCOPROTEIN LIGAND1

Background. Inflammatory leukocyte-endothelium interactions, mediated by selectins, contribute to renal ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury. We examined the influence of the soluble P-selectin glycoprotein ligand 1 (sPSGL) on early I/R-induced changes in a rat kidney transplantation model with long cold ischemia. Methods. After 24 hr of cold storage, syngeneic kidneys were grafted into bilaterally nephrectomized rats. Before transplantation, recipients received either 1 mg/kg of sPSGL or vehicle (n=8 per group). Six hours after reperfusion, grafts were removed for light microscopy and immunohistochemistry. Capillary blood flow was measured under a fluorescence microscope by using the concentric-circles method. Results. A greater proportion, 74.7±7.2% (sPSGL) vs. 28±7.4% (controls), of all dye-labeled outer medullary capillaries appeared in the 12-&mgr;m radius (P <0.01), indicating dense blood flow, whereas 7.6±2.9% vs. 43.3±9.7%, respectively, appeared in the 60-&mgr;m radius (P <0.05), indicating rarefied blood flow. In the sPSGL-treated group, the extent of severe tubular damage within the inner stripe of the outer medulla was lower compared with controls (37.5±8.3% vs. 78.4±3.5%, P <0.01). Outer medullary heat shock protein 72 expression was 14.5±1.6% in the sPSGL-treated group compared with 9.6±1.4% in controls (P <0.05). The number of infiltrating polymorphonuclear leukocytes was similar in both groups. Treatment with sPSGL had no influence on the serum creatinine level. Conclusions. Our data suggest that impairment of outer medullary blood flow is crucial in I/R injury of kidney grafts with prolonged cold storage. Reduction of capillary blood flow perturbations by sPSGL protects tubular cells from severe structural damage. Blocking early selectin-mediated leukocyte adhesion may have therapeutic implications in improving the prognosis of renal transplants with severe I/R injury.