Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Graduates of a French Immersion Program.

This study investigated results of a study that focused on the choice made by three anglophone Canadian graduates of a French immersion program in elementary and junior high school to take high school core courses in French. Specifically, the study examined the students' decisions regarding postsecondary education, career choices, language-related experiences since graduating from high school, recommendations for participants and educators in French immersion programs, and attitudes about their own children's participation in French immersion. The major result was that 4 years after completing high school, the respondents continued to regard their French immersion schooling experiences as successful and seminal in their development. None chose a career or postsecondary program requiring second language knowledge, none used French regularly, and all expressed a feeling of loss and a desire to seek out situations in which they could use French authentically. Other emerging themes included: pride in the immersion experience; a perception that they processed information and conceptualized ideas in ways that were different from their non-immersion counterparts; some embarrassment at not having used French since high school graduation except for travel within Canada or France; recommendation of immersion to others; and regret for not using French more outside school during immersion. Contains 12 references. (MSE) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** 1 GRADUATES OF A FRENCH IMMERSION PROGRAM PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
In the Midst of Comprehensive School Reform: Principals’ Perspectives

Background/Context The role of the principal, and especially the role of the principal in promoting school reform to increase student achievement, is a topic with a long and evolving history. Principals are believed to play a critical role in school reform because they have the potential to impact all aspects of school policy, from time allocated to recess to decisions about curriculum and instruction, teacher hiring and evaluation, assignment of students to teachers, and after-school programs. There is a growing and complex literature about the role of principal and teacher leadership in school reform and improvement, and the degree to which the principal's leadership and management can improve academic achievement is actively debated. However, most of this debate occurs on logical grounds because the empirical evidence linking principal leadership to student achievement is sparse. Research Question The interview questions assessed principals’ perceptions about degree of program implementation, school progress, and issues of teacher and student stability, and their beliefs about what policy makers should know about school reform. Population Twenty-one principals of schools involved in Comprehensive School Reform in Arizona. Research Design The research was based on interviews conducted with each of the principals. The focus of this article centers on their discussions of English language learners, teacher turnover, what students are like, teacher effort, parent involvement, budget constraints, and principal expectations for improving achievement. Conclusions Principals described some of the issues they faced in trying to improve student achievement. These issues included high numbers of students (and parents) with limited English skills, high turnover rates of teachers and students, difficulty of involving parents in schooling, inadequate and inflexible budgets, and the various constraints imposed by the pervasive conditions of poverty that surrounded these schools and their students. Yet, despite these obstacles, principals exhibited matter-of-fact and, in most cases, positive postures toward school improvement. Principals did not see their problems—especially those of students’ learning—to be intractable, but they did urge policy makers to have patience and a fuller awareness of the difficulties they face.
Self-Developed Testing System for Determining the Temperature Behavior of Concrete

Cracking due to temperature and restraint in mass concrete is an important issue. A temperature stress testing machine (TSTM) is an effective test method to study the mechanism of temperature cracking. A synchronous closed loop federated control TSTM system has been developed by adopting the design concepts of a closed loop federated control, a detachable mold design, a direct measuring deformation method, and a temperature deformation compensation method. The results show that the self-developed system has the comprehensive ability of simulating different restraint degrees, multiple temperature and humidity modes, and closed-loop control of multi-TSTMs during one test period. Additionally, the direct measuring deformation method can obtain a more accurate deformation and restraint degree result with little local damage. The external temperature deformation affecting the concrete specimen can be eliminated by adopting the temperature deformation compensation method with different considerations of steel materials. The concrete quality of different TSTMs can be guaranteed by being vibrated on the vibrating stand synchronously. The detachable mold design and assembled method has greatly overcome the difficulty of eccentric force and deformation.
Gut microbial communities of American pikas (Ochotona princeps): Evidence for phylosymbiosis and adaptations to novel diets

Gut microbial communities provide many physiological functions to their hosts, especially in herbivorous animals. We still lack an understanding of how these microbial communities are structured across hosts in nature, especially within a given host species. Studies on laboratory mice have demonstrated that host genetics can influence microbial community structure, but that diet can overwhelm these genetic effects. We aimed to test these ideas in a natural system, the American pika (Ochotona princeps). First, pikas are high-elevation specialists with significant population structure across various mountain ranges in the USA, allowing us to investigate whether similarities in microbial communities match host genetic differences. Additionally, pikas are herbivorous, with some populations exhibiting remarkable dietary plasticity and consuming high levels of moss, which is exceptionally high in fibre and low in protein. This allows us to investigate adaptations to an herbivorous diet, as well as to the especially challenging diet of moss. Here, we inventoried the microbial communities of pika caecal pellets from various populations using 16S rRNA sequencing to investigate structuring of microbial communities across various populations with different natural diets. Microbial communities varied significantly across populations, and differences in microbial community structure were congruent with genetic differences in host population structure, a pattern known as "phylosymbiosis. " Several microbial members (Ruminococcus, Prevotella, Oxalobacter and Coprococcus) were detected across all samples, and thus likely represent a "core microbiome. " These genera are known to perform a number of services for herbivorous hosts such as fibre fermentation and the degradation of plant defensive compounds, and thus are likely important for herbivory in pikas. Moreover, pikas that feed on moss harboured microbial communities highly enriched in Melainabacteria. This uncultivable candidate phylum has been proposed to ferment fibre for herbivores, and thus may contribute to the ability of some pika populations to consume high amounts of moss. These findings demonstrate that both host genetics and diet can influence the microbial communities of the American pika. These animals may be novel sources of fibre-degrading microbes. Last, we discuss the implications of population-specific microbial communities for conservation efforts in this species.
Relativistic N-boson systems bound by pair potentials V ( r ij ) = g ( r 2 ij )

We study the lowest energy E of a relativistic system of N identical bosons bound by pair potentials of the form V (rij) = g(r 2 ij) in three spatial dimensions. In natural units h̄ = c = 1 the system has the semirelativistic ‘spinless-Salpeter’ Hamiltonian
Intrusion-Resilient Secret Sharing

We introduce a new primitive called intrusion-resilient secret sharing (IRSS), whose security proof exploits the fact that there exist functions which can be efficiently computed interactively using low communication complexity in k, but not in k-1 rounds. IRSS is a means of sharing a secret message amongst a set of players which comes with a very strong security guarantee. The shares in an IRSS are made artificially large so that it is hard to retrieve them completely, and the reconstruction procedure is interactive requiring the players to exchange k short messages. The adversaries considered can attack the scheme in rounds, where in each round the adversary chooses some player to corrupt and some function, and retrieves the output of that function applied to the share of the corrupted player. This model captures for example computers connected to a network which can occasionally he infected by malicious software like viruses, which can compute any function on the infected machine, but cannot sent out a huge amount of data. Using methods from the bounded-retrieval model, we construct an IRSS scheme which is secure against any computationally unbounded adversary as long as the total amount of information retrieved by the adversary is somewhat less than the length of the shares, and the adversary makes at most k-1 corruption rounds (as described above, where k rounds are necessary for reconstruction). We extend our basic scheme in several ways in order to allow the shares sent by the dealer to be short (the players then blow them up locally) and to handle even stronger adversaries who can learn some of the shares completely. As mentioned, there is an obvious connection between IRSS schemes and the fact that there exist functions with an exponential gap in their communication complexity for k and k-1 rounds. Our scheme implies such a separation which is in several aspects stronger than the previously known ones.
The burden of air pollution on years of life lost in Beijing, China, 2004-08: retrospective regression analysis of daily deaths

Objectives To better understand the burden of air pollution on deaths, we examined the effects of air pollutants on years of life lost (YLL) in Beijing, China. Design Retrospective regression analysis using daily time series. Setting 8 urban districts in Beijing, China. Participants 80 515 deaths (48 802 male, 31 713 female) recorded by the Beijing death classification system during 2004-08. Main outcome measures Associations between daily YLL and ambient air pollutants (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter <2.5 µm (PM2.5), PM10, SO2, and NO2), after adjusting for long term trends, seasonality, day of the week, and weather conditions. We also examined mortality risk related to air pollutants. Results Mean concentrations of daily PM2.5, PM10, SO2 and NO2 were 105.1 μg/m3, 144.6 μg/m3, 48.6 μg/m3, and 64.2 μg/m3, respectively. All air pollutants had significant effects on years of life lost when we used single pollutant models. An interquartile range (IQR) increase in PM2.5, PM10, SO2, and NO2 was related to YLL increases of 15.8, 15.8, 16.2, and 15.1 years, respectively. The effects of air pollutants on YLL appeared acutely and lasted for two days (lag 0-1); these effects associated with an IQR increase in PM2.5 were greater in women than men (11.1 (95% confidence interval 4.7 to 17.5) v 4.7 (−2.9 to 12.3) YLL) and in people aged up to 65 years than those older than 65 years (12.0 (2.9 to 21) v 3.8 (−0.9 to 8.6) YLL). The mortality risk associated with an IQR increase in PM2.5 was greater for people older than 65 years (2.5% (95% confidence interval 0.6% to 4.5%) increase of mortality) than those aged up to 65 years (0.7% (−0.8% to 2.2%)). Conclusions YLL provides a complementary measure for examining the effect of air pollutants on mortality. Increased YLL are associated with increased air pollution. This study highlights the need to reduce air pollution in Beijing, China, to protect the health of the population.
Key Indicators of Child and Youth Well-Being : Completing the Picture

Contents: Preface-Indicators of Child and Youth Well-Being: Completing the Picture. B. Brown, Introduction: About the Chapters. Part I: Health Indicators. D.P. Hogan, M.E. Msall, Key Indicators of Health and Safety: Infancy, Pre-School, and Middle Childhood. M.W. Stagner, J.M. Zweig, Indicators of Youth Health and Well-Being: Taking the Long View. Part II: Education Indicators. T. Halle, M. Reidy, M. Moorehouse, M. Zaslow, C. Walsh, J. Calkins, N.G. Margie, A. Dent, Progress in the Development of Indicators of School Readiness. A. Flanagan, D. Grissmer, What Do National and State NAEP Scores Tell Us About the Achievement of American K-12 Students. Part III: Social and Emotional Development Indicators. M. Ripke, A.C. Huston, J. Eccles, J. Templeton, The Assessment of Psychological, Emotional, and Social Development Indicators in Middle Childhood. J.L. Roth, C.J. Borbely, J. Brooks-Gunn, Developing Indicators of Confidence, Character, and Caring in Adolescents. J. Eccles, B. Brown, J. Templeton, A Developmental Framework for Selecting Indicators of Well-Being During the Adolescent and Young Adult Years. Part IV: Social Context of Development Indicators. G.D. Sandefur, A. Meier, The Family Environment: Structure, Material Resources, and Child Care. K.M. Harris, S. Cavanagh, Indicators of the Peer Environment in Adolesence. D. Mayer, J. Ralph, Key Indicators of School Quality. J.D. Morenoff, R.J. Sampson, Constructing Community Indicators of Child Well-Being. Part V: Child and Youth Indicators in Practice. T. Corbett, Social Indicators as Policy Tool: Welfare Reform as a Case Study. D. Murphey, Creating Community Capacity to Use Social Indicators. Part VI: Social Indices of Child Well-Being. K.C. Land, V.L. Lamb, S.K. Mustillo, Child and Youth Well-Being in the United States, 1975-1998: Some Findings From a New Index. N.G. Bennett, H-H. Lu, Methodological Issues Surrounding the Construction of an Index of Child Well-Being.
Ontology Semantics and Applications Panorea Gaitanou

This paper presents the widespread use of ontologies in many areas. One of the most important is Semantic Web development. The existence of numerous search engines, which produce results simply by using keywords, is an ineffective method of finding the requested information. With the use of ontologies, intelligent search could be performed, based on semantics and concepts. Furthermore, in the e-commerce field, it is explicitly necessary to integrate and combine applications from different enterprises and indefinable single web entities. Moreover, in the multimedia and graphics field, ontologies can be expanded from their original form and each concept can be described as a multimedia entity. Multimedia ontologies could help in content indexing and optimization, in knowledge sharing and learning based applications and can provide reasoning services. In Peer-to-peer networks and grid technologies, ontologies can facilitate the interoperability among computer systems. Finally, in Pervasive (or Ubiquitous) Computing Environments, ontologies can address several issues concerning the development and management of such systems.
Evolutionary Analyses and Natural Selection of Betaine-Homocysteine S-Methyltransferase (BHMT) and BHMT2 Genes

Betaine-homocysteine S-methyltransferase (BHMT) and BHMT2 convert homocysteine to methionine using betaine and S-methylmethionine, respectively, as methyl donor substrates. Increased levels of homocysteine in blood are associated with cardiovascular disease. Given their role in human health and nutrition, we identified BHMT and BHMT2 genes and proteins from 38 species of deuterostomes including human and non-human primates. We aligned the genes to look for signatures of selection, to infer evolutionary rates and events across lineages, and to identify the evolutionary timing of a gene duplication event that gave rise to two genes, BHMT and BHMT2. We found that BHMT was present in the genomes of the sea urchin, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals; BHMT2 was present only across mammals. BHMT and BHMT2 were present in tandem in the genomes of all monotreme, marsupial and placental species examined. Evolutionary rates were accelerated for BHMT2 relative to BHMT. Selective pressure varied across lineages, with the highest dN/dS ratios for BHMT and BHMT2 occurring immediately following the gene duplication event, as determined using GA Branch analysis. Nine codons were found to display signatures suggestive of positive selection; these contribute to the enzymatic or oligomerization domains, suggesting involvement in enzyme function. Gene duplication likely occurred after the divergence of mammals from other vertebrates but prior to the divergence of extant mammalian subclasses, followed by two deletions in BHMT2 that affect oligomerization and methyl donor specificity. The faster evolutionary rate of BHMT2 overall suggests that selective constraints were reduced relative to BHMT. The dN/dS ratios in both BHMT and BHMT2 was highest following the gene duplication, suggesting that purifying selection played a lesser role as the two paralogs diverged in function.
Mitochondria in Cardiovascular Physiology and Disease Mitochondrial-localized NADPH oxidase 4 is a source of superoxide in angiotensin II-stimulated neurons

Case AJ, Li S, Basu U, Tian J, Zimmerman MC. Mitochondriallocalized NADPH oxidase 4 is a source of superoxide in angiotensin II-stimulated neurons. Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol 305: H19–H28, 2013. First published April 26, 2013; doi:10.1152/ajpheart.00974. 2012. — Angiotensin II (ANG II) plays an important role in the central regulation of systemic cardiovascular function. ANG II-mediated intraneuronal signaling has been shown to be predicated by an increase in mitochondrial superoxide (O2 ̇ ), yet the source of this reactive oxygen species (ROS) production remains unclear. NADPH oxidase 4 (Nox4), a member of the NADPH oxidase family, has been reported to be localized in mitochondria of various cell types and has been implicated in brain angiotensinergic signaling. However, the subcellular localization and function of Nox4 in neurons has not been fully elucidated. In this study, we hypothesized that Nox4 is expressed in neuron mitochondria and is involved in ANG II-dependent O2 ̇ mediated intraneuronal signaling. To query this, Nox4 immunofluorescent staining and mitochondrial enrichment were performed in a mouse catecholaminergic neuronal cell model (CATH.a). Nox4 was shown to be present in neuron mitochondria as evidenced by colocalization with both the mitochondrial-localized protein manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD) and dye MitoTracker Red. Moreover, Nox4 expression was significantly increased in enriched mitochondrial fractions compared with whole cell lysates. Additionally, adenoviral-encoded small interfering RNA for Nox4 (AdsiNox4) caused a robust knockdown in Nox4 mRNA and protein levels, which led to the attenuation of ANG II-induced mitochondrial O2 ̇ production. Finally, in the subfornical organ (SFO) of the brain, Nox4 not only demonstrated mitochondrial localization but was induced by chronic, peripheral infusion of ANG II. Collectively, these data suggest that Nox4 is a source of O2 ̇ in neuron mitochondria that contributes to ANG II intraneuronal signaling.
Short-Term Striatal Gene Expression Responses to Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Are Dependent on MEK and ERK Activation

Background Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is believed to be an important regulator of striatal neuron survival, differentiation, and plasticity. Moreover, reduction of BDNF delivery to the striatum has been implicated in the pathophysiology of Huntington's disease. Nevertheless, many essential aspects of BDNF responses in striatal neurons remain to be elucidated. Methodology/Principal Findings In this study, we assessed the relative contributions of multipartite intracellular signaling pathways to the short-term induction of striatal gene expression by BDNF. To identify genes regulated by BDNF in these GABAergic cells, we first used DNA microarrays to quantify their transcriptomic responses following 3 h of BDNF exposure. The signal transduction pathways underlying gene induction were subsequently dissected using pharmacological agents and quantitative real-time PCR. Gene expression responses to BDNF were abolished by inhibitors of TrkB (K252a) and calcium (chelator BAPTA-AM and transient receptor potential cation channel [TRPC] antagonist SKF-96365). Interestingly, inhibitors of mitogen-activated protein kinase kinases 1 and 2 (MEK1/2) and extracellular signal-regulated kinase ERK also blocked the BDNF-mediated induction of all tested BDNF-responsive genes. In contrast, inhibitors of nitric oxide synthase (NOS), phosphotidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K), and CAMK exhibited less prevalent, gene-specific effects on BDNF-induced RNA expression. At the nuclear level, the activation of both Elk-1 and CREB showed MEK dependence. Importantly, MEK-dependent activation of transcription was shown to be required for BDNF-induced striatal neurite outgrowth, providing evidence for its contribution to striatal neuron plasticity. Conclusions These results show that the MEK/ERK pathway is a major mediator of neuronal plasticity and other important BDNF-dependent striatal functions that are fulfilled through the positive regulation of gene expression.
SLA-driven planning and optimization of enterprise applications

We propose a model-based methodology to size and plan enterprise applications subject to Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Our approach is illustrated using a real-world Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, namely SAP ERP. Firstly, we develop a closed queueing network model with finite capacity regions describing the SAP ERP application performance and show that this model is effective and robust in capturing measured response times and utilizations. Secondly, we propose an analytical cost model that jointly accounts for fixed hardware costs and dynamic operational costs related to power consumption. Based on the developed performance and cost models, we propose to use multi-objective optimization to find the Pareto-optimal solutions that describe the best trade-off solutions between conflicting performance and cost-saving goals. Experimental validation demonstrates the accuracy of the proposed models and shows that the attained Pareto-optimal solutions can be efficiently used by service providers for SLA-driven planning decisions, thus making a strong case in favor of the applicability of our methodology for deployment decisions subject to different SLA requirements.