Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The learning experiences of health and social care paraprofessionals on a foundation degree

Foundation degrees have been developed in the UK as a means of meeting the learning needs of paraprofessionals in health and social care and the services within which they work in a cost‐effective fashion. Workplace learning is an intrinsic component to these degrees. Taking a socio‐cultural perspective, this paper examines how the students’ workplaces, life circumstances and sense of career trajectory shaped their learning experience and motivation. A small‐scale evaluation study, using semi‐structured interviews, focused on the learning experiences of a group of paraprofessionals enrolled in a foundation degree in health and social care. Data revealed fragmented employment patterns, underpinned by consistent vocational drives. While the study resonated with vocation, participants were ambivalent or lacked information about career progression. Workplace conditions, relationships and limited time shaped learning and coping strategies. A strategic and focused approach to student learning is required and includes attention to career pathways, workforce development strategy, the requirements of a range of stakeholders, workplace supervision and support for learning.
From Motivation to Engagement: The Role of Effort Regulation of Virtual High School Students in Mathematics Courses

Engagement and motivation are not one and the same, but motivation can be transformed into engagement with proper design of support. In this study, we examined the differences between high performers and low performers with regard to changes in their motivation, regulation, and engagement throughout the semester. Participants were 100 students enrolled in online self-paced asynchronous mathematics courses offered at a virtual high school in the United States. A survey was administered to participants at three times throughout the semester. Data were analyzed using repeated measures MANOVAs. Overall, high performers and low performers differed with regard to their changes in motivation and regulation throughout the course, specifically, in self-efficacy and effort regulation. The study findings offer implications for teaching and research on creating potentially effective support for virtual learning.
Higher education chaplaincy and the changing role of religion in the public square : a contextual theology for university chaplaincy

University chaplaincy has received little attention in discussions of the role of religion within the secular university. Theologians have primarily considered chaplaincy as a generic form of ministry rather than constructing accounts based in the different chaplaincy contexts. By contrast this thesis aims to construct a contextual theology for chaplaincy based in an understanding of the role of religion in the public square of the secular university. Using a discourse analysis of recent policy documents and reports from government, the Higher Education Sector and the Churches I seek to uncover their underlying understandings of the role of religion in secular Higher Education. This analysis reveals that although there is little mention of chaplaincy outside the Church documents the secular university is a complex fusion of secular, multi-faith and Christian themes with religion in the university increasingly understood through thin accounts concerned with managerial processes. The thesis then examines the history of chaplaincy in the British university looking for a coherent theological narrative for the development of this context. This history shows how the growth of university chaplaincy has been shaped by increasingly diverse forms of society. Using the historical narrative and contemporary analysis I then build a typology for contemporary chaplaincy responses. In the final chapter I offer a theology for university chaplaincy based in an understanding of the essentially diverse nature of secularity, on the dialogical accounts of the university offered by Ford and Higton and an understanding of Christian responses to otherness through hospitality drawn from the work of Barnes and Bretherton. The thesis argues for the importance of the Higher Education chaplaincy for the university, the Churches and for academic theology, concluding with recommendations about the training and support of chaplains.
Distributed under Creative Commons Cc-by 4.0 Are Floating Algal Mats a Refuge from Hypoxia for Estuarine Invertebrates?

Eutrophic aquatic habitats are characterized by the proliferation of vegetation leading to a large standing biomass that upon decomposition may create hypoxic (low-oxygen) conditions. This is indeed the case in nutrient impacted estuaries of Prince Edward Island, Canada, where macroalgae, from the genus Ulva, form submerged ephemeral mats. Hydrological forces and gases released from photosynthesis and decomposition lead to these mats occasionally floating to the water's surface, henceforth termed floating mats. Here, we explore the hypothesis that floating mats are refugia during periods of sustained hypoxia/anoxia and examine how the invertebrate community responds to it. Floating mats were not always present, so in the first year (2013) sampling was attempted monthly and limited to when both floating and submerged mats occurred. In the subsequent year sampling was weekly, but at only one estuary due to logistical constraints from increased sampling frequency, and was not limited to when both mat types occurred. Water temperature, salinity, and pH were monitored biweekly with dissolved oxygen concentration measured hourly. The floating and submerged assemblages shared many of the same taxa but were statistically distinct communities; submerged mats tended to have a greater proportion of benthic animals and floating mats had more mobile invertebrates and insects. In 2014, sampling happened to occur in the weeks before the onset of anoxia, during 113 consecutive hours of sustained anoxia, and for four weeks after normoxic conditions returned. The invertebrate community on floating mats appeared to be unaffected by anoxia, indicating that these mats may be refugia during times of oxygen stress. Conversely, there was a dramatic decrease in animal abundances that remained depressed on submerged mats for two weeks. Cluster analysis revealed that the submerged mat communities from before the onset of anoxia and four weeks after anoxia were highly similar to each other, indicating recovery. When mobile animals were considered alone, there was an exponential relationship between the percentage of animals on floating mats, relative to the total number on both mat types, and hypoxia. The occupation of floating mats by invertebrates at all times, and their dominance there during hypoxia/anoxia, provides support for the hypothesis that floating mats are refugia.
Evaluating hardware-assisted virtualization for deploying HPC-as-a-service

Virtualization has been the main driver behind the rise of Cloud computing. Despite Cloud computing's tremendous benefits to many applications (e.g., enterprise, Web, game/ multimedia, life sciences, and data analytics), its success in High Performance Computing (HPC) domain has been limited. The oft-cited reason is, apparently, latency caused by virtualization. Meanwhile, the rising popularity of virtualization has compelled CPU vendors to incorporate virtualization technology (VT) in chips. This hardware VT is believed to accelerate context switching, speed up memory address translation, and enable I/O direct access; those are basically sources of virtualization overheads. This paper reports the evaluation on computation and communication performance of different virtualized environments, i.e., Xen and KVM, leveraging hardware VT. Different network fabrics, namely Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand, were employed and tested in the virtualized environments and their results were compared against those in the native environments. A real-world HPC application (an MPI-based hydrodynamic simulation) was also used to assess the performance. Outcomes indicate that hardware-assisted virtualization can bring HPC-as-a-Service into realization.
Advanced positioning and location based services in 4G mobile-IP radio access networks

This paper proposes an evolved architecture from 3G networks to provide basic and advanced positioning methods for location based services in mobile IPv6-based radio access networks. We start analyzing current status of location-based services (i.e. LBS or LCS) and architectures in 3G networks as well as state-of-the-art research on LBS and mobile Internet. Next we set the requirements the solution should fulfill. We continue proposing the evolved architecture for support of basic and advanced positioning methods, using MIPv6 and HMIPv6 as mobility scenario for the mobile IPv6 based RAN, describing element's functions and changes from current approaches as well as description of the dynamic behavior. We complete the proposal with a bandwidth analysis of the signaling, identifying issues when planning implementation of LCS services in the network.
Particle swarm optimization of potential fields for obstacle avoidance

This paper addresses the safe navigation of multiple nonholonomic mobile robots in shared areas. Obstacle avoidance for mobile robots is performed by artificial potential fields and special traffic rules. In addition, the behavior of mobile robots is optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO). The control of non-holonomic vehicles is performed using the virtual leader principle together with a local linear controller.
Modeling Pause-Duration for Style-Specific Speech Synthesis

A major contribution to speaking style comes from both the location of phrase breaks in an utterance, as well as the duration of these breaks. This paper is about modeling the duration of style specific breaks. We look at six styles of speech here. We present analysis that shows that these styles differ in the duration of pauses in natural speech. We have built CART models to predict the pause duration in these corpora and have integrated them into the Festival speech synthesis system. Our objective results show that if we have sufficient training data, we can build style specific models. Our subjective tests show that people can perceive the difference between different models and that they prefer style specific models over simple pause duration models.
Do Schools Reinforce or Reduce Learning Gaps between Advantaged and Disadvantaged Students? Evidence from Vietnam and Peru

This article examines—for two developing countries, Vietnam and Peru—whether disadvantaged children learn less than advantaged children when both types of children are enrolled in the same school. This is done by estimating education production functions that contain two school fixed effects for each school, one for advantaged children and one for disadvantaged children. The article examines six different definitions of advantage based on household wealth, cognitive skills at age 5, gender, ethnicity (Peru only), maternal education, and nutritional status. The results show no sign that schools are less effective for disadvantaged groups in Vietnam; indeed, if anything one traditionally advantaged group, males, seems to do worse in school than the corresponding disadvantaged group, females. In contrast, in Peru ethnic minority students and students who enter primary school with low cognitive skills appear to learn less in school than ethnic majority students and students with relatively high cognitive skills, respectively, who are enrolled in the same school.
Study of tsunami propagation in the Ligurian Sea

Abstract. Tsunami propagation is analyzed for the Ligurian Sea with particular attention on the French coasts of the Mediterranean. Historical data of tsunami manifestation on the French coast are analyzed for the period 2000 B.C.–1991 A.D. Numerical simulations of potential and historical tsunamis in the Ligurian Sea are done in the context of the nonlinear shallow water theory. Tsunami wave heights as well as their distribution function is calculated for historical tsunamis and it is shown that the log-normal distribution describes reasonably the simulated data. This demonstrates the particular role of bottom irregularities for the wave height distribution function near the coastlines. Also, spectral analysis of numerical tide-gauge records is done for potential tsunamis, revealing the complex resonant interactions between the tsunami waves and the bottom oscillations. It is shown that for an earthquake magnitude of 6.8 (averaged value for the Mediterranean Sea) the tsunami phenomenon has a very local character but with long duration. For sources located near the steep continental slope in the vicinity of the French-Italian Rivera, the tsunami tide-gauge records in the vicinity of Cannes – Imperia present irregular oscillations with a characteristic period of 20–30 min and a total duration of 10–20 h. For the western French coasts the amplitudes are significantly less with characteristic low-frequency oscillations (period of 40 min–1 h).
AN ANALYSIS OF AUTOMATIC CONTENT SELECTION ALGORITHMS FOR SPOKEN DIALOGUE SYSTEM SUMMARIES

Previous work on information presentation in dialogue systems has argued that a user model is essential for selecting utterance content. Other work claims that the ability to browse the data is critical for supporting information-seeking behaviors in information retrieval applications, but does not specify how to provide browsing support. In this work, we test the hypothesis that automatically constructed summaries based on the current dialogue state and provided incrementally during the dialogue can support users' browsing activities. We examine the impact of three factors on summary efficacy: (1) the number and type of attributes selected for summary construction; (2) the use of a decision theoretic user model; and (3) the use of association rules derived automatically from the database subset currently in-focus. Our experimental results show that equally effective summaries can be constructed using either a combination of a user model with association rules, or the "Refiner" method described in previous work.
Speaker Verification Using Orthogonal GMM with Fusion of Threshold , Identification Front-end , and UBM

This paper shows that the performance of a Gaussian Mixture Model using a Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM) speaker verification (SV) system can be further improved by combining it with threshold and speaker identification (SI) “front-ends. ” The paper formulates performance in terms of false rejection rate and false acceptance rate of the overall SV system. We show analytically that an SI-based front-end can significantly decrease the false acceptance rate and only results in a slight increase in the false rejection rate. Experimentally we use a subset of NIST 2001 speaker recognition corpus with 10 registered speakers of 20 utterances against 10 imposters of 960 utterances. The results show significant reduction in the false acceptance rate, from 3.5% down to 1.0% (i.e. 71% error reduction) while maintaining the same zero false rejection rate.
Efficient creation and incremental maintenance of the HOPI index for complex XML document collections

The HOPI index, a connection index for XML documents based on the concept of a 2-hop cover, provides space- and time-efficient reachability tests along the ancestor, descendant, and link axes to support path expressions with wildcards in XML search engines. This paper presents enhanced algorithms for building HOPI, shows how to augment the index with distance information, and discusses incremental index maintenance. Our experiments show substantial improvements over the existing divide-and-conquer algorithm for index creation, low space overhead for including distance information in the index, and efficient updates.
Carbon Black Nanoparticles Promote Endothelial Activation and Lipid Accumulation in Macrophages Independently of Intracellular ROS Production

Exposure to nanoparticles (NPs) may cause vascular effects including endothelial dysfunction and foam cell formation, with oxidative stress and inflammation as supposed central mechanisms. We investigated oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction and lipid accumulation caused by nano-sized carbon black (CB) exposure in cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs), THP-1 (monocytes) and THP-1 derived macrophages (THP-1a). The proliferation of HUVECs or co-cultures of HUVECs and THP-1 cells were unaffected by CB exposure, whereas there was increased cytotoxicity, assessed by the LDH and WST-1 assays, especially in THP-1 and THP-1a cells. The CB exposure decreased the glutathione (GSH) content in THP-1 and THP-1a cells, whereas GSH was increased in HUVECs. The reactive oxygen species (ROS) production was increased in all cell types after CB exposure. A reduction of the intracellular GSH concentration by buthionine sulfoximine (BSO) pre-treatment further increased the CB-induced ROS production in THP-1 cells and HUVECs. The expression of adhesion molecules ICAM-1 and VCAM-1, but not adhesion of THP-1 to HUVECs or culture dishes, was elevated by CB exposure, whereas these effects were unaffected by BSO pre-treatment. qRT-PCR showed increased VCAM1 expression, but no change in GCLM and HMOX1 expression in CB-exposed HUVECs. Pre-exposure to CB induced lipid accumulation in THP-1a cells, which was not affected by the presence of the antioxidant N-acetylcysteine. In addition, the concentrations of CB to induce lipid accumulation were lower than the concentrations to promote intracellular ROS production in THP-1a cells. In conclusion, exposure to nano-sized CB induced endothelial dysfunction and foam cell formation, which was not dependent on intracellular ROS production.
The Medicago truncatula DMI 1 Protein Modulates Cytosolic Calcium Signaling 1

Biology Department, University of York, York YO10 5YW, United Kingdom (E.P., D.S.); John Innes Centre, Norwich Research Park, Norwich NR4 7UH, United Kingdom (J.S., A.B.H., A.E., G.E.D.O., J.A.D.); Department of Agronomy (M.V., J.-M.A.) and Department of Botany (M.S.O.), University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706; Department of Plant Pathology, University of California, Davis, California 95616 (B.K.R., D.R.C.); and Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602–4712 (G.F., M.G.H.)
Neurogenin3 Activation Is Not Sufficient to Direct Duct-to-Beta Cell Transdifferentiation in the Adult Pancreas*

Background: Whether neurogenin3 activation represents beta cell neogenesis in adults is controversial. Results: Neurogenin3-activated pancreatic duct cells do not become beta cells. Conclusion: Neurogenin3 activation is not a signature for adult beta cell neogenesis. Significance: Our data strongly argue against the widely held belief that neurogenin3 is a marker of beta cell neogenesis in the adult pancreas, especially from duct cells. It remains controversial whether adult pancreatic ducts harbor facultative beta cell progenitors. Because neurogenin3 (Ngn3) is a key determinant of pancreatic endocrine cell neogenesis during embryogenesis, many studies have also relied upon Ngn3 expression as evidence of beta cell neogenesis in adults. Recently, however, Ngn3 as a marker of adult beta cell neogenesis has been called into question by reports of Ngn3 expression in fully-developed beta cells. Nevertheless, direct evidence as to whether Ngn3 activation in adult pancreatic duct cells may lead to duct-to-beta cell transdifferentiation is lacking. Here we studied two models of Ngn3 activation in adult pancreatic duct cells (low-dose alloxan treatment and pancreatic duct ligation) and lineage-traced Ngn3-activated duct cells by labeling them through intraductal infusion with a cell-tagging dye, CFDA-SE No dye-labeled beta cells were found during the follow-up in either model, suggesting that activation of Ngn3 in duct cells is not sufficient to direct their transdifferentiation into beta cells. Therefore, Ngn3 activation in duct cells is not a signature for adult beta cell neogenesis.
Similarity Matrix Model for the NTCIR-12 MedNLPDoc Task

We participated in the NTCIR-12 MedNLPDoc phenotyping task. In this paper, we describe our approach for this task. The core part of our model is a similarity matrix model in which each element has a local similarity value between n-grams from a disease name and a medical record. We conduct an experiment to evaluate the eﬀectiveness of our method. We report the results of our preliminary experiments and the run submission.
Automatic transcription of piano music based on HMM tracking of jointly-estimated pitches

This work deals with the automatic transcription of piano recordings into a MIDI symbolic file. The system consists of subsequent stages of onset detection and multipitch estimation and tracking. The latter is based on a Hidden Markov Model framework, embedding a spectral maximum likelihood method for joint pitch estimation. The complexity issue of joint estimation techniques is solved by selecting subsets of simultaneously played notes within a pre-estimated set of candidates. Tests on a large database and comparisons to state-of-the-art methods show promising results.
Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems ( PACIS ) 6-18-2013 From Structural Assurances to Trusting Beliefs : Validating Persuasion Principles in the Context of Online Shopping

The topic of shopping attitude has received long lasing attention in the context of e-commerce. Previous studies have elucidated the different facets of online shopping attitude and have overemphasized a prevalent assertion on the relationship between web design artifacts and consumers’ psychological responses. However, the imitability of web design in practice makes no differentiation among a glut of shopping websites and probably leads to revenue declination due to the fact that the instability of attitude frequently leads to attitudinal ambivalence. Hence, understanding how to strengthen consumers’ attitudes toward online shopping should be fruitful for remedying attitude inconsistency in e-commerce. The current study extended related research by examining the simultaneous effects of trusting beliefs on consumers’ attitudes toward online shopping. We adopted the concept of structural assurance and the principles of persuasion as the theoretical underpinnings. The proposed model is expected to contribute to relevant literature by offering theoretical contributions and managerial implications that can help both researchers and online retailers to understand more clearly how consumers develop their attitudes toward shopping online.