Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of school-based kindergarten transition policies and practices on child academic outcomes.

This study examined the effect of school-based kindergarten transition policies and practices on child outcomes. The authors followed 17,212 children from 992 schools in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten sample (ECLS-K) across the kindergarten school year. Hierarchical linear modeling revealed that the number of school-based transition practices in the fall of kindergarten was associated with more positive academic achievement scores at the end of kindergarten, even controlling for family socioeconomic status (SES) and other demographic factors. This effect was stronger for low- and middle-SES children than high-SES children. For low-SES children, 7 transition practices were associated with a . 21 standard deviation increase in predicted achievement scores beyond 0 practices. The effect of transition practices was partially mediated by an intervening effect on parent-initiated involvement in school during the kindergarten year. The findings support education policies to target kindergarten transition efforts to increase parent involvement in low-SES families.
Through a gendered lens? Male and female executives’ representations of one another

Executive leadership is constituted as a predominantly male domain, placing women in an antithetical position to executive power. In theorising this situation, a social constructionist model of gender suggests that in the corporate world, as elsewhere, perceptions of the behaviour of men and women are “automatically filtered through a gendered lens” and reconstituted within a more general discourse on gender difference, tapping into subconscious images of leadership to reinforce a masculinist construction of executive power. Yet today women are increasingly in executive roles. This study explores the relationship between a social constructionist model of gender and executive discourse by drawing on interviews with ten male and ten female New Zealand executives. Given that these executives hold comparable organisational status and power, the study examines whether or not a gendered lens still operates in their representations of one another, and if there are indications of gender and social change in the discourse.
A Novel Cyclohexene Derivative, Ethyl (6R)-6-[N-(2-Chloro-4-fluorophenyl)sulfamoyl]cyclohex-1-ene-1-carboxylate (TAK-242), Selectively Inhibits Toll-Like Receptor 4-Mediated Cytokine Production through Suppression of Intracellular Signaling

Proinflammatory mediators such as cytokines and NO play pivotal roles in various inflammatory diseases. To combat inflammatory diseases successfully, regulation of proinflammatory mediator production would be a critical process. In the present study, we investigated the in vitro effects of ethyl (6R)-6-[N-(2-chloro-4-fluorophenyl)sulfamoyl]cyclohex-1-ene-1-carboxylate (TAK-242), a novel small molecule cytokine production inhibitor, and its mechanism of action. In RAW264.7 cells and mouse peritoneal macrophages, TAK-242 suppressed lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced production of NO, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and interleukin (IL)-6, with 50% inhibitory concentration (IC50) of 1.1 to 11 nM. TAK-242 also suppressed the production of these cytokines from LPS-stimulated human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) at IC50 values from 11 to 33 nM. In addition, the inhibitory effects on the LPS-induced IL-6 and IL-12 production were similar in human PBMCs, monocytes, and macrophages. TAK-242 inhibited mRNA expression of IL-6 and TNF-α induced by LPS and interferon-γ in RAW264.7 cells. The phosphorylation of mitogen-activated protein kinases induced by LPS was also inhibited in a concentration-dependent manner. However, TAK-242 did not antagonize the binding of LPS to the cells. It is noteworthy that TAK-242 suppressed the cytokine production induced by Toll-like receptor (TLR) 4 ligands, but not by ligands for TLR2, -3, and -9. In addition, IL-1β-induced IL-8 production from human PBMCs was not markedly affected by TAK-242. These data suggest that TAK-242 suppresses the production of multiple cytokines by selectively inhibiting TLR4 intracellular signaling. Finally, TAK-242 is a novel small molecule TLR4 signaling inhibitor and could be a promising therapeutic agent for inflammatory diseases, whose pathogenesis involves TLR4.
Values as truisms:evidence and implications

Three experiments tested the general hypothesis that values are cultural truisms-that is, beliefs that are widely shared and rarely questioned. Experiment 1 examined specifically whether people lack cognitive support for their values. It was predicted and found that analyzing one's reasons for particular values caused the values to change, a finding that would be expected only if individuals lack cognitive support for their values. Experiment 2 verified that analyzing reasons caused value change only when participants were not provided with cognitive support for their values. Experiment 3 found that the effect of analyzing reasons generalized across a range of ind vidual-differences variables. Experiment 3 also showed that analyzing reasons resulted in value ratings that were less predictive of relevant attitudes than pre-reasons-analysis value ratings, but only for high self-monitors.
Filtering product reviews from web search results

This study seeks to develop an automatic method to identify product reviews on the Web using the snippets (summary information) returned by search engines. Determining whether a snippet is a review or non-review is a challenging task, since the snippet usually does not contain many useful features for identifying review documents. Firstly we applied a common machine learning technique, SVM (Support Vector Machine), to investigate which features of snippets are useful for the classification. Then we employed a heuristic approach utilizing domain knowledge and found that the heuristic approach performs equally well as the machine learning approach. A hybrid approach which combines the machine learning technique and domain knowledge performs slightly better than the machine learning approach alone.
Domain-specific olivocerebellar projection regulated by the EphA-ephrin-A interaction

Neural maps in the vertebrate central nervous system often show discontinuously segregated, domain-to-domain patterns. However, the molecular mechanism that establishes such maps is not well understood. Here we show that in the chicken olivocerebellar system, EphA receptors and ephrin-As are expressed with distinct levels and combinations in mapping domains. When ephrin-A2 is retrovirally overexpressed in the cerebellum, the olivocerebellar map is disrupted, excluding axons with high receptor activity from ectopic expression domains. Conversely, overexpression of a truncated EphA3 receptor in the cerebellum reduces endogenous ligand activity to undetectable levels and causes aberrant mapping, with high receptor axons invading high ligand domains. In vitro, ephrin-A2 inhibits outgrowth of inferior olive axons in a region-specific manner. These results suggest that Eph receptors and ephrins constitute domain-specific positional information, and the spatially accurate receptor-ligand interaction is essential to guide inferior olive axons to their correct target domains.
Medical data mining: knowledge discovery in a clinical data warehouse

Clinical databases have accumulated large quantities of information about patients and their medical conditions. Relationships and patterns within this data could provide new medical knowledge. Unfortunately, few methodologies have been developed and applied to discover this hidden knowledge. In this study, the techniques of data mining (also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases) were used to search for relationships in a large clinical database. Specifically, data accumulated on 3,902 obstetrical patients were evaluated for factors potentially contributing to preterm birth using exploratory factor analysis. Three factors were identified by the investigators for further exploration. This paper describes the processes involved in mining a clinical database including data warehousing, data query and cleaning, and data analysis.
Characterization of skeletal phenotypes of TRα1PV and TRβPV mutant mice: implications for tissue thyroid status and T3 target gene expression

Bone development is extremely sensitive to alterations in thyroid status. Recently, we analyzed the skeletal phenotypes of mice with the dominant negative resistance to thyroid hormone (RTH) mutation PV targeted to either the thyroid hormone receptor (TR) α1 or β gene. This perspective summarizes our findings to date and explores the wider implications for thyroid status and T3 target gene expression in individual tissues.
Broadband Wireless Access Interference and Capacity Estimation

The performance of an IEEE 802.16 based OFDMA network is simulated employing real geographical and base station data. The effects of soft handover, smart antennas, and transmit diversity on system performance are presented. In particular, the relationship between power control and adaptive modulation is investigated and shown to reduce the uplink interference considerably, thus improving the coverage and the capacity of the network. The differences between the interference characteristics of OFDM and OFDMA based operations are also presented. The reasons for dropped calls and a throughput analysis for a typical OFDMA network are also discussed.
An adaptive GPU performance and power model

Benefiting from integrating massive parallel processors, Graphics Processing Units(GPUs) have become prevalent computing devices for general-purpose parallel applications - so called GPGPU computing. While providing powerful computation capability, GPGPUs are power hungry. Almost half of the total amount of a GPGPU-based system power is consumed by GPGPU, which has seriously hindered the application of GPGPUs. As such, it's essential to build an accurate and robust model to analyze the performance and power consumption of GPGPUs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive performance and power consumption model by using random forest algorithm. The model is based on the overall GPU architecture performance counters, including multi-processor, memory access pattern and bandwidth metrics, and adapts to different NVIDIA GPU architectures. The results demonstrate that our model can achieve an average accuracy with prediction error 2.1% and 3.2% for the performance and power consumption, respectively. Furthermore, by identifying the most important impact factors and quantifying their contributions, our proposed approach can help GPGPU programmers and architects get quick insights on the performance and power consumption of GPGPU systems.
Micro perceptual human computation for visual tasks

Human Computation (HC) utilizes humans to solve problems or carry out tasks that are hard for pure computational algorithms. Many graphics and vision problems have such tasks. Previous HC approaches mainly focus on generating data in batch, to gather benchmarks, or perform surveys demanding nontrivial interactions. We advocate a tighter integration of human computation into online, interactive algorithms. We aim to distill the differences between humans and computers and maximize the advantages of both in one algorithm. Our key idea is to decompose such a problem into a massive number of very simple, carefully designed, human micro-tasks that are based on perception, and whose answers can be combined algorithmically to solve the original problem. Our approach is inspired by previous work on micro-tasks and perception experiments. We present three specific examples for the design of micro perceptual human computation algorithms to extract depth layers and image normals from a single photograph, and to augment an image with high-level semantic information such as symmetry.
Combination of PCA and undecimated wavelet transform for neural data processing

Nervous system conveys information by electrical signals called ‘spikes’, therefore, spikes detection and sorting are challenging topics in the neural data processing. The principal component analysis (PCA) is a convenient tool for clustering spikes; however it has some disadvantages for closely shaped and overlapped spikes. For such the cases, an algorithm based on the combination of the principal component analysis and undecimated wavelet transform, is proposed to enhance the cluster formation from the spikes mapping. These results indicate that the principal component analysis used in combination with the undecimated wavelet has a better performance in the spike sorting. This can lead to more compact and separate clusters in comparison with the PCA clustering and more efficient spike sorting.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised with Normal and Psychiatric Adolescents.

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) has received substantial factor analytic attention. The majority of these studies have been exploratory in nature and have supported Kaufman's (1979) finding of a three-factor solution. The few confirmatory factor analytic studies have provided some support for the three-factor interpretation over the two- and one-factor interpretations, but they have consistently failed to examine other potentially valuable models for the WISC-R. This study tested one, two-, three-, and four-factor models within both normal and psychiatric adolescent inpatient samples. For both samples, the Kaufman three-factor solution emerged with the best overall fit of the WISC-R subtest covariance structure. The remaining models (Guilford-Bannatyne, Bannatyne, Guilford, Horn, and single g) were found to be less applicable to the WISC-R subtest covariance structure and were effectively eliminated as explanatory models when applied to the WISC-R.
Cochran-Armitage Test versus Logistic Regression in the Analysis of Genetic Association Studies

Objective: The Cochran-Armitage trend test based on the linear regression model has become a standard procedure for association testing in case-control studies. In contrast, the logistic regression model is generally used for estimating effect sizes. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach that allows for association testing and parameter estimation by means of the same statistic. Methods/Results: The trend test is recommendable as a test of no association between genotype and risk of disease. It is a two-sample test for differences between cases and controls with respect to the average number of risk alleles occurring in the genotype of an individual. We argue that this difference is not of primary interest in genetic association studies. It should be replaced with the disease odds ratio, which can be assessed under both cohort sampling and case-control sampling. Conclusion: The Cochran-Armitage trend test should be replaced by the Wald statistic from a logistic regression model for hypothesis testing and estimation in genetic association studies.
Carbenicillin in the Treatment of Infections Involving Anaerobic Bacteria

Twenty-one patients with serious infections involving anaerobic bacteria were treated with carbenicillin. Multiple anaerobes were involved in 8 cases, and in 10 cases, facultative anaerobes were also isolated. Bacteroides fragilis was isolated in 10 cases. Results were judged excellent in 7 cases, good in 8 cases, and fair in 5 cases. These data suggest that carbenicillin may be an effective antibiotic for the therapy of infections due to anaerobic bacteria, particularly those involving B. fragilis.
Changing the game? The impact of Twitter on relationships between football clubs, supporters and the sports media

Twitter is making headlines as footballers and supporters use the social media platform to get their fix of football news or vent their views on the game. This essay explores how football clubs are coping with this relatively new form of media and how it is changing their relationships with fans and journalists. The essay’s new empirical material is based on a survey of Football and Premier League clubs, combined with analysis of Twitter content. Findings show that Twitter is opening up new, direct forms of communication between clubs and their fans. These are challenging the traditional roles of sports journalists. However, journalism’s continued strength lies in its detachment and independent voice. Twitter is also allowing players to find their voice and create powerful personal brands. There is currently a lack of leadership, clarity and coherence among clubs and football authorities over how to regulate and manage this.
Discriminating mental tasks using EEG represented by AR models

EEG signals are modeled using single-channel and multi-channel autoregressive (AR) techniques. The coefficients of these models are used to classify EEG data into one of two classes corresponding to the mental task the subjects are performing. A neural network is trained to perform the classification. When applying a trained network to test data, the authors find that the multivariate AR representation performs slightly better, resulting in an average classification accuracy of about 91%.
Influence of Parathyroid Hormone-Loaded PLGA Nanoparticles in Porous Scaffolds for Bone Regeneration

Biodegradable poly(lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) nanoparticles, containing human parathyroid hormone (PTH (1–34)), prepared by a modified double emulsion-solvent diffusion-evaporation method, were incorporated in porous freeze-dried chitosan-gelatin (CH-G) scaffolds. The PTH-loaded nanoparticles (NPTH) were characterised in terms of morphology, size, protein loading, release kinetics and in vitro assessment of biological activity of released PTH and cytocompatibility studies against clonal human osteoblast (hFOB) cells. Structural integrity of incorporated and released PTH from nanoparticles was found to be intact by using Tris-tricine SDS-PAGE. In vitro PTH release kinetics from PLGA nanoparticles were characterised by a burst release followed by a slow release phase for 3–4 weeks. The released PTH was biologically active as evidenced by the stimulated release of cyclic AMP from hFOB cells as well as increased mineralisation studies. Both in vitro and cell studies demonstrated that the PTH bioactivity was maintained during the fabrication of PLGA nanoparticles and upon release. Finally, a content of 33.3% w/w NPTHs was incorporated in CH-G scaffolds, showing an intermittent release during the first 10 days and, followed by a controlled release over 28 days of observation time. The increased expression of Alkaline Phosphatase levels on hFOB cells further confirmed the activity of intermittently released PTH from scaffolds.
Crowd sculpting: A space‐time sculpting method for populating virtual environments

We introduce “Crowd Sculpting”: a method to interactively design populated environments by using intuitive deformation gestures to drive both the spatial coverage and the temporal sequencing of a crowd motion. Our approach assembles large environments from sets of spatial elements which contain inter‐connectible, periodic crowd animations. Such a “Crowd Patches” approach allows us to avoid expensive and difficult‐to‐control simulations. It also overcomes the limitations of motion editing, that would result into animations delimited in space and time. Our novel methods allows the user to control the crowd patches layout in ways inspired by elastic shape sculpting: the user creates and tunes the desired populated environment through stretching, bending, cutting and merging gestures, applied either in space or time. Our examples demonstrate that our method allows the space‐time editing of very large populations and results into endless animation, while offering real‐time, intuitive control and maintaining animation quality.
On the Optimization of Resource Utilization in Distributed Multimedia Applications

The application and research area of Multimedia Content Analysis (MMCA) considers all aspects of the automated extraction of new knowledge from large multimedia data streams and archives. In recent years, there has been a tremendous growth in the MMCA application domain (for real-time and off-line execution scenarios alike), and this growth is likely to continue in the near future. Multimedia applications operated in a real-time environment pose very strict requirements on the obtained processing times, while off-line applications have to perform within 'tolerable' time frames. To meet these requirements, large- scale multimedia applications typically are being executed on Grid systems consisting of large collections of compute clusters. For optimized use of resources, it is essential to determine the optimal number of compute nodes per cluster, properly dealing with the perceived computation versus communication ratio. This ratio generally depends on the characteristics of the application at hand, and on the software and hardware specifics of the computational environment. Motivated by these observations, in this paper we develop a simple and easy-to-implement method to determine the "optimal" number of parallel compute nodes. The method is based on the classical binary search method for non-linear optimization, and does not depend on the, usually unknown, specifics of the system. Extensive experimental validation on a real distributed system shows that our method is indeed highly effective.
Work after stroke: focusing on barriers and enablers

Previous research on work after stroke has used quantitative methods and a medical model approach to identify factors that influence return to work. This study uses an inclusive, qualitative methodology (focus groups) to begin to explore stroke survivors’ own perspectives about what helps and hinders paid or voluntary work after stroke. The research was conducted in partnership with Different Strokes, a British organisation of stroke survivors. Five focus group discussions were held with 37 stroke survivors and 12 of their supporters. Data was analysed using an adapted Framework approach to identify themes within and across individuals and groups. Factors representing barriers to or enablers of work were identified in four key themes: rehabilitation process, employer agency, social structural and personal. The study found evidence of social oppression via infrastructure, institutional structures and practices, and some individuals’ attitudes. Alongside this, some supportive individuals, practices and strategies were identified.