Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Poverty and the Psychosocial Competencies of Children: Evidence from the Young Lives Sample in Four Developing Countries

Abstract:Using unique data from four developing countries, this paper explores the relationship between material poverty and the psychosocial competencies of children. Within a cohort of 12-year-olds, we find that measures of self-efficacy, sense of inclusion, self-esteem and educational aspirations all correlate with measures of the material well-being of the family in which they are growing up. In short, material circumstances shape these wider dimensions of child well-being. As other evidence has shown, these measures of psychosocial competencies reflect important life skills that affect children as adults and shape their future socioeconomic status. This suggests a mechanism by which poverty may be transmitted across generations. In addition, our evidence shows how a caregiver's education and school participation affects children's psychosocial competencies. This may indicate a possible means of overcoming such transmission of poverty over time.
Social theory and philosophy for information systems

As Information Systems matures as a discipline, there is a gradual move away from pure statistics towards consideration of alternative approaches and philosophies. This has not been incorporated into the literature of the field. Until now. Collecting major social theorists and philosophers into one volume, Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems provides a historical and critical analysis of each that is both authoritative and firmly focused on practical relevance to IS. The result is an insightful text for researchers, academics and students that will provide an up-to-date starting point for those considering alternative approaches.
Influence of the Toothpaste with Brazilian Ethanol Extract Propolis on the Oral Cavity Health

Propolis-based therapeutic agents represent this potential for the development of new drugs in dental care. The aim of a clinical-cohort study was to determine the influence of application of toothpaste enriched with Brazilian extract of propolis (EEP) on health status of oral cavity. Laboratory analysis was conducted in order to assess the chemical composition of EEP including total phenolic compounds, the DPPH (1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl) radical scavenging activity, ABTS radical cation scavenging activity, and FRAP assay. Clinical research involved two groups of subjects comprising 32 adult patients, with assessment based on the preliminary evaluation of the state of their marginal periodontium. The investigation of oral health indices API, OHI, and SBI and microbiological examination of oral microflora were also carried out. Results obtained indicated time-dependent microbial action of EEP at 50 mg/L concentration, with antimicrobial activity against Gram-positive bacteria. The total decrease of API, OHI, and SBI mean values was observed. Hygienic preparations with 3% content of Brazilian ethanol extract of green propolis (EEP) efficiently support removal of dental plaque and improve the state of marginal periodontium.
Effects of Vinpocetine on Random Skin Flap Survival in Rats

Abstract The effect of vinpocetine on flap survival, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression, and superoxide dismutase (SOD) and malondialdehyde (MDA) contents were evaluated in this study. The McFarlane flap model was established in 20 rats and evaluated within two groups. Postoperative celiac injection was given for 7 days in the two groups: vinpocetine was applied in Group 1, and the same volume of saline was applied in Group 2. Flap necrosis was measured on day 7 by cellophane in all groups. VEGF expression was determined using immunohistochemical methods on tissue samples taken after 7 days of injections. SOD and MDA contents were examined according to the Kit (reagent instructions). Vinpocetine significantly reduced necrosis area in Group 1 (p < 0.05). VEGF expression and SOD contents were significantly increased in Group 1 compared with Group 2 (p < 0.01), whereas MDA level was reduced (p < 0.05). This experimental study demonstrates that vinpocetine improves survival of random skin flaps, promotes neovascularization, and increases VEGF expression. Meanwhile, vinpocetine has a protective effect against ischemia-reperfusion injury by improving SOD vitality and decreasing MDA value.
When collective memories of victimhood fade: Generational evolution of intergroup attitudes and political aspirations in Belgium

Collective memory theories propose that groups' remembrances of their past depend upon their current social situation. In Belgium, a significant proportion of Dutch speakers share a collective memory of past victimisation by French speakers and fight for an ever-larger autonomy of their region. Yet, as the respective economic, political and social situations of the linguistic regions of Belgium recently evolved with a reversal of fortunes, the current experience of younger Dutch speakers does not fit the traditional memory anymore. We thus predicted that the collective memories of victimhood would decline amongst them, thus bringing changes in intergroup attitudes and political aspirations. Three generations were compared in a survey of 1226 French-speaking and 1457 Dutch-speaking individuals. For both groups, younger generations evidenced less regionalist and more integrative positions than older ones. However, these effects were stronger for Dutch-speaking respondents, and for them, collective memory of victimhood mediated the relation linking age and identification with Belgium, intergroup attitudes and political aspirations. We concluded that the current social context has decisive consequences for collective remembrances, which, in turn, impact intergroup relations and political attitudes and choices.
On the Rate of Convergence of Local Averaging Plug-In Classification Rules Under a Margin Condition

The rates of convergence of plug-in kernel, partitioning, and nearest neighbors classification rules are analyzed. A margin condition, which measures how quickly the a posteriori probabilities cross the decision boundary, smoothness conditions on the a posteriori probabilities, and boundedness of the feature vector are imposed. The rates of convergence of the plug-in classifiers shown in this paper are faster than previously known
Usage analysis and the web of data

The workshop on Usage Analysis and the Web of Data (USEWOD2011) was the first workshop in the field to investigate combinations of usage data with semantics and the Web of Data. Questions the workshop aims to address are for example: How can semantics help in understanding usage data, how can semantic information be derived from usage data, and how can we learn about usage of and on the emerging Web of Data, and what can we learn from it? We report on the findings and results of this workshop, held on March 28, 2011 in conjunction with 20th International World Wide Web Conference, in Hyderabad, India.
Analysis of Genetic Elements ControllingStaphylococcus aureus lrgAB Expression: Potential Role of DNA Topology in SarA Regulation

ABSTRACT Penicillin-induced killing and murein hydrolase activity inStaphylococcus aureus are dependent on a variety of regulatory elements, including the LytSR two-component regulatory system and the virulence factor regulators Agr and Sar. The LytSR effects on these processes can be explained, in part, by the recent finding that a LytSR-regulated operon, designated lrgAB, affects murein hydrolase activity and penicillin tolerance. To examine the regulation of lrgAB expression in greater detail, we performed Northern blot and promoter fusion analyses. Both methods revealed that Agr and Sar, like LytSR, positively regulatelrgAB expression. A mutation in the agr locus reduced lrgAB expression approximately sixfold, while thesar mutation reduced lrgAB expression to undetectable levels. cis-acting regulatory elements involved in lrgAB expression were identified by fusing various fragments of the lrgAB promoter region to thexylE reporter gene and integrating these constructs into the chromosome. Catechol 2,3-dioxygenase assays identified DNA sequences, including an inverted repeat and intrinsic bend sites, that contribute to maximal lrgAB expression. Confirmation of the importance of the inverted repeat was achieved by demonstrating that multiple copies of the inverted repeat reduced lrgABpromoter activity, presumably by titrating out a positive regulatory factor. The results of this study demonstrate that lrgABexpression responds to a variety of positive regulatory factors and suggest that specific DNA topology requirements are important for optimal expression.
Absent Sequences: Nullomers and Primes

We describe a new publicly available algorithm for identifying absent sequences, and demonstrate its use by listing the smallest oligomers not found in the human genome (human "nullomers"), and those not found in any reported genome or GenBank sequence ("primes"). These absent sequences define the maximum set of potentially lethal oligomers. They also provide a rational basis for choosing artificial DNA sequences for molecular barcodes, show promise for species identification and environmental characterization based on absence, and identify potential targets for therapeutic intervention and suicide markers.
Self-inflicted Chronic Bacterial Keratoconjunctivitis Using Self Semen

This case report describes a case of self-inflicted chronic bacterial keratoconjunctivitis involving the patient's own semen. A 20-year-old male soldier was referred to our clinic for the evaluation of refractory chronic bacterial conjunctivitis. Over the previous 4 months, he had been treated for copious mucous discharge, conjunctival injection, and superficial punctate keratitis in both eyes at an army hospital and a local eye clinic. Despite the use of topical and systemic antibiotics according to the results of conjunctival swab culture, there was no improvement. During the repeated smear and culture of conjunctival swabs, surprisingly, a few sperm were detected on Gram staining, revealing that the condition was self-inflicted bacterial keratoconjunctivitis involving the patient's own semen. Thus, in cases of chronic keratoconjunctivitis that do not respond to appropriate antibiotic treatment, self-inflicted disease or malingering should be considered.
Relativistic Winds from Compact Gamma-Ray Sources. II. Pair Loading and Radiative Acceleration in Gamma-Ray Bursts

We consider the effects of rapid pair creation by an intense pulse of γ-rays propagating ahead of a relativistic shock. Sidescattered photons colliding with the main γ-ray beam amplify the density of scattering charges. The acceleration rate of the pair-loaded medium is calculated and its limiting bulk Lorentz factor related to the spectrum and compactness of the photon source. One obtains, as a result, a definite prediction for the relative inertia in baryons and pairs. The deceleration of a relativistic shock in the moving medium and the resulting synchrotron emissivity are compared with existing results for a static medium. The radiative efficiency is increased dramatically by pair loading. When the initial ambient density exceeds a critical value, the scattering depth traversed by the main γ-ray pulse rises above unity and the pulse is broadened. This sets an upper limit to the preburst mass-loss rate of ~10-5 M☉ per year and places significant constraints on γ-ray burst progenitors. An anisotropic γ-ray flux (on an angular scale Γ-1 or larger) drives a large velocity shear that greatly increases the energy in the seed magnetic field forward of the propagating shock.
Does a WSN MAC Based on Uniform Access without Re-attempts Have Merits?

We consider a simplified medium access control scheme, select-and-transmit (S&T), for wireless sensor networks, in which the sensor nodes choose transmission slots uniformly without re-attempts. Numerical results show that the S&T MAC can perform better than the IEEE 802.15. 4 standard in event-driven sensor networks scenarios, where only a small proportion of packets need to be collected
VCSR: Video Content Summarization for Recommendation

In this paper, the authors present a video content summarization for recommendation (called VCSR) system to auto-recommend suitable multimedia learning materials for learners. The VCSR system firstly extracts important content as summarization from input raw video data, while the generated summarization will be auto-routed to learners according to their profiles. Video captions are initially recognized using optical character recognition (OCR), then a set of key passages with corresponding frame images are extracted to form a video summary. The recommendation is achieved by calculating the relevance of the video summarization for each learner. Also, this paper indicates how the VCSR system effectively plays the intermediate role in a modern digital library.
An Adaptive Body-Biased VCO with Voltage-Boosted Switched Tuning in 0.5-V Supply

This paper presents an adaptive body-biased low-voltage VCO. Despite the 0.5-V supply, the VCO uses coarse digital tuning by employing voltage-boosting technique. In addition, the effect of PVT variations is reduced by adaptive body-biasing technique. The proposed VCO is implemented in 0.18 mum CMOS technology and operates at 2.4 GHz. It achieves phase noise of -115.8 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset and 7.3 % of tuning range, while consuming 200 muW. Figure-of-merit with the tuning range is -189.1 dBc/Hz, which is the lowest among the recent state-of-the-art low-voltage VCOs
Diminished reality using appearance and 3D geometry of internet photo collections

This paper presents a new system level framework for Diminished Reality, leveraging for the first time both the appearance and 3D information provided by large photo collections on the Internet. Recent computer vision techniques have made it possible to automatically reconstruct 3-D structure-from-motion points from large and unordered photo collections. Using these point clouds and a prior provided by GPS, reasonably accurate 6 degree of freedom camera poses can be obtained, thus allowing localization. Once the camera (and hence the user) is correctly localized, photos depicting scenes visible from the user's viewpoint can be used to remove unwanted objects indicated by the user in the video sequences. Existing methods based on texture synthesis bring undesirable artifacts and video inconsistency when the background is heterogeneous; the task is rendered even harder for these methods when the background contains complex structures. On the other hand, methods based on plane warping fail when the background has arbitrary shape. Unlike these methods, our algorithm copes with these problems by making use of internet photos, registering them in 3D space and obtaining the 3D scene structure in an offline process. We carefully design the various components during the online phase so as to meet both speed and quality requirements of the task. Experiments on real data collected demonstrate the superiority of our system.
Grasp: Randomised Semiring Parsing

Abstract We present a suite of algorithms for inference tasks over (finite and infinite) context-free sets. For generality and clarity, we have chosen the framework of semiring parsing with support to the most common semirings (e.g. Forest, Viterbi, k-best and Inside). We see parsing from the more general viewpoint of weighted deduction allowing for arbitrary weighted finite-state input and provide implementations of both bottom-up (CKY-inspired) and top-down (Earley-inspired) algorithms. We focus on approximate inference by Monte Carlo methods and provide implementations of ancestral sampling and slice sampling. In principle, sampling methods can deal with models whose independence assumptions are weaker than what is feasible by standard dynamic programming. We envision applications such as monolingual constituency parsing, synchronous parsing, context-free models of reordering for machine translation, and machine translation decoding.
Growing…But Constrained: An Exploration of Teachers' and Researchers' Interactions with Culture and Diversity through Personal Narratives

Educators from all realms of education who engage in in-depth conversations and reflections about personal experiences and perspectives related to diversity are significantly important to the cultural understandings in Education. This paper is a narrative analysis of how teachers who were enrolled in a Master’s Program from two university campuses of the same predominantly White university participated in an in-depth look at their diverse cultural experiences through reflection and dialogue. Two researchers, one African American female utilizing the Critical Race Theory perspective the other Caucasian female using Socioconstructivism, interacted with one another and the teachers’ narratives through several personal experiences interchanges. The resulting teacher/research dialogue on culture and diversity revealed how when the constraints of different theoretical frameworks and past encounters with culture and diversity are exposed a space for dialogue on culture and diversity, characterized by growth, opens up. Key Words: Diversity, Teachers, Culture, Narrative Analysis, Critical Race Theory, and SocioConstructivism The graduate education classroom is intended to be a space in which learning takes place through interaction with content and thought. The standards with regard to diversity are threaded throughout the content and interactions that the students have within each course they take. Dialogue on diversity is typically facilitated by exercises which are designed to give the teachers-as-students a space to interact with their own beliefs, values, and perceptions for the purpose of enhancing their cultural awareness. As U.S. schools service increasingly diverse student populations, the need for such a dialogic space in education is amplified. Some researchers believe that teachers engaged in such activities have found inconclusive or minimal changes of depth or breadth of teachers’ cultural understanding after such course engagement (Jennings, 2007). On the contrary, Critical Race Theory (CRT) researchers have found that educators grow in their cultural understandings and practices once they become comfortable with their own identities following the above stated activities (Helms, 1992; Tatum, 2009). This study seeks to enhance this work by addressing the following: How do teachers and researchers who interact with personal and past experiences inform present perceptions of culture and diversity? Within this context, two female professors in education who are also researchers, one African American and one Caucasian, sat down to analyze autobiographic narratives of 64 teachers who had responded to issues of culture during a graduate Foundations of Education course. The teachers who are enrolled in a master’s program, from two
High-Power 1.3-$\mu$m Quantum-Dot Superluminescent Light-Emitting Diode Grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy

In this letter, we demonstrate the improved performance of 1.3-mum seven-layered InAs-GaAs quantum-dot superluminescent light-emitting diodes by the engineering of the epitaxial growth conditions alone, namely the thickness of the low-temperature GaAs spacer layer between quantum-dot layers. For laser devices, a significant reduction in threshold current density and increase in external efficiency is observed, while for superluminescent diode structures, a ~4 fold increase in CW power at a given drive current is obtained
Students' perceptions of the differences between formal and informal learning

Research has shown that most learning in the workplace takes place outside of formal training and, given the swiftly changing nature of the field, computer science graduates more than most workers, need to be able to learn computing topics outside of organized classes. In this paper we discuss students' perceptions of the difference between formal and informal learning of computing topics, based on three datasets: essays collected from a technical writing course at a single university; the results of a brainstorming exercise conducted in the same course; and semi-structured interviews conducted at six institutions in three countries. The students report strengths and weaknesses in informal learning. On the one hand, they are motivated, can choose their level of learning, can be more flexible about how they learn, and often retain the material better. On the other hand, they perceive that they may miss important aspects of a topic, learn in an ad hoc way, and have difficulty assessing their learning.
Structural abstract interpretation, A formal study using Coq

interpreters are tools to compute approximations for behaviors of a program. These approximations can then be used for optimisation or for error detection. In this paper, we show how to describe an abstract interpreter using the type-theory based theorem prover Coq, using inductive types for syntax and structural recursive programming for the abstract interpreter's kernel. The abstract interpreter can then be proved correct with respect to a Hoare logic for the programming language.
The Actor's Attitudes Towards the Principles of Governance: The Case of Maritime Commerce Sector in Turkey

This paper asserts that the question about how such a complex, diverse and dynamic sector as maritime commerce can be directed and coordinated in Turkey gives a rise to the idea of governance which is more sensitive to the demands and interests of stakeholders. It also argues that the way to the governance mechanisms that have to be established in the maritime commerce sector is furnished with the concrete governance principles to a large extent. Within this framework the aim of this paper is to analyse actor’s attitudes towards governance principles in the Turkish maritime commerce sector. In the empirical part, the attitudes of the executives of the institutions and organizations operating in the Turkish maritime commerce sector towards the governance process in theory and in practice are examined with the help of a questionnaire named as “ interorganizational governance scale . ” This discussion, along with empirical evidence provided by executives of public, private and third sectors, leads to the conclusion that tangible governance mechanisms should be established for proper implementation of the principles of governance.
First Records of Tick‐Borne Pathogens, Borrelia, and Spotted Fever Group Rickettsiae in Okinawajima Island, Japan

In early April 2000, tick‐borne pathogens were surveyed in the northern area of Okinawajima Island, Okinawa Prefecture, which is the southernmost area of Japan. Borrelia valaisiana, a Lyme disease spirochete, was isolated from a field mouse Mus calori, and unidentified rickettsiae of the spotted fever group were isolated from all stages of Amblyomma testudinarium. These are the first reports of these pathogens on Okinawajima Island.
A cartesian-space method for calculating human reachable occupancy

In previous work, we calculated overapproximative sets of human arm positions using a kinematic parameterisation of the human arm, for use in a formally-verifying robot trajectory planner. This has the drawback that inverse kinematics calculations are computationally expensive. In this technical report, we present another method, not requiring inverse kinematics but using the maximum Cartesian accelerations, velocities and positions attainable by a human. This can offer significant computational advantage, which is critical for a real-time motion planning application.