Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gay Mothers and Early Childhood Education: Standing Tall

LEGISLATION IN NEW ZEALAND would suggest there is a liberal and accepting attitude towards diverse families in this country, yet discrimination and heteronormative expectations are strongly evident. In this article I report the findings of a study of the experiences of lesbian-parented families in early childhood centres. Seventeen gay women from 12 lesbian-parented families were asked about their own and their children's experiences in a variety of early childhood education settings. The findings, which are discussed in terms of a theory of heteronormativity, describe the steps the women reported they needed to take to prepare their children to cope in a heteronormative world. I conclude that, despite seemingly supportive legislation, this group of gay mothers felt it necessary to protect their children from heteronormativity and to prepare them for coping with discrimination.
Frailty and functional decline indices predict poor outcomes in hospitalised older people.

BACKGROUND admission to a Geriatric Evaluation and Management Unit (GEMU) can optimise a patient's chance of functional recovery. OBJECTIVE to evaluate the ability of several commonly used frailty and functional decline indices to predict GEMU outcomes, both at discharge and at 6 months. DESIGN prospective, observational study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS consecutive GEMU patients aged ≥70 years. METHODS patients were classified as 'frail' or 'at high risk of functional decline' using several frailty and functional decline instruments. Predictive ability was evaulated using logistic regression and area under receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curves (auROC). RESULTS a total of 172 patients were included. Frailty prevalence varied from 24 to 94% depending on the instrument used. Several instruments predicted patients at risk of poor outcome, including the Frailty Index of Accumulative Deficits (FI-CD), Fried's Cardiovascular Health Study index, the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures index, an adapted Katz score of activities of daily living (ADL), Instrumental ADL, the Score Hospitalier d'Evaluation du Risque de Perte d'Autonomie (SHERPA) and grip strength [odds ratio (OR) range of 2.06-6.47]. Adequate discriminatory power for discharge outcome was achieved by the FI-CD (auROC = 0.735, P < 0.001) and an adapted Katz score (auROC = 0.704, P = < 0.001). The FI-CD also showed adequate discriminatory power for a poor 6-month outcome (auROC = 0.702, P < 0.001). CONCLUSION frailty and functional decline instruments can predict older patients at risk of poor outcome. However, only the FI-CD showed adequate discriminatory power for outcome prediction at both follow-up time-points.
Overhead transmission lines dynamic line rating estimation in WAMS environments

A loadability policy established on the basis of the Overhead Transmission Lines (OHLs) static thermal rating is referred to the worst-case conditions (i.e. zero wind speed). Whilst it reduces the potential misoperations, at the same time it implies an underuse of the electrical infrastructures. The transition towards smart grids architectures calls for a reliable exploitation of these assets in order to improve the power system efficient operating. Such considerations are at the basis of the so called Dynamic Line Rating (DLR) paradigm which is incorporated in the smart grid vision. An open issue in this topic is the need to take under control the weather conditions and hence the OHL temperature along the entire OHL length. To overcome the pointed out issue, thanks also to the quick development of Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS) technology, an innovative approach can be pursued. OHL thermal dynamic can be derived from the measurement of the voltage and current synchrophasors at the OHL ends, so overcoming the need of spatially distributed sensors DLR system. It is worth noting anyway that in this case it deals with an average estimate of the OHL conductor temperature and not a punctual one as obtained by using distributed devices. With regard to the described framework, the present paper presents the first experimental findings obtained in an in-field DLR campaign carried out on the Italian power system. A recently proposed DLR estimation algorithm, never applied in reallife WAMS environment, is selected for the purpose. From its response, interesting considerations and valuable modifications to apply to the estimation algorithm mathematical framework are suggested in the work. The fundamental characteristics that the latter needs to have are well posed in evidence. The discussed experimental outcomes are referred to a real-life OHL included into the Italian WAMS monitoring program.
Treatment of comorbid depression and alcohol use disorders in an inpatient setting: comparison of acceptance and commitment therapy versus treatment as usual

Depression and alcohol use disorders are the most frequently identified problems within outpatient and inpatient mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities. As a result, the identification of an effective approach for the treatment of these comorbid conditions has become essential. The goal of this study was to compare a treatment, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which sought to weaken experiential avoidance as a potentially common pathogenic process that may help support comorbid disorders to a treatment as usual (TAU) approach. Individuals committed to the Mississippi State Hospital with diagnoses of comorbid depressive and alcohol use disorders were randomly assigned to receive either TAU (n = 12) or ACT (n = 12). They were administered a battery of measures at pretreatment, during treatment, and prior to discharge, which assessed level of depression and alcohol use and alcohol-related issues as outcome variables, as well as level of experiential avoidance and therapeutic alliance between counselor and participants as process measures. Results indicated that ACT participants required a smaller dose of treatment until they met criteria for discharge and were significantly less depressed than their counterparts who received TAU. An analysis of the process measures suggested that both a reduction in experiential avoidance as well as enhancement of therapeutic alliance contributed to the differential treatment effect associated with ACT. Implications of the findings for the treatment of comorbid depression and alcohol use disorders, in particular, are discussed as well as those for dealing with co-occurring presenting problems more broadly. Weaknesses and limitations of the current study are discussed with the goal of strengthening future related research. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page
Behavior Theory in Health Promotion Practice and Research

Grounded in public health practice, this text offers a comprehensive study of the health behavior theories that are the foundation of all health education and promotion programs. Your students will come away with a clear understanding of essential relationships between human behavior and health, as well as the practical application of theory and approaches to health promotion research and practice. Designed for graduates or upper level undergraduates, the book maintains a consistent, single voice and offers many examples throughout. Contents: Section I. Theory in Context: 1. Health Behavior in the Context of Public Health 2. A Social Ecological Perspective 3. Theories of Motivation and Behavior: A Brief History and Contemporary Perspectives Section II. Cognitive and Social Theories of Motivation and Behavior 4. Expectancy Value Models 5. Operant Conditioning, Self-Regulation, and Social Cognitive Theory 6. Social Influence Theory: The Effects of Social Factors on Health Behavior 7. Diffusion of Innovations Theory Section III. Behavior Change Theories 8. Learning, Teaching, and Counseling 9. Self-Determination Theory and Motivational Interviewing 10. Stage Models 11. Health Communication and Social Marketing 12. Communities and Health Promotion
Capacity Performance of Adaptive Receive Antenna Subarray Formation for MIMO Systems

Antenna subarray formation is a novel RF preprocessing technique that reduces the hardware complexity of MIMO systems while alleviating the performance degradations of conventional antenna selection schemes. With this method, each RF chain is not allocated to a single antenna element, but instead to the complex-weighted and combined response of a subarray of elements. In this paper, we derive tight upper bounds on the ergodic capacity of the proposed technique for Rayleigh i.i. d. channels. Furthermore, we study the capacity performance of an analytical algorithm based on a Frobenius norm criterion when applied to both Rayleigh i.i. d. and measured MIMO channels.
Looking at the Big Picture: School Administrators and Violence Reduction

This study investigated district and site administrators’ perceptions of school violence and violence prevention programs in fifteen school districts of various sizes in twelve states located across the United States. The study focused upon: (1) school administrators’ fears about violence, (2) frequency of administrators as victims of violent actions over the past two years, (3) areas in the school environment which pose the greatest risk for violence for students or school personnel, (4) profiles of typical victims and perpetrators of violence, (5) strategies implemented by schools/districts to reduce violence, (6) perceptions regarding which strategies were considered to be the most and least effective in reducing violence, and (7) the cost to school districts for violence prevention. The study concluded by providing a suggested plan of action to remediate and reduce violence in schools.
Risk of regurgitation and aspiration in patients infused with different volumes of enteral nutrition.

BACKGROUND Patients with stroke suffer from nutrition impairments and often rely on enteral nutrition (EN), which is associated with respiratory complications such as regurgitation and aspiration. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the incidence of regurgitation and aspiration in patients with severe stroke infused with different volumes of EN. METHODS A randomized controlled trial was conducted on 210 patients with severe stroke undergoing EN therapy. Patients were randomly assigned into two groups. Subjects in the treatment group received EN with an initial rate defined according to the total volume and the infusion rate was adjusted based on gastric residual volume (GRV) assessed every 4 hours. Subjects of the control group received EN without monitoring the GRV and reached the target infusion volume within 72 hours. The incidence of reflux and aspiration was recorded. RESULTS The incidences of regurgitation and aspiration were significantly lower in treatment group (6.3% and 7.9%, respectively) than control group (18.8% and 17.5%, respectively). In the treatment group, 1 patient developed regurgitation while 2 developed aspiration when EN was 500 mL. When EN increased to 1000 mL, 2 patients developed regurgitation and 2 developed aspiration, and 5 patients developed regurgitation and 6 had aspiration when EN was 1500 mL. There was no significant difference in the risk of reflux and aspiration when total volume of EN increased from 500 to 1500 mL. CONCLUSIONS During EN therapy for patients with stroke, using feeding pump with a continuous infusion for 20 hours and adjusting infusion rate based on GRV could reduce the incidence of respiratory complications.
Hooks and comets: The story of microtubule polarity orientation in the neuron

It is widely believed that signature patterns of microtubule polarity orientation within axons and dendrites underlie compositional and morphological differences that distinguish these neuronal processes from one another. Axons of vertebrate neurons display uniformly plus‐end‐distal microtubules, whereas their dendrites display non‐uniformly oriented microtubules. Recent studies on insect neurons suggest that it is the minus‐end‐distal microtubules that are the critical feature of the dendritic microtubule array, whether or not they are accompanied by plus‐end‐distal microtubules. Discussed in this article are the history of these findings, their implications for the regulation of neuronal polarity across the animal kingdom, and potential mechanisms by which neurons establish the distinct microtubule polarity patterns that define axons and dendrites. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 71: 403–418, 2011
Issues in Building Practical Provenance Systems

The importance of maintaining provenance has been widely recognized, particularly with respect to highly-manipulated data. However, there are few deployed databases that provide provenance information with their data. We have constructed a database of protein interactions (MiMI), which is heavily used by biomedical scientists, by manipulating and integrating data from several popular biological sources. The provenance stored provides key information for assisting researchers in understanding and trusting the data. In this paper, we describe several desiderata for a practical provenance system, based on our experience from this system. We discuss the challenges that these requirements present, and outline solutions to several of these challenges that we have implemented. Our list of a dozen or so desiderata includes: efficiently capturing provenance from external applications; managing provenance size; and presenting provenance in a usable way. For example, data is often manipulated via provenanceunaware processes, but the associated provenance must still be tracked and stored. Additionally, provenance information can grow to outrageous proportions if it is either very rich or fine-grained, or both. Finally, when users view provenance data, they can usually understand a SELECT manipulation, but “why did the bcgCoalesce [1] manipulation output that? ”
Ergodic rate analysis for multi-pair two-way relay large-scale antenna system

A multi-pair two-way relay system sharing with a single relay with large numbers of antennas is considered. In this paper, we investigate the ergodic achievable rates when maximum ratio combining/maximum ratio transmission is used at the relay station. The analytical results for the achievable rates are derived and the asymptotic analysis is conducted when the number of antennas, N, grows to infinity. Results demonstrate a number of phenomena including the logarithmic increase of the average rates with the number of antennas, and the logarithmic decrease of the average rates with the number of interference pairs, K-1, when the transmit power of both relay and users are fixed.
Automatic generation of short answer questions for reading comprehension assessment

Abstract Writing items for reading comprehension assessment is time-consuming. Automating part of the process can help test-designers to develop assessments more efficiently and consistently. This paper presents an approach to automatically generating short answer questions for reading comprehension assessment. Our major contribution is to introduce Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) as the linguistic framework for question generation, which enables systematic utilization of semantic and syntactic information. The approach can efficiently generate questions of better quality than previous high-performing question generation systems, and uses paraphrasing and sentence selection to improve the cognitive complexity and effectiveness of questions.
Global design of perfect-reconstruction orthogonal cosine-modulated filter banks

Designing perfect-reconstruction orthogonal cosine-modulated filter banks is essentially a nonconvex problem and to date only local solutions can be claimed. By virtue of the recent progress in global polynomial optimization, this paper describes an attempt of developing a global design method using an order-recursive strategy combined with a technique that identifies a desirable initial point in each round of recursion. Simulation and comparison studies are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed design technique.
Physiological Roles of Glutathione S-Transferases in Soybean Root Nodules1[C][W][OA]

Glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) are ubiquitous enzymes that catalyze the conjugation of toxic xenobiotics and oxidatively produced compounds to reduced glutathione, which facilitates their metabolism, sequestration, or removal. We report here that soybean (Glycine max) root nodules contain at least 14 forms of GST, with GST9 being most prevalent, as measured by both real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction and identification of peptides in glutathione-affinity purified extracts. GST8 was prevalent in stems and uninfected roots, whereas GST2/10 prevailed in leaves. Purified, recombinant GSTs were shown to have wide-ranging kinetic properties, suggesting that the suite of GSTs could provide physiological flexibility to deal with numerous stresses. Levels of GST9 increased with aging, suggesting a role related to senescence. RNA interference studies of nodules on composite plants showed that a down-regulation of GST9 led to a decrease in nitrogenase (acetylene reduction) activity and an increase in oxidatively damaged proteins. These findings indicate that GSTs are abundant in nodules and likely function to provide antioxidant defenses that are critical to support nitrogen fixation.
Measuring and Reducing Off-Target Activities of Programmable Nucleases Including CRISPR-Cas9

Programmable nucleases, which include zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and RNA-guided engineered nucleases (RGENs) repurposed from the type II clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9) system are now widely used for genome editing in higher eukaryotic cells and whole organisms, revolutionising almost every discipline in biological research, medicine, and biotechnology. All of these nucleases, however, induce off-target mutations at sites homologous in sequence with on-target sites, limiting their utility in many applications including gene or cell therapy. In this review, we compare methods for detecting nuclease off-target mutations. We also review methods for profiling genome-wide off-target effects and discuss how to reduce or avoid off-target mutations.
Sources of Uncertainty in Calculating Mortality and Morbidity Attributable to Air Pollution

Quantifying the burden of illness and mortality from air pollution exposure relies on statistical estimates and other assumptions that have inherent uncertainties. Through an intensive study in Hamilton, Canada, this study illustrates for policymakers the sensitivity of health effect estimates to a wide range of possible uncertainties. Dose-response relationships were derived based on pooled and averaged estimates published in the scientific literature from 1997 to 2001. These estimates were applied to local air pollution, mortality, and hospital admissions data for the years 1995–1999. The data were adjusted to reflect uncertainties in the current state of knowledge, including (1) baseline pollution, (2) single versus multipollutant effects, (3) local or pooled estimates, and (4) chronic effects. The estimates of mortality ranged from 96 to 374 annual deaths, while admissions ranged from 139 to 607 respiratory and from 479 to 2000 cardiovascular admissions. Chronic fine particle exposure resulted in 232 annual deaths. As conclusions, first, there should be an effort to reach a consensus on reporting scientific findings from air pollution studies using standardized study designs and reporting formats. Second, given the sensitivity of the estimates to underlying assumptions, an immediate need exists for widely accepted burden of illness and mortality estimation conventions. Third, many areas of air pollution research require considerable refinement before complete estimates can be ascribed.
Environmental prevalence of Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii in India: An update

An overview of work done to-date in India on environmental prevalence, population structure, seasonal variations and antifungal susceptibility of Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii is presented. The primary ecologic niche of both pathogens is decayed wood in trunk hollows of a wide spectrum of host trees, representing 18 species. Overall, C. neoformans showed a higher environmental prevalence than that of C. gattii which was not found in the avian habitats. Apart from their arboreal habitat, both species were demonstrated in soil and air in close vicinity of their tree hosts. In addition, C. neoformans showed a strong association with desiccated avian excreta. An overwhelming number of C. neoformans strains belonged to genotype AFLP1/VNI, var. grubii (serotype A), whereas C. gattii strains were genotype AFLP4/VGI, serotype B. All of the environmental strains of C. neoformans and C. gattii were mating type α (MATα). Contrary to the Australian experience, Eucalyptus trees were among the epidemiologically least important and, therefore, the hypothesis of global spread of C. gattii through Australian export of infected Eucalyptus seeds is rebutted. Reference is made to long-term colonization of an abandoned, old timber beam of sal wood (Shorea robusta) by a melanin positive (Mel+) variant of Cryptococcus laurentii that was pathogenic to laboratory mice.
CrowdMD: Crowdsourcing-based approach for deduplication

Matching dependencies (MDs) were recently introduced as quality rules for data cleaning and entity resolution. They are rules that specify what values should be considered duplicates, and have to be matched. Defining such quality rules on a database instance, is a very expensive and a time consuming process, and requires huge efforts to analyse the whole database. In this demo paper, we present CrowdMD, a hybrid machine-crowd system for generating MDs. It first asks the crowd to determine whether a given pair, from training sample pairs, match or not. Then, it uses data mining techniques to generate attributes constituting an MD. Using a Restaurant database, we will show how the crowders can help to generate MDs by labelling the training sample through the CrowdMD user interface and how MDs can be mined from this training set.
Viscometric Flow Interpretation using Qualitativeand Quantitative

Although the development of rheological software has kept pace with the advances in modern rheometrical instruments the process of data analysis and interpretation remains fallible and can be prone to some signiicant errors. The reason for this is that the ability and knowledge of human beings to utilise the intruments and data at their disposal can be somewhat limited in some instances. To solve this problem an intelligent system has been built which incorporates knowledge to assist the user. The system provides descriptions about the data or graph using natural language, explanations using tutorial frames, and a step-by-step hands-on guidance through the data analysis. In this paper, the two major problems faced by users are stated and the techniques (symbolic and nonsymbolic computation) employed to solve these problems are described theoretically. Finally, illustrations are given which show how these ideas are implemented in the system.
Dynamic strategy for window splitting, parameters estimation and interpolation in spatial parametric audio coders

In most parametric stereo audio coders, sets of spatial parameters are extracted from the audio channels in a time-frequency domain. In order to reduce the amount of data, the parameters plane is highly down-sampled, and transmitted together with a mono downmix. Then, in the decoding process, it is necessary to interpolate the upmix matrix computed from these parameters. Usually, this is done in the same way for each portion of signal, regardless of its nature. In this article, we propose a dynamic strategy of window splitting, estimation of the parameters and interpolation of the upmix matrix based on transient detection in the audio signal. Subjective tests show an improvement when applied to the new stereo parametric tool from MPEG USAC.