Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Language Assessment of Latino English Learning Children: A Records Abstraction Study

ABSTRACT The researchers examined how speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in a small northern California school district assessed Spanish speaking English learning (EL) Latino children suspected of language impairments. Specifically we sought to (1) determine whether SLPs adhered to federal, state, and professional guidelines during initial assessments and (2) identify tests and measures used by SLPs during language assessments. The researchers conducted a records abstraction review of 88 speech-language assessment reports of Spanish speaking EL Latino children. The reports were examined for parameters of best practice as outlined in recent studies. Results indicated that for each report the SLP responsible for assessing the child failed to consider at least one best practice parameter. Although impossible to determine at this stage, it is likely that many of these children were erroneously assessed and subsequently placed in speech-language programs. Findings support the notion that many EL Latino children continue to be inappropriately assessed for language impairments.
Consistent Layout Techniques for Successfull RF CMOS Design

lthough CMOS technology is slowly maturing as a competitive RF-IC contender, the lack of efficient design tools and accurate device models constitutes a major hindrance to commercial acceptance. These shortcomings are of high importance since they indicate a serious lack of practical design experience. For successful first-try circuit design, there must be a large degree of consistency between simulated and measured device performance. Note that CMOS technology barely offers sufficient performance for typical RF applications and simultaneously suffers from very large process tolerances. Hence, it is essential that device models are accurate enough to prevent conservative over-designs. For other types of integrated technologies, e.g. gallium arsenide, high modeling accuracy has often been achieved by offering only a limited set of devices to the designer. Each of the available devices is then carefully characterized and a model is created for commercial simulation tools. As RF CMOS is still in its infancy, such design practice has not yet been adopted and it is questionable if it ever will. This is particularly evident with active devices where the use of fully scalable model libraries has manifested itself as a vital part of integrated circuit design. Further, a free choice of device dimensions allows the designer to approach optimum process performance more closely with low-cost technologies. For current RF CMOS work, full scalability is thus assumed and much effort is dedicated to make commercial transistor models-such as BSIM3v3 [1], MM9 [2], and EKV [3]-applicable to RF design in the gigahertz frequency range. This paper describes some of the hurdles that must be overcome in order to facilitate fully scalable RF MOSFET models. First, the paper is initiated with a section on RF MOSFET design issues. The section discusses the contradictions between (i) layout for optimum RF performance and (ii) layout for high modeling consistency. Next, a unit transistor layout based on a cluster of fingers is presented which facilitates scalable modeling. Although such design practice imposes a limitation on the design freedom, the necessary confinements can be introduced without significantly degrading the device RF performance. Several measurements on submicron devices are presented in order to validate the advantages of having a consistent layout and scalability results for a 0. 25µm bulk process are presented. ¹ Troels Emil Kolding received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in 1996 and 2000 respectively. He is currently a design engineering manager with RISC Group Denmark. His research interests include RF …
Using the Extended Vector Model for XML Retrieval

The authors describe an approach to XML retrieval based on Fox’s extended vector space model [2]. The current implementation of their system and results to date are reported. (All results are based on retrieval at the article level since flexible retrieval is still being implemented.) The basic functions are performed using the Smart experimental retrieval system.
Industry-relative Ratios Revisited: the Case of Financial Distress Industry-relative Ratios Revisited: the Case of Financial Distress

For the most part, research purporting to address the issue of financial distress has actually studied samples of bankrupt companies. In contrast, this paper starts with a sample of companies that are financially distressed but not yet bankrupt. The sample was obtained following a screen of the Compustat industry database with a three-tiered identification system. The screen bifurcated companies into financially distressed and not distressed groups. A multi-tiered screen reduces the incidence of mistakenly identifying a non-distressed company as financially distressed. The paper then asks whether identical factors are able to indicate the likelihood of both future bankruptcies and financial distress. An early warning financial-distress model was deve loped to compare with an existent model of bankruptcy that relied on industry-relative data. The final financial distress model included two variables already present in the bankruptcy model and three new variables. The partial overlap of explanatory factors between the models suggests a semi-strong relationship between financial distress and bankruptcy since some factors leading firms to become financially distressed do not later lead them into bankruptcy. Model insights are particularly useful for banks and other lenders who want to control problem loans in the financial-distress phase that precedes bankruptcy.
Flexible querying of WEB documents

In this paper we present a flexible query language for expressing both conditions on the documents structure and conditions on the topics of interest. The first condition acts as a soft filter so as to reduce the set of documents on which to evaluate the second condition. Flexibility is achieved by allowing users to specify both a linguistic quantifier such as most for qualifying the global composition of the documents into a number of sections and preferences on the desired documents sections.
Visualization Support for Managing Information Overload in the Web Environment

Scope and method of study. The promise of the information age is for the information user to access the highest quality information in the right form, at the right time, and right place. Information technologies have proliferated at an unprecedented rate and are serving the needs of information users better than ever. However, this proliferation has led to an information overload. The information overload problem has adverse impacts on the use of information and the quality of the decisions made therein. This research focuses on the information overload problem on the Internet, and proposes a potential remedy to the overload problem encountered while searching the World Wide Web. In this study, we developed a prototype system that makes use of clustering and visualization for browsing the results of a typical Web search. This prototype is based on the idea of visualizing search results by organizing them into a hierarchy according to their individual contents. This system presents a visual overview of the groups in this hierarchy, and lets its users focus (zoom) on specific groups of interest. We used two different zooming methods (full zoom vs. fisheye zoom), and empirically compared their success with each other as well as the traditional non-visual presentation method by means of an experiment. Findings and conclusions. We hypothesized that the visual systems would lead to higher success than the text-based system, and that the fisheye zooming system would lead to higher success than the full zoom system. The results of our data analyses provide partial support to our hypotheses since the specific system(s) that a searcher used caused a significant difference in the speed that (s)he performed the experimental tasks. The data analyses results as mentioned above and the comments made by the experimental subjects suggest that our design ideas are promising, and it is worthwhile to focus on improving the implementation.
Contrasts and reflections: Social work fieldwork supervision in Brazil and England

This article compares field supervision in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to practices in a major city in England in order to contextualize the academic training of students. It considers practical dimensions and incorporates a qualitative study carried out in England exploring how the process of supervision in social work affects student learning and development from the supervisor’s perspective. In the study, particular attention is paid to field support provided to students and to practice educator qualifications. The results support the importance of placement supervision and the role of practice educators and supervisors in the overall social work education process.
Exploring dense trajectory feature and encoding methods for human interaction recognition

Recently, human activity recognition has obtained increasing attention due to its wide range of potential applications. Much progress has been made to improve the performance on single actions in videos while few on collective and interactive activities. Human interaction is a more challenging task owing to multi-actors in an execution. In this paper, we utilize multi-scale dense trajectories and explore four advanced feature encoding methods on the human interaction dataset with a bag-of-features framework. Particularly, dense trajectories are described by shape, histogram of gradient orientation, histogram of flow orientation and motion boundary histogram, and all these are computed by integral images. Experimental results on the UT-Interaction dataset show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7-14%. Additionally, we thoroughly analyse a finding that the performance of vector quantization is on par with or even better than other sophisticated feature encoding methods by using dense trajectories in videos.
Public narratives under intensified market conditions: Chile as a critical case

ABSTRACT This paper aims to extend existing theorisations around the notion of public narratives by analysing their regulatory effects under intensified market conditions. My analysis suggests that public narratives constitute a liminal space, one that it is not exclusively real or imaginary, factual or normative, but that simultaneously affects and is affected by vernacular practices and wider discursive structures. However, this paper argues that, under extreme conditions, these public narratives become a rigidifying space with homogenising/normalising effects. To do this I look at a set of ‘obligatory scenes’ captured in tales of success and struggle of teachers, parents and students in popular newspapers and fringe media in Chile. These accounts share a common ground: national assessment as a framework of intelligibility for the practices of parents, teachers and students. The central claim of this paper is that under intensified market conditions the scenes captured in these publicly available stories become ‘obligatory’ storylines, and their protagonists idealised policy subjects.
Synaptic NMDA Receptors Mediate Hypoxic Excitotoxic Death

Excessive NMDA receptor activation and excitotoxicity underlies pathology in many neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders, including hypoxia/ischemia. Thus, the development of effective therapeutics for these disorders demands a complete understanding of NMDA receptor (NMDAR) activation during excitotoxic insults. The extrasynaptic NMDAR hypothesis posits that synaptic NMDARs are neurotrophic/neuroprotective and extrasynaptic NMDARs are neurotoxic. The extrasynaptic hypothesis is built in part on observed selectivity for extrasynaptic receptors of a neuroprotective use-dependent NMDAR channel blocker, memantine. In rat hippocampal neurons, we found that a neuroprotective concentration of memantine shows little selectivity for extrasynaptic NMDARs when all receptors are tonically activated by exogenous glutamate. This led us to test the extrasynaptic NMDAR hypothesis using metabolic challenge, where the source of excitotoxic glutamate buildup may be largely synaptic. Three independent approaches suggest strongly that synaptic receptors participate prominently in hypoxic excitotoxicity. First, block of glutamate transporters with a nonsubstrate antagonist exacerbated rather than prevented damage, consistent with a primarily synaptic source of glutamate. Second, selective, preblock of synaptic NMDARs with a slowly reversible, use-dependent antagonist protected nearly fully against prolonged hypoxic insult. Third, glutamate pyruvate transaminase, which degrades ambient but not synaptic glutamate, did not protect against hypoxia but protected against exogenous glutamate damage. Together, these results suggest that synaptic NMDARs can mediate excitotoxicity, particularly when the glutamate source is synaptic and when synaptic receptor contributions are rigorously defined. Moreover, the results suggest that in some situations therapeutically targeting extrasynaptic receptors may be inappropriate.
Improvement of cognitive function after physical movement training in institutionalized very frail older adults with dementia

Physical exercise has positive effects on cognitive functioning in both healthy older adults and ambulatory older adults with dementia. The present study investigated whether a 10-week multimodal movement intervention conducted in the seated position can slow cognitive deterioration in demented and physically very frail nursing-home residents. Our analysis revealed that training participants showed no further overall cognitive deterioration throughout the study and a significant improvement in the ADAS-Cog orientation/praxis subscore (p = .04). In contrast, the control group demonstrated a significant decline in the ADAS-Cog sum score (p = .02). These results might be of relevance for geriatric practice since they indicate that a short-term physical intervention – even in the seated position – can decelerate cognitive decline and dementia despite physical frailty.
Explaining Hedge Fund Investment Styles by Loss Aversion: A Rational Alternative

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different, possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patterns simultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decision making. In this paper we present a simple model based on loss aversion that can accommodate for all of these pay-off structures in one unifying framework. We provide evidence that loss-aversion is a likely assumption for management as well as investor preferences. Following the current empirical literature, we solve a static asset allocation problem that includes a nonlinear instrument. We show analytically that four different pay-off functions may be rationally optimal. The key parameter in determining which of these four to choose in a specific setting, is the financial planner's surplus. The notion of surplus connects hedge fund manager's incentive schemes with the idea of mental accounting as proposed in recent behavioral finance research.
Self-censorship on Internal Social Media: A Case Study of Coworker Communication Behavior in a Danish Bank

ABSTRACT Internal social media (ISM) or social intranets provide organizations with a communication arena in which coworkers can actively contribute to organizational communication. Coworkers are, however, far from impulsive and spontaneous when they communicate on ISM. A case study in a Danish bank found that coworkers considered carefully the consequences of their posts or comments before publishing them. These coworkers perceived four different risks associated with ISM communication, and they used seven self-censorship strategies to ensure that both the content and the formulation of their communication were relevant and appropriate. Coworkers not only censor themselves by withdrawing, as previous studies have suggested, but they also postpone publishing content, phrase or frame content differently, imagine responses from organizational members, ask others for a second opinion, choose another channel, or write only positive comments. Through these seven self-censorship strategies, coworkers retain the quality of communication on ISM and prevent conflict or relational damage. Future research should explore the self-regulation strategies underlying self-censorship in order to improve understanding of the circumstances that increase the likelihood of responsible use of ISM. The potential dark side of self-censorship also requires exploration: when can self-censorship threaten coworkers’ freedom of expression, and develop into organizational silence?
Very-long-chain fatty acids are required for cell plate formation during cytokinesis in Arabidopsis thaliana

Acyl chain length is thought to be crucial for biophysical properties of the membrane, in particular during cell division, when active vesicular fusion is necessary. In higher plants, the process of cytokinesis is unique, because the separation of the two daughter cells is carried out by de novo vesicular fusion to generate a laterally expanding cell plate. In Arabidopsis thaliana, very-long-chain fatty acid (VLCFA) depletion caused by a mutation in the microsomal elongase gene PASTICCINO2 (PAS2) or by application of the selective elongase inhibitor flufenacet altered cytokinesis. Cell plate expansion was delayed and the formation of the endomembrane tubular network altered. These defects were associated with specific aggregation of the cell plate markers YFP–Rab-A2a and KNOLLE during cytokinesis. Changes in levels of VLCFA also resulted in modification of endocytosis and sensitivity to brefeldin A. Finally, the cytokinesis impairment in pas2 cells was associated with reduced levels of very long fatty acyl chains in phospholipids. Together, our findings demonstrate that VLCFA-containing lipids are essential for endomembrane dynamics during cytokinesis.
Adjective Density as a Text Formality Characteristic for Automatic Text Classification: A Study Based on the British National Corpus

In this article, we report significant findings resulting from an investigation into the correlation between adjective density, calculated as the proportion of adjectives in word tokens, and degrees of text formality as part of an attempt to examine the potential application of adjectives in automatic text classification and identification. Correlations obtained from the training corpus will be compared with human ranking of the text categories concerned in the study and then adapted to unseen data in the test set. A linear regression analysis suggests a strong correlation between degrees of text formality and adjective density. With a weighted average F-measure of 0.606 achieved by a Naive Bayes classifier, the research establishes adjectives as a powerful differentia of text categories amongst the open word classes, an important feature that has been generally ignored by past studies in automatic text categorization. The empirical findings suggest that the use of adjective density will lead to enhanced practical systems for automatic text classification.
Detection of E-Commerce Systems with Sparse Features and Supervised Classification

Enriching web shop pages with structured data has recently become popular in e-commerce. It is mainly driven by search engines favouring those pages. While structured data in e-commerce is mainly generated automatically by shop extensions, this data covers only a small share of the market, resulting in a major hamper for applications operating on aggregated data. In this context, more than 90% of product detail pages on the web are generated by only 7 e-commerce systems. Meanwhile, little research addresses methods to automatically detect e-commerce systems. Automated detection would allow to design system-specific extractors able to grow the amount of structured data in e-commerce. Therefore, we propose a novel approach to this problem, which filters features generated from HTML tag attributes with an e-commerce specific white list. We evaluate 6 classification algorithms on the problem and discuss computational effort. We can show that this approach is capable of detecting the 6 most important e-commerce systems with a F1-score of 0.9 by analyzing only one HTML page per web shop. We evaluate our findings on an independent dataset and on reference shop sites.
Tests of the sealed-bid abstraction in online auctions

This paper presents five empirical tests of the popular modeling abstraction that bidders in ascending online auctions bid “as if” they were in a sealed bid auction. The tests rely on observations of the magnitudes and timings of top two proxy bids, with the different tests stemming from different regularity assumptions about the underlying joint distribution of signals and timings. We apply the tests to data from three eBay markets MP3 players, DVDs and used cars and we reject the sealed-bid abstraction in all three datasets. This consistent rejection casts doubt on several existing theories of online-auction behavior. Moreover, we reject the sealed-bid abstraction even in carefully selected subsets of the data that one might consider more likely to conform to sealed bidding. Given these findings, demand-estimation using eBay data is more difficult than previously thought. In particular, our results suggest that the empirical strategies based on multiple order-statistics of the bidding distribution will not work. We thank Raphael Thomadsen, Jeremy Fox, Ali Hortacsu, Harry Paarsch, and seminar participants at Chicago GSB for comments and suggestions. We also thank eBay for providing the data, and Uri Simonsohn for cleaning up and sharing the movie dataset. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the FTC or any individual Commissioner. All errors are our own. Contact: Robert Zeithammer, UCLA Anderson School of Management, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Email: rzeitham@ucla.edu.
The WINTERP Widget INTERPreter — An application prototyping and extension environment for OSF/Motif.

Winterp is an interactive, language-based user-interface and application-construction environment enabling rapid prototyping of applications with graphical user interfaces based on the OSF/Motif UI Toolkit. Winterp also serves as a customization environment for delivered applications by providing a real programming language as an extension language. Many existing user-interface languages only have the expressive power to describe static layout of user interface forms; by using a high-level language for extensions and prototyping, Winterp also handles the dynamic aspects of UI presentation, e.g. the use of direct manipulation, browsers, and dialog. Winterp makes rapid prototyping possible because its language is based on an interpreter, thereby enabling interactive construction of application functionality and giving immediate feedback on incremental changes. Winterp’s language is based on David Betz’s public domain Xlisp interpreter which features a subset of Common Lisp’s functionality. The language is extensible, permitting new Lisp primitives to be added in the C language and allowing hybrid implementations constructed from interpreted Lisp and compiled C. Hybrid implementation gives Winterp-based applications the successful extension and rapid-prototyping capabilities of Lisp-based environments, while delivering the multiprocessing performance of C applications running on personal Unix workstations.