Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
‘Would you like to tidy up now?’ An analysis of adult questioning in the English Foundation Stage

This study provides an extension of analysis concerned with adult questioning carried out in the Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years (REPEY) study. The REPEY study drew on robust quantitative data provided by the Effective Provision of Pre‐School Education (EPPE) project to identify the particular pedagogical strategies being applied by more effective pre‐school settings to support the development of the skills, knowledge and attitudes that enable their children to make a good start at school. Following a line of investigation identified in the EPPE analysis, and supported by previous studies, REPEY included a preliminary analysis of the forms of questioning applied by early childhood practitioners. These findings were based on 1967 adult questions identified in a random sample of four half‐day observations drawn from each of the 12 pre‐school settings that were identified by EPPE as more ‘effective’. In this extension of the analysis a text search of the N‐Vivo database identified a total of 5808 questions across the full 400 hours of observations of 28 staff that were recorded in 2000–2001. The aim of the research has been to provide a more thorough analysis of the forms of questioning applied, and to investigate the possibility that the use of open‐ended forms of questioning might be particularly supportive in early childhood development. Surprisingly, it was found that 94.5% of all the questions asked by the early childhood staff were closed questions that required a recall of fact, experience or expected behaviour, decision between a limited selection of choices or no response at all. Only 5.5% were open‐ended questions, which provided for increased encouragement (to speculate and trial and error) and/or potential for sustained, shared thinking/talking. This article provides an account of the analysis and the authors' coding and rationale for the seven types of closed questions and four types of open‐ended questions that are most commonly asked by early years staff.
Workshop on Feedback from Multimodal Interactions in Learning Management Systems ( FFMI )

Emotions play a significant role in students’ learning behaviour. Positive emotions can enhance learning, whilst negative emotions can inhibit it. This paper describes a Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) study which investigates the potential of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) together with an emotion detector able to classify emotions from speech to support young children in their exploration and reflection whilst working with interactive learning environments. We describe a unique ecologically valid WoZ study in a classroom. During the study the wizards provided support using a script, and followed an iterative methodology which limited their capacity to communicate, in order to simulate the real system we are developing. Our results indicate that there is an effect of emotions on the acceptance of feedback. Additionally, certain types of feedback are more effective than others for particular emotions.
Social Contact and Cognitive Functioning: The Role of Personality

Objectives Social contact has been shown to be positively associated with cognitive functioning. It is unclear, however, whether all individuals can equally benefit from social contact with regard to their cognitive functioning. The goal of this study was to examine whether the beneficial effects of social contact are affected by individual differences in personality. Method We examined the Big Five personality traits as moderators of the associations between social contact and episodic memory and executive functioning using the second wave of the Midlife in the U.S. study (N = 3,524, M(age) = 55.8). Results High levels of Extraversion and low levels of Openness to Experience strengthened the association between social contact and memory and executive functioning. High levels of Neuroticism and Agreeableness weakened the association of social contact with memory but not with executive functioning. The results are consistent across adulthood. Discussion Personality modifies the social contact-cognition association. Whereas extraverts may need social contact for cognitive stimulation, those who are high on Openness gain their stimulations elsewhere. The highly neurotic might experience contact as stressful and hence as less beneficial. Emotional rather than cognitive motivation might be the reason that the highly agreeable benefit less from social contact with regard to their cognitive functioning.
Feasibility of a screening programme for lung cancer in former asbestos workers.

BACKGROUND Low-dose computed tomography (CT) has been found to detect more Stage IA lung cancer than chest x-ray. AIMS To investigate whether lung cancer screening with CT was effective and acceptable in former asbestos workers. METHODS CT scanning was carried out following the protocol previously described in the literature. A questionnaire was used to assess cumulative asbestos exposure. An economic analysis was also performed. Informed consent was obtained from all patients. RESULTS A total of 1119 male asbestos workers (58% of invited) were examined, of whom 65% were smokers or ex-smokers. Mean age was 57.1 years with mean cumulative exposure to asbestos of 123 fibres/ml x years. Pleural plaques were found in 375 workers (32%), while 338 workers (29%) were included in the radiological follow-up, which led to 25 biopsies (13 of lung, 9 of pleura, 3 of both) and five screen-detected lung cancers (0.4%), one in Stage I. Incidence rate was 149 per 10(5), equal to that in the male general population of similar age. The expenses for diagnosis were 1014 and 244962 Euro per screened subject and screen-detected lung cancer case, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Screening adherence and frequency of detection were low, while costs and radiation dose were high. In spite of a high cumulative asbestos exposure, lung cancer risk was not increased relative to the general population. The screening programme was not felt to be cost-effective from the perspective of the government as a third-party funding agency.
Secondary Traumatization Among Adult Children of PTSD Veterans: The Role of Mother–Child Relationships

The study examined the level of secondary traumatization among adult children of Israeli war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as manifested in emotional distress, stress resulting from terrorist attacks, and capacity for intimacy. In addition, the role of the mother–child relationship as a moderator of these manifestations of distress was examined. Forty-six adult children of fathers with chronic PTSD, and 46 adult children of fathers who had participated in a war but did not have PTSD participated. Findings revealed that adult children of PTSD veterans showed higher levels of psychological distress, greater terror-related stress, and a lower capacity for intimacy than children of non-PTSD veterans. Positive relationship with the mother was found to moderate the level of participants' capacity for intimacy and their levels of psychiatric symptoms.
Decidability of Non-interactive Simulation of Joint Distributions

We present decidability results for a sub-class of "non-interactive" simulation problems, a well-studied class of problems in information theory. A non-interactive simulation problem is specified by two distributions P(x, y) and Q(u, v): The goal is to determine if two players, Alice and Bob, that observe sequences Xn and Yn respectively where {(Xi, Yi)}ni = 1 are drawn i.i. d. from P(x, y) can generate pairs U and V respectively (without communicating with each other) with a joint distribution that is arbitrarily close in total variation to Q(u, v). Even when P and Q are extremely simple: e.g., P is uniform on the triples (0, 0), (0,1), (1,0) and Q is a "doubly symmetric binary source", i.e., U and V are uniform ± 1 variables with correlation say 0.49, it is open if P can simulate Q. In this work, we show that whenever P is a distribution on a finite domain and Q is a 2 × 2 distribution, then the non-interactive simulation problem is decidable: specifically, given δ > 0 the algorithm runs in time bounded by some function of P and δ and either gives a non-interactive simulation protocol that is δ-close to Q or asserts that no protocol gets O(δ)-close to Q. The main challenge to such a result is determining explicit (computable) convergence bounds on the number n of samples that need to be drawn from P(x, y) to get δ-close to Q. We invoke contemporary results from the analysis of Boolean functions such as the invariance principle and a regularity lemma to obtain such explicit bounds.
The Effects of an Off‐season Strength and Conditioning Program on Starters and Non‐starters in Women's Intercollegiate Volleyball

Fourteen female NCAA Division I collegiate volleyball players were monitored during a 12-week off-season strength and conditioning program. Physical characteristics (mean ± standard deviation) included: age, 19.6 ± 0.6 years; height, 171.9 ± 6.8 centimeters; weight, 64.3 ± 7.0 kilograms. Training included resistance exercise, plyometrics, aerobic endurance exercise and on-court volleyball practice. At the beginning of the study, starters (ST, n = 6) were compared with non-starters (NST, n = 8), and were found to be faster, more flexible and stronger. ST were still stronger when one-repetition maximum (1 RM) values were corrected for fat-free mass (FFM). Ten subjects completed the 12-week strength and conditioning program and participated in the post-training tests. ST and NST responded similarly to the training program for all physical and performance tests. Significant improvements were observed for FFM, sport-specific peak and mean isometric force, vertical jump (VJ), shoulder flexibility, 1 RM strength and 1 RM/FFM for the bench press, military press, squat and hang power clean, and isokinetic leg extension torque at 1.05 and 3.14 rads•sec–1. Furthermore, two-mile run times and sit-up performance (in 60 seconds) also improved. Significant decreases were observed for VJ endurance. Over the course of the training program, the relationship between 1 RM strength and FFM decreased, while shoulder flexibility was increasingly related to sport-specific isometric strength. Isokinetic testing did not reflect the magnitude of changes in 1 RM tests. Thus, while differences appear to exist in physical characteristics between starters and non-starters, it was shown that most physical and performance variables for ST and NST can be improved with a comprehensive strength and conditioning program for female collegiate volleyball players.
Optimising the deployment of fibre optics using Guided Local Search

The deployment of fibre optics poses a huge investment risk, thus telecommunication companies are skeptical about replacing copper given the high cost of doing so. Over recent times, the usage of the internet has changed and led to a need for fibre optics. The decision on whether to deploy or not is made through the use of complex models. However, the problem being that deployment plans are manually predefined based on previous knowledge, this process does not guarantee that the plans are optimal. This paper demonstrates that the deployment of fibre optics can be optimised by using intelligent algorithms. We implemented a metaheuristic (Guided Local Search) to the problem to demonstrate the effectiveness and benefit of looking for an optimal deployment plan. Results indicate that Guided Local Search lead to a significant increase in the profit and can address the problem of finding an optimal deployment plan.
Authorship Detection with PPM Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2013

This paper reports on our work in the PAN 2013 author identification task. The task is to automatically detect the author of the given text having small training sets with known authors. The task was solved by a system that used the PPM (Prediction by Partial Matching) compression algorithm based on an n-gram statistical model. With the emergence of user-generated web content, text author profiling is being increasingly studied by the NLP community. Various works describe experiments aiming to automatically discover hidden attributes of text which reveal author's gender, age, personality and others. Authorship identification is an important problem in many areas including information retrieval and computational linguistics. While a great number of works have presented investigations in this area there is need for a common ground to evaluate different author recognition techniques. PAN 2013 as part of the CLEF campaigns aims to provide the common conditions and data for this task. We participated in this shared task with the PPM (Prediction by Partial Matching) compression algorithm based on a character-based n-gram statistical model.
The negotiated project-based learning: understanding the views and practice of kindergarten teachers about the implementation of project learning in Hong Kong

A global trend towards formulation of curriculum has emerged over the past decade. The concepts of project approach have aroused growing attention, and many literatures have indicated its benefits to children. It is believed that to achieve these potential benefits of project learning, teachers needed to formulate a curriculum that follows the interests of children, to design appropriate activities, to build a good relationship with children and help them in the process of learning. The study revealed that teachers were positive towards the impact of project learning on children's experience but fell back to a traditional way of implementing curriculum.
Support Vector Machines for Human Face Detection

paper describes an attempt to build a component-based face detector using support vector machine classifiers. We present current results and outline plans for future work re- quired to achieve sucient speed and accuracy to use SVM classifiers in an online face recognition system. We take a straightforward approach in implementing our own SVM classifier with a Gaussian kernel that detects eyes in grayscale images, a first step towards a component-based face detec- tor. Details on design of an iterative bootstrapping process are provided, and we show which training parameter val- ues tend to give best results. Conclusions drawn from our work up to date are consistent with previous research and problems encountered are to be expected by anyone build- ing an object detection system - SVM classifiers with large numbers of support vectors are slow and accuracy depends largely on the quality and variety of training data.
Ribosomal Binding Site of Release Factors RF1 and RF2

We have established a new in vitroassay for translational termination. It consists of 70 S ribosomes bound to a synthetic RNA minimessenger via interaction with P-site binding fMet-tRNAf Met. If the A-site codon is a stop signal, release activity can be measured by quantifying hydrolyzed formylmethionine. Characteristics of this assay in terms of reaction time, ion concentration, release factor RF1 and RF2 concentration, and competition with A-site-decoding tRNA are discussed. The new assay shows that polypeptide chain release activity is directly dependent on the presence of a stop codon in the ribosomal A-site.
Health-Related Internet Use in Older Primary Care Patients

Background: Adults aged 65 years and older stand to benefit from the accumulating wealth of Internet-based health resources, including online interventions to assist in the self-management of chronic health conditions. However, concerns have been expressed that lesser Internet use and familiarity among older adults may limit the utility of web-based health interventions in older age groups. As these interventions become more prevalent, it is important to understand older adults’ receptivity to using the Internet as a tool in managing healthcare. Objective: The purpose of the present study was to gauge the extent to which older primary care patients are receptive to using web-based health resources, and to explore how health-related Internet use may be related to patient characteristics such as age, income, and health and mental health status. Methods: We surveyed 50 adults aged 65 years and older in a Veterans Administration primary care clinic regarding: (1) Internet use for any purpose, (2) Internet use to obtain health or mental-related information, and (3) interest in using Internet-based interventions to address various health-related needs. A substantial proportion of respondents were in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, and many had multiple medical conditions. Results: Nearly three-quarters of older primary care patients in our sample were regular Internet users and over half had experience in using the Internet to search for health information. The majority of Internet users endorsed an interest in using web-based resources to manage various aspects of their health and mental healthcare. Conclusions: Our results support the conclusion that older primary care patients, including those among the oldest-old and those with multiple medical conditions, are amenable to using the Internet as a means of enhancing healthcare.
Automatic analysis (aa): efficient neuroimaging workflows and parallel processing using Matlab and XML

Recent years have seen neuroimaging data sets becoming richer, with larger cohorts of participants, a greater variety of acquisition techniques, and increasingly complex analyses. These advances have made data analysis pipelines complicated to set up and run (increasing the risk of human error) and time consuming to execute (restricting what analyses are attempted). Here we present an open-source framework, automatic analysis (aa), to address these concerns. Human efficiency is increased by making code modular and reusable, and managing its execution with a processing engine that tracks what has been completed and what needs to be (re)done. Analysis is accelerated by optional parallel processing of independent tasks on cluster or cloud computing resources. A pipeline comprises a series of modules that each perform a specific task. The processing engine keeps track of the data, calculating a map of upstream and downstream dependencies for each module. Existing modules are available for many analysis tasks, such as SPM-based fMRI preprocessing, individual and group level statistics, voxel-based morphometry, tractography, and multi-voxel pattern analyses (MVPA). However, aa also allows for full customization, and encourages efficient management of code: new modules may be written with only a small code overhead. aa has been used by more than 50 researchers in hundreds of neuroimaging studies comprising thousands of subjects. It has been found to be robust, fast, and efficient, for simple-single subject studies up to multimodal pipelines on hundreds of subjects. It is attractive to both novice and experienced users. aa can reduce the amount of time neuroimaging laboratories spend performing analyses and reduce errors, expanding the range of scientific questions it is practical to address.
A Wearable Channel Selection-Based Brain-Computer Interface for Motor Imagery Detection

Motor imagery-based brain-computer interface (BCI) is a communication interface between an external machine and the brain. Many kinds of spatial filters are used in BCIs to enhance the electroencephalography (EEG) features related to motor imagery. The approach of channel selection, developed to reserve meaningful EEG channels, is also an important technique for the development of BCIs. However, current BCI systems require a conventional EEG machine and EEG electrodes with conductive gel to acquire multi-channel EEG signals and then transmit these EEG signals to the back-end computer to perform the approach of channel selection. This reduces the convenience of use in daily life and increases the limitations of BCI applications. In order to improve the above issues, a novel wearable channel selection-based brain-computer interface is proposed. Here, retractable comb-shaped active dry electrodes are designed to measure the EEG signals on a hairy site, without conductive gel. By the design of analog CAR spatial filters and the firmware of EEG acquisition module, the function of spatial filters could be performed without any calculation, and channel selection could be performed in the front-end device to improve the practicability of detecting motor imagery in the wearable EEG device directly or in commercial mobile phones or tablets, which may have relatively low system specifications. Finally, the performance of the proposed BCI is investigated, and the experimental results show that the proposed system is a good wearable BCI system prototype.
Morphine-induced behavioral sensitization in alcohol-preferring and alcohol-avoiding rat lines

Repeated use of drugs of abuse induces permanent changes in the brain that together with environmental factors can promote the development of addiction. Addiction to alcohol or drugs is a chronic disease that is characterized by a compulsion to seek and take the drug, loss of control in limiting intake, continued use despite obvious harm, and recurrent relapses. Behavioral animal models of addiction are invaluable tools for evaluating the neuroadaptations underlying these behaviors. Behavioral sensitization is a form of neuronal plasticity where repeated administration of drugs induces a progressive and enduring enhancement in their behavioral and neurochemical effects. The aim of this study was to investigate differences in susceptibility to morphine-induced behavioral and neurochemical sensitization in alcohol-preferring AA and alcohol-avoiding ANA rat lines, and to clarify its role on voluntary intake of ethanol. In vivo microdialysis was used to examine dopaminergic, glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission in the brain. Interactions between behavioral sensitization and voluntary ethanol intake were assessed in AA rats during and after the rats were sensitized to morphine. The results showed that AA rats are more susceptible to morphine-induced behavioral sensitization than ANA rats. Neurochemical studies indicated a dissociation between the locomotor stimulant effects of morphine and extracellular levels of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. In addition, sensitization to morphine affected glutamatergic transmission in the ventral tegmental area differently in AA and ANA rats. In contrast, extracellular levels of GABA differed neither between the lines nor between morphinesensitized rats and controls. Glutamatergic transmission is therefore potentially involved in the higher susceptibility to morphine-induced sensitization in AA rats relative to ANAs, but the role of GABA remains unclear. Morphine-induced behavioral sensitization or other long-term adaptations in the brain induced by repeated morphine administration were not critically involved in the regulation of voluntary ethanol drinking. Opioid receptor activation with morphine injection, however, was shown to dramatically increase ethanol drinking in morphine-sensitized AA rats. Thus, the neuronal mechanisms underlying behavioral sensitization to morphine probably are distinct from those mediating ethanol reinforcement. In contrast, when given an additional morphine injection, reinforcing effects of ethanol were enhanced in AA rats sensitized to morphine.
Matrix Multiplication Performance on Commodity Shared-Memory Multiprocessors

Cache-oblivious algorithms for matrix multiplication are confirmed as an effective way of exploiting Intel architecture shared-memory multiprocessors. The performance also remains consistent across a wide range of matrix size. The Cilk programming environment remains an effective way of implementing this type of algorithm, but the need for portability and a compiler upgrade route mean that a portability library is a competitive alternative. The paper considers the interaction of matrix multiplication algorithms with the memory hierarchy, as well as multithreading across differing operating system variants and compilers.