Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Principal Quality, ISLLC Standards, and Student Achievement: A Virginia Study

A significant relationship exists between principals’ quality at certain grade levels and student achievement on the Virginia Standards of Learning tests. A statewide study finds principals rated higher on school leadership as measured by an Interstate School Leadership Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) Standards rubric. These schools have higher student achievement than comparable schools headed by lower rated principals controlling for socioeconomic status. Implications for increasing student achievement, developing and keeping a school achievement culture, and improving principal leadership are discussed.
Ghost: a human body part labeling system using silhouettes

Ghost is a real time system for estimating human body posture and detecting body parts in monochromatic imagery. It constructs a silhouette based body model to determine the location of the body parts while people are in generic postures. It combines hierarchical body pose estimation, a convex hull analysis of the silhouette, and a partial mapping from the body parts to the silhouette segments using a distance transform method that does not violate the topology of the human body. Experimental results demonstrate robustness and real-time performance of the proposed algorithm.
Experimental setup for the measurement of local temperature in electronic component during the steady and transient state

Non-contact optical methods can be used for submicron surface thermal characterization of active semiconductor devices. In this work, an experimental device based on near infra-red radiometric method is presented. This device is breadboard to analyze a thermal behaviour of electronic component in steadied and transient state. The absolute temperature distribution is measured at the micron scale. The obtained results highlight the excellent spatial resolution of the experimental measurement apparatus and its great sensitivity for detection of weak thermal emission variations.
Moderate to High Concentrations of High-Density Lipoprotein From Healthy Subjects Paradoxically Impair Human Endothelial Progenitor Cells and Related Angiogenesis by Activating Rho-Associated Kinase Pathways

Objective—Recent clinical evidence has failed to demonstrate the benefits of elevation of serum high-density lipoprotein (HDL), suggesting potential loss of protective effects of HDL at high concentrations. This study aimed to investigate the concentration-related effects of HDL on in vitro and in vivo functions of human endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) and related angiogenesis. Methods and Results—Early and late outgrowth EPCs were generated from human circulating mononuclear cells. Oxidized low-density lipoprotein reduced viability of late outgrowth EPCs, which was reversed dose dependently by HDL. In the absence of oxidized low-density lipoprotein, HDL at low concentrations (5–50 &mgr;g/mL, equal to 0.5–5 mg/dL in human) enhanced EPC tube formation by activating phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase/Akt/endothelial NO synthase pathways. Moderate to high concentrations (400–800 &mgr;g/mL) of HDL paradoxically enhanced EPC senescence and impaired tube formation by activating Rho-associated kinase (ROCK) and inhibiting phosphatidylinositol-3 kinase/Akt and p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase pathways. Rho-associated kinase inhibitors, either Y27632 or statins, prevented high HDL–induced EPC senescence and improved in vitro tube formation, as well as in vivo capacity of angiogenesis of EPCs. Conclusion—While protecting EPCs from the injury of oxidized low-density lipoprotein, moderate to high concentrations of HDL paradoxically impaired EPCs and related angiogenesis in the absence of oxidized low-density lipoprotein by activating Rho-associated kinase pathways, providing mechanistic evidence of potential hazard effects of HDL.
Collective action by older people in natural disasters: the Great East Japan Earthquake

ABSTRACT How can social participation by older people support their wellbeing? We explore the elder-focused community support system developed in Minamisanriku town after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. Many elderly people lost all their material possessions and were moved from their devastated home communities to temporary housing. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 participants including 14 community workers and three members in the Minamisanriku Council of Social Welfare (MCSW) in a programme framed by the MCSW's disaster-response model. Thematic analysis highlighted how older people's involvement in the visiting programme of their temporary community, and conducting twice-daily visits to other vulnerable elders, enabled them to provide valued social support to isolated and homebound peers. It also helped reconstruct their own social identities shattered by the dissolution of former communities, the shock of displacement and loss of possessions. This positive social participation was heavily influenced by strong bridges between their temporary community and MCSW support staff and infrastructure that promoted and supported their visits. Our study highlights how strong and empowering relationships amongst older people can be facilitated by an active government-funded support agency that is immediately responsive to the needs and deeply respectful of the world-views of vulnerable groups.
Atomic force microscopy: High resolution dynamic imaging of cellular and molecular structure in health and disease

The atomic force microscope (AFM), invented in 1986, and a member of the scanning probe family of microscopes, offers the unprecedented ability to image biological samples unfixed and in a hydrated environment at high resolution. This opens the possibility to investigate biological mechanisms temporally in a heretofore unattainable resolution. We have used AFM to investigate: (1) fundamental issues in cell biology (secretion) and, (2) the pathological basis of a human thrombotic disease, the antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). These studies have incorporated the imaging of live cells at nanometer resolution, leading to discovery of the “porosome,” the universal secretory portal in cells, and a molecular understanding of membrane fusion from imaging the interaction and assembly of proteins between opposing lipid membranes. Similarly, the development of an in vitro simulacrum for investigating the molecular interactions between proteins and lipids has helped define an etiological explanation for APS. The prime importance of AFM in the success of these investigations will be presented in this manuscript, as well as a discussion of the limitations of this technique for the study of biomedical samples. J. Cell. Physiol. 228: 1949–1955, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
PRMT5, a Novel TRAIL Receptor-Binding Protein, Inhibits TRAIL-Induced Apoptosis via Nuclear Factor-κB Activation

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) is a member of the TNF superfamily and has selective antitumor activity. Although TNF-α-induced intracellular signaling pathways have been well studied, TRAIL signaling is not fully understood. Here, we identified a novel TRAIL receptor-binding protein, protein arginine methyltransferase 5 (PRMT5), as a result of proteomic screening. PRMT5 selectively interacted with death receptor 4 and death receptor 5 but not with TNF receptor 1 or Fas. PRMT5 gene silencing sensitized various cancer cells to TRAIL without affecting TRAIL resistance in nontransformed cells. PRMT5 contributed to TRAIL-induced activation of inhibitor of κB kinase (IKK) and nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB), leading to induction of several NF-κB target genes. Although IKK inhibition increased sensitivity to both TRAIL and TNF-α, PRMT5 knockdown potentiated TRAIL-mediated cytotoxicity alone. PRMT5 had no effect on TNF-α-mediated NF-κB signaling. These results show the selectivity of PRMT5 for TRAIL signaling. The PRMT5 small interfering RNA-mediated susceptibility to TRAIL was rescued by ectopic expression of active IKKβ, confirming the involvement of PRMT5 in TRAIL resistance by activating the NF-κB pathway. Collectively, our findings suggest the therapeutic potential of PRMT5 in TRAIL-based cancer treatments. (Mol Cancer Res 2009;7(4):557–69)
Metacognitive and motivational predictors of surface approach to studying and academic examination performance

The objective of this study was to verify the structure of a model of how surface approach to studying is influenced by the trait variables of motivation and metacognition and the state variables of avoidance coping and evaluation anxiety. We extended the model to include: (1) the investigation of the relative contribution of the five metacognition sub-traits; and (2) the prediction of academic examination performance while controlling for past academic examination performance. A sample of 101 university students completed prior to undertaking academic examinations of the following self-report instruments: Work Preference Inventory, Metacognitions Questionnaire 30, Revised COPE Inventory, Evaluation Anxiety Scale and Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students. Results supported the original structure of the metacognitive-motivational model of surface approach to studying in addition to showing that it predicts academic examination performance controlling for past academic examination performance. The present study confirmed some previous findings, identified new predictive relationships and offered a comprehensive model of surface approach to studying and academic examination performance controlling for past academic examination performance.
QoS-Aware Traffic-Efficient Web Service Selection over BigData Space

Service Composition is playing a pivotal role in diverse industries to approach more cost effective solutions. Web service selection is playing a key role in the domain of the composition and it considers as the most important last informant of the successful Composition. However, service selection is becoming highly resource starvation job due to the flooding of web services (volume), diverse range of Non-Functional Properties (NFP's) generation (variety) and uncertainty of NFP's (veracity). These concerns obviously open a gateway to the research directions in the BigData space. Therefore, we have proposed successful web service selection method based on BigData space while addressing internal traffic concerns during the selection process of the web services. We have employed well informed mathematical model to satisfied diverse QoS selection requirements. The novel graph theory based selection method to selects the optimal composition plan among given candidate services to choose a most profitable plan. Moreover, also, we have addressed scalability and traffic issues aroused in the Hadoop space by introducing the state of the art approaches to our method. Here we have addressed internal traffic congestions and improve the data communication of the selection process. These approaches are working effectively towards efficient service selection. Our experiment results show that our approach allows to produces more scalable and effective selection result.
Atmospheric production of radiation belt light isotopes

Nuclear interactions between inner zone protons and atoms in the upper atmosphere produce energetic H and He nuclei that are an additional radiation belt source. We calculate production rates of these isotopes from models of the inner zone proton intensity, the upper atmosphere drift-averaged composition and densities, and cross sections for the various interaction processes. For comparison with observations of radiation belt H and He isotopes, the production rates are combined with a model of the energy loss rate in the residual atmosphere to calculate particle intensities. Although the calculations are in principle straightforward, they depend on a detailed knowledge of the various model inputs, including models for radiation belt protons, and may also depend on the phase of the solar cycle. On the other hand, the results of the calculations, when compared with the observational data, can provide useful tests of the model inputs. Initial results show that the atmosphere is a significant source for inner zone ^4He, ^3He, and ^2H.
A named data approach for DTN routing

Many common DTN routing protocols are replication-based, which have relatively good performance in terms of message delivery ratio but high overhead, and leave the issue of garbage collection open. In this paper, we propose Named Data Distance Routing (NDDR), a named data based DTN routing approach which makes routing decisions for named data based on topological distance information. This helps to reduce the overhead of routing. We have implemented NDDR in the ONE simulation environment and the simulation results show that the proposed routing method has better performance in terms of message delivery ratio and network overhead compared with several typical replication-based DTN routing protocols.
Diverse activation functions in deep learning

We introduce the concept of diverse activation functions, and apply them into Convolutional Auto-Encoder (CAE) to develop diverse activation CAE (DaCAE), which considerably reduces the reconstruction loss. In contrast to vanilla CAE only with activation functions of the same types, DaCAE incorporates diverse activations by considering their cooperation and location. In terms of the reconstruction capability, DaCAE significantly outperforms vanilla CAE and full connected Auto-Encoder, and we conclude rules of thumb on designing diverse activations networks. Based on the high quality of the latent bottleneck features extracted from DaCAE, we demonstrate a satisfying advantage that fuzzy rules classifier performs better than softmax layer in supervised learning. These results could be seen as new research points in the attempts at using diverse activations to train deep neural networks and combining fuzzy inference systems with deep learning.
Consumer feedback on nursing care and discharge planning.

BACKGROUND Gaining consumer feedback about nursing care and discharge planning is especially important given the changes that have occurred in acute inpatient mental health facilities. Consumers can best define the quality of the service they receive and surveys are considered to be good sources of information about nursing care and discharge planning. AIM The aims of this study were to clarify consumer discharge needs, ascertain consumer perceptions of helpful practice, identify areas that require improvement, identify resources consumers deem important, ascertain satisfaction with specific aspects of services, and obtain baseline data to improve future discharge planning. METHOD Satisfaction-with-services and discharge questionnaires were completed by clients (39 and 45, respectively) prior to discharge from three acute inpatient mental health units over a 2-month period. FINDINGS Findings indicated that clients were most satisfied with the respect they received from staff, attention staff gave to concerns and worries, quality of service provided by nurses, way treatment met client needs and overall stay in hospital. The majority of respondents (95%) indicated that their discharge arrangements were explained to them and 90% were satisfied with these. Whilst over two-thirds indicated that the information provided in hospital to assist with discharge had been helpful, they highlighted some areas for service improvement. Resources to prepare them better for discharge included increased contact with consumer consultants and more information about mental health problems, medication and relapse prevention. CONCLUSION This study constitutes another small step towards decreasing the gap between consumer expectations and actual treatment by asking consumers about their perceptions of discharge planning. The findings provide the basis for the development of more appropriate strategies to improve the continuity of services between hospital and community mental health settings.
Cooperative sensing and allocation scheme using IEEE 802.22-Standard

Today's wireless networks are regulated by a fixed spectrum assignment policy. Cognitive Radio Networks (CRN) allows wireless systems to exploit the unused licensed spectrum, while the licensed users or primary users (PUs) remain idle. In order to provide dynamic spectrum access (DSA) to these wireless systems or secondary users (SUs), it is necessary to sense the spectrum to identify the unused licensed channels. In this paper, we propose a co-operative sensing scheme, along with a complementary dynamic spectrum allocation scheme in conformation to the framework, as documented by IEEE 802.22 Standard. The aim of our work is to provide an efficient and easily implementable spectrum sensing and dynamic allocation scheme following 802.22 Standard. Our work shows that the proposed sensing scheme can achieve a lower probability of miss, and allows sensing procedure to be carried by receivers with lower sensitivity over topologies with varied fading characteristics, than centralized sensing mechanism.
Atlas of Iberian water beetles (ESACIB database)

Abstract The ESACIB (‘EScarabajos ACuáticos IBéricos’) database is provided, including all available distributional data of Iberian and Balearic water beetles from the literature up to 2013, as well as from museum and private collections, PhD theses, and other unpublished sources. The database contains 62,015 records with associated geographic data (10×10 km UTM squares) for 488 species and subspecies of water beetles, 120 of them endemic to the Iberian Peninsula and eight to the Balearic Islands. This database was used for the elaboration of the “Atlas de los Coleópteros Acuáticos de España Peninsular”. In this dataset data of 15 additional species has been added: 11 that occur in the Balearic Islands or mainland Portugal but not in peninsular Spain and an other four with mainly terrestrial habits within the genus Helophorus (for taxonomic coherence). The complete dataset is provided in Darwin Core Archive format.
Coordinate ascent scheduler for the multi-user MIMO broadcast channel

Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna systems are being used to increase the spectral efficiency for the next generation of wireless networks (LTE, WiMAX). In this paper we focus on beamforming techniques for the downlink channel. In particular, we consider the problem of downlink user selection to maximize the downlink resources while satisfying the QoS requirements of all users. We do this by assigning suitable utility functions to user flows that are designed to maintain the specified QoS constraints. Since multiple users can be simultaneously scheduled in a time-bandwidth resource block, the scheduling problem becomes multi-dimensional and, in general, its computational complexity grows non-linearly with the number of users. We propose a simple but sub-optimal coordinate ascent algorithm for scheduling users. Prior work on this problem included simple greedy algorithms but with inferior performance or near-optimal algorithms that are computationally intensive. We will demonstrate that our proposed solution, although computationally simple, provides near-optimal performance.
Inferring link loss using striped unicast probes

In this paper we explore the use of end-to-end unicast traffic as measurement probes to infer link-level loss rates. We leverage on of earlier work that produced efficient estimates for link-level loss rates based on end-to-end multicast traffic measurements. We design experiments based on the notion of transmitting stripes of packets (with no delay between transmission of successive packets within a stripe) to two or more receivers. The purpose of these stripes is to ensure that the correlation in receiver observations matches as closely as possible what would have been observed if the stripe had been replaced by a notional multicast probe that followed the same paths to the receivers. Measurements provide good evidence that a packet pair to distinct receivers introduces considerable correlation which can be further increased by simply considering longer stripes. We then use simulation to explore how well these stripes translate into accurate link-level loss estimates. We observe good accuracy with packet pairs, with a typical error of about 1%, which significantly decreases as stripe length is increased to 4 packets.
Intensive insulin therapy with insulin lispro: a randomized trial of continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion versus multiple daily insulin injection.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate glycemic control, hypoglycemic events, and quality of life in patients treated with continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII) and multiple daily insulin injection (MDI), with insulin lispro as the principal insulin. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This clinical trial enrolled 27 patients with type 1 diabetes. They were randomly assigned to CSII (n = 13) or MDI (n = 14) treatment regimens. Glycemic control (HbA(1c) level) was the primary outcome and was measured monthly for 9 months. Secondary outcomes were patient reports of hypoglycemic events (recorded monthly for 9 months) and quality of life assessed at 9 months using the Diabetes Quality of Life (DQOL) questionnaire. RESULTS A significant decrease in HbA(1c) from baseline was shown for both groups. However, the overall treatment effect (CSII - MDI) for HbA(1c) was +0.08% (95% CI -0.23 to +0.39, P > 0.10). This was significantly less than the a priori limit of +/-0.5% (P = 0.004). The relative treatment effect ([CSII - MDI]/MDI) for the overall number of hypoglycemic events was +9% (95% CI -37 to +87, P > 0.10). There were no statistically significant differences between treatment groups for any of the DQOL subscales. CONCLUSIONS No statistically significant differences in glycemic control, reported hypoglycemic events, or quality of life were found in this study. Furthermore, a clinically significant difference of more than +/-0.5% HbA(1c) between the two regimens can be confidently ruled out. We conclude that the choice of intensive insulin therapy should be a matter of patient preference, consistent with lifestyle.
Design of an Optimal Heat Sink for Microelectronic Devices Using Entropy Generation Minimization

The present article describes the design of an optimum rectangular microchannel heat sink typically used in microelectronics heat transfer management. We use the entropy generation minimization criterion to model the heat transfer process, and the spiral algorithm to solve it. For the scenarios we considered, optimum heat sinks using environmentally friendly ammonia (azane) performed about 17% better than those using air. Moreover, we observed that the thermal resistance related to the working fluid represents about 52 ± 16% of the total equivalent thermal resistance, whilst the thermal resistance related to convection phenomena only represents about 12 ± 6%.
ClassSpy: Java Object Pattern Visualization Tool

Modern java programs consist of large number of classes as well as vast amount of objects instantiated during program execution. Software developers are always keen to know the number of objects created for each class. This information is helpful for a developer in understanding the packages/classes of a program and optimizing their code. However, understanding such a vast amount of information is not a trivial task. Visualization helps to depict this information on a single screen and to comprehend it efficiently. This paper presents a visualization approach that depicts information about all the objects instantiated during the program execution. The proposed technique is more space efficient and scalable to handle vast datasets, at the same time helpful to identify the key program components. This easy to use interface provides user an environment to glimpse the entire objects on a single screen. The proposed approach allows sorting objects at class, thread and method levels. Effectiveness and usability of the proposed approach is shown through case studies.