Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards an Interactive Assessment Framework for Engineering Design Learning

In this paper we explore the use of text processing technology for on-line assessment in an engineering design project class. We present results from a 5-week classroom study in a capstone engineering design course in which we explore the potential benefits of such technology for student learning in this context. Furthermore, we present results from ongoing work assessing student productivity based on features extracted from their conversational behavior in the course discussion board. While we found that typical shallow productivity measures such as number of posts, length of posts, or number of files committed have no correlation with an instructor assigned grade, we can achieve a substantial improvement using simple linguistic patterns extracted from on-line conversational behavior. © 2007 ASME
An Empirical Study of the Career Paths of Senior Educational Administrators in Manitoba, Canada: Implications for career development

This paper conceptualizes queue theory (Tallerico & Blount, 2004) to discuss a mixed-methods study that determined the career patterns of senior educational administrators in public school divisions in Manitoba, Canada, compared by position, context and sex. Findings indicate that queue theory has merit for describing the career paths of senior administrators in Manitoba, but it must be qualified. Context creates labour queue stratifications based on educational level (access), the extent to which senior administrators are channeled into traditional career paths, and number of positions served overall. Context, sex and position interact to form queues based on leaves from service, and create discrepancies on the experiences of career supports and work challenges.
Creativity and Cultural Production: A Study of Contemporary Western Popular Music Songwriting

The contemporary Western popular music industry tends to work within a paradigm of creativity that runs counter to current academic research. This research into creativity can be categorized as falling along a continuum from individual to contextual responsibility and ranges across a number of disciplines including psychology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and communication and media studies. However, it is the contention of this article that it is the systems model of creativity in particular, partially coupled with the similarly complex approach to cultural production presented by Pierre Bourdieu, which provides the most useful working platform to investigate the idea of creativity. Through the use of an ethnographic research methodology, this article investigates the systems model of creativity as it applies to contemporary Western popular music songwriting. It concludes that a contemporary Western songwriter's ability to make choices, and therefore be creative, is both circumscribed and facilitated by his or her knowledge of the domain of contemporary Western popular music and his or her access to, and knowledge of, the field that holds this knowledge that allows the conclusion, at the more philosophical level, that these ideas can also be presented as an account of the interdependence of agency and structure within the workings of the creative system.
ZAP-70 expression as a surrogate for immunoglobulin-variable-region mutations in chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

BACKGROUND The mutational status of immunoglobulin heavy-chain variable-region (IgVH) genes in the leukemic cells of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is an important prognostic factor in the disease. We investigated whether the expression of ZAP-70 by CLL cells correlated with the IgVH mutational status, disease progression, and survival. METHODS The expression of ZAP-70 was analyzed in T-cell and B-cell lines and in peripheral-blood samples from 56 patients with CLL with the use of flow cytometry, Western blotting, and immunohistochemistry. The results were correlated with the IgVH mutational status and clinical outcome. RESULTS ZAP-70 was detected by flow-cytometric analysis in cells of T-cell lineage and in leukemic cells from 32 of 56 patients with CLL. In all patients in whom at least 20 percent of the leukemic cells were positive for ZAP-70, IgVH was unmutated, whereas IgVH mutations were found in 21 of 24 patients in whom less than 20 percent of the leukemic cells were positive for ZAP-70 (P<0.001). Concordant results were obtained when ZAP-70 expression was assessed by immunohistochemistry or Western blotting. The level of ZAP-70 expression did not change over time (median, 37 months) in sequential samples from 30 patients with CLL. Patients with Binet stage A CLL who had at least 20 percent ZAP-70-positive leukemic cells had more rapid progression and poorer survival than those with less than 20 percent ZAP-70-positive cells. CONCLUSIONS Among patients with CLL, expression of ZAP-70, as detected by flow-cytometric analysis, correlated with IgVH mutational status, disease progression, and survival.
Two-dimensional electrophoresis image interpretation

A method for interpreting two-dimensional electrophoresis gels is presented. Genetic background and electrophoretic processes are summarized, and present methods for analyzing gel images and exploiting series of gels are described and their drawbacks outlined. Artificial intelligence techniques are introduced to build and image interpretation system which can compensate for certain failures of present methods and augment their efficiency. By reproducing methods of biological experts, this system automatically identifies proteins-whether isolated or inside constellations-on an electrophoretic gel. This system is based on a modular architecture, featuring image processing procedures, which allows extraction of parameters from the image and a top-down and bottom-up reasoning process. The reasoning process first matches extracted parameters to possible geometric models of proteins; it then returns to the image to determine possible missing elements on the gel. A prototype of this system was implemented and tested on plasma gels to identify apolipoproteins. <<ETX>>
Expectancy theory components and non‐expectancy moderators as predictors of physicians' preference for retirement

In the second of a series of studies designed to test the validity of a role-choice model based on expectancy theory as a framework for the prediction of the preference to remain employed or to retire (the criterion), 317 older physicians employed in public clinics were interviewed. Analysis of several expectancy component configurations showed that the criterion depended, first and foremost, upon the differences between perceived instrumentalities of continued employment and of retirement for the attainment of outcomes. However, the prediction of the criterion by instrumentality differentials was strongest for physicians who were dissatisfied with their present jobs and indicated high job stress, and for those who had a lower evaluation of their own professional competence. The implications of the results and suggestions for their application in pre-retirement guidance and counselling are discussed.
Placebo‐free designs for evaluating new mental health treatments: the use of adaptive treatment strategies

The dominant pre‐marketing clinical trial in psychopharmacology is a non‐equivalence design that randomizes patients to one of three treatments: an accepted standard, the innovation (new drug), or placebo, with the main efficacy comparison being innovation vs placebo. The reasons behind the choice of placebo control in new drug development include anticipated small effect size for active‐controlled comparisons and the sufficiency of demonstrated treatment effect (new drug vs placebo) for regulatory approval. These reasons have led to great reliance on placebo control in drug evaluation studies, despite the ethical controversy over the use of placebo when there are known effective standard treatments. While the use of placebo controls has been widely debated, a less considered aspect of the usual placebo‐controlled non‐equivalence design is the disparity between the decisions that it supports and those that pervade clinical practice. We propose an alternative approach that randomizes one group of patients to an adaptive treatment strategy that exemplifies the adaptive nature of clinical decision‐making in the treatment of ongoing mental health disorders. The basic idea is to compare the adaptive strategy, which uses a patient's outcomes to date to determine when to switch from an initial treatment (e.g. an accepted standard) to an alternative (e.g. the new) treatment, to fixed trials of either treatment option. We state the conditions under which the adaptive treatment RCT is attractive to implement and the requirements for doing so. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
APPROXIMATE DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES FOR SKILL-BASED ROUTING IN CALL CENTERS*

We consider the problem of dynamic multi-skill routing in call centers. Calls from different customer classes are offered to the call center according to a Poisson process. The agents are grouped into pools according to their heterogeneous skill sets that determine the calls that they can handle. Each pool of agents serves calls with independent exponentially distributed service times. Arriving calls that cannot be served directly are placed in a buffer that is dedicated to the customer class. We obtain nearly optimal dynamic routing policies that are scalable with the problem instance and can be computed online. The algorithm is based on approximate dynamic programming techniques. In particular, we perform one-step policy improvement using a polynomial approximation to relative value functions. We compare the performance of this method with decomposition techniques. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms leading routing policies and has close to optimal performance.
Are Mothers Really “Gatekeepers” of Children?

Guided by symbolic interactionism, this qualitative study based on interviews with 83 rural mothers investigated mothers' perceptions of nonresident fathers' involvement in low-income families. Contrary to some fathers' claims that mothers “gatekeep” their access to children, the majority of mothers in our study wanted increased father involvement. The mothers' desire for active father–child interaction was not dampened by their frustration at the lack or irregularity of child support payment, which mothers tended to accept, given the lack of economic opportunities in rural communities. Despite their wishes to promote father–child contact, mothers also experienced frustration and distrust toward former partners when they perceived that the fathers were not fulfilling their expected parental roles. This study demonstrates that mothers' actions, which may be interpreted as gatekeeping by the fathers, are often not intended to discourage father involvement but rather are meant to negotiate more acceptable father behavior.
Student Guidance and Attention to Diversity in the Processes of Quality Assurance in Higher Education

The main objective of this article is to analyse the importance given to student guidance and diversity in the standards and criteria used in the quality accreditation and evaluation processes in Europe and the US. Agencies selected in this study are the members of ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education), EQAR (European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education) and regional and programme accrediting organisations in the US that are recognised by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). The data were analysed by means of qualitative and content analysis of the principles, standards and criteria published in the guidelines of the respective agencies. The results of this study reveal that guidance and attention to diversity are included in the quality evaluation guidelines for university study programmes and for higher education institutions in different ways. The main conclusion is that most guidelines include general criteria about guidance and diversity. In order to assist HEIs in the way to plan this support, guidelines should include specific criteria for the provision of academic, career and personal guidance within general student support services. Additionally, criteria should specify the actions to be taken and the resources to respond to diversity.
Painting With and Without Numbers: the use of qualitative and quantitative methods to study social learning

The Enterprise Social Learning Architecture (ESLA) team of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), conducted a four-year research study investigating social learning within the Australian Defence Organisation (ADO). The immediate aim of this research was to understand the issues inherent in building learning, adaptive and sustainable systems. The long-term objective was to develop architectures that would support the development of information systems to guide and enhance organisational learning and facilitate knowledge management. In this paper we will discuss the methodologies used by the ESLA team to gain understanding into effective social learning and the organisational and cultural factors that support such learning. Also, the paper will discuss the lessons learned from methodological approaches to this study as well as support tools used to analyse large volumes of qualitative data. There has been an increasing emphasis in the past decade on investigating the social and organisational factors that may underpin successful information system development and usage (Butterfield and Pendegraft, 1996; Davenport and Prusak, 1992; DeLone and McLean, 1992). Investigation of these issues necessitates a sound understanding of organisational culture, human social interactions, communication and relationships, and reflects an increasing awareness of the importance of the social aspects of socio-technical systems that people work and operate in. This paper describes the process by which the qualitative methods in this study of knowledge processes were expanded to include quantitative methods. It focuses on how this combination of data collection methods evolved, and the ways in which it was capitalised on to provide a much more enriched set of findings than would have been the case if qualitative or quantitative methods had been used alone. The paper also focuses on pitfalls that arose in the use of the various methods, including those associated with the use of software for qualitative data, and the means by which a successful methodological blend can be achieved with research relating to knowledge and its management.
Trevi: watering down storage hotspots with cool fountain codes

Datacenter networking has brought high-performance storage systems' research to the foreground once again. Many modern storage systems are built with commodity hardware and TCP/IP networking to save costs. In this paper, we highlight a group of problems that are present in such storage systems and which are all related to the use of TCP. As an alternative, we explore Trevi: a fountain coding-based approach for distributing I/O requests that overcomes these problems while still efficiently scheduling resources across both networking and storage layers. We also discuss how receiver-driven flow and congestion control, in combination with fountain coding, can guide the design of Trevi and provide a viable alternative to TCP for datacenter storage.
An effective clustering algorithm to index high dimensional metric spaces

A metric space consists of a collection of objects and a distance function defined among them, which satisfies the triangular inequality. The goal is to preprocess the set so that, given a set of objects and a query, one can retrieve those objects close enough to the query. The number of distances computed to achieve this goal is the complexity measure. The problem is very difficult in the so-called high dimensional metric spaces, where the histogram of distances has a large mean and a small variance. A recent survey on methods to index metric spaces has shown that the so-called clustering algorithms are better suited than their competitors, pivot based algorithms, to cope with high dimensional metric spaces. The authors present a new clustering method that achieves much better performance than all the existing data structures. We present analytical and experimental results that support our claims and that give the users the tuning parameters to make optimal use of this data structure.
Functional studies of the domains of talin

The protein talin has two domains of approximately 200 and 47 kD, which can be cleaved apart by a variety of proteases. To examine the function of these two structural domains of talin, we have digested purified talin with a calcium-dependent protease and separated the resulting fragments chromatographically. Both fragments were radioiodinated and used to probe Western blots of whole fibroblasts and chicken gizzard extracts. The large talin fragment bound to vinculin and metavinculin. The small fragment did not demonstrate any binding in this assay. The fragments were labeled fluorescently and microinjected into fibroblasts in tissue culture. The large talin fragment incorporated quickly into focal adhesions where it remained stable for at least 14 h. The small fragment associated with focal adhesions of fibroblasts but was also distributed diffusely in the cytoplasm and the nucleus. These experiments suggest that talin has at least two sites that contribute to its localization in focal adhesions. Intact talin microinjected into Madin-Darby bovine kidney epithelial cells localized to the focal adhesions but was excluded from the zonulae adherentes, despite the localization of vinculin to both of these sites. In contrast, the large talin fragment, when microinjected into these epithelial cells, incorporated into both focal adhesions and zonulae adherentes. The difference in localization between the large talin fragment and intact talin seems to be due to the removal of the small domain. This difference in localization suggests that talin binding sites in zonulae adherentes have limited accessibility.
Low-Power, Stable and Secure On-Chip Identifiers Design

Trustworthy authentication of an object is of extreme importance for secure protocols. Traditional methods of storing the identity of an object using non-volatile memory is insecure. Novel chip-identifiers called Silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) extract the random process characteristics of an Integrated Circuit to establish the identity. Though such types of IC identifiers are difficult to clone and provide a secure, yet an area and power efficient authentication mechanism, they suffer from instability due to variations in environmental conditions and noise. The decreased stability imposes a penalty on the area of the PUF circuit and the corresponding error correcting hardware, when trying to generate error-free bits using a PUF. In this thesis, we propose techniques to improve the popular delay-based PUF architectures holistically, with a focus on its stability. In the first part, we investigate the effectiveness of circuit-level optimizations of the delay based PUF architectures. We show that PUFs which operate in the subthreshold region, where the transistor supply voltage is maintained below the threshold voltage of CMOS, are inherently more stable than PUFs operating at nominal voltage because of the increased difference in characteristics of transistors at this region. Also, we show that subthreshold PUF enjoys higher energy and area efficiency. In the second part of the thesis, we propose a feedback-based supply voltage control mechanism and a corresponding architecture to improve the stability of delay-based PUFs against variations in temperature. Acknowledgments Firstly, I would like to thank Dr. Leyla Nazhandali for her continued support and for providing me with interesting research topics. Priya and Sinan Huang for their assistance through the course of my masters. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Dr. Vivekraja and Mrs. Santhi Vivekraja, and my family for their continued encouragement and support.
Etiological paradigms of depression: The relationship between perceived causes, empowerment, treatment preferences, and stigma

Background: There is a growing trend to view depression as a biological illness rather than a psychosocial condition, even though there is no consensus as to what causes depression. Furthermore, there are mixed data on the impact of advocating the biological model. Aims: This study examined public perceptions concerning the etiology of depression as well as the relationship between such perceptions and treatment preferences, empowerment, and stigma. Method: Survey techniques were used to assess how 66 college students view the etiology of depression. Etiology beliefs, as well as demographic data, were regressed upon measures of treatment preference, empowerment, and stigma. Results: Factor analysis produced three distinct models of etiology: biological, psychological, and environmental. Regression analyses showed that endorsement of the biological model was associated with increased empowerment, preference for psychotherapy, and decreased stigma. Endorsing the psychological model was associated with an increased belief that people can help themselves and increased stigma. Endorsing the environmental model was associated with a mixture of positive and negative beliefs concerning depression. Conclusions: Endorsement of each etiological model is associated with both positive and negative consequences. The current public emphasis on viewing depression as biologically based should thus be viewed with some caution. Declaration of interest: None.
Child Care Choice in Urban Thailand

This article uses qualitative and quantitative evidence to examine child care decision making in Bangkok, Thailand. The preference model developed from qualitative data predicts a strong preference for care by a relative, even if the child has to live separately from his/her mother, and distrust of nonrelative and formal care. Overall about three quarters of children in the sample were cared for by their mother (some of whom were combining work with child care) or another relative when they were age 2. Although the degree to which mothers were working in a formal setting was the strongest predictor of being in nonmaternal care, children of higher socioeconomic status were also found more likely to be in nonmaternal care and less likely to be in a relative's care. The results are discussed in light of changing roles for women in a society undergoing rapid socioeconomic change.
How Germans prepare for the English past tense: Silent production of inflected words during EEG

Processes involved in late bilinguals’ production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants’ silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production.