Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deep-sea bacteria enriched by oil and dispersant from the Deepwater Horizon spill.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill resulted in a massive influx of hydrocarbons into the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf). To better understand the fate of the oil, we enriched and isolated indigenous hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria from deep, uncontaminated waters from the Gulf with oil (Macondo MC252) and dispersant used during the spill (COREXIT 9500). During 20 days of incubation at 5°C, CO(2) evolution, hydrocarbon concentrations and the microbial community composition were determined. Approximately 60% to 25% of the dissolved oil with or without COREXIT, respectively, was degraded, in addition to some hydrocarbons in the COREXIT. FeCl(2) addition initially increased respiration rates, but not the total amount of hydrocarbons degraded. 16S rRNA gene sequencing revealed a succession in the microbial community over time, with an increase in abundance of Colwellia and Oceanospirillales during the incubations. Flocs formed during incubations with oil and/or COREXIT in the absence of FeCl(2) . Synchrotron radiation-based Fourier transform infrared (SR-FTIR) spectromicroscopy revealed that the flocs were comprised of oil, carbohydrates and biomass. Colwellia were the dominant bacteria in the flocs. Colwellia sp. strain RC25 was isolated from one of the enrichments and confirmed to rapidly degrade high amounts (approximately 75%) of the MC252 oil at 5°C. Together these data highlight several features that provide Colwellia with the capacity to degrade oil in cold, deep marine habitats, including aggregation together with oil droplets into flocs and hydrocarbon degradation ability.
Being Gifted in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, a policy for the education of its gifted students has existed in its current form since 2000. However, the gifted education policy is yet to be evaluated, despite growing calls internationally and locally for increased accountability of public policy, including policies relating to gifted education. Using VanTassel-Baska’s five-component model of a high-quality gifted education policy as their conceptual framework, the authors analyze and evaluate the gifted education policy in Hong Kong by first collecting source materials related to the gifted education policy and conducting interviews with three key policy makers. A total of 75 documents and the interview data were subjected to content analysis and the findings indicate that the gifted education policy in Hong Kong has an additional component, which the authors term aims and objectives. Although the aims and objectives differ across the eight groups of beneficiaries, they are not explicitly stated. In addition, the policy neither reflects current research in giftedness nor is it mandated, highlighting possible areas that limit its effectiveness. It is concluded that a thorough update of the policy is warranted if it is to meet its stated aims and objectives.
Locus of control and its relationship to occupational choice behaviour

On a teste l'hypothese selon laquelle dans le choix de leur metier des etudiants avec «lieu de controle interiorise» sont moins influences par des facteurs externes que des etudiants avec «lieu de controle externe» qui de leur cote sont moins influences par des facteurs internes
Changes in goal-related affects: Decrease burnout during a group psychotherapy intervention

The study examined the role played by changes in employees' goal-related affects in decreasing burnout during a group intervention. 62 white-collar employees, suffering from severe burnout, were randomized into 10-month group intervention programmes consisting of 16 intensive 1-day sessions every second week. The participants appraised their work and interpersonal goals according to their positive and negative affects weekly for 54 weeks. During the pre- and postintervention and follow-up (6 months later) measurements, the participants filled out a burnout measurement. The results, analysed by multilevel modelling, showed that a decrease in the negative affects and an increase in the positive affects of work and interpersonal goals during the later part of the intervention was related to a decrease in burnout symptoms. The decrease in goal-related negative affects was associated with a decrease in burnout in the postintervention measurement, whereas the increase in goal-related positive affects was related to a decrease in follow-up burnout.
Are we all Keynesians now? The US press and the American Recovery Act of 2009

It is widely believed that the media has an important role to play in promoting development and in shaping economic policy. This is done partly by the media’s framing of the issues for public debate and by educating consumers of news. Increasingly, economists have shown that the media has played a constructive role in promoting informed civil engagement on economic policy and even in promoting corporate governance. At the same time, the business press has been referred to as the weak link or ‘step child’ in an increasingly professional and knowledgeable news room. Among other critiques, business journalists are faulted for being ideologically captured, and so generally presenting a pro-business/market point of view. They are often accused of being not only biased, but too ill-informed to write in an analytical or critical way about economics. This article examines the US press coverage of the stimulus package over several months in 2009 to ascertain the validity of these hypotheses. We found that although there was robust discussion of the stimulus, it was mostly focused on the political process rather than the economic issues, there was little agenda setting and government and business sources – including many with a ‘vested interest’ – were overwhelmingly cited the most.
High quality atpg for delay defects

The paper presents a novel technique for generating effective vectors for delay defects. The test set achieves high path delay fault coverage to capture small- distributed delay defects and high transition fault coverage to capture gross delay defects. Furthermore, non-robust paths for ATPG are filtered (selected) carefully so that there is a minimum overlap with the already tested robust paths. A relationship between path delay fault model and transition fault model has been observed which helps us reduce the number of non-robust paths considered for test generation. To generate tests for robust and non-robust paths, a deterministic ATPG engine is developed. Clustering of paths has been done in order to improve the test set quality. Implications were used to identify the untestable paths. Finally an incremental propagation based ATPG is used for transition faults. Results for ISCAS'85 and full-scan ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that the filtered non- robust path set can be reduced to 40% smaller than the conventional path set without losing delay defect coverage. Clustering reduces vector size in average by about 40%.
An Information-Theoretic Approach to Finding Community Structure in Networks

Networks are used in a wide range of disciplines to characterise the fundamental features of complex systems. Examples include social, biological and computer systems. Here we consider the problem of detecting and characterising community structure and, in particular, the evaluation of clusterings: divisions of a network into groups of densely connected nodes with fewer connections between groups. We present the mutual information between the network structure and a given clustering as an intuitive evaluation of the clustering in question and discuss ways to incorporate this into a computationally efficient algorithm. We illustrate the appropriateness of this concept through extensive testing and objective comparisons with modularity, a wellestablished statistical evaluation of community structure.
Extraction of hydrographic networks from satellite images using a hierarchical model within a stochastic geometry framework

This article presents a two-step algorithm performing an unsupervised extraction of hydrographic networks from satellite images, within a stochastic geometry framework. First, the thick branches of the network are detected by a segmentation algorithm based on a Markov random field. Second, the line branches of the network are extracted using a recursive algorithm based on a hierarchical model of hydrographic network, in which the tributaries of a given river are modeled by an object process in the neighborhood of this river. Optimization of the object process is done via simulated annealing using a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. We show experimental results on a satellite radar image.
L'école telle qu'ils la voient: Validation d'une mesure des perceptions du contexte scolaire par les élèves du secondaire.

The purpose of this study was to develop a French-language questionnaire to measure students' perceptions of the teaching practices to which they are exposed (goal structures and teacher-student relations). The primary objective was to assess the psychometric qualities of the questionnaire with 1,265 students distributed among various high school years. Internal consistency and test-retest stability of the scales proved to be entirely satisfactory. Results of confirmatory factorial analysis demonstrate the scales' construction validity. Results of multiple regressions also indicate that retained perceptions are consistent predictors of students' motivational directions and emotional experience at school, regardless of their socio-demographic or academic characteristics. The study's second goal was to contribute to the theoretical debate over what students' perceptions reflect. Such perceptions have shown to have little dependency on their socio-demographic or academic characteristics. Students' responses also displayed consistency in relation to their class level. Further, the effects of students' perceptions when aggregated in exogenous variables parallel such effects on an individual basis. Finally, students' perceptions are in line with those of their teachers. These results support the notion that students' perceptions are based largely on the characteristics of their school environment.
Quantum gravity vacuum and invariants of embedded spin networks

We show that the path integral for the three-dimensional SU (2) BF theory with a Wilson loop or a spin network function inserted can be understood as the Rovelli-Smolin loop transform of a wavefunction in the Ashtekar connection representation, where the wavefunction satisfies the constraints of quantum general relativity with zero cosmological constant. This wavefunction is given as a product of the delta functions of the SU(2) field strength and therefore it can be naturally associated with a flat connection spacetime. The loop transform can be defined rigorously via the quantum SU(2) group, as a spin foam state sum model, so that one obtains invariants of spin networks embedded in a three-manifold. These invariants define a flat connection vacuum state in the q-deformed spin network basis. We then propose a modification of this construction in order to obtain a vacuum state corresponding to the flat metric spacetime.
Three Accelerated Developmental Education Programs

To support the long-term success of underprepared students, many community colleges are experimenting with accelerated developmental education models, which allow students to complete remediation and enroll in college-level math and English within a shorter time frame. This study examines three developmental acceleration programs, including two in English and one in math. Overall, students on accelerated pathways were more likely than a set of matched peers to successfully complete the relevant college-level course within 3 years. However, to help maintain strong student performance within subsequent college-level courses, accelerated pathways may need to incorporate rigorous content, systematic faculty development, and targeted student supports.
Mining questions about software energy consumption

A growing number of software solutions have been proposed to address application-level energy consumption problems in the last few years. However, little is known about how much software developers are concerned about energy consumption, what aspects of energy consumption they consider important, and what solutions they have in mind for improving energy efficiency. In this paper we present the first empirical study on understanding the views of application programmers on software energy consumption problems. Using StackOverflow as our primary data source, we analyze a carefully curated sample of more than 300 questions and 550 answers from more than 800 users. With this data, we observed a number of interesting findings. Our study shows that practitioners are aware of the energy consumption problems: the questions they ask are not only diverse -- we found 5 main themes of questions -- but also often more interesting and challenging when compared to the control question set. Even though energy consumption-related questions are popular when considering a number of different popularity measures, the same cannot be said about the quality of their answers. In addition, we observed that some of these answers are often flawed or vague. We contrast the advice provided by these answers with the state-of-the-art research on energy consumption. Our summary of software energy consumption problems may help researchers focus on what matters the most to software developers and end users.
Controlled Drinking as an Appropriate Treatment Goal

Abstract Treatment systems within the U.S. are almost exclusively focused on abstinence as the goal of treatment for alcohol use disorders. This article reviews literature on the natural course of recovery from alcohol disorders and examines the role of testing control over drinking in the course of successful resolution of alcohol problems. Theory, quantitative and qualitative evidence support controlled drinking trials under certain conditions as a necessary and normal stage in the natural course of recovery. Empirical evidence suggests that some who are younger; who have less severe history of alcohol use; who have never been treated or diagnosed for alcohol disorders; who possess no family history of addiction; and who believe in self-efficacy over alcohol use could benefit from a single and well conceived controlled drinking trial. This article concludes with a summary of a controlled drinking treatment protocol that can coexist in abstinence-based treatment programs.
Life histories as counter-narratives against dominant and negative stereotypes about people with intellectual disabilities

The history of intellectual disabilities is largely a story of discrimination and social exclusion portraying people with intellectual disability as abnormal and inferior. This article describes a particular methodological approach to inclusive life history research with a small group of women with intellectual disabilities in Iceland. The article documents how, through a four-year collaborative research process, the life histories became counter-narratives to dominant historical beliefs and stereotypes. In addition to the personal empowerment of the women and the construction of a collective memory, this project has also resulted in public sharing of their stories through speaking up and giving presentations, and thus potentially also changing the historical memory.
Waking up to weight: The meditational role of sympathovagal balance in the relation between inadequate sleep and childhood obesity

108 Introduction 109 Method 115 Study Population 115 Measures 116 Anthropometrics 116 Sleep 117 Puberty 118 Heart Rate Variability 118 ECG Data 118 ECG Signal Processing 118 Procedure 119 Statistical Analysis 120 Results 121 Hypothesis Testing: Sleep and Obesity 122 Hypothesis Testing: Sleep and Sympathovagal Imbalance 122
Organ-Based Computed Tomographic (CT) Radiation Dose Reduction to the Lenses: Impact on Image Quality for CT of the Head

Purpose Recently, a new specific organ dose adaption and reduction protocol, or SODAR tool (X-CARE, Siemens Healthcare), which reduces dose to the anterior aspect of the body of patients, was installed on our computed tomographic scanner. The purpose of this pilot project was to evaluate image quality and dose distribution in the acquired data with the new protocol. Materials and Methods Sixteen consecutive patients were scanned with the new SODAR head protocol. The findings were compared with 16 matched patients who were imaged with the standard computed tomographic head trauma protocol. Image quality was assessed qualitatively using a scale of 1 to 4 (1, excellent; 2, good; 3, fair; 4, nondiagnostic). Additionally, 1-cm2 regions of interest were placed in the white matter of the cerebral hemispheres, the cerebellar hemispheres, and the brain stem at the level of the pons for a quantitative analysis. The standard deviation of each measurement was recorded as an indicator for image noise. Dose measurement trials were performed using optically stimulated luminescence dosimeters on head phantoms and then on patients. Results Subjective image quality ranged between 1 and 3; no scan areas were considered nondiagnostic. Overall image quality of the posterior fossa averaged at 1.656 was slightly reduced compared to the cerebral hemispheres (mean, 1.141). The mean standard protocol brain stem image quality was 1.604, with only minimal deterioration to 1.708 in the SODAR group. No significant difference in image noise could be found between the SODAR group with a mean noise of 4.515 and standard images with a mean of 4.721 (P > 0.05). The dose to the anterior aspect of the patient was lowered to 3.2 mGy compared to 4.5 mGy on the lateral aspect of the scan (P > 0.05). To compensate for the photon loss in the posterior aspect, the dose has to be slightly increased to a mean of 6 mGy, but overall, a significant dose reduction with stable image quality could be achieved by reducing the dose length product from 1489 to 1347 mGy·cm using SODAR (P < 0.0001). Conclusion Using the SODAR protocol resulted not only in an impressive 46% to 59% frontal dose reduction but also in the overall dose reduction. This dose reduction was obtained without sacrificing image quality, providing diagnostic images of the brain while protecting radiosensitive structures like the eye lenses in trauma brain imaging. Future applications will be reducing dose to other radiosensitive structures such as the thyroid gland and breast tissue from potentially harmful low-energy radiation without compromising image quality.
Validação do questionário crenças acerca da medicação em pacientes diabéticos tipo 2

The present paper focused on the validation of the Questionnaire on Beliefs about Medication, which assesses both General Beliefs and Specific Beliefs. The psychometric properties of the instrument were analyzed on a sample of 387 type 2 diabetic patients. The validity study for General Beliefs found a unifactorial solution, with an alpha of . 76, and for Specific Beliefs, a two-factor solution - Necessities and Concern -, with an alpha of . 77 and . 69, respectively. In terms of construct validity, a relationship between General Beliefs, subscale Necessities from Specific Beliefs, and adherence to medication, as evaluated by Medical Adherence Rating Scale, was found. The instrument presents good psychometric qualities to be used in type 2 diabetic patients.
Spectral Clustering Using Multilinear SVD: Analysis, Approximations and Applications

Spectral clustering, a graph partitioning technique, has gained immense popularity in machine learning in the context of unsupervised learning. This is due to convincing empirical studies, elegant approaches involved and the theoretical guarantees provided in the literature. To tackle some challenging problems that arose in computer vision etc., recently, a need to develop spectral methods that incorporate multi-way similarity measures surfaced. This, in turn, leads to a hypergraph partitioning problem. In this paper, we formulate a criterion for partitioning uniform hypergraphs, and show that a relaxation of this problem is related to the multilinear singular value decomposition (SVD) of symmetric tensors. Using this, we provide a spectral technique for clustering based on higher order affinities, and derive a theoretical bound on the error incurred by this method. We also study the complexity of the algorithm and use Nystr ̈om’s method and column sampling techniques to develop approximate methods with significantly reduced complexity. Experiments on geometric grouping and motion segmentation demonstrate the practical significance of the proposed methods.
MIMO two-way relaying with transmit CSI at the relay

Conventional half-duplex relaying schemes suffer from the loss in spectral efficiency due to the two channel uses required for the transmission from the source to the destination. Two-way relaying is an efficient means to reduce this loss in spectral efficiency by bidirectional simultaneous transmission of data between the two nodes. In this paper we study the impact of transmit channel state information at the relay in a MIMO two-way decode-and-forward relaying scheme. We investigate and compare two different re-encoding schemes at the relay. The first is based on superposition coding, whereas the second one is based on the bitwise XOR operation.
Planning and Problem solving Using the Five disc Tower of London Task

This paper investigates the planning and problem-solving abilities of normal adult subjects using a complex version of Shallice's (1982, 1988) Tower of London (TOL) task. Subjects were required to plan a fluent solution to a range of 5-disc TOL puzzles and then execute their formulated plans as fast as possible. The number of errors and the times taken to prepare the most efficient solutions increased monotonically with the number of chunks of subgoal moves. A subgoal move is a move that is essential for the solution of the puzzle, but which does not place a disc into its goal position. A subgoal chunk is a consecutive series of subgoal moves that all transfer discs to and from the same pegs. Furthermore, preparation time was found to be sensitive to a manipulation that increased the number of competing alternative choices, at critical steps in move selection. When subjects planned their action sequences “on-line”, analyses of individual moves and individual move latencies suggested that planning TOL solutions was limited by the difficulty in evaluating and selecting one action (or one subgoal chunk) from the set of competing potential actions at each step in the course of problem solving.