Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Good practices for quantitative bias analysis.

Quantitative bias analysis serves several objectives in epidemiological research. First, it provides a quantitative estimate of the direction, magnitude and uncertainty arising from systematic errors. Second, the acts of identifying sources of systematic error, writing down models to quantify them, assigning values to the bias parameters and interpreting the results combat the human tendency towards overconfidence in research results, syntheses and critiques and the inferences that rest upon them. Finally, by suggesting aspects that dominate uncertainty in a particular research result or topic area, bias analysis can guide efficient allocation of sparse research resources. The fundamental methods of bias analyses have been known for decades, and there have been calls for more widespread use for nearly as long. There was a time when some believed that bias analyses were rarely undertaken because the methods were not widely known and because automated computing tools were not readily available to implement the methods. These shortcomings have been largely resolved. We must, therefore, contemplate other barriers to implementation. One possibility is that practitioners avoid the analyses because they lack confidence in the practice of bias analysis. The purpose of this paper is therefore to describe what we view as good practices for applying quantitative bias analysis to epidemiological data, directed towards those familiar with the methods. We focus on answering questions often posed to those of us who advocate incorporation of bias analysis methods into teaching and research. These include the following. When is bias analysis practical and productive? How does one select the biases that ought to be addressed? How does one select a method to model biases? How does one assign values to the parameters of a bias model? How does one present and interpret a bias analysis? We hope that our guide to good practices for conducting and presenting bias analyses will encourage more widespread use of bias analysis to estimate the potential magnitude and direction of biases, as well as the uncertainty in estimates potentially influenced by the biases.
Strictly nonautonomous cooperative system with a first integral

The authors consider the nonautono mows cooperative system \[{{dx_i } / {dt}} = F_i (t,x_1 , \cdots ,x_n )\quad (i = 1, \cdots ,n)\] in the nonnegative orthant in the real n-dimensional Euclidean space, which has the first integral with positive gradient. The authors guess that every solution to such a system either converges to an asymptotic state (for the almost periodic (or periodic) case, this state is an almost periodic (or periodic) solution) or eventually leaves any compact set. They partly prove this conjecture.
E-learning Recommendation System

E-learning recommendation system helps learners to make choices without sufficient personal experience of the alternatives, and it is considerably requisite in this information explosion age. In our study, the user-based collaborative filtering method is chosen as the primary recommendation algorithm, combined with online education. We analyze the requirement of a web-based e-learning recommendation system, and divide the system workflow into five sections: data collection, data ETL, model generation, strategy configuration, and service supply. Moreover, an architecture is proposed, based on which further development can be accomplished. In this architecture, there are seven modules, and four of them are core modules: recommendation models database, recommendation system database, recommendation management, data/model management.
How to Make a Decision: The Analytic Hierarchy Process

People make three general types of judgments to express importance, preference, or likelihood and use them to choose the best among alternatives in the presence of environmental, social, political, and other influences. They base these judgments on knowledge in memory or from analyzing benefits, costs, and risks. From past knowledge, we sometimes can develop standards of excellence and poorness and use them to rate the alternatives one at a time. This is useful in such repetitive situations as student admissions and salary raises that must conform with established norms. Without norms one compares alternatives instead of rating them. Comparisons must fall in an admissible range of consistency. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) includes both the rating and comparison methods. Rationality requires developing a reliable hierarchic structure or feedback network that includes criteria of various types of influence, stakeholders, and decision alternatives to determine the best choice.
Different Effects of Guanine Nucleotides (GDP and GTP) on Protein-Mediated Mitochondrial Proton Leak

In this study, we compared the influence of GDP and GTP on isolated mitochondria respiring under conditions favoring oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) and under conditions excluding this process, i.e., in the presence of carboxyatractyloside, an adenine nucleotide translocase inhibitor, and/or oligomycin, an FOF1-ATP synthase inhibitor. Using mitochondria isolated from rat kidney and human endothelial cells, we found that the action of GDP and GTP can differ diametrically depending on the conditions. Namely, under conditions favoring OXPHOS, both in the absence and presence of linoleic acid, an activator of uncoupling proteins (UCPs), the addition of 1 mM GDP resulted in the state 4 (non-phosphorylating respiration)-state 3 (phosphorylating respiration) transition, which is characteristic of ADP oxidative phosphorylation. In contrast, the addition of 1 mM GTP resulted in a decrease in the respiratory rate and an increase in the membrane potential, which is characteristic of UCP inhibition. The stimulatory effect of GDP, but not GTP, was also observed in inside-out submitochondrial particles prepared from rat kidney mitochondria. However, the effects of GDP and GTP were more similar in the presence of OXPHOS inhibitors. The importance of these observations in connection with the action of UCPs, adenine nucleotide translocase (or other carboxyatractyloside-sensitive carriers), carboxyatractyloside- and purine nucleotide-insensitive carriers, as well as nucleoside-diphosphate kinase (NDPK) are considered. Because the measurements favoring oxidative phosphorylation better reflect in vivo conditions, our study strongly supports the idea that GDP cannot be considered a significant physiological inhibitor of UCP. Moreover, it appears that, under native conditions, GTP functions as a more efficient UCP inhibitor than GDP and ATP.
The 2D:4D ratio and its relationship with other androgenisation parameters in parents of individuals with autism spectrum disorders

The 2D:4D ratio is the quotient between the index and ring fin- ger lengths and is a non-direct indicator of androgenisation. If prenatal tes- tosterone levels in the amniotic fluid are high then the probability increases of developing lower ratio values. It has been suggested that people with au- tism spectrum disorders (ASD) and their parents may have highly andro- genised brains, and for this reason the 2D:4D ratio is used as a marker of such idiosyncrasies. This study aims to analyse if parents of people with ASD differ from the general population in several parameters of andro- genisation related to the 2D:4D ratio. The sample was composed of 43 parents of offspring with ASD and 42 controls who had the 2D:4D ratio measured, answered several trait questionnaires, and had their testosterone and cortisol levels measured. Although there were no differences between groups in the 2D:4D ratio, the left hand of the ASD parents showed greater predictive ability to explain empathy and autism quotients, coopera- tive behaviour, and cortisol levels. In addition, the severity of the symp- toms of their offspring was predicted only with male parents. The results indicate that the 2D:4D ratio could be used together with other parameters as an indicator of the likelihood of developing autistic traits in offspring.
Participatory learning in residential weekends: benefit or barrier to learning for the international student?

The context for this research is a residential learning weekend which is embedded into all postgraduate programmes at Newcastle Business School via a management development module entitled ‘Developing Self’. The objective of this study was to identify and explore how participatory learning in multicultural groups enables international students to increase their self-awareness and to develop team-building and leadership skills. Using an interpretivist methodology comprising semi-structured interviews with 14 self-selected international students, the data are analysed using the funnel structure of progressive focusing and is presented alongside a number of illuminating quotes. Our findings show that students perceive participatory learning to provide significant benefits to their studies as well as their future career as managers.
Occurrence of enterotoxigenic staphylococci in household and laboratory dogs.

Enterotoxigenic staphylococci (ES) were isolated from the exterior body sites including the suppurative lesions of 15 (13.0 %) out of 115 household dogs. Of the total 26 toxigenic isolates from the household dogs, 21 belonged to biotype E (canine origin, according to Baird-Parker's classification modified by HAJEK & MARSALEK) and produced enterotoxins C (18 isolates) and A (3 isolates), 4 belonged to biotype A (human origin according to the classifi cation) and produced enterotoxins A (3 isolates) and D (1 isolate), and the remaining one belonged to biotype B (classified as swine or poultry origin) and produced enterotoxin C. ES were also isolated from the exterior body sites of 2 out of 9 laboratory dogs which were examined monthly over one year. All of the 6 toxigenic isolates from the laboratory dogs belonged to biotype E and produced enterotoxins A+C (3 isolates) and C (3 isolates).
Analysis of Erythrocyte Glycophorin-A Variants by Flow Cytometry in Lung Disease Patients Detects the Effect of Tobacco Smoke

The glycophoryn A (GPA) assay evaluates somatic in vivo mutations. It is considered a cumulative biodosimeter for genotoxic exposures and is under evaluation in cancer risk assessment. GPA, a polymorphic membrane protein of the erythrocytes, determines the MN blood groups. The N0 and NN variant frequencies (VF) may be detected in MN subjects (about 50% of the population) by flow cytometry using two differently labelled antibodies. We explored if GPA N0 and NN VF might be relevant to the assessment of individual lung cancer risk and susceptibility, in a small population with a high prevalence of heavy tobacco smokers: 8 lung cancer patients and 16 subjects with non‐malignant lung diseases associated with increased risk of lung cancer. There was a wide interindividual variability and complete overlap between non‐neoplastic and neoplastic patients. A significant positive correlation was seen with smoking duration in N0 VF (p=0.04, age‐adjusted). Current smokers (n=12) displayed higher N0 values than never (n=1) or ex‐smokers (n=11), 36.3±18.2 and 21.0±13.2, respectively (p < 0:01). No association was shown with occupational exposure. The present exploratory study suggests that assessment of individual lung cancer risk and susceptibility by the GPA assay does not seem to be feasible. The assay appears to provide a biomarker of longterm exposure to tobacco smoke.
'Education for the Environment: A critique'—an analysis

This article analyses Education for the environment: a critique' (Jickling & Spork, 1998). It illustrates ways in which the critique is a partial analysis of education for the environment. Thus, the article addresses Jickling and Spork's concern that education for the environment is a universalising discourse that seeks to marginalise other approaches. It does this by showing how it may be Jickling and Spork's lack of reflexivity over their own ideology of education which leads them to construct such a partial interpretation of education for the environment. This article also argues that the critical pedagogy of education for the environment provides a professionally-ethical way of teaching which contrasts with the allegations of indoctrination in the critique. The article nevertheless reflects an appreciation of the opportunity to engage constructively with contesting ideas in environmental education and concludes with suggestions for further avenues of inquiry for those wishing to engage in discourse analysis in order to deconstruct and, hopefully, reconstruct, education for and also in/through, with and about the environment.
The Restricted Isometry Property for Banded Random Matrices

In this paper, we investigate the problem of determining the conditions under which the restricted isometry property (RIP) is satisfied for a particular type of matrix referred to in here as a banded random matrix (BRM). Such matrices have been recognized as suitable models for a number of compressive-sensing based sampling architectures, including the interleaved random demodulator, the random demodulator, the parallel non-interleaved random demodulator, the random sampler, and the periodic nonuniform sampler. It is thus important to establish the conditions under which the BRM satisfies the RIP; to our knowledge, this question has not been theoretically addressed in the literature. If the resulting conditions are satisfied, full signal recovery using a convex optimization algorithm is guaranteed. The specific objective of this research is to determine the conditions under which the RIP is satisfied for two possible sampling matricies: a BRM and a BRM multiplied by the discrete Fourier matrix.
Leadership Identity in Ethnically Diverse Schools in South Africa and England

This article adopts an international perspective to examine the perceptions and practice of leaders in a South African and an English primary school and the leadership implications. Both schools have experienced a relatively swift and large scale diversification of learners away from the previous white majority. In each case the educators have not diversified to the same extent. Interview data is explored to consider how diversity is conceived, and the implications for practice. Similarities and differences are identified, in order to increase understanding of context, its relation to practice and the implications for development in diverse organizations and societies. The article concludes that in both countries there are assertions that skin colour does not matter. Such blindness is a barrier to building greater inclusion.
Principal Stratification as a Framework for Investigating Mediational Processes in Experimental Settings

Abstract Experimental evaluations are increasingly common in the U.S. educational policy-research context. Often, in investigations of multifaceted interventions, researchers and policymakers alike are interested in not only whether a given intervention impacted an outcome but also why. What features of the intervention led to the impacts observed, or what was the causal mechanism or pathway through which treatment assignment resulted in an improved outcome? Quantitative methods for modeling such mediational processes appropriately are an active area of methodological exploration. I contribute to this literature by discussing an approach that relies on the analytic framework of principal stratification. Approaches, such as regression analysis and instrumental variables estimation (a special case of principal stratification), rely on assumptions—sequential ignorability and an exclusion restriction, respectively—that may be too strong to be plausible in practical settings. Principal stratification provides a broader framework with which these assumptions may be relaxed, although in exchange for other sets of assumptions. To illustrate and critique, I apply the principal stratification framework and Bayesian estimation techniques to data from MDRC's experimental evaluation of career academy high schools to explore the hypothesis that students’ increased exposure to the world-of-work through the career academy treatment serves as a causal mechanism of subsequent improvements in earnings in the years following high school. Whereas many applications of the principal stratification framework consider a mediator measured on a binary scale, this article contributes an example in which a three-category measure of the mediator is considered.
Making concepts of print symbolic: understanding how writing represents language

Preschool children were given an opportunity to produce pseudocursive scribbles and then assessed for their concepts of print. Prereading children who could identify letters and print their own names participated in four tasks examining their beliefs about what made written material readable. The tasks evaluated children's perceptual distinctions between writing and non-writing as well as more subtle distinctions between printed and cursive forms of writing. Children were first placed in situations that might result in their producing pseudocursive writing and then were asked questions about whether it could be read and who could read it. Following this, they solved three tasks in which they were asked to make judgements about what kinds of material could be read, who could read it, and what letters were represented in a sample of cursive writing. The tasks were progressively more difficult but showed that the children knew a lot about the forms of writing. In spite of this, virtually all the children produced pseudocursive scribbles and believed they could be read. The interpretation is that the knowledge these children have of the forms of writing does not include understanding the symbolic function by which these forms represent language.
A Longitudinal Investigation into L2 Learners’ Cognitive Processes during Study Abroad

The present study longitudinally investigates the cognitive processes of advanced L2 learners engaged in a multimedia task that elicited status-equal and status-unequal refusals in English during their study abroad. Data were collected three times by retrospective verbal report from 20 Chinese learners who were studying abroad over the course of one academic year. The results revealed that the learners reported paying increasingly more attention to sociopragmatics in context when they responded to each situation of the task. Furthermore, the study showed the effect of study abroad on the learners' perceptions of the factors affecting their pragmatic productions across the three phases. These effects were reflected by the decrease in pragmatic difficulties and the increase in pragmatic knowledge reported by the learners. This article demonstrates that using the retrospective verbal report at different points during learners' study abroad allows the examination of the changes in the cognitive processes involved in L2 pragmatic production.
Design of a Potent d-Peptide HIV-1 Entry Inhibitor with a Strong Barrier to Resistance

ABSTRACT The HIV gp41 N-trimer pocket region is an ideal viral target because it is extracellular, highly conserved, and essential for viral entry. Here, we report on the design of a pocket-specific d-peptide, PIE12-trimer, that is extraordinarily elusive to resistance and characterize its inhibitory and structural properties. d-Peptides (peptides composed of d-amino acids) are promising therapeutic agents due to their insensitivity to protease degradation. PIE12-trimer was designed using structure-guided mirror-image phage display and linker optimization and is the first d-peptide HIV entry inhibitor with the breadth and potency required for clinical use. PIE12-trimer has an ultrahigh affinity for the gp41 pocket, providing it with a reserve of binding energy (resistance capacitor) that yields a dramatically improved resistance profile compared to those of other fusion inhibitors. These results demonstrate that the gp41 pocket is an ideal drug target and establish PIE12-trimer as a leading anti-HIV antiviral candidate.
Forking a New Process with the Predetermined PID Value during Process Migration

dynamic process migration, a process which is under execution is migrated from its originating machine to a new machine in order to uphold load-balancing in large distributed systems by allowing applications to access a large number of computing resources spread across the network and may provide significant improvements in overall system behavior. After migration of a process to the destination workstation, the resuming process must be allocated the same "process-id value": the value which the process originally possessed on the source workstation before migration. This paper discusses a kernel-level solution for the problem of checkpointing the credential of "process identifier" and to allocate a selected process-id value to a new process. We suggest a new system call setforkpid( ) to assign the specific process-id value of interest to the selected new process. An attempt is made to suggest a solution for the Linux kernel 2.6. 25 environment.
AVERAGE PROPERTIES AND TEMPORAL VARIATIONS OF THE GEOMETRY OF SOLAR NETWORK CELLS

The average properties of the network cells geometry and their temporal variations are investigated for quiet solar regions at the center of the solar disk. These regions were extracted from the daily Ca II K full-disk observations carried out at the Rome Observatory with the PSPT telescope during one year (from July 1996 to June 1997) at the beginning of Solar Cycle 23. We applied an automated procedure to derive the skeleton of bright Ca II K regions. By using this skeleton as representative of the chromospheric network, we identified and characterized the network cells on the images. The results we found seemed to point out that network cells are regular in shape and slightly flat. We found an upper limit of 2% for the anisotropy of the cell orientation. By analyzing the latitudinal dependence of the cell size, we found that the cell area decreases by about 30% towards the poles. We also characterized the network pattern by using wavelet analysis. We compared the results obtained by the different analyzes. Finally we analyzed the temporal behaviours of the network cell geometrical properties. In particular, we found a decrease of the characteristic scale value of about 8% for the period analyzed.
Remote observation of CVD patients using biological sensors

CVDs are the one of the most common reason for the death of many people worldwide, which increases year by year. Also more common reason for the elderly people to get hospitalized. Aim of this paper is to complexly collect the essential signs of the CVD patients at home or in ward bed and send to Hospital Management System (HMS) server and to particular consultant. We can easily monitor the patient's signs from distance and take immediate action to patients when necessary. The important parameters like ECG, SpO2 and Blood Pressure are collected and the data's are transferred through wireless technology. Our proposed model gives best output from hospital real time patient monitoring system.