Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teaching the acceptance of diversity: An anti -bias education initiative that empowers student leaders to be the agents of change

TEACHING THE ACCEPTANCE OF DIVERSITY: AN ANTI-BIAS EDUCATION INITIATIVE THAT EMPOWERS STUDENT LEADERS TO BE THE AGENT S OF CHANGE by Kimberly J. Smith Dissertation chair: Dr. Elizabeth Twomey As our world continues to evolve as a global community, schools must prepare students to live, work, and thrive in a diverse society. Teaching the acceptance of diversity to our students is a significant step in building a safe and peaceful cult ure within our school communities. Teaching the acceptance of diversity to a generation of youn g people is a significant step in building a peaceful world. This qualitative case study examined an anti-bias education initiative that empowered students to become leaders and activists in their high school. The findings of this study revealed that the diversity education initiative did not have an immedia te impact on school culture, but the students who took active leadership roles encountered a transformational experience. The student leaders demonstrated substantial growth in the skills and understandings essential to anti-bias activism. Significant to this developm ent was heightened awareness of discriminatory language and behavior, a more co prehensive view of diversity and its role in community, and the ability to engage peers in dialogue about challenging diversity topics. In a dialogic exploration of individual differ ences, student leaders discovered the commonality that connects all humanity. This insig ht led them to affirm individual identity, to conceptualize the richness that diversity adds to community, and ultimately to embrace diversity as community. The findings of this study point to the incremental nature of school culture change and the need to institutionalize a diversity education/student leader effort as a l ong-term initiative in order to achieve substantive school improvement. The findings compel educators to provide leadership opportunities for students, cultivating their ability to become productive citizen-leaders in an increasingly global community. This is t e subject matter of their lives, an authentic curriculum that activates thei r knowledge, their ability, and their responsibility to transform their world (Starratt, 2008). This dissertation captures the lived experiences of a group of students who led this diversity educat ion initiative, and how their reflections inform educational policy, practice, and lea dership.
Removal of limulus reactivity and cytokine-inducing capacity from bicarbonate dialysis fluids by ultrafiltration.

Bicarbonate-based dialysate solutions support the rapid growth of bacteria. The long-term (360-h) efficacy of ultrafiltration by two polysulphone ultrafilters in removing not only endotoxin but also the cytokine(IL-1, TNF)-inducing capacity was evaluated using an experimental circuit contaminated with Pseudomonas aeruginosa filtrates. One of the polysulphone ultrafilters was submitted to a standard sanitization procedure every 12 h (hypochlorite 1.2% solution for 5 min and rinsing for 20 min). Endotoxin was detected by the kinetic quantitative chromogenic limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL) assay. Immunoreactive IL-1 and TNF were evaluated in the lysates of peripheral blood mononuclear cells containing 5 x 10(5) human monocytes. The results of the present studies show that although LAL-reactive bacterial products were significantly removed in post-ultrafilter samples, they remained detectable, albeit below the upper limit accepted by the present European pharmacopeias (< 0.125 EU/ml). The removal of cytokine-inducing capacity was time-dependent and correlated with time of use in the case of the sanitized ultrafilter. Beyond the time of use, two other factors emerged as possibly capable of reducing the efficacy of the ultrafilter in removing LAL-reactive bacterial components, namely the pressure and the cytokine-inducing activity in pre-ultrafilter samples. Preincubation with polymyxin B, an agent that irreversibly binds lipid A and blocks lipid A-induced biological activities, did not abrogate the cytokine-inducing capacity in all post-ultrafilter samples; this suggests that either low-molecular-weight endotoxin subunits or lipid A-unrelated components may be responsible for the residual biological activity in post-ultrafilter samples. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Public Policy and Accounting Research: What Is to Be Done?

Abstract Singleton-Green [2010. The communication gap: Why doesn't accounting research make a greater contribution to debates on accounting policy? Accounting in Europe, 7(2), 129–145] argues that a communication gap between researchers and those involved in public debates on accounting problems significantly reduces the impact of accounting research. A new ICAEW report, The Effects of Mandatory IFRS Adoption in the EU: a Review of Empirical Research, tries to bridge the communication gap on the subject that it covers. The report found not only a significant amount of relevant research, but also that its usefulness was limited in various ways. The paper makes a number of recommendations to researchers: they should point out any biases in the data they use, address some issues through field work, not assume that surrounding institutions are unchanged, be careful to understand the specific features of the countries they cover, investigate differences in previous research, and state the economic significance of their findings. The paper also makes recommendations for non-academic participants in public policy debates, including: they should actively promote relevant research, help researchers get access to information, and help ensure that researchers have the incentives to do what is needed to benefit public policy.
Reliability of longitudinal ultrasonographic measurements of carotid intimal-medial thicknesses. Asymptomatic Carotid Artery Progression Study Research Group.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Serial ultrasonic B-mode measurements of intimal-medial thickness (IMT) of the carotid artery are commonly used as surrogates for describing atherosclerosis progression. This report describes the longitudinal reliability of IMT measurement during a multicenter clinical trial, quantifies the error attributable to differences among readers, and discusses how studies can be efficiently designed. METHODS Serial B-mode measurements of carotid IMT from the 3-year Asymptomatic Carotid Artery Progression Study (ACAPS; formerly Asymptomatic Carotid Artery Plaque Study) were used to estimate the contributions to longitudinal measurement error of systematic reader effects, nonvisualization, and nonsystematic error and to describe the distribution of "true" progression rates that underlie the observed data. Variance components were estimated from random-effects models fitted to outcome measures formed by averaging IMTs from different sets of carotid artery walls. These were used to contrast the relative efficiency of study designs. RESULTS Of the total variance of measured IMT, 11% was attributable to systematic differences among readers. Nonvisualization contributed less than 7%. Thus, the predominant source of error was unaccounted for (ie, random error or "noise," which in our analyses included any drift, nonlinearity, and sonographer differences). For studies with measurement protocols similar to ACAPS, follow-up times of 2 years or more are desirable for describing the mean progression rates of cohorts, and of 6 years or more for categorizing progression within individuals. In 3-year studies, sample sizes as low as 237 provide 90% statistical power for detecting risk factors that have correlations with IMT progression of . 50 or greater. CONCLUSIONS The ACAPS measurement protocol provided highly reliable serial IMT data. Moderate-sized multicenter studies using B-mode outcomes are feasible.
Echocardiography Evaluation in ECMO Patients

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a special form of organ support for selected cases of cardiovascular and severe respiratory failure. Echocardiography is a diagnostic and monitoring tool widely used in all aspects of ECMO support. The pathophysiology of ECMO, and its distinct effects on cardiorespiratory physiology, requires an echocardiographer with high skills to understand the interaction between the ECMO and the patient. In this chapter, we present the main application of echocardiography in ECMO patients and some general concepts on the ECMO working. ECMO, such as the standard cardiopulmonary bypass employed in cardiac surgery, V-V (veno-venous), can support the insufficient respiratory system by oxygenating and removing carbon dioxide from the blood. VA-ECMO (venous-arterial) can support haemodynamics by providing mechanical circulatory assistance. Today, ECMO can be used as bridge to decision, waiting for the development of the clinical conditions to support with other devices the evolution of cardiorespiratory failure or stop the assistance. Echocardiography (trans-thoracic (TTE) or transoesophageal (TOE)) can be used primarily to take decisions regarding appropriateness of ECMO support, therefore to control cannula insertion and confirm final position, to modify number and position of the cannulae in case of malfunctioning of these, and, finally, to assess clinical progress and suitability for weaning from ECMO.
Clinical, pathologic and immunologic features of patients with non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma in a leukemic phase. A retrospective analysis of 34 patients

A retrospective review of 34 patients with non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma and a leukemic phase was undertaken. The median survival after onset of a leukemic phase was 30 months for patients with nodular poorly differentiated lymphocytic lymphoma which was significantly longer than 19 months for diffuse poorly differentiated lymphocytic lymphoma, and 2 months for diffuse histiocytic and undifferentiated lymphoma. Clinical features of patients with diffuse histologies that contributed to a poor prognosis included advanced stage of disease as well as age. Underlying lymph node histology also defined features of the leukemic phase which included duration, peak leukocyte count, and in some instances, distinctive morphologic characteristics of circulating malignant cells. Although small sample size did not permit definitive correlations of immunological subtype and survival, heterogeneity was noted, suggesting that clearer stratification of these patients with immunologic techniques may be useful in assessing prognosis in future investigations.
Beyond Reviewing

Existing research on tourism social media users rarely extends beyond their role as appraisers of tourism and hospitality products. Such research fails to identify the different modes of experience and behavior that these users assume in their cyberspace interactions. This article demonstrates that user interactions entail much more than evaluating products. Using data from TripAdvisor, it identifies five additional user roles that define their experience and comportment online: troll, activist, social critic, information seeker, and socialite. Adopting a netnographic approach, these categories are interrogated to provide a more nuanced understanding of the online user experience in tourism social media space. Further, for each role, we glean the implicit uses and gratifications users seek from using the media. It is argued that the combined enactment of these roles creates a rich repository of experiential narratives that tourism businesses and destination managers can tap into for insights into the modern tourism consumer.
Argon laser initiated resin photopolymerization for the filling of root canals in human teeth

This work was undertaken to determine if 488 nm light is transmitted through dentin in quantities adequate to polmerize resin located several millimeters from the light source (an optical fiber). The spread of polymerization in a camphorquinone activated resin due to 488 nm light emanating from an opaque plastic canal was compared with light emanating from a canal of the same diameter in tooth dentin. Results indicated that irradiation of a resin‐filled chamber via an opaque canal generated a series of ellipsoidal forms, while irradiation via a root canal generated bullet‐shaped forms of much larger volume and weight. The base of these bullet‐shaped forms was flat against the dentin‐resin interface and surrounded the canal. These results indicated that 488 nm argon laser light was transmitted through dentin and could act to polymerize resin at a distance of several millimeters from the canal. Further experiments verified that resin in lateral canals of tooth roots was readily polymerized by 488 nm light applied at low power levels (50 mW). These experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the argon laser in polymerizing light activated dental resins located within or adjacent to tooth dentin at distances up to several milimeters from the fiberoptic terminus. The flexibility and control that these procedures make possible in the obturation of root canals may lead to substantial improvements in endodontic therapy.
Modeling and Analysis of Requests, Behaviors, and Actions for RFLP Structure

Organization of product information in requirements, functional, logical, and physical (RFLP) model structure is recent result on the long way from conventional documents to comprehensive and consistent virtual environments in engineering. Recent virtual engineering environments utilize generic product model which is self adaptive in order to assure its automatic instantiation in case of changed circumstances and events. The RFLP structure applies known ideas from requirements engineering (RE) and systems (SE) engineering and provides high level abstraction for multidisciplinary definition of product concepts and features. At the same time, advanced features of RFLP structured product model allows for wide applications including fundamental and product related research and development from small experiments on few objects to definition of complete products. Actual problem is to replace the current human dialogue based RFLP structure element definition by multiple human requests driven RFLP structure element generation. As a contribution to solve this problem, paper introduces the request, behavior, and actions (RBA) knowledge content structure. RBA structure was tailored in accordance with knowledge demand at RFLP structure element generation and assured consideration of human intent through contextual chain of content elements from content dialogue or import to RFLP element generation. RBA structure concentrates on modeling of request content driven product behavior. Functional, logical and physical product structures are driven by behavior definitions. RBA structure is recent result at the Laboratory of Intelligent Engineering Systems (LIES, Óbuda University).
Independent-component-analysis-based spike sorting algorithm for high-density microelectrode array data processing

Microelectrode arrays (MEAs) become an important tool for neurophysiology research. They are instrumental in revealing neural network formation processes and inter-cell communication schemes, which helps to understand the functioning of the human brain and to treat it's diseases. The electrode pitch of current CMOS-based MEAs can be as low as 18 ¿m, which allows for recording the activity of single cells simultaneously on several channels. Each electrode in turn records the activity of several adjacent neurons. The presented algorithm employs Independent Component Analysis (ICA) method to recover the spike signals and to assign them to a particular neuron. To overcome the fundamental ICA requirement of linearly mixed independent sources, which is not satisfied in the case of neuronal recordings, the algorithm runs in a loop, successively extracts traces with spiking activity, overlays those with previously detected ones and assigns signals to individual neurons.
PSpec-SQL: Enabling Fine-Grained Control for Distributed Data Analytics

Business organizations regularly collect customer data to improve their services. Organizations may want to share data within themselves or even with third-parties to maximize data utility. Since business data contain lots of customer data, organizations must respect customers’ privacy expounded by privacy laws. In this paper, we present PSpec-SQL, a distributed data analytics system that automatically enforces privacy compliance for SQL queries. Our system provides a high-level language PSpec for the data owner to specify her data usage policy. As usual, the data analyst queries data to perform data analysis, but our system checks each query to ensure only policy-compliant queries are executed. We have implemented a prototype of PSpec-SQL on top of Spark-SQL, and carried out a case study on the TPC benchmarks. The results show the practicability of our system with negligible overhead over query processing.
Phase constant of SIW revisited with numerical SOC technique in FDTD algorithm

In this paper, the modeling of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) is revisted based on the finite-difference timedomain method and numerical short-open calibration (SOC) technique. Two error boxes are defined to calibrate the parasitic effects of the impressed electric fields and the errors of finite periodic units. Subsequently, the approximately infinite periodic structure is realized and obtained from a core network of device-under-test. Hence, the complex propagation constant of SIW could be accurately extracted by de-embedding the error boxes. Finally, the numerical examples are presented to verify the accuracy of the extracted parameters.
AS imple, Unified, Exactly Solved Framework for Ten Puzzles in Macro-Finance

This paper works out a simple unified framework for a series of puzzles in macro-finance. It builds on the Rietz-Barro view, that a small probability of large crises or disasters generates is what generates risk premia in asset markets. During a disaster, an asset’s fundamental value will fall by a time-varying amount. This time-varying amount generates time-varying risk premia, hence volatile asset prices, and partial predictability of future asset returns. Using the recent technique of linearity-generating processes (Gabaix 2007), the model is very tractable, and all prices are in closed form. Hence, the paper presents a simple, exactly solved, frictionless benchmark for a series of questions on asset prices. It provides a way to think about the following puzzles: (i) equity premium puzzle (ii) risk-free rate-puzzle (iii) excess volatility puzzle (the fact that equity prices are so volatile) (iv) value-growth puzzle (stocks with high price-dividend ratios have low future returns) (v) upward sloping nominal yield curve (vi) Fama-Bliss findings that a higher slope of the yield curve predicts higher risk premia on bond returns (vii) corporate bond spread puzzle (the spread between corporate and government bond rates are higher than warranted by the U.S. historical experience) (viii) characteristics vs covariance puzzles (simple numbers such as the price-dividend ratio of stocks predict future returns better that covariances with economic factors) (ix) partial predictability of aggregate stock market returns by price/dividend and consumption/wealth ratios (x) high price of deep out-of-the-money puts. The interpretation of the “probability of disaster” could be rational, or behavioral, in which case it offers a convenient way to model investor “sentiment. ” (JEL: E43, E44, F31, G12, G15)
Learning visually grounded meaning representations

Humans possess a rich semantic knowledge of words and concepts which captures the perceivable physical properties of their real-world referents and their relations. Encoding this knowledge or some of its aspects is the goal of computational models of semantic representation and has been the subject of considerable research in cognitive science, natural language processing, and related areas. Existing models have placed emphasis on different aspects of meaning, depending ultimately on the task at hand. Typically, such models have been used in tasks addressing the simulation of behavioural phenomena, e.g., lexical priming or categorisation, as well as in natural language applications, such as information retrieval, document classification, or semantic role labelling. A major strand of research popular across disciplines focuses on models which induce semantic representations from text corpora. These models are based on the hypothesis that the meaning of words is established by their distributional relation to other words (Harris, 1954). Despite their widespread use, distributional models of word meaning have been criticised as ‘disembodied’ in that they are not grounded in perception and action (Perfetti, 1998; Barsalou, 1999; Glenberg and Kaschak, 2002). This lack of grounding contrasts with many experimental studies suggesting that meaning is acquired not only from exposure to the linguistic environment but also from our interaction with the physical world (Landau et al., 1998; Bornstein et al., 2004). This criticism has led to the emergence of new models aiming at inducing perceptually grounded semantic representations. Essentially, existing approaches learn meaning representations from multiple views corresponding to different modalities, i.e. linguistic and perceptual input. To approximate the perceptual modality, previous work has relied largely on semantic attributes collected from humans (e.g., is round, is sour), or on automatically extracted image features. Semantic attributes have a long-standing tradition in cognitive science and are thought to represent salient psychological aspects of word meaning including multisensory information. However, their elicitation from human subjects limits the scope of computational models to a small number of concepts for which attributes are available. In this thesis, we present an approach which draws inspiration from the successful application of attribute classifiers in image classification, and represent images and the concepts depicted by them by automatically predicted visual attributes. To this end, we create a dataset comprising nearly 700K images and a taxonomy of 636 visual attributes and use it to train attribute classifiers. We show that their predictions can act as a substitute for human-produced attributes without any critical information
Testing Alternative Models for Forecasting Volatility in Stock Futures Market: A Linear Approach

Thanks to numerous empirical research studies, a general consensus has been reached on examining the various alternative models for forecasting and modeling volatility in stock futures contracts by using out-of-sample forecast according to statistic and risk management evaluation criteria. The dataset were retrieved from National Stock Exchange (NSE) website terminal for the period from April 1, 2003 and ending on December 31, 2008. The forecasting models that are considered here ranges from Random Walk, Linear Regression, Moving Average, Autoregressive Models. In order to evaluate the forecasting performance of different models we use two forecasting error statistics by considering the root mean square error (RMSE) and the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) for testing the return characteristics. Our findings suggest that, according to RMSE statistics the autoregressive model and linear regression models rationally shared and ranked first for out-of-sample forecasts in the linear models. In addition, one cannot conclude that the success or failure of a particular type of forecasting model applied to one market carries over to a different market, because the size and liquidity of a market can affect the quality of volatility forecasts. Finally, one can learn more about the market movement and return volatility through studying the non linear approach.