Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Reported Effects of a Systematic Professional Learning Program on the Knowledge, Skills, and Concerns of Australian Early Childhood Educators who Support Young Children Displaying or at Risk of Challenging Behaviours

Abstract High-quality early childhood education is a vital experience for young children with and without disabilities. Social and communication experiences in the context of play represent a core curriculum that sets a foundation for later learning and participation. Using a new self-report instrument, this article describes data collected in a large-scale professional learning project in NSW, Australia, that aimed to support early childhood teachers, paraprofessionals and other personnel who directly work with young children, including individuals who present or are at risk of challenging behaviours. Using a case application model of remote and direct coaching support and intervention centred on the input of expert practitioners, the reports of participants were collected before and after a series of three sequential workshops with embedded action research processes for participants. The program was designed to increase social and communicative exchanges and reduce the likelihood of challenging behaviours, by providing a systematic and practical framework for the introduction of functional behavioural assessment and positive support planning. Respondents indicated significant improvements in knowledge and skills after the program, along with decreased concerns in some areas. The paper concludes by discussing potential areas for an expanded research agenda into the professional learning needs of personnel in this field and more broadly within early childhood support systems and services.
Joint Normalization and Dimensionality Reduction on Grassmannian: A Generalized Perspective

This letter proposes a generalized framework with joint normalization that learns lower dimensional subspaces with maximum discriminative power by using Riemannian geometry. We model the similarity/dissimilarity between subspaces using various metrics defined on Grassmannian and formulate dimensionality reduction as a nonlinear constraint optimization problem considering the orthogonalization. To obtain the linear mapping, we derive the components required to perform Riemannian optimization from the original Grassmannian through an orthonormal projection. We respect the Riemannian geometry of the Grassmann manifold and search for this projection directly from one Grassmann manifold to another face-to-face without any additional transformations. In this natural geometry-aware approach, any metric on the Grassmann manifold can theoretically reside in our model. We combine five metrics with our model, and the learning process is treated as an unconstrained optimization problem on a Grassmann manifold. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that our approach leads to a significant accuracy gain over state-of-the-art methods.
The influence of increasing temperature and CO2 concentration on recent growth of old-growth larch: contrasting responses at leaf and stem processes derived from tree-ring width and stable isotopes

Time series of tree-ring growth show significant increases since the early 1970s at the alpine tree line, with simultaneously increasing temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentration. For a comprehensive understanding of this growth change, the physiological response patterns at both the leaf and stem level need to be separately analyzed and identified, and can be retrieved from tree-ring growth and isotope (δ13C, δ18O) series. In this study, we assessed the relative contribution of environmental factors to interannual tree-ring variability by multivariate linear mixed-effects models and the dual isotope approach on a dataset of tree-ring records of ~400-year-old larch (Larix decidua Mill.) from a non-water-limited high-elevation site in the Swiss Alps. The models suggest that summer temperatures and the recent lack of larch budmoth outbreaks were most important for explaining growth variations and trends, while a significant direct effect of the continuously increasing CO2 concentration could not be confirmed. In contrast, δ13C and δ18O, which are strongly influenced by fractionation changes in the leaf, clearly reflected the impact of air humidity (precipitation and vapor pressure deficit) and CO2 concentration: the increase in (δ13C-derived) intrinsic water-use efficiency over the second half of the 20th century suggests an increase in carbon assimilation as a result of enhanced CO2 concentration. The tree-ring δ18O largely reflected recent precipitation as source water, thus indicating a low variability in stomatal conductance, which was confirmed by the dual isotope approach. These leaf-level effects were not reflected in stem growth as they may have been masked by the temperature-caused growth limitation controlling the allocation of increased amounts of photosynthates into wood growth. Our approach demonstrates that the identification of different roles of environmental factors on leaf and stem processes helps to improve the assessment of site-specific changes of carbon fluxes and growth performance under future environmental conditions.
Analysis of Vertical Loop Antenna and Its Wide and Flat Variant Performance in Wearable Use

This paper presents an analysis of the input impedance and radiation pattern behavior for a rectangular loop antenna when it is reshaped from a narrow square to wide and flat. The antenna operation is examined by 3-D electromagnetic simulations. Parametric simulation results are shown to explain the effect of antenna dimensions on the impedance behavior. Based on the numerical results, an equivalent circuit is developed to model the impedance change due to reshaping the loop antenna. The main observations are that the decreased height and the increased width of the antenna increase the bandwidth potential of the inherently narrowband loop and increase its directivity. These characteristics together with a vertical loop orientation enable a high performance antenna for locations very close to conductive or lossy materials. Based on the presented impedance analysis, an optimized antenna prototype for a wearable use is manufactured and its performance is verified by measurements. Measured radiation efficiency for the antenna in contact with a human tissue phantom is −5.0 dB at 2 GHz and the obtainable bandwidth potential is >10%.
Thermal conductivity and annealing effect on structure of lignin-based microscale carbon fi bers

This work reports on systematic investigation of the structure and thermal conductivity of lignin-based carbon fibers (CF) at the microscale. The lignin-based CF is produced by melt-spinning pyrolytic lignin derived from red oak. The 0 K-limit phonon scattering mean free path uncovers a characteristic structure size of ~1.2 nm, which agrees well with the crystallite size by X-ray scattering (0.9 and 1.3 nm) and the cluster size by Raman spectroscopy (2.31 nm). The thermal conductivity of as-prepared CFs is determined at ~1.83 W/m$K at room temperature. The thermal reffusivity of CFs shows little change from room temperature down to 10 K, uncovering the existence of extensive defects and grain boundaries which dominate phonon scattering. The localized thermal conductivity of CFs is increased by more than ten-fold after being annealed at ~2800 K, to a level of 24 W/m$K. Our microscale Raman scanning from less annealed to highly annealed regions shows one-fold increase of the cluster size: from 1.83 nm to 4 nm. This directly confirms structure improvement by annealing. The inverse of the thermal conductivity is found linearly proportional to the annealing temperature in the range of 1000e2800 K. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Conditional Random Fields based Knowledge Retrieval in Mobile Environments

The exponential growth of digital products lead to the massive generation of data every day at the alarming volume,velocity and diversity. In order to extract meaningful value,advanced storage ,processing and analytical systems are growing fast. Collective Adaptive Systems(CAS) are such large scale distributed systems which provide a scalable and efficient way of storing and processing the data at such a massive scale.Allow Ensemble[13] is one such CAS systems where participants(nodes) have the knowledge repository based on probabilistic graphical models.These model are built from the observed data in different contexts. These models are associated with a degree of learning based on the quality and amount of observed data. The participants of CAS are loosely connected components differing in dimensionality of these knowledge repositories in a dynamic environment. The efficient retrieval of knowledge from these probabilistic models possess a greater challenge and is the core task of this thesis work. The major challenges we faced to achieve this task includes: 1.A confidence measure to quantify the degree of learning of the knowledge model on each participant (network node). 2.This confidence measure should answer the query in absolute sense in a way that it determine the confidence in knowledge model wrt to itself when tuned to give the best/saturated knowledge. 3.The mechanism needs to be developed to aggregate this measure for a group of crf nodes to determine the overall average degree of learning. 4.The efficient routing mechanism need to be developed to answer the query with specified confidence measure of learning. We propose the following concepts to handle this task. 1.Confidence Metric which quantify the degree of learning and providing the absolute sense of learning using the statistical concept of Confidence intervals. The confidence value is associated with every node of the probabilistic crf graph and these values can be aggregated to produce an overall confidence score. 2.We have developed an efficient routing mechanism so that query can be routed to the best learned knowledge model specific to its context parameters. Each participant stores and propagates the information about the knowledge model reachable through its neighbor. We call this approach knowledge aggregation based routing. 3.We have proposed a new routing scheme of query learning in which routing behavior is developed from the past queries. In general,the high retrieval accuracy is obtained in both scenarios. We believe that our approach of summarization ,propagation and effective retrieval of knowledge in a probabilistic models poses great direction to further enhance and develop interesting applications that can make good use of our research work.
Gender differences in educational adaptation of immigrant-origin youth in the United States

BACKGROUND Immigrant-origin students (i.e., firstand second-generation immigrants) comprise roughly 20% of the US school-age population. Despite growing awareness of a femalefavorable gender gap in educational performance, quantitative research on immigrant educational adaptation rarely considers whether there are differences in the educational adaptation patterns between boys and girls. METHODS Using a nationally representative sample of 2002 high school sophomores from the Educational Longitudinal Study, we examine gender-specific patterns of generational differences in high school grades and investigate racial/ethnic variation in these patterns. RESULTS Among whites and Asians, girls and boys exhibit similar patterns of educational adaptation as measured by high school grade point average, but there are significant gender differences in patterns of educational adaptation among blacks and Hispanics. Second-generation Hispanic boys, but not girls, have lower grades than their coethnic native counterparts, and first-generation black boys, but not girls, earn higher grades than their native peers. Class preparedness and instrumental motivation partially explain these gender differences in educational adaptation, especially among blacks. 1 Address correspondence to: Yue Qian, Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia (Vancouver), 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z1. Email: yue.qian@ubc.ca. 2 Ohio State University, Columbus, USA. Email: buchmann.4@osu.edu. 3 Ohio State University, Columbus, USA. Email: zhang.2040@buckeyemail.osu.edu. Qian, Buchmann & Zhang: Gender differences in educational adaptation of US immigrant-origin youth 1156 http://www.demographic-research.org CONCLUSIONS The results reveal the heterogeneity in immigrant-origin youth’s educational adaptation along gender and racial/ethnic lines and illuminate which students – in terms of gender, generational status, and race/ethnicity – are most at risk of downward mobility.
Distributed Control Method for Economic Dispatch in Islanded Microgrids With Renewable Energy Sources

The economic dispatch in islanded microgrids (MGs) is a thorny problem due to the low equivalent inertia and the uncertainty of environmental conditions. In this paper, a two-layer model is proposed for economic dispatch in islanded MGs, in which an MG is considered as the lower layer, while a communication network is considered as the upper layer. Furthermore, a systematic method is presented to derive fully distributed control laws from any given communication network. On the communication network, there are two subgraphs, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tilde {G}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\hat {G}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, one of which consists of all agents, while the other of which consists of only controllable agents. Correspondingly, two sets of control laws are derived from the two subgraphs, where the control laws from the subgraph <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\tilde {G}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ensure the supply-demand balance in the MG, while the control laws from the subgraph <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\hat {G}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> realize the economic dispatch. Moreover, the economic operation in MGs can be satisfied, only if agents on the communication network regulate distributed generators iteratively according to the control laws. Finally, three cases are designed to evaluate the performance of the method, and the simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Potential of Biogas Production from Palm Oil Empty Fruit Bunch (EFB) in South-East Asia

This paper focuses on finding an alternative biogas substrate among the wastes from food industry - Palm Oil Empty Fruit Bunch (EFB). The study was conducted in the Laboratory of Ecotechnologies - the biggest biogas laboratory in Poland situated at Poznan University of Life Sciences. The research has based on modified German standard DIN 38 414/S8 and VDI 4630, while the chemical and physical analytical methods were based on Polish and German Standard System. The results of the methane efficiency analysis give the result 74,33 m3/Mg FM of substrate but it was characterized by high content of lignocellulose material creates serious problem for preparation - need special kind of crushing.
A Review of Smartphone Applications for Promoting Physical Activity.

INTRODUCTION Rapid developments in technology have encouraged the use of smartphones in health promotion research and practice. Although many applications (apps) relating to physical activity are available from major smartphone platforms, relatively few have been tested in research studies to determine their effectiveness in promoting health. METHODS In this article, we summarize data on use of smartphone apps for promoting physical activity based upon bibliographic searches with relevant search terms in PubMed and CINAHL. RESULTS After screening the abstracts or full texts of articles, 15 eligible studies of the acceptability or efficacy of smartphone apps for increasing physical activity were identified. Of the 15 included studies, 6 were qualitative research studies, 8 were randomized control trials, and one was a nonrandomized study with a pre-post design. The results indicate that smartphone apps can be efficacious in promoting physical activity although the magnitude of the intervention effect is modest. Participants of various ages and genders respond favorably to apps that automatically track physical activity (e.g., steps taken), track progress toward physical activity goals, and are user-friendly and flexible enough for use with several types of physical activity. DISCUSSION Future studies should utilize randomized controlled trial research designs, larger sample sizes, and longer study periods to establish the physical activity measurement and intervention capabilities of smartphones. There is a need for culturally appropriate, tailored health messages to increase knowledge and awareness of health behaviors such as physical activity.
Reliable Automatic Recognition for Pitch-Shifted Audio

In this paper we present the difficulties involved in recognizing pitch-shifted audio, discussing its usage and implications. In the framework of audio fingerprinting techniques, we address the issue by proposing two complementary solutions, both of which can be exploited without affecting an existing reference database. As fingerprint algorithm, a well-known, robust method is employed in a modified version and providing insights on its peculiarities. Tests were carried out on a vast song library and exhibit an excellent success rate, up to considerable distortion magnitudes.
Comparative genomics of bdelloid rotifers: Insights from desiccating and nondesiccating species

Bdelloid rotifers are a class of microscopic invertebrates that have existed for millions of years apparently without sex or meiosis. They inhabit a variety of temporary and permanent freshwater habitats globally, and many species are remarkably tolerant of desiccation. Bdelloids offer an opportunity to better understand the evolution of sex and recombination, but previous work has emphasised desiccation as the cause of several unusual genomic features in this group. Here, we present high-quality whole-genome sequences of 3 bdelloid species: Rotaria macrura and R. magnacalcarata, which are both desiccation intolerant, and Adineta ricciae, which is desiccation tolerant. In combination with the published assembly of A. vaga, which is also desiccation tolerant, we apply a comparative genomics approach to evaluate the potential effects of desiccation tolerance and asexuality on genome evolution in bdelloids. We find that ancestral tetraploidy is conserved among all 4 bdelloid species, but homologous divergence in obligately aquatic Rotaria genomes is unexpectedly low. This finding is contrary to current models regarding the role of desiccation in shaping bdelloid genomes. In addition, we find that homologous regions in A. ricciae are largely collinear and do not form palindromic repeats as observed in the published A. vaga assembly. Consequently, several features interpreted as genomic evidence for long-term ameiotic evolution are not general to all bdelloid species, even within the same genus. Finally, we substantiate previous findings of high levels of horizontally transferred nonmetazoan genes in both desiccating and nondesiccating bdelloid species and show that this unusual feature is not shared by other animal phyla, even those with desiccation-tolerant representatives. These comparisons call into question the proposed role of desiccation in mediating horizontal genetic transfer.
Culture, corporate governance and analysts forecast in Malaysia

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between Bumiputra (in reference to Malay indigenous race) directors, a proxy for culture and analysts forecast. In addition, the study investigates whether corporate governance affects that relationship. Design/methodology/approach - – The sample of this study is based on 664 firm-year observations from 193 firms during the 1999-2009 periods. The authors employ a panel least square regression with both period and industry fixed effects. The authors retrieved of analyst data from the Institutional Broker Estimate System (I/B/E/S) database while the authors hand collected the corporate governance variables. The remaining data were collected from Compustat Global. Findings - – The authors find a positive relationship between the proxy of culture, Bumiputra directors and analysts forecast error suggesting that cultural values influences the level of information in the Malaysian capital market. Research limitations/implications - – The research is dependent on the data availability from I/B/E/S database. Originality/value - – The authors extend the work of Haniffa and Cooke (2002) in investigating how cultural values influence the capital market. In addition, this is the first study that investigates culture values and the analysts forecast.
FORMULATION AND IN VITRO EVALUATION OF FLOATING MICROSPHERES OF DEXTROMETHORPHAN HYDROBROMIDE

Objective: The aim of the present study was to develop floating microspheres of Dextromethorphan hydrobromide (DXM HBr), which belongs to class antitussive. Methods: Floating microspheres were prepared for the improvement of bioavailability of Dextromethorphan hydrobromide by retaining in the stomach for prolonged period of time by solvent evaporation technique using polymers like ethyl cellulose (EC) and hydroxylpropyl methyl cellulose (HPMC K4M and K15M) in different ratios.The prepared floating microspheres were evaluated for micromeretic properities, percentage yield, in vitro buoyancy, drug entrapment efficiency, in vitro dissolution studies. Results: Results showed that as the concentration of polymer increases it affects the particle size, percentage yield, in vitro buoyancy and drug release from the microspheres. Percentage yield of microspheres was found up to 71.16%. The formulated microspheres were free flowing with good flow properties. Scanning electron microscopy of optimized formulation F3 confirmed spherical structure of microspheres with pores on the rough surface and the particles were of the size range from 112-224 µm. The floating microspheres of optimized formulation(F3), exhibited the prolonged drug release of 99.61% in sustained manner up to 12 hours and remain buoyant more than 12 hours. The drug release mechanism from the floating microspheres was found to be Anamolus type (non-fickian diffusion) and followed Higuchi kinetics. Conclusion: The developed floating microsphere system is a promising floating drug delivery system for oral sustained administration of Dextromethorphan hydrobromide (DXM HBr).
Online, Loudness-Invariant Vocal Detection in Mixed Music Signals

Singing voice detection, also referred to as vocal detection (VD), aims at automatically identifying the regions in a music recording where at least one person sings. It is highly challenging due to the timbral and expressive richness of the human singing voice, as well as the practically endless variety of interfering instrumental accompaniment. Additionally, certain instruments have an inherent risk of being misclassified as vocals due to similarities of the sound production system. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach that is based on our previous work for VD, which is specifically designed to deal with those challenging conditions. The contribution of this paper is threefold: First, we present a new method for VD that passes a compact set of features to a long short-term memory recurrent neural network classifier that obtains state-of-the-art results. Second, we thoroughly evaluate the proposed method along with related approaches to really probe the weaknesses of the methods. In order to allow for such a thorough evaluation, we make a curated collection of datasets available to the research community. Finally, we focus on a specific problem that was not obvious and had not been discussed in the literature so far. The reason for this is precisely because limited evaluations had not revealed this as a problem: the lack of loudness invariance. We will discuss the implications of utilizing loudness-related features and show that our method successfully deals with this problem due to the specific set of features it uses.