Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
African American Students’ Experiences in Special Education Programs

Background/Context Disproportionate placement of African American students into special education programs is likely to be a form of institutional racism, especially when such placement stigmatizes students. If placement also fails to lead to educational benefits, the practice becomes even more suspect. Some studies have explored disproportionate placement (i.e., over-representation) from the perspectives of policy makers and educators, but few have looked at the practice from the vantage of the African American students experiencing it. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study explored how nine African American students in secondary special education placements perceived their school experiences and the benefits, challenges, and detriments associated with their placements and accompanying disability labels. Setting Participating students attended one of three high schools in an urban district in the midwestern United States. Respectively, the schools had low, medium, and high percentages of students on individualized education programs (IEPs). Population/Participants/Subjects Three students from each of three schools participated in the study. With the help of school personnel, the researchers selected students who (a) were African American, (b) were juniors or seniors, (c) carried the label of learning disabilities or mild cognitive impairment, and (d) had received special education services for at least three years. Research Design The researchers used an in-depth interview design including three increasingly detailed interviews with each student. Verbatim transcripts of interviews provided the data the researchers analyzed using (a) inductive coding, (b) development of case-specific profiles, (c) organization of codes to identify patterns in the data, and (d) identification of emergent themes. Findings/Results Three emergent themes suggested that, in most cases, students found the negative consequences of their special education placement to outweigh any benefits. The limited benefits of placement included interactions with responsive teachers and, in a few cases, more suitable instructional pacing. The negative consequences included the experience of being stigmatized by peers, making limited academic progress because of a slow-paced curriculum, and confronting barriers that kept them from returning to general education placements. Conclusions/Recommendations The study found that traumatic events in the students’ lives led to academic difficulties, which subsequently led to placement in special education. Rather than supporting the students through a difficult phase of their lives, educators used special education referral and placement as a form of victim blaming. This response had the effect of excluding the students from engagement with the general education curriculum and from interaction with friends. The dynamics of victim blaming led the researchers to judge special education referral and placement of the nine African American students as a form of institutional racism.
Web Service Interface Syndication and its Application to a Collaborative Weblog Search

This paper presents the idea of Web service interface syndication - a scheme for the collaborative creation of overlay networks based on common Web service interfaces. Rather than requiring complex management of dynamic peers we picture a setting of interconnected static Web applications forming syndicates and offering services in a self-organized fashion. Among other application scenarios, this paper will present vicinitySearch, a collaborative Weblog search service which has been created in order to demonstrate the concept. This service offers a remarkable added-value to the Weblog community, making use of existing collaborative structures and the interoperability provided by XML Web services. Apart from the general concept of Web service interface syndication, the paper presents an implementation of the vicinitySearch service that has been done in terms of a Wordpress plugin
A MIQE-Compliant Real-Time PCR Assay for Aspergillus Detection

The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is widely used as a diagnostic tool in clinical laboratories and is particularly effective for detecting and identifying infectious agents for which routine culture and microscopy methods are inadequate. Invasive fungal disease (IFD) is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in immunosuppressed patients, and optimal diagnostic criteria are contentious. Although PCR-based methods have long been used for the diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis (IA), variable performance in clinical practice has limited their value. This shortcoming is a consequence of differing sample selection, collection and preparation protocols coupled with a lack of standardisation of the PCR itself. Furthermore, it has become clear that the performance of PCR-based assays in general is compromised by the inadequacy of experimental controls, insufficient optimisation of assay performance as well as lack of transparency in reporting experimental details. The recently published “Minimum Information for the publication of real-time Quantitative PCR Experiments” (MIQE) guidelines provide a blueprint for good PCR assay design and unambiguous reporting of experimental detail and results. We report the first real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay targeting Aspergillus species that has been designed, optimised and validated in strict compliance with the MIQE guidelines. The hydrolysis probe-based assay, designed to target the 18S rRNA DNA sequence of Aspergillus species, has an efficiency of 100% (range 95–107%), a dynamic range of at least six orders of magnitude and limits of quantification and detection of 6 and 0.6 Aspergillus fumigatus genomes, respectively. It does not amplify Candida, Scedosporium, Fusarium or Rhizopus species and its clinical sensitivity is demonstrated in histological material from proven IA cases, as well as concordant PCR and galactomannan data in matched broncho-alveolar lavage and blood samples. The robustness, specificity and sensitivity of this assay make it an ideal molecular diagnostic tool for clinical use.
Unsupervised acoustic model training: Comparing South African English and isiZulu

Large amounts of untranscribed audio data are generated every day. These audio resources can be used to develop robust acoustic models that can be used in a variety of speech-based systems. Manually transcribing this data is resource intensive and requires funding, time and expertise. Lightly-supervised training techniques, however, provide a means to rapidly transcribe audio, thus reducing the initial resource investment to begin the modelling process. Our findings suggest that the lightly-supervised training technique works well for English but when moving to an agglutinative language, such as isiZulu, the process fails to achieve the performance seen for English. Additionally, phone-based performances are significantly worse when compared to an approach using word-based language models. These results indicate a strong dependence on large or well-matched text resources for lightly-supervised training techniques.
A study on query expansion methods for patent retrieval

Patent retrieval is a recall-oriented search task where the objective is to find all possible relevant documents. Queries in patent retrieval are typically very long since they take the form of a patent claim or even a full patent application in the case of prior-art patent search. Nevertheless, there is generally a significant mismatch between the query and the relevant documents, often leading to low retrieval effectiveness. Some previous work has tried to address this mismatch through the application of query expansion (QE) techniques which have generally showed effectiveness for many other retrieval tasks. However, results of QE on patent search have been found to be very disappointing. We present a review of previous investigations of QE in patent retrieval, and explore some of these techniques on a prior-art patent search task. In addition, a novel method for QE using automatically generated synonyms set is presented. While previous QE techniques fail to improve over baseline retrieval, our new approach show statistically better retrieval precision over the baseline, although not for recall. In addition, it proves to be significantly more efficient than existing techniques. An extensive analysis to the results is presented which seeks to better understand situations where these QE techniques succeed or fail.
Energy-efficient LDPC layered decoder

It is very important to reduce the energy consumption of low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoders, especially for the intelligent and mobile terminals in green communications. This paper presents a novel energy-efficient layered decoder (EELD) to save the power consumption of quasi-cyclic LDPC (QC-LDPC) decoders based on the layered belief propagation (LBP) algorithm. The EELD forces a check-node process into asleep, when all the reliabilities of its neighboring variable nodes exceed the lazy threshold. The EELD also adopts the lower limit of the beliefs, rather than all the beliefs, of the neighboring variable nodes to compare with the lazy threshold in order to decide the state of check-node process. The EELD can skip the useless check-node processes to save energy consumption with slight additional complexity. Simulation results show that the EELD can improve the power efficiencies of the decoders by up to 28% for WiMAX codes without loss of error performances.
Program Summary

The long standing problem of the relations among the scalar invariants of the Rie-mann tensor is computationally solved for all 6·10 23 objects with up to 12 derivatives of the metric. This covers cases ranging from products of up to 6 undifferentiated Riemann tensors to cases with up to 10 covariant derivatives of a single Riemann. We extend our computer algebra system Invar to produce within seconds a canon-ical form for any of those objects in terms of a basis. The process is as follows: (1) an invariant is converted in real time into a canonical form with respect to the permutation symmetries of the Riemann tensor; (2) Invar reads a database of more than 6 · 10 5 relations and applies those coming from the cyclic symmetry of the Rie-mann tensor; (3) then applies the relations coming from the Bianchi identity, (4) the relations coming from commutations of covariant derivatives, (5) the dimensionally-dependent identities for dimension 4, and finally (6) simplifies invariants that can be expressed as product of dual invariants. Invar runs on top of the tensor computer algebra systems xTensor (for Mathematica) and Canon (for Maple). Catalogue identifier of previous version: ADSP Does the new version supersede the original program? : Yes. The previous version (1.0) only handled algebraic invariants. The current version (2.0) has been extended to cover differential invariants as well. Computers: Any computer running Mathematica versions 5.0 to 6.0 or Maple versions 9 to 11 Operating systems under which the new version has been tested: Linux, Unix, Windows XP, MacOS Programming language: Mathematica and Maple Memory required to execute with typical data: 100 Mb No. of bits in a word: 64 or 32 No. of processors used: 1 No. of bytes in distributed program, including test data, etc.: Code < 1Mb; database: 40 Mb; 13 expanded cases order 12 at commutation step: 250 Mb. Distribution format: Unencoded compressed tar file Nature of physical problem: Manipulation and simplification of scalar polynomial expressions formed from the Riemann tensor and its covariant derivatives. Method of solution: Algorithms of computational group theory to simplify expressions with tensors that obey permutation symmetries. Tables of syzygies of the scalar invariants of the Riemann tensor. Restrictions on the complexity of the problem: The present version only handles scalars, but not expressions with free indices. Typical running time: One second to fully reduce any monomial of the Riemann tensor up to degree 7 …
Nonlinear dynamic system identification and performance measurement using extreme learning machine

This paper describes the identification of a nonlinear time invariant system is quite essential for its stability point of view. Among all the identification approaches, FLANNs is the best one but in case of learning speed and convergence point of view it does not work well. Amongst all the traditional approaches, a newly developed algorithm named ELMs (Extreme Learning Machine) for identification and tracking bears only a hidden layer chooses the input weights as well as threshold values randomly. Due to this above matter of fact ELMs is widely named as SLFNs. This algorithm proofs best in terms of generalization and shows better convergence at a very high learning speed. The experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm is the best one for identification detection and tracking cases which hold an extremely high rate of learning.
Alteration of Intestinal Microbiota in Mice Orally Administered with Salmon Cartilage Proteoglycan, a Prophylactic Agent

Proteoglycan (PG) extracted from salmon nasal cartilage has potential to be a prophylactic agent. Daily oral administration of the PG attenuates systemic inflammatory response in the experimental mouse models. In this study, we applied the culture-independent approach to investigate an alteration of intestinal microbiota composition in PG-administered mice. The results indicated that the population level of bacilli increased in the small and large intestine upon PG administration. On the other hand, the population level of clostridia decreased in the large intestine. The proportion of bacteria that are able to ferment saccharides and produce short-chain fatty acids increased in the small intestine and decreased in the large intestine. Importantly, population level of probiotic lactobacilli and bacteria exhibiting the immunomodulatory effect increased in the PG-administered mice. In addition, several disease-associated bacteria decreased upon PG administration. These results provided an understanding of the specific role of PG involved in host immune modulation and supported our hypothesis that daily oral administration of PG improves the overall balance in composition of the intestinal microbial community.
Myo-inositol as a main metabolite in overwintering flies: seasonal metabolomic profiles and cold stress tolerance in a northern drosophilid fly

SUMMARY Coping with seasonal changes in temperature is an important factor underlying the ability of insects to survive over the harsh winter conditions in the northern temperate zone, and only a few drosophilids have been able to colonize sub-polar habitats. Information on their winter physiology is needed as it may shed light on the adaptive mechanisms of overwintering when compared with abundant data on the thermal physiology of more southern species, such as Drosophila melanogaster. Here we report the first seasonal metabolite analysis in a Drosophila species. We traced changes in the cold tolerance and metabolomic profiles in adult Drosophila montana flies that were exposed to thermoperiods and photoperiods similar to changes in environmental conditions of their natural habitat in northern Finland. The cold tolerance of diapausing flies increased noticeably towards the onset of winter; their chill coma recovery times showed a seasonal minimum between late autumn and early spring, whereas their survival after cold exposure remained high until late spring. The flies had already moderately accumulated glucose, trehalose and proline in autumn, but the single largest change occurred in myo-inositol concentrations. This increased up to 400-fold during the winter and peaked at 147 nmol mg−1 fresh mass, which is among the largest reported accumulations of this compound in insects.
Extending XACML profile for RBAC with semantic concepts

XACML is a widely accepted access control standard on the web. However, XACML policy files are hard to read and maintain, and quite difficult to express RBAC. In this paper, we extend XACML profile for RBAC using OWL in the motivation of simplifying policy administration with semantic concepts, and better synergy between XACML and RBAC. First we partly support RBAC policy of XACML with OWL. Then, we show how to use an OWL-DL reasoner to help XACML PDP to make access control decisions in the extended system architecture.
Understanding the role of relationships in making career choices among Turkish MBA students

Relationships are central to human functioning. They serve as channels for social resources such as informational, emotional and instrumental support. However, the role of these relational influences in career progress is usually de-emphasized in the literature. Rather, work and relatedness have been perceived as two opposite and distinct modalities of human functioning. Accordingly, work is assumed to represent agency, individuality and separateness, whereas relatedness is assumed to imply dependency. Only in recent years has interest in understanding how relationships and careers are intertwined increased (Blustein, 2001; Blustein et al., 1997; Blustein et al., 2004; Flum, 2001; Schultheiss, 2003; Phillips et al., 2001; Schultheiss et al., 2001). This increased interest in relationships in the organizational research is a reflection of a general tendency away from individualistic explanations toward more relational and contextual ones in social sciences. The recent research examining the interplay between work and relatedness points to the limitations of stereotypical individual autonomy at the workplace and argues that connectedness with others is essential. For example, based on an extensive literature, Baumeister and Leary (1995) concluded that relatedness is a basic need. Similarly, Bellah et al. (1985) illustrated that people find it difficult to imagine a good life as being lived alone. In their critiques of American individualism, Bellah et al. (1985, p. 82) noted. ‘For highly individuated Americans, there is something anomalous about the relation between parents and children, for the biologically normal dependence of children on adults is perceived as morally abnormal. ’ Hence,
Silencing of Pellino1 improves post-infarct cardiac dysfunction and attenuates left ventricular remodelling in mice.

AIMS Pellino1 is an evolutionally conserved immune regulator and participates in the regulation of Toll-like receptor/interleukin-1 receptor (TLR/IL-1R)-mediated signalling. Recent studies have shown that TLR/IL-1R contributes to the left ventricular (LV) remodelling after myocardial infarction (MI). However, the role of Pellino1 in LV remodelling following MI has not been investigated. This study examined the effect of Pellino1 silencing on cardiac function and LV remodelling after MI. METHODS AND RESULTS Male C57BL/6 mice were subjected to permanent ligation of left anterior descending coronary artery (LAD) to induce MI. The levels of Pellino1 were significantly increased in the myocardium 3 days and sustained for 4 weeks after MI, when compared with the sham control. Hypoxia increased Pellino1 expression in cultured cardiomyocytes and fibroblasts. To examine whether Pellino1 plays a role in MI-induced cardiac dysfunction and the LV remodelling, we suppressed the expression of Pellino1 either by intramyocardial delivery of adenovirus expressing siRNA for Pellino1 (AdsiPeli1) or by Cre-LoxP-mediated conditional deletion of Pellino1 from the myocardium. In both models, silencing of Pellino1 significantly attenuated MI-induced cardiac dysfunction, decreased scar size, and reduced collagen deposition, when compared with the control groups. Pellino1 silencing in mice also attenuated MI-induced Pellino1 E3 ligase activity, receptor-interacting protein 1 and tumor necrosis factor receptor associated factor 6 (TRAF6) ubiquitination, nuclear factor Kappa B (NF-κB) activity, cytokine production, and inflammatory cell infiltration into the myocardium when compared with the MI group. CONCLUSIONS Our data demonstrate that Pellino1 plays an important role in the pathogenesis of MI. Targeting Pellino1 may ameliorate cardiac dysfunction and remodelling following MI.
Efficient Content Distribution in DOOH Advertising Networks Exploiting Urban Geo-Social Connectivity

Digital out-of-home (DOOH) advertising networks, comprised of pervasive distributed digital signages (screens), are rapidly growing. It is reported that more than 70% of DOOH revenue comes from local ads, while it is especially challenging to decide when and where to deliver the most suitable ad due to the spatio-temporal dynamics of human mobility and preferences. Understanding urban geo-social connectivity in terms of people movement would greatly benefit ad content distribution, and could potentially be utilized by a large number of mobile applications and geo-social services. However, existing DOOH ad distribution systems are designed to target individuals, which might not be the best choice in public spaces, and do not consider the preferences of "cohort of users". In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to target cohort of users extracting urban geo-social connectivity through large-scale mobile network data and existing geo-social service data. We construct a dynamic urban geo-social connectivity graph, and formulate the problem of distributing ads for maximum exposure to the "right" users under a constrained budget. Hence, we propose a heuristic algorithm. Simulation results show that our system targeting "cohort of users" achieves a maximum 300% improvement compared to naive distributing method in displaying ads to the "right people" when user preferences are completely known, while a minimum of 25% improvement when the knowledge of user preferences is limited.
Distributed Self-Concatenated Coding for Cooperative Communication

In this paper, we propose a power-efficient distributed binary self-concatenated coding scheme using iterative decoding (DSECCC-ID) for cooperative communications. The DSECCC-ID scheme is designed with the aid of binary extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) charts. The source node transmits self-concatenated convolutional coded (SECCC) symbols to both the relay and destination nodes during the first transmission period. The relay performs SECCC-ID decoding, where it may or may not encounter decoding errors. It then reencodes the information bits using a recursive systematic convolutional (RSC) code during the second transmission period. The resultant symbols transmitted from the source and relay nodes can be viewed as the coded symbols of a three-component parallel concatenated encoder. At the destination node, three-component DSECCC-ID decoding is performed. The EXIT chart gives us an insight into operation of the distributed coding scheme, which enables us to significantly reduce the transmit power by about 3.3 dB in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) terms, as compared with a noncooperative SECCC-ID scheme at a bit error rate (BER) of 10-5. Finally, the proposed system is capable of performing within about 1.5 dB from the two-hop relay-aided network's capacity at a BER of 10-5, even if there may be decoding errors at the relay.