Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal trajectories of illness perceptions among adolescents with type 1 diabetes.

OBJECTIVES To examine development in illness perceptions of type 1 diabetes across adolescence and relationships with intelligence, diabetes responsibility, and diabetes outcomes. METHODS Illness perceptions were measured via the Illness Perceptions Questionnaire at 3 times, every 6 months in 213 adolescents (M age = 13.00; SD = 1.54) with type 1 diabetes. Intelligence and adolescents' perceived responsibility for diabetes were examined, and adolescents' report of adherence and quality of life (QOL), and glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c) from medical records addressed diabetes-related outcomes. RESULTS Linear growth models showed significant increases in perceptions of diabetes coherence, chronicity, consequences, personal and treatment control, and decreases in diabetes cyclicality and parental control across time. More favorable illness perceptions were generally associated with adolescent intelligence at baseline, more adolescent responsibility for management, better adherence and QOL, and lower HbA1c at each time point. CONCLUSIONS Results suggest that adolescents develop complex illness perceptions, which are associated with better diabetes management.
A novel diblock of copolymer of (monomethoxy poly [ethylene glycol]-oleate) with a small hydrophobic fraction to make stable micelles/polymersomes for curcumin delivery to cancer cells

Curcumin is a potent natural anticancer agent, but its effectiveness is limited by properties such as very low solubility, high rate of degradation, and low rate of absorption of its hydrophobic molecules in vivo. To date, various nanocarriers have been used to improve the bioavailability of this hydrophobic biomaterial. This study investigates the encapsulation of curcumin in a novel nanostructure of monomethoxy poly(ethylene glycol)-oleate (mPEG-OA) and its anticancer effect. Tests were done to determine the critical micelle concentration (CMC), encapsulation efficiency, drug-loading efficiency, and cytotoxicity (against U87MG brain carcinoma cells and HFSF-PI3 cells as normal human fibroblasts) of some nanodevice preparations. The results of fluorescence microscopy and cell-cycle analyses indicated that the in vitro bioavailability of the encapsulated curcumin was significantly greater than that of free curcumin. Cytotoxicity evaluations showed that half maximal inhibitory concentrations of free curcumin and curcumin-loaded mPEG-OA for the U87MG cancer cell line were 48 μM and 24 μM, respectively. The Annexin-V-FLUOS assay was used to quantify the apoptotic effect of the prepared nanostructures. Apoptosis induction was observed in a dose-dependent manner after curcumin-loaded mPEG-OA treatments. Two common self-assembling structures, micelles and polymersomes, were observed by atomic force microscopy and dynamic light scattering, and the abundance of each structure was dependent on the concentration of the diblock copolymer. The mPEG-OA micelles had a very low CMC (13.24 μM or 0.03 g/L). Moreover, atomic force microscopy and dynamic light scattering showed that the curcumin-loaded mPEG-OA polymersomes had very stable structures, and at concentrations 1,000 times less than the CMC, at which the micelles disappear, polymersomes were the dominant structures in the dispersion with a reduced size distribution below 150 nm. Overall, the results from these tests revealed that this nanocarrier can be considered as an appropriate drug delivery system for delivering curcumin to cancer cells.
Process Mining in Healthcare - A Case Study

To gain competitive advantage, hospitals try to streamline their processes. In order to do so, it is essential to have an accurate view of the “careflows” under consideration. In this paper, we apply process mining techniques to obtain meaningful knowledge about these flows, e.g., to discover typical paths followed by particular groups of patients. This is a non-trivial task given the dynamic nature of healthcare processes. The paper demonstrates the applicability of process mining using a real case of a gynecological oncology process in a Dutch hospital. Using a variety of process mining techniques, we analyzed the healthcare process from three different perspectives: (1) the control flow perspective, (2) the organizational perspective and (3) the performance perspective. In order to do so we extracted relevant event logs from the hospitals information system and analyzed these logs using the ProM framework. The results show that process mining can be used to provide new insights that facilitate the improvement of existing careflows.
Birth Order Reconciling Conflicting Effects

Secular trends in test scores are accurately predicted by trends in aggregate birth orders. The trend data contradict individual-difference analyses that show birth order as a poor predictor of individual test scores. This article demonstrates why the 2 formulations of the problem-the individually distributed birth order analysis and aggregate-pattern analysis--generate different results. A meaningful interpretation is given by the confluence model a theory specifying the process whereby the intellectual environment modulates intellectual development. The authors introduce the concept of collective potentiation that specifies collective side effects of birth order, In contrast to genetic theories, the confluence model quantifies the differential environmental contributions to intellectual development of successive siblings, and it offers several well-confirmed derivations that genetic and other developmental theories cannot explain. order figures also changed during this interval from 2.3 in 1962 (who took the A-levels in 1979) to 1.9 for children born in 1978 (who took their A-levels in 1995). Among others, a high aggregate birth order of a cohort means that the proportion of firstborns in that cohort is also relatively h i g h a factor that is significant, as we explain below, in understanding test score trends. The correspondence between the test trends and family trends is remarkable. Regression equations showed that the aggregate birth order was by far the major source of variation in test scores, for it alone accounted for as much as 81% of variance in SATs, 86% in the A-levels, a n d 89% in the Iowa scores. 2
Revisiting the Translation of Nature of Science Understandings into Instructional Practice: Teachers' nature of science pedagogical content knowledge

This study (a) assessed the influence of an integrated nature of science (NOS) instructional intervention on inservice secondary science teachers' understandings, retention of those understandings, and their NOS instructional planning and practices; and (b) examined factors that mediated the translation of teachers' NOS understandings into practice. Nineteen teachers participated in an intensive, 6-week NOS course, which concluded with teachers developing plans to address NOS in their classrooms. Next, 6 participants were observed as they implemented their instructional plans. Data sources included pretest, posttest, and delayed-test NOS assessments, classroom observations, and several teacher-generated artifacts. The NOS course was effective in helping teachers develop informed NOS conceptions and retain those understandings 5 months after its conclusion. Teachers met with challenges and successes as they attempted to address NOS instructionally. The translation of NOS conceptions into practice was primarily mediated by the very nature of teachers' newly acquired NOS understandings, which were situated within the science contents, contexts, and experiences in which they were developed (i.e. the NOS course); thus, limiting participants' abilities to transfer their understandings into novel contexts and contents. The results helped build a model of the sources of science teachers' pedagogical content knowledge for teaching about NOS in content-rich contexts.
Puerto Rican High Achievers: An Example of Ethnic and Academic Identity Compatibility

Although research finds that members of some involuntary minority ethnic groups tend to develop oppositional identities, Puerto Rican students studied in this research project at an urban high school did not associate school success with “whiteness. ” These students were academically successful while still maintaining their ethnic identity. They were not accused of acting white, did not mask their academic accomplishments, and did not assume raceless personas. Different conceptualizations of ethnicity, sociohistorical context, and class may account for their maintenance of ethnic identity while achieving success in school.
Exploration of Linked Anomalies in Sensor Data for Suspicious Behavior Detection

We present a visual analytics system to understand the operation data of a company, GAStech, from IEEE VAST Challenge 2016. The data include proximity data recording the locations and movements of employees, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) data recording the environmental conditions in the building. Analyzing the data to detect the suspicious behaviors of some disgruntled employees is of special interest. Our system provides coordinated multiple views to visualize the proximity data and the HVAC data over time. Visual hints and comparisons are designed for users to identify abnormal patterns and compare them. Furthermore, the system automatically detects and correlates the anomalies in the data. We provide use cases to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.
HealthyhornsTXT: A Text-Messaging Program to Promote College Student Health and Wellness

Objective: Text-messaging interventions positively affect health behaviors, but their use on college campuses has been limited. Text messaging serves as a relatively affordable way to communicate with large audiences and is one of the preferred modes of communication for young adults. This study examined the feasibility and acceptability of a campus-wide, health text–messaging program. Participants: The subscriber pool consisted of approximately 6,000 undergraduate students from a large, southern university. From that pool, 1,095 participants (64% female; 41% White) completed a posttest survey. Method: Text messages covered a range of health topics and information about campus resources. Research was conducted from August through December 2015. Process data were collected throughout the semester; participants’ attitudes were assessed via an online survey at the program’s conclusion. Results: Students demonstrated engagement with the messages throughout the semester as evidenced by replies to text-back keywords and clicks on website links embedded within messages. Messages about sleep, stress management, and hydration were considered most relevant. The majority of participants (61%) reported increased awareness regarding their health. Conclusions: Text-messaging interventions are a feasible strategy to improve college student health.
Formulating age: Dimensions of age identity in elderly talk

It is illuminating to study identity as a dynamic, interactionally achieved process rather than as a static, intraindividual construct. Our article identifies and seeks to overview the diverse means by which the age identities of elderly (aged 70–87) interactants are formulated in a corpus of 40 cross‐generation and within‐generation conversations, based on transcriptions of videorecorded data. We propose an informal taxonomy of age‐identity marking processes in talk, spanning particular age categorization and temporal framing processes. Detailed analysis of individual cases shows how variable identities may be constructed by and for individuals, often bilaterally, and relative to projected identities of others. Finally, we consider theoretical and practical implications of the discursive management of age identity for intergenerational relations and contact.
Effects of International Comparative Studies on Educational Quality on the Quality of Educational Research

Large-scale survey studies of educational achievement are becoming increasingly frequent, and they are visibly present in both educational policy debates and within the educational research community. One main aim of these studies is to provide descriptions of inputs, processes and outcomes, and another aim is to provide explanations of how different factors interrelate to produce educational outcomes. These aims are difficult to reach, which in combination with the fact that the comparative studies are typically more policy driven than theory driven, are reasons why these studies are contested on quality grounds. In this article, a set of fundamental methodological challenges related to the validity of the measurement instruments and to the possibility of making inferences about causality are identified and discussed in relation to examples of different studies. Strengths and weaknesses of different research approaches are discussed, and it is proposed that the dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative approaches should be replaced with distinctions between low-and high-level inference approaches with respect to data, generalization and explanation. It is concluded that while the international studies easily invite misuse and misinterpretation, they also offer possibilities for improving the quality of educational research, because the high-quality data generated by these studies can be taken advantage of in research on causal effects of factors in and out of educational systems.
Does Passive Learning Account for Disabled Readers' Comprehension Deficits in Ordinary Reading Situations?

Thirty-two LD and 32 average elementary students, matched by grade, read under three conditions: a classroom group condition, an individual (child and examiner) condition, and an individual restatement condition, requiring subjects to summarize, or restate, the contents of each paragraph during passage reading. Overall results of comprehension tests failed to confirm predicted differential effects of conditions on attentional control. The performance pattern across conditions was the same for both reader groups, although LD students' comprehension was considerably lower than that of their average peers. The condition requiring restatements resulted in superior performance for both reader groups suggesting that average as well as LD readers did not always process the texts actively under the group and individual reading conditions.
A Dynamic Reconstruction Approach to Topic Summarization of User-Generated-Content

User generated contents (UGCs) from various social media sites give analysts the opportunity to obtain a comprehensive and dynamic view of any topic from multiple heterogeneous information sources. Summarization provides a promising means of distilling the overview of the targeted topic by aggregating and condensing the related UGCs. However, the mass volume, uneven quality, and dynamics of UGCs, pose new challenges that are not addressed by existing multi-document summarization techniques. In this paper, we introduce a timely task of dynamic structural and textual summarization. We generate topic hierarchy from the UGCs as a high level overview and structural guide for exploring and organizing the content. To capture the evolution of events in the content, we propose a unified dynamic reconstruction approach to detect the update points and generate the time-sequence textual summary. To enhance the expressiveness of the reconstruction space, we further use the topic hierarchy to organize the UGCs and the hierarchical subtopics to augment the sentence representation. Experimental comparison with the state-of-the-art summarization models on a multi-source UGC dataset shows the superiority of our proposed methods. Moreover, we conducted a user study on our usability enhancement measures. It suggests that by disclosing some meta information of the summary generation process in the proposed framework, the time-sequence textual summaries can pair with the structural overview of the topic hierarchy to achieve interpretable and verifiable summarization.
Classroom environment and student outcomes among students using anthropometry activities in high‐school science

The main purpose of this research was to evaluate the use of anthropometric activities among a sample of 761 high‐school biology students in terms of student outcomes (achievement and attitudes) and classroom environment (assessed with the Science Laboratory Environment Inventory, SLEI). Data analyses supported the SLEI's factorial validity, internal consistency reliability and ability to differentiate between classrooms. The efficacy of using anthropometric activities was supported by pretest–posttest differences in achievement, as well as by a comparison with a control group's attitudes and perceptions of classroom learning environment. Overall, results provide a degree of support for the positive influence of using anthropometric activities in terms of students' attitudes and the classroom learning environment.
Use of an intermediate face between a learner and a teacher in second language learning with shadowing

Shadowing is a language-learning method whereby a learner attempts to repeat, i.e., shadow, what he/she hears immediately. We propose displaying a computer-generated intermediate face between a learner and a teacher as an appropriate intermediate scaffold for shadowing. The intermediate face allows the learner to follow a teacher's face and mouth movements more effectively. We describe a prototype system that generates an intermediate face from real-time camera input and captured video. We also discuss a user study of the prototype system with crowd-sourced participants. The results of the user study suggest that the prototype system provided better pronunciation cues than video-only shadowing techniques.
ENHANCED REPETITION BLINDNESS WITH ANGRY EMOTIONAL FACES

Repetition blindness is defined as difficulty detecting repeated targets within an array of stimuli. However, it is unclear how emotion affects this phenomenon. In the present study, participants were exposed to happy and angry faces, and nonemotional stimuli shown in rapid serial visual presentation. They were required to identify the repeated targets, and the magnitude of repetition blindness was measured to indicate emotional effects. Analysis showed that, while there was no difference in accuracy between happy and angry faces on non-repeated trials, accuracy was significantly lower for angry faces on repeated trials inducing greater repetition blindness. This effect was stronger when the stimulus exposure rate was 150 msec, suggesting its early processes and strong capturing of attention. These results show that repetition blindness effect was stronger with angry faces, which is likely due to enhanced emotional alertness and increase in intensity of the processes inducing greater repetition blindness.
In vitro evolution of α-hemolysin using a liposome display

Significance The directed evolution of proteins in vitro has generated highly functional proteins and has contributed to elucidating the sequence–function relationship of proteins. However, the available methods consider globular proteins, not membrane proteins, despite the biological and pharmaceutical importance of the latter. We report the development of a method called liposome display, which enables the in vitro evolution of membrane proteins. We applied the method to evolve the pore-forming activity of α-hemolysin from Staphylococcus aureus and obtained a mutant with 30-fold higher activity than the WT. Given its high degree of controllability, liposome display allows for the rapid and efficient evolution of a wide range of membrane proteins, thereby improving the field of membrane protein engineering. In vitro methods have enabled the rapid and efficient evolution of proteins and successful generation of novel and highly functional proteins. However, the available methods consider only globular proteins (e.g., antibodies, enzymes) and not membrane proteins despite the biological and pharmaceutical importance of the latter. In this study, we report the development of a method called liposome display that can evolve the properties of membrane proteins entirely in vitro. This method, which involves in vitro protein synthesis inside liposomes, which are cell-sized phospholipid vesicles, was applied to the pore-forming activity of α-hemolysin, a membrane protein derived from Staphylococcus aureus. The obtained α-hemolysin mutant possessed only two point mutations but exhibited a 30-fold increase in its pore-forming activity compared with the WT. Given the ability to synthesize various membrane proteins and modify protein synthesis and functional screening conditions, this method will allow for the rapid and efficient evolution of a wide range of membrane proteins.
Parameter identification and validation analysis for a small USV

In this paper a manoeuvre based identification process and parameter analysis of a small unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is described. The objective is to identify unknown hydrodynamic and propulsion parameters in one step by means of a series of different manoeuvres. Methods on the basis of the Fisher information matrix are used for the quality analysis of the parameter estimates. Furthermore, a process for reduction of parameters is deployed. It is also shown that no thrust force measurements are required and the complete parameter set can be considered concurrently, avoiding the risk of suboptimal results when using a sequential approach.
Why Your Encrypted Database Is Not Secure

Encrypted databases, a popular approach to protecting data from compromised database management systems (DBMS's), use abstract threat models that capture neither realistic databases, nor realistic attack scenarios. In particular, the "snapshot attacker" model used to support the security claims for many encrypted databases does not reflect the information about past queries available in any snapshot attack on an actual DBMS. We demonstrate how this gap between theory and reality causes encrypted databases to fail to achieve their "provable security" guarantees.