Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An exploration of motivation, relevance and realism in simulation based medical education : "I don't want to look like an idiot"

The use of simulation in medical education, as well as the literature in the area, has increased dramatically in the past two decades. There is emerging evidence that simulation can be effective and the features of simulation which result in improved training and patient outcomes are becoming clearer. It is known that attitudes and motivation influence learner behaviour and outcomes, yet there is a paucity of evidence for the effectiveness of simulation which takes this into account. This work offers an original contribution by providing a theoretically underpinned insight into motivation for simulation. It also adds to the literature by reviewing current evidence on the effectiveness of simulation, reviewing the literature on motivation in medical education and qualitatively exploring the factors which can enhance or hinder motivation for simulation in a range of medical professionals. Twenty-three doctors and senior medical students, sampled in existing learning groups, including medical students, foundation doctors, anaesthetists and general practitioners, participated in seven group interviews: transcribed interviews were analysed for content and theme using framework analysis. The results demonstrated a range of simulation experiences, positive and negative value perceptions and pragmatic factors which can enhance or undermine motivation. Positive value perceptions of simulation included providing a rehearsal opportunity, an opportunity to experience rare situations, a trigger for feedback and reflection, and an opportunity for teamworking, in a context free from the risk of patient harm. Negative value perceptions included anxiety about role play, peer scrutiny, and making mistakes whilst observed by peers: ‘I don’t want to look like an idiot’, and issues about appropriate degree of realism. Some groups of learners, such as GPs indicated that simulation based courses were less relevant to their learning needs, in contrast with anaesthetic mid-career doctors who considered simulation highly relevant and a normal part of their experience. Pragmatic moderators were also identified, such as time, cost and location. These findings were consistent with existing theories of learner motivation. This thesis makes a further original contribution to the literature by identifying the importance of realism (particularly semantic realism) as a factor influencing motivation. In this study the influence of realism on learner motivation was not readily mapped to existing theories of learner motivation, identifying a gap in the literature. This thesis highlights the importance of recognising anxiety in simulation, and ensuring appropriate realism. It recommends addressing anxiety as part of briefing and de-briefing for simulation, and recommends that course designers enhance internal consistency and semantic realism within simulation scenarios. Future research should take motivation and other learner attitudes into account when evaluating the effectiveness of simulation based educational interventions.
Wnt-Mediated Repression via Bipartite DNA Recognition by TCF in the Drosophila Hematopoietic System

The Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway plays many important roles in animal development, tissue homeostasis and human disease. Transcription factors of the TCF family mediate many Wnt transcriptional responses, promoting signal-dependent activation or repression of target gene expression. The mechanism of this specificity is poorly understood. Previously, we demonstrated that for activated targets in Drosophila, TCF/Pangolin (the fly TCF) recognizes regulatory DNA through two DNA binding domains, with the High Mobility Group (HMG) domain binding HMG sites and the adjacent C-clamp domain binding Helper sites. Here, we report that TCF/Pangolin utilizes a similar bipartite mechanism to recognize and regulate several Wnt-repressed targets, but through HMG and Helper sites whose sequences are distinct from those found in activated targets. The type of HMG and Helper sites is sufficient to direct activation or repression of Wnt regulated cis-regulatory modules, and protease digestion studies suggest that TCF/Pangolin adopts distinct conformations when bound to either HMG-Helper site pair. This repressive mechanism occurs in the fly lymph gland, the larval hematopoietic organ, where Wnt/β-catenin signaling controls prohemocytic differentiation. Our study provides a paradigm for direct repression of target gene expression by Wnt/β-catenin signaling and allosteric regulation of a transcription factor by DNA.
Climate variability, snow, and physiographic controls on storm hydrographs in small forested basins, western Cascades, Oregon

Large floods are often attributed to the melting of snow during a rain event. This study tested how climate variability, snowpack presence, and basin physiography were related to storm hydrograph shape in three small (<1 km2) basins with old‐growth forest in western Oregon. Relationships between hydrograph characteristics and precipitation were tested for approximately 800 storms over a nearly 30‐year period. Analyses controlled for (1) snowpack presence/absence, (2) antecedent soil moisture, and (3) hillslope length and gradient. For small storms (<150 mm precipitation), controlling for precipitation, the presence of a snowpack on near‐saturated soil increased the threshold of precipitation before hydrograph rise, extended the start lag, centroid lag, and duration of storm hydrographs, and increased the peak discharge. The presence of a snowpack on near‐saturated soil sped up and steepened storm hydrographs in a basin with short steep slopes, but delayed storm hydrographs in basins with longer or more gentle slopes. Hydrographs of the largest events, which were extreme regional rain and rain‐on‐snow floods, were not sensitive to landform characteristics or snowpack presence/absence. Although the presence of a snowpack did not increase peak discharge in small, forested basins during large storms, it had contrasting effects on storm timing in small basins, potentially synchronizing small basin contributions to the larger basin hydrograph during large rain‐on‐snow events. By altering the relative timing of hydrographs, snowpack melting could produce extreme floods from precipitation events whose size is not extreme. Further work is needed to examine effects of canopy openings, snowpack, and climate warming on extreme rain‐on‐snow floods at the large basin scale. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Information Technology and Business Value in a Global Economy: Do Information Technology Investments Pay Off In a Developing Economy?

Understanding the business value of IT has mostly been studied in developed countries, but because most investment in developing countries is derived from external sources, the influence of that investment on business value is likely to be different. We test this notion using a two-layer model. We examine the impact of IT investments on firm processes, and the relationship of these processes to firm performance in a developing country. Our findings suggest that investment in different areas of IT positively relates to improvements in intermediate business processes and these intermediate business processes positively relate to the overall financial performance of firms in a developing country.
A study on occurrence rates per bit for the logistic map over integers

We are investigating the logistic map over integers with finite precisions and sequences out-putted by the iterative mapping. In our proposed simple pseudo-random number generator with the logistic map over integers, we implicitly assumed that 0 and 1 occurrence frequencies per bit of outputs by the map are nearly equal. By some numerical experiments, we got the conjecture that occurrence rates per bit are nearly equal for many bits of 2n-bit values in the intermediate step of the map by one iteration and many iterations.
Documentary Abstracting: Toward a Methodological Model

In the general abstracting process (GAP), there are two types of data: textual, within a particularly framed trilogy (surface, deep, and rhetoric); and documentary (abstractor, means of production, and user demands). For its development, the use of the following disciplines, among others, is proposed: linguistics (structural, transformational, and textual), logic (formal and fuzzy), and psychology (cognitive). The model for that textual transformation is based on a system of combined strategies with four key stages: reading‐understanding, selection, interpretation, and synthesis. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Rapid application specific floating-point unit generation with bit-alignment

While ASIPs have allowed designers to create processors with custom instructions to target specific applications, floating point units are still instantiated as fixed general-purpose units, which wastes area if not fully utilized. Therefore, there is a need for custom FPUs for embedded systems. The creation of a custom FPU requires the selection of a subset of the full floating-point instruction set and the implementation of this subset in hardware, such that the runtime of the application is minimized. To minimize area, it is desirable to merge the datapaths for each of the floating-point operations, so that redundant hardware is minimized. Floating-point datapaths are complex and contain components with varying bit-widths, so sharing components of different bit-widths is necessary. However, this introduces the problem of bit-alignment, which involves determining how smaller resources should be aligned within larger resources when merged. This is a problem that has been largely neglected in previous work. Thus, this paper presents a novel algorithm for solving the bit-alignment problem, which neatly integrates into the datapath merging process. By solving this bit-alignment problem, automatic datapath merging can be made available for FPU generation. To explore the trade-offs between area and performance, a rapid design space exploration was performed to determine which FP operations should be implemented in hardware rather than emulated. Our results show that more floating-point hardware does not necessarily equate to lower run-time if the additional hardware increases delay. We found that bit-alignment reduced area by an average of 22.5% in our benchmarks, compared to an average of 14.1% without bit-alignment.
Indigenous People and Qualitative Research - Making It Work

Indigenous people currently comprise 26.8 % of the Northern Territory population. The Federal Government has recently embarked on a closing the gap campaign to improve the lives of Indigenous people and to address the disadvantage that exits in the lives of Indigenous people. This paper is designed to provide Indigenous and nonindigenous people working in research with some practical advice on how to improve the research experience for Indigenous people and how to develop culturally appropriate research methodologies. The paper proposes that qualitative research methods are practical, useful, beneficial and culturally appropriate for research on and with Indigenous people. The paper also provides practical advice on how to ensure that Indigenous people are represented in research to ensure that their voices are clearly heard. It is hoped that this paper creates awareness among researchers so that they can use this awareness in their research on Indigenous people. The methodology used to write the paper is based on the author's own research experiences as an Indigenous researcher. In the main, the data used in this paper has been gathered from qualitative research textbooks and from personal experiences in research and based on the author's personal experiences of delivering post graduate research courses on Indigenous research issues. The paper shows that qualitative research methods can be useful, productive and culturally appropriate for Indigenous people and can be used to enrich data and to encourage Indigenous people to participate in research. The paper shows that through qualitative research techniques, Indigenous people are able to express themselves and identify issues themselves, which means that researchers are able to gather more data while at the same time, providing Indigenous research participants with a feeling of cultural safety. This is important for those in the area of Indigenous research as Indigenous people have had a long history of negative research experiences.
Are short γ-ray bursts collimated? GRB 050709, a flare but no break

Context. From the small sample of afterglow lightcurves of short duration γ -ray bursts (GRBs), the decays are rapid, roughly following a power-law in time. It has been assumed that the afterglow emission in short GRBs is collimated in jets in the same way as in long GRBs. Aims. An achromatic break in a short GRB afterglow lightcurve would therefore be strong evidence in favour of collimation in short GRBs. Methods. We examine the optical lightcurve of the afterglow of the short GRB 050709, the only short GRB where a jet break has been claimed from optical data. Results. We show that (1) the decay follows a single power-law from 1.4 to 19 days after the burst and has a decay index $\alpha = 1. 73_{-0.04}^{+0.11}$; (2) that an optical flare at ${\sim}10$ days is required by the data, roughly contemporaneous with a flare in the X-ray data; and (3) that there is no evidence for a break in the lightcurve. Conclusions. This means that so far there is no direct evidence for collimation in the outflows of short GRBs. The available limits on the collimation angles in short GRBs now strongly suggest much wider opening angles than found in long GRBs.
Mucin 5B Promoter Polymorphism Is Associated with Susceptibility to Interstitial Lung Diseases in Chinese Males

The variation of G>T in the MUC5B promoter (rs35705950) has been associated with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and familial interstitial pneumonia (FIP) in Caucasians, but no information is available regarding this variant in the Chinese population. We recruited 405 patients with interstitial lung diseases (ILD), including 165 IPF patients and 2043 healthy controls, for genotyping the MUC5B gene in the Chinese population. One hundred three patients with pneumonia and 360 patients with autoimmune diseases (ADs) were recruited as disease controls. Our results indicated that the prevalence of the minor allele (T) of the polymorphism rs35705950 in healthy Chinese subjects was approximately 0.66%, which was lower than that described in the Caucasian population. The frequencies of the T allele were 3.33% and 2.22% in IPF and ILD patients, respectively, and these values were significantly higher than those of healthy controls (P = 0.001, OR = 4.332 for IPF, and P = 0.002, OR = 2.855 for ILD). A stratified analysis showed that this variant in MUC5B associated with the risk for ILD mainly in older male Chinese subjects. No difference was observed between patients with pneumonia, AD patients, and healthy controls.
User-centric Architecture for Virtual Voice-only VoIP Conferencing

Recently, porting real-time collaborative services on the Internet has been attracting much interest. Mixing packets from all clients in a conference can lead to diminished speech clarity. In this paper, we describe real-time voice conferencing service framework designed for a Virtual Conferencing Environment. We propose a system designed to accommodate a large number of participants without losing spontaneity. We surmise that change in speakers addressing the conference should not be abrupt, which transpires when the decision is exclusively based on floor control techniques leading lower quality of conference. We propose a dynamic conference control and media handling of a conference taking into account users behavior. We try to allow users to decide who should have the floor to address the conference instinctively. Highlights of this architecture are scalability, bandwidth saving and improvement in quality of the conference. The contributions of this work aid in faster and user-friendly implementations of collaborative conferencing systems on the Internet. A working prototype has been field tested on a campus wide subnet.
Image Quality Metrics

Advances in image synthesis techniques allow us to simulate the distribution of light energy in a scene with great precision. Unfortunately, this does not ensure that the displayed image will have a high fidelity visual appearance. Reasons for this include the limited dynamic range of displays, any residual shortcomings of the rendering process, and the extent to which human vision encodes such departures from perfect physical realism. Image quality metrics are paramount to provide quantitative data on the fidelity of rendered images. This course addresses techniques to compare real and synthetic images, identify important visual system characteristics and help reduce rendering times significantly. Case studies involving both static and dynamic images are considered. Their different image quality metric requirements are compared and contrasted.
Satisfied with red tape? Leadership, civic duty, and career intention in the military

ABSTRACT We examine how the coerciveness of HR procedures and leadership behaviours affect job satisfaction (JS) and career intention (CI), and how civic duty (CD) mediates these relationships. Within the framework of the human resource management performance chain, we draw on leadership and motivational theories and test the proposed relations in a structural equation model with data from a survey of the Federal Armed Forces Germany (n = 1,331). The findings show that the behaviour of supervisors, rather than red tape, influences JS and CI. The results extend our understanding of the interplay between leadership behaviours and followership attitudes under high degrees of organizational coercion.
Exploiting Different Strategies for the Parallelization of an SMT Solver

In this paper we present two diﬀerent parallelization schemes for the SMT solver iSAT, based on (1) the distribution of work by dividing the search space into disjoint parts and exploring them in parallel, thereby exchanging learnt information, and (2) a portfolio approach, where the entire benchmark instance is explored in parallel by several copies of the same solver but using diﬀerent heuristics to guide the search. We also combine both approaches such that solvers examine disjoint parts of the search space using diﬀerent heuristics. The main contribution of the paper is to study the performances of diﬀerent techniques for parallelizing iSAT.
A node authentication clustering based security for ADHOC network

The exodus to Wireless networks from wired network is a growing field in the past few decades. Various wireless applications are made up of mobility and scalability based nodes. Among all the wireless networks Mobile Ad-Hoc network is one of the most significant and distinctive applications today. All the nodes are self employed, not fixed on a fixed network infrastructure, and it can act as sender as well as receiver, and directly communicate to the other nodes in the network within the communication range of the network. Also the nodes in the Wireless network can act as relay nodes to their neighbors to relay messages. Since the nodes in the Wireless Network having the ability to self-configuring by them, they are deployed in critical mission based applications like military usage or any kind of emergency recovery. Since the open medium and wide distribution of nodes make the network vulnerable to malicious attackers. In such situations, it is necessary to deploy an effective IDS mechanism to prevent or protect the Network from attacks. In the existing system EAACK - [Enhanced Adaptive Acknowledgement] is proposed as an IDS and it especially designed for MANET. In this paper a combined IP-trace back with E2AACK - [End-to-End Adaptive Acknowledgment] mechanism is proposed to detect and prevent the malicious nodes in the network. The malicious node activity can be detected by IP-trace back and prevented by getting acknowledgement from both end nodes. The simulation result shows that the E2AACK approach provides higher detection rate and prevention which greatly affect the network performance in terms of throughput and delay.
Comparative News Summarization Using Linear Programming

Comparative News Summarization aims to highlight the commonalities and differences between two comparable news topics. In this study, we propose a novel approach to generating comparative news summaries. We formulate the task as an optimization problem of selecting proper sentences to maximize the comparativeness within the summary and the representativeness to both news topics. We consider semantic-related cross-topic concept pairs as comparative evidences, and consider topic-related concepts as representative evidences. The optimization problem is addressed by using a linear programming model. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
CTL Responses of High Functional Avidity and Broad Variant Cross-Reactivity Are Associated with HIV Control

Cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses targeting specific HIV proteins, in particular Gag, have been associated with relative control of viral replication in vivo. However, Gag-specific CTL can also be detected in individuals who do not control the virus and it remains thus unclear how Gag-specific CTL may mediate the beneficial effects in some individuals but not in others. Here, we used a 10mer peptide set spanning HIV Gag-p24 to determine immunogen-specific T-cell responses and to assess functional properties including functional avidity and cross-reactivity in 25 HIV-1 controllers and 25 non-controllers without protective HLA class I alleles. Our data challenge the common belief that Gag-specific T cell responses dominate the virus-specific immunity exclusively in HIV-1 controllers as both groups mounted responses of comparable breadths and magnitudes against the p24 sequence. However, responses in controllers reacted to lower antigen concentrations and recognized more epitope variants than responses in non-controllers. These cross-sectional data, largely independent of particular HLA genetics and generated using direct ex-vivo samples thus identify T cell responses of high functional avidity and with broad variant reactivity as potential functional immune correlates of relative HIV control.
SWS 2016 Feminist Lecture: Reducing Gender Biases In Modern Workplaces: A Small Wins Approach to Organizational Change

The accumulation and advancement of gender scholarship over past decades has led us to the point where gender scholars today can leverage our deep understanding of the reproduction of gender inequality to develop and test models of change. In this lecture, I present one such model designed to reduce the negative effects of stereotypic biases on women’s workplace outcomes. After synthesizing the literature on stereotyping and bias and showing the limits of past change efforts, I develop a “small wins” model of change. Key to this model is that researchers work with teams of managers to produce concrete, implementable actions that produce visible results. I argue that small wins motivate further action and are the building blocks to larger organizational transformation. Preliminary results from several case studies show that this approach can produce important changes in the short run, such as reducing gender biases in workplace evaluations, and that these small wins can inspire longer run change, such as increases in the rate of hiring women.