Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Negotiating ‘Community’ in Educational Settings: Adult South Sudanese Students in Australia

In the culturally diverse Australian context, the relationship between culture, community and learning is a significant factor in educational outcomes. We argue that teachers and service providers can assist refugee students by being mindful of the students' negotiation of widening circles of community rather than by viewing the learning environment as independent of students' orientation to community. Data for this paper is derived from an ethnographic study of adult south Sudanese engaged in three different Australian learning environments. The concepts of social capital, interdependent self-construal/conjoint agency and active versus passive settlement styles are used to explore students' sense of belonging to, and negotiation of, different communities in relation to learning. Participants' engagement with learning is mediated through these different levels of community – an immediate ethnic group, a south Sudanese community and the wider Australian community. Active participants in the learning environments achieved success by focusing on long-term ethnic community responsibilities, negotiating these responsibilities to prioritise learning and developing strategic relationships with teachers.
Artificial vision with wirelessly powered subretinal electronic implant alpha-IMS

This study aims at substituting the essential functions of photoreceptors in patients who are blind owing to untreatable forms of hereditary retinal degenerations. A microelectronic neuroprosthetic device, powered via transdermal inductive transmission, carrying 1500 independent microphotodiode-amplifier-electrode elements on a 9 mm2 chip, was subretinally implanted in nine blind patients. Light perception (8/9), light localization (7/9), motion detection (5/9, angular speed up to 35 deg s−1), grating acuity measurement (6/9, up to 3.3 cycles per degree) and visual acuity measurement with Landolt C-rings (2/9) up to Snellen visual acuity of 20/546 (corresponding to decimal 0.037 or corresponding to 1.43 logMAR (minimum angle of resolution)) were restored via the subretinal implant. Additionally, the identification, localization and discrimination of objects improved significantly (n = 8; p < 0.05 for each subtest) in repeated tests over a nine-month period. Three subjects were able to read letters spontaneously and one subject was able to read letters after training in an alternative-force choice test. Five subjects reported implant-mediated visual perceptions in daily life within a field of 15° of visual angle. Control tests were performed each time with the implant's power source switched off. These data show that subretinal implants can restore visual functions that are useful for daily life.
Strategic Rhetoric: a constraint in changing the practice of teachers

Abstract Within the overall occupational culture of teachers, there are a number of different staff subcultures which compete for limited resources within a contracting educational system. This paper concentrates upon the subculture of physical education by focusing on one department engaged in a teacher initiated curriculum innovation where competing perspectives of change are made evident. It is suggested that coping strategies developed within the educational context of the school in order to enhance subject status may deflect teachers from considering the possibilities of change in their classroom practice.
Consequence Choice and Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities: Effects on Academic Engagement

The difficulties students identified with emotional and behavior disabilities present sometimes strain inclusive educators. General education teachers often find themselves ill equipped to provide effective support for both students with and without disabilities. An effective intervention that may hold promise for included students with academic and behavior problems involves the use of choice; more specifically, consequence choice, which provides students with the ability to select their own reinforcement. The current study examined the effects of choice of reinforcement via a single-subject multielement design with baseline for four students with emotional disturbance or behavior disabilities educated in an inclusion setting. With an increase in task difficulty, the behavior of two students indicated a functional relation between engagement and choice and two additional students demonstrated a functional relation between the presence and absence of reinforcement. Students did not distinguish academic behavior across the course of the study. The difficulty level of the instructional material, as well as the perceived preference of the reinforcers may play a role in study outcomes. Future directions follow study limitations and implications for inclusion practitioners.
AntNet: Distributed Stigmergetic Control for Communications Networks

This paper introduces AntNet, a novel approach to the adaptive learning of routing tables in communications networks. AntNet is a distributed, mobile agents based Monte Carlo system that was inspired by recent work on the ant colony metaphor for solving optimization problems. AntNet's agents concurrently explore the network and exchange collected information. The communication among the agents is indirect and asynchronous, mediated by the network itself. This form of communication is typical of social insects and is called stigmergy. We compare our algorithm with six state-of-the-art routing algorithms coming from the telecommunications and machine learning fields. The algorithms' performance is evaluated over a set of realistic testbeds. We run many experiments over real and artificial IP datagram networks with increasing number of nodes and under several paradigmatic spatial and temporal traffic distributions. Results are very encouraging. AntNet showed superior performance under all the experimental conditions with respect to its competitors. We analyze the main characteristics of the algorithm and try to explain the reasons for its superiority.
Robust inverse perspective mapping based on vanishing point

Vision-based road signs detection and recognition has been widely used in intelligent robotics and automotive autonomous driving technology. Currently, one-time calibration of inverse perspective mapping (IPM) parameters is employed to eliminate the effect of perspective mapping, but it is not robust to the uphill and downhill road. We propose an automatic inverse perspective mapping method based on vanishing point, which is adaptive to the uphill and downhill road even with slight rotation of the main road direction. The proposed algorithm is composed of the following three steps: detecting the vanishing point, calculating the pitch and yaw angles and adopting inverse perspective mapping to obtain the “bird's eye view” image. Experimental results show that the adaptability of our inverse perspective mapping framework is comparable to existing state-of-the-art methods, which is conducive to the subsequent detection and recognition of road signs.
Subject/object processing asymmetries in Korean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data

Subject relative (SR) clauses have a reliable processing advantage in VO languages like English in which relative clauses (RCs) follow the head noun. The question is whether this is also routinely true in OV languages like Japanese and Korean, in which RCs precede the head noun. We conducted an event-related brain potential (ERP) study of Korean RCs to test whether the SR advantage manifests in brain responses, and to tease apart the typological factors that might contribute to these responses. Our results suggest that brain responses to RCs are remarkably similar in VO and OV languages. Our results also suggest that the marking of the right edge of the RC in Chinese (Yang et al. 2010) and Korean and the absence of such marking in Japanese (Ueno & Garnsey 2008) affect the response to the following head noun. The consistent SR advantage found in ERP studies lends further support to a universal subject preference in the processing of relative clauses.
An observational cohort study of triage for critical care provision during pandemic influenza: ‘clipboard physicians’ or ‘evidenced based medicine’?

We assessed the impact of a United Kingdom government‐recommended triage process, designed to guide the decision to admit patients to intensive care during an influenza pandemic, on patients in a teaching hospital intensive care unit. We found that applying the triage criteria to a current case‐mix would result in 116 of the 255 patients (46%) admitted during the study period being denied intensive care treatment they would have otherwise received, of which 45 (39%) survived to hospital discharge. In turn, 69% of those categorised as too ill to warrant admission according to the criteria survived. The sensitivity and specificity of the triage category at ICU admission predicting mortality was 0.29 and 0.84, respectively. If the need for intensive care beds is estimated to be 275 patients per week, the triage criteria would not exclude enough patients to prevent the need for further rationing. We conclude that the proposed triage tool failed adequately to prioritise patients who would benefit from intensive care.
A Robust Overlay Network for Real-Time Multimedia Dissemination

Robustness of overlay networks is an importantproperty as well as short delay for real-time media transmission. Unlike previous schemes, which achieve robustness by restoring spanning trees afternodes or links fail, we focus on reducing possible data loss when failure occurs. According to analysis of the relation between tree depth and data loss, we first present a spanning tree which minimizes dataloss but results in large delay. By introducing a factor, we propose a spanning tree which exhibits fine flexibility and tradeoff between data loss and delay. Simulation results show that it achieves relatively low data loss and delay simultaneously, as is optimum for a large range of applications.
User-Guided Level Set Segmentation of Anatomical Structures with ITK-SNAP

Active contour segmentation and its robust implementation using level sets have been studied thoroughly in the medical image analysis literature. Despite the availability of these powerful methods, clinical research still largely relies on manual slice-by-slice outlining for anatomical structure segmentation. To bridge the gap between methodological advances and clinical routine, we developed ITK-SNAP: an open source application intended to make level set segmentation easily accessible to a wide range of users with various levels of mathematical expertise. We briefly describe this new tool and report the results of a validation study in which ITK-SNAP was compared to manual segmentation of the caudate in the context of an ongoing child neuroimaging autism study.
The Affirmative Model of Disability: A Means to Include Disability Orientation in Occupational Therapy?

Disability orientation is a missing concept in occupational therapy. Disability orientation describes a person's interpretation of his or her disability experience and his or her perceptions of the meaning of being disabled. One orientation is that of affirmation, which originates in the affirmative model. This takes a non-tragic view of disability and impairment, and rejects the assumption that disability is necessarily negative. Instead, those with an affirmative orientation view disability as difference that can be celebrated and can enrich life. Since occupational therapists may work with people with an affirmative disability orientation, understanding and acceptance of this orientation could support client-centred practice.
Geographic Routing in Large-Scale Highly-Dynamic Mobile Ad hoc Networks

In the near future extremely large scale mobile ad hoc networks of thousands or tens of thousands of mobile nodes will be physically feasible and desirable for a host of applications. However, routing within these networks is challenging, especially at high data rates and when node movement is highly-dynamic. In this work we present Topology Aware Geographic Routing (TAG), a position-based routing protocol that strategically uses local topology information (when available) to make better local forwarding decisions, decreasing the number of hops required to deliver a packet when compared with other geographic routing protocols. In addition TAG is able to reliably deliver packets even in topologies that violate the often used but unrealistic unit disk graph and quasi-static assumptions. We present empirical results from a variety of simulations, illustrating how TAG outperforms GOAFR+, GFG, and OLSR in both theoretical environments and in a simulated, real-world, continental-scale airborne network.
Minimal sequence and structural requirements of a subgenomic RNA promoter for turnip crinkle virus.

Infection of plants or protoplasts with turnip crinkle virus (TCV) results in the synthesis of the genomic RNA and two subgenomic (sg) RNAs of 1.7 kb and 1.45 kb, respectively. Both of the sgRNA promoters were characterized previously and their secondary structures predicted by computer analysis [J. Wang and A. E. Simon (1997). Virology 232, 174-186]. Secondary structure-sensitive chemical and enzymatic probes have now been used to determine the structure of the promoter directing synthesis of the 1.45-kb sgRNA, namely the 1.45-kb sgRNA promoter, in solution. The newly obtained structure conforms with the previously predicted hairpin structure except for the hairpin base: four CG base pairs and a CA bulge are present instead of an A bulge. Studies of deletions within the 96-nucleotide (nt) 1.45-kb sgRNA promoter defined a minimal 30-nt core sequence as essential for promoter activity: a 21-nt hairpin and a 9-nt flanking single-stranded sequence. Mutational analysis in the stem section of the core promoter supported a role for the primary sequence and secondary structure in promoter activity. Sequence alterations in the flanking single-stranded region further suggest that the sequence CCCAUUA, encompassing the transcription start site, is required for efficient transcription of the 1.45-kb sgRNA by the TCV RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in vivo.
Weighted Lacunary Statistical Convergence in Intuitionistic Fuzzy Normed Linear Spaces

In this paper, we define new summability method which is called as ( N, pr, θ ) summability derived by weighted mean and lacunary sequence in intuitionistic fuzzy normed linear spaces. We use ( N, pr, θ ) summability to define new statistical convergence type which is named as weighted lacunary statistical convergence derived by weighted mean and lacunary sequence in intuitionistic fuzzy normed linear spaces, respectively. Moreover, we study the relation between weighted lacunary statistical convergence and lacunary statistical convergence, where the base space is IFNLS.
Leadership and Effectiveness in the Context of Gender: The Role of Leaders' Verbal Behaviour

This field study focuses on verbal consideration, which is a leadership behaviour that expresses esteem for the follower and her or his work, knowledge and opinion. It was assumed that the relationship between verbal consideration and various outcomes is moderated by the leader’s gender. One-hundred-and-forty leaders and 455 of their direct followers were surveyed in a one-wave questionnaire study in Germany. Male and female leaders showed the same degree of verbal consideration as rated by their followers. Verbal consideration is related to three out of four outcome variables for both sexes. One unexpected moderating effect of leaders’ gender was found: followers of male leaders displaying verbal consideration report less ‘irritation’ (a state of exhaustion considered a threat to good task fulfilment). One explanation may be that male leaders get ‘extra credit’ for showing verbal consideration as it may be thought to entail special effort, whereas for female leaders it may be seen as normal and routine. This assumption should be examined in further studies in order to get more information about the different mechanisms by which female and male leaders reach the same quality of outcomes.
A signalling cascade involving PKC, Src and Cdc42 regulates podosome assembly in cultured endothelial cells in response to phorbol ester

The involvement of Src, Cdc42, RhoA and PKC in the regulation of podosome assembly has been identified in various cell models. In endothelial cells, the ectopic expression of constitutively active mutants of Src or Cdc42, but not RhoA, induced the formation of podosomes. Short-term exposure to phorbol-12-myristate-13-acetate (PMA) induced the appearance of podosomes and rosettes after initial disruption of stress fibres. Molecular analysis of PMA-induced podosomes and rosettes revealed that their composition was identical to that of podosomes described in other models. Pharmacological inhibition and siRNA knock-down experiments revealed that both PKCα and PKCδ isotypes were necessary for podosome assembly. However, only constitutively active PKCα could mimic PMA in podosome formation. Src, Cdc42 and RhoA were required downstream of PKCs in this process. Src could be positioned between PKC and Cdc42 in a linear cascade leading to podosome assembly. Using in vitro matrix degradation assays, we demonstrated that PMA-induced podosomes are endowed with proteolytic activities involving MT1-MMP-mediated activation of MMP2. Endothelial podosomes may be involved in subendothelial matrix degradation during endothelium remodelling in pathophysiological processes.
Impact of Palliative Care Consultation Service on Terminally Ill Cancer Patients

AbstractThe palliative care consultation service (PCCS) that has been enthusiastically promoted in Taiwan since 2005 was designed to provide comprehensive end-of-life care for terminally ill patients with qualified interdisciplinary specialists in acute care ward setting. This study aims to evaluate the impact of PCCS on terminally ill cancer patients.A total of 10,594 terminal cancer patients who were referred to PCCS from a single medical center in Taiwan between 2006 and 2014 were enrolled. The percentages of patients’ and their families’ disease awareness, do-not-resuscitate (DNR) designation, refusal and acceptance of palliative care among terminally ill cancer patients were analyzed retrospectively.At the beginning of PCCS, the percentages of disease awareness among patients and their family were increased from 25.4% to 37.9% (P = 0.007) and from 61.2% to 84.7% between 2006 and 2014 (P = 0.001), respectively. Patients’ disease awareness after PCCS referral between 2006 and 2014 was increased from 47.1% to 64.5% (P = 0.016). Family's awareness of diagnosis and prognosis after PCCS referral researched to a steady plateau, 94.1% to 97.8% in different year cohort (P = 0.34). The percentage of DNR designation rate at the beginning of PCCS (in 2006) was 15.5%, and the designation rate was increased annually and finally reached to 42.0% in 2014 (P = 0.004). The percentage of DNR consents after PCCS was also improved from 44.0% in 2006 up to 80.0% in 2014 (P = 0.005). PCCS refusal rate decreased gradually and dropped to 1.6% in 2014 (P = 0.005). The percentage of PCCS utilization was increased 5-fold during the 9-year period after the promotion of PCCSIn the program of PCCS promotion, an increasing trend of PCCS utilization, better patients’ and their families’ awareness of diagnosis and prognosis, more consent to DNR, more patients were discharged with stable condition at the end of PCCS and a decrease refusal rate of end-of-life palliative care among terminal cancer patients were observed in Taiwan between 2006 and 2014.
Helping Young Children Cope with the Stress of Relocation: Action Steps for the Counselor.

Susan really seemed to enjoy being a member of her small kindergarten class. Her teacher, a family friend, lived in Susan's neighborhood. Each morning Susan walked three blocks to school with her mother and a playmate. After school, the mother of Susan's playmate-friend met them at the school and walked the girls to her home for lunch. Susan often stayed at their home and played for the rest of the afternoon. Late in the fall, however, Susan's life changed dramatically. Her father accepted a new job in another community. In this community, Susan was soon enrolled in a large kindergarten class. Instead of walking to school with her mother, Susan now rode in a big yellow school bus with about 40 other children. No longer was she enrolled in a half-day program but found herself in school well into the afternoon. Her busy teacher had several aides, and at first, Susan was not even certain who her "real" teacher was. A previously well-adjusted little girl, Susan began to suck her thumb and complained of headaches during her first days at the new kindergarten. When Susan's new teacher was at last able to spend some time alone with Susan, she was not surprised to hear the confused little girl ask, "Miss Johnson, am I still me? " Relocation moves such as the one Susan experienced can be extremely stressful for any person. If an adult were to move to a new job that involved a longer working day, much less pleasant transportation, and the immediate loss of friendships, that adult might well exhibit stress-related physical symptoms or regress to less mature forms of behavior just as Susan did. It is not surprising that 5-year-old Susan wondered if she were "still me" in her new environment.
Use of Insecticide-Treated House Screens to Reduce Infestations of Dengue Virus Vectors, Mexico

Dengue prevention efforts rely on control of virus vectors. We investigated use of insecticide-treated screens permanently affixed to windows and doors in Mexico and found that the screens significantly reduced infestations of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in treated houses. Our findings demonstrate the value of this method for dengue virus vector control.
The good, the bad, and the risky

Social risk interacts with self-esteem to predict relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. However, because socially risky situations afford both rewards and costs, it is unclear which affordance is responsible for these effects. Two experiments primed social rewards or costs within different relationship-initiation contexts and then evaluated participants’ relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. Results revealed that global self-esteem regulates responses to both affordances. When social rewards were primed, lower self-esteem individuals (LSEs) exhibited stronger relationship-initiation motivation than higher self-esteem individuals (HSEs), whereas the reverse was true when social costs were primed. Furthermore, LSEs exhibited the strongest relationship-initiation motivation when rewards were primed, whereas HSEs exhibited the strongest relationship-initiation motivation and used more successful relationship-initiation behaviors when costs were primed. This pattern of results suggests a complex association between social affordances and self-esteem during relationship initiation that is not predicted or explained by current theoretical models and thus deserves further empirical attention.
Tracklet association for object tracking

This paper proposes a novel multi-target tracking framework, where two different association strategies are utilized to obtain local and global tracking trajectories. Specifically, a scene self-adaptive model is first utilized to generate local trajectories by constructing the association between detection responses and tracking tracklets; then, a novel incremental linear discriminative appearance model is utilized to generate global trajectories by constructing the association between local trajectories; finally, a non-linear motion model is utilized to fill the vacancies between global trajectories to obtain continuous and smooth tracking trajectories. Experimental results conducted on PETS 2009/2010 and TUD-Stadtmitte database demonstrate the proposed framework can achieve continuous and smooth tracking trajectories under the case of significant deformation, appearance change, similar appearance, motion direction change, and long-time occlusion.