Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Teacher Adaptations in Core French: A Case Study of One Grade 9 Class

Since the introduction of the term 'learning disabilities' into the educational lexicon, teachers and researchers have endeavoured to determine the best ways to adapt teachers' pedagogies to address the needs of students with these challenges in the classroom. Most of the recommended strategies have been designed with the traditional classes in mind - English, Science, Math, and History. However, in recent years, there has been an increased awareness of a need for knowledge about adaptation strategies that are suitable for the goals of the second/foreign language classroom. This study reports the findings of an observation study that was designed to identify which adaptation strategies that had been recommended in the learning disabilities research literature were feasibly implemented in one Grade 9 core French class in Ontario; such insight will enable other core French and second/foreign language teachers to make their classes more inclusive.
Joseph Raphson, F. R. S

Three hundred years ago, in 1690, a mathematical book was published in London that ensured its author a certain degree of immortality: his name will now always be associated with that of Isaac Newton. The book, being the first account of the so-called Newton-Raphson method in the fully developed form which survives to the present day, was entitled ‘Analysis Aequationum UNIVERSALIS, SEU Ad AEQUATIONES ALGEBRAICAS Resolvendas METHODUS Generalis, et Expedita, Ex nova Infinitarum serierum Doctrina, DEDUCTA AC DEMONSTRATA’. This article tells as much as we have been able to discover about the enigmatic author of the book. BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS Very little is known about the life of Joseph Raphson; of the few statements made about him in the literature, even fewer can now be verified from original sources. The details that follow can still be found in surviving contemporary documents, but unfortunately we have to start rather late in his life, with his election to the Royal Society. Mr Joseph Raphson was proposed for Fellowship of the Royal Society at the meeting of Wednesday, 27 November 1689, by the renowned Edmond Halley. The Society’s Journal Book (1) reads: Dr Stanley, Mr Ralfson, and Mr Moult were proposed candidates at this meeting, and approved,.
First-Principles Study of Chemical and Topological Short-Range Orders in the Mg–Si Liquid Alloys

The structures of a series of Mg–Si liquid alloys were investigated by means of ab initio molecular dynamic simulation. The pair distribution function analysis manifests a tendency of aggregating for the Si–Si pairs in the Mg90Si10 liquid alloy. Chemical short-range orders are observed around Si atoms between unlike atoms, and the maximum is observed for the eutectic Mg47Si53 alloy. Furthermore, the topological environment changed abruptly near the eutectic Mg47Si53 alloy according to Voronoi polyhedra analysis. The variation of diffusion coefficients of Mg and Si suggests that the dynamical properties of Mg–Si liquid alloys are more sensitive to temperature than to compositions.
Adult caregiving among American Indians: the role of cultural factors.

PURPOSE With a sample of American Indian adults, we estimated the prevalence of adult caregiving, assessed the demographic and cultural profile of caregivers, and examined the association between cultural factors and being a caregiver. This is the first such study conducted with American Indians. DESIGN AND METHODS Data came from a cross-sectional study of 5,207 American Indian adults residing on 2 closely related Lakota Sioux reservations in the Northern Plains and one American Indian community in the Southwest. Cultural factors included measures of cultural identity and traditional healing practices. RESULTS Seventeen percent of our sample reported being caregivers. In both the Northern Plains and Southwest, caregiving was positively correlated with younger age, being a woman, larger household size, attending and participating in Native events, and endorsement of traditional healing practices. In both regions, attendance and participation in Native events and engagement in traditional healing practices were associated with increased odds of caregiving after adjusting for covariates. Only in the Northern Plains did we find that speaking some Native language at home was associated with increased odds of being a caregiver. Examination of interaction terms indicated some sex differences in the association between cultural factors and caregiving in the Northern Plains but not in the Southwest. IMPLICATIONS Our findings indicate that greater cultural identity and engagement in traditional healing practices are related to caregiving in American Indian populations. Caregiving research, intervention efforts, and caregiving programs and services in Native communities should pay special attention to the dynamics of culture and caregiving.
Viral genome characterisation by the heteroduplex mobility and heteroduplex tracking assays

The heteroduplex mobility assay (HMA) is a means of comparing two PCR amplicons or, in the variation known as the heteroduplex tracking assay (HTA), a means of estimating the quasispecies diversity of a viral genome. Heteroduplex assays have many applications including subtyping viral genomes, screening for low frequency variants in a population, scanning the relative genetic diversity across a genome and screening for recombinant clones. They can be used to detect dual infections, superinfections, contaminated blood products and laboratory contaminations. PCR amplicons of about 65% sequence similarity or greater will form heteroduplexes under appropriate conditions, and phylogenetic trees can be drawn from heteroduplex mobility data. While homoduplexes indicate more than 98% similarity between two DNA sequences, heteroduplexes indicate at least seven mismatches in a 500‐bp amplicon, or a three‐base pair gap in 1000‐bp. Minority variants comprising 1% to 5% of the genome population can be detected and quantified by HTA. Thus far, heteroduplex assays have been described for HIV and other lentiviruses, hepatitis C and G viruses, Norwalk‐like viruses, influenza, measles and poliovirus. They could be applied to a wide range of other viral species. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Consistent follow-up segmentation of pleural thickenings

Pleural thickenings, which are an indicator for pleural mesothelioma, can be detected and analyzed using thoracic CT-data. They may cover a large area on the pleura surface and can have complex morphologies. Image noise, small deformations and especially the unclear boundary can significantly influence the segmentation process. Two independent segmentations from two points in time might independently suffer from these influences. As a consequence, they cannot be combined for reliable growth rate estimation. Therefore, we suggest a method to introduce consistency between both points in time. The method is carefully designed to estimate small growth from low resolution structures with complex morphologies. First, a surface mesh with segmentation confidence is extracted from one point in time. This mesh is refined considering the segmentation confidence and partial volume. Subsequently, this refined mesh is transferred to the other point in time and growth is tracked with sub-voxel precision.
Combined estimation and control of HMMs

The principal contribution of this paper is the presentation of the potential theoretical results that are needed for an application of stochastic approximation theory to the problem of demonstrating asymptotic stability for combined estimation and control of a plant described by a hidden Markov model. We motivate the results by briefly describing a combined estimation and control problem. We show how the problem translates to the stochastic approximation framework. We also show how the Markov chain that underlies the stochastic approximation problem can be decomposed into factors with discrete and continuous range. Finally, we use this decomposition to develop the results that are needed for an application of the ODE method to the stochastic control problem.
Real Time Dynamics Monitoring System (RTDMS): Phasor Applications for the Control Room

The Real Time Dynamics Monitoring System (RTDMS) has been developed to enable utilization of time-synchronized phasor measurements for reliability management with the overall objective of accelerating the adoption and fostering greater use of the technology within North America. Since 2003, it has been serving as a platform to translate research concepts and algorithms into actual applications for power system operators, reliability coordinators, and operating engineers both within the Eastern and Western Interconnections. The system supports an open, scalable and modular system design that adheres to a Server-Client architecture offering a suite of applications for wide-area real time visibility, monitoring and alarming on key metrics related to grid stress, dynamics, and the power system's proximity to instability, and performing offline forensic event analysis and baselining functions on normal operating conditions, limits and alarms. This paper provides an overview of the RTDMS system: its system architecture functionalities and applications.
An extensible RTCP control framework for large multimedia distributions

The Real-time Transport Control Protocol (RTCP) is a crucial mechanism used, amongst other things, for synchronisation and feedback control in multimedia sessions. However as groups grow to large numbers, it faces two serious challenges: the growing deployment of unidirectional and asymmetric broadcast architectures, such as Source-Specific Multicast and satellite networks, eliminate the shared control backchannel on which RTCP relies; the per-receiver RTCP reporting frequency diminishes prohibitively due to the bandwidth-sharing algorithm. We present new algorithmic techniques that enable RTCP to combat these issues, allowing it to function in a wider range of environments and to scale to larger groups.
On-Line Screening, Isolation and Identification of Antioxidant Compounds of Helianthemum ruficomum

Many Helianthemum species (Cistaceae) are recognized for their various medicinal virtues. Helianthemum ruficomum is an endemic species to the septentrional Sahara on which no report is available so far. The purpose of this work was to investigate the chemical composition and the radical scavenging capacity of this species and its isolated components. Collected from Mougheul (south-west of Algeria), the aerial parts were macerated with 80% EtOH/H2O, after evaporation, the remaining extract was diluted with H2O and extracted with petroleum ether, chloroform, ethyl acetate and n-butanol. EtOAc and n-BuOH extracts were evaluated for their free radical scavenging capacity by on-line HPLC-ABTS•+ assay. The obtained data which were confirmed by TEAC and ORAC assays, allowed guiding the fractionation of these extracts by CC, TLC and reverse phase HPLC. Among the components, 14 were isolated and identified by spectroscopic analyses: protocatechuic acid (1), trans-tiliroside (2), cis-tiliroside (3), astragalin (4), picein (7), vanillic acid 4-O-β-d-glucopyranoside (8), lavandoside (9), 4-hydroxybenzoic acid 4-O-β-d-glucopyranoside (10), nicotiflorin (11), rutin (12), vicenin-2 (13), narcissin (14) and stigmasterol (5) and β-sitosterol (6) as a mixture (71% and 29%, respectively). Compounds 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 14 were new for the genus Helianthemum. The antioxidant power of all the isolated compounds was also evaluated by HPLC-ABTS•+, TEAC and ORAC assays. The results clearly indicated high antioxidant potential of the extracts and tested compounds of this species especially, compounds 1, 4, 8, 9, 10 and 12.
The origin of allometric scaling laws in biology from genomes to ecosystems: towards a quantitative unifying theory of biological structure and organization

SUMMARY Life is the most complex physical phenomenon in the Universe, manifesting an extraordinary diversity of form and function over an enormous scale from the largest animals and plants to the smallest microbes and subcellular units. Despite this many of its most fundamental and complex phenomena scale with size in a surprisingly simple fashion. For example, metabolic rate scales as the 3/4-power of mass over 27 orders of magnitude, from molecular and intracellular levels up to the largest organisms. Similarly, time-scales (such as lifespans and growth rates) and sizes (such as bacterial genome lengths, tree heights and mitochondrial densities) scale with exponents that are typically simple powers of 1/4. The universality and simplicity of these relationships suggest that fundamental universal principles underly much of the coarse-grained generic structure and organisation of living systems. We have proposed a set of principles based on the observation that almost all life is sustained by hierarchical branching networks, which we assume have invariant terminal units, are space-filling and are optimised by the process of natural selection. We show how these general constraints explain quarter power scaling and lead to a quantitative, predictive theory that captures many of the essential features of diverse biological systems. Examples considered include animal circulatory systems, plant vascular systems, growth, mitochondrial densities, and the concept of a universal molecular clock. Temperature considerations, dimensionality and the role of invariants are discussed. Criticisms and controversies associated with this approach are also addressed.
The relationship between in vitro gas production, in vitro microbial biomass yield and 15N incorporation and its implications for the prediction of voluntary feed intake of roughages

Abstract The relationship between in vitro gas production, concomitant in vitro apparent and true DM degradability has been examined in forty-two roughages. The partitioning of truly-degraded substrate between gas volume and microbial biomass yield and 15N incorporation into cells was also investigated. The relevance of this partitioning for the regulation of DM intake (DMI) was examined for fifty-four roughages. The results can be summarized as follows. In vitro gas production and in vitro apparent and true degradability are highly correlated (P<0.0001), r being 0.96 and 0.95 respectively. There is an inverse relationship between in vitro gas production and microbial biomass yield (r—0.67, (P<0.0001) and also 15N enrichment (P<0.001)when the variables were related to a given unit of substrate truly degraded. Selecting roughages by in vitro gas production may well be a selection against maximum microbial yield and a combination of in vitro gas volume measurements with a complementary determination of the substrate truly degraded is proposed, to calculate a partitioning factor (PF) reflecting the variation of short-chain fatty acid production per unit substrate degraded. PF is calculated as the ratio, substrate truly degraded: gas produced by it. PF was highly significant (P<0.0001) in DMI prediction when included in stepwise multiple correlations together with in vitro gas volume variables reflecting the extent and rate of gas production; 11 % of the variation in DMI was accounted for by the PF. The total model, including extent and rate of gas production and the PF, accounted for 84 % of the variation in DMI. Roughages producing proportionally less gas per unit substrate truly degraded had higher feed intakes.
A Study of Recommender Systems on Social Networks and Content-based Web Systems

rely on recommendations in everyday life from other people either orally or by reviews printed in newspapers or websites. Recommender systems are a subfamily of information filtering systems that explore to predict the 'rating' or 'preference' that user would give to an item. These systems are best known for their use in e-commerce websites where they use input about a customer's interest to generate a list of recommended items. Many recommender systems explicitly rate to represent customer's interest by using only the items that the customers purchase, but can also use other attributes, including items viewed, subject interests and demographic data. They direct users towards those items that meet their needs by reducing unwanted information spaces. To perform recommendation a number of techniques have been proposed, including content-based, collaborative, and hybrid techniques. To improve performance and to outweigh the drawbacks of individual recommendation techniques, these techniques are sometimes combined to form hybrid recommenders. This paper is categorized into seven sections. Section-I presents the introduction related to the recommendation systems used in the social networks and on- line Web systems, section-II critically analyzed the related literature work about collaborative recommendation, content- based recommendation, and hybrid recommendation, section- III describes the business aspects of recommender systems, section-IV describes various ways of displaying recommendations to a customer, section-V investigates the various recommendations techniques and their limitations and section-VI provides the conclusion of the recommender systems. In this paper the efforts are made to review and discover the techniques to investigate the proper usage of recommender systems in the e-commerce applications.
Hybrid excitation of SRM for reduction of vibration and acoustic noise

The inherent simplicity, ruggedness, and low cost of a switched reluctance motor (SRM) makes it a viable candidate for various general-purpose adjustable-speed applications such as industrial and home appliances. The primary disadvantage of an SRM is the vibration and acoustic noise compared with that of conventional machines. The main source of vibration in the SR drive is generated by rapid change of radial magnetic force when phase current is extinguished during commutation action. In this paper, a hybrid excitation method with C-dump inverter is proposed to reduce vibration and acoustic noise in the SR drive. The hybrid excitation has two-phase excitation by long dwell angle as well as conventional one-phase excitation. The vibration and acoustic noise are reduced because the scheme reduces abrupt change of excitation level by distributed and balanced excitation.
Understanding the Impact of Service Reputation on the Online Group-buying Behaviors

It has been well recognized that vendors’ reputation plays an important role in e-commerce. As a popular platform for promoting the services or products online, groupon websites have developed various reputation systems to assist the customers in making their purchase decisions. This paper performs an empirical study to investigate the impact of service reputation on the groupon buying behaviors using data from a major groupon website in China. A set of service reputation metrics is developed to measure the service reputation for different service providers, and the groupon buying behavior is measured by the amount of users participating in the corresponding collective buying activity. Correlation analysis is carried out to find out the relationship between the service reputation and the groupon purchase behaviors. Our research indicates the necessity for an improvement for the current service reputation systems of the groupon web sites.
Microbial growth and accumulation in industrial metal-working fluids

The dynamics of microbial growth in metal-working fluids (MWF) and the effect of the addition of biocides were studied in large fluid systems, in this case, one central tank which holds 150 m3. In this system, populations of Pseudomonas pseudoalcaligenes (greater than 10(8) CFU/ml) were sustained for a year, although large quantities of biocides were added. Quantitation of 3-OH lauric acid, a marker for many Pseudomonas spp. , by gas chromatography indicated that the bacterial biomass exceeded the viable counts by approximately 15 times. Fungi were grown on several occasions, the dominating genera being Fusarium and Candida. Soon after the old MWF was removed and the tank was provided with fresh MWF, which consisted of an emulsion of mineral oil in water, there was a massive growth of P. pseudoalcaligenes that reached levels of greater than 10(8) bacteria per ml. Initially, only low concentrations of other species were found for some weeks. After this period, different enterobacteria and other gram-negative rods often appeared at high concentrations (10(7) and 10(8) bacteria per ml, respectively). Bacteria identified as P. pseudoalcaligenes showed great variation with respect to colony morphology and a certain heterogeneity with respect to biochemical characteristics. Certain bacterial species grew as microcolonies on metal strips immersed in the circulating MWF, but P. pseudoalcaligenes was not recovered from this habitat. The total bacterial count in the air surrounding the machines in the metal-working shop showed an inverse relation to increasing distance from the machine. The concentration of bacteria in the air varied because of the number of machines in use, temperature, and humidity. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Sloan School of Management Working Paper Sequencing Surgery, Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy: Insights from a Mathematical Analysis Sequencing Surgery, Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy: Insights from a Mathematical Analysis Running Title: Sequencing Multimodal Treatments

Ve present results from a mathematical analysis that is aimed at finding the best way to sequence the three traditional cancer treatments: surgery (S), chemotherapy (C) and radiotherapy (R). The mathematical model tracks the temporal evolution of the primary tumor and its associated metastases, and incorporates the primary tumor's effect on the dormancy and growth of the metastases. We show that the SCR schedule (i.e., surgery followed by chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy) achieves a higher cure probability than SRC if the primary tumor is sufficiently large or if the metastatic population is sufficiently large relative to the primary tumor. We also show that a novel schedule, SRCR, which splits the radiotherapy regimen into two disjoint portions, is optimal among all schedules, provided that the patient's dormant metastatic tumors do not become vascularized within about 40 days after surgery.
‘Market relevance’, ‘social relevance’, and psychology in South Africa

In light of the Psychological Society of South Africa’s commitment to ‘social relevance’, this article investigates the ongoing appeal for ‘relevance’ in the discipline. Pursuant to the social constructionist tenet regarding the constitutiveness of language, it examines addresses delivered at national Psychological Society of South Africa congresses since 1994. With Fairclough’s three-dimensional model for critical discourse analysis serving as its analytic frame, the article presents rhetorical, discursive, and socio-historical analyses of nine presidential, opening, and keynote addresses. Specifically, two competing discourses are identified: the first – a market discourse – advocates the development of a psychology that is financially rewarding, globally competitive, and internationally recognised. Accordingly, ‘market relevance’ is sought in which teaching, research, and community service outputs are graded according to international standards and priorities. The second discourse of civic responsibility casts South Africa’s traumatic past as unresolved and requiring, therefore, the intervention of psychologists. In this case, ‘social relevance’ is desired in order to bring about the emancipation of marginalised communities. On balance, however, it is the market discourse that saturates the discursive order. It is argued that South Africa’s re-entry into the international community has given rise to far-reaching changes to the country’s political, economic, and higher education landscapes, which have adjusted themselves to the demands of a globalised neo-liberal hegemony.